As I was driving home last night, I paused on a song as I was flipping through radio stations. As I listened to the first lyrics of the song, my mind did not immediately roam to God or faith or religion. Rather, the lyrics brought to mind the people I have in my life (or back in my life) now and how wildly different my life is now from what it was a year ago.

I rarely write or speak of my faith for multiple reasons. Over the last ten years, my faith journey has taken some crazy turns, and my faith now looks very different, even entirely unrecognizable, from the beginnings of my faith in junior high and high school. At some point, I began finding myself disillusioned with the ideas of faith that I had come to grasp as truths. When I left for college, I moved away from the cloister of people who had shaped my faith for so long, and I began to encounter more complex situations where the ideas I had been taught no longer fit with my deeper, internal understanding and beliefs of how others ought to be treated. I began to find my simply defined faith challenged by bigger ideas.

While at college two hours away from home, my home church disintegrated (to become something bigger, it turns out), and I lost even that tether to faith. I was forced into a situation where I had to form my own understanding of faith. I struggled (and sometimes still do struggle) to listen to “Christian” music or messages because I began to find them trite, cloying, hypocritical, or disappointing, and sometimes all of the above. I began seeing hurtful messages that were sometimes interwoven with messages people meant to be wonderful and healing. It has taken years of healing fellowship within my church for me to come back to an equilibrium with my faith, even though my faith probably still doesn’t fit many people’s theological definitions of what faith ought to look like or be.

The one truth of my faith that I have been most influenced by, which has always felt genuine and honest to me, is the concept of agape love. Unconditional. My sister used this word again recently, which was the first time I’ve consciously thought about it in a long time. In high school, the word was commonplace in my vocabulary, and although it has fallen into disuse throughout my faith journey, the concept of agape love has remained the foundation on which my faith is built.

In listening to lyrics that spoke of being thankful for the scars, I was reminded that faith was the reason I was able to make one of the hardest decisions I have ever made, and the reason I was able to choose healing over brokenness. It was not a moment of thinking, “oh, of course, this is clearly the choice God wants me to make.” It was a lost, broken, and pleading appeal to my faith, desperately hoping that life could get better and that God would not want me to choose misery out of fear of the unknown. I found strength in having faith in the future, faith in possibilities, faith in the people I knew would be there for me on the other side no matter what I decided, and faith that my Higher Power would want better for me. This desperate, ugly, raw version of faith is the reason I am in a healthier, more self-actualized place in my mental and emotional growth than I have ever been. Faith is not for the faint of heart. It is much easier to continue on as things have been. It is much easier to encounter fair-weather faith. It is much harder to meet your faith in the midst of the pain.

My faith has always been found in people. My faith when I am lacking faith appears in the calm, constant existence of people in my life who care about me and want the best for me. It appears in their ability to love me the way I need to be loved and their insistence on reaching out to me beyond walls I’ve constructed to hide the hurt or to keep the hurt at bay. It appears in the friends I haven’t spoken to in weeks or months who can somehow sense when I need them and still know exactly what to say. I have learned my faith from the people who never fail to make me smile or laugh regardless of what’s going on in my life and who remind me just how healing joy can be. I have learned my faith from the people who can simply hug me and heal something deep inside of me that I didn’t even know needed healing. I have learned my faith from showing others this same Love.

Agape. Unconditional. Constant.

Monday night, I came home from work, cooked, ate dinner, and pulled out my laptop to Skype with a friend. I then proceeded, as I do every time I try to log on to Skype, to enter and re-enter my password until I finally managed to log in. I suppose that speaks to how often I use technology for face-to-face communication…

But between the laughing, the joking, and the being repeatedly smacked in the face with the cat’s tail, we talked about life and the goings on of school and work. And at one point, we crossed the lines of “polite” conversation into that oh-so-dangerous territory of religion and politics (*duhn duhn duhn*).

By the end of our Skype visit, we had covered Christianity versus Islam, evolution versus creation, the Bible versus the Quran, and even relevant verses with similar representations in each of our holy texts. Yet, in leaving this conversation, I found that despite the horrid “impoliteness” of our conversation topic, which may have made Emily Post roll in her grave (sorry, Mrs. Post!), the points we each made weighed more heavily towards seeking commonality than shouting differences. (Although, to be fair, our conversations generally consist of talking loudly and simultaneously at each other until one of us gives in and listens before jumping right back in twenty seconds later.)

In light of the most recent shooting (because unfortunately that needs to be clarified), this conversation struck me more poignantly than other, similar conversations we have had in the past. To sit and to earnestly, genuinely listen to another human-being with a real interest in learning about our differences and finding out more about where those differences came from and how they’re still, somehow, almost always related is a blessing I know many refuse to have. Because that is one blessing that is ours for the taking.

Don’t get me wrong. I like to talk. I didn’t always. Growing up, I would have told you I hate talking stop trying to make me, my stuffed animals and I do just fine thank you very much. At some point, I learned that the easiest way to enter a conversation was to do it loudly, because otherwise, who could hear me over my sister’s chatter? (Sorry, Sister!)

