abundance, grit, desperate: lessons from the flower patch farm girl

I wish I had taken better notes.

There were so many stellar speakers.  So many good words.

And I was going from zero to eighty because it’s been quite some time since I sat in a conference-style learning environment and paid close attention to grown ups speaking.

Shannan Martin, known on her blog as Flower Patch Farm Girl, taught a session I attended.  Her words certainly gave me pause.  She had my dreamy ideal life.  A lovely farmhouse home and a little spot of land to call her own.  And then she and her family left all that.  To move to a city and live on the other side of the tracks and take all the good and the bad that rolls right in with that.   (A good and a bad my brain can’t entirely comprehend, having always been a rural girl myself.)

My words from her session are scribbled and disjointed.  Maybe because I was in the front row and I was distracted a little by thinking about how much my sweet friend Myra really likes Shannan’s writing and how I wish she had been there with me to listen to her talk.  Or because I was sitting beside that Tommy Nelson editor in the front row.

Either way, the phrases I am attributing to her right now may or may not be taken out of context and jumbled together a tad.  (But, you know, that’s sort of how good talks and Jesus work sometimes – you get what you need to hear to be rescue and balm at your point of need.)

She said – the abundant life is not what we think it is.

No.  No it isn’t.

I can agree with this.  When we think abundant we think American abundance.  The fat paycheck.  The fancy pants car.  The titles and the fame and the circular driveway with a fountain in the middle.  A theatre room and vacations out of the country and the ability to live unencumbered by financial burdens.

But Shannan spoke of another kind of abundance.  The kind of abundance that does’t even show up on your doorstep looking like abundance.  It looks more like roadkill.  (My words, not hers.)

Her words were something about this “undercurrent of grit” and I just found that idea perfectly in step with my life right now.

An undercurrent of grit.

Shucks.  I’m setting up residencey in that undercurrent it feels like.  All grit.  All the time.

(And as I type, I know that’s not entirely true.  Not all grit.  Not all the time.  But grittier than I’d choose.  More grit than shine.  Grit all tangled up and mixed in and unable to sift it out.  So much grit you taste it in your mouth.)

She talked about that contrary Biblical truth of ….. If you cling to your life, you will lose it, and if you let your life go, you will save it.

Who on earth knows what to do with that one?

Who?  Tell me – I need to know.

I’ve been guilty of clinging, you guys.  Guilty and still holding tight.  White knuckles and steely eyes and clinging, clinging, clinging.

My former (beloved, clung to) life has been wrenched from my grasp and it’s floating somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle and I’m pretty certain I’ll never see it pass this way again.

And for all my tenuous clinging, I couldn’t hold on to any of it.

There’s one more thing.

One more thing she said that I don’t like but I keep seeing it as truth in my own story.

Shannon shared how she felt as if God kept her right on the edge of desperate.

For me, that feels so true and so scary that it hurts my stomach a little.

It’s like, all my life, I need to be kept right on the edge of desperate to be reminded that I need Him.

Because, you guys, every time I slide back over to easy-living and comfort, I forget.

It’s embarrassing and shameful.

But it is true.

Right on the edge of desperate.

Desperate to not be on my own.

Desperate to be rescued.

Desperate to see hope and grace and mercy and to drink deeply of all three.

Right on the edge of desperate.

So that I can depend on Not Me.

So that my hands remain lifted up

and my heart remains ready to be led.

Right here.

You can find me.

On the edge of desperate.