Radical Lives and White Picket Fences

I penned this blog post six years ago. Recently, a friend wrote to say she had long kept a printed copy of it but wondered if it still lived somewhere permanently online? I discovered that it did not. So, I’ve rectified that. For my friend. And for you, dear reader. Here is a new (old) blog post. A reminder for me and you of all the ways our beautiful, adventurous lives are built on letting go.

 

From old straw hat to converse sneakers, I am spattered. My husband has a shock of bright paint in his hair, and my boys are doused and dripping with it. The girls have wandered off, but I imagine cheeks freckled and shirts polka-dotted with paint.

We are painting the new picket fence around our garden, and we are painting it white.

This is the moment when I realize my life has become a cliché. Or maybe my life has become a literary allusion to a great American novel? No. That is too optimistic. Ours is outdoor latex from the big-box store not whitewash from Aunt Polly’s garden shed.

I’m not sure if this is cliché or idiom, but either way, it doesn’t look good.

The phrase white picket fence is a linguistic shortcut. A word picture. And we all know what it means. It means conformity. It means homogeneity. It means safety.

Would you believe me if I told you my own white picket fence is the picture of radical surrender?

***

I have hated the word surrender for years. It is barbed with guilt and shame. It reminds me of a time when I was afraid of my own dreams and desires. What is the point of dreaming my own dream if God has some other plan for me?

I was a child in the church, and I believed desires were destined for sacrifice. In my mind, following Jesus looked like Abraham raising his knife over his own, much-loved son.

Abraham surrendered himself in obedience, and I was always wondering when my own moment would come. I was young. I had no idea who I was or who I was made to be, but “deny thyself” was the religion I absorbed.

And so I hated and feared the word surrender. It was a thorn, it was a splinter, and I walked my own way with a limp.

***

Here is what I did not know: that moment when the knife was raised was only ever a moment. If we are following the voice of God, we do not live in that moment. It is a door. We hear Love calling our name, and we walk on through. We walk through to some other place.

Abraham stepped through that door and then spent a lifetime hugging his beloved son close.

I am a grown woman now, and I, too, have walked through that door. It wasn’t so dramatic. I am no Abraham, after all. But when I stopped teaching and began writing openly about my faith on the internet, I took a knife to the academic career I’d been building for years.

I heard love calling, and I walked in a new direction. I walked away from my carefully crafted resume. I walked away from college towns and a book about British writers of the 1930s. I walked away from office hours with some eager (and some very uneager) university students, and I walked toward something new. Something that looks, on the surface, a whole lot less important. Something that looks about as meaningful as the proverbial white picket fence.

But appearances can lie, and I am living a dream come true.

I followed Love toward a dream so buried I would never have found it without the help of a very sharp knife.

I didn’t know exactly what I would find on the other side of the moment. Surrender was terrifying, but one wild step led me here: to this farmhouse on the hill, to my writing desk by a window, to this white picket fence.

Which looks like safety but feels like adventure.

 

Photo by permission – Kelli Campbell.