the ecosystem of your life

you're not a machine, but you are a forest

Photo by Jesse Bauer on Unsplash

I remember who I was for all of my life before a week and a half ago. That’s when I stopped sleeping.

I’m still a few weeks away from the third trimester of pregnancy, but we are quickly passing from obnoxious cheeriness to whiny weariness. The empty-void-monster of insomnia itself combines with general discomfort¹ to wake me up after four or five hours. Whatever I do for the rest of the night is not sleep as I have ever known it before.²

Some days—maybe even most days—I can finagle my schedule and stagger cups of half-caf to get in a nap. Every single time is the same: I flop on the couch in utter despair about my to-do list and in near-tearful distress about how sleepy I am. But thirty minutes to an hour later, an adult-type me awakens, with a renewed capacity for critical reasoning and emotional management. Yes, I am behind on my day. And yes, I am still in here, and even this day is salvageable.

The problem—and the ultimate cause of the despair—remains that this leaves me with only a few functioning hours in my day, and the same looming slightly-unpredictable-but-very-hard deadline for completing my pre-baby projects. I find myself trying to figure out if there is anything my frankly bizarre night-brain can do in the wee hours; if the perfect bedtime-half-caf-nap schedule could give me a couple more lucid moments in my day; or maybe how to hire a cleaner.

Of course, when other people outline dilemmas like this, I tend to try and say gently soothing things about asking for help and letting things go, while internally screaming/begging them to just let their limitations exist.

Sometimes our projects and our deadlines just aren’t realistic anymore. But we get so terrified of “failing” at making our lives bigger and better, we can’t even fathom the possibility of embracing the failure, let alone that doing so might make us a lot happier (and maybe “better” in other ways).

But I’m not ready to let go. And I actually think that’s okay. There are those times when life hands us a hard stop, and then there are those times life is handing us more of an invitation to get creative.

Last week when I spoke at the Theology on Tap lecture series here in Chattanooga, this is the part everyone wanted to talk about:

If your church or your life is a well-oiled machine, you’re going to start living in fear of mistakes, because machines actually tend to be quite delicate and sensitive to any change. You could accidentally put the wrong oil in it, and not know until the whole thing destroyed itself.

But if your church is a well-tended forest, it is far more self-repairing than self-destroying. Empire might have leveled huge swaths of it, but the healthy ecosystem can still reclaim that ground, especially if you’re giving it attention and care to help facilitate its regeneration.

As I write in My Body and Other Crumbling Empires, I believe the incarnation and Jesus’s life and ministry tell us that bodies are sites of divine revelation. And the body is a microcosm of the rest of Creation in showing us this truth about machines and forests. Just from looking around, it doesn’t seem like God made much of this world to be self-contained, strictly separable into its constituent parts, mathematically predictable, optimizable, or even really all that measurable if we mean to try and describe or comprehend things in their fullness. Yet our imaginations for our lives are dominated by the logic of the machine.

When I get panicky about my sleep situation, it’s because I’m afraid I won’t be able to control the machine of my life. Which, like, duh. You’d think I’d know by now that I have never, ever, for one second, ever been in control of my life-machine.

That doesn’t mean we don’t get to dream dreams and work toward visions (SMART goals, even!) for the forests of our lives. It just means we have to dream and work inside of—in rhythm with—something that’s alive and unpredictable, interdependent with others, generously offering us signals and feedback, beautifully complex and interwoven with small but constant needs, habits, beings, and relationships we all too often overlook.

Even if the perfect sleep-coffee-nap schedule or golden angel of a house cleaner “solved the problem,” deploying these solutions as machine tweaks would not solve the problem. Because the thing is, I’m realizing that right now, I’m the baby. Taking care of my (once again) suddenly-needy³ self is just practice for taking care of a far needier little body and soul in…14 weeks or fewer. Likewise, if sleep is the oil in the machine, we’re about to have a ‘70’s-style energy crisis around here no matter what. Whatever machine exists is about to be moot. I can be frustrated about it if I want to, I suppose, but there’s not ultimately much point to that.

But if these practices—patiently experimenting with midnight art projects, coffee rituals, and nap times,⁴ or rearranging the budget for a house cleaner—are exercises in tending this forest, then they are enriching the soil of this home and this life in which our family is going to grow (and in which I would like my career to still exist, in whatever form it unfolds next). If sleep is a species or a nutrient in the forest, maybe some group of other species (habits or relationships) can grow into the vacant space, conserve and support it, and sometimes weirdly, imperfectly take its place.

These practices won’t just be frantic hacks ripped/bought from the pages of a parenting lifestyle magazine. They’ll ask me to attend to what is nourishing and kind, and to be open to experimentation and temporary failure. They might involve friends, neighbors, and family. They’ll be adaptable to whatever comes next. And they’ll still be gently molding these weeks of my life to accommodate the projects—the desires of my heart—that I hope to work joyfully on, even if the whole process looks very different from my original plan.

Chronic illness has required me to tend to this same ecosystem every single day for several years now, but every time I realize I need to apply these skills and principles to a new context, it feels like relearning it all over again. The machine mentality is just so pervasive and just so tempting.

Nate and I have been in a weird time in our faith/church life for a while. I’m just now noticing that weird doesn’t make it bad. There are places where it’s slow and needy, and others where it’s actually strong, stable, interesting, fortifying, and vibrant. My need to “figure it out” has more to do with my desire to make it explicable to other people than with anything God has called us to do. We deeply need our curiosity, our humility, and our goodwill to keep navigating this particular part of our journey. But the quickest way to kill those things would be to try and force our tender souls into the machine of church as we’ve been taught to “do it right.”

Sometimes a well-oiled machine is a thing of beauty. Sometimes a machine—especially a simple one—is just the thing we need in some small aspect of our lives.

But I don’t think God has ever asked us to wake up in the mornings and serve machines, institutional, corporate, productivity-oriented, justice-producing, or otherwise. I think God is in the soil and in the air, quietly tending to us, dreaming with us and also inviting us to stay open to whatever tangled vines and unexpected wildflower meadows we happen upon, together, next.

peace, love, bread, and wine,
Lyndsey

P.S: what “machine” in your life are you learning to tend more like a forest?

1. and the dog’s sudden nighttime neediness?!

2. Honestly, fire away with the insomnia hacks and suggestions, but if neither the magnesium supplement nor the journaling nor the hypno-meditations can do it, I’m not counting on anything else. (Most of us know I’m terrified of extraneous medications, but it could get to that point I suppose.)

3. the water! the snacks! the naps! the tears!

4. I just grabbed Daniel Pink’s When from the library and its first two chapters have had a lot of super-practical tools for figuring out how to sync schedules with energies.

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This week my episode on A People’s Theology with Mason Mennenga came out. I loved this conversation and I’ve been waiting for it to drop so I could share it with you!