Bittersweet

Oh, Shauna. You are so good to me. Bittersweet is yet another heaping dose of your eloquent, honest, life-giving prose and I love it. Here are some parts that stood out to me and of course there are LOTS. (Emphasis on certain parts is my own doing, not how the text is printed.)

p. 11: Bittersweet is the practice of believing that we really do need both the bitter and the sweet, and that a life of nothing but sweetness rots both your teeth and your soul. Bitter is what makes us strong, what forces us to push through, what helps us earn the lines on our faces and the callouses on our hands. Sweet is nice enough, but bittersweet is beautiful, nuanced, full of depth and complexity. Bittersweet is courageous, gutsy, earthy.

p. 12: When you haven't yet had your heart really broken, the gospel isn't about death and rebirth. Its about life and more life. Its about hope and possibility and a brighter future. And it is, certainly, about those things... When you life is easy, a lot of the really crucial parts of Christian doctrine and life are nice theories, but you don't really need them. When, however, death of any kind is staring you in the face, all of a sudden rebirth and new life are very, very important to you.

p. 13: ...when life is sweet, say thank you and celebrate. And when life is bitter, say thank you and grow.

p. 15: If you try to stand and face the wave, it will smash you into bits, but if you trust the water and let it carry you, there's nothing sweeter. 

pp. 17-19: Looking back now I can see that it was more than anything a failure to believe in the story of who God is and what he is doing in this world. Instead of living that story - one of sacrifice and purpose and character - I began to live a much smaller story, and that story was only about me. I wanted an answer, a timeline, and a map... If I'm honest, I prayed the way you order breakfast from a short-order cook: this is what I want. Period. This what I want. Aren't you getting this? I didn't pray for God's will to be done in my life, or, at any rate, I didn't mean it. I prayed to be rescued, not redeemed. I prayed for it to get easier, not that I would be shaped in significant ways. I prayed for the waiting to be over, instead of trying to learn something about patience or anything else for that matter... More awareness of God's presence and action and ability, and less stranglehold on my fear and anxiety. More floating, and less getting tumbled.

p. 36: Feeding people is a way of loving them, in the same way that feeding ourselves is a way of honoring our own createdness and fragility.
When we stop everything else to gather around the table and eat a meal made by someone's hands, we honor our bodies and the God who created them. We honor the world he made and the beauty of creation. And in that moment we acknowledge that even though life is fast and frantic, we're not machines and we do require nourishment, physically and otherwise.

pp. 65-66: Share your life with the people you love, even if it means saving up for a ticket and going without a few things for a while to make it work. There are enough long lonely days of the same old thing, and if you let enough years pass, and if you let the routine steamroll your life, you'll wake up one day, isolated and weary, and wonder what happened to all those old friends. You'll wonder why all you share is Christmas cards, and why life feels lonely and bone-dry. We were made to live connected and close...
So walk across the street, or drive across town, or fly across the country, but don't let really intimate loving friendships become the last item on a long to-do list. Good friendships are life breakfast. You think you're too busy to eat breakfast, but then you find yourself exhausted and cranky halfway through the day, and discover that your attempt to save time totally backfired. In the same way, you can try to go it alone because you don't have time or because your house is too messy to have people over, or because making new friends is like the very worst parts of dating. But halfway through a hard day or a hard week, you'll realize in a flash that you're breathtakingly lonely, and that the Christmas cards aren't much company. Get up, make a phone call, buy a cheap ticket, open your front door. 
Because there really is nothing life good friends, life the sounds of their laughter and the tones of their voices and the things they teach us in the quietest, smallest moments.

p. 69: Aaron and I are finding that marriage, and maybe all relationships, are built on the past. That's a good thing, when the past involves honeymoons and great dates and moments of sweetness and partnership. But what we are left with when, increasingly, the past also contains the moments when we hurt each other, the times we stopped listening, the needs we saw and didn't meet, the conversations we walked away from?

p. 79: Sometimes we get so tangled up in our own perceptions of ourselves, what we think we're good at and what we're not, that we lose perspective, seeing only our failures and bad habits. I can give you a top ten list of why its hard to work with me or crazy-making to live with me, and especially in difficult seasons, its almost impossible to remember that feeling of being great at something, or the feeling of being proud of yourself.

pp. 81-83: Part of why I'm seeing it [grace] everywhere now is because I'm just coming around to the realization that I don't really want to need grace. And all of a sudden now I can see that I never have been very comfortable with the idea. I don't really trust that people will show me grace. I don't show it to myself well, and when I'm doing very poorly, I don't show it to anyone else well, either. 

