Let's Be Real

Cultivating Authenticity in a Journey from Loss to Life

Emily Katherine Dalton

• Publisher: Morgan James Faith
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781400207633
• eBook ISBN: 9781642795219
• Topic: Theology & Religion

Let's Be Real exposes the depths of honest grief as a 22-year-old girl says goodbye to her father after holding his hand as her family sang him happy birthday.

At only 22, Emily Katherine Dalton never imagined her story would take such a turn, losing every sense of family and home she had ever known. The secure faith she had formed felt shattered. In Let's Be Real, she shares her honest, gritty journey of fighting to believe all she had ever known until her world turned upside down. Fighting to name the depths of new emotions and questions she had never before held, wrestling to somehow let the people around her into the chaos, and relentlessly trying to run toward a God she had to learn to relate to all over again after facing the greatest trauma she had ever known. Let's Be Real offers readers insight into processing emotional trauma and what authentic friendship really looks like as Emily Katherine relates and reframes stories that taught her the greatest lessons about the faith that follows trauma, grief, and loss—a faith that has to be real.

REAL FRIENDS

Miranda Lambert, David, and Jonathan

I am unsure if these three people have ever been categorized together. Bible heroes David and Jonathan are often grouped together, but adding Miranda Lambert in there I imagine is a bit like adding anchovies to a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. These three characters’ dynamic seems hard to fathom, with stories that seem difficult if not impossible to interweave. Family can be the same way.

To know me well is to know I am Southern, quick to ask you about your heart, a toucher, and a reader. To know me well is to also know my brothers.

Michael is six years older than me, a CrossFit coach, fierce lover of all things American, a presence that doesn’t quietly fade into the background, an achiever, a motivator, a creative, and an organizer.

Andrew is two and a half years older than me, but he always argued it was three when we were growing up. He’s an English teacher, a conspiracy theorist, a lover of literature, an out-of-the-box, big-brother’s-got nothing-on-me, challenger of social norms, and a dog lover.

We are three very different people, united primarily by a love for coffee, La Croix, and New Girl.

We don’t make sense, yet amidst our eclectic dynamic we form a family. This tight unit is meant to be “born for adversity” and oh, has it been in this past year. And while family can be the safest and most caring places, it can also be the hardest.

I love Miranda Lambert’s song, Mama’s Broken Heart.⁴ Lambert sings of a broken heart manifesting in a small, southern town, perfectly explaining the experience. The song describes her heartbreak as it echoes through her home and beyond. Reeling from her broken heart, Miranda’s bold chorus recounts her mom’s demands to freshen up and calm down to save face—every southern girl is nodding in agreement to this experience. But the tagline of the chorus is that this broken heart is Miranda’s to hold, not her mom’s.

Her mom is minimizing her pain, seeking to mitigate her outbursts that are so very raw. While Miranda is expressing the brokenness of her bleeding heart, her mom spotlights the image she is presenting to all of her onlookers. Many of us we were raised to appear to keep it all together when everything falls apart, but sometimes we are what’s falling apart, and our mess trickles from behind closed doors.

I resonate with this song deeply, as I do with a few too many country songs, considering my upbringing. In a small town, word does get around quickly, especially amongst those who tend to always be the ones to spread the word. And often whose phone is “ringing off the hook” (for those younger than me, phones used to be attached to a hook, so when they rang a lot they would fall off. In modern day terms, everyone was blowing up my mom’s phone.) is Mama, or anyone in your family for that matter.

And I love the stance Miranda takes in this song. She doesn’t apologize for her crazy. She simply says, “No, Mom. This is my broken heart to feel.” And her feelings are valid.

I don’t condone cutting your own bangs or a few of the other crazy things in this song. But there are a lot of times our family asks us to “hide our crazy,” whether it is communicated explicitly or through various demands. For some of us, it has been for the very reason stated in the song: to “start acting like a lady.” For others, we had to hide our crazy to “keep a spotless reputation.” And for some, we were never allowed to let our crazy surface because we just had to move on and face the next demand life brought.

