Taming the Fortress
On being "the company," the number of chairs around the table, relearning trust, red nail polish, and why hustling to become less is also damaging
I was ready to come home after only three days. It wasn’t because I wasn’t enjoying the trip, nor was it because I didn’t love being with my family in Texas. It was because hurrying and hustling to repair the crumbling walls of my fortress is just as damaging as hustling to build them.
Being the company
Everyone is aware that hosting company is labor, even if a labor of love. But we don’t talk often enough about how being the company is also a challenge. Bringing yourself to the table is hard work. Especially when red nail polish is involved. (I’ll share about that later.)
As the company, there are cultural, subcultural, and family dynamics to be aware of. You have to be “on” to engage. You aren’t in the safe space you’ve created for yourself, your home, where you can totally relax. And you want to bless the people your visiting rather than shake their world. Or at least, those are some of the dynamics I care about when being the company.
The hardest part for me is trying to stay present, authentically.
I feel like I am a lot, with all my untamed anxieties, a fragile chronic illness, and continually healing trauma. But I know my boundaries, and I am forever grateful my family in Texas is a safe space for me. Coming to a table—any space, community, or forum, both in person or online—is a different ballgame altogether when I am unclear if I’ll be accepted with my current beliefs and limitations.
Tackling trust by being the company
Recently, I’ve been attending services at random churches. I am not actually trying to join any of these faith communities. I find myself an observer, often wondering what it would look like to not just be a guest, but to really be welcomed as I am. I’m practicing the art of coming to new tables, as the company.
Have you ever walked into a room and immediately felt like you could be yourself? Or the opposite—immediately felt your guard go up? Sometimes I have the discernment to recognize it isn’t the room or people in the room that are the main issue. The issue is that the room rubs at me, where sores on my soul still ooze.
No wonder I want to pull up behind marble walls.
These days, the healing work I am tackling is about the topic of trust. I can’t exactly pin-point when I shifted from being extremely, unconditionally trusting, to when I became guarded—even cynical—over the past few years. I find it a victory that I can even observe this wariness in myself.
I am not judging myself for being guarded—it makes sense that I am after what I’ve gone through. This is part of the healing process. I am not requiring myself to trust untethered and foolishly, either. I count myself lucky that my trust in God hasn’t been shattered, as it has been for so many I know. And so I cling upon my Comforter, my discernment and guard.
Healing requires a lot from us. And so we hustle to build and maintain impenetrable walls. Then we don’t get hurt. Then we won’t need to live with the pain. Or need to heal. But it takes energy to protect ourselves, too. In fact, we can’t even protect ourselves as we’d like to. So I decided I might as well learn to trust again.
These days, I exercise and train by being the company. It is a brave move. When I am the company, I notice what it would take for me to trust those around me enough to bloom authentically.
How much grace do we accept for ourselves as we count the cost of trusting again?
How brave do we have to be in order to navigate new spaces, to be the company?
Each human is still a human
Being the company usually feels uncomfortable because I come packaged with my family. And families are a lot.
My husband didn’t come on this last trip as he stayed home to focus on a project. My teenagers generally act as expected for their age, not requiring more than what a typical teenager requires. But each of these people are still people I am committed to. Just because they aren’t highly demanding of my time and attention doesn’t lessen the fact I am still giving my time and attention to them.
After friends had their fifth child, I asked them how they were fairing. Despite the rhetoric we often hear about large families “just throwing in another one,” it is never that simple. They were now divided by five instead of four. Their capacity might have increased with emotional and spiritual maturity, but their levels of time and energy remained the same. How were they supposed to meet the needs of a totally new human with a fifth of themselves?
Their authentic evaluation stuck with me, even as I intentionally and unintentionally added more people to my own family. We can’t discount the capacity it takes from us to welcome each human around us.
Becoming too much
These days, being the company feels especially overwhelming because of my younger children who don’t have boundaries. My toddler sneezes in the faces of our hosts without apologies. He sticks his fingers in outlets, licks toilet brushes, and climbs into ponds. Then there is my son who has ADHD and is on the autism spectrum. He frequently talks twenty times louder than necessary and is often rude by social standards. By the end of the trip, he was hovering on the edge of reoccurring meltdowns thanks to a lack of routine, continual interactions with people, and the ice skates that gave him a blister.
I was proud of them on this trip. They did well based on their capacity. And yet, I was always on, ready to guide them and prevent or clean up their messes. Until I got too tired. Then I would miss some brick that fell out of place. The walls would begin to deteriorate and we became too much.
How many chairs are at the table?
Once, a wise woman told me to consider my table’s capacity not by the number of people that can fit around it, but by how many chairs each person needs. She encouraged me to add a chair for each significant challenge each person came with (like neurodivergence, an encompassing health issue, a disability, or mental health struggle).
We had eighteen people at our Thanksgiving feast. But by this standard, my family alone was responsible for eleven figurative chairs to trip-over rather than the five allotted for us.
Fortress
My family is a fortress—graceful stone walls, and sleek, lovely turrets. Whether it is expected of me or not, I have built limits on how much of a burden I am willing to let us become. To show respect, I want to make the muchness and chaos of my family tamed, boxed, and reduced within walls. I want to have family pride, as if we are a shining citadel, organized with manners, well managed emotions, and effective family operating systems. If I had my way, we’d stand tall and pristine on a hill, values and shared vision admired by all.
Especially when we are the company.
This is its own form of hustle. Hustling to be less. Hustling to stay within boundaries and limits that have no grace.
When we talk about hustling and hurrying in our culture, we are usually referring to striving to build and become more. But just as frequently we strive to curtail. We aren’t honest with our baggage and we try to hide it within nearly unpenetrable walls.
