Science (non) Fiction

my day for posting – my meeting with my boss is on Wednesday, so Thursday is always a little less hectic than earlier in the week…
Had a great but busy weekend – went home to celebrate Mom’s birthday, which was fun and got to spend some time with Matthew (and his friend John) – we had a really good time, played a lot of games, went through a corn maze (if you haven’t done one, you need too, they’re fantastically fun!) and ate a lot of good food!
My week has also been crazy busy – volunteered Monday night (at Ronald McDonald Family Room in the hospital, which I’ve been doing for over a year and half), training for crisis-line sexual assault/domestic violence volunteering Tuesday and tonight (6-9 – ugh!), YAF last night (dinner for Mike’s B-day and then Maggie Moos) and home again this Friday night to see family again and maybe go to at least part of mom’s birthday party this Sat – whew! Plus I got to have some real quality talks with Matthew and that’s been awesome! Also got caught up with some friends I haven’t talked to/seen in a little while – coffee with Frances and our moms Sunday before I left Charlotte was great, and got to catch up with Alexa some by phone this week too (I’m praying!) – really good to chat…
I’ve been singing this song in my head for a while now – the words are great and work well even without the music – love Caedman’s Call!

“Shifting Sand”

Sometimes I believe all the lies
So I can do the things I should despise
And every day I am swayed
By whatever is on my mind

I hear it all depends on my faith
So I’m feeling precarious
The only problem I have
with these mysteries
Is they’re so mysterious

And like a consumer
I’ve been thinking
If I could just get a bit more
More than my 15 minutes of faith,
Then I’d be secure

My faith is like shifting sand
Changed by every wave
My faith is like shifting sand
So I stand on grace

I’ve begged you for some proof
For my Thomas eyes to see
A slithering staff, a leperous hand
And lions resting lazily

A glimpse of your back-side glory
And this soaked altar going ablaze
But you know I’ve seen so much
I explained it away

Waters rose as my doubts reigned
My sand-castle faith, it slipped away
Found myself standing on your grace
It’d been there all the time

My faith is like shifting sand
Changed by every wave
My faith is like
shifting sand
So I stand on grace

I love this song – we sang it last night at YAF and it reminded me how much I like it – the melody is pretty, but the words are also really powerful for me – beautiful and poignant and hopeful…

O Love that will not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in thee;
I give thee back the life I owe,
that in thine ocean depths its flow
may richer, fuller be.

O Light that followest all my way,
I yield my flick’ring torch to thee,
My heart restores its borrowed ray,
that in thy sunshine’s blaze its day
may brighter, fairer be.

Joy that seekest me through pain,
I cannot close my heart to thee,
I trace the rainbow through the rain
and feel the promise is not vain
that morn shall tearless be.

O Cross that liftest up my head,
I dare not ask to fly from thee;
I lay in dust life’s glory dead,
and from the ground thereblossoms red
life that shall endless be.

Cute kitty!

So I’m in the middle of Blue like Jazz by Donald Miller, and unlike the first time I tried to read it 6 months ago, I am absolutely loving it! I bought it after hearing all the rave reviews from people and tried it, only to give up after 15-20 pages because I got so frustrated by his somewhat rambling style of writing. Well I was looking for a good book at Borders the other day and ran across another of his books called Searching for God Knows What and after reading the title and summary, I decided to give it a try – and it was awesome! He’s still a bit ramble-y (I know that’s not really a word), but it’s so great and he expresses so many fears and questions and random things that I can relate to – quite brilliant really… Anyway, so I got my copy of Blue like Jazz back after having loaned it out to several people (who all enjoyed it immensely) and I’m now probably close to halfway through it – and I’m really enjoying it now – I’ve laughed several times, and not just the little silent chuckle, but the ‘I’m out in public and laughing out loud and people are looking’ kind of laugh – embarassing but still funny! So, I highly recommend both those books, plus he’s written other books, but I haven’t read them yet – Matthew’s reading Through Painted Deserts now, so I’ll find out how good that one is soon.
I still have a rather large stack of books that I’m working on, including one written by a scientist who’s a Christian about his struggles with connecting his faith with his work – really good so far, but pretty dense for bedtime reading, so it’s slow going… I can always use suggestions for books to read, light or heavy reading!

From Blue like Jazz:
“In exchange for our humility and willingness to accept the charity of God, we are given a kingdom. And a beggar’s kingdom is better than a proud man’s delusion.”

“The ability to accept God’s unconditional grace and ferocious love is all the fuel we need to obey Him in return. Accepting God’s kindness and free love is something the devil does not want us to do. If we hear, in our inner ear, a voice saying we are failures, we are losers, we will never amount to anything, this is the voice of Satan trying to convice the bride that the groom does not love her. This is not the voice of God. God woos us with kindness, He changes our character with the passion of His love.”

