Shaky Ground

What to Do After the Bottom Drops Out

Traci Rhoades

• Publisher: Morehouse Publishing
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781640653849
• eBook ISBN: 9781640655607
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Personal Success

New ways to heal the spirit during the most challenging times.

Traci Rhoades, author of Not All Who Wander (Spiritually) Are Lost, continues to find profound beauty and endless insights in her spiritual wanderings among church traditions. In this new book, Rhoades encourages readers to explore practices – some ancient and others unconventional – that offer solace for those times when 'the bottom drops out.'

Sharing what she's learned about God, Rhoades shakes off the limits of denominational boundaries, making this book particularly valuable for younger Christians or those who are longing to take a deeper dive into their faith.

PART I

SOLID GROUND

CHAPTER 1

Things Have Always
Been Shaky

My heart has no desire to stay where doubts arise and fears dismay; Though some may dwell where those abound, my prayer, my aim, is higher ground.

—Johnson Oatman Jr., “Higher Ground”

Jesus of Nazareth walked the earth during a difficult chapter in Jewish history. Let’s review with the briefest of overviews. Toward the end of the time in which the events of the Old Testament occurred, the Assyrians took over the Northern Kingdom, sending thousands of Israel’s people into exile. The Babylonians, who conquered the Assyrians, took over the Southern Kingdom, sending thousands of Judean people into exile. King Cyrus of Persia, who took over the Babylonians, sent the Judeans home, except they didn’t all return. Some of them had grown accustomed to where they were. It can be hard to pick up and move again. In the four hundred years between the events of the Old Testament and New Testament, the Greeks took over the Persians. Then, in 63 bc, the Romans took over the Greeks. The Romans dominated the civilized world, and the Jewish people found themselves overtaxed and living in a land occupied by a foreign army. Revolts were common and there was much political unrest.

This is the world Jesus entered. Perhaps every generation before us has uttered similar words, but those tumultuous times in Jesus’s day, they feel an awful lot like our world: corrupt government officials, capital punishment, racial tension. These times too were shaky.

Read a daily newspaper. Turn on the morning news. Check your social media feed. We do live on shaky ground. Maybe today is worse than twenty years ago. A hundred years ago. A thousand years ago. Worse than it was in Jesus’s day. Or maybe the world’s always been shaky. No doubt current events point to a broken world. Violent shootings, terrorist activity, terminal and chronic illnesses, life-altering global viruses, are not nothing. But maybe we could assuage our anxiety, our deep-seated fears, if we regularly determined we would cling to our Savior. Maybe the lesson we need to internalize deeply is that we live in a fallen world. It is Christ alone who is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8).

If it is true, the things that are the dire matters of our day are in fact legitimate causes for concern, but there have always been causes for concern in this world, then what Jesus told the large crowd gathered on a mount in his day is still true for us: “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today” (Matthew 6:34).

I grew up singing the old hymns. We sang the same ones so often, I find I’ve tucked them away deep in my subconscious. Many times, as I go through the day, lines will bubble up. Friends, if our world is indeed unstable and always has been, there’s a hymn, or two, for that.

“On Christ the sold rock I stand; all other ground is sinking sand. All other ground is sinking sand.”

“Rock of ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee.”

I don’t know if it’s my age or the times we live in, but I feel as if things have gotten more complicated. What I want to communicate clearly right here at our beginning is that, according to Jesus, “In the world you face persecution” (John 16:33), and “He makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good” (Matthew 5:45).

Nothing in our shaky world surprises God, and it is Christ alone who has overcome the world.

So here we are, in a world that’s always been more than a little wobbly. Once we acknowledge this fact, our next question should be, what can we do about it?

A side note: the previous sentence doesn’t say what can I do about it. For far too long, we’ve been walking around in a me-first individualistic society (at least in the part of the world I call home) and that might be a big part of the problem. At our roots, we are self-absorbed, while Jesus calls us to root ourselves in him. We are designed to walk through this world together. In Christ, we can better help one another and accept help from others.

Collectively standing firm, even when the ground below goes topsy-turvy, will require something from each of us. For Christians, it means learning to lean on Jesus (there I go with another hymn). The good news is he doesn’t expect us to figure this out on our own. He’s given us spiritual actions we can take to draw nearer to him. He is there, waiting to be found, and through times of stillness, prayer, taking in scripture, reciting creeds, and other ways we’ll explore, the Church can be reminded our one foundation is Jesus Christ our Lord (closing out with a hymn).

CHAPTER 2

Silence as Medicine

Weary or bitter or bewildered as we may be, God is faithful. He lets us wander so we will know what it means to come home.

