Common Grounds Online: Interview with Leigh McLeroy, The Beautiful Ache, 1 of 3

Editor’s Note: I’ve known Leigh McLeroy for many years and she is a great friend. Leigh is a writer. She’s also very much alive. She reads, notices, cares, loves, laughs, cries, rolls up her sleeves and serves. Sometimes she writes what she lives and sees, and that’s a gift to the rest of us.

The Beautiful Ache is all stories, Scriptures and Leigh’s. It’s joyous and heart-wrenching, and suffused with the true grit of real life following the Savior. I love this book.

Part 2 of the interview. Part 3 of the interview.

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GL: Leigh, it’s fun for me to see your book coming out. I loved your book, partly because you’re a master storyteller and a great writer, partly because I know you. And I hope our CGO readers will get to know you. So let’s start…

I know in one sense you’ve always been a writer. But when did you begin to see yourself as a writer? What pulls you to write?

LMc: I think every writer is a first of all a reader - and I started reading when I was four and pilfering my five year old sister's kindergarten books. My love of reading morphed into a love of writing fairly quickly. Writing for me is a way to process my thoughts and connect with the world around me. Then when Jesus came into the picture at age eight my writing became a habit. (Once a word-nerd, always a word-nerd I like to say.) Even so, it's only been in the last five years that I could refer to myself as writer without stammering or blushing. I’m still kind of getting used to identifying myself that way - or hearing others do so.

GL: Do you feel like you have to write? If your full time job entailed you doing non-writing tasks, would you feel compelled to write in your off-hours? What I’m getting at is this—is there a sense of compulsion (or propulsion) that pulls you into writing?

LMc: It’s definitely a have-to. Although I freelance full-time now, what I’m writing for clients isn’t always what I would choose to write for myself. So that always happens, no matter what my job might require of me. When people find out that you string words for a living they’ll often say, “Oh, I’ve always thought I’d like to be a writer, too.”

But the plain truth is, writers write. Whether or not they have time, whether or not they’re paid, whether or not anyone reads their stuff. I wrote Moments for Singles when I was employed as a marketing director at a large children’s hospital. That means I wrote the book at night, and from 5:00 to 7:00 a.m.

I’ve written an e-mail devotional every Wednesday for four years now because there are things I see and feel that I need to speak about. I’d write those pieces whether anyone read them or asked for them or not. (Although it’s certainly nice that they do!)

GL: Why do you think it is that you have worked in a fast-paced, high pressure jobs, and yet you’re aware of beauty all around you and you take time to participate in living? I realize that you’re not alone in this, but you’re also somewhat uncommon. It seems to me that many with fast-paced, high pressure jobs get tunnel vision out of necessity and have lost their capacity to notice and participate. They don’t have time for such ‘foolishness’ any more. What makes you slow down to experience and appreciate?

LMc: I’m not sure there’s an inverse relationship between pace and perception. Maybe there is. I’ve just always been tuned to truth and beauty in the ordinary, everyday stuff of life. And to story. Elizabeth Barrett Browning said “Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God.” I see the world as a place that’s bursting with glory, even if it’s disguised much of the time. I like to spy it out. Maybe that reality for me is a stronger influence than outward pressures of time or pace or the demands of the work-a-day world.

GL: “The world as a place bursting with glory, even if it’s disguised much of the time,” could be a description of the stories you tell in The Beautiful Ache. Tell me about the seed of this book. When did the ideas begin to strike you, and how did those ideas evolve into The Beautiful Ache?

LMc: The Beautiful Ache is definitely a book that took shape over time. I’m usually much more deliberate about writing projects, but this one wasn’t on my schedule. I wasn’t sure when I began writing the chapters that they would ever become a book, at all. And it took some time before the thread that held them together became clear to me.

I just subconsciously kept coming back around to the same touchstone of truth: that we are made for another world, see glimpses of it here, and ache for what is not yet ours. Then, that the ache is a good thing – not something to be stuffed, or soothed or medicated or dismissed. It teaches us things we need to know. It has real value.

The book actually began over six years ago with a piece called “Beautiful Joe,” a story I read as a child that taught me the value of persevering through pain. Each chapter of The Beautiful Ache examines a different aspect or “ache” of in-between living: the ache for adventure, the ache of persevering, the ache to worship, the ache for healing, and so on. C.S. Lewis said, “If we find in ourselves a desire which no earthly experience can satisfy, the most logical explanation is that we were made for another world.” It sounds so simple when he says it, doesn’t it?

GL: Can you tell me a story from your life when you did stuff, sooth, medicate or dismiss an ache? What did you forfeit from seeking to make the ache go away? How would you handle that episode again if you were to receive the ache and deal with it with Jesus?

