Dance On Trafficking

Come over here! Pull up a chair, my comrades, countrymen and co-conspirators . . . Because I’ve got something REALLY special (eeeeeeeek!) to share with you. (Wait for it . . .)

I’m linking my arms and my heart with the good people at Love146 in their efforts to raise awareness and finances for the ongoing and arduous task of rescuing children around the world who are caught in slavery’s net. Love146 runs a campaign every year called Tread On Trafficking, a global invitation for anyone who wears shoes to put that tread to good use by fighting slavery in any creative way possible. The most familiar ways that people contribute to this event are through running, walking, working out and biking – all with the intent of asking sponsors to help them meet their fundraising goal. Every cent raised goes directly to Love146.

So, I had another idea of how to use our feet to fight all the bad traffick and I am SUPER excited to share it with you. But first you gotta turn the imagination place inside your brain all the way up. Ready? Let’s GO!

When my kids hit the dance floor and go entirely loose-limbed to the make-you-move tunes, in my mama-estimation they personify the highest and holiest definition of what it means for a child to be wildly and audaciously free. They are conscienceless of their legs and arms spinning and stomping and could care like nothing about how they look, praise be to God. They simply show the universe what it means to be all the way alive in the bodies and souls they were given. And there is certainly no greater joy as a parent than to watch the uninhibited nature of a child and my only thought in that moment of witnessing their unbridled motion is that THIS is one of life’s purest fragrances – the artless liberty of the young human spirit.

But you and I know that dancing with liberty isn’t an option or even a speck of thought on the radar of choice for millions of boys and girls around this orbiting globe. More to the point: children everywhere live the sum-total-opposite of what it means for a child to be alive. And the grief and tears that rise up in our throats with that reality is too big and toxic to swallow back down and how? How do we make an endless atrocity right? What else on earth can we do to press back against the darkness that devours several million childhoods for breakfast each day?

We ask these burning questions for the sake of our burning hearts and the children themselves who are burning alive inside the skin of their own lives, all their flesh in flames with no water source to soothe the scorch. And because they can’t put out their own fires, all the abolitionist-hearted people on the earth stop, drop and roll; we imagine and brainstorm and beat against the box of what’s been done before just so we can come up with new ways to kick this cancerous calamity off the edge to nowhere.

We do all we can to fight this oppressive power until just. one. more. liberating idea is born.

So come in close for a moment all you child lovers and slavery haters; justice fighters and peace makers. A light came on in my thinking space and I’d like to invite you to see what I see.

What if we had . . . [insert drum roll] a wide-spread (global even?) dance party?! Can you imagine it? If we all got our feet together on the same day, if we all lasso our kids and call our neighbors and their kids; if we grab sisters, siblings, daughters, mothers, sons, fathers, friends and we all decide that we’re going to dance unanimously against trafficking? If we put our on party shoes, maybe a tutu or a striped tie or polka dot pajamas and blow up balloons, toss confetti, crack open glow sticks, bake some colorful cupcakes and right before the music starts we tell our children about the boys and girls who live bound and enslaved all over the world and how those children don’t get to dance and be free, so we’re going to be free for them.

We’re going to dance for them.

We’ll tell their earnest little faces that every motion of their liberated limbs is an act of light, a display of freedom. We’ll tell them to hook every fiber of their dancing towards the intention of unshackling the slave-children. We’ll tell them to shake their booties for the ones bound up in man-made bondage. We’ll tell them to go wild and shout loud and be absolutely unrestrained. We’ll tell them to show everything on earth – above, around, below and beyond – how children were born to be, just in case there was any doubt about it anywhere.

And you know what? I can already envision the spiritual fabric of the atmosphere rippling and shifting because of our unified, expressive movement speaking to all the powers that be. Those powers that be will hear our roar that we are fighting darkness with light; fighting slavery with a total admission of liberty. And maybe we will watch with wonder as an immense impact takes it’s place in history.

Do you believe it?

My husband, myself, our kids and circle of friends will be having an outrageous dance party On June 28th and we’d be straight-up, through-the-roof excited to have you join us – from wherever you are!

What do you say? Y’all IN?!

Here’s how to get started:

1. Join our Tread on Trafficking “team” by clicking HERE.

2. Set a fundraising goal and SPREAD THE WORD! You can email, Tweet, Facebook, Instagram and make flyers. Tell your mailman and banker and hairdresser and mechanic. Invite ALL THE PEOPLE to your party! And/or, invite ALL THE PEOPLE to SPONSOR your party by making a donation to your Tread On Trafficking page.

