Through a Glass, Darkly

I have a tendency to define myself in terms of what I do not have rather than seeing the many blessings I have been given. This is, of course, ridiculous, but every time I try to step away from it, I realize that it is one of the core definitions of who I am. And has been for quite some time. As a teenager, I focused on my classmate’s nice car and the fact that I couldn’t be on the cross-country team because my dad said he needed me to work for him instead. I noticed that my family didn’t get to hang with the “important” families at church (and maybe you think church shouldn’t be like that, but, let’s face it, church is as social as any other organization). I wish I could say that I have progressed beyond that, but I haven’t. At least not all of the time. I worry about different things now, the things I do not have, but I still worry about them. I stress about the fact that I wasn’t given the skills to make my home the way I wish I could. I focus on the loss of my dad. And I worry about Mike’s parents.

I do not talk about this very often: Mike’s parents refused to give us their blessing to get married. They did not come to our wedding, and we haven’t seen them in over seven years. We haven’t really talked to them in over nine. For several years after we were married, people who hadn’t seen us in a while would ask, “Is there anything new with Mike’s family? Are you talking to them?” and I would feel guilty because we had to say that no, there isn’t, and no, we aren’t. Over time, the questions have dwindled away, and I would be surprised to hear anyone ask at this point. We don’t often have those kinds of conversations about the topic anymore. We did our best, but it seems unlikely that there will be any kind of reconciliation any time in the foreseeable future.

It’s hard to say that. I feel the guilt that any good girl raised in the church would feel when I say that. How can I even think that there won’t be reconciliation? How can I close the door on that relationship? I hope that we have not closed the door completely, although sometimes I admit that I can’t see how any kind of relationship would work with them at this point. We have lived a lot of life without them, and they have lived a lot of life without us.

Here’s the thing. When I want to bless someone, it’s something I give freely, without making anyone jump through some kind of hoops or earn my approval. There is a legitimate balance between being true to what you believe and doing what is best for your family. I think we all know that’s not what I am talking about here. We did not act according to their script, and they chose to punish us for it.

Over the years, I have had people, both well-meaning and otherwise, tell me that we should not have gotten married without the blessing of Mike’s parents. Which was not the most helpful thing for me to hear. These are family issues, and they are complicated, and I have only barely scratched the surface with what I have said here. Even without knowing the details or the nuance, people have been certain that we did the wrong thing by moving on without Mike’s parents. For a long time, I wondered if we should have waited for their approval, and my guilt for the lack of relationship mingled with the questions I had about blessing and marriage and family. Does their lack of a blessing really mean anything? What would their blessing have meant? Should we have sucked it up and done what they asked? Does life work in some pattern of blessings and curses?

This Christmas, the things, the relationships I do not have hit me especially hard. We lost our friend, my grandma was in the hospital, we had some unexpected family drama. I see the people we do not have, and I feel the lack of them in our lives. It feels like a curse, and sometimes I am tempted to believe that’s what it means, that if I’d been better or kinder they would have liked me. If I’d been better or kinder, my dad would still be here. If I’d been better or kinder, God would have blessed us instead of taking away.

When I do that, I hurt the people closest to me. Why can’t I see that the friends and family I do have are enough?

I think this idea of living in a blessing or in a curse takes away from a much bigger picture. After the Andrew Peterson concert, I got Mike to put a Square Peg mix on my iPod, and as I have been running over the past few weeks, I have heard Andrew Peterson’s song “All Things New.” I haven’t listened to that album very much, but it’s been in my head the past few days:

Come broken and weary, come battered and bruised
My Jesus makes all things new, All things new

Come lost and abandoned, come blown by the wind
He’ll bring you back home again, home again

Come frozen with shame, come burning with guilt
My Jesus loves you still, loves you still

The challenge for me in this situation is to believe in that redemption. To see the friends and family who surround us rather than those who are gone and who choose not to participate in our lives. I love the life we have been given. The most random things fill me with feelings of wonder and gratitude. I love our crazy old house. I love it more than I loved our old house because we have had to work at it more. I love that Alisa has moved in and that we can hang out on Saturday mornings. I love shopping at the Farmer’s Market and cooking meals and attempting crafts and taking trips and playing the Wii with my friends. I love drinking Homeland Creamery milk in my coffee, watching the clouds form as I pour it in.

There is often no discernible pattern to the things that happen. There is certainly no system like the one I imagine I would have in place if I was in charge. But that is both the blessing and the curse of this life. Old things can be broken, and if we are patient and willing, perhaps they can be remade – maybe into the same thing, or maybe into something completely different. The cracks still show, and the brokenness is still there.

I wish I could wrap this up in a nice bow and say that God makes these broken things beautiful again, and that the beauty is in the brokenness, but I think that would be too trite, and it’s not really telling the truth as I have experienced it. Being broken isn’t really beautiful. It’s not beautiful when people die or when relationships and hearts are broken or when people we love are in the hospital. The beauty that I see and feel is that God is there walking with us. The redemption is that he teaches us that we aren’t alone, and that he can use our past hurts to teach that same lesson to other people. And that sounds good, but sometimes, honestly, that is not enough for me.

But every now and then I break, and as I pick myself up, I realize that I have been put back together differently, that I am seeing the world with new eyes. I have a hunch that those are the sorts of blessings that God is talking about. In those moments, I can begin to see what he means when he talks about making all things new.

This week, the things I do not have seem much more present than the things I do have, but I will hold on to the memory of redemption as I try to believe that change is possible in our lives. Even in those areas where the struggles seem the same, where there seems to be nothing but but darkness. Perhaps, they, too, can be remade.

Our Sunday School class has been going through Philip Yancey’s Soul Survivor, and this week was Annie Dillard. I am quite a fan of Annie Dillard, and have quoted before this favorite passage of hers:

“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.” -Annie Dillard in Teaching a Stone to Talk

I read The Maytrees and I kind of thought it was a book teaching me How to Live. I think her writing is beautiful, even if the nature stuff honestly doesn’t do much for me. In Sunday School someone asked me why I like her so much, then, and part of my answer had to do with the fact that she is an unabashed intellectual. I have seen in modern-day evangelicalism a real anti-intellectualism, and when I was in college, there were some people around me who said things that indicated that what was really important about being in college was not going to class, but being a soldier for the Lord. Thankfully, it was also about this time that I discovered Annie Dillard, and her writing helped answer that question for me. I wouldn’t call myself an intellectual, but she helped me feel as if it would be okay to prioritize learning and education – not above God, but as part of our lives here on earth.

What I didn’t say in Sunday School because I was fleshing it out was that I was probably also drawn to Annie Dillard because she is so comfortable in her own skin, because she seems able to say what she thinks without qualifying or explaining. I suffer so much from wanting to be understood, but much of what Annie Dillard says is obtuse, and she does not apologize for that.

We had a wonderful restful Christmas vacation, and I am so grateful to have the kind of job where I can have two weeks off. It was a difficult Christmas in some ways – the loss of our friend, some unexpected family drama. Things that are difficult to explain, things that leave me feeling misunderstood. Those things combined to make me a little bit melancholy the week after Christmas, dwelling too much on the things that we do not have. My default in those situations is to be jealous and angry of the things that others have that I do not. I took some runs over the week and cried and raged my way through the neighborhood. I ran as I listened to songs asking God to, “Come with your light and fill up my heart.”

I don’t even know what that means sometimes, because all I see is the darkness.

So, of course, on Sunday, we sang “We Three Kings” for Epiphany. I love that song, but I was faced once again with this idea of God’s light shining in the darkness. I saw it on Christmas Eve as my family spoke about the things we are thankful for, as we sang “Silent Night” by candlelight, as we watched A Charlie Brown Christmas with our friends. I saw it on New Year’s as we spent time with friends who love and care for us. I saw it over and over this Christmas season: concerts and lunches and coffee and people stopping by to see us. Our family and people who are family for us (because they know we are a little short on family in some quarters). They have been like the Christmas star for me as they guided me to Jesus’ light.

“God does not demand that we give up our personal dignity, that we throw in our lot with random people, that we lose ourselves and turn from all that is not him. God needs nothing, asks nothing, and demands nothing, like the stars. It is a life with God which demands these things.

Experience has taught the race that if knowledge of God is the end, then these habits of life are not the means but the condition in which the means operates. You do not have to do these things; not at all. God does not, I regret to report, give a hoot. You do not have to do these things–unless you want to know God. They work on you, not on him.

You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.” -Annie Dillard in Teaching a Stone to Talk

Without the darkness, I would not be quite as grateful for the light.

I’ve been reading Acedia & Me by Kathleen Norris, which is very good. Acedia is a sort of listlessness and despair. It was originally one of the “eight bad thoughts” but never made it onto the list of “seven deadly sins.” One of the points that she makes that I need to ponder is that we as a society have bought into the idea that in order to make good art, it ought to come out of some kind of melancholy. We talk about tortured artists, and I have heard people say that the best art comes from some kind of depression. It’s part of a much larger problem that I will talk about when I write about the book, but I will just say now that it is certainly an enlightening read. I know that I buy into that idea at least a little bit. Maybe even more than a little bit. I tend to think that the things I write here are better when I am melancholy. It’s hard work to be down all the time. It’s not healthy, and sometimes I feel as if I have to create drama in order to create better art or to be more interesting, as if that makes sense at all.

Lately I haven’t felt very creative or interesting. I see people around me who are “light and bright and sparkling,” and I don’t feel anything but flat. I have met some new people lately, and I felt as if I made a horrible first impression. Why should anyone be attracted to someone as blah as I am feeling? I have been so busy that I barely have time for my friends. I have been sick twice this school year, so I’m feeling pretty run down as it is. And taking two graduate level classes on top of working is, honestly, a little bit too much. We did fun things this weekend: a cooking class, The Great Pumpkin Party, The Duchess. But I still don’t feel like myself. I felt a bit as if I was watching everyone else have fun from the outside. I took the weekend off from homework, and it was the right thing to do. But it wasn’t enough.

Last week, Emily asked why it is that people write online. I don’t want this to turn into blogging about blogging, but I write because I think the discipline of crafting something is important. Not that I always take the time to craft something, but when I do, it feels good. One paragraph leading into another until I have said what it is that I wanted to say. Pushing the “post” button makes me feel as if I have accomplished something, and that’s why I have continued. When Emily was at my house on Saturday, we talked briefly about a conversation that was an offshoot of that one, a conversation in which I had offered some advice but then said, “Of course, you probably shouldn’t take my advice since I only have about 12 readers.” I like all 12 of you a whole lot, and I am thankful and humbled that you care about what I have to say. At the same time, I struggle a lot with wanting to be liked. So it’s hard not to feel as if it would be nice to be liked and understood by lots of people. I don’t see that happening any time soon, so it’s not something I worry about a whole lot. I don’t have the time or the energy (especially right now) to do anything about it. At the same time, it seems a symptom of a larger problem – my flatness, my inability to commit to my friends, my escapism and despair. Perhaps you could call it acedia. Whatever it is, I am not sure that I would hang around me, either.

I think, though, that worrying so much about approval is not being faithful to the writing itself. Mike keeps trying to tell me this, but I can be a little hardheaded about this sort of thing. I might never write a great novel, or even a mediocre novel. But I still learn through what I write, even if it’s just throwing it up on the internet and seeing if anything comes out of it. Writing things in a funny way has taught me to laugh at myself. Taking the time to think through my indignation sometimes gives me more compassion. And writing through melancholy has shown me that I want more than hollow introspection for myself. Even if I don’t write for connection, I worry that stopping would leave me even more disconnected than I already feel. I don’t have time for my friends as it is. At least this way they know if I saw a funny yard sign while I was out. (Today I saw a sign that said “Tina Fey 2008.” LOVE.)

I don’t know what I have to offer the world, especially the internet world. I am not a mom, and I don’t make crafts. I’m not into decorating my house, and I don’t even own a hot glue gun. (God help Mike if I did – I would undoubtedly hurt both myself and our house.) I’m not into fashion or art or photography. I don’t really like to shop. I’m a reader, and that’s not exactly the most dynamic hobby that there is. But as part of my battle against my own acedia, I am trying to reclaim a bit of who I am rather than trying to be something I am not. Kathleen Norris would say that choosing faith and life are the keys to fighting acedia. Engagement, then, is the key to fighting my listlessness. This is also at the heart of what Mike keeps trying to tell me when he tells me he wants me to keep writing. Sometimes I think that keeping my body healthy is enough – exercising, eating vegetables, taking vitamins – when it’s my soul that needs the cure. My soul feels a little battered this fall. Work has been hard. Things have happened at church that have left me in tears and needing a little time to recover. I haven’t figured out how to carve out time for my soul. I haven’t made time for my friends or read very many books or talked to my mom very much on the phone. The book I am reading, the conversations I am having, and the weekend I just had are good steps in that direction. Those small graces aren’t melancholy at all. The key is processing them in ways that I haven’t necessarily done before.

If acedia is a “bad thought,” then I suppose the key to overcoming it is “good thoughts.” Melissa tells me this a lot – it’s about believing truth rather than believing lies. I have never been very good at fighting lies with facts. Those lists of who God says that I am never seem to make a dent in the wrong things that I believe. Facts don’t really do it for me, because there’s a difference between facts and knowledge, much like the difference between facts and truth. I don’t know that I know what it looks like to be more engaged at this point, what it means to embrace truth and pursue good. But like Sara Zarr said, it’s so helpful to know that some of the ways that I have felt for years are real and have a name and that people have been writing about them for centuries.

