Maybe it’s more than just karma.

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We’re moving soon, and I have no idea where.

I am quite the planner, and the fact that I can’t plan right now is pretty catastrophic. It’s right up there with having to wear pants every day.

Have you met pants?

Evil.

I realize now, however, that this is a test of my faith and commitment to God’s plan for me whereas before I would have suspected it was the universe firing down at me for the time I had my best friend break up with my eighth grade boyfriend over the phone. 

I mean, I was tired and hate confrontation and pants would have probably somehow beeen involved so no thank you.

But my beliefs have been reshaped, and I’m no longer a lifelong member of the karma club. I think if there was a “universe” that doled out consequences, there would be a few more people hiding in their pantries right now (because that’s where the snacks are. Duh).

It makes a lot more sense to me to believe there’s a God that leaves some people to their own devices. They might be smiling now, but trust me. Life goes fast and with it? That smile.

So my heart knows that I don’t need to know or see anything to fully confirm my belief that God’s got this. And really, that’s such a relief to know.

For the majority of my life, as the beautifully budding humanist I once was, I put so much emphasis on my inner MEMEMEMEMEMEME! I thought I was pretty spectacular and could handle just about anything.

Which was hilarious if you’ve ever seen me attempt to open a jar of pickles. Or find a pair of pants in a sea of shirts.

It’s like when there’s ten thousand spoons and all you needs is a knife. Beautiful imagery. Someone should write a song about that. 

Anyways, what I’m trying to say is if you’re in a dire “what the frick??” moment and can’t see beyond two inches in front of your nose. Hold tight.

Close those eyes of yours because they’re not doing you much good right now, are they? Deep breath now. And a prayer, letting God know that you trust Him, you believe in Him, and you will let him guide you along this beautifully horrifying road known as life.

And that you will wear pants no matter how much it cuts to the core of your very soul.

Soul paper cut. Ow.

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Beyond skin deep.

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My skin is rebelling.

This is not what my skin does.

Remember my other organs? How beautifully I’ve been crafted by God that even the medical community has frequently commented on it in the past? (Matt stop rolling your eyes.)

Well, my skin has jumped ship recently.

It’s my fault. As the only child of a woman who is the skin care queen (my mother looks like my slightly older baby sitter. And I’m sure when we’re out, fellow store patrons are relieved knowing someone is keeping an on me), I was given a solid diet of Paula’s Choice products since I was ten.

This is probably why for the longest time waiters were mad at me for ordering so much alcohol. Or maybe it was because I like to order through interpretative dance. Either way.

Ava recently received her first Paula’s Choice skin care kit from my mother this year as well so you can understand that this isn’t a gift given in passing. This is a serious family tradition that marks the beginning of a life characterized by angry waiters and gluing your ID to your forehead.

And I’ve been failing horribly.

I think somewhere down the line I just assumed I had naturally beautiful skin as a consolation prize for telling time making me so mad/sad.

And I’m kind of cheap. And if the Internet tells me slathering a tub of butter on my skin will turn me into a glorious baby deer, I’m gonna do it.

So for weeks, I was poring through articles and firsthand accounts about how certain incredibly cheap DIY skin care routines were the bomb diggity (shout out to sixth grade Ericka, represent!). Ahem.

I tried everything from slathering honey on my face (I was so delicious) to rubbing powdered turmeric into my cheeks for a healthy glow (jaundice is a kind of healthy…right?).

All along I was denying the very thing that kept my skin healthy and my photo on the wall of every bar in the tri-state area.

Faith, like good skincare, can often be neglected. Or maybe it’s never been tapped in the first place.

I’ve been there. I went from Catholic, to “maybe there’s a God,” to “there’s no god but long live Gloria Steinem,” to “anyone going to eat the rest of this guacamole?” to “I’ve been up three nights in a row with night terrors and who peed on the kitchen floor?” (Fortunately, it was dog pee. You can stop holding your breath now.)

My life has never been linear, at least not in my head. I have a knack for cutting people out of it like trying to win a Japanese game show and if you meet me in person after reading my blog posts, you might find me incredibly dull, if not adorably kid-sister like. I’ve already built the fort so…

But God is forever reaching out to me. I know that. And what’s weird you guys is that I FEEL it. Like Justin Beiber once randomly sang on Instagram:

And oh, the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God
Oh, it chases me down, fights ’til I’m found, leaves the ninety-nine

(Yeah, he’s gone super Jesus. So…Armageddon soon. Just a friendly warning.)

