Christ in the Messy Middle
Eight Ideas that come to mind
while reading Amy Young
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I have a messy life and know others do too. The Messy Middle is about encouraging those living lives that need and want to be salt and light. -- Amy Young |
Meet Amy Young
writer, blogger, and speaker
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Life-lessons from her father, Tom Young
1. Be responsible for your actions (and enter into joint investment with others). 2. Have confidence and go boldly. 3. Work with your strengths. 4. Do life with others. 5. Take seriously the legacy you will lead. |
Amy Young
Amy Young's Blog:
The Messy Middle
"My name is Amy and I live in the messy middle of life. The tag line for this blog is “where grace and truth reside.” I find people tend to be drawn to grace, grace, grace OR truth, truth, truth. Neither side requires much discipline, do they? Instead they foster autopilot living. But real life happens … in the messy middle, with both. I know, it can be maddening. But also exhilarating! In terms of this blog, The Messy Middle is where the pains, joys, boredoms, frustrations, interests, relationships, and God reside. It’s not as easy or clean or simple or safe as life on the perimeter, but there’s no place you would rather be." (Amy Young)
"I returned to the US a couple of year ago after living almost 20 years in China (most recently in Beijing). It is tempting to assume that because I’ve lived in a land that requires a passport, the mess of life is more interesting in foreign lands. Here’s the thing, the messy middle exists everywhere! The Messy Middle is not so much about a location, as an attitude. Am you going to take a risk, live life, and when you fail, fail towards God? Do you see God not only in the extraordinary, but in the ordinary too? I’m kind of a nut about Pi (the number, though desserts are good too), Zumba, signs, the Denver Broncos, and the Kansas Jayhawks. This space leans into the tension of living with purpose while also having fun. I’m taken with the question: how do we invest enough so that we are not floating around tether-less; but not so rooted in any one part of our lives that we are unable to keep growing, changing, and exploring as a person who loves God?" (Amy Young)
"I returned to the US a couple of year ago after living almost 20 years in China (most recently in Beijing). It is tempting to assume that because I’ve lived in a land that requires a passport, the mess of life is more interesting in foreign lands. Here’s the thing, the messy middle exists everywhere! The Messy Middle is not so much about a location, as an attitude. Am you going to take a risk, live life, and when you fail, fail towards God? Do you see God not only in the extraordinary, but in the ordinary too? I’m kind of a nut about Pi (the number, though desserts are good too), Zumba, signs, the Denver Broncos, and the Kansas Jayhawks. This space leans into the tension of living with purpose while also having fun. I’m taken with the question: how do we invest enough so that we are not floating around tether-less; but not so rooted in any one part of our lives that we are unable to keep growing, changing, and exploring as a person who loves God?" (Amy Young)
Books by Amy Young
All the News That’s Fit to Tell and How to Tell It
Love, Amy: An Accidental Memoir Told in Newsletters from China
Looming Transitions: Starting Well and Finishing Well in Cross-Cultural Service
22 Activities for Families in Transition
Looming Transitions Workbook
Love, Amy: An Accidental Memoir Told in Newsletters from China
Looming Transitions: Starting Well and Finishing Well in Cross-Cultural Service
22 Activities for Families in Transition
Looming Transitions Workbook
Beyond the Surface of Mothering
by Amy Young
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Love pushes us to see beyond the surface. The messy middle is made with stories where we see ourselves and people we know. People who: Like Eve, have children with serious rivalry. Like Hagar, have been discarded for a new family and are mothering alone. Like Naomi, have tasted the bitterness of a child’s death. Like the mother of Leah and Rachel, knows what it’s like to have one child favored over another by society. Like Hannah, have been separated from your child at a young age. Like Mary, have a complicated pregnancy story or Like Tamar, have tried multiple ways to become a mother or Like Rachel, have counted the months and years while other women in your family and circle of friends become pregnant. Who like Rebekah, are drawn to one of your children more than the others. Like David’s mother, is raising children after God’s heart and though you rejoice in watching them, don’t want to rub it in friends’ faces. Like Ham’s mother have children whose substance abuse can cause problems. Like Bathsheba, have sick children who may die. Like Joseph and Benjamin, experienced the death of their mother. Like Mary, have children with public legal situations and all you can do is watch. Like the Shunammite woman when told by Elisha she would become pregnant, replied, “No, please do not mislead your servant!” Like her, not wanting to open doors to hope, only to have them slammed in your face. Like Hannah, have known the provoking of a family member. Like many, watched their mothers age and waste before their eyes. Like Moses’ mother, reluctantly gave up her child because it wasn’t safe for you to bring her child up herself. Or Who like Pharaoh’s daughter, were called to love and nurture children that weren’t yours by birth. Like Timothy’s mother and grandmother, are steadily and without much fanfare or recognition teaching your children about the truths of God, sowing seeds for eternity Like the unnamed women who never quite fit into the norms of society, either never marrying or having children, yet wanting to. You are in our midst. We are called to be a people who rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn. A full life holds both. |
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On Being Grounded in Christ
excerpt from Amy Young's Looming Transitions
"In all of life, but especially when we are cultivating a fertile soul, staying grounded in Christ is a big rock and worth guarding.