—Marilynne Robinson, Home

It took us three years to sell our house. It took another few years to purchase a piece of property and another year to build a new home. There’s a lot more to this story, but for now, I want to focus on how God led me home.

We bought the property where we live now in the springtime. I remember because I used to drive out here when it was still quite cold. The weather takes forever to warm up in Michigan. The dirt roads that took me a few miles off the highway were still frozen, so I didn’t get any dust on my car. When you turn onto the road to our then newly purchased property, there’s a Dead End sign. It’s not a through road. I remember thinking, that’s fine because this road is going to lead to my new home, and I don’t need it to go anywhere else.

Bundled up in a coat and hat the first time I saw the property, I remember turning my face into the wind. There was a grassy two-track that led to the hillside overlooking the pond. It felt bitterly cold standing there looking over the land, the hills, the trees, the water. My soul was exhausted: all those times we had a house showing, and potential buyers found reasons not to go through with the purchase; the houses we looked at in what we kept hearing was a “buyers’ market” without ever finding the right house for us. We didn’t have plans to move again anytime soon, if ever. We were looking for a forever home. Brothers and sisters, aren’t we always doing this? Oh, how I longed for it.

Standing on top of a hill, I sensed the presence of God hovering over me, indeed all around me. “You will heal here,” God whispered to my spirit. The beauty, the seasons, the time alone, and the solitude—God had brought me here, and I knew I’d emerge whole again.

Healing has layers. I sensed there was an even deeper work God wanted to do in me. Dad had died six years prior to that spring, and after his death, we eventually sold the family farm in Missouri. We moved there when I was three years old. It had been in our extended family for three generations at that point. As a child, I didn’t remember living anywhere else. I must have ridden my bike up and down our gravel road what feels like a thousand times. The neighbors mostly stayed the same. There was a creek in the backyard, and when my big brother let me tag along with him and his friends, I inevitably walked too close to the water’s edge and fell in. We’d hunt mushrooms and pick blackberries according to the seasons. My dad built a big pole barn, and I can still hear my brother’s baseball ricocheting off its metal walls as he played catch for hours. I didn’t realize it then, but a place can get inside of you.

Dad passed away suddenly. I’d been married for a few years and hadn’t lived at home for some time. Still, I took for granted this particular spot on earth would always be in our family. Growing up, it had been Mom who oversaw the finances. In my mind, I see my parents seated at the dining room table, her trying to get him to focus on paying bills and doing tax paperwork. When my parents divorced, Mom moved into town and Dad stayed on the property, as it originally belonged to his side of the family. I gave little thought to who managed the budget then. In my twenties, I was forging my own way in the world. I had no idea what financial state the home place was in, didn’t know Dad had used it as collateral to get himself out of other debts. Reader, I need you to know drugs and alcohol play a role in this story. I didn’t know the price these vices would demand of my family. More than we could afford. Good Christian girls aren’t supposed to know such things. We planned Dad’s funeral, buried him in a simple pine box, and spent our initial grieving months, on into years, putting together the financial puzzle he’d left behind. Looking back, I’m thankful we didn’t know right away we’d have to sell our land. God, in his providence, revealed this reality piece by piece.

I sat with my mother-in-law on their front porch one afternoon, updating her on Dad’s estate. I still remember how surreal it felt to learn new terms like “executor,” “probate court,” and “estate planning.”

“We’re going to have to sell everything,” I told her, delivering the news in a monotone. I felt all cried out over the saga of the last few years.

“Isn’t there anything you can do?” she replied. “It’s terrible you can’t keep the land in the family.”

“This would have been impossible to fathom in the early days of grief. But now, I know we’ve walked every step of the process, and we’ve accepted this is the way things have to be.”

Acceptance doesn’t mean I liked it. Going off to college, living in the city, settling in a new state, I’d never considered there might come a day when home wouldn’t be there. When my husband and I built our new house, we, along with our daughter, put our hands in the fresh concrete on the back porch, like I did when we poured the steps on the back porch of my childhood home. Are my handprints and those of my brothers still there, or have they been worn down by the tread of strangers’ footprints, erased by the elements of snow, rain, and ice over the years?

I have a deep attachment to open spaces. Two times in my life I have felt like I could call a place home, and both were in a country setting. It’s possible this is genetically wired in me. I come from a line of country people, many of them farmers. On both sides of my family, mothers have lost their children. My Grandma Lucy, my mom’s mom, lost two teenagers within a year of each other, both to car accidents. Years later, she’d lose another son in a car accident, within a year of losing her husband to complications from Alzheimer’s disease. Yet, in all my years of spending time with Grandma Lucy, she never appeared bitter. When I was growing up, our family didn’t talk much about the aunt and uncle I had never met. We did share stories about Uncle Lonnie, but mainly because my generation all remembered him. Now that I’m older I wonder what it must have been like for her. My mom remembers Grandma spending a lot of time in her bedroom when her two teenage children passed away. People would stop by to offer help or bring a casserole dish, and she told Granddad he’d have to take care of things. There is some business that’s only between us and God.