LMc: That’s a fair question, but not necessarily an easy one to answer. One recurring “ache” for me has been for a home and a family of my own. God has not led me that way thus far, and I have, at various times in my life, done one or more of the following to (ineffectively, I might add) soothe that ache: 1. Deny that I have any desire to marry and have children, 2. Maintain such a ridiculous schedule that there would hardly be room for someone else to squeeze in, 3. Serve the church to the point of exhaustion to “justify” my usefulness/worth, 4.) Tell myself that most of my married friends have “settled” while I have maintained my (self-righteously) high standards. (Kind of ugly, isn’t it?) What I missed by doing this was the deep fellowship with Christ that comes with any and every ache, humility, openness and – here’s the biggie: peace.

Because it’s a recurring ache and not an “episode,” I can tell you how I deal with it now: I don’t deny it anymore. I don’t apologize for it. I ask God to give me the desires of my heart – literally to place His desires in my heart! – and I hold fast to hope. It’s harder on my ego, but easier on my heart.

Last week in my small group (three married couples and two singles) we asked one another, “If God gave you a magic wand, what would you wave it over and change in your life?” My first thought was “I’d conjure up a husband and a family,” but I immediately began thinking of other, “holier” and less embarrassing (and less truthful) things to say. But when my turn came I swallowed hard and told the truth. Although it hurt to do so, it felt right not to hide from people I’m deliberately pursuing community with. Through those friends in that moment, I felt the love of Christ surround me. If I had been less than honest to save face, I would have forfeited that blessing.

GL: What difference does Jesus make in this situation? It seems to me that Jesus, as Lord, could change circumstances. So when he doesn’t, or hasn’t yet, then….what difference does he make? You say you felt the love of Christ surround you—what does that mean?

We all ache, we all suffer in different ways—so what benefit is there, in the situations that he doesn’t change, to asking Jesus into our ache, into our suffering? What benefit is there in believing/following/loving Jesus that someone without Jesus wouldn’t have in that circumstance?

When your thirty-one year-old wife and the mother of your two young children dies of brain cancer after countless prayers from hundreds of believing friends, what difference does it make to ask Jesus into the despair? When your one year-old has to undergo physical therapy, and the treatment you inflict on your baby makes him scream in pain every day for months, what difference does it make to invite Jesus into that pain? When your dark tunnel of depression has become darker, narrow, with no end in sight and the in-breaking shafts of light mostly memory, what good does it do to invite Jesus into your desperation? If he is our God and could change really, really tough circumstances but will not, what good does it do to do life with him?

LMc: Glenn – this is why I love our conversations – even the ones that make me tear at my hair. First, let me say that I think your question itself answers this one: Why are books that offer six easy steps to fix everything, how to become a better wife/husband/lover/leader/etc. and have your very best life right-this-minute so popular? We want relief. We want to fix it – now!

But the situations you describe are impossible for us to fix. Could God change them? In a heartbeat. But will He? We don’t know. In the cases you mention, He didn’t, or hasn’t yet, and may not, ever. The difference He makes in each one is the difference the resurrection makes. It simply changes everything. He may not avert evil when He could, or cause us to triumph over our enemies when they bear down on us (and Satan is an enemy).

What He does is be present with the promise that although we are struck down, we will not be defeated. And that we are never alone. There is fellowship in our suffering because Jesus suffered. We come to know Him there, and to know a stark beauty and truth, and a peace that defies reason. When I said I felt the love of Christ surround me I meant just that. I felt loved with a supernatural love. I felt held somehow in my hurt. And if I deny that pain, I close myself off to the fellowship of His sufferings, and to a lesser, but still significant degree, to the fellowship of the saints. It’s a safer life, but a smaller one.

GL: Okay. Good stuff that I need to think about…a lot. But for the sake of the interview, let’s navigate away from these good but difficult waters. Let’s turn our attention to your book.

What do you ‘do’ in the book? You’ve told us that you explore the concept of the beautiful ache. How do you do this?

LMc: Each chapter of the book examines a certain way that the ache comes to us: the ache for beauty, for example, or the ache for healing, or the ache of hope, of labor, of desire for adventure, etc. And within that context, I interweave personal experience and biblical narrative to draw meaning out of the ache. In this way, the reader can identify with the beautiful ache, and hopefully, begin to appreciate it, understand it, and embrace it because of what it means in light of the gospel. Someone asked me the other day if it was depressing. It’s not! I hope it’s a real, honest, winsome invitation to draw near to the God whose power and truth and beauty is not “safe,” but who is very, very good.

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See Leigh's website for The Beautiful Ache (here).

Part 2 of the interview. Part 3 of the interview. And one more time, to get a copy of Leigh's book, click here on The Beautiful Ache.