An Open Letter To Us

My love,

In the course of human history, probably a billion words have been written, spoken, or sung in regards to love. Some brilliant, some banal, some profoundly expansive, some sweetly simple, and some utterly gag-worthy, these utterances have blended together to cover the timeline in a cacophony of the meaningful and mushy-gushy. I don’t know where my words will fall on that scale, and I sincerely doubt that these simple sentences will make a music that stands out above the rest. But the beauty of love is that anyone, even the very simple, can experience it and express it. And so, permit me please to try.

According to a Buddhist proverb, if you meet somebody and your heart pounds, your hands shake, and your knees go weak, you haven’t met The One. I suppose that sentiment is both true and false, at least in my experience. I’ve met just a few individuals that have induced that fluttery reaction in the pit of my stomach. I’ve sheepishly and shakily sorted through my words with the highest hopes of picking the magic order, as if love was indeed a formula with hidden elements and shaky experimentation. Indeed, in each of these instances I believed myself to be in love with the he who could very well be The One. All the butterflies and sweaty palms in the world, however, could not make the stars align for them and I. The supposed correlation of agitation and love failed me again and again. If only I had listened to the Buddhists.

The proverb continues: When you meet your soul mate, you will feel calm. No anxiety, no agitation. This passive approach to love seemed ludicrous to me once. Love was passionate fire, an uphill battle, the classic fairytale duel with the dragon to rescue the princess. How else were you supposed to know you loved someone, without the blood and sweat and tears and butterflies?

And I guess I didn’t know when I met you. I could have never guessed that the boy who made me laugh, made me feel safe in an effortless friendship, would bypass the stage of sweaty palms and racing hearts to begin a love that I can’t quite explain. Friends one day; lovers the next. This transition utterly baffles me and all that I had ever believed about the stages of love. However, I have learned that falling in love is less about matching my feelings to song lyrics, Shakespeare plays, and Pinterest quotes and more about writing my own story.

So here it goes:

Once upon a time, I fell in infatuation. And twice upon a time, and yet a third time again. This sad and repetitive cycle produced nothing but dead butterflies, residually sweaty palms, quite a few tears, and the sorry realization that the love of fairy tales was nothing but a sham. This unfortunate and inaccurate misbelief in infatuation as love characterized most of my growing years.

Once upon a different time, I began to fall in love. Without the fluttering nerves, I don’t believe I recognized it for a long while. It was a quiet love, one that sneaks underneath the back door and warms up the room slowly, until you suddenly realize that you have been utterly swaddled in it, the most comfortable you have ever been. It was a joyful love, punctuated by frequent bouts of laughter that slowly lengthened until they were one continuous smile. It was a contemplative love, questioning ourselves, each other, the world around us, never settling for what was given, but always pushing for something deeper and more fulfilling. It was a love wrapped up in the purest form of friendship, the attraction of knowing everything about one another too comfortable to resist. It was the kind of love that absolutely needed time in order to blossom; every passing day provided just enough of a glance of what was to come. And come it did—silent and steady, until here it was. And here we are.

I think the great Buddha missed the mark slightly in his proverb. While love is not exclusive to butterflies in your stomach, it most certainly does not need to be absent of them. Love is not the absence of extreme emotion, but the ability to experience such emotions in tandem with another person. There have been and will be moments of exhilaration, of nervous energy, of sadness, of anger. And, as I am prone to experience, moments of fear. I must admit that there are days that I spend afraid of this love. I do not feel that it is unwarranted; the love we share hinges on the very foundation of our relationship. Any connection so deep carries with it the great risk of a schism that could one day destroy everything built upon it. With you I sail uncharted waters, and such a journey carries both the exhilaration of adventure and the deep unease of the unknown. When such uneasiness threatens to swallow me in its depths, I will remember the words of the Apostle John, the disciple whom Jesus loved: “Perfect love casts out fear.” And while I cannot love you perfectly, and you cannot love me perfectly, I can only trust that our mutual pursuit of the Lover of our souls will drive out the fear of the unknown and create in us a more perfect affection for his image.