Part of guarding your relationship with God is knowing yourself and what may or may not work for you; it also involves getting creative and throwing some shoulds out the window: “I should read my Bible for twenty minutes a day”; “I should make time to help with the clothing drive at school”; “I should be reading a spiritual book a month”; “I should be able to cook homemade meals more often.”
Staying grounded in Christ...anchors you within the larger story, helping you avoid the temptation to turn this current chapter into the sum total of the story. This perspective allows for this particular season of life to come to fruition and be harvested before planting another crop in the next season."
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-- Young, Amy. Looming Transitions: Starting and Finishing Well in Cross-Cultural Service (p. 73). Amy Young. Kindle Edition.
Part of guarding your relationship with God is knowing yourself and what may or may not work for you; it also involves getting creative and throwing some shoulds out the window: “I should read my Bible for twenty minutes a day”; “I should make time to help with the clothing drive at school”; “I should be reading a spiritual book a month”; “I should be able to cook homemade meals more often.”
Staying grounded in Christ...anchors you within the larger story, helping you avoid the temptation to turn this current chapter into the sum total of the story. This perspective allows for this particular season of life to come to fruition and be harvested before planting another crop in the next season."
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-- Young, Amy. Looming Transitions: Starting and Finishing Well in Cross-Cultural Service (p. 73). Amy Young. Kindle Edition.
Velvet Ashes
Women who Love Jesus
and Live Abroad
Amy Young offers many suggestions in Looming Transition: Starting Well. One of them is that you stay grounded in Christ. Her advice parallels that of the many women involved in Velvet Ashes. Velvet Ashes is an online community of women who love Jesus and who serve overseas, knowing what it is like to be uprooted from familiar soil and rerooted in foreign soil, having to redefine themselves along the way. You can learn about it in the video below.
Eight Ideas that Come to Mind
About Being Grounded in Christ
while reading Amy Young
- Christ is in the Messiness. Christ is not only a man who lived a long time ago. Christ is a living spirit, always beyond the surface, amid the messiness -- the grittiness and enfleshedness -- of everyday life and relationships.
- Christ is an inner Teacher. Christ is also in the very activity of redefining yourself, again and again,with help from friends, family, prayer, worship, and scripture. Christ is an inner teacher and guide.
- Christ is the Logos. Christ is the the Logos: the Spirit of Creative Transformation at work throughout the world and universe. This hills and rivers, the trees and stars -- they, too, are revelations of Christ.
- Christ is Fluid like a River. This Spirit is dynamic and changing, ever-adaptive to each new situation. The Spirit is the same yesterday and today and tomorrow, and yet the sameness is a fluid sameness, a dynamic sameness. Christ is not simply rock-like, Christ is also river-like. And the same holds for God. God is always loving, and love is always adapting to each person, indeed each creature, by availing each person and creature of fresh possibilities for healing and wholeness relative to the situation.
- Christ is Already "There". When people who love Jesus travel to foreign lands, they may discover that Christ is already there, albeit not linked with Jesus. They may see the Spirit in people from other religions and in people who don't have any religion, as in China. Wherever there is wisdom, compassion, and creativity; sincerity, courage, and struggle; Christ is present thus named or not.
- Being Grounded in Christ is Listening to Others beyond the Surface. The task of Jesus-lovers is not simply to "share the gospel." It is to be good listeners, capable of being transformed by the wisdom and love of others who are not Christian. In the very listening, combined with a williness to be creatively transformed by their stories, Christ is present.
- Being Grounded in Christ is Listening to your own Heart. The task of Jesus-lovers is also to listen to their own hearts. It is to feel your own feelings, without hiding from them, with a special listening for the place where, in the words of Frederich Buechner, the gladness of your heart meets the hungers of the world. It is important to know the gladness, too: what brings you joy.
- Being Grounded in Christ is Trust in the Availability of Fresh Possibilities. Jesus was grounded in an intimate relationship with his Abba and also with an openness to the living spirit of Abba in the world. This living spirit is the Logos, and it is a perpetual source of fresh possibilities. Being grounded in Christ is trust in their availability.
I first discovered Amy Young through the poem above, and I love it. I have shared it with many people and will do so in the future. It was from the poem that I discovered her blog, which I will also share with others.
I'm not sure Amy Young would agree with all of the ideas posed above, or even any them. But for me they arise, not only by reading her book and learning from her life, or by learning from what I know of Velvet Ashes, but from my own experience and the influence of process theology on my life.