God would do anything to get me back on track and fully enveloped in His love. Even when I’m off dazed and wandering in the forest, terrorizing a bee hive so I can slather its honey on my face.

My skin is healing now. My mother actually emergency called the Paula Choice’s customer service line to map out a custom plan for my skin and the products should be arriving soon (Some mothers bake cookies… Okay, mine bakes cookies, too. She just looks twenty while doing it).

In her words: “There is NOTHING. I mean NOTHING I need in this world other than my skin care products. Not all my purses, not all my shoes…okay wait, Jesus. Jesus first…then my skincare products.” And if you’ve ever seen that woman’s closet, this is saying something. I’d really like to vacation there one day.

Moral? 

Don’t forget what makes your soul clean and heart healthy. God will never forsake you, so pay him back the favor, mmmkay?

Now let’s go order margaritas and get yelled at. 

Do they really love Jesus?

Ericka ClayLeave a comment

Poetry.

Let’s talk about that.

I do this weird thing where I’m like really really good at poetry. Better than I am at talking about how good I am at things.

And you have to imagine how frustrating it is to be so good at something nobody likes.

It’s like if I were really really good at giving lobotomies.

It just doesn’t pay, son.

But I’m doing it anyways.

I’m currently writing a compilation of poems after I’ve read, processed, and become slightly terrified from reading portions of the Bible.

Let’s talk about the terror.

It’s not a type of terror that encourages me to fear God as in run away screaming and crying and praying that hiding behind a giant bag of organic quinoa chips in the pantry will somehow throw God off my scent (yes, we are an organic quinoa chip household. Deal with it).

It’s more of a fear of other humans. People who have somehow taken the Bible and mass produced a sticky sweet “Christianity” that involves driving an over-sized SUV and dedicating Starbucks as the weekly Bible study hangout.

And you got to realize how horrible I feel lumping a whole segment of the population into this kind of category. It’s always been “us” versus “them” in this society and until we all accept Christ, it’s always going to be that way, folks.

So I don’t mean to perpetuate that type of behavior, but you have to admit, going to church and being given a nasty stare from a soccer mom/super model who just loves her Jesus oh so much kind of gives you a bad taste in your mouth.

And dude, I’ve so been there.

Here’s the thing: look at Jesus. Look back at the soccer mom/super model. Now look back at Jesus. Now look at my Tom’s. Aren’t they adorable? Okay, now back at the soccer mom/super model.

What’s the problem here? Besides the fact that I don’t own ALL the Toms? It’s the fact that people like soccer mom/super model is representing Christ when really, she’s just representing herself.

And that sucks for us who have really undergone something incredible and want to share it with our friends, family, strangers who are hurting in this world. It so sucks that someone who looks down their nose at you is also telling you that this is what Christianity is all about: perfectly coiffed hair, bright red lipstick, big ‘ol Louis Vuitton that’s liable to smack you in the face if you’re genetically blessed to be 5’4″ and incapable of possessing moderately passable reflexes (*cough* *cough* Ericka).

But it’s not.

It’s exactly what the Bible has been telling us this whole time. It’s about imperfection, human struggle, dirt and feces and all consuming self-hatred and loathing for others and intense love that makes you want to vomit a little bit and a reliance on God because the truth of the matter is that YOU WILL NEVER BE GOOD ENOUGH. And the other truth of the matter? That’s perfectly okay and as it should be.

God has you and loves you. And here’s the thing: God loves soccer mom/super model, too. The old me would have keyed an incredibly life-like rendering of that time I posed with a cardboard cut out of JTT into the side of her Denali. Some would even have considered it an idiot-savant level of artistic expression.

The new me? Well, I’m a lot less “fun” these days. So what I’d do instead is pray for her. Not in that condescending “bless your heart” Southern way that is totally epic but not at all appropriate. But a real prayer. That she will understand and accept Jesus thoroughly and fully and start walking the narrow path.

Otherwise, one day, she’ll stumble and fall down the broad road, shoulder-to-shoulder with everyone whose hearts have turned stone hard, missing her car, her Ericka-sized purse, but very little else.

Getting Over Myself

Ericka Clay1 Comment

Thirty-three is hard for me.