I don’t mean to make myself into a white washed mausoleum, but when I am unauthentic in this way, I am hurried on the outside and dead on the inside.
The mixed up bedfellows of pride and confidence
My pride coupled with a desire to belong that makes me hustle to be less, within long and lovely castle walls. I’m convinced it would be easier if I always knew I would belong, but my confidence cannot be based on guaranteed acceptance, as acceptance isn’t guaranteed. I need something other to be confident in.
The line between confidence and pride has always seemed blurry. Over the decades, there have been times I was aware of both. Then there were times I could see my pride for what she was—separate from confidence—and worked to turn away from her. But more often, I was unaware of when she climbed in next to me, traveling alongside me like the carriage of an old-fashioned motorcycle.
Over the last few years, some of my pride, if not much of it, has been swept away by the vulnerabilities of illness.
I only notice her absence because so often I feel naked, like I only have a sheet wrapped over my shoulder. If I feel clothed, does that mean pride has again rewoven herself into my clothing?
Or does that mean I’ve started to be confident again? That I am less like a blindfolded woman, taking steps forward on uneven ground? Most of the time, I am unsure if the ground will even catch me when I bear down with my weight.
“Let the boaster boast in this…”
When I was a child, I learned an upbeat song quoting random verses in Jeremiah. I took from it that I shouldn't brag, but I didn't have a method to stop. Human nature often creates a religion fixated on managing sin. It was how I approached pride—trying to dig out a problem in my own strength.
As we hustle to build our safe fortresses or hustle contain our “too muchness” within walls, it seems we have started with a faulty assumption—that our fortress can become secure. But no matter how strong or pristine a fortress is, it is always vulnerable to earthquakes.
This is what the Lord says:
“Don’t let the wise boast in their wisdom,
or the powerful boast in their power,
or the rich boast in their riches.
But those who wish to boast
should boast in this alone:
that they truly know me and understand that I am the Lord
who demonstrates unfailing love
and who brings justice and righteousness to the earth,
and that I delight in these things.Jeremiah 9:23-24 NLT
I never got the meaning of the song's chorus. It's actually about having connections. Knowing the one of unfailing love, the one who calls us “enough,” and the one who brings justice—that is something to brag about. “These are my trademarks,” is the way God’s states these aspects of his character in the Message translation of these verses. He is the remedy, an unshakable mighty fortress worth leaning upon, keeping us secure.
With God, we aren’t the company. We aren’t guests. We can let our hair down, because with him we are home.
Red nail polish
Years ago, when my now teens were littles, I re-met a woman I used to know at a wedding. She was distant family and invited us to stay with her anytime we were driving through. I nodded, said thanks, and was sure I’d never call her (despite the fact we drove by her home in the long stretch between Michigan and Virginia a couple times a year).
Less than a week later I found myself in a McDonald’s parking lot on the phone with her. On the drive home my daughter (age 3) came down with a high fever and was pretty sick. We couldn’t travel anymore.
Graciously, she welcomed us to her home, despite the germs we brought. Her family fed us. They let us take over one of their rooms. We were one-hundred percent welcomed just as we came. It was humbling.
Because of the sickness, my daughter’s sleep schedule was off. She got up off-and-on during the night, playing around me as I tried to catch a little more rest. That is, until I awoke to red goo dripping on me. At first I thought it was blood, but it wasn’t. In horror, I realized there was red nail polish all over me, my daughter, my pillow, and their white, newly carpeted floor. I ran to the bathroom, threw my daughter in the tub, and searched the cupboards for nail polish remover.
Full of shame, I found the family eating breakfast and broke the news. Her husband ran to the store to get nail-polish removal, but it didn’t do much.
To make it worse, later that day when loading the kids back into my van, my daughter was nowhere to be found. After assuring ourselves she wasn’t floating upside down in the pool, we began searching the house in earnest. She wasn’t on the first floor, nor in the basement. Three adults and four teenagers looked in every nook and cranny of that house. We searched each room upstairs, the garage, and behind every bush in the yards. She had disappeared. They moved on, searching down the street and we were about to call the police when I found her.
My daughter later told me that she enjoyed her stay so much that she didn’t want to leave. And so she hid. She’d gone to a part of the house she’d never been—the parent’s walk-in-closet. She had tucked herself in behind a stack of suitcases and remained as quiet as a mouse, even though others had already come in to search the space.
The dad asked me later how I wasn’t having a panic attack, because he sure was.
The next time I visited—they let me visit again!—I peaked in the room where the nail polish fiasco went down. They had installed a big circle rug over our disaster.
I swore that when I “grew up,” I wanted to be as generous and welcoming as this family.
No Hustling in Texas
It wasn’t until I came home from Texas that I realized how much I was hustling to keep our mess within our castle walls. I didn’t succeed. For one, everyone got sick from my sneezing toddler. Thankfully, as a guest with my family, I am given grace.
It turns out, I’ve been given a lot of grace by many people. I’ll keep needing it too, especially as I keep trying to be authentic and real instead of shut up within a facade of perfection.
As I keep practicing trust by being the company, I am sure there will be plenty of times when I am not given grace. There will be more earthquakes. And even though I don’t look forward to them, I am still boasting in my invisible, Strong Tower, where I am home.
Follow me on Instagram here @AuthenticallyElisa.
On Average Advocate this week: Dear Sick Changemaker
If you want to become very generous in your welcoming and hosting, many this is for you! Especially if you want to create a home where everyone can get their needs met and feel at peace! Grab the template and extra making a support team guide here!
Who dares accuse us whom God has chosen for his own? No one—for God himself has given us right standing with himself.
Can anything ever separate us from Christ’s love? Does it mean he no longer loves us if we have trouble or calamity, or are persecuted, or hungry, or destitute, or in danger, or threatened with death?
And I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love.