(I still have more about the actual book, believe it or not, but I have to finish it first.)

O Lord, mercifully receive the prayers of your servant who calls upon you, and grant that I may know and understand what things I ought to do, and that I also may have the grace and power faithfully to accomplish them; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. -taken from The Divine Hours, Prayers for Summertime

My copy of The Divine Hours for summer got packed at the very end of May, so I didn’t have it until we unboxed the books last weekend. Meaning I missed all of June. Which was kind of a downward spiral for me with the class I was taking, the stress of things possibly falling apart with the house, the end of school, and, oh, yeah, packing. Now that I am able to sit on my couch and drink my coffee and read my prayers, I can see how it might have been a good thing for me to have that in my routine, to read those words and say those prayers with so many other people. To have something solid to stand on when I was floundering in my own lack of belief. Because those are big prayers. That up there? That’s a big prayer. That cuts to the heart of many of my prayers: What am I supposed to do? Why is it that particular thing? There are times when I know what I ought to do: I should forgive, because it is one of the cornerstones of my faith. I might even understand why I am supposed to forgive: Because I have been forgiven, and because it will actually make me feel better not to be carrying those things around. Just to name a few. But sometimes I don’t understand how it’s possible, and I think that’s the kind of understanding this prayer is crying out for. Help me know what to do. Help me understand how to do it.

It resonated particularly with me this morning, because last summer we had an unprecedented streak of days over 100 degrees, something I can never remember happening before. It was miserable and unbearable, but, caught up in my haze of summer discontent, I continued to go to my car every day at lunch and read. I would read the Midday Office in The Divine Hours, and I would read my novel. You can look at last year’s list to see which books were read in July and August and then imagine me sweating it out in my car. I parked in the shade, don’t worry. And I drank a lot of water.

I remember talking to Andrea on the phone one day, talking about how I was so desperate to have the summer off, but I didn’t know what to do. There were so many classes I needed to take, and I didn’t really know how to get in the school system. I don’t remember praying this prayer particularly, but I must have, this same week, last year. Mike and I want a different sort of life, one where we are closer to our friends and where we have more time to be together. I do not think I can work another summer without going completely stir-crazy. I know what we want, but I don’t know how to get there. Help.

And now, I sit in my new house, with five more weeks of summer vacation. I have felt for so long that everything was piling up around me and I could not relax. But I am beginning to feel that relaxation settle in, that the restlessness that prevailed last summer is finally dissipating. There are many areas of my life where I still don’t know what to do and how to do it. But I can look back over the past year and feel as if we were guided in each of those difficult steps: applying for a new job, taking the new job, taking classes, putting our house on the market, and, finally, moving. I know that this prayer isn’t just about me and my own life, but also about God’s greater work in the world and how we can participate in it. But those are the things that were on my heart last summer, and (most of the time) I believe the things that are on my heart are part of the things that God cares about. I was lonely and restless, I believe, because he created me to be in community and to want to have time to spend with my friends and family. I can breathe deeply now, in a way I haven’t in a long time, because I have that time to rest, because Mike and I have time to work on our house and go on vacation. Because I have friends within walking distance (and one whose place of employment can be seen from my sunroom). Because I can see my mother and my brother more often. Because I was given the grace to take the next step. Because I can sit here in my sunroom with my coffee and feel as if many of my desperate prayers from the past few years have been answered.

Eef Barzelay’s new CD has a song called “I Love the Unknown,” which was also on the Clem Snide CD Your Favorite Music. We are big Eef fans in this house, and I have been listening to his new CD a lot. As I was singing “I Love the Unknown” in the shower one morning, I had to laugh at myself. I am about as far from loving the unknown as any person can be, and even Eef Barzelay can’t trick me into throwing caution to the wind and taking a bus to “the place with the most allure,” wherever that might be. I like my ordered existence, and I like lists and plans, and I happen to think that’s a perfectly acceptable way to live. The unknown is a scary place, full of . . . things that are unknown. Let me get my calendar out and we can schedule some things instead. The past few weeks have been particularly bad specifically because many, many things have been up in the air.

But then, there’s the end of the song, the part that goes like this:

The doctor asked him what he was afraid of,
just what was he running from?
He said, “It’s not a fear of success, nor of closeness,
but of going through life feeling numb.”

Well, that might be a little bit Fight Club, but maybe the man does have a point there. As much as I like my ordered existence, my routine, sometimes I feel as if life is passing me by and I am not paying attention. There is always something to get through, something we must do that we would prefer not to do, and so we count the days away rather than embracing the time that we have.

I learned a lot of things from my dad: how to drive a stick shift, how to change the oil in my car, how to hammer a nail. Those are all useful, but he also taught me about life and about shaking things up. I have talked before about how he would take us out of school to have a day with him at the mall or at the fair or just on his delivery route. I certainly value those days spent with him in his truck more than I would have remembered whatever I missed that day at school. When you have a family, it’s hard to say that you love the unknown, because you are looking out for more than just yourself. But my dad would never have advocated going through life being numb. He loved fiercely, he cared about people, and he wanted more for me than feeling bogged down by the life going on around me, wishing the days away until the next milestone.

When I took my new job, I wasn’t sure that my dad would have approved. He saw how hard my mom worked as a teacher, and he did not want the same for me. But I know he would have approved of some of my reasons, including wanting to be able to spend more time with my friends and family, especially in the summer. This is my first chance to catch a breath in a while, and as the calendar of our summer stretches out in front of us, so many days left to fill, I have to admit that I don’t mind that sort of unknown quite as much. I appreciate this summer more than I did when I was used to having summers off all the time. I am going to do my best to make it count.

Did you think maybe we would make it through this summer without any Harry Potter entries? Surely you are not quite that naive!

My plan was to reread the series this summer, but since they are packed, Mike and I have been listening to them instead. The other day, I paused the iPod and said, “A year ago we still did not know how it ended.” It took me back to those desperate feelings of needing to know how it was all going to end. To the night we saw J.K. Rowling at Carnegie Hall. To reading the book in our pajamas all day on July 21st. To the release party, complete with a fantastic setup of snacks, pizza, and my brother frantically reading in the corner, trying to finish Half-Blood Prince before midnight.

And it took me back to one of my favorite moments from the whole Deathly Hallows release experience, one that I didn’t mention at the time, but that I would like to talk about now: the day that the books came into the library.

It was just after lunch on July 11. My coworker stepped into my office, saying, “There’s a box that has Harry Potter written all over it. Should you come look at it?” I nearly tripped as I rushed over to the boxes, and, indeed, sitting right on top, there it was. Do not open before July 21.

The night before, I had dreamed that it was Harry Potter Day, and I was so happy. We hadn’t been spoiled. We were going to make it. I woke up, and, no, it wasn’t Harry Potter Day. It was just a regular old Wednesday. It technically was Harry Potter Movie Day, but Harry Potter Movie Day didn’t really mean all that much to me.

We opened the invoice and I reiterated to my coworker the importance of keeping and processing them in a secure environment, not opening the box before absolutely necessary, not reading it, not posting on the internet. All the things we’d promised in order to get the books. This was it. This was the last book. It was Right. There. It would not be an exaggeration to say that I kind of hugged the box. I was so excited. Finally, the book was within my reach. Finally, it was almost time to read it. First I hid it behind my trashcan. Then I hid it under my desk. Go ahead and imagine all of that. I’ll wait.

You back? Have you stopped laughing? All right then. I tried frantically to call Mike, who was actually watching the movie (which I did not know at the time), and therefore did not answer his phone. I debated telling some of my friends. There was the gloating factor “guess what is under my desk” aspect vs. the pressure I knew they’d give me. “Why don’t you just open it?” they’d say. “Why don’t you take it home and read it? I’d never be able to do that.” I did not need any encouragement to be weak. I was feeling very weak. I just wanted to know what was going to happen. I just wanted to know. I had so many questions. But I had given my word, I had signed all the papers, so I kept my mouth shut and the box under my desk. I tried to call Mike again. I sent him emails with LARGE CAPITAL LETTERS. I sat at my desk for a while, and I realized that I did not want to spend the next ten days with it that close to me.

I’ll be honest with you — it surprised me how hard it was to have them so close. When Half-Blood Prince came in, I had no problem being strong. I had no problem waiting to get and read it at midnight like everyone else. I didn’t even look at the back cover. With Deathly Hallows, though, my fear of spoilers made me really anxious, and it was hard to have the “solution” to that anxiety right under my desk. In my mind, the spoiler situation was elevated to a “severe threat” level, which made it much easier to think about cheating. To protect myself. Ah, justification. Let me wrap myself in your arms.

And so I locked them in a closet, both for the safety of the books and for my own sanity. I locked them in a closet as if I was trying to make a bargain with God. “If I do the right thing, could you please work it out so I don’t get spoiled? Could you please make other people do the right thing, too?” Life doesn’t work like that, I know. And bargaining with God is always a bad idea. But instead of taking the book home, breaking the law, breaking my word, I did the right thing. The other 20 copies came in on July 17th. Again, I locked them immediately in a closet. I did hold one in my hand this time, but I didn’t even crack it open to look at the title page. It felt good, to hold it in my hand. I let that be enough.

There was some discussion that week of what kind of person would intentionally spoil a book for other people. I put forth the theory that it was a power trip. I felt uniquely situated in the discussion, because, as my boss said, “I am not keeping you from the book. Your own conscience is keeping you from it.” (I told him he’d better put that in my performance evaluation: “Shows integrity even under extreme pressure.”) While I never would have spoiled it for anyone, I understood the draw of letting other people know that I had it, even if I wasn’t going to read it. As I said before, at first I couldn’t handle the pressure of people knowing, but later in the week, after the spoilers were out, I started to see things differently. When Half-Blood Prince came into my office four days before the release date, I gloated. I didn’t read it early, but I wanted them to know I had it. Since then, I have come to see that as somewhat sad. I don’t need to get my identity from having the book before other people, as if I am part of some special group and they aren’t. What would be the point of that? And so, for the most part, I managed not to tell people. I discussed the paperwork I had to sign, and perhaps people inferred that we had it, but all in all, I think I was much better behaved than when Half-Blood Prince came out. I hope it meant that I had grown a little in the two years between the two books, behaving like a reasonable adult rather than being tacky and immature.

And in the end, it worked out. I got to work on the morning of the 20th, I processed the books and got them ready for checkout the next day. (Actually processing the books was HARD. I had to TOUCH THEM and put JACKETS ON THEM and NOT READ THEM.) We had our party and there were no spoilers and Mike and I spent a frantic 21 hours reading it out loud. And all of that was wonderful, and I won’t forget it. But, for me, the moment when I saw the box was one of the most exciting experiences of the whole crazy ride, and I am incredibly proud to say that I had it and I locked it away.

(I saved one of the boxes, because I thought it was awesome. But this picture is from July 20th, the day we opened the boxes to process them. And, yes, my hands did shake a little bit. Stop laughing at me! I was kind of excited!)

This year, our church’s Lenten theme was about restoration. Every week, someone gave a focus on how God has restored some aspect of their lives – a woman who was abused as a child has now become a counselor; a man who spent many years focusing on himself is now married and he and his wife have adopted their nieces and nephews after a tragedy in their family. I knew a little bit about some of those stories, but it was very powerful to hear them spoken.

On Palm Sunday, after the kids marched in with their palm leaves and they had been put in vases at the front of the church (after brushing a little bit too close to one of the candles and almost catching on fire) our pastor preached a sermon about betrayal, which, of course, had more than a little to do with Judas. At one point in the sermon, he was talking about various forms of betrayal, and he said something about parents rejecting you because they didn’t approve of your choice of spouse. One thing I like about going to a small church is that he includes examples from the congregation, that I know that he knows our story. But I was honestly surprised at what he said . . . betrayal? I have always thought of what happened with Mike’s parents as flat-out rejection. I have taken it very personally, this rejection of me. It took a while to get my mind around the idea that it was a betrayal of how parents are supposed to act. (Also, it was probably a good reminder that this, like most things, isn’t really about me.)

On Easter Sunday, after a wonderful church service, we had a big lunch with some friends from church. As our friend was blessing the meal, he thanked God for our families and the families we create around ourselves. While family is very important to me and Mike, we don’t experience certain aspects of that in the same ways that many people do, because Mike’s parents aren’t around. Our friend’s grace was a good reminder of the restoration we see in our own lives: like Naomi, we have felt so empty, but the Lord has filled us up again.

I don’t know anything about Tullycraft, but one evening I was listening to the radio station that Mike DJed for over the summer, and I heard this beautiful haunting song. I made Mike call the station and find out what the song had been, and it turns out that it was “The Lonely Life of the UFO Researcher” by Tullycraft. Now, sure, that’s a silly title, and in some ways it’s a silly song. I kept finding reviews that said that very thing. But, in my humble opinion, those people are missing the point. This is a song about faith and doubt, about believing in what is not seen, about questions and needing to know the truth. All of those things are set in the context of UFOs, but don’t be deceived. I experience these same emotions all the time, belief and unbelief forming an uneasy truce in my heart. Feeling misunderstood by people who don’t share my same faith. Desperately wanting a sign that I’m not wasting my time.