3. Plan your party! Be CRAZY if you want, or low-key if you need; go BIG or dance with a few – there’s no right or wrong way to create this event. The main intention is be every bit like a liberated child.

4. Instagram and Tweet and Facebook pictures from your party and use the hashtag #danceontrafficking so we can all connect to each other and share the love, love, LOVE!

5. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me in the comments or by clicking on the little envelope at the top of the sidebar.

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I Beg To Differ

Come in close with me for a moment? I’m in a gentle, whispering sort of mood and I have some thoughts to give and questions I would ask all you feelers and thinkers and lovers. My questions are the coffeehouse or fire pit variety, the kind that get asked when we can look through the steam or across the flames and find, above all things, the value-code writ into each other’s faces.

1. Do you think God knew we would interpret the gospel 7 billion different ways before sunrise on Sunday? (My sense is that God knew this was inevitable and They still didn’t build parameters to make sure it didn’t happen.)

2. Do you think They are concerned about interpretation nuances?

3. And do you ever wonder if we were even meant to believe the same things regarding doctrine, theology and the like?

Sometimes I lay in bed during the night watch and imagine all kinds of people standing behind my eyes. I place them there just so I can look real long into their soul-windows and speak these over them in the dark: “I see you”. Because what if nobody ever tried to see them before and my looking at them with love is like a prayer going out to cover this essential human need?

So I lay with my physical eyes shut and my spirit-eyes wide open and I see the panorama of skin colors and heights, sizes and shapes. But more importantly I see that everyone is carrying the weight of their own history; an entire world riding piggy on their backs and everyone is fighting their own battles, wearing their own scars, bleeding from their own wounds, pushing through their own struggles. I see we’re all haunted by standard red devils and white ghosts and it’s not just when these eyes are closed. I see that you and you and all of you are bent with your own heaviness, just like I’m doubled over with mine. I see humanity has 7 billion different molecular codes informing their responses, reactions; persuading the spectrum of their emotions. On my left I see the guy who seems whole on the outside, but his soul limps like a zombie, diseased and mostly dead. I see the one in the shadows who perpetuates unspeakable evil and I look at him extra long so I have time to trace his life backward in my mind’s eye and hopefully understand what happened to him, “Who hurt you?” I will always ask. I see the girl who thinks she’s got it all figured out, but she actually don’t know shit. (Sometimes that girl is me.) I see the religious, non-religious; educated, uneducated; rich man, poor man; young man, old man. I see the preposterous, vulgar, timid, boisterous, abused, broken, numb, bloodshot, drunk, diseased, depressed, drugged and dumb. I see sinners, saints, successes, eccentrics, bullies, bullied, straights, gays, clowns, misfits, fools and thieves.

I see a mysterious cocktail of a thousand different characteristics inside the mix of each person . . .

Join me at Deeper Story today to read the rest of my thinkings! Click HERE or HERE or HERE.

Love,

Erika

When A Community Has Cancer

Here I am.

And I’ve been real quiet haven’t I?

I’ve been real quiet because I’ve been real hurting and I haven’t known how to quantify the real pain into real words. Because she called me on a Saturday when the biggest winter blizzard in decades was blowing over our heads and through her intuitive tears told me she had found a lump in her breast. And just like that my heart fell down to the floor because this is the girl whose soul is stitched into my rib bones and we share every little atom of life – raising our boys side-by-side, telling each other secrets, supporting and struggling and sticking together in spite of all the things that life can hurl at a person and when she gets scared? My God, if I don’t know the feeling like it’s manifesting right inside my own skin. So we prayed together across phone wires, saying the “please God, no” and hanging onto hope for benign, taking deep breaths like we were starving for them.

But, something in her must’ve known.