While I’ve always held a sort of disdain for fairytales, I must admit that the analogy of dragons guarding castles rings true. I have spent too long hiding in towers of my own making, holding myself captive to an unknown future. Bit by tiny bit, you have taken down those castle walls and placed me face-to-face with my demons, my dragons, not to face them alone, but together. The sound of crashing tower walls is the most beautiful love song you have written for me.

Thank you for fighting for me. For helping me walk away from the monsters under my bed. For cherishing even the most broken parts of me. For loving my shadow.

In such a short time, you have bore all things, believed all things, hoped all things, and endured all things, and you are more than I deserve.

In the cacophony that is love, I think our song is worth listening to.

I am yours,

Whitney.

Life and Limbs: My Compartment Syndrome Story

My sophomore year of college is finally over. I’m at home, sitting on the couch, TV on, snacks and drink in hand. My legs are up, but that’s not just for relaxation’s sake; there just happens to be a 4-foot tube sticking out of my right leg, draining one of six incisions from my second surgery in a month.

You know, just the normal way to celebrate making it halfway through my undergraduate degree.

It’s helpful at the end of any challenging period of life to spend a little bit of time in self-reflection. Retracing the story from beginning to end, even if that end is still unclear, is therapeutic in a way. As I tell my story, I’m admitting from the beginning that I still do not understand why this story has to be part of my story. At times, I am still scared and frustrated and angry, even as I am recovering. But perhaps remembering where I’ve been and how far I’ve come will give me some extra strength to keep moving forward.

Here’s my story:

10 months ago, at the end of July 2014, I ran a 5k, a 90’s themed fun run with one of my best friends. It was a super fun day (I got to wear a floral snapback and a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cutoff tank, what’s not to love?), but I struggled the entire race with pretty severe shin pain. I chalked it up to bad running form—shin splints—and kept running. Two days later, when my legs still hurt to the point where I could barely walk, I still wasn’t concerned. I figured that my new shoes or lack of running experience had caused my shin pain and laughed about never running a race again. A few more days of rest and my legs would be back to normal. I couldn’t be more wrong.

A month later, I began my sophomore preseason of volleyball at Cairn University. I was both incredibly excited and incredibly nervous for the upcoming season; I had not gotten much playing time as a freshman, yet I was voted a captain and earned a starting role for this season. I expected a lot of myself. I vowed to never be satisfied with my performance; every area of my game could always get better. Doing anything less that 100% was not an option. I’ve always been a driven athlete, but I truly believed that if I put all of my heart and hustle into this season, I had the opportunity to shine. “Heart and Hustle” became my mantra; maxing out both my physical effort and my mental stamina became the way I approached every practice and every game.

Three days into preseason, the leg pain returned. I immediately went to see my trainer and we agreed that shin splints were my problem. I started to heat and ice my legs daily, hoping that as I got more in shape, my shins would begin to fall in line. As practices went on and the school year started, my legs seemed to be getting worse, not better. Accompanying the sharp aching along the inside of my shins was a deep pain that seemed to fill up my calves and stop my muscles from working properly. Three different kinds of tape and expensive shin braces did relatively nothing to alleviate the pain. Nevertheless, I fought through the pain. I needed volleyball to give my life structure and couldn’t bear the thought of being unable to play.

I remember the moment I knew that there was something seriously wrong with my legs. It was about 8 or 9 games into our season, and we were away at a school. Our first set hadn’t gone very well and I was determined to play much better for the rest of the game. I walked out on the court before the set began and turned to speak to one of my teammates. All of a sudden, the deep, full pain that had occasionally filled my legs before came back with a vengeance. This was the first time that the debilitating pain had occurred without any physical activity to bring it on. I struggled through the rest of a disappointing match and sitting on the sidelines afterwards, head hung low and struggling through tears, I knew that I had a bigger problem than shin splints. I just didn’t know what.

Stress fractures. That was the consensus of my athletic trainer and my orthopedic doctor. Heartbroken, I had to stop playing volleyball and trade my Mizunos for a walking boot and crutches. I went through the MRI, sadly confident of the diagnosis and that I would not be playing volleyball for at least 4 weeks.

No stress fractures. The MRI came back completely clear, except for some inflammation on the tissue lining my bones. Basically, just really bad shin splints. My doctor cleared me to play volleyball, claiming that the pain and inflammation would go away as soon as the season was over and I got some rest. I finished the season in an incredible amount of pain, but I was just so relieved to be back on the court.