Antenna towers, and distant hopes
I’ve measured happiness with telescopes
Well, I’ve been face to face with what my future brings
The reels they turn recording blips and pings
Through the white noise and distortion
There’s a message I can feel
Just give me one sign that you’re real

Please give me one sign that you’re real

This year, our Lenten theme has to do with restoration, and I thought on Sunday about what Mike and I were like five years ago, how much we had managed to hurt each other and how, little by little, we have grown up and grown from those mistakes. If I am needing some sort of sign from above to confirm God’s existence, I only need to look at my husband, who faced his fears about college and grades and intelligence and returned to school, coming out of his shell and developing an incredible confidence in himself and his abilities. And not being satisfied with bettering himself, he has wholeheartedly embraced a profession that allows him to help other people.

There are so many ways that Mike encourages my faith, but none more than the way that he has quietly allowed God to work in his heart and give him the courage to change. This is what I picture when we talk about God restoring the years that the locusts have eaten: I think about how I will feel on May 16th.

At church on Wednesday, they said that the Ash Wednesday service is next week. Ash Wednesday? It’s almost Lent already? How did this happen?

I was doing yoga that night, and at the end there is a position called Savasana, which I believe is called the “corpse pose.” I have been told that we do this pose both to rest our bodies and slow down after yoga, but also that it has a deeper meaning, something having to do with embracing death. So usually when I am in that pose, at the end of yoga, I pray a little bit and I rest a little bit and I think a little bit about death. Mostly when I think about death, I think about my dad. Sometimes everything that happened seems so long ago, like something that happened in another life or to someone else. And sometimes the smallest thing will bring tears to my eyes. It’s strange to think about all the things we have done without him, strange to see how our family looks now. These days, I just feel baffled that he isn’t here.

One of the classes I am taking is a young adult literature class, and for that class I wrote an evaluation of A Ring of Endless Light by Madeleine L’Engle (arguably my favorite of her books, and the one I return to most often). When I was younger, a lot of the lessons that it teaches about embracing death as a part of life went over my head, but when my dad was sick, I thought of that book more than any other. I have been thinking about Vicky Austin this week, about affirmations of life in the face of death. I have been feeling sad and lonely the past few weeks, so it’s been a good reminder to me to reach out to the people around me rather than retreating into my own shell. And yesterday was an encouragement, as I got to know some of the teachers at school a little better, as we watched a documentary and drank wine with some friends (aren’t we pretentious? Don’t you envy our yuppie existence? There was not just wine but also cheese).

I don’t really know what it means to embrace death, but I am glad that we practice it every year. I am glad for a chance to try again to learn with those around me as we enter into Lent. And that is what I will be doing next Wednesday, when my head is marked with ashes and I am told, “Memento mori.“

And thus ends the longest vacation that Mike and I have had together since our honeymoon. Of course, we didn’t go anywhere, or do much of anything, which was one reason it was so glorious. We had a lovely Christmas, and after that, we spent the rest of the break sleeping in, enjoying the sales, watching movies we’d been given (Once, Waitress) or that we wanted to see (Juno, which was very good) . . . just relaxing. About halfway through our time off, Mike said, “We’re going to have to come up with ideas for things to do in the summer.” Too true. All we did was sit around. We aren’t used to having so much time for activity. What do people do? Also, how is anyone going to convince us to have kids after all this wonderful sleeping in? I hear all you parents complaining about the lack of sleeping in all the time. Go ahead, try to convince me. I will be having some quality time with my flannel sheets.

One very nice thing is that, while we didn’t agree on everything, we didn’t bicker. It used to be that when we spent a lot of time together, we’d end up sniping at each other a little bit, but even the stress of the holidays didn’t turn us on each other. It’s a nice thing to be able to take note of, especially since our schedules are going to basically be the same.

Some people believe in ending the old year the way you’d like the new year to go – fresh haircut, full tank of gas, full pantry. We did that to some extent, cleaning things on New Year’s Eve, making a lot of soup to freeze, making a grocery store run. Our Christmas decorations always come down on the 1st, and Mike, who gets projects in his head and is unstoppable, reorganized our upstairs, cleaned out his side of the closet, and went to Goodwill with all our unwanted stuff that had been piling up. I, um, ironed. And read a book. I did help with the Christmas stuff! I feel ready for the year ahead, which promises some exciting things, namely Mike’s graduation (he can tell you how many days, exactly, if you are wondering). I didn’t feel much like reflecting on the past year, mostly because it took some unexpected turns at the end that I am still adjusting to, but I am thankful for a chance to make a fresh start.

When we went to see Juno, four girls came in during the previews and sat on the row right behind us. They proceeded to talk and talk and talk. One of them said, “Is this the commercials?” and her friend responded, “Yeah, it’s the trailers.” This concerned me, because I realized that it meant that they had no problem talking through the entire movie, and I didn’t have any of these. And, indeed, they did proceed to chat through the first part, until I turned around and said, “I didn’t pay good money to listen to you talk through the entire movie.” They were moderately more quiet after that. On the way home, Mike and I talked about that situation. I asked him if he had been planning on doing something. His plan? Move to the row behind them and kick their seats. You see the difference between us. He asked me why I didn’t just say, “Please stop talking,” and, you know, I have no idea why I didn’t say that. This is my problem – I get so worked up that I just blow my top and say rude things. If this is how I end the year (and it wasn’t just this one time), I can’t help but think that it’s a sign that this is something that needs some attention in my life.

I don’t make resolutions, especially public ones, but it is nice to face a new year (fresh with no mistakes in it) and imagine the ways that you can learn and change and grow. I hope that, at the end of this year, I’m a little further along, a little bit more patient and kind. And I hope I remember not to holler down the stairs when I want to talk to Mike. Seriously, that is such a bad habit.

On Wednesday morning, Mike and I got up and went for a walk. For months and months, I have been asking him to walk with me to an old graveyard that is close to our house, and he finally agreed to go with me. We put on sweatshirts and took our coffee and headed over. It was older than I had thought it would be, with graves back to the 1850s, and we were both moved to see that some of the families had lost a lot of children in a short span of time. This might sound strange, but the graveyard was such a pleasant place to spend an hour that morning. Not so much the newer, fancier part, but the older part, with the headstones that were obviously hand-carved, with the people’s ages represented in years, months, and days . . . it was sweet. And real. It might not be the normal way to spend time on Thanksgiving weekend, but this was a weekend where a lot of things I have been thinking about death and sharing life and really living all kind of came together, so it ended up being one of the best things we could have done, to go to a place where life and death are honored in such a tangible way.

Before Thanksgiving, Mike and I watched Pieces of April, as we do every year. (I am honestly not sure whether we watched it last year. I can’t imagine that I was like, “Sure, we should totally watch a movie about the black sheep of the family hosting Thanksgiving. While her mother is dying.” But maybe we did, since it is our tradition.) It was different to watch it this year. I had a completely different perspective on what April was probably feeling, and the ending struck me in a completely different way. Before this year, I had always felt like they probably just ran out of money, and that’s why the ending was so abrupt. But now I feel like the ending was in small moments and snapshots because that’s what they will remember about their mother’s last Thanksgiving. They won’t remember it like a film. It will be in bits and pieces. Knowing what my own holiday recollections are like, it seemed much more realistic and appropriate than everyone having the right words. It was everyone trying, and we (the audience) saw that, and that was enough.

What really struck me, though, was when, at some point, April was talking about Thanksgiving and said that it was important because it was a day when everyone realized they needed each other. At my grandma’s house on Thursday, I felt that, too. I guess a visual representation of that is the meal, how each person brings a few dishes . . . and then suddenly there’s an entire meal (and then some) on the counter. I felt it in the conversation, in the way the men in my family come together to take care of my grandma’s needs, and, yes, in the food. I don’t see my relatives all that often, and I don’t always know exactly what we have in common, but . . . they are willing to eat my pie and tell me they enjoyed it. That means something to me, you know? It means something that I have people I can bake for, and it means something that I can trust my family enough to try recipes out on them.

On Friday, after our Christmas decorating, I read Story of a Girl by Sara Zarr. I did, in fact, read the whole book. I couldn’t put it down. (And, to be honest, earlier that day I finished The Golden Compass, so I finished two books that day. I also finished two books on Saturday. It was quite a productive reading weekend.) I wanted to read it because of it being a finalist for the National Book Award, and because I have read the author’s blog and she seems wonderful. And the book, though I don’t think I will write it up, was also wonderful in ways I am not sure I can articulate. Though my life is very different from that of the main character, there was a scene in the book where she was sitting at a table with her friend, her best friend, and she was absolutely unable, because of her own junk, to be the kind of friend she knew she was supposed to be. She was not able to say the right things. She was not able to offer a hug. Instead, she sat there and ripped a hole in the plastic booth she was sitting in.

Oh, how I know that girl. I think I am not completely her anymore, but I still find, from time to time, that I don’t always say the things that are on my heart or offer to hug someone because I don’t know how to say them, because I am afraid. Afraid of being rejected, of being too emotional, of people thinking I’m weird, of it being the wrong response. But I don’t want to dwell on that, either, because I do see how far I have come, that I am much better at reaching out to people and risking my heart. Even a small thing, like making a pie, has, in the past, been fraught with peril. But I can remember specific things that have happened this year where I stood at a crossroads, and instead of playing it safe, I chose to offer the hug to someone I don’t normally hug. I chose to try the difficult recipe. I chose to say what was on my heart. I haven’t done it all of the time, but the memories of trying are like stones in my pocket, and I run my fingers over them from time to time to remind myself of what I am capable of.

One of the books I finished on Saturday was a book of poetry by Mark Jarman that I worked on for a few weeks. I have been trying to read more poetry, and I have been trying to really take it in when I do read it. One of the poems in that particular book was, oddly enough, about sharing your heart with people. It closed with the line, “You can’t take it with you. Why not leave it with me?” It was such a reminder for me of all the things I have been learning: to make the move and extend the hand, to make decisions that allow me to spend time with friends and family, to be wise about where I invest myself. That last one is pretty important, too, because I have spent a lot of time worrying about the opinions of people whose opinions really shouldn’t matter. I still do, to some degree, but it’s another area where (I hope) I have made some progress.

This is all kind of a mess, I know, but in my head there is a thread connecting it, and I hope you can see glimpses of it here and there. I have learned a lot in the past year and a half about friendship, about choosing the people who really matter, and about opening myself up because life can be so short. It has looked like different things – entering a chili contest that I didn’t win, entering a Scholastic contest that I did win (well, Mike did, anyway). Standing in the sanctuary and hugging my friend. Learning how to bake. Making the phone call that was hard for me. Choosing to enter a friend’s grief rather than focusing on my own. Taking another job. Joining a book club with people who impress and intimidate me. I want to honor my dad by really living life the way he did, and I want to honor God by making the most of the life that he gives us here on earth.

In the end, that’s what I am most thankful for this year: that I am here, that I have a chance to keep on trying to get it right with the people I love. Maybe one day I won’t need a specific Thursday in November to help me remember that.

Since this summer, I have been reading The Divine Hours. No, I don’t do it every day, and, no, I don’t do it at all the prescribed times. But it’s been helpful to have the readings and prayers set out for me. I like saying these things over and over, because the more I say them, the more I believe them. I believe that God cares about peaceful nights, that it means something to say The Gloria every day, that the Psalms don’t have to just be old poetry that I can memorize.

I think the best part of those prayers, for me, is compline, because of the part where, every day (that I remember to do the reading), I ask forgiveness for what I have done and what I have left undone. It’s those things I’ve left undone that are the most likely to keep me awake at night: the apology I didn’t offer, the hand I didn’t extend, the kind word not spoken. I like acknowledging that it’s not just what I do that hurts people (and myself), that what I choose not to do (or don’t bother to do) can be the wrong thing, too. I like it because it’s so different from the idea of sins as lists of things to stay away from. I can’t just check “love thy neighbor” off on a list . . . it’s a way of life. I don’t have to get it right all the time, but it’s better to acknowledge that fact, because if I think about it, I might just be able to choose differently tomorrow.

This quarter’s compline has included this familiar prayer:

Watch, O Lord, with those who wake, or watch, or weep tonight, and give your angels and saints charge over those who sleep. Tend your sick ones, O Lord Christ. Rest your weary ones. Bless your dying ones. Soothe your suffering ones. Shield your joyous ones, and all for your love’s sake. Amen.

I won’t swear to it, but I think my first introduction to this prayer was through Madeleine L’Engle, and I’m fairly sure that it was one of her books that pointed out my favorite part of the prayer: to shield the joyous. When I pray that part, I always feel as if I am praying for a bride on the night before her wedding, as she is glowing with the excitement and anticipation of getting to share her life with the man she loves. I would love to be able to protect this imaginary bride from the things that will come, the pain and heartbreak that are part of sharing our lives with those around us, so that she might be that joyful forever. I want the Lord to protect that feeling as much as I want him to heal the sick and bless the dying. The truth, though, is that my idea of healing the sick might not be what the Lord has in mind, and that for many dying people, death itself is a blessing. So it is with joy, too . . . untested, it cannot reach the same depths of joy that has struggled and won. I would not go back to being that bride, because the years between, though they have been challenging, have brought something more substantial. But I will pray for her just the same. I will go on praying for the sick, the weary, the suffering, the dying, and the joyous. I will pray because I believe that it makes a difference, that thinking of others helps me be more mindful of them, that I might not leave my own care for them undone tomorrow. And I will go on praying because it helps me believe in a God who cares for us, no matter which of those categories we find ourselves in.

