Introducing Melanie: Blue Marble God

The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It's for you I created the universe. I love you. There's only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you'll reach out and take it. Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too. 

... Frederick Buechner ...

When Shannon and I launched The Front Porch Series, we knew we were onto something.  We'd sat with many many women over the course of years, hearing stories and longings and celebrations.  And we knew that people (and most of the people we meet with are women) need places to take their stories, and themselves, to.  Places to speak and be heard.  To practice and express self.  Where presence is healing, supportive; even if it doesn't change circumstances.  And, importantly, places that are a bit removed from but still very close to the everyday.  We are huge believers in counseling (done with good therapists), but one thing we have both also known is the parallel need for a typically-people-ed existence...a process-oriented, grace-experienced, love-offered space with the people who we normally live life with but in settings and experiences that are not the usual normal.  That are a bit more sacred and protected.  One cannot replace the other:  we encourage people toward counseling when needed, we offer the parallel.  Among many other things, time and again the groups we've led highlight how life bumps up against spirituality.  Questions about meaning, about God, about the abuses and joys of gathering around faith.  And as we send people out after a day retreat, we want them to continue a connectedness because we can't carry all the day forward for them....they have to do some of that work in their own life, in their own way.  But we know amazing people who love well.  So we keep a list.  Some are counselors, many are not.  They are mentors, spiritual directors, good hearts, women who listen well, who have experience in certain domains of the every day of life.  For that is where we live:  in the every day.  And being accompanied in the every day is phenomenally powerful.  Here is your life.  Be in it.

And Melanie is one of the people you might want to be in it with.

One of my absolutely favorite women EVER is my friend Melanie Poole Gillgrist. I think I cried with Melanie the first time I met her (always a good sign in my book!) somewhere in the ballpark of 2004, sitting in her office at Northwest Family Life.  I volunteered for a little while at NWFL...their executive director, the amazing & incomparable Nancy Murphy, was on a world-wide speaking/conference tour & I checked her mail, voice mail, and email while she was away then did some work on a research project I no longer remember the details of.  But Melanie was there and helped hold the place together, and I spent at least as much time in her office every week talking as I did at Nancy's desk working.  My mom had died a few years before, I'd lived abroad, I was in a relatively new marriage, I was figuring out who I was at that time, and I was in need of a friend who was a bit older than me and wiser but who would love me in a way that didn't make me feel the difference between us.  The kind of woman who would give me a vision for the future without her trying to do it.  I found her in Melanie.

Melanie is one of those women who gets under your skin and settles into your heart simply by bringing who she is.  She speaks soul and humor and comfort.  She is brilliant, witty, analytical, comfortable, contemplative, kind, focused, poetic, strong, and completely memorable.  I fell head-over-heels in love with Melanie and her husband Rob and will never be the same for it.  Melanie's compassion and steadiness and thoughtful conversation, Rob's intensity and intellect and hearty laughter...the authenticity and emotional warmth and relational style they each bring...availability and health....as two individuals and as a couple they are a gift of passionate life (and I think 'passion' is a tired word so for me to use it is saying something!). 

They became friends for both Jonathan and me.  (Photo on the ferry to Bainbridge, 2005.)  The four of us shared meals and ferry rides and coffee and work.  We drank wine and ate pasta and talked as the candles burned down.  We watered our plates with sprinkles of tears and waves of laughter, moving through life's turns both good and, frankly, terrible, and then in moments of redemptive amazement.

Rob & Melanie moved to Minnesota a few years back and then to Butler, Pennsylvania (which, ironically, is where my mother-in-law grew up).  I would move heaven and earth to get them back here but, alas, God hasn't left moving heaven and earth up to me.  But she's now on the Internet, which is sort of like the human version of being everywhere at once!  Melanie's new venture, Blue Marble God, launched this week & I'll be reading every post.  When I read, it's like being with her.  Her words speak the integrity of honest spirit and everyday life.  They come simply but from deep personal exploration, marinating the soul toward places her gentleness might belie.  Because I know her, I know:  she knows.  Melanie has lived a textured life...she is acquainted with deep grief and loss and sheer fun and delight.  Her heart for contemplation and integrated spirituality beats strongly.  If you've ever wanted a spiritual director Melanie's your woman!  Cheers to you Melanie!  The word needs your voice.  Its sound is so lovely and I am grateful for the vibrancy of it that I still experience today...a heralding of God....in my everyday.


©2012 Mindy Danylak

Holding On

"To be alive is to be vulnerable."
-- Madeline L'Engle

There's an office building about half way down the block that has a steep gravel driveway running behind it, from the street level up to a hilly area in back.  I walk that stretch of Eastlake twice a day.  They were a ways ahead of me but caught my eye immediately when I stepped outside onto the sidewalk.  She, in her faded jeans, worn jacket, tennis shoes and backpack.  He, in black pants, black shirt, black baseball cap and gold hoop earrings.  He had a backpack too, a nicer one.  Purple.  He may have been as old as 22.  She definitely wasn't.  It immediately felt off.

As they walked she ducked her head slightly toward him the way 17-year-old girls do when they're insecure and under the control of someone who they think loves them.  He paid her no heed.  They didn't speak.  He never looked at her.  She was with him but they were not together.  And his grip....  He held on to her, not by the hand but by the top of the wrist.  They weren't going somewhere; he was taking her somewhere.

