A Little Bit of Water

Sometimes, we just need a little bit of water. 

On one such occasion, my family of four, along with Rufus the dog, packed the car to the gills. We drove far, too far it seemed, in an effort to hole up in the dirt and pines near the base of Lake Siskiyou. We would sleep in a tent! We would commune with nature! We would engage in good wholesome fun, together, far from the influence of technology! All exclamation points most decidedly included, the hopes we held stepping into the weekend did happen – even if sleep felt elusive and my then elementary-aged sons engaged in a few too many games of Roblox along the way. 

At one point, I remember crouching on a log by the lake, enveloped in an umbrella of shade from the Ponderosa pines overhead. The thermometer outside of the chicken shack measured 100 degrees. I felt like I was melting, my insides dripping like vanilla soft serve down the sides of my hand. Sticky to the touch, I yearned for relief, for coolness, for a real scoop of ice cream to call my own. When the 60-SPF sunblock set in fifteen minutes later, I galloped down to the cerulean water, running deeper, and deeper still, soon diving when my legs slowed to molasses. Finally, respite came, this time in the form of reservoir waters built in the sixties for purposes of watershed protection and flood control. 

I needed that water, at least in the moment. Hundreds of other Northern Californian lake dwellers, equally vying for spots of shade under Coleman pop-up tents and weathered logs alike, also found comfort in the coolness and peace those holy dam waters provided. Lake Siskiyou, it seems, became the cup we drank from, the food that sustained us in the late afternoon heat of triple-digit weather. 

I share this story with you, because when I was asked to share what Grow Christians has meant for me over the years, more often than not, it’s been the little bit of water I often didn’t know I needed.  

As a writer, it’s been the place I can come with a story of my family or of the urban backyard garden and find solidarity with a community of like-minded readers. The stories I most like to write – the ones that sometimes start with lakes and dams and sleeping underneath a canopy of stars – are not always the ones other people like to read. But Grow Christiansgave me a soft place to land, a soft place cushioned with roomy thoughts of God and spirituality and the Episcopal Church alike. 

In more ways than one, that last piece of finding a home in the Episcopal tradition and then of writing into that tradition often became the water I needed more than anything else. As many readers know (and as I write about in Church Camp), evangelicalism is my cradle home, my mother tongue. Even though I came to call the Episcopal tradition home more than a decade ago now – and was ordained to the diaconate last month – sometimes it takes a little while to learn a new language. More than once, Grow Christians became the cerulean water I galloped into on a hot summer’s day. 

This place became a space where we wrestled together with mysteries unknown, and then, sometimes, with the God behind all that mystery. When I did not always know how to move forward, how to keep putting one foot in front of the other because the aforementioned mother tongue begged me to embrace a certitude of black and white answers, Grow Christians gave me permission to embrace a more liminal gray—to not know and be okay with not knowing, and to trust that God might still be in that place. 

“Today feels different, though,” I wrote in a post nearly six years ago. “Instead of curiosity, I feel sadness. Instead of joy, an air of lament fills the air around me.” Holding the dichotomy of two opposing emotions (and then later, of being found by God in those emotions) was revolutionary for me. I may not have then written, “And do you know what a big deal it is for me to write these words, let alone actually believe these words true?” But the truth is that our small and mighty publication gave me permission to work out a growing, changing, evolving faith, on paper, no less. For this I am forever grateful. 

Grow Christians, thank you for being that little bit of water we all needed on a hot summer’s day. You’ve been the space and the community, the people and the workings-out through words so many of us needed, even when we were unaware.

For this, we are most grateful.