It’s planner season.
In this strange year of too much and yet not enough, I went
ahead and bought a planner even though I haven’t had much occasion to use my
planner since March. My head is all prepared for sweaters and pumpkins and
sharpened pencils, even though of course my heart knows better.
My mind in late August always starts preparing for school,
no matter how old I get, apparently. I found some of my old collages in my
cleaning out my basement this summer and it struck me how these- especially the
ones that I would put on my notebooks and book covers- they were sort of vision
boards for that young Joy.
That young girl that I was back then, she had such dreams
about what exactly life was supposed to look like- she always thought that she
was eventually going to grow out of her awkwardness.
Long ago I realized that I was never not going to be this clumsy,
much too loud person who never fails to realize two minutes too late that she
has said the exact wrong thing. But this summer, this strange summer of forced
introspection, has allowed me to make a peace with that in a new way.
The Wondering Years and All Things
Reconsidered by Knox McCoy
I consider Knox and Jamie (of my most beloved Popcast) to be
friends who are much cooler than I am. (I often wish that podcasts had been
around when I was in college and so at loose ends for what to do about my
absolute inability to talk to anyone around me.) These two
books by Knox speak so to my soul about what it means to remember with such
fondness these pieces of my faith that I grew up holding to, while at the same
time digging into and learning so much more to theology than I ever grasped as
that young girl.
I grew up loving Brio magazine and DC
Talk and I adored the Christy Miller series so much that I not only wrote a letter to my future husband at 16 (just as she did) but also I wrote a
letter to him every single year on my birthday and presented them to Nick on
our wedding night and genuinely never thought that a weird thing to do until
two years ago.
Knox (and Jamie and Erin) grew up in this same culture, too
old for VeggieTales but a little younger than Salty, right in that McGee and
Me, "Jesus Freak" hotspot. And frankly that’s not something that I talk about too
very much- none of my friends in high school read or watched these things, and
it was just sort of something that was a part of who I was but was also not
something that I discussed with anyone. Finding these books spoke to that part
of my soul, the one that remembers so fondly that world that I grew up in while
reconciling it with my much deeper and more considered adult faith.
Knox writes, “I am a part of a generation of evangelicals
who struggle to balance the simplistic spiritual perspective we internalized as
children with the more complicated notions and cultural conflicts we experience
now as adults.”
It was a delightful way to spend bits of my summer.
Untamed by Glennon Doyle
Everyone kept telling me that I needed to read Untamed. People who know me really well, and people I have only barely met. So finally I plunged in.
And I get it- my co-dependent soul needs to inject some of her words into my veins. Becoming an adult in the middle of life, becoming who you were meant to be after what seems like the biggest bits of life have come and gone- it's hard and yet amazing, uncomfortable and yet freeing.
There are pieces of Glennon's story that I just cannot relate to (breaking up her family, even though I completely and totally understand why that happened, and it's not that I fault her for it, but it is also far from my reality), and the old Joy would have internalized that as having done the wrong thing, not grieved or changed in the correct way. The Joy of 2020 takes that as different people living different lives and loving them and understanding that growth comes in all kinds of different forms.
Glennon is a brave soul and I am all the better for having met her.
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Brit Bennett is officially one of my favorite writers. The Mothers was amazing, and yet The Vanishing Half tops it. This novel is intricate in its examination of race and family and it has stayed inside of my soul, in the way that all the best books do.
This summer has been full of many more books and movies and rearranging the furniture. Full of reliving so much of who I was twenty some years ago, and at the same time listening to Folklore on a loop and falling in love with Sam Ryder on Tik Tok (his version of "What's Going On?" is perfect) and absolutely loving The Baby-sitters Club on Netflix (much to my surprise, because I truly love my Baby-sitters on VHS tapes).
This summer has been a reset, a time of quiet that has been healing to my soul. A time of learning and grace and trying to be kinder to myself in understanding that we are all figuring this out as we go.