The season ended and I wish I could say my pain ended too. Unfortunately, my legs felt the same 2 months after the end of volleyball that they did during the season. After switching doctors, more x-rays, and a bone scan, I still had no conclusive answers. However, my one doctor had mentioned one possible answer in passing: compartment syndrome.

Exercised-induced compartment syndrome. A neuro-muscular condition caused by muscle walls that wrap around the legs too tightly and restrict blood flow, muscle function, and nerve endings, causing the same type of pain as a heart attack. A rare condition, but it occurs most commonly in long-distance runners. Or, apparently, volleyball players who had never before had any shin problems, like me. Go figure.

The path to diagnosis of compartment syndrome wasn’t fun. I had to travel to a special clinic in Philadelphia, where they inserted a 6-inch needle attached to a pressure gauge 3 times into each leg, took pressure readings, then had me run on a treadmill for 10 minutes, and reinserted the needles to get final pressure readings. What they found blew them away. A normal pressure reading is below the number 15, with a minimal change after exercising. My pressure readings were all above 15 before running, and after running, the numbers climbed to well over 70. Compartment syndrome was the conclusive diagnosis.

While I was ecstatic that after 8 months, I finally knew what was wrong with my legs, I had a choice to make: I could stop playing volleyball and living an active life, or I could get surgery. I had to make the choice for surgery. I needed to return to my team. I needed to return to my active lifestyle. And so on April 1^st, 2015, I went in for an endoscopic fasciectomy, a surgery in which my surgeon would take miniature scissors and cut open all of the walls of my muscles in both of my shins and calves. 6 incisions and 4 hours later, I was out of surgery. My compartment syndrome was practically cured.

Recovery. I can’t even begin to explain how weird it was re-learning how to walk. But after a week on the couch, I was determined to get back to school and get on with my life. Hobbling around on crutches, with a good two inches of bandages on my legs, I went in for my first post-op appointment, hoping to get cleared to come back to school. What I saw underneath those bandages was completely unexpected. Two of the incisions had been stitched too tightly due to swelling, and the skin had died, turning it black. My surgeon was concerned, but took the stitches out anyway. I was clear to come back to school and hopefully heal for the last month of the semester.

Unfortunately, those two dead incisions turned into two very infected incisions. I had no idea either was infected until one developed large blood blisters and one of them popped; if I hadn’t discovered the infection, I could have very well lost my leg. In order to prevent the spread of infection, my doctor reopened one of the incisions and instructed me to pack it with saline-soaked gauze twice a day. Thanks to the help of my friends at school, I successfully walked around college for 2 weeks with a gaping 3-inch hole in my leg. Cross that off the ol’ bucket list for sure.

Surgery #2 was to get rid of the infection and place a drain in my incision to keep any infection from coming back. Originally scheduled on my 20^th birthday (which was definitely a lesson in growing up!), the surgery got pushed back 2 weeks until after the semester ended, which was a blessing in disguise. That surgery went very well, and that brings the story full circle to today, me sitting on the couch, watching reruns on the Food Network and trying not to get tangled up in my drainage tube.

Life is crazy sometimes. After this whole ordeal, I’m not sure that I have too much profound wisdom to give to the world. I cannot explain why I was chosen to go through these crazy months, instead of the normal crazy months of a college sophomore. I do not know why my volleyball season was cut short or why I wasn’t able to perform to the level that I had worked so hard to reach. I do not know why I had setback after setback on my way to recovery. People would remark that I was a "trooper" or "mature" or a "strong woman of God," but most nights I just wanted to cry and most mornings I didn't want to get out of bed to face the day. Even after recounting my story, I still think it is as wild and unexplainable as when I experienced it.