If you’ve been around here at all to hear me talk about my high school days, you know that the thing that made them bearable was the Quiz Bowl team. Those hours spent in my school library shaped me in so many ways, and I look back on them with pure pleasure. There’s not much else from high school that was pleasurable, so this is kind of a big deal.

I still have the shirt we made my senior year, the one that says, “There was never an age in which useless knowledge was more important than our own.” I wear it sometimes for working out, though I am always afraid to wear it too much because I want it to last, as if that piece of cotton is some kind of talisman and I can’t risk ruining it. More than that, too, it reminds me of where I’ve come from. These days I am pretty comfortable in my own skin, but back then I needed a t-shirt to explain to the world who I was. A nerd. (As if they couldn’t tell.) I wore it with my yellow shoes (of course), and I wore it in college until I decided it was too childish and put high school behind me. (It took more than relegating a t-shirt to a Rubbermaid container to actually put high school behind me, but it was a valiant effort on my part.)

(Honestly, t-shirts are still one of my love languages. I have stopped giving Mike silly t-shirts because his t-shirt drawer overfloweth, but I am still happy to receive clever t-shirts for myself.)

It has taken me a long time to feel that I have friends, that I am capable of sustaining friendships, that I don’t have to apologize for my values and interests and opinions. Part of what my high school media specialist did was start me on that path . . . by being loudly and proudly nerdy herself. I wouldn’t go back to middle or high school myself for anything, but I am excited to go and work with them now that I have something to give.

I start the new job tomorrow, and if you were wondering why, I have a t-shirt I’d like to show you. It’s not the entire reason that we made the decision, not by any means. But it’s the reason I think I can do it.

‘Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free,
’Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
’Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

I have to admit that it made me a little bit uncomfortable on Sunday to be talking about simplicity at church. It was a great message, that simplicity is about what drives our decisions, our hearts. It’s okay to appreciate the things we have here, to spend our money on things we enjoy. But those shouldn’t be the things that guide us. This is something Mike and I have been talking about a lot, making sure that our decisions are in line with what we value. Making sure we actually value what we claim to value. Trying to choose family over finances. So it wasn’t that the sermon made me uncomfortable in that sense. It was, in fact, very encouraging. Instead, it was hard to come home and see the pictures of my sponsored child, Stephen, that came in the mail on Saturday, and to think that we need to talk about simplicity at all. Stephen is from Kenya, where over half of the population is poor, and where 700 people a day die from HIV/AIDS.

I don’t want to romanticize Stephen’s situation, though. I know a lot of people love Andrew Peterson’s song about his own sponsored child, “Land of the Free,” but it has always made me uncomfortable, to be honest. In it, he claims he’s “just a little jealous of the nothing that she has,” which . . . goes too far for me. I think that it’s better for me to try to put the blessing/curse of The Land of Plenty in the correct context in my own life without claiming to be jealous of people who have less than I do, as if it’s inspiring to wish to live like they do. Rather than assuming that these people see the sun and think of heaven, or that they never complain about the rain, I should simply remember that all of life has its advantages and its drawbacks. Maybe it seems that people who struggle with much more basic needs than I do can be more focused on God, but poverty isn’t beautiful or romantic, and it’s insensitive of me to act as if it is. The song never rings true to me, because the people he is singing about are just that: people. They aren’t object lessons. It’s easy for me to sit on my cushy couch in my air-conditioned home and say, “Oh, if I was unfettered by wealth, I’d be able to appreciate God more.” My guess is that it has more to do with personality than circumstances, because, for many people, worrying about where dinner is going to come from may not leave energy to spare on the things of heaven.

On Sunday, besides singing “Simple Gifts,” we sang “’Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus,” a simple song about faith that I cannot sing without hearing my grandmother’s voice. “Jesus, Jesus, how I trust him, how I’ve proved him o’er and o’er. Jesus, Jesus, precious Jesus, oh, for grace to trust him more.” There’s nothing simple about faith and trust in light of what we see here on earth, and yet, in the end, sometimes we make it more complicated than we have to. The song “Simple Gifts” perhaps gets it right –there is great freedom in joy in choosing humility and simplicity. That seems rather different than envying those caught in the trap of poverty.

I guess I will close with one more song, my favorite of all of the wonderful lyrics by Rich Mullins: “Nobody tells you, when you get born here, how much you’ll come to love it and how you’ll never belong here.” I think that this is probably what Andrew Peterson was trying to say, that where we live has so many benefits that we have to remind ourselves that it’s not our true home. I listened to this song last night on the way home, with the windows rolled down and the stars in the sky.

I think we can get caught up in the idea that simplicity means following a certain set of rules: moving to certain neighborhoods, going without certain things. That road, as far as I can tell, leads to dissatisfaction and discontentment. I think, instead, that, like much of Christianity, the joy comes when we choose to take on the idea of what our culture tells us is true about wealth and status, opting instead for the freedom to live generously out of the wealth God has given us, whether that’s emotional or material. I shouldn’t envy anyone, not those who have more than I do or those who have much, much less. I should worry, instead, about placing God before the possessions in my life, caring more for his ways and his people and his priorities. And what a gift it is to be able to choose to do that.

When true simplicity is gained,
To bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed.
To turn, turn will be our delight,
‘Til by turning, turning we come round right

When Melissa and I were first becoming friends, one of the things that we ran into was that I have this need for physical space. I am not a very touchy person. I couldn’t tell you why that is, but I have never been one of those girls who plays with other girls’ hair or snuggled up to friends on the couch. Melissa and I have now worked through this issue. This means I let her touch me occasionally. Look, here is an example of how far I have come:

I am practically couch-snuggling with Kelly in that picture. I’m a whole new woman.

I am like this with my emotions, too. I think I can be pretty open when I share how I am feeling, but you have to let me be the one who makes that decision. When I feel like my emotional boundaries are being assaulted, I kind of freak out. Sometimes I accuse Mike of being hard to pin down, but then I will be in a conversation with someone and realize that I am doing exactly the same thing that he does to me . . . wriggling and squirreling my way out of having to give details.

A lot of it is that I am so afraid of being laughed at. I think I’m better at that than I used to be, much more confident, but . . . I fear I will never get over it completely. I cannot handle being made to look stupid, or being thought the butt of a joke. If there’s something I think you are going to use against me or, worse, laugh at me about, I will do everything I can to keep from telling you about it. And if you turn me into the butt of a joke, especially if you do it in a room full of people, I am not going to forget it.

So one of my buttons definitely has to do with that. I see people (like my husband) navigate similar situations without it being stressful for them, and I can’t understand it. How does he just let that sort of thing roll off his back? Why doesn’t he mind all the questions? Of course, I could also ask: Why does traffic make him so uptight?

When I think about other people and situations that have pushed my buttons, a lot of it has had to do with disrespect. Disrespect of my opinion (or, you know, anyone’s but your own), my intelligence (hey, I’m a reasonably smart cookie), my emotions (perhaps you shouldn’t publicly insult me merely weeks after my dad died), my effort, my boundaries. These aren’t bad things to oppose, but when they happen, my fears of looking stupid and being laughed at, combined with the disrespect, make it hard for me to function. I shut down. I get abrupt or even surly. I can’t make eye contact. I practically will my body to curl into itself. I do believe this is the worst version of myself. Unfortunately, there are some people who only know this version, because I feel belittled to the point that I completely lose the sense of who I am around them.

Lately, much to Oprah’s chagrin, I have not been living what I consider to be my best life now. My buttons have been pushed, and in some situations, I am functioning at a level that is considerably lower than normal.

The advice I have been getting is to pray about this, to pray about my responses and trust that God will move. And I do believe that he can help me make some changes, but this is a McDonald’s culture, and I want change to happen now, even if it’s never really happened that way in the past, and how in the world is it reasonable for me to expect character flaws to correct themselves in a week’s time?

So I am relegated to patience, to taking my temper on one phone call, one risky emotional situation at a time. At least I know that when I lose hope, I can sit on Melissa’s couch and let her put her arm around me. To be able to take comfort in that is a reminder that, from time to time, I do actually make a little progress.

This time of year, I find the seduction of cool nights (finally, cool nights) impossible to resist, and you are likely to find me and my iPod outside. I love running on nights like that, though my soundtrack tends to be a little too melancholy to inspire running at a very admirable pace.

Mike listens to sad music in the fall, too. Well, he listens to sad music all year. For someone so upbeat, he really likes wallowing in sorrow, especially in the fall. And now that it’s September, he’s put in his official autumn soundtrack: August and Everything After. It’s been a while since I’ve heard it, and I found myself humming “Anna Begins” as I transferred the laundry to the dryer last night. I am so easily swayed. My music, though, definitely switches in late summer. I started a playlist in early August that was called “Kari is tired,” and I’ve been listening to it for the past six weeks or so. The “Summer 2007” playlist (usually my playlists have pretty boring names) was a whole lot more upbeat. A lot of “Kari is tired” songs are going on a CD I am making for a CD circle, and I should probably warn them that the mix I have so far is pretty much a downer. I told Mike I needed a few more upbeat songs, and he said, “No, put some more sad songs on there, really push them over the edge.” And you thought he was the optimistic one.

I appreciate that the rhythm of the church calendar gives us space to grieve, instead of asking us to be “up” or “peppy” all the time. This year, especially, I have appreciated that the rhythm of the seasons does the same thing. In spring, I celebrated new life and rebirth and the miracle of the resurrection. Now, autumn means that the world is beginning to die, that we are heading into winter. It’s another Lent, in a way: memento mori. After this past year, I think that autumn will always be a time to grieve, and I like that the earlier sunsets and cooler evenings help me learn to make room for that. And make room for me to learn it.

The truth is that I don’t know how to make room for my own grief, let alone other people’s. I don’t know how to be patient with myself or others when it comes to grieving. I have never been good at dealing with strong genuine emotion. I take refuge in sad music and big plans. I want some kind of process, some steps to follow. I want to make things manageable. For now, the slow decline into winter is going to have to be enough.

Over the weekend, Mike helped me navigate a stressful situation that involved theft, blood, and drama. I had warned him that I would need his assistance, but that turned out to be quite the understatement. He was a calming presence throughout the afternoon, handling some things so I could do others, giving me confidence in my decisions, and emphasizing the things that were going well.

It took longer than I thought for us to get used to each other again when he came back from Costa Rica. We’re not used to living so much life without each other (I lived life! It’s just that it mostly involved doing laundry and planning meals), so it was hard to get on the same page again. And that doesn’t even take into account the changes that a trip like that can bring into someone’s life – seeing sea turtle hatchlings, zip lining in the rainforest, white water rafting. Boy does my laundry seem dull in comparison. The chocolate cake I made, however, was not boring at all.

I am not one to believe that (or live like) I need Mike to be my everything. I have great friends and a great family, but when it comes down to it, Mike is my best friend because I spend the most time with him. I love experiencing life with him, and he’s undoubtedly the person with whom I experience the majority of things. I think that it was hard for us to get used to each other again because I hadn’t been able to tell him the little stories of the day – the silly website I visited, the recipe I want to try, the strange encounter at the grocery store. We worked very hard to reconnect over the weekend, spending time with our rabbits, seeing a wonderful movie, and then, with the theft, blood, and drama, sliding back into a bit of normalcy with our familiar teamwork.

This whole thing was quite a learning experience for me. It had been a while since we were apart from each other for quite so long, especially without being able to talk at all, and our relationship is so different these days than it was back then. The last time he went away for over a week, I hadn’t gone from thinking of myself to thinking of us, even though we were married. The past few years, we’ve gone from just being “fun” to encouraging and challenging each other through some difficult times. It’s gotten easier to see us as a team, which made it harder when my partner wasn’t here.

Though I think we are still pretty fun. I was inordinately pleased to be able to call him last night about a bumper sticker, and happy to have him call this morning and report his latest musings on flavored coffee. I laughed during our, “What are we going to have for dinner?” discussion that turned into silliness. More than anything, I love our conversations that are grounded in the holy ordinary.

“In the end, I think the relationships that survive in this world are the ones where two people can finish each other’s sentences. Forget drama and torrid sex and the clash of opposites. Give me banter any day of the week.” -Hey Nostradamus! by Douglas Coupland

Was this what being a parent was going to be like? A life of anxiety, of fretting about little things? Have a child and give a hostage to fortune; yes, but have any human link, any friendship, and a hostage was given . . . A few minutes earlier she had thought of the giving of hostages. Well, she said to herself, I’ve just given another one.

I just don’t want to go on and on anymore about Alexander McCall Smith’s books. I mean, I always read them, I always love them, what else do you want to know? Today I read the newest in the Isabel Dalhousie series, The Careful Use of Compliments. I really enjoyed it. I know you are shocked.