It’s hard for someone who was consistently mistaken for a sixteen-year-old in her twenties. One time a pharmacist yelled at me because he thought I was skipping school since the high school was right next door. I was twenty-three. And pregnant. But you know, South Texas, y’all.

And the other day I had to verify my age (who knows for what, exactly. I have a horrible memory. I was most likely just talking to a random street lamp), and I had this stupidly expectant look on my face that read, “Ha! What do you think about that!” But the guy just nodded like thirty-three seemed like a pretty good fit.

Heathen.

You have to understand that up until this point I’ve lived my life like an only child who has been constantly patted on the head. And I don’t mean that to be condescending because it’s not.

Really, it’s nice to be patted, and to be told you have movie star teeth by your dentist, and to be given a gold star by your doctor because you’re in peak physical shape, and to be told by your hairdresser that your hair color is such a pretty shade, and she can’t actually verbalize what color it is because it’s like nothing she’s ever seen before and to be congratulated on the fact that you know how to write words in a way that stumps other people when for you it’s pretty much like scratching a mosquito bite.

What I’m trying to say is that for the longest time I thought I was pretty dang amazing.

And I lived like it. Smug but at the same time self-deprecating because if you play it right, you can make people jealous of you and love you all at the same time. It helps with getting what you want in life.

Now, you see why I need Jesus?

I’m not that person anymore. And apparently my face is following suit. I have lines in the forehead that used to be my thinking lines. They’d pop out whenever I was writing poetry, or think tanking that parallel parking business (cars are the worst), or figuring out why Taylor Hanson hadn’t been nominated president yet. But then they’d subside and my forehead was nice and smooth, the type of forehead you’d imagine would belong to a sixteen-year-old looking twenty-three-year-old pregnant woman getting yelled at in her local neighborhood pharmacy.

But they live on my forehead now even when I’m not thinking and doing things like blankly staring into a void, wondering why I’m talking to a street lamp. I also have smile lines which I find incredibly offensive because I’ve lived most my life trying not to smile for this very reason. All through my childhood my mother would be like “Smile, like your friends do. You look so upset!” And I’d just think, Smile like those hooligans?? I’d like to see what that bad decision does to their faces in thirty years.

Sigh.

My face is thinner now. My teeth yellower, probably. I don’t know. I’m still pretty obsessed with having movie star teeth seeing that I’m the lead in Ericka: The Woman Who’s Hiding Behind Her Pants in the Closet so She Doesn’t Have to Make Dinner. It’s on Lifetime.

But the rest of me has taken that step on a downhill slope. And you know what? I’m really not that mad about it. Don’t get me wrong. For someone who’s struggled with body dysmorphia for most of her life, there was a period where I was glued to the mirror wondering why God was so mad at me and decided to take it out on my face.

But He’s not.

Aging is the consequence of sin, my friends. It’s something that’s going to happen, and in a way, it’s kind of nice when you think about it. It puts into check all those pats on the head, the nice compliments, the pride you take in the color of your hair, the shine in your eyes.

It’s there, for now. But not for long.

So at the end of the day, you have to take a long hard look at yourself, and go beyond the forehead lines and the evidence of past smiles and ask yourself: What do I believe?

Because there are only two choices in this world when you get right down to it.

And you can look sixteen all you want. But it’s never going to change that truth.

 

Bibles and blazers, oh my.

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The closest I ever got to reading the Bible growing up was the Bible as Fiction class I took in college.

Wait. Scratch that.

I did have a religion class I took in high school. (Think Catholic. All Girls. Blazers. A sobering realization later in life that not everyone gets a brand new car on their sixteenth birthday. Yeah.)

I remember having to tab those really thin, practically see through pages and either accidentally sticking the pages together or ripping them apart.

So I easily equated the Bible with equal parts frustration and anger over the years.

Plus it’s antiquated, right? I mean look at us now. All evolved and emotionally sensitive to each others’ needs.

I’m sorry. I just fell out of my chair from all the laughing. And the idea of me wearing a blazer.

Okay, so what if it’s not antiquated? What if it applies even if socially things have changed a bit over the years? How does this book reflect our lives and more importantly, how does this book guide each individual human being on the planet to become the living embodiment of Christ’s love on earth?

That’s a pretty big ask in my book. And I know what wearing polyester on a daily basis feels like.

So, where do we begin?

I always like to begin at the beginning if only to live my life like a Lewis Carroll novel. And I find that beginnings are easier when you have back up.

Enter the Bible Project.

