Fear’s last love song.

hannah brencher.

Hannah- 

So…I was really hoping I could come back to you a month later with some huge spiritual experience and an “I’m out of the woods” story.  I don’t have one.

Instead it has been baby steps forward, only to stumble back again.  Some days I’m fine, some days all I want to do is lay down and cry because it just doesn’t make sense to me.

Darkness has been so evident lately and I’m so scared of falling into it instead of God.  I know it’s really not my battle because I’m not strong enough to fight against it…but I don’t really know how to surrender it to God, either. I’m not really sure how to trust someone I can’t see, feel or hear but I want to.

I want to hate the darkness and be free from it.  I want to be okay again and stop falling into…

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Notes from the battlefield.

hannah brencher.

I used to think it was my grandmother who turned me into a writer but now I know it was my father.

My father, though he doesn’t always say a lot of words, is the most vocal of men when it comes to action steps. He uses his hands. He shows up. He helps anyone and everyone who needs it. “Showing up” has become a buzzword. I’ve used it so much that I am sometimes want to cut off both my hands so that my fingers can never type it again until they truly, truly know what it means. I’m not an expert in showing up— I am simply trying to get better by texting back, knocking on people’s front doors with wine glasses in my free hand, and choosing not to walk away.

Growing up, I could not be more embarrassed by my father. I was 12 years old…

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An Open Letter to Socality Barbie.

hannah brencher.

photo cred: Socality Barbie

Dear Socality Barbie,

I broke the Chemex coffee maker this morning trying to take a photo of it. It’s dumb to even ask why I was trying to document the experience– I wanted people to know that I’d gotten up, made my own coffee, and was now preparing to conquer the first Monday of the fall in a flannel. Why else would I need the perfect morning lighting and my cellphone at 6am?

The cone of the Chemex cracked as I abruptly hit it against the kitchen cabinet and watched the spout shatter into three thick pieces. My dad got my mom the Chemex for their anniversary. She looked at me and blinked twice like, “Why are you even taking a picture of this?” Now I have to buy her a new coffee maker before I fly back to Georgia on Sunday.

Now not a…

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Good morning Baltimore.

hannah brencher.

I take two white pills every night before I crawl into the sheets. They are a reminder to me, more than anything, that November happened.

…

November happened.

And so did December. January. February. A collection of months I wished, for so long, I could scrape off the calendar. I thought I knew darkness before those months. In a lot of ways, I didn’t know anything until those months came crashing on top of me. Sometimes you think you are fine until everything around you falls apart. And then you see the truth: everything was not fine. You were dying inside. You were clinging to other people to complete you. You were desperately in need of rewiring.

…

I think thereare times in our lives when we need an upgrade. Or a software update. And then there are times when we need all the little things inside of us to…

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The rain you can’t control.

hannah brencher.

Today is Sabbath and I am trying, with everything in my being, to walk it out.

I’m not a Sabbath type of girl. If I am not hustling then I really don’t know what to be doing. I spent the first 5 years of my career being allergic to the concept of rest. I first started to see this as a budding problem when I really didn’t have anything to talk about besides work. More than that, I started to see that work was a cover-up for me. A safety zone. Something I could hide behind to keep people from getting too close.

2015 has been a year where I have come at my ugly roots with a weed wacker. And, as a result, I’ve been learning to rest. And break. And figure out what makes me happy.

So today Sabbath looks like me wrapped in my favorite reliable flannel…

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Old Camel Knees. 9 parts.

hannah brencher.

Part 1.

We prayed for three hours.

Three hours. That is worth repeating once more: three hours.

There is little that I do for three hours. In fact, there is currently a list— a very short list— of things I am capable of doing for three-hours blocks of time. Those things include:

Reading a good book.

Eating copious amounts of nachos.

Watching anything Bradley Cooper related.

That’s about it. It’s a pretty short list. Prayer has never made the cut.

Still, in spite of me, we prayed for three hours. This is all because I found myself stumbling into a small chapel on Saturday. It was instantly myself and four students of a ministry in Atlanta. I didn’t know a single one. Sprawled out across chairs in a small chapel, tucked in the back of a white brick building, I eyed the plain walls covered in Sharpie marker prayers.

“We’re…

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When it started because of you.

hannah brencher.

Jenna showed up in May.

May of last year.

She shoved out her hand in front of me and told me she wanted to help me in any way I needed her. I was new to Georgia. My furniture was barely assembled. I was learning in the daily that IKEA is just another same for Satan.

I was settling into a new office space and beginning to ask those questions. You know the kind of questions I’m writing about: What am I doing here? Why did I move? Why does this feel so strange and uncomfortable?

And then there was Jenna. Immediately, she was a light. She was only 19. She was the kind of person who’d stood on the earth for a quick & short time but her spirit was decades old. Her spirit had lived and died and breathed and broken several times before it met me in…

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Give Yourself Some Space: The Permission to Say No

The Temptations We Face

I’m Tired of Talking About God