In this book, Isabel, who is in her 40s, has recently had her first child, and, in the quote above, she considers the idea that loving people is a little bit like being held hostage by fate – things are going to matter to you more because of that. You are going to care more and be more affected by things when you love other people.

While I see that perspective, especially from Isabel, who has lived alone for quite a long time, I think I feel quite the opposite. For me, loving people and letting them into my life has been more like the giving up of hostages. Here I let go of my need to be “together” all the time. There goes my need to be right, out of respect and love for my friend. Watch as I say farewell to the walls that keep me from believing people actually care about me.

I wonder if we’ll see Isabel, in later books, change her mind about what it means to open up to people. She has grown quite a lot in that area over four books, choosing to risk her emotions when she could play it safe. It’s been interesting to see her navigate her relationships as she makes those choices.

Or maybe I am wrong about all of this, since I’m not a parent. Maybe parenting really is like being held hostage.

The first sunrise I remember seeing was when we lived in Gibsonville, which means I was probably 4 or 5. I remember my mom drinking her coffee, but I don’t remember if anyone else was there or why I was up. The sun was red that morning as it slipped over the horizon. In middle school, when I was at the beach with a friend, she always wanted to get up and watch the sun rise. In college, even though I consider myself a morning person, there were times I’d stay awake until almost sunrise. I never really see the appeal of watching the sun come up, to be honest. As much as I like mornings, seeing the sun just means that you’re awake really early. I prefer evening – watching the stars come out.

I don’t know the last time I was out driving by myself before sunrise. We left to take Mike to the airport at 4:30 this morning, and as I drove home, drinking my coffee (my only task this morning was to make sure there was coffee) and listening to my Gilmore Girls playlist, I watched as the eastern sky started growing brighter, ever so slightly. While I am thrilled for Mike that he gets to go to Costa Rica and play with sea turtles, I have not been thrilled about this trip in general, mostly because I won’t be able to be in touch with him. Our relationship was formed in an age of email and cell phones, so the idea of not being able to talk to him until he comes back next Sunday night is a little overwhelming. I worry both about something happening to him and something happening here while I can’t get in touch with him. I worry about the fragility of life. As I confessed to him last night, even when he’s here I worry almost every time I answer the phone that something has happened to him or to someone I love. This trip also means that the summer is pretty much over, and that he’ll be starting his final year of school. We have a lot of changes ahead.

But, as Grant Lee Phillips sang this morning, “Ain’t nothing that stays the same / I won’t ask it of you.” Last night I did try to convince Mike to stay, but we both knew he couldn’t. And I wouldn’t really ask him to. This trip, this time without contact is something new for us. We have a lot of new things ahead in the coming months. I want to enjoy this time to myself, take advantage of it. This morning, that meant not going back to bed, but staying up and reading the paper (which was here when I got back), making plans for the day.

I tend to want things to stay the same. It’s good that I’m married to someone who doesn’t feel that same way, who gets excited about our new adventures. This week he’s off on his great Sea Turtle Adventure, but I hope to have some adventures of my own.

(And also to get some more sleep. Getting up at 4:00 is not my favorite.)

It’s hard to live a life filled with wonder. I get glimpses of it when we play with kids, when summer nights stretch out hot and humid in front of us, at Christmas, when I eat something that tastes amazing, when something I have been looking forward to finally happens. But most of my life isn’t like that. I get caught up in my regular routine: getting to work, cracking open a Diet Coke, processing books, going home, making dinner, cleaning the house. It’s hard to find a day of rest in the midst of all that has to be done at work and at home, and it can be hard to remember to be excited about life in the middle of summer when you’d rather be relaxing by the pool.

When I think about people in my life who have taught me about wonder, I think about my dad. It’s a well-documented fact that he was the one who was most excited on Christmas morning, but he lived like that, too, I think. He would take us out of school to go shopping for Mom’s birthday, or to the State Fair, or just to go with him to school (when he was in school after some health problems). I think he was trying to teach us about taking time for what’s important. He certainly always tried to emphasize that there were things he wanted for us much more than good grades, no matter how proud he was of our good grades (and he was very proud of them).

When it came to faith, what I got from my dad was a sense of gratitude that he was allowed to participate at all. I am sure that shaped the way that I think about faith – I am a person who likes to have answers, but when it comes to my faith, I’d rather not try to spell out each theological point. I am much more comfortable with embracing the mystery, being thankful that we can be a part of something so much bigger than ourselves.

When my dad was sick, one of the things he said was that some people see the glass as half full, some see it as half empty, but, as for him, his cup runneth over. I would like, someday, to embrace life like he did, rather than just living.

Waterdeep is a band I always associate with my dad. I have no idea if he ever heard their music at all, but I think he would have liked them, their jangly sound and their take on life. I think he and Don Chaffer could have been friends, actually, and I think he would have thought their music was pretty great. Their new song, “Good Good End,” makes me think of my dad: “I’m amazed by life, and it’s amazed by me / We’re a strange old pair, me and eternity,” is not something he would have said, but I think he would have agreed with the sentiment. What a blessing that we’re here. What a mystery that life doesn’t stop here. What a miracle that, in the end, Jesus will be waiting for us. I miss my dad, but I am thankful he has found his good good end.

You can leave right now
You can ring a bell
You can tell ‘em you think I ain’t doin’ too well
But when I stood like you
I eventually fell
So you can leave right now
Go on and ring your bell

I’m amazed by life
And it’s amazed by me
We’re a strange old pair, me and eternity
It don’t make good sense
It ain’t easy to see
But I’m amazed by life
And it’s amazed by me

It’s a long hard road
With a good, good end
And if I keep on walking on past the crooked bend
I will meet my Maker
I will meet my Friend
It’s a long hard road
With a good, good end

After months and months of thinking about it, the invitation to my tenth high school reunion came on Friday. Mike taunted me by telling me that interesting things came in the mail that day, and, to his credit, I did have interesting things. But one fewer than he had declared, because the last interesting thing was simply an invitation to my high school reunion. Ten years, which is hard to believe. I looked at it and, after months of vacillating, quickly decided that I didn’t want to pay to spend money with people I wasn’t friends with the first time around. I spent a long time being bitter about that, but now I see that it’s okay that we weren’t friends. We shouldn’t have to pretend friendship just because we lived in the same town, went to the same high school. It reminds me of when I figured out that I didn’t have to be friends with someone just because he or she is a Christian. That doesn’t actually mean we have things in common, things on which to build a relationship. I didn’t get to know the things inside their hearts that make them who they are any more than they found out mine. Not to mention that I’m not the same person I was back then. I hope they aren’t, either.

The invitation was full of the sentiment and nostalgia you’d expect, and I’m sure the committee worked hard on it. But I think you have to be a different sort of person to look forward to your high school reunion. You have to be the sort of person who looks back at high school with some affection, who was positively affected by what went on there. And while I don’t claim to have hated every day of high school, I feel instinctively that the people who would attend our reunion probably aren’t the people I hung out with in the library during break. I worry about the things I would say to the people there, the grasping, needy parts of me that would come out in that situation.

There’s a part of me that would like to go and be successful and have a smart, good-looking husband, but those aren’t parts of myself that I like to encourage. If I’m going to go to a reunion in order to prove something, I’m going for the wrong reasons. Why should I feel the need to prove anything at all?

I have thought about this for a lot of years. The end of high school was much better than the rest of it, but the whole experience left a bad taste in my mouth. I wondered if I needed to go, to wear a fantastic dress, to have some kind of redemption. I think, though, in the end, not needing to go is the redemption I wanted after all.

A few years ago, I read Ordinary Losses: Naming the Graces that Shape Us by Elisa Stanford. The title of the book, the concept, really grabbed me (as well as the fact that the forward was by Lauren Winner). This is a book about the small losses in our lives, the kind we all experience – a friend moving away, a change in routine – and what those mean to us.

Lately I have been thinking about those ordinary kinds of losses myself – the end of a favorite TV show, a friend moving away, what our routine will look like when Mike is done with school . . . even the end of Harry Potter. Those aren’t good things or bad things, really. They’re just life marching on.

It’s the little things that fell me sometimes. I can get my mind around the questions, “What will I do on Tuesday nights now that Gilmore Girls and Veronica Mars are gone?” and, “When will I see my friend again?” I can’t even begin to form questions about the big losses. And so I cry over the end of my show, I cry about my friend, but I still don’t know what to do to help myself grieve those big things.

After a farewell dinner for my friend last night, I sent out an email that probably sounded like I’d had too much wine. I hadn’t had anything to drink – if I was drunk on anything, it was the comfort and companionship that these friends have offered me over the past few years. In my email, I tried to say that when I met them, I didn’t have much of an idea of how to be myself. I didn’t feel very likeable, or that I knew how to be a good friend. These women (as well as many of my other friends) have accepted me as I am, have supported me over the past year, and I have finally started to be more comfortable in my own skin. I have had some conversations about that lately, about how confidence and forgiveness have worked their way into my heart and how it’s a visible change. So many friends have helped me take those steps, and it’s such a precious gift.

So, naming that loss, that friend moving away, is to affirm why it’s important – we’ll all still be here, of course, and we’ll be able to go on without her, but it’s only right to acknowledge what her friendship has meant to me. Hence the drunk-on-friendship (and possibly chocolate and cheese) email. I think, I hope, that learning how to say, “I am really going to miss you,” is practice for the bigger kinds of grieving. So I throw a party for the end of a television show, I make plans for Harry Potter, I talk and dream about what our lives will look like after Mike graduates, because I believe that those things teach me how to live in the abundant life that we have been blessed with here on earth, how to grieve things both big and small.

On Good Friday, I sat in the pew and I told God that I knew that I was being too controlling, but, please, if we could just get through Easter Sunday, I promised to deal with it then. And it’s true. I have been trying to control things. Everything has seemed so out of control that I have been managing everything, trying to make things okay for my family, stuffing my emotions, setting a high standard for myself and forcing myself to live up to it. On Good Friday, as Mike and I were driving to the zoo after the service, I said, “I know this isn’t a way to live, but I don’t know how to stop doing it.” His advice? “You should stop doing it.”

It’s not really working, either – there are all kinds of things that are outside my control, and when something happens, I occasionally melt down. All my efforts aren’t getting me anywhere at all. I haven’t been living in a constant state of freak-out, though, because I keep putting things away, pushing them to a far corner deep within my mind – “I am not going to deal with that right now.” I haven’t been blogging about anything but books, because when you don’t feel (or deal with) anything, you don’t have much to say about your life. You can only talk about what you are doing. And what I’ve been doing is what I usually do – read. I’ve been plowing through books with more resolve than usual, because it keeps me occupied. I’m sorry it’s been so boring. I am still learning how to grieve appropriately.

On that topic, in Sunday School last week, we talked about whether it was appropriate to have the Lenten services be a little bit more “down” than services at other times. I said yes, because the Bible isn’t a book that’s always happy, our lives aren’t always happy, and I think the rhythm of the Christian year should represent all the different aspects of our lives. I was taught and still believe that abundant life doesn’t just mean a happy life. It’s about the full spectrum of emotions. Christians aren’t that great with grief, but we’re never going to get better at it if we insist that our worship services all be upbeat.

So, now that I made it through the darkness of the Tenebrae service, the sorrow of the Good Friday service, and the joy of Sunday’s Easter service, where does that leave me?

On Sunday, I sat on stage (I was liturgist, reading the call to worship, the scripture, and the prayers) and watched as we took the black drapery (that is so not the word I am looking for) off of the cross and brought the brass candlesticks and lit candles back into the sanctuary. Rejoice! For he is risen! And, oh, I am so thankful that we have hope that there is life beyond this. It helps to know that one day I can see my dad again. I am sure that there was quite an Easter celebration in heaven. But I stuffed those feelings and made it through the service, doing my job, not wanting to think about what the hope of eternal life means to me this year. We had lunch with friends, we visited my family, and when we got home I was so tired that my whole body hurt.

I wasn’t going to post poetry again so soon, but when I was looking for an appropriate Easter-ish poem, I found this Madeleine L’Engle poem, too.

“Go Away. You Can’t Come In. I’m Shutting the Door.”

Go away. You can’t come in. I’m shutting the door.
I’m afraid of you. I’m not sure who you are anymore.
I’m closing the door. I’m staying safe and alone.
Batter against it all you like. This house is built on stone.
You can’t come in. I’ve shuttered the windows tight.
You never say who you are. If it’s You, then it’s all right,
But you might be the other, the beautiful prince of this world
Who makes my heart leap with his cohorts and banners unfurled.
I could be unfaithful with him without any trouble
If I opened the door. He could easily pass for your double.
I’ve buried my talents. If put them to use
I could hurt or be hurt, be abused or abuse.
I wish you’d stop blowing. My whole house is shaken.
I’ll hide under the covers. Be gone when I waken.

What’s that light at the windows, that blast at the door?
The shutters are burning, there’s fire on the floor.
Go away. I don’t know you. My clothes are aflame,
My tongue is on fire, you are crying my name;
I hear your wild voice through the holocaust’s din.
My house is burned up.
What?
Oh, welcome! Come in!

