Deborah Spooner
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The white-gray space heater was on, only one foot to the right of me. It felt like ice was slicing through the air and stopping an inch from my body, emanating its thick chill onto me.

I was actually shaking. But not just within my body. Much deeper within my heart and mind.

I had to push a name on a phone screen. A name I’d called many times before. A name that had called my phone more. A name that, over two years ago after I texted, I’d fling my phone as far away as possible, so nervous of having communicated and yet so hopeful of having communication back: wanting it and dreading it at the same time. What if I said something wrong? But what if I said something right?

This conversation was going to be different.

I’d sat by a heat source: a fire built by someone who was family. I’d started journaling, the packed-up processing I’d neglected from the past nine months pushing out. Ten pages later, I’d written almost a letter—written for my own processing but now unintentionally for me to process to him.

I edited. Refined. But tried not to edit my heart, not remove it from my words so much anymore as I used to. Struggling to know how much to share, to know how to share, to know what parts to leave quiet and which to expose. Struggling, when my heart wants to finally love but when my mind screams that this is just what brings the most fear, and when the shadow of his answer was already materializing  in my mind.

We texted and were having problems finding a time to talk. I felt nauseous, carrying my words within myself as something spoiling inside. It was time, time to let them out so I could fully heal.

I read my words, recorded them in a voice message, and sent it. Didn’t want to but almost didn’t have a choice anymore. Forty minutes later surrounded by new friends and salmon fishing camp stories in a semi-new city, the waiting began. I was juxtaposed: carrying old pain and anticipation but anticipating the new hope on the flipside of almost deeper than speakable pain, the freedom on the underbelly of costly release.

Five days later, I was by the space heater, pushing call. We talked, for about thirty. It was good. He said thank you, truly thank you for taking the time to share. He said sorry, sorry for the confusion and misactions. He said honesty, honesty that he’d be conflicted too, wavering between wanting and doubt. He said encouragement, encouragement that God is working. He said care, deep care for me. He said closure, closure and locking and a new kind of leaving.

We end capped it with theology and prayer requests, classic us. Three years of knowing him, one year of seeing him for hours almost every day. But now, the end my mind had been crying for but my heart had been fighting against: the door was locked to us ever being more than what we once were, of him becoming family, of me becoming his.

I pushed end, knowing as my finger touched the red that his would likely never hold me again, that our relationship which was more than it sometimes should have been was now finalized as less than it could have been.

But every leaving is a coming.

I was coming, first. Feeling anger slide away as soon as his voice slid in, but now I started sinking into sadness. Anything other. I hate it, despise it, can’t figure it out cleanly and make it go away. Then doubt. I could have, should have done something differently. If I would have changed my words, my thoughts, my appearance, not been so focused on myself, sought the Lord more, prayed more, then this would be different. Pressure. I’m letting my family down. All those who commented on how they saw this working. It must be my fault. Fear. You don’t know how to let people in, you wanted this but you always talked yourself out of wanting it but loved even though you doubted and still doubt doubt doubt, you may never find someone, he isn’t the right one but maybe he could have been or maybe he was and you’re wrong, who is going to know you as much as he did but you didn’t let him know you as much as you could and that is the problem, you are always the problem.

To every thought, a counter-thought. To every belief, a disbelief. To every hope, a shadow. To every confidence, a certain uncertainty. And pain. Soul-deep pain blanked with suffocating sadness, worsened by the compression of swirling change of the past six months, months when I uprooted my life and unbared my soul.

But every leaving is a coming.

I was coming, second. I stood by the deep mahogany cabinet, the amber yellow lamp casting a small glow as we turned out the rest of the lights in my parents’ home. I’d been talking some, sharing.

“It’s like I’m holding on. There’s this orb of so much piled high, and I’m clinging to the edge, dangling. Dangling and afraid to let go. Dangling, afraid to let my expectations go and go where He’s taking me.”

Trust. James had hit the core of it. A year before, I’d been writing a Greek paper, sitting in the deep red chairs of the library. The song had blazed through the ear buds:

“What if you could let your guard down? What if you could trust me somehow? I swear that I won’t let you go. I won’t let you go.”

I trust God with my life, but I hold onto my control of my days. Know He’s working it all out in the end but worrying about my messing it all up from the beginning.

James had let me go, but maybe he’d really shown me that I need to let go. To let go to this fear of people leaving and it always being my fault, to let go not only of the expectations people have of me but also those I bear upon myself, to let go of my fixation on perfectly pleasing God and to come, to come as a sinner in need of a Savior, a girl balancing belief and brokenness, a wide-eyed daughter who is learning to guard but not hide her heart, a woman afraid to trust, a human who is weak but can chose to seek: to lay down her dreams and desires when it actually costs, to come to the feet of Jesus with all of her and say five simple words: I can’t. But, I come.

Every leaving is a coming.
And maybe coming to a pain-dripping end of myself leaves me in the best place possible: surrendered.

Lord, have Your way in me.

“What if you could let your guard down? What if you could trust me somehow? I swear that I won’t let you go. I won’t let you go.”


Read 23 books in 5 months? That sounds a little ridiculous, but isn’t that the case with some of the most fun things in life?

August 1 – December 31 may go down for me, personally, as some of the hardest months of my life (so far). But, they’ll go down as more than that. They’re also when I did just that: read more books than the number of years I’ve walked on this earth.

I say read loosely because Audible has truly changed my life. One-hour commute time and life’s dish washing, laundry-putting-away reality means a whole lot of time for having things read to you.