Yes, I think she knew. Because less then a month, a mammogram and biopsy later that mass she felt in her breast was cancer, additionally tested and found “aggressive”. She’s only 36 and it hurts so big for me to witness this. All I want is for her to get over here and pour out her pain into my hands so I can press it against my chest and run all the way to the far side of the earth, throw that hurt off the edge and watch it plummet headlong towards some bottomless abyss. But that is just my imagination talking and I’m left with a slow walk back to reality and that thing I wanted to fling is a lead burden filling up my limbs, making me be heavy all over. A part of me feels like it would be easier to go through cancer myself then watch how this fire will make her burn. I would do it, you know. I would absorb every microscopic bit of disease to spare her the months of agony – chemo, surgery, radiation and the whole sweeping panorama of side effects. Lord knows I can’t do that. But she did give us the key to her surviving and thriving when 30 of us circled around her as a community to lay prayer-hands on her face and hair and neck and spine and arms and fingers and blue jeans – we covered all the spaces and couldn’t get close enough this time and we told her that for better of for worse *WE* have cancer and it’s an honor and privilege to be trusted with her daily care. We’re gonna stick our fingers in her veins and tie our blood tighter together and just you wait and watch what we can do because we’re standing arm in arm like a ferocious and united human shield around her body. Watch us wear her burden on our backs and stare down this death-maker duel-style while we move and rhythm ourselves all the way in the opposite spirit of it. And by “opposite spirit”, I mean: as a people we’re gonna show this disease what it really means to be alive.

Also: I want you to know something else about this lady; what kind of woman she is and why I wish you could look at her in the midst of the mess and sorrow. Because I’ve never known anyone who digs into life deeper so she can stand taller and reach higher and spread her arms and heart wider and every tough situation I’ve seen her go through? Well, she has just come out so shining, with Kingdom glory on her face and wisdom beaming from stem to stern and compassion extending to the tips of all her digits. And before she ever knew she had cancer, the Spirit whispered the word JOY over her year, told her it would be the lens by which she would see anything in the coming days (how timely and crazy is that?) and my own ears have heard the words from her lips again and again these past weeks: “I choose JOY”.

Would you pray with us? Maybe just a tiny inhale and exhale filled with good and God-full intention would be enough on your part. Or, more then just that if you are so inclined. Her name is Jen, but we know her as Liberty . . . So maybe your prayer could be for her freedom from all this some day.

I Am An Alchemist

Psst . . . Would you harness all your extra energetic atoms and come close in here for a moment? I want to tell you a special little something . . .

For 32 years I’ve been walking around the sun and with every turn about the calendar I’ve learned that I’m unfurling into more of who I was born to be; discovering dots, connecting threads, sketching ideas, chasing the Spirit around all the places so I can ask him all the questions all the time – just for the joy of scribbling what I hear on the scratchpad of my soul and I’m sure I get to keep all the whispered secrets harbored safe within me for at least (or no less then) eternity.

Get this: I’m still learning new things about myself and some might find this strange and others entirely refreshing, but lately I’ve been rolling the air between the tips of my fingers just so I can touch what nothing-molecules feel like. I’m every which way bent on not missing a single ordinary thing because I recently discovered that I am, by nature, an alchemist.

What’s that you say?

Alchemist: A person who uses any magical power or process of transmuting a common substance, usually of little value, into a substance of great value.

Hmmm . . . I wonder WHO the original alchemist was and is and is to come? You must know that I’m thinking now of that long ago dust-spread being woven and shaped into humanity by the magical breath of The Great Alchemist. And I’m thinking of every redemption story I’ve ever heard and all the tales of burned-down ashes turning towards raised-up beauty because that one true Alchemist spoke the magic-wielding words of value and love. I just can’t escape this urge to be under the tutelage of such wonder. So, I touch the air with the flesh of my hands and imagine it’s worth so much more then I often remember, this element I take for granted just as often as my next breath.

Alchemy, I think, is nothing if not the noticing of the practically un-noticeable. And by practicing noticement, the magic of value and love is infused into the most common of substances until they become, to the beholder, a substance of great value. Glory be! Who knew you could get giddy like this and watch the daily drudgery and typical times go by, rich and filled full with amazement.

In related news, I wrote this prayer in my journal a few weeks back and it speaks volumes of the place God has seduced me to: “A quiet and reverent good morning I would speak to You now . . . with rest and love and fullness in my heart. I’m breathing You in like a mystic, slowing all my molecules to look like miracles. They are miracles and I would remember today that You are holy and wholly, absolutely other. Give me eyes to see and ears to hear and a heart to understand just one or two unfathomable mysteries . . . Would You let me touch the connections between this world and Your pulsing beat? Related: I want to drink You, every bit that I can. Is that possible? To sink into the celestial abyss? Right here in all my ordinary days? By the way, I love . . . I LOVE my ordinary days. You have built me for this, changed me to reflect the mysticism of the mundane and I am grateful, but more so: content. I am content. My God. Miracles never cease. Picking up scattered scraps of paper, filling a million cups with milk, doing the kitchen dance over a pot of simmering soup . . . I am content and AMEN I say to that.”