He’s so good at making connections between big faith ideas and normal everyday things, or at least things that we can try to grasp more easily than ‘God stuff’ – like he talks about how penguins have an internal knowledge of when their eggs are about to hatch and that that’s how he feels about God, that he’s drawn to Him by some inexplicable force – and he says that people like to think about the love story of people and God being something like Romeo and Juliet when really it’s more like The taming of the shrew with the persistent lover chasing the reluctant bride – good stuff, eh?!?!

It’s been a while – but that means I have a little more to tell y’all about!
I’ve started training at Family Services for becoming a volunteer in either their sexual assault or domestic violence program – I could either be doing something like the rape crisis line I worked for in Asheville in college, or something more to do with court cases involving domestic violence – but the training is going to be pretty intense I think (at least it was when I did something similar in college) and quite long, so let’s hope I can keep it together for that – with the bonus being that I get to hang out with Beth, who just started her job at Family Services this week (Congrats Beth!) and has to re-take the training, since she’ll eventually be leading all or parts of it in the future. I’ll keep you posted on the status of things…
I went and saw my brother this past weekend – actually Sunday and Monday – we went to Raleigh (he’s between Raleigh and Fayetteville) and played putt-putt and got lost in downtown Raleigh (apparently we both inherited Mom’s sense of direction!) and ate too much at talked and watched some of The Office (embarassingly funny) – we talked a lot about stuff we remember from our childhood, which is always fun, cause Matthew remembers almost nothing before he was about 6 or 7! A good visit all around – and since he’ll probably be leaving in a little while, it was good to spend some time together just the two of us.
Had a picnic last night with YAF – I’d never been to the place before (Reynolda House – the front ‘yard’ which is like a country estate!) and it was awesome! Beautiful weather, nice lawn for playing frisbee and bocce (which I won! with a lot of help from Keith!) and a couple people brought guitars so we even had some music – got ice cream afterwards at Coldstone (or Stone Cold as we will now refer to it as!) – yummy and fun night!
We have a very famous scientist in today to give a seminar – he studies anthrax and anthrax toxin – very interesting stuff actually – looking forward to it, even if it is in the middle of the afternoon…
I was going to post some fave new Get Fuzzy comics, but I can’t get them to work right now – so if you want to laugh – go to the Get Fuzzy link on the side bar ——->
and read yesterday’s and today’s comics – hysterical!

Congratulations are in order for my mom, who accepted a job with MetLife (hehe – makes me think of Snoopy!) and will begin working there shortly!!!!!! Yeah Mom! There’s some kind of training period, during which she’s supposed to take this very tough insurance-y test, and then she’ll be more official – but it’s a first step! Whoohoo! And the office is over in Ballentyne, so it’s not too far from their house, which is great – some of the other jobs were farther away, even one downtown, so this is a major plus – esp given gas prices…

In other news, my laptop’s hard drive crashed yesterday, but the fabulous people in academic computing managed to save pretty much everything before it fritzed out – but it’s going to take a while to get a new hard drive in and even to get a loaner – hopefully sometime today… But good news, I’m going to visit my brother this weekend – probably Sunday til Monday – so we should get some good brother-sister time – maybe putt-putt or go-carts – that sounds bro-sis-ish, right?!?!

I’m bringing back a quote from a while ago cause I read it again and loved it again – from Robert Burns – abridged from one of his poems (actually called something like In the Prospect of Death or something morbid, but still quite good!):

Thou know’st that
Thou hast formed me
With passions wild and strong;
And list’ning to their witching voice
Has often led me wrong.

Where with intention I have err’d,
No other plea I have,
But, Thou art good;
and Goodness still
Delighteth to forgive.

OK, much to be summarized, so I’ll do it in bullet form:
- I have passed to my fourth year of graduate school – whoohoo! Doesn’t mean a whole lot, except a longer presentation in the spring (actually January – yikes!) and teaching one lecture for the first-year grad students – but it’s a step forward!
- I’m working with a first-year grad student on part of my project, similar to what I did for the summer, but she’s supposed to be (or become) more autonomous and self-directed, plus it’s a little longer – sort of scary for me, but if she can help my project forward, that’s awesome!
- I finally bought an MP3 player – an iPod mini – the small one – and it’s pink (of course!) – so cute! I already had a bunch of songs on iTunes so I’m set for a little while for songs – but could always use suggestions…I even got an armband so I can now listen to music/books while working out, doing labwork, etc…
- I got new glasses – well, since I didn’t wear the old ones all that much, this isn’t a huge change, but I was getting a lot more headaches than usual, and squinting more (and I don’t need any more little lines in the forehead), so I got my eyes checked and he changed my prescription a little bit – so, two new pairs of glasses – one with metal frame on top, and the other sort of horn-rim librarian glasses – I’ll try to post pics later on…

So, my mom and brother both need prayers still for job hunting – they both have some good leads, but more prayer is never bad! I will hopefully be heading out to WA state to see Dawn (college roomie) in mid-October – should be a blast! And the next CityWide has been set for Oct 18 at 7:30pm. Plus several YAF-related trips (beach, camping) and my alma mater’s homecoming in October – busy fall, even without work! hehehe

Happy Labor Day!