Here’s my roundup of some of the books I read in case you’re looking for some good reads (or listens):

Marketing
·       Building a Storybrand (Donald Miller)
·       How Brands Grow (Byron Sharp)
·       Story Wars (Jonah Stauch)
·       Content: The Atomic Principle of Marketing (Lieb and Szymanski)

Theology
·       The Weight of Glory (C.S. Lewis)
·       Basic Christianity (John Stott)
·       On the Mortification of Sin in Believers (John Owen)
·       Adorned: Living out the Beauty of the Gospel (Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth)
·       Spiritual Leadership: Principles of Excellence for Every Believer (J Oswald Sanders)
·       Letters to the Church (Francis Chan)

Personal Development
·       The Invaluable Laws of Growth (John Maxwell)
·       Do More Better: A Practical Guide to Productivity (Tim Challies)
·       The Road Back to You (Cron and Stabile)
·       Uninvited: Living Loved when You Feel Less Than, Left out, Lonley (Lysa Terkeurst)
·       Leadership and the Five-Minute Manager (Blachard and Johnson)
·       The First Ninety Days (Michael Watkins)

Other
·       The Pastor’s Kid (Barnabas Piper)
·       Daring to Hope (Katie Davis)
·       Behind the Beautiful Forevers (Katherine Boo)
·       Missional Motherhood (Gloria Furman)


And brace yourself for 2019 because this year's reading goal? It's 50. 


I know. Maybe one day it’ll actually reach me.

It was almost my last night at my parents’ home for a while, and I was standing on the reed-tanned floors, wrapped in a red blanket as the sleek white snow illuminated by the Christmas lights seemed to seep into my cold bones.

My dad had told me he loved me, and that he hoped I knew how deeply and unchangingly. I appreciate that. And as much as my father is so, so human, I knew I was blessed to know that he meant it. Because know it? I did.

Yes Dad, I do know. Maybe one day it’ll actually reach me.

Earlier, I’d been perched on the edge of the hotel room’s 80s lime green armchair. It was past 10 PM, and both him and my mom were there. We’d come—come from me taking a final walk across my college campus with my sister as she now graduated and we were both alum, a walk that symbolized much more than just the diploma she carried. Then after that walk to a table talking with relatives, some who hadn’t actually talked to me in over seven years. All the while, I was coming to terms with the goodbyes and endings—to friends, to someone who soon would be no longer would be the couple everyone made us out to be, to a life I could have had.

I was coming to terms.

Dad, I’m distanced.

I had gone camping two months before this hotel conversation. I was about four miles up a Smoky Mountain. Asthma making my lungs feel like they needed to be stretched for they were cramping and compressing, a nose and eyes watering from the pollen, my mind could see more clearly: that—striding across a literal mountain—I was strolling through a mountain inside myself. Lights flicked on inside, and I later called my mom: it’s like I have this box. This big, white box is in front of me. I stuff things inside of it. Feel something that I don’t like? Stuff it in the box, keep moving on. It’s great, sometimes. But the box is ravenous, taking the joy and the pain. It’s always there, and it’s thick, and I can’t get around it, even when I want to. It’s three feet deep, separating me from anyone. I see people, but they’re at arms’ distance, just out of reach.

Maybe one day it’ll actually reach me.

It came out twice again. I had driven with her to soccer, to play on a team that I had signed up for but had now checked-out of my own life to such a degree that I couldn’t do more than stand on the sidelines. Maybe, it really was a metaphor to how I feel that I am on the sidelines of my own life, something I’m supposed to be participating in but I stubbornly am standing by, arms crossed feet planted, unmoving. On the way back, she asked me questions.

Deborah, tell me when you think you actually did something “good enough”?

I couldn’t.

Every crazy circumstance she had to remind me which others reacted with “Deborah, you did what?!” I always had a counter to. Yes, but people didn’t know this. Yeah, they thought it was great, but people just set the bar way too low. Sure, people said I surpassed their expectation, but they don’t know what it could have been like if I just would have gotten it together a little more.

She said it, then, near the end, after my frantic stream of consciousness that I hardly had ever let anyone in on to know that fully before.

Deb, I’m not even going to say that you’re too hard on yourself anymore. It’s more than that. You don’t know what your worth.

And I put it in the box.
Shut, door, lock, key, chains, seven layers back inside my head. I had to do math. When something strikes a chord, deep down hard, I do math. I add 2 + 2. It’s 4, and 4 + 4 is 8. I did this in the bathroom stall one day at work, and I got to over 2,000. This is what happens when I’m at the breaking point about to lose control, and I do it to reel it back in. To keep from having to go that deep. To keep the tears that so often just can’t seem to come from emerging.

We talked again, last night. I’d let a pretty major thing about my past just drop, and it didn’t get tossed around and come out in a better place like usually happens in our conversations. It dropped. And landed. Heavy. She’d left soon after, and I was left knowing something was up. She brought it back up later that night, and I sat, white and grey blanket up to my chin, hair up in a bun. We talked of real trust and directness, of fear and failure. I’d read her something, at the end, something deeply steeped in still-yet-processing.

Deb, you’re really good at writing.

I stared back at her, and then said the words I’d trained myself to know should come after such a statement, even when they are not in my mind or heart.

Thank you. And this time, with her, I let myself add it, a little sliver closer to the truth. Maybe one day I’ll believe it.

I love you. Maybe one day it’ll reach me.
You’re worth something. Maybe one day it’ll reach me.
You’re good at this. Maybe one day it’ll reach me.

I think maybe, now, all I can reach is this: that in order to reach true, free life, I have to be reached by the One who exists far beyond me. And maybe realize He’s always been reaching for me.
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About Me

Deborah Spooner is an analytical creative enamored by ideas and addicted to dripping words in candor. Serving as a Marketing Strategist for LifeWay’s Adults Ministry, she loves all things big-dreaming, difference-making, and Jesus-pointing. A pastor’s daughter with a background in communications and theology, you can find her at her local church with her students (and probably way too excited about the color yellow) as she seeks to know Christ more and make Him known.

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