Welcome to Camp Funk

Maybe you’re dying a little bit on your insides?

Every day. Every Monday and Tuesday, Wednesday there are little pieces of your soul crumbling and crying

Maybe you’re over there between the loads and piles of laundry and you think you’re dying of all this mundane rut of a routine?

Maybe it’s the driving at rush hour that’s got you bent over the steering wheel thinking this is it — I just can’t do this anymore.

Maybe it’s your cubicle that’s got you slowly feeling all the life drain right out of you.

Maybe the leftover dishes feel like all your leftover life that you’ve been missing — gritty and gross and nasty to clean.  

Maybe your daughter or loved one  has cancer and your heart really is dying with every day you lie next to them  on a hospital bed — there’s the doubt that you’ll ever survive losing them. 

And it’s real. That kind of broken heart.

Maybe your mom or dad just died and you have no idea how to go on without them in your lives.

Maybe it’s your marriage that has died, all those wedding vows crumbled like old plaster .

Maybe it’s your son you haven’t seen in a month, who’s stopped returning your calls, stopped talking to you, stopped letting you into the nooks and crannies of his life. That beautiful life that used to be yours to rock and hold and soothe and whisper midnight prayers over bad dreams. That life won’t look you in the eye anymore and it feels like you lost an arm, losing contact with that son.

Maybe your insides hurt so bad you’re amazed no one notices. Because a Batman band aid can’t possibly hold back the bleeding from a broken soul.

And maybe your soul is bloody and messy and desperately lonely.

Maybe I need to remind you that you’re not alone.

If one part bleeds, the whole body suffers that blood loss.

                        (this little jelly bean was pretty much in the same place 4 days in a row)

If one part is dying, the body must face death. Or fight it. 

I want to fight with you. I want to fight for you. 

And I’ve lived enough broken and loved enough friends through their own cracks to know that redeemed is not the same as fixed and that holes can still ache even when we’re whole again. Death, divorce, loss, heartbreak — admitting them doesn’t make us immune. Or cancel the loss. Or restore the missing.

But sometimes saying it out loud is an invitation to the God who already knows to lay Himself down in our rips and tears and hold us together — often through the arms of our friends. The people who’ve heard us whisper, “I’m not fine.”

Because Jesus is in the business of making all Things New!

Not perfect. Not like they used to be. But new. Third day after the grave kind of new. Resurrection new.

So, it’s time to be brave now. It’s time to tell someone how you feel.

It’s time to let someone into your secret insides.

Because while it can be excruciating to admit our un-fine moments, it’s in those moments that people can actually GET to us to help us. We need people. We are a body. And if one part is all bashed up and bleeding, it hurts everywhere else.

Friendship with skin on will let you down. It will likely hurt you sometimes. But it will also laugh with you, not at you, over the everyday bits and pieces that make us real. Unmade beds, broken deadlines, dark secrets, random diaper genies outside our front doors and

It’s my  joy to love you.

It’s my honor to bear witness to your brokenness.

It’s my calling to sit down beside you as you crumple over there in the valley of the shadow of death. I will wait with you. I will bear witness to your sorrow. 

Today you are not alone.

Beloved.