Now you know a little something more about the heart that beats inside my body and next time I go about making God-seed declarations, I’m gonna tell you why I am, by nature, also an anthropologist. In the meantime, I was wondering (and it would rock my world) if you wouldn’t mind sharing with me something about yourself? It could be a photo or a paragraph or a prayer or a link to a blog post – anything! What is something you are - regardless of whether you’ve been validated by man or certified by any institution? The anthropologist in me longs to know the inherent you and desires to see how we all intersect and connect in this beautiful interlocking circle of Kingdom contribution.

When A Cross-Dresser Meets An Off-Key Kumbayah

I quit all service-related activities this past summer when I burned out.

And I haven’t been back at them since.

But the thing is, when you go too long with your heart-values being unrequited, something different—but equally damaging—happens: your heart starts to choke on your own values because they just keep sitting there, stacking up inside you.

Until they come so high you can nearly taste them crawling inch by inch up the back of your throat, suffocating you for their need to be released.

So it was no surprise to walk into Loaves and Fishes Food Pantry at butt-early o’clock on Saturday and feel like I could breathe again. I had come home. Home, I tell you. A place so familiar I can smell it in my sleep, with sounds and sights cascading dreamily through me like a favorite childhood memory – maybe the one where I sit on the counter in our growing-up kitchen, sneaking dough and keeping my mama company while she makes my favorite cookies. Comfort, contentment, intimacy, warmth down to my little white feet, that’s what flooded over my body when I travelled across the threshold of that church-basement pantry.

I’ve said it before and I’ll I say it again: there is never a greater sense of belonging then in this space, where my soul is catapulted to the center of an unwashed, undignified sea of quirky people. I love the loud-mouths, the misfits, the skin colors and wrinkle patterns. I love the offending scents, bad language and indecent behavior. I love the spectrum and volume of energy buzzing and pinging from wall to wall, the graceless chaos of pushing and shoving. I love the reluctant acceptance and show of community. I love the joy that still comes when someone starts yelling at me because I can’t understand the name he mumbles at the registration table. All this—even much more—and I feel like I’m the opportunist who found herself in heaven because she already chose to die.

Jay-Z and Kanye were wrong, you know. There IS church in the wild and I find it every time I’m there in that jungle of battered humanity, where I am chief of all the rabble-ish creatures. But, for absolutely dead damn certain the finest part of the whole [rethink] church service that morning was the moment when a lively cross-dressed man (complete with giant gold hoop earrings) flaunted in and started serenading the crowd at the very height of his off-key lungs. Round and around and around he would weave himself slowly through all the food-seeking bodies with an open hymn book in hand, singing song after song. He was so LOUD y’all, but in my estimation this man seemed like he represented The Glue that stuck all us kids together that day . . . not only did his off-color character invite you to come just as you are with all the strangeness and skeletons you stand up under, but because the first song he belted forth was none other then Kumbayah – the tune “originally associated with human and spiritual unity, closeness and compassion”. The whole eccentric event made me want to whoop and dance and grin as wide as the lousy limitations of my face would allow. And my spirit was so stretched with colliding and ricocheting sensations, the feeling you might have when something shamelessly pure and indescribably right and incandescently beautiful rises from an unseen place and expands your chest with all the good things. Bursting, I have heard it called before.

I am bursting. And all the craziness and Kumbayah singing doesn’t stop me from pausing within the bedlam just to inhale him, my Jesus. Pausing and breathing and shutting my eyes for only a moment and I can see his figure moving around the earthbound bodies in that fluid way – touching shoulders, bathing feet, bending close for every hug, delivering that celestial-sized smile he’s famous for . . . You see? The reason I go is selfish, really. I just want to be close to Jesus and remember who he is [especially] during this Lent season. Not only is he all over every person I smell and touch and serve, but his Spirit is also whorling between every piece of food and flesh. I mean, you literally and certainly CAN’T miss him. Of all the reasons for dragging my arse out of bed on a Saturday morning, that one is the absolute best.

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