And while family was originally intended to be a safe place for each of us to grow, and a place for us to be known, loved, nurtured, and cared for on our best days and our worst, for many of us, family feels like the place we have to “save a little face” the most. I think this is why everyone is so desperate to get home to a glass of wine after a family Christmas dinner, coping with the pressure and exhaustion of choosing each and every word so carefully as countless questions are launched your way from the people who supposedly love you most. If I’m real, I hate it.

I hate it because I desperately desire to honestly bear my mistakes with my family, but it’s hard. I want to honestly bear the growth I’ve walked through and the things I’ve learned about myself, but one of the scariest places to bear such progress is in a room full of the faces looking at me whose eyes have seen and known you every day of my life.

The lack of vulnerability permeates not only within our families, but in how we communicate about our families to the world around us. Somewhere along the way, something taught us to be loyal to this idea that your family is always good, no matter how much of a lie that is, choosing to look like the Brady Bunch over the Kardashians every day, no matter what happens behind closed doors and is discussed over the phone afterward. And if I’m real, processing my own story with my family took years of pushing it down, afraid of all the Kardashians in our home, held to the Brady standard.

And I have learned so much from Jonathan and David in this. Jonathan is Saul’s son and Saul is the King of Israel. But the people of Israel are unhappy with Saul, desiring that David would be made King. This is a conflict of interest for Jonathan both because David is his best friend and because Saul is trying to kill David. While Jonathan truly felt the pressure to be loyal to his family, especially as the royal family, when Saul was seeking to kill David, Jonathan remained a great friend to him, warning him of Saul’s schemes, and ultimately saving his life.⁵

Sometimes being real with people means letting them into the crazy of your family. Sometimes you need to protect your family, but sometimes we need to stop sending as many Christmas cards with starched collars and smiling faces and start sending more texts to safe, close friends that say, “Pray for me so I don’t strangle my brother.” Or maybe that’s just me.

I’m Good

My college dorm was not in good shape, to say the least. It was probably the sweetest and most tender home I will ever have, living with fifty girls who all loved Jesus and one another so sweetly, but oh were there spiders.

I personally don’t really love animals; although, I’ve recently fallen in love with a cat I live with and I’m having a little bit of an identity crisis over it. That being said, above all animals, I hate insects more than any other creatures—and spiders the very most. They just look evil. And I feel as though they stare at me like, “Hey, I’m about to outrun you and hide forever and there is nothing you can do about it.”

My dorm taught me all kinds of new things about spiders. I learned some could reach sizes I had never seen. I learned their bodies could be so big that when you stepped on them it left blood on your wall. I learned so much I wish I never did.

But one weekend, I learned more about spiders than ever before. Our window screens didn’t quite meet our windows, and living in a dorm on top of a mountain about five miles away from civilization, these cracks in our windows were an open invitation to the party of the year for little spiders whenever it got cold outside. As it got colder, they would pour in those little cracks. I sprayed everything possible around the edges of our windows. We even taped the bigger holes, but still they managed to find a way in.

One morning, I woke up with an odd spot on my foot. It was on top of my right foot on a vein and kind of looked like carpet burn. I thought it was unusual, but I kept going. By that afternoon, it was swollen, hot, and freaking me out. I then began experiencing flu-like symptoms. I’m no doctor, but I knew something crazy was going on inside my body. I went to the student health center and then to a local clinic, where I learned my foot had been bitten by a brown recluse spider. I got an antibiotic and was told to rest and drink a lot of liquids.

I went to the grocery store to stock up on what I would need and what I felt like I could eat.

Weak, I carried my cases of water and groceries from the parking lot to my dorm and then up my stairs. I had to stop midway up the stairs because I was so weak. I felt light-headed and dizzy and like I could barely keep going, but I was determined to make it. So I did. “I’m good.” I kept telling myself.

I spent the next four days in bed, watching Friday Night Lights and calling my mom in tears. The water and food I carried up my stairs with every ounce of energy I didn’t have eventually ran out.

Before I could ask for help, a friend brought me soup and another made me bread. Countless friends fussed at me for not asking for help to carry my things inside. Friends came and lie in bed with me. Others helped me with my laundry and wrote me notes.

