This post will not be like the rest I have spent many hours writing and re-writing to get perfect SEO and Pinterest worthy perfectly cropped photos and a ton of grammatical errors. This post is blunt, to the point and from my ever breaking and healing heart. We birthed this blog in 2015 with ONE goal. To bridge the gap in communities. That was it. Isn’t that a simple goal? A not-for-profit business model to support the least of these. So what happened? Where have we been? What’s the deal?
Yes, it has been over a year since I have written a blog post. Why? Because I was mentally exhausted. I was tired of people asking, ‘why?’. I was tired of non-profits we were trying to support asking ‘why?’. I was tired of begging for volunteers for community outreach projects. I was tired of printing t-shirts to sell for hours on end and people asking for them for free or saying that $19 was expensive…((insert eye roll)) , I was tired of spending days writing one blog post and getting a couple ‘nice,nice’ comments…people, I was tired, tired, tired….and so I found myself laying on a rock on the bank of a creek early one Sunday morning crying. Which was interrupted by a friend texting me saying she wasn’t going to make it to church…she was on her own rock…it turned into her offering me sweet words of encouragement.
Several days later I got a phone call from my husband on his way to work one morning. It went something like this, “you need to do something else for now, you can’t let this pull you under.” And that was that. I walked away and didn’t write one more word, look for one more community service project or contact one more non-profit. It’s just now, 14 months later that I have found it in me to share this story. Because on occasion someone will ask me, what’s up with FizlDizl?
This summer a friend of mine and myself decided to read Jen Hatmaker’s book Seven. It seemed like a good season for the book, and we dove right in. (the book and workbook are amazing and you can find the book HERE). (not even an affiliate link) I was on page 122 one early August morning, the house quiet, air thick with humidity, the dark lush leaves of the trees gently blowing in the morning breeze working to cool off the heat of the day before it started, and read these words that STOPPED me in my tracks…
“I had come to see that the great tragedy in the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor…I long for the Calcutta slums to meet the Chicago suburbs, for lepers to meet landowners and for each to see God’s image in the other…I truly believe that when the poor meet the rich, riches will have no meaning. And when the rich meet the poor, we will see poverty come to an end.” -Shane Claiborne
That, that was all I wanted. To share the utter and complete joy that comes when you lower yourself to serve, from the depths of your heart, to give what you have been blessed with – not money or things, but your time and love…to council -to pray and show up for the poor, the tired, lonely, unaccepted, the ones that don’t have someone to help pull them up and show them the way.
We have gotten complacent, and busy and tired and help when it’s on our terms for our people, when it fits into our schedule that we have crammed so full we fall into bed exhausted not wanting to face the next day because we know it holds more of the same. Because we have to let the kids do all the things. Except we don’t. My kids thrive most when they don’t do all the things. Go figure. While we worry about how to pay for the dance classes and braces and car payments for a cars we don’t really need there is a family worrying about how to put some scraps of food on the table for their kids…less than 7 miles from my front door. And every child gets government funded lunch and breakfast and we can’t take two hours once a month to go sit with them, tutor a child, make a family a meal who is not in need of it for convenience but for survival. This is why…this is why we started sharing our journey. Because even at our lowest most desperate times of rolling change to pay the mortgage, we weren’t poor. We had food. We had clothing, that was clean, and we had a support system. And right there is what is most lacking…a support system that can show them a better way. This isn’t even all about the poor, but the lonely and brokenhearted, like so many minority groups. We all seem to have an opinion but few are willing to show up in the trenches. Few reach out their hand and say, “how are you” let alone give up their lunch without telling everyone.
That friend I mentioned talking to me while I lay in the wildness crying out to the Lord all my broken pieces for His people that I couldn’t help or get people to help me reach in the God size way He had laid on my heart….that friend…I met while I sat on the floor in her father’s house while I met with her sister and her friends representing a sales company, that not one of them could afford to buy something from, but still I felt it in my heart to show up, in a not so favorable neighborhood…that friend was so shy, so scared to come sit and let me offer her something for free because she had so very little….she was a stranger that I couldn’t shake…she thought she didn’t have anything to offer me, a single mom living with her family, barely living paycheck to paycheck…and is now one of my very best friends who flipped the tables and gave back to me that day with simple kind loving words of encouragement that got me up off that rock.
So, that is where FizlDizl has been – desperately searching for fresh air to breath. Taking time to regroup and refocus. The past few months God has been bringing some things back around that He laid on my heart before. I don’t know the exact path, but I know He has gone before us, and has big big plans for our family. We would love to have you be a part of it all. So if you’re okay with no frills blog posts like this for now, please follow along….it’s what I have to give at the moment. And you never know, maybe Bill will even do a video for you if you’re lucky. Because people without community there is no reason for this life, don’t forget for one moment that we were made for relationships and community. And I will fight to my last breath to help bridge the gap in communities.
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