There are many things I do not know. But there is one thing that has remained certain:

In this crazy journey called Life, in my darkest and most suffocating moments, there is Someone--my Rock--who is always seeking and searching for me in the darkness, promising me firm ground on which to stand when all else falls away. It sounds incredibly cliché, but I truly feel that to understand God as a Rock, Shield, and Buckler, you have to experience Him firsthand as all of those things, without any other—pardon the pun—legs to stand on. When you find yourself surrounded by confusing darkness and the very ground you’ve built your existence upon seems to be falling into oblivion, you have two choices: you can fall apart and fade away with that ground, or you can thrust your fist into the air and place all your hope in the belief that the God of all salvation will hold you fast. And, through the little things like my mom driving to college at the drop of a hat to help me get around, strangers holding doors and writing anonymous notes, and my friends volunteering to take me to Starbucks (addiction never sleeps) and to shove gauze into my leg hole (see above picture), I experienced exactly how God uses earthly vessels as instruments of grace. And so, with an otherworldly cheeriness and with my signature slight tinge of snark, I’m going to face my twenties a little battered, a little scarred, but completely submitted to whatever else God must hold me through.

Because life, and the people I get to go through it with, truly are the greatest.

Even when limbs are not.

The LORD is my rock, my fortress, and my savior; my God is my rock, in whom I find protection. He is my shield, the power that saves me, and my place of safety.

The Book of Psalms, Chapter 18.

The Greater War

As today is the centennial anniversary of the beginning of World War One, I thought it would be appropriate to share a poem I wrote for a final assignment for a history course on the Great War I took last semester. The Great War was not honorable or idealistic. It was a complicated engagement in which both sides experienced staggering loss. The war changed the course of human history and put on trial the ideologies of nationalism, patriotism, imperialism, and honorable death. It was their war to fight, but it is our war, now a hundred years removed, to remember.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." (george santayana)

The Greater War

We are the generation

of a hundred years removed.

Removed from

                        the parades,

                        the farewell handkerchiefs waving

                        for a dapper man in uniform, smiling,

                        not knowing

that his grinning face would be blown off.

Removed from

                        the quiet town in the valley,
                        serene until

                        it burns black

                        and charred and broken

                        by men who were only following orders.

Removed from

                        the trenches,

                        winding miles of graves

                        filled with men who were already dead, they just didn’t know it.

Removed from

            the gas,

                        men choking on the poison they created:

                        what an honorable way to die.

Removed from

            the children

            who grew up with daddies off to war

            and pennies jingling in their pockets

            and vegetables growing in their victory gardens

            and the big, bad Huns being squashed by Uncle Sam

            and their brains slowly turning to mush

            so they must take their medicine,

            big heaping spoonfuls of bitter war.

           

We are a generation

of a hundred years removed, but

this was not our war.

Our war, our greater war, is with time.

We cannot forget.

We will not forget.

Why Beauty is Ugly and How to Redeem It

A few years ago, I shared an article on my Facebook page entitled “Not Everyone is Beautiful.” I was immediately hooked because of its controversial title—I can appreciate a little political incorrectness—and was even more struck by its content. You can go read it for yourself HERE (http://nathanbiberdorf.wordpress.com/2014/06/09/not-everyone-is-beautiful/), but the gist of the article was the author railing against our cultural tendency to share inspirational quotes like "Everyone is beautiful, whether you know it or not." Here's some of what he had to say:

"I know what you mean when you say “Everyone is beautiful.” You mean that everyone is valuable, everyone has worth, everyone has good qualities that make them interesting and important and someone to be loved. And if we could reclaim the word and make it mean that, I’d say keep at it.

But the fact is, we don’t own the word. The world owns the word, and to the world, “beauty” is physical attractiveness and little more. To use “beautiful” in our wider, deeper, more important meaning only confuses the issue. It sends our young women mixed messages, telling them that everyone is beautiful, and sending them into despair when the boys flock after someone with a thinner waistline and a wider bust. It tells us we have value because of our looks, and leaves us to worry where our value goes after those looks fade...So forget about “beautiful”. It’s become an ugly word anyway." (Nathan Biberdorf)

Needless to say, it started a little bit of a firefight on my Facebook wall. Friends commented that it was a “sarcastic rant” and that they weren’t sure the author was on point. I agreed with them to some degree, but felt like the article landed in the gist of how I’ve begun to feel about the subject. I felt that it was time for me to share my own opinions on the subject of beauty and my journey to reach my present convictions.

