If you want to keep me, treat me like a child before bedtime. Invite me to your story time or to hear your poetry read aloud. Sit up in a chair and let the room go quiet. Give it pause. Let the space hang. Let me sit on the floor, leaning back on my elbows, poking my legs out straight and wobbling side to side. Crack a book open, lick your finger, and let me hear the page. Read in rhythm. Use your narrator voice, crescendo. Sing a song and I’ll become unaware of my body, my mouth hanging open as I go with you.

I am always hungry for this, for a story to swallow me whole.

The stories, the rhythms, they remind me of my childhood. So many of my cravings are like this, a beckoning back to an innocent Eden, my childhood where my daddy never stopped telling stories. He never stopped pointing out the stars, how they sing. He made our lives better than fiction. Our bedtime stories were a series about small creatures who lived in our woods named Yimlets. I learned imagination and song from him.

He played guitar or banjo, and my sister and I would dance. Those Appalachian songs told stories of love and heartache. We got the love of music from Daddy. Under the covers at night, after he said goodnight, I would turn the radio down as low as it could go and press record on the tape player when a good song came on. My bedroom window was long, and when it turned dark, I could see myself in the reflection, like a full-length mirror with the whole world on the other side. I danced to myself, even under the covers. I learned the way of toe tapping, of beats on a set of hips, how shoulders talk without lips. I can’t help but dance, to have bass pull me up, like on marionette strings. What music or storytelling was in Eden, I don’t know, but I guarantee it was there.

Some mornings, after breakfast, I followed my daddy. All I knew was to follow him. He had a machete and would go ahead of me until we got to the muscadines. It felt like fiction to find wild grapes hidden there in such black, dangling bunches. Sometimes I am hungry for the rhythm of boots through brush, the dust, the tougher skin, and the sweet burst of wild in a grape.

When the heart longs for community in story or music, when it longs for pleasant memory and taste, and when we want expression in art of motion, to move on from where we are, what are we to do? What are we to do with desire?

“Each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.” {James 1:14-15}

Even in the Eden of my girlhood, I was taught that desire led to death. So when I came to faith, rather than give in to desire, fall into sin, and die, I decided to kill off desire instead. This is what I thought church was for. I lay down before her — the church — like I had on the dorm room floor at the moment of my salvation. I waited for passions to die. I waited to feel alive. Even as I was ingesting Scripture like it was water to guzzle for the fires of desires within, I felt that I was losing my life and my strength. If you were to ask Seth why we left that mega-church in Tulsa, he’d have a different answer that had much to do with politics and money, the shady ways of church gone high-minded and business savvy. But for me, I just left tired of wrestling desire. Church couldn’t help me with it anymore.

Does this sound familiar to you? The wrestle with desire or how easy it is to wrongly place your faith in the church instead of in Christ? We would love to invite you to read the rest of Amber’s story in her beautiful new book, Wild in the Hollow. It’s our joy to giveaway five copies {simply enter by using the giveaway widget below}, or if you’d like to read more about Amber, her book, and where to purchase, you can do that here.

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Amber Haines writes about mothering many boys and keeping faith from the perspective of a Christian woman who’s had an abortion and an affair. She loves to tell a story, to speak and write about the church and the power of weakness and forgiveness.

She hopes to encourage you in your creative endeavor and spiritual giftings, in your pursuit of the Kingdom of God, and in your weakness. She believes the people of Christ’s church are to be agents of healing and reconciliation. It was brokenness that taught her so, and she’s still learning.

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