Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

faith & spirituality

What losing my voice teaches me about finding it

I lost my voice this week. For three agonizing days, my throat has hurt to talk, and while I’m not what you would call “chatty,” I am a communicator, and having a weak voice at best has been frustrating.

My son, God love him, who is almost 6, thinks it’s hilarious to say, “What? I can’t hear you” when I ask him a question. I’m pretty sure he can hear me, and I’m not always patient in my reply.

tea

Photo by David Mao | via unsplash

The first day, I was whispering and then a friend told me that whispering is actually harder on your voice than regular speaking, so I gave up on that and tried to use my voice at whatever level I could. My daughter, who is 7 1/2, took to repeating everything I said so that her brother would attempt to follow directions. I gestured a lot and tried to communicate messages to my husband so he could speak for me. I’m not sure I realized how much I talk to the kids until I couldn’t.

It’s exhausting to have no voice. Everything is harder. I haven’t received many phone calls, which is good, because I would probably let most of them go to voicemail. I’m grateful to still have the ability to text and e-mail and write things on Facebook, so at the end of the day I still feel like I’ve communicated something. But it’s hard for me to resist speaking to my in-real-life people.

There’s a moment each morning when I wonder if my voice has come back. I’m almost reluctant to try it out because of the disappointment I’ll feel if it hasn’t returned. Each day shows some improvement, but I’m not sure when I’ll be fully functional again.

 

To read the rest, head over to Putting on the New, where I blog on the 12th day of each month.

A guide through the messy work of discovering: Review of Out of Sorts by Sarah Bessey

“Sorting” is not a word we the people of the United States use very often and certainly not in the British way. But it’s a perfectly apt description of the process of discovering and re-discovering what I believe and why. And Sarah Bessey guides us through this messy work in her new book Out of Sorts.

It is a record of her own faith journey and a guidebook, in a way, of the path through a process that can be disorienting.

Like all good stories, it begins with a familiar phrase:

beautifully sorted out

And while there’s no tidy ending (because all of our journeys are unique), it’s not a story devoid of “happily ever after.”

The sorting of a person’s beliefs can be a beautiful thing. But it’s not necessarily easy.Out of Sorts cover

Out of Sorts doesn’t offer a how-to approach to finding your once-and-for-all set of beliefs. But it offers encouragement to question, to remember, to grieve losses and hurts, to look back on your life and church experiences and theology and determine what stays and what goes. Bessey’s book is like a friend who sits with us as we sort, but who can’t make the decisions for us. Those are for us alone. She offers her own experiences, her own work of finding a fresh look at Jesus in the Gospels, of discovering ancient practices she’d not been exposed to in her charismatic upbringing.

“Lean into your questions and your doubts until you find that God is out here in the wilderness too. I have good news for you, brokenhearted one: God is here in the wandering.”

It’s the kind of book I want to re-read to soak up the richness. Like a guidebook to a favorite vacation destination, I want to consult it again and again until the landscape is as familiar to me as my own neighborhood.

“You may sit by the trail and cry over the poisonous, lovely things being left behind. You’ll wonder why you’re still holding on this thing or that thing. You’ll find that some things you were ready to toss have become dear, so precious, that you’ll carry them in your lap to keep them safe.”

Encouraging, prophetic and challenging. A must-read if the faith tradition in which you were raised seems in conflict with the faith tradition you have now.