The concept of beauty has always been a stumbling point for me. I didn’t grow up as the girl with the natural beauty that broke necks—but I definitely turned some heads. When I was about 10 years old, I developed a condition called trichotillomania, a nervous disorder similar to OCD that causes a self-induced and recurrent loss of hair. Most cases are fairly mild and hair loss is unnoticeable; however, my case was more moderate to severe. I lost my eyelashes, eyebrows, and a significant portion of hair from my scalp. I looked similar to a patient recovering from chemotherapy. In several cases, people approached me and asked if I indeed had cancer. Some days, I wish that that was the case. People who are fighting an uncontrollable disease are the strong, beautiful ones that get on national TV and thousands of likes on Instagram. In my mind, I wasn’t one of those people. No one was setting up a charity for me or sharing my pictures on Facebook captioned, “How about 1 million likes for this freak who can’t control herself? Isn’t she beautiful?” I wasn’t fighting a disease, I was fighting myself. And every day when I looked in the mirror, I convinced myself that I was losing.

By the time I was 16, I got my trichotillomania under control for the most part. Unfortunately, the damage had already been done. My hair mostly grew back, but not thick and beautiful—normal—like before. However, the damage from my disorder went much more deep than follicle-level. I emerged from trich with a damaged perspective of both who I was on the outside and of who I was on the inside. I learned how to flawlessly hide the surface-level damage, but I felt helpless to cover the scars that cut deeply through my identity. As I purchased eyebrow pencils and hair powder that usually winds up in the makeup bags of balding 60-year-old women, I felt incomplete. And even today, as I still have to deal with the consequences of the disorder I still occasionally struggle with, I am very aware that those who are considered beautiful do not deal with hair loss on a daily basis like I do. I know that I do not naturally fit the constructs of the contemporary definition of beauty.

So I stopped searching for ways to shove myself into that definition and started searching for a new definition altogether. What I’ve found has changed the way I look at myself and the way I approach my relationship with God.

This search led me to articles like “Not Everyone Is Beautiful.” While I do not believe that the author is a Christian, his conclusion echoes my own. Society has constructed the definition of beauty to be a ginormous, flimsy amphitheater. Everyone outside can hear what’s going on inside, but the VIP list is incredibly short and the concert is only accessible to those who can mirror the famous few on the list. Unfortunately, every so often, the amphitheater comes crumbling down and the giant that once controlled all of society is suddenly irrelevant when a new colossal structure is built downtown. Try to keep up.

Every so often, someone who does not fit the conventional mold is suddenly touted as beautiful, too—like the hairless girl with cancer or the child in Africa with a horrible cleft lip. Society will call them “beautiful” and “strong,” but what we really mean is, “What a ‘beautiful’ trooper. I’m praying for her recovery (so her hair grows back)” or “Someone should adopt that ‘beautiful’ child (and pay for a surgery to make his face normal).” We praise their strength, but until everyone begins shaving their heads or developing face-altering medical conditions, it’s not “real” beauty. It sounds horrible, but because cultures all around the world have placed such a premium on some projected standard of “beautiful,” there have to be people who just don’t fit that standard. That’s the industry that sells—makeup, hair products, medical procedures, diet programs, weight-loss pills, gym memberships, self-help books. Making people who aren’t “beautiful,” beautiful, is, sadly, a way of life, an endless cycle that I fell prey to when I was very young. I learned what I was “supposed” to look like, learned that I didn’t look that way, and searched desperately for something to fix it. After trying for years to operate as a young Christian girl in a viciously flawed system, I’ve finally stopped myself, begun a new evaluation, and began to operate under an entirely different system altogether.

The three things I’ve realized:

1.     The definition is flawed.

The world says beauty is x, y, and z. It’s a linear function of features and traits that, combined, make a person a specimen to be either admirable or disagreeable. Beauty is not just a standard, it’s a normal way of life. Society has trained us all to immediately, if subconsciously, identify those who stand out only because of how they do or do not look. It’s a projection, and a shifting one at that. X, Y, and Z today will be replaced by A, B, and C tomorrow. When society changes, so does its standards and definitions, and millions are trapped in the rat race of projected normality.