I’ve always wondered what it was like for the Woman at the Well to live such an isolated life. She had a less than respected reputation in her town, which caused the other women to look down on her and the men to only talk to her in secret. She had five husbands and came to the well at the heat of the day when it wouldn’t be crowded, and she was probably hopelessly lonely. She was battered by the way her community had treated her, rough around the edges, and not cutting Jesus any slack. But He sat, saw, and spoke with her. He told her who she was and gave her Living Water.

What I love is that her transformation isn’t just her own. She goes from her interaction with Jesus to tell everyone in the town, “See this man has told me everything I’ve ever done.” Her whole town comes to follow Jesus because of her testimony.

See, there’s a big difference in having friends who know who you are and friends you can call to carry water up the stairs for you. There’s a big difference in friends who like your Facebook status or comment that they’re praying for you, and friends who are with you on the darkest of nights. The same friend who brought me soup was the same friend a year later who sat and cried with me because I no longer had a daddy, after all the flowers had died and the cards stopped coming.

What did the Woman at the Well do when she was sick, and her family needed water? Who could she ask for help? She probably mustered up what energy she could and went to work.

That’s the thing about pride. It isolates us.

Some of us are in situations where we truly don’t have anyone. Most of us do have someone in our lives, but we are terrified to let them know we need them. We were raised to be strong, to focus on our responsibilities and battles, and to get the job done. No one tells us what to do when we can’t.

I have a hard time knowing when I need anything, because this has been so engrained in me. I neglect my own needs—even eating and sleeping at times—because I get so caught up in meeting other’s needs. (Yes, I am an Enneagram 2.) But when I’m desperate, empty, and at the end of my rope, I’m confronted with the needs I thought I had gotten rid of.

Because of my story, I have often given my needs a bad rap for making me “needy,” “clingy,” or “dramatic.” The truth is, though, that our every desire—which leads to our needs—is given to us to bring us back to the feet of Jesus. Our desires for contentment, satisfaction, attention, and affection are not wrong. They are not weaknesses. Instead, they are means by which God reminds us that we are purposefully dependent. But we also have physical needs: clothes, shelter, and meals, for instance. We face these needs because we live in a world that is fallen from the Paradise that lacked no good and perfect thing we were created for. I believe these needs too are purposed to draw us back to the feet of Jesus. But they often do so by making us cross the path of His bride, the Church.

This past week was hard. It was exactly three months since Daddy’s heart attack. I found myself sobbing, “God, how can you let this be this hard?” Later I found myself zapped of all energy. I had a hamper overflowing with more than a week’s worth of laundry; I was worried about how I would pay for meals for the next few days because money was tight; and I truly just needed to be cared for. But that Sunday afternoon I lie in a bed in a house a very generous family let me live in for the summer, with clean sheets a friend had washed for me, having eaten a free lunch my church provided for me, and overwhelmed by the beauty of the body of Christ that even when I don’t have the capacity to share my needs, God provides.

If ever there were a testament of the Body of Christ, it was when we were in the hospital fighting for my dad’s life. When we weren’t well. When I couldn’t muster up the strength and courage to be fine. We were really broken and really needy. And we didn’t go without one meal. There were always cookies, cases of water, gum, fruit, everything you could imagine. A sweet lady from church even made me a birthday cake and delivered it to my door.

If ever anyone was conditioned to say, “Oh, I’m good,” when God places people in your path to care for you, it’s me. But I have never been met in more real ways by Jesus than by being real with the people around me.

The disciples had a similar encounter. Following the crucifixion, they were lost and grieving and trying to figure out their new normal. So they were walking on the Emmaus road, talking about what they had experienced and being really broken with one another. On their journey, they came upon a stranger who asked them about what had happened. The story later reveals that this stranger was Jesus.

And no story paints the picture more clearly that Jesus meets us when we are real, raw, and broken with one another. We are all tired of mustering up our Sunday best to go to church and act like we have it all together, when inside we are barely holding on. For example, one Sunday I was at church for four hours and as I was leaving, a lady shared about the divorce she’s walking through that will be finalized this week. The pain she shared on her face and through her tears was the most real conversation I had all morning.

This is where Jesus meets...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Content
• Foreword
• Introduction
• THE REAL ME
• REAL FRIENDS
• REAL SAVIOR
• About the Author