--She writes about how a friend of hers keeps asking for prayer for the same situation over and over, but doesn't actually make changes in her life to do something about it. She is frustrated over her terrible decisions and "having" to pray about it. --

...Uh-oh! So in my economy, we earn the right to be prayed for by making all the right decisions? Practically speaking, if we all made the right decisions, we wouldn't generally need prayer, would we? But more than that, who am I? Is it my job to decide who does and who doesn't deserve to be prayed for, based on the tokens they've put into the good-decision-meter? My friend and I are bound together by our common love for Christ and common acceptance of his grace.
It gets even worse, actually. The thing is, she asked for my advice, many years ago, and went against it. This situation wouldn't exist had she taken my advice. So now my small, ugly self doesn't want to pray for her. Something about making one's bed and lying in it. I have her what comes easily to me: advice. She didn't take it, and now she wants something that's harder for me to give: prayer.
That's a grace-less way to live, where everything is an opportunity to achieve or fail. Its exhausting to live like that, where everything's a performance, and you can't trust the people in your life to give you a break or to give you a second chance or to give you what you really are longing for, which is grace.
I don't like the idea that someone can judge me and that I have to depend on their grace. I want to take that power out of their hands. I hate to think about the fact that the people who love me show me the grace for all my faults. I prefer to believe instead that the math works: that there are good things about me and hard things about me, but that they've checked the math and because I'm funny enough, they can let go of how terrible I look most days, or that if I'm interesting enough, the fact that my house is dirty isn't such a big deal. But that kind of math is specifically anti-grace. Grace isn't about netting out on the right side of things.
If arithmetic is numbers, and if algebra is numbers and letters, then grace is numbers, letters, sounds, and tears, feelings and dreams. Grace is smashing the calculator, and using all the broken buttons and pieces to make a mosaic.
Grace isn't about having a second chance; grace is about having so many chances that you could use them through all eternity and never come up empty. Its when you finally realize that the other shoe isn't going to drop, ever. Its the moment you feel as precious and handmade as every star, when you feel, finally, at home for the very first time.
Grace is when you finally stop keeping score and when you realize that God never was, that his game is a different one entirely. Grace is when the silence is so complete that you can hear your own heartbeat, and right within your ribs, God's beating heart too.
I used to think that the ability to turn back time would be the greatest possible gift, so that I could undo all the things I wish I hadn't done. But grace is an ever better gift, because it allows me to do more than just erase; it allows me to become more than I was when I did those things. Its forgiveness without forgetting, which is much sweeter than amnesia.

pp. 114, 116: We slip into believing that it's better to strive for perfection that to accept and offer one another grace. Back once again to grace, the spiritual theme of my year. What I need as a mother is grace. God's grace, that allows me to fail and try again, that allows me to ask for help when I don't have the wisdom or patience I need, that reminds me we're not alone in this, and that God loves my son even more than I do. And grace from other mothers. I need grace and truth-telling and camaraderie from other moms. I need us to tell the truth about how hard it is, and I need us to help each other, instead of hiding behind the pretense and pressure of perfection.
...Let's give each other a break and a little help and some soft places to land. 
If you're a mom, what you do is nurture and protect and give grace. You do it all the time, and it's very important, because it reminds is, in daily, tangible ways how God nurtures and protects and gives grace. And maybe today the one who really needs that nurturing and protection and grace is you.

p. 127, 129: I know that most of us are longing for something. I know that longing is part of the deal, part of living in the not-yet-heaven. I know people who are longing to marry, who are longing to be healed from disease, longing for their children to come home, longing for the financial pressure to release. I get that longing is part of how we live...
I'll celebrate with my friends. I'll hold babies, buy baby gifts, ask them what it's like for them and really listen to the answer. I'll do it because it's the right thing to do, and because I can't ask them to mourn with me unless I'm willing to celebrate with them, as deeply painful as it is on some days. And my friends have done it for me, certainly; they stood in my wedding when they wanted to be brides, bought shower gifts when they wanted to be mothers. No one is exempt from the longing, and now, it seems, it's my turn. 
...I'll choose to believe that the happiest ending isn't the one you keep longing for, but something you absolutely cannot see from where you are.

p. 150: In my most blind moments, I think that women without children live luxurious, carefree lives, filled with nothing but cosmopolitans, bikinis and well-maintained highlights. I find that the phrase "She's let herself go" fills me with terror and guilt and panic as I look down at my jagged dirty fingernails and overly soft tummy. I am she, certainly. And then I realize that as much as I want my friend Jenny's abs, she wants a baby, and we're all yearning for something. 

p. 155-157: Keep in mind that there are a million ways to do a wedding, and that for whatever reason, people feel extraordinarily free to comment on anything they feel is out of the ordinary. Consider this great training if you should one day decide to have children. Advice on cakes and seeing each other before the ceremony is a great warm-up for unsolicited lectures on the ills of epidurals, the importance of delayed vaccinations, and many varied ways you will probably damage and scar your precious new life. 
Part of being a married couple means that you create a new identity together, woven from your experiences and histories and lives, and while the whole world is replete with opinions and recommendations, work hard to become your own family, with your own values and traditions, things you always do, things you never do, things that bring you back to why you fell in love in the first place. Dance to your song in the backyard, wear your wedding shoes every anniversary. Carve out your own history together, little by little, month by month, year by year. Because there will be seasons that are as dry as deserts, and the history of your love for one another will be the water you need to bring new life and growth, turning that season from dust to garden once again. 
...You will be a bride for one day, but you will, with God's grace and your own very hard work, be a wife to this man every day for the rest of your life. Being a bride is super-fun, but it pales in comparison to the thrill and beauty of being a part [a] truly great partnership... Make your love story one worth telling. Make it one worth living, every day, as long as you both shall live.