As a Christian, I understand that the world is sinful. I’m beginning to understand that the definition of “beauty” is fallen, too. We’ve taken a characteristic that describes the works of God and twisted and marred it, reducing it to something that enslaves and debases, criticizes and undervalues. Our version of beauty is a shallow puddle compared to God’s intended raging ocean, a hollow shell instead of a perfect fruit, a charred building full of beggars instead of the finest palace built for royalty. In our sinful hands, we’ve transformed the concept of beauty into something very unbeautiful indeed.

2.     Beauty is deeper than instrumental value.

When searching out the true definition of beauty, I was sure going deeper was the answer. Beauty isn’t skin-deep, right? So I began to focus on who I was on the inside. In my mind, I began to form a laundry list of my personality traits and talents. I figured I was pretty smart, had some athletic talent, musical. I was a good listener and loved others. I wanted to do what was right. These characteristics, regardless of how I looked, must make me a beautiful person, right?

Wrong. I still hadn’t gone deep enough. I had only succeeded in identifying my worth to society—what I as a person contributed to the world. But my usefulness, my instrumental value, was still only a list of x, y, and z, and once again I had fallen prey to a shallow life of endless comparisons and trying to do or be better. I had also entered dangerous territory where I had begun to define myself by what I am instead of who I am. That doesn't sound like a very large difference, but it impacted how I considered myself before others and how I approached God. I believed I was only as valuable as what I could do and as who others knew me to be. I started basing my relationship with God on how well I served Him or how good of a Christian life I could lay at his feet. That's a works-based relationship, and it was doomed to fail from the start. Instead of feeling closer to God, I felt further away, more defeated. I knew that this definition of beauty was still not the whole picture. I knew there had to be more to the concept of beauty, to God’s concept of beauty, than characteristics I had to develop on my own or a projection of myself I had to diligently uphold. I knew beauty and value were somehow linked, but I had to find a different type of value to find a different type of beauty.

3.     The Intrinsic Truth

In the beginning, God created.

He created the physical realm. The sky and the earth. The oceans and the land. The dinosaurs and the chickens. The horses and the horseflies that keep attacking me when I’m trying to lay out at the pool.

You and I, too.

But He did so much more than pop out some animals and plants. By his very nature, He projected his characteristics on the physical world. His power is evident in the rushing waterfall. His grace is evident in the provision of oxygen to breathe and food to eat.

And his beauty is evident in his pronouncement of all that He made, good.

By his very word, the things He created were complete, valuable and perfect. They had a place and a purpose, and, as the result of the spoken word of a beautifully perfect Creator, they were beautifully perfect. And when God said, “Let us make man in our image,” He imparted to us the ability to reflect who He is. Our creation in the image of God gives us intrinsic value—value not because of what we’ve done or who we’ve portrayed ourselves to be—but value that resides in the image of God in us. And though we are fallen creatures, sinful and capable of marring the entire concept of beauty, beauty remains in us because of our standing as a creation of the most High God. Any other definition of beauty is vain—incomplete, fleeting, and incapable of being attributed to every person that seeks it.

Beauty is in the eye of whoever is holding the dictionary. Beauty is in the eye of the Beholder--the One who beheld the universe before it's creation and was the very definition of Beauty from the beginning of time.

So yes, not everyone is beautiful. Perhaps no one is always beautiful, at least according to a definition that changes as times and cultures do. To be honest, I'm not sure it's possible to operate completely outside the system of socially-constructed ideas of beauty. I’m still going to buy makeup and do my hair and enjoy making myself look “beautiful”—but I’m not going to struggle with it anymore. Because I’m learning a new definition of beauty, one that began when God looked down on a perfect world and in radical and unprecedented fashion granted humankind the ability to reflect Himself. And though I am flawed and often choose to live in ugliness, I am valuable because He has given me value as his creation. I am beautiful because He is. Everyone is. Will you join me in leaving the pursuit of self-degrading, ugly beauty in the past?

To those who are crying out for a new definition: Go back to page one. It’s been there all along. And it is very good.

genesis 1:27 - so God created man in his own image, in the image of God He created him, male and female he created them.

genesis 1:31 - and God saw everything that He had made, and it was very good.

ecclesiastes 3:11 - He has made everything beautiful in his time.

psalm 139:14 - I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works, my soul knows it very well.