I haven’t been burned up. God hasn’t been forcing me to let him in, knocking down any doors. But, in a way, I do feel burned up. Like I don’t know what to do next. And I don’t. I guess this year’s Lent, if it was about anything, was about bringing me to the end of myself. I’m going to try to remember how to be a human again, to feel things and to let myself be sad or happy or confused, if that’s what I am. I don’t want to do this, because I don’t want to be a mess. But I think it’s better to be a mess than to keep on doing something that isn’t working.

For a long time, my friendships were relationships in which the other person pursued me first. If they liked me enough to pursue me, we could be friends. This wasn’t because I saw myself as some great prize, but because I am basically, in many ways, a shy person, and also because I struggled/still struggle with a lot of insecurities which make it hard for me to put myself out there and face (soul-crushing) rejection. For many years, I have seen myself as much lower on the social ladder than most other people, and I wouldn’t want to presume to be on their level, so I have to let them be the ones to make the first move. It’s something I’ve been working on, but I’m never going to be as welcoming and gregarious as many people are, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to pursue other people without worrying at all about rejection.

This is, I think, the reason that one relationship never took off. I have been told that I share a lot of interests with this woman, and that we would get along. When we have been places together, I tried to make a bit of conversation, but when she didn’t seem engaged, I let it go, afraid of either being a bother or of putting myself out there and being rebuffed. So, what I am wondering is whether she is also the type that likes to be pursued and I quit too soon, or whether she simply wasn’t interested. And if she wasn’t interested, why do I care so much? Why does it hurt me?

In thinking about this, I articulated to Mike that I think I have wasted a lot of time worrying about being included by people who don’t really care about me. I have, in the past, thought a lot about “inner circles” and how I might find myself in one. I probably hurt people by being so focused on the people who were “above” me instead of cultivating the relationships that were already around me. I know I hurt myself, selling myself short by desiring relationships with people who weren’t interested in me just so I could be cooler by association.

It’s better these days, partly because I am more comfortable with who I am and partly because social circles change. I guess that’s something I’d like to say to my former self: “Yes, you will come to a place where you are able to let people like you for who you are instead of feeling the need to perform for them.” But it’s something I need to say to my current self, too, since thinking about some of that rejection can still bring me to tears.

This is a tangentially related thought, but, in thinking of old relationships, it’s come up as well. I have wondered lately about forgiveness in terms of letting people change. If someone behaved inappropriately, made me extremely uncomfortable, and hurt a lot of people around me, what is my obligation now, years later, when that person appears to have changed? I say I believe in a God who brings about change, I believe that, through God’s grace, I have changed, but I don’t know what it looks like to believe that for someone else. Can I believe that this man, a commitment-phobe, has finally settled down? Can this womanizer really change his spots and have healthy relationships with women? Has this woman actually learned that other people have valid perspectives?

I guess all of this is tied up together in my mind because being an open and welcoming person in general probably means being open and welcome in other ways, too – second and third and fourth chances, things that are hard for me. This Lenten season, I have, quite unintentionally, been reading and thinking and praying a lot about community and relationships. I hope that reflecting on the ways that I have changed and grown will help me allow others that same space to have learned from their mistakes.

She emptied her mind of all thoughts and pictures; she held it empty till the sudden change in it gave her the consciousness of the spreading out of the stronger will within; then she allowed that now unimportant daily mind to bear the image and memory of Nancy into its presence. She did not, in the ordinary sense, “pray for” Nancy; she did not presume to suggest to Omniscience that it would be a thoroughly good thing if It did. She merely held her own thought of Nancy stable in the midst of Omniscience. -Charles Williams, The Greater Trumps

When the prayer requests roll around in their predictability, he silently questions their usefulness. Will this make any difference? Will the cancer disappear now that we’ve mentioned it? -Vinita Hampton Wright, Dwelling Places

“… I simply take him into my heart, and then put him into God’s hand.” -Madeleine L’Engle, A Ring of Endless Light

We got a lot of cards and phone calls and emails after my dad passed away, and so many people expressed that we were in their thoughts and prayers. I can be kind of skeptical about whether my own prayers for other people do much good, but I did feel very much as if I was being carried and supported by the people who were praying for me.

One card in particular, from someone I used to work with, said, simply, “I am holding you in the light.” I have since learned that that is a Quaker saying (which makes sense, as this man is a Quaker), and it deeply resonated with me. Sometimes the idea of prayer is a little more than I can manage – how could I possibly know exactly what to ask for someone? What if I get it wrong? – but the idea of lifting someone into the light, where there can be no darkness . . . that makes sense. It reminded me very much of the quotes above from Charles Williams and Madeleine L’Engle, the idea that intercessory prayer isn’t so much about me saying the right things, that it’s not really about what I do at all.

I would say that I pray every day, but lately I have not always known what to say lately other than, “Hi, I’m still here.” I have found myself taking a lot of deep breaths and focusing on God, though not necessarily saying much of anything. And I have continued to feel as if God is very close, as if he’s right next to me and I could almost touch him. Maybe he likes it when I don’t fill the silence with words all the time, when I sit in the quiet and trust that he is there, that he knows what I can’t find the words to say. This seems to me to be a more mature kind of praying than I managed when I was a teenager, demanding that God work in certain ways and not knowing how to handle it when, most of the time, he didn’t.

I know that when I pray for other people, it changes me – makes my heart softer, gives me more compassion, gives me wisdom about my relationship with them, but I wonder sometimes if it does anything at all for them. It was encouraging to feel carried along, a reminder that there are things going on underneath the surface that I can’t see.

“Prayer was never meant to be magic,” Mother said.
“Then why bother with it?” Suzy scowled.
“Because it’s an act of love,” Mother said. -Madeleine L’Engle, A Ring of Endless Light

The latest (Christmas-themed) novel by Elizabeth Berg, The Handmaid and the Carpenter, caught my eye when it came into the library. It’s pretty short, so I read most of it in the doctor’s waiting room yesterday (I didn’t wait very long, don’t worry), and I have to say that I enjoyed it.

In thinking about what I might say about this book, I went back and looked at this entry on Joseph that I wrote two years ago after seeing Andrew Peterson’s Christmas show. (I was disappointed to see I’d already used the title I had in mind for today. I guess we need more songs about Joseph for me to use as post titles.) It touched on many of the things the book explored – the kind of man Joseph must have been to marry Mary even when he didn’t have to, the kind of man God would have chosen to be Jesus’ earthly father. In this book, Joseph struggled with belief after Jesus’ birth, after the angels came to him in dreams, even after the wise men and shepherds came to pay tribute. Without giving too much away, I think I can say that Joseph struggled with believing Mary right up until the very end of the book, but then, finally, he was given the grace to believe. I really enjoyed the way it was handled.

I generally enjoy stories that flesh out Biblical characters, and this one was better than the other Mary and Joseph book I read several years ago, Two from Galilee. The Handmaiden and the Carpenter fit in with the theme of the past week, songs and stories about the people in the Bible and what it must have been like for them to be part of this miracle. It’s good to remember that these people were real, more than just the figurines that sit on top of my card catalog.

I think that I try too hard at Christmas to be in the spirit and to enjoy the season. I have to confess that I don’t really know what that looks like this year, so I’ve been back and forth between crying while making Christmas cookies and having a great time with my friends in Nashville. Maybe that’s normal. But reading this book reminded me of what I’ve been saying to myself all year, “Do the best you can with what you’ve been given.” God supplies grace enough for the rest.

“But take heed to yourselves lest your hearts be weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and cares of this life, and that day come upon you suddenly . . .” -Luke 21:34, RSV

“But be on your guard. Don’t let the sharp edge of your expectation get dulled by parties and drinking and shopping. Otherwise, that Day is going to take you by complete surprise . . .” Luke 21:34, The Message

This Sunday’s New Testament reading was from Luke, and while its apocalyptic message was not exactly the tone we usually think of for the first Sunday of Advent, I liked the message of hope and renewal, of looking ahead. I read something this week that was talking about remembering Advent as a time of expectation and preparation, not as a time to get all sentimental about Baby Jesus, and I thought about that when we discussed these verses in Sunday School and heard them again during service. The verse above may be about the end of the world, but it sounds like something we should remember this time of year: Don’t let the Day catch you unprepared! Don’t get so caught up in life that you forget to be readying your heart!

The Christmas season has caught me unawares this year, I must confess. By now, I normally have planned out my list and the baking so that the season won’t feel rushed, so that I can focus on preparing my heart. I didn’t plan ahead this year, though. I have been caught up in the present and not focusing on what was ahead. And so we have parties and plays and concerts that we’re attending, things that we choose to do as part of our Advent preparation, but that, this year, are making me feel as if there’s not quite enough time to do the baking and shopping. This weekend, I felt, was a bit of a crossroads for me: Was I going to continue feeling frantic, or was I going to let things go? In thinking about the next few weeks, am I going to sacrifice going to Christmas concerts at the church in order to bake? Wouldn’t that mean my priorities are out of order?

This weekend, trying to be mindful of all of that, I spent time with friends and made the cookie dough (and froze it for later), Mike and I started our Advent book, and I tried to clear the calendar for the things that are the most important, to see the shopping and baking as part of the celebration, part of the way I love my family, but not the main event.

Every year Advent comes around and I have to learn to prioritize in a new and different way. This year I am learning about life and circumstances and how to prepare my heart in the midst of grieving. I am thankful for the hope present in today’s verses, the hope of the candle that was lit this morning, the hope of a little baby who came to save us of our sin. Hope that rises above circumstances and helps me to remember not to let that Day take me by complete surprise.

I do very much mind if I am getting nowhere, actually. It weighs on my mind and makes me even more tired than a plate full of tryptophans. But, slowly, slowly, I’ve been learning that heading in a straight line to what I perceive to be the answer may not be an answer at all. No, the answer might require patience, finesse, taking the long way around. And so, in the end, it might be better just to enjoy the process, to see how the “mystery of the curve” might take a little more time, but it also might give me the experience I need to better know what to do. As I circle this issue yet again, I am trying to believe that, if it’s not resolved yet, there’s something else I need to learn from letting this happen. Again. Only this time I’m going to try to let the end result work itself out.

I don’t mind if I am getting nowhere
Circling the seed of light
I’ve been greedy for some destination
I can’t get to where are you
Turning reverie to perfect solids
Bone and shells to hide ourselves
I tried but can’t find refuge in the angle
I’ll walk the mystery of the curve

Five colors blind the eyes
See the world inside
Amazed alone

I have to say that I thought this would be over by now. I know I’ve said that, said it so much that even I am tired of hearing it. And I know I’ve been stressing myself out, holding onto it and rolling it over and over in my mind when there’s more than enough on my plate already. But then I step back for just a minute, and I think about who I am now, and how different I am than when this started. I have made good decisions for myself, I have more confidence, I am stronger. Maybe this situation hasn’t changed, but I certainly have. And that’s not really “getting nowhere.”

And this is the time of year to believe in change. To remember the mystery of a little baby in a manger, and not to put limits on relationships, what I think can happen, what I think should happen. To try, once again, to let go of the things I hold too closely: what others think of me, being understood, and instead to grasp onto things that are healing: friends who prop me up, spending time with family, road trips and concerts and Advent. The baby in the manger reminds me to hope, even when I’m too afraid, too tired to risk it on my own.

Opening my hands
Closing wounds I made myself
Raise the dead and bury all my fears
Listen to the rain
And the bells that ring in my dreams
Turning time to break its line from here
To the small forgotten road
Where we see the concrete world disintegrating

So, for now, what I believe is that “getting nowhere” is getting somewhere after all.

Fabulous lyrics from “Five Colors” by Sam Phillips.

I hated every day of high school
It’s funny, I guess you did too. -Patty Griffin

When we were at the Patty Griffin concert last year, she played “Tony,” and after the above line, there were so many cheers that I was taken aback (although, looking at the crowd, it’s not such a stretch to think that they’d feel that way). And when I saw 13 Going on 30, it wasn’t a huge surprise to me that, of all the people watching it, I was the least popular of any of us in high school. I feel like the cool thing is to say, “Yeah, man, I did hate every day of high school. My life was so full of angst and pain. No one understood me, man.” And as much as I (still) want to sit at that cool table, it’s just not true. I wasn’t popular in high school, but I wasn’t that miserable person who got crapped on all the time, either. I remember those guys every time I hear “Tony,” but my high school years weren’t that hard. I just didn’t have a place, or friends that I hung out with outside of school. There were things I enjoyed, like the Nerd Club and Quiz Bowl. It definitely wasn’t the best time of my life, and I was lonely a lot, but it would be a lie to say that I hated every single day. I had people to eat lunch with, and if I didn’t spend my Friday and Saturday nights cruising the town like everyone else did, well, it honestly doesn’t matter anymore.

I’ve been thinking about high school recently for two reasons. The first is that a local high school recently burned down. Thankfully, no one was hurt, but the school was completely destroyed and the kids had to be divided up for this school year. The kids seemed to bond together, saying things like, “We just want to be together,” and, “The school is my home away from home,” and, “We’re like one big family.” Some people seemed to find this inspiring. I, on the other hand, could not stop rolling my eyes. “You all hate each other,” I said when I would see that in the paper or on television. “Admit it.” And while it’s probably true that all the kids did probably hate each other, I wondered at the time why my response has been one of skepticism and scorn. Why does it matter if the kids want to remember everything with rose-colored glasses?