Still, she and I have some things in common. Like Amy Young, I have spent a good bit of time in China as an educator with a Christian heart. I did not spend 20 years in China as she did; but I've gone to China every summer for the past fifteen years and know many Chinese very well. I like China. Like Amy, I love Jesus. So I've been trying to figure out what it means to love Jesus in a country whose people I love and whose government is explicitly atheistic and, increasingly of late, anti-Christianity.
There's more. Like Amy I believe in loving life and in laughing. Her entire spirit exudes a zest for life that reminds me of the spiritual alphabet developed by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat of Spirituality and Practice. Truth be told, I sense a lot of these spiritual qualities of heart and mind in Amy Young's spirit as reflected in her writings.
I'm not sure Amy Young would agree with all of the ideas posed above, or even any them. But for me they arise, not only by reading her book and learning from her life, or by learning from what I know of Velvet Ashes, but from my own experience and the influence of process theology on my life.
Still, she and I have some things in common. Like Amy Young, I have spent a good bit of time in China as an educator with a Christian heart. I did not spend 20 years in China as she did; but I've gone to China every summer for the past fifteen years and know many Chinese very well. I like China. Like Amy, I love Jesus. So I've been trying to figure out what it means to love Jesus in a country whose people I love and whose government is explicitly atheistic and, increasingly of late, anti-Christianity.
There's more. Like Amy I believe in loving life and in laughing. Her entire spirit exudes a zest for life that reminds me of the spiritual alphabet developed by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat of Spirituality and Practice. Truth be told, I sense a lot of these spiritual qualities of heart and mind in Amy Young's spirit as reflected in her writings.
Still, I feel different from Amy Young in some important ways. Differences can be complementary or conflicting, or somewhere in the messy in-between. In any case. I am not an evangelical Christian, and I am not as Bible-based (or biblicist) as she is. I have been active in inter-faith work in ways that do not seem as pronounced with her; I am drawn toward more contemplative forms of Christian life: and I sometimes describe myself as a Christian influenced by Buddhism. Morever I am older than her father was when he passed away and moved forward. (I love her talk!) So in suggesting these eight ideas, I am simply sharing ideas that come to my mind -- and that make sense to me -- while reading her, for whatever they are worth. I'll summarize here:
To be grounded in Christ is not to escape the messiness of life. Indeed, it is to recognize the inescapability of messiness and, in some ways, to embrace it lovingly, trusting in the availability of fresh possibilities for responding constructively to whatever comes your way.
This trust is faith. The fresh possibilities are one way that God’s Breathing is present in your life. The New Testament speaks of this Breathing as the Logos: the creative and healing spirit of God at work in the world. For the Christian, Jesus revealed this Breathing in his healing ministry, death, and resurrection. He was and is a window to the Breathing. But he did not exhaust it. There is more to the Logos, to the Breathing, than Jesus.
The Breathing is everywhere throughout the world, wherever there is wisdom and compassion and creativity, sincerity and courage and kindness. It need not be named God’s Breathing in order to be effective. What made Jesus “the Christ” is that he was open to the Breathing in his way and time, as we might also be in our way and time. His mission was to invite us to be people of the Breathing.
To be grounded in Christ, then, is not simply to be anchored in the memory of Jesus. That is, it is not to have a place of rest that escapes life’s transitions and changes. It is also to have the freedom to change, to accept the creative transformations that are essential to life, to adjust to new situations, to face uncertain and inevitably messy futures with love and trust, with boldness.
I think Amy's father, Tom, might like the last part. His second life-lesson was to have confidence and go boldly. It seems to me that Amy has learned this lesson well, and I'm grateful that we can learn from her, in our own wild and precious ways.
To be grounded in Christ is not to escape the messiness of life. Indeed, it is to recognize the inescapability of messiness and, in some ways, to embrace it lovingly, trusting in the availability of fresh possibilities for responding constructively to whatever comes your way.
This trust is faith. The fresh possibilities are one way that God’s Breathing is present in your life. The New Testament speaks of this Breathing as the Logos: the creative and healing spirit of God at work in the world. For the Christian, Jesus revealed this Breathing in his healing ministry, death, and resurrection. He was and is a window to the Breathing. But he did not exhaust it. There is more to the Logos, to the Breathing, than Jesus.
The Breathing is everywhere throughout the world, wherever there is wisdom and compassion and creativity, sincerity and courage and kindness. It need not be named God’s Breathing in order to be effective. What made Jesus “the Christ” is that he was open to the Breathing in his way and time, as we might also be in our way and time. His mission was to invite us to be people of the Breathing.
To be grounded in Christ, then, is not simply to be anchored in the memory of Jesus. That is, it is not to have a place of rest that escapes life’s transitions and changes. It is also to have the freedom to change, to accept the creative transformations that are essential to life, to adjust to new situations, to face uncertain and inevitably messy futures with love and trust, with boldness.
I think Amy's father, Tom, might like the last part. His second life-lesson was to have confidence and go boldly. It seems to me that Amy has learned this lesson well, and I'm grateful that we can learn from her, in our own wild and precious ways.