Where Grandma lived it was quiet too. A house at the end of a long lane, surrounded by acres of farmland and some livestock. Did the land help her heal? With other children to raise and chores to do in the house and around the farm, she couldn’t stay confined for long. There was always something to do. Perhaps putting her hands to work again also helped with her healing. Work keeps our mind from focusing on things we cannot change.

I remember the early days of walking around our new property. My husband mowed paths throughout the acreage, and I spent time learning what seasons delivered which wildflowers, noting what high winds and strong rains do to the mature trees along the trails. I let myself acknowledge this place didn’t feel like home yet. Not like the place where I’d grown up in rural Missouri. I was thankful to be in the country again, but had no idea how long it would take for this new place to settle in me. God reminded me to be patient.

In my beginning days on this new piece of land, staring out over these hills, I also acknowledged I had a lot of emotional work to do. Losing a childhood home, being without a home of our own for several years, I’d expressed how I felt about all this to God, to my mom, husband, and a few close friends, but a number of words remained unspoken: words that wouldn’t change anything; words that only wore rings around our circumstances. I was bone weary. From thinking back on how my brothers and I lost our dad, but also all the ways we never really had him. From trying to find a home, wondering why it was taking so long, and trying desperately to figure out what God might be trying to teach me so we could hurry up and move on to other life lessons. I thought back on discussions my husband and I had about what our next steps should be, the times we agreed and the times I gave in, swallowing harsh words of frustration. We’d had our daughter while in between homes. Would we be able to give her a sense of home like my husband and I had both known?

Now, here we were. I knew how to do country living. I felt confident the solitude found in this space, the silence that only comes here in the middle of nowhere, would act as a balm to my soul. I could finally give a proper goodbye to my childhood home and replace it with these trees and body of water, alive among this wildlife. No, not that this new place would replace my childhood home, but it could serve as a tender reminder of what it’s like to let a place take up residence inside of you.

I was ready to heal. It didn’t happen in a few days. There have been ups and downs, steps forward and back again. As God and I spent time together here, he would bring to mind areas where I needed to repent. Sometimes that meant an apology to someone in my life. Other times, I had to forgive myself. In each case, repentance meant ultimately turning to God again. It always means that—it’s the ongoing work of one of my favorite church words, sanctification. Being confident that he who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it (Philippians 1:6). These years here have been good for me and my family. Dad would have liked it here.

We don’t all live in the country, of course. That’s my story, but there are other versions of our need for place. There are other definitions of home, and what that means in a life. The quiet, the hay fields, the rolling hills, these all help ground me, providing space for healing. I also had to be a willing participant in the process. My mind had to stop overthinking, slow down, and become still. That’s what home, both a physical location and a spiritual posture, does for us. If somewhere in the process I had realized I needed professional help to heal, I would have sought out a therapist. I have in the past, and it helped.

In addition to quieting the world around me and in me so that I can experience healing, I’ve learned to offer my thoughts, my days, up to God. A prayer of Examen is an ancient method developed by Saint Ignatius of Loyola. It looks intently at the entirety of a day’s activities and provides the space to interact with it. Start by asking the Holy Spirit to guide your thoughts. Look back over the day and express your thanks for the good things that happened, even on those days when it’s tough to find things to name. Examine the feelings that come up as you consider the day. Pray about the activities, the people involved, how it all made you feel. Where are the moments that call for repentance and the need for new direction? Offer those confessions in prayer. When were the times of deep awareness of God’s presence, regardless of the circumstances? Offer gratitude. For me, during this time God also regularly brings to mind people who could benefit from my attention in some way. It might be someone who needs prayer, and I might know the specific need or I might not. I have sent notes and texts out of these daily Examen prayers. Sometimes there are people I have offended, or need to be more patient with, or should forgive. The guidance I receive isn’t aways easy, but I have come to trust it as helpful and true, from the source who holds all things together.

Looking toward tomorrow, p...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Catherine McNiel
• The Bottom Drops Out
• Prologue: How Do We Follow Jesus?
• PART 1 SOLID GROUND
• PART II STABILITY
• PART III ANCHORED
• PART IV FOUNDATION
• PART V ASSURANCE
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix of Practices
• References
• About the Author