I think I feel a little bit like it matters to the people who were like me, the ones who were lonely and didn’t have friends. If my school had burned down, I would have rolled my eyes at the popular kids who said things like, “We’re all one big family,” when there’s no way they would have let me hang out with them at lunch or after school. I would have been glad for the break, thankful for a few days not to navigate the social scene, not to be so unsure of myself. I would have used the time to write a kick-butt college application essay about the experience (starting sentence: “It was a day like any other day”) and read books and helped my parents and mowed the grass . . . I wouldn’t have been meeting up with people to cry about losing a building that didn’t have all that many positive associations for me. I offer as proof: It’s not like I’ve been back.

I think things like, “We’re all one big family,” contribute to an overly romanticized version of high school that’s just not attainable. And I hate to see kids who were more like me feeling like they are doing something wrong because they aren’t experiencing that. “No,” I want to tell them, “the big family thing isn’t normal. And if you don’t have friends now, don’t worry about it. You’ll get out of there and find places where there are people who think and act more like you. You just have to put in your time like the rest of us did before you can find that.” At the same time, I think, “I hated every day of high school,” is a bit romanticized as well. Most of us actually fell somewhere in between, feeling lost and unsure of ourselves, but not deathly miserable.

The other thing that’s got me thinking about high school is the book I read yesterday: A Home on the Field by Paul Cuadros. It’s about the high school that I attended and the challenges some of the Hispanic members of the community faced as they tried to start a soccer team there, in more of a high school football kind of town. The Hispanic population in the town was just starting to grow when I graduated, and it’s grown exponentially since then. Obviously, that’s caused all kinds of problems – logistical problems (the schools weren’t really prepared for so many non-English speaking students), legal problems (since many are illegal), and social problems (when a town changes so suddenly, it causes resentment). When I was at the school, they didn’t even have a soccer team, but now, not only do they have a team, but they won the state championship in 2004. As I read the book, it was interesting to see my hometown from an outsider’s perspective. I read things and I think, “Oh, it’s true, but did you have to tell them that?” The struggles that the influx of Hispanics has caused, the racism that’s evident there, the people who were fighting for the town to do the right thing. I recognize many of the people in the book, including my (passive) former principal who never stood up for anything, many of the teachers both good and bad who are mentioned, the white families who are pulling their kids out of the schools in order to “protect” them . . . it’s all true. I could picture the halls of the school and the streets of the town as I read it, which made it that much harder to read, and even though my life has been much much easier than the Hispanic youth who were featured in the book, I related a bit to their “outsider” status, which made the book even more personal. I should say that there are a lot of good, decent people in my hometown who worked hard to do the right thing, and I think that comes through in the book. It’s just that there are always adjustments to make when change comes so quickly. The book does end on a hopeful note, and I, too, have hope that things are going to improve there and at the school.

There were some small factual errors that I noticed, but nothing major. (Do you know how disconcerting it is to be close enough to a story to be able to recognize small factual errors in a book? I didn’t. Until yesterday.) If you are interested in knowing a little more about the town I grew up in, or how the unforeseen growth of the Hispanic population has changed one small town in the South, this is a great book to check out. As I told my coworkers, it’s not balanced . . . but it’s accurate.

It’s easy to take potshots at my high school and my hometown, but then I remember the way that people in the community responded to my family when my dad was sick and after his death: an outpouring of food and love and concern. It was a little bit refining to see that, to be pulled out of my tendency to see everything in black or white. To be reminded of the kindness of the people who live there, despite the problems the community has faced and despite the fact that I never felt quite at home there. I have to admit that, even though it wasn’t easy for me, it wasn’t a bad place to grow up.

There is a bit of Gilmore talk at the bottom of this post, so those of you who want my take should check there.

I am not feeling like myself these days. I’m not saying I’m not keeping my head above water, because I am. I completely am. I’m just . . . there are some areas where I’d grown where I’m just not doing as well. I try to be okay and joke around . . . but maybe that means that people don’t get that I am really sad. Really sad. And tired. I’m not operating on all cylinders. I need a little extra grace. We’ve been busy being out of town and in town with guests and plans and . . . this weekend we actually had to write on our calendar, “NO PLANS.” That way we couldn’t schedule anything. And that’s a situation I find really draining in general, to be busy all the time. But busy on top of emotionally fatigued? That’s a bad situation.

I don’t want to just have a big pity party for myself all the time, but it’s hard. Everyone else’s lives have gone on and mine hasn’t. I am not the same person I was before. I need time to catch up with all of this.

We’ve had some good things going on, though. The good thing about being busy is being distracted. So we had the football game and Mom’s birthday and Rhonda and Katie came to town . . . I’ve been baking a lot (a veritable cornucopia of pumpkin treats) and getting back on top of housework.. I can run a whole mile without stopping. We’re surviving.

One of the best things that’s happened lately is that we got a new mattress. I didn’t even know we NEEDED a new mattress. But, you guys, this is not a joke. Our new mattress is like sleeping in a hammock of clouds held up by angels. (I think it was Katie who said, “Did you just say, ‘A hammock of clouds held up by angels?’” Yes, yes I did.) It is so fantastic that you just can’t imagine. I hadn’t been sleeping well, but it’s been helping a lot. Hammock. Clouds. Angels. Seriously.

Last night I started a book called Words in a French Life, about a woman who moved to France and is learning the language. Each chapter is sort of like a blog entry, where she takes a word and talks about a little scene or a story that helps her understand the word. It’s cute. I like how it moves from English to French and I can still keep up using context clues and, you know, the little French that I do know. It’s a cute idea that made me think about what my own word would be, one that keeps coming up. I feel like I say this a lot, but a constant theme lately in my life has been courage. One of my favorite quotes is one that Anne Lamott stole from (I think) Dorothy Bernard: “Courage is just fear that’s said its prayers.” I feel, most of the time, like I am too small to be brave, too small to stand up and face life. I feel small and afraid, tossed around by circumstances, and that I’m always just . . . recovering. Cowering in the corner. I worry too much about what people think, how they see me, how I should respond.

We’re doing a sermon series on women from the Old Testament, and what has struck me about each of them is that they were brave in different ways. Esther, Ruth, Tamar, Shiphrah and Puah . . . the over-arching theme has been that it’s about being brave in the small things. Even though some of them were brave in very large ways, it was really just about taking the next step, doing the right thing, one day at a time.

There’s a sign in my kitchen that simply says (in funky lowercase letters): “courage.” I bought it when I was in the middle of a hard time, to remind myself that I had made it that far. I’d like to say that I look at it in the mornings or when I am trying an especially difficult recipe, but the truth is that it mostly goes unnoticed. From time to time, though, it does catch my eye, and I try to remember to keep going. And that’s enough courage for a difficult rainy day.

So, I didn’t watch Gilmore Girls last night. I had an awful day, I was extra-cranky, and . . . I didn’t feel like watching The Further Adventures of Lorelai and Christopher when I knew they’d just make me more cranky. So I went to bed just after 9:00. (I did want to stay up and watch Veronica Mars, but I was too tired to do so.) It got me thinking, this morning, though – some of the GG boards I read have (Christopher) fans who like to say, “If you are just watching for one storyline, you’re not a real fan of the show.” I . . . disagree. Remember when I talked about how people enter books through different ways – characters, place, story, language . . . none of those are right and none of them are wrong. People just like different things about different books. I, for example, tend to focus on characters and character growth. I think this plays out in my TV watching, as well – I love watching the relationships and seeing the characters learn from their mistakes. I think you can see where I’m going with this. Seeing Lorelai and Christopher give it yet another try is, to my mind, not really the kind of show I like to see. I don’t feel like the characters have gotten anywhere, and that’s just not fun to me.

Additionally, I am at a place in my life where I watch TV to escape. I have had a hard year, and I don’t want to watch sad or difficult things on TV. I have, in recent years, tended more toward comedies anyway – I stopped watching ER and started watching lighter fare like The Office and Friends and Gilmore Girls (or even Veronica Mars) and reality shows like Survivor and The Amazing Race and even American Idol. Shows where the people are generally happy (at least compared to ER, because, dang, that is an unhappy show) and comedic or interesting things happen. I want to escape to Stars Hollow to see Lorelai arguing with Michel and Rory going toe-to-toe with Paris and Babbette calling everybody “sugah” and Kirk working 42 jobs and Luke being grumpy and pouring coffee. All this long lost daughter/broken engagement/one night stand stuff is, honestly, not my cup of tea. Especially when Christopher is involved. I don’t think that makes me “not a real fan of the show,” I think it means that there are things about the show I used to enjoy that . . . simply aren’t around anymore. At least right now. I don’t find The Further Adventures of Lorelai and Christopher to be endearing in the least, mostly because I don’t find him endearing in the least.

That’s not to say that I’m giving up on the show. I’m just saying that . . . I may not watch it on Tuesday nights for a while. I’ll still watch it, but it might not be appointment television. I still want to know what’s going to happen, but . . . I’m not in a place right now where I want to sit down specially to watch people I don’t like make decisions I don’t agree with. And I am not going to apologize for that. So, I thought this was a good time to let you know – I’ll keep watching and writing my responses, but they might be later in the week than they have been. Deal?

Good.

Lately I’ve been drinking more decaf tea in the evenings. After many years of rejecting fruit tea, I have decided I like it after all. I especially like Black Cherry Berry Herb Tea by Celestial Seasonings. I don’t even normally like cherries. Sadly, I realized last night that one of the reasons I might like it is because it smells like Kool-Aid. Cherry Kool-Aid. Mike tasted it and said, “Three more spoonfuls of sugar, and it’ll taste just like warm Kool-Aid, too.” I like a tea that tastes like Kool-Aid. The tea people are going to take my tea card away, aren’t they?

Mike made me a playlist that has the song “White Houses” by Vanessa Carlton on it, among other things. Alisa and I were talking about it and I mentioned that it’s a really sad song, but I couldn’t think quite why when I said it, so I looked up the lyrics, and it’s about a magical summer when the main character lived in a house with four friends and the fun that they had and the boy that she liked . . . and then it all got messed up with sex and the relationships got complicated and . . . it ended. In the song, she’s looking back with affection on that time, even though she’s lost those friends now. I’m the kind of person who likes to romanticize the past, I think. (Susan made me a mix CD with “Painting Pictures of Egypt” and we should probably cue it here.) I either do that or I completely throw out all the good stuff with the bad stuff. Either way, it’s hard for me to see things as they were, and I tend to look back and feel that things were much easier. I enjoy “White Houses” because I know exactly the kind of summer that she’s talking about, the kind with so few responsibilities and all you have to do is spend time with your friends and stay up late and have inside jokes and everything is fraught with meaning. And you don’t realize how quickly it will fade away, that those days will be over and you’ll find yourself with a 40-hour-a-week job and maybe even a house and a family. This is getting to be so long that maybe it should have been its own entry, but the song has reminded me that I’m going to look back on this time with affection just as much as I do previous times, and I’ll remember the sleeping in on the weekends and the road trips and the cups of coffee with friends and the shopping with my mom and the job that I enjoy. And I should try to embrace it now, not just exist in it. And maybe that’s a little deep for a silly pop song, but I don’t really care.

At church they’re doing a series on Jewish women, and I’ve missed a few of them, but I was there for Ruth. I’ve heard the story of Ruth hundreds of times – sermons on it, small group studies, personal studies . . . so much Ruth! This time the sermon was about how Ruth trusted God as she took each step, not worrying so much about the future. And it was also about how God created a family for Ruth and Naomi, even though it didn’t look like what they had expected. Both of those were things I needed very much to hear right now. I think that’s what I’m learning these days.

Bad.

I haven’t had any time for exercise in the past two weeks. I’ve been so busy in the evenings, or so tired. I’d rather veg out on the computer or in front of the TV. I haven’t been reading all that much. I haven’t seen many of my friends. When I am busy, I get anti-social.

I hate having to decide what to wear in this kind of weather. Some days it’s cool. Some days it’s cool in the morning and in the 80s in the afternoon. Don’t tell me to layer. I know that. I just don’t have good clothes for this kind of weather.

Ugly.

Earlier this week I read Kristen’s entry about OxyClean spray, and I was like, “Wow, nothing like that has ever happened to me with OxyClean.” I don’t use the spray, but even so. And then, this morning I discovered that, while using OxyClean to get a tomato stain off of Mike’s new M. Ward t-shirt, I apparently bleached the front. And I don’t think the shirt is available online (at least, I can’t find it). And I am sad. It’s been ages since something of his got messed up in the wash, but I really hate that it was his new shirt. Anybody got a solution? It looks like M. Ward is . . . touring in Europe right now. Anybody want to go to Europe and catch a show and bring me back a t-shirt?

Other.

I finished a book that was pretty enjoyable: Dinner with Anna Karenina. It was about a book club and the things that happen to them over the course of a year. Up next: this month’s book club selection, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt.

I watched the girl look at herself in the mirror, and she turned to me and said, “Miss, what do you think? I need a dress for my school formal. Do you think this one looks okay?”