Yet, for all that I joke about how long it took me to voluntarily talk, I learned to be loud pretty quickly, and it’s the ongoing unlearning of that lesson that often forces me to confront myself about the thing that makes me duck and cover when politics or religion comes up in conversation, whether spoken or written. That easier said than done kind of word: listening.

There are people it’s easy for me to listen to. And there are people I scroll right past in my Facebook newsfeed. And there are those people with whom I enjoy a good, deep, genuine and authentic conversation. Those are the conversations I learn from. Not just knowledge, but skills. To listen to a lecture, or a podcast, or a friend who’s ranting an agreeable, thank-goodness-someone-finally-said-it-but-it-wasn’t-me kind of rant is an entirely different skill than listening to someone who doesn’t agree with everything you think or say, and respects you enough to challenge you to an intellectual conversation about it.

Those are the conversations to model. For ourselves. For our family. For our friends. For all our Children who watch what we do. For our Neighbors.

To respectfully challenge someone you respect can be good, but to listen to something challenging is better. Differences grow from commonalities. Finding a way to bring it back to what we have in common is our way of finding a way out.

Originally I was going to write a post entitled “Unfailing Optimism.”

It sounded good. It sounded optimistic.

I’ve had many blessings this week, plenty of things to be cheerful about. The dog stretching himself out along the length of my leg is certainly one of them, and the cat that went flying spreadeagle through the air after her toy this morning is another.

But as I lie here awake, I feel plagued by stress and anxiety about the things I haven’t done this week but should’ve, about my doubts about the future… The list goes on, but you get the point.

And for some reason the blog post that I had postponed writing (at some point this week when I was pretending that I would get my real work done) came to mind.

Unfailing Optimism.

It looks good on paper (or the computer screen)… It sounds wonderfully idealistic… It seems inspiring… But it doesn’t feel real.

At least not right now.

Right now, the word failing sounds more accurate.

So of course, the words “failing optimism” planted themselves firmly in my brain. Then, my brain played a trick on them.  It changed the inflection. No longer existed only the meaning of “failing (at) optimism.” Now, something else had to follow. I haven’t yet decided which one fits my life, my personality, and my attitude best, but I have a few options.

Failing optimism, there is faith.

Failing optimism, there is action.

Failing optimism, there is truth.

More often than not, I think we fail to be optimistic. Sometimes it can seem hard to be optimistic about anything.

But failing that, we can choose something stronger.

The same phrase said one way is the ultimate defeatist attitude. Said another, it represents all the wild possibilities of things that are equally important.

Failing optimism, ________________________.

These days, sometimes it feels like I’m just exuding frustration from my every pore. While I am well aware that I’m not a paragon of acceptance when it comes to change, I’ve seen and experienced a great deal of resistance towards change over the past few weeks.

Change itself can create a surge of feelings ranging anywhere from excitement to fear (as I discussed in my post “Big Dreams“). Often, these feelings co-occur, or even meld. They can become so intertwined that it’s difficult to tell them apart, and we allow the negative feelings to overwhelm any possible positive feelings. After all, negativity can be an easy and extremely attractive default.

Let me be clear. Every single emotion you may feel in the face of change is valid. Sometimes it’s impossible not to feel. Sometimes it’s easier to shut those feelings off and pretend they don’t exist and that they aren’t the reason you’re so resistant to the change. Whatever the feelings and however deep you’ve buried them, those feelings are still there, they are valid, and valid emotions need to be felt. Not addressing those emotions, pretending that they’re not influencing decisions you make, becomes a dangerous game.

I have often found that when I’m finally able to accurately identify the source of my anxiety, or my anger, or my tears, those around me are often able to forge a more appropriate response. Until that point though, conversations are often useless. Arguing about how to correctly wash a fork is far less productive than talking about how stressed out I am that I’m not able to be at home. In the same way, expressing resistance to change because of the sadness and loss you feel when faced with leaving a place that holds memories of a wedding day filled with love or memories of cherished moments with someone you’re still grieving can produce a much different response than resisting because it’s been this way for years and there’s no need to change.

This kind of vulnerability is tough, not just because it means being open and honest with others, but because it also means being open and honest with yourself, and sometimes that can hurt. Not many people have learned vulnerability like this. In past years, I’ve realized that my anger is often code for a hurt that I’ve decided (consciously or subconsciously) not to deal with. What I’ve realized is that it’s easier to be angry than to be hurt.

In the face of change, vulnerability precedes productivity. Vulnerability means letting someone else help you through the change, and sometimes we don’t want that help. Sometimes it’s easier to just resist the change and pretend like we’re not hurting.

The problem is that this often produces a great deal more hurt than what we had to begin with.

Choosing vulnerability doesn’t necessarily mean choosing change, but it does mean recognizing and choosing to deal with the hurt.

Change happens, but you decide your response.