I was getting closer when he turned up the gravel ramp toward the weeds under the Mercer Street ramp.  By the time I crossed the street they were at the top of the ramp.  He cut off along the chain link fence and they were gone.

I know she was not safe.

There are times when the sense of paralysis is swift and overwhelming.  "You have to do something!" careening through your brain mixes with "There is nothing I can do to stop this."  The whole thing lasted seconds but my thoughts covered a lot of ground in that time.  Angry tears flushed mascara to my lap as I drove home.  I was livid.  With him, with me, with the whole situation.  Should I have tried to talk to them?  I was so far behind I'd have had to make a bit of a scene to do that, but I've made a very public scene before on behalf of a young woman and it worked and I would do it again...and better.  But do it and say...what?  Or call the police?  "Yeah, um, I think the girl down the sidewalk is in trouble; could you send someone right away? and I'll climb the fence and try to find them in the foot-trails under the freeway and if I do I'll follow or stall them until you get here."  Maybe I should have called.  The police here have done a fair amount of work around trafficking issues.  Or maybe I should have attracted attention in hopes that they'd think I needed help.  Sometimes, though, attention places the girl in more danger than she's already in.  The need to prove loyalty intensifies.  The wrist grip tightens.  To notice her is personal.  She is not there for her.  No one should notice her.

And yet, notice is imperative.

There are a couple of women in my life who I wonder about all the time.  They are young but adult, relatively independent, making choices.  They have taken and stopped many a hand extended toward them.  Some of those hands were extended for good, some for ill.  They don't always know the difference.

We have this idea that we can do so much.  We raise money, we write letters, we call our senators.  We host awareness events, we attend conferences, we volunteer on work trips.  We write books, we change laws, we throw people in prison.  We rescue and we provide counseling and job training and we talk about systemic problems.  The modern-day abolition movement runs on the very idea of eradicating slavery forever.  It won't happen.  At least not in this lifetime.  It's good work but I don't believe any of it is enough for all time.

But I do believe in doing it.
And then in doing it again.

"Write me of hope and love, and hearts that endured."
-- Emily Dickinson

A month ago Jonathan & I attended a fundraising dinner in Walla Walla for a nonprofit that provides orphan support in Jamaica.  Money was raised that night for three projects, each of them valuable investments in the furtherance of life for thousands of orphaned children.  A few months ago a I helped a friend with a scholarship fundraiser here in Seattle, benefitting young people trying to move beyond extreme poverty in the Philippines.  Last night I spent hours pouring over the website and mission materials of an orphanage in Kenya.  A gal I've met with visited someone there this year, putting it on my radar.  I'm deeply drawn to this kind of work for a number of reasons.  It's along a path I've been on the past few years.

Noticing is part of who I am. I know that none of these projects can fill all the gaps.  I've been through enough grief to know that sometimes you just have to accept the holes and learn to live with them.  Loss is real.  But it's not all the same.  We all face losses but some losses are more ripping for us than others.  So these projects are important pieces of protection and care, of notice, and where the fill is love the holes can become less sharp around the edges.

Kids become orphans in many ways.  For many of them, their bodies tell heartbreaking stories of abuse and neglect.  In her address at the dinner, Carla Francis Edie, head of Jamaica's Child Development Agency, emphasized that many of the children in their system need extensive psychotherapy to deal with the profound abuses that landed them in the state system to begin with.  I hope that one way or another they'll get it.

But that's not all I hope for.

Carl Robanske, EO's founder, interviewed a 14 year old girl whose story was shared at the dinner.  She held up her hand, showing him the scars she bears from the time her mother flew at her face with a machete.  If she hadn't raised her hand...  Carl spent very little time discussing EO's work but he didn't need to.  He summed it up in 3 words:  "We hold them."

I'm for holding.

I feel haunted by the girl on Eastlake.  I know we all have our versions of this story...real scenarios, and if not our own then others'; and, when others', where we wonder if we should step in or not, where we wonder if we made the wrong decision, whatever the decision was.  There are all kinds of reasons not to, many of them good ones.  The decision is not always straight forward.  I don't berate myself, but I do feel the bind.  But she feels it more.  Well actually I don't know about that -- she may not feel it.  But I know she's in it, and someday it may become more than she can bear.  Regardless of whether it does or not, though, it's heartbreaking that she is bearing it.  Some people say what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.  In some cases that may be true and life is found in or from all of it; but in any case I'd rather strength be gained by what we are behind, by the good that we hold, not at the hands of exploitation or pain for its own sake.  I tend to think that's the only way pain makes us stronger....we gain strength through the hands held out to us that offer hope, whether they are the hands of people or the hands of Hope in the heart.  It's a given that there will be pain and grief.  I don't deny that nor, even in my losses, do I wish it away.  But it should not be the only thing that grows us.

I am just home from a week in Alabama and South Carolina, where I spent hours and hours listening to women tell defining stories from their lives. Holding was thematic, literally for some...holding a dying child, wanting to be held by a deceased mother, holding a depressed husband, dreams of a grandfather's hands. And then there's that holding of the wrist...  Holding is not neutral. And at its best it won't be enough either. But where it is loving presence and support, affirmation of human value, rest, redemptive touch and respectful offering, it is good.

I'm for that.

_________________
©2011 Mindy Danylak

see also at:
http://geographyofgrace.com/2012/10/08/holding-on/