Sewing To Be Sown
This past week I had an assignment to "do your own creative work that expresses your current stage in your post-LA Term journey." This project could take whatever form we wanted it to, but we also had to write an accompanying paper to describe our assignment and how our assigned readings for this week impacted our project. While I do reference the reading, which you unfortunately do not have access to, I wanted to share this work beyond the classroom as I begin to process my time post-LA Term.
I started with the skyline, the backdrop of our entire time in Los Angeles. I could not begin to tell of my post-LA journey without highlighting the thing that elicits the most emotion for me in conversations about that season of life – the city itself. While much of the time I viewed the city as dark and hopeless, two places stuck out to me as safe and filled with light. The LARC, on the right side of my piece, was a place of safety in learning, a place of community with my cohort, and a place where the ideas about the city of Los Angeles were sparked within me. The Dream Center, depicted on the left, the location of my internship with the Women’s Discipleship Center, was a place I was fortunate enough to call home. My time on the eleventh floor every Tuesday and Thursday always left me feeling encouraged and loved. On some of my most difficult days during LA Term, the women in the program reminded me what it meant to find hope and solace in the Lord, not in my own ability. They taught me the art of surrender in the midst of my more stubborn moments. And they welcomed me without reservation. That was not something I could say of the rest of the city. For the majority of my time in LA, I felt alone, like an outsider, and the pangs of heartbreak often felt all consuming. The dripping red is representative of these feelings. At times, it felt like I was truly bleeding because of the brokenness I experienced. This theme of “break my heart for what breaks yours,” depicted on the bottom half of my piece, continues to dominate my thoughts and feelings about LA Term.
The most poignant symbolism of my piece however, the reason why I chose to embroider a scrap of fabric, is because of what the act of embroidery itself represents in my processing. I can tell people about my time on LA Term, I can wrap up all my feelings nicely into a presentable picture, or I can even tell them the messy truth. I can present things through words or tears or class art projects, but nothing I can say or do to express LA Term will ever fully articulate my experience. Even if I were to explain things to those who were in my cohort alongside me, we all had different lived experiences of our time there, and unless someone could see my very heart, they would not know the entirety of the mess LA Term has made of me.
Like the backside of this embroidery, my internalized emotions and experiences post-LA Term are messy, and they do not always show a clear picture. I can share about my experience to make it clearer, and I can even reflect on my messiness within and know exactly how it comes together. The bigger picture, the clear depiction on the front, is still understood to come from the seemingly chaotic backside of this embroidery, just as I am beginning to understand my chaotic thoughts and feelings post-LA Term.
LA Term has not made me someone different. It has grown me into someone different. “We do not believe that we “grow” our lives – we believe that we “make” them” (Loeb, p. 118). This idea of being grown rather than made is counter-cultural, but it rings true of my feelings in my post-LA Term journey. On the very last day of being in LA, I wrote a blog post on how my time in the city has made me different. I hinged the post upon the concept that I was not different, per say, but was simply more myself. “While I may seem different to you, I promise that I am more Michaela than I have ever been, because I know God is behind all of this (at times) challenging growth,” I wrote. The more time I have put between my experiences in LA and the present moment, the more I realize just how true this is. I have not been made into something new, but grown into a more “real” version of myself, if you will.
My embroidery project was not made. I never felt that it was a chore to bring into existence because it was not something I had to create, but an expression that had been growing inside me all along. As I launch into this next season of life, an idea that was also discussed in the Loeb reading, of continually processing LA Term, I need to give myself the grace to grow with the ideas, as they will not stay static either. I cannot force myself to be someone who has everything figured out. I must simply move forward, trusting that sometimes things need to die before they can be regrown. “On the surface it seemed that life was lessening, but silently and lavishly the seeds of new life were always being sown” (Loeb, p. 120). If I were to view the embroidery of my life only from the back side, it would seem that things are only getting messier, when really, from the opposite perspective, my life is beginning to display a picture filled with more growth and significance. Going forward, I cannot attempt to “make” anything of my experiences in order to rationalize the heartbreak and injustice that I felt. I can simply grow into them as they change with the seasons of life, grow to a place of peace in fully knowing that God is in control, grow to believe that there is hope, and that I really can be someone to make a difference. “If we want to save our lives, we cannot cling to them but must spend them with abandon” (Loeb, p. 122).