The Bible Project is a series on YouTube that breaks down what exactly the Bible is, how to read it, and how it connects with Jesus in ways that’s hard to fathom for us simple plebeians who are still lamenting the fact that Hanson is no longer played on the radio. 

Above is their What is the Bible? video. Every video of theirs is beautifully animated, well-researched, and put into understandable terms that WILL BLOW YOUR MIND.

Take that super annoying and not at all useful Bible tabs.

But because these guys have built such an amazing ministry and have a heart for truly spreading the Good News to others, they also have a website where you can download written materials that take studying the Bible to the next level.

And I don’t know if you know anything about me but studying is how I like to get my party on. They don’t call me Party Pants Clay for no reason. And by “they” I mean me. And my dog. She’s half-chihuahua so you know she’s legit.

The Bible Project crew offers study notes on various topics, but I’m linking their How to Read the Bible study notes here.

“But Ericka, I don’t even own a Bible and don’t have the magnificent shoulders necessary to pull of a blazer like you do.” 

I know, you guys. I know.

But then here’s this brilliance: Tim and Jon, the co-founders of The Bible Project, already knew that and developed an easily accessible Bible app like the glorious wizards they are.

It’s called the Read Scripture app and breaks down the Bible into digestible chunks and even sprinkles their informative videos and meditative/prayer opportunities throughout.

And again, no tabbing required.

I cannot stress that enough.

I’m creating a resources page on my site that will have this type of info handy for you all.

I know what it’s like to live in the darkness. And there will be plenty of opportunity to get into the nitty gritty of my past life. But just know, it only seems like the end because the end is whispering hard in your ear.

But so is God.

It’s up to you to decide who you’re going to listen to. And the Bible can help you do just that.

No blazer required. Fortunately.

Let go, let God.

Ericka Clay4 Comments

Untitled design (3)

I deleted all my previous posts.

How’s that for minimalism?

But it’s been something that’s been playing on my heart and in my head for awhile now.

I’m not who I used to be.

I look the same. Ish. And I’m just as brilliant and incredibly humble about it.

You’re welcome.

But fundamentally there’s been a change. I’ve let the hand go of the old me, and every day I attempt to hold tight onto Christ’s.

That’s a big transformation for someone who’s no stranger to dancing on bar tops.

But I guess my feet got tired. And my daughter needed dinner. And my husband loved me too much for me to keep hating myself.

And God loved me, too.

So I took the leap and let go of everything, and I’m finally free.

And now it’s time to write about what I want to write about. What I really think God would like me to talk about.

Let go. Let God.

I’m doing that on an intense level. On a very real physical level that’s manifested itself into me clawing through cabinets and drawers, ridding our lives of the “maybe one days” and the “you never knows.”

Here’s the thing: you don’t know. You just have yourself, this moment, and God’s path for you. And that’s what the Bible keeps telling us.

And I think that living a simpler life is part of that path for me.

I’m not saying having things is inherently bad because it isn’t. But humor me for a second: what if those were the very things that were keeping us from the journey we’re supposed to be taking?

Let go. Let God.

Okay. So what does that look like? Like with anything else, it’s going to be tailored to you and to what God wants for you. So my first suggestion is my first suggestion for anything: pray.

And here are the words you say:

Lord, please lead me on the path you’ve chosen for me. Please help me to remove any obstacles that have impeded my progress towards knowing you fully and completely so that I can become the person you intended me to be.

Or something equally brilliant. Get creative.

So me? What have I been doing? Here’s a quick list that we’ll delve into for future posts as things progress:

  • I’ve freed my brain from Facebook and Instagram. It gets way more oxygen that way.
  • A complete overhaul of our stuff. Goodbye junk. I never liked you anyways.
  • Clean eating to balance my hormones and feel better.
  • Working out to balance my body.
  • More books. Always.
  • Reading the Bible and writing a poetry compilation as I interpret what I read. You know. Girl stuff.
  • Knitting. And wondering why yarn is the devil.
  • Homeschooling my daughter and learning more about her and myself, really.
  • Slowly taking the natural route as far as home care, face care and body care products.
  • Talking to God like I used to talk to myself.
  • Breathing. Again, girl stuff.

I’m growing, learning, changing. And so are you. There’s no perfect recipe for anything. Only a perfect God.

And as I continue to find my way, seeking Him. I’d like to write about it in the process.

Brilliantly, of course.