It most decidedly did not look okay. But as I tried to put words together that would kindly convey what I was thinking, my aunt jumped in and said, “It would look better with more support,” which was true. What I did not say that I wanted to say was, “You can do better.” She didn’t look like a model, even a plus-sized one, but . . . she could have looked cuter in a dress that played up her assets. But I didn’t know how to say that, so I said nothing. As I waited by the door of the dressing room for my aunt to change, I watched to see if the girl came back out with that dress. I listened to her talk to her friends, but I couldn’t tell if she was going to buy it. We left before I heard what was decided.

I’ve been saying a whole lot of nothing lately. People ask me how I’m doing, and I tell them I’m fine or I change the subject. People do things that surprise me (in the bad kind of way) and I stay silent, retreating into (or hiding in) politeness, good manners that dictate that I say nothing. I am starting to wonder if the people around me have noticed.

I have been feeling kind of stuck lately – I’m still working my way through that same Lee Smith book. It’s been slow going, but I felt like I made some good progress last night and today, and I finally feel like the end is in sight. I’ve also been struggling with my response to some relationships, not knowing exactly the right way to handle things. I can be a person who lacks grace, especially when I’m stressed out, and that’s been an issue for me the past few weeks. When I’ve been hurt, I’ve complained to Mike about it, rehashing the other person’s faults and exponentially increasing my own irritation simply by letting it fester. I’d gotten better about that, I thought. Lately, though, every criticism has stuck with me, every slight has been magnified. I’ve reverted.

And I guess reverting is understandable, though I know Mike is getting pretty tired of it. But it’s not what I want. I want to be more compassionate, but I see so many of my heart’s desires slipping through my fingers, and as I snatch at them, I lash out at people. Snatching, as Harriet Vane once told us, is never the best solution. And yet it’s hard to resist the urge.

Yesterday at church, I was reminded by the story of Ruth that God provides family for us even when it doesn’t look like the traditional family that we grow up idealizing. That was a good thing to hear, because it’s been on my mind a lot lately. I feel like I learned that lesson once, right after Mike and I got married, when I was sad about not having his parents, but I am learning it again now.

Ruth also made me think about just taking the next step, doing the right thing right now, and not worrying about the future. Right now what I need to be worrying about is being a graceful compassionate person. I need to speak up for myself without getting so worked up. I need to just keep taking one step at a time.

I am a little bit afraid that this journal is turning into “Kari Reviews Everything,” but . . . I saw a really great movie last night. I know, I know.

I think I enjoy documentary films so much because I enjoy stories about people. Steve Hartman has spent a lot of time on CBS proving that, no matter how boring we think we are, we all have a story to share, and many of those stories are just as (if not more) dramatic and heartfelt as the greatest novel or blockbuster movie. Fewer explosions, less beautiful people, less “perfect” dialogue, but the sincerity can’t really be compared. Part of my love for stories probably comes from my years in youth group and retreats in college – one thing we were taught is that the story of our relationship with God is a beautiful thing, no matter how boring we think that it is. That your story doesn’t have to have motorcycle gangs and drugs and dramatic conversions to be a story of God’s faithfulness and how you are growing in that. I think my story as a Christian honestly is kind of boring, but I also know that my leaders and friends were speaking the truth, which is one reason I have come to see people’s stories as . . . almost a holy thing. A way to connect to other people, to see their humanity.

I also, as you probably know, enjoy stories about relationships. I think a lot about my own relationships: with Mike, with my friends, with family, with friendships that didn’t work out or never got off the ground. I think about why they work or why they didn’t. In college, I started learning how relationships could be refining, how, if I let them, they could help smooth my rough edges. And marriage, of course, has taught me even more about that. I have been thinking lately about how my marriage and my friendships have given me confidence that I am someone worth being friends with. That some of the problems I’ve had with relationships in the past weren’t completely my fault. That I’m capable of loving and being loved. That I shouldn’t let some of the failures of the past overshadow the relationships that continue to grow these days.

But wasn’t I supposed to be talking about a movie? Well, Mike and I saw Wordplay last night, and we both loved it. More than we expected to, even. It’s a fun little documentary about crossword puzzles – the history, the construction, the people who do them, and, finally, the annual tournament. We meet some of the participants (many of whom are past champions) and get to know their stories as we build up to the tournament. And then, finally, it’s tournament time, and people are arriving at the hotel and hugging each other and catching up. And they compete the first day, and they have a talent show that night, and they play games, and Will Shortz is hanging out with them, and it looked like so much fun. I loved watching the community they had formed – one lady was introduced as a first-timer, and another lady quickly said, “Do you want to have dinner with us?” It looked like, yes, there were cliques, and, yes, there was some fierce competition, but . . . everyone was united by their love of crosswords and competition as well as their sense of fairness. One of the most moving scenes was a woman who had been the champion back in the 70s, and who lost her husband at the tournament one year – he had a heart attack on the Sunday afternoon of the tournament weekend. But she said she still comes because she knows he would want her to, and she talked about how there were other people who had also passed away, but she felt their presence, too. I thought that summed up the whole appeal of the movie for me – these people really care about each other, and that’s why they come back year after year.

And that’s not even touching on the incredible skill and knowledge that the people in this movie possess, which was the reason I wanted to see the movie in the first place. (Well, that and Jon Stewart.)

We watched the movie in a tiny theater – at first we thought it was going to be just us and another couple, but then the seats started filling up, and by the end the theater was mostly full, about 25-30 people in a theater that seats no more than 40. We had the kind of movie experience you would want for a small movie about geeks – people laughing, applauding, and exclaiming at all the appropriate times. It was as if we formed a community of our own for the duration of the movie.

In college, we talked a lot about “sharing life” as being an important part of authentic Christianity, but I don’t think I knew what that really meant. I still don’t think I entirely know what that means, but I have a better idea than I did. Last night’s movie made me think of “sharing life” in terms of being in relationships with people who understand (and support) what makes you tick, of the importance of getting to be who you really are without having to put up any fronts or censor yourself, of the value of sharing your interests with the people around you. In a really good way, it made me lament some of my own lost relationships a little less – most of the time, they were lost because there was a lack of truly understanding one another, however that ended up playing out.

Often, seeing other people’s stories reminds me of the value of my own. Seeing Wordplay, a movie that celebrates ordinary people with many different gifts and talents who love crossword puzzles, made me remember that the best way to live is to be who I really am, to celebrate my quirks and embrace my passions. My story is only going to be boring if I try to make it fit some prescribed formula. But a life full of friends (”kindred spirits,” really) and interests (no matter how strange), of love and family, of knowing and being known . . . how could that be a boring story?

When we got married, one of the things we struggled with was hospitality. I don’t think that I’m inhospitable, but hospitality isn’t one of my gifts. It doesn’t come easily for me like it does for other people. I forget to ask you if you need a refill, and I forget that we shouldn’t just sit at the kitchen table and talk for hours when we could be sitting in softer chairs. I get stiff and awkward.

Mike, on the other hand, would be happy if we hosted a big Sunday dinner at our house every week. He grew up in a community that did that, that had Sunday dinners together with friends and family, and I think he feels the lack of it in his life. I spent a lot of years having my life be overly scheduled, so I shy away from planning something every week like that. Basically, what I’m saying is that having a big Sunday dinner every week is my idea of purgatory. To have to cook, to have to be in town, to have to have the house cleaned . . . I see all of that as stressful rather than a means to an enjoyable end.

I felt like I was beginning to make strides in the area of hospitality – we hosted a Thanksgiving dinner that went over well, and Scott and Kelly were visiting a lot. And then Mike had a rough spring semester, and, this is God’s honest truth, we didn’t have any visitors at our house from Christmas until May. Mike was busy with homework and I read more books than I thought possible. We were holed up here all spring, being anti-social, not because we intended to, but just because we didn’t take steps to keep it from happening. Susan came to see us before she moved and she was the first person who’d been to visit since Christmas. (My brother and my parents had been there, but family isn’t the same as “visitors.”) And when Susan was there, she and I sat at the kitchen table and talked for three or four hours. I forgot to go into the other room where there were softer chairs.

Every month in Real Simple, they have a question that they ask their readers, and recently an upcoming question was, “What’s your favorite thing about your kitchen?” I love my kitchen, so I had to think about it for a while. Is it the cabinet space? Is it the bright yellow color? Is it all the windows? But then I decided that, instead of being ashamed about all the hours spent at our kitchen table, that that was my favorite thing about the kitchen. In a burst of hospitality, we bought a kitchen table that seats six, and we have loved having people over to eat and sit for hours at it. I can stand in my kitchen and think of meals there with friends, of conversations that went long into the night, of card games and coffee, laughter and tears.

The past few years have caused me to learn a thing or two about hospitality, both in my house (from watching Mike) and in my heart. I have gotten better at trusting people, at letting my friendships be reciprocal, at letting people in my space without having so many walls. It’s not the traditional way that we think of hospitality, but letting my heart be more open has been a big step for me. What I really want as far as hospitality goes is for people to feel comfortable asking for a refill, or even getting up to get their own. I want people to let me know if I’ve forgotten to put something on the table. I want them to say, “Want to move to the den?” if I forget. I want our friends to know where the glasses and silverware are so that they don’t feel like visitors. Sometimes I get so stiff that I forget how to create that environment. But I’m working on it. I’m hopeful that having a more open heart will lead to having a more open home.

Mike and I went away this weekend to stay at Casa Holland and see the Braves, have storytime with Trey and Aaron, play poker, watch That Thing You Do, and stay at Cafe Intermezzo until way way past “ungodly hours” and on into “so ridiculously late it’s early.”

As expected, we had a lot of fun, and there are tons of stories to tell. Today, though, what I’ve been thinking is that when I’m not feeling my best, be it tired or sad or sneezy (I was all three of those dwarves this weekend), I revert a bit. This weekend, I felt like I reverted to some insecurities that I hadn’t been dealing with lately, telling Mike that I knew everyone had to be sick of me sneezing (I took Claratin!) and being tired (we were all tired) and sad (I doubt anyone actually begrudges me feeling sad). I tried to perk up and be happy, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that everyone would be having a better time if I wasn’t there.

I haven’t done much of that these days, being so insecure in my relationships. I’ve been fighting it. When you don’t feel 100%, though, it’s easier to slip into those patterns. When you’re already worried that everyone is so over you being sad, it’s easier to imagine that sneezing your way through IKEA may make even your husband want to throw you out of a window. Or at least into a bin of spatulas. I wonder sometimes if I’m ever going to believe that my friends care about me enough to have patience with all my crap. (Or snot, as the case may be.)

It’s a cliche, but it does seem true that life is about making progress and losing some of that ground again. I imagine it as a dance – you move forward, you move back, but most important is that you keep your footing. I stumbled a bit this weekend, but I am thankful that, despite my insecurities, I was mostly buoyed along in the fun, and that my friends gave me the space to be myself. I just wish that who I was this weekend was someone a little more energetic.

Really, what I learned this weekend was about grace. Community living will do that for you. In the midst of taking turns with showers and watching Friends and caravanning our way around Atlanta and eating entirely too much food, I was reminded of how great it is to know people who will open their house to you for a weekend, how great it is to stay with people who are willing to put up with some inconvenience to spend time with you, how great it is to make new friends and open your heart. How all those things, big and small, are part of what makes life here so wondrous.

When I started working on these thoughts, I was thinking of the weekend in terms of missed opportunities – conversations I didn’t get to have, time I didn’t get to utilize. But now . . . now I see that wasn’t really what the weekend was about after all. I got to see people taking time out of their lives to love and enjoy each other, which was just exactly the three-day weekend I needed.

Every time Mike goes out of town, I feel the urge to act like a teenager and throw wild keg parties. Which is ridiculous . . . why do I act as if he’s the adult in our house? He might care if I was throwing wild keg parties, it’s true, but he doesn’t care if I eat pizza rolls or popcorn for dinner. (I know, I know, we’ve been over this before. I told you this happens every time.)

With all this big talk about acting wild and crazy, you would think that I . . . acted wild and crazy last night. You would be wrong. Yesterday I went grocery shopping, baked a cake, folded laundry, did dishes, and went to see my brother for his birthday. I was in bed before 10:00, finished the book I was reading (don’t tell the doctor I was reading in bed, because she told me not to. But when there’s no one else home, it’s just more fun to read in bed than anywhere else, because bed is where the pizza rolls and popcorn are), and was asleep before Mike called at 10:30. It’s a good thing I’m going to the movies tonight, because I . . . am . . . boring. But the house looks better than it did.

Last night before I went to bed, I made a list of all the things I needed to do this morning, including calling a doctor, watering the garden before I left the house, and making sure I had everything I needed to go to the movies tonight. I have been making lots of lists lately, both at work and at home, just to cut down on stress. It seems to help. And so, this morning I remembered to go to the backyard and water the plants.

At 7:30 am, our backyard was beautiful. The sun’s beams were filtering through the trees, there was a mist near the ground, everything was covered in dew, and the neighbor’s dogs were apparently not yet awake, so it was quiet and peaceful. I watered the tomato plants and peppers (we had to give up on squash, which is so disappointing) and then the trees before leaving for work. The hem of my pants was wet and a little dirty, but it was nice to be outside during the cool part of the day. This post, with the going to bed early and getting up early to water the plants and call the doctor, is further evidence that I’m a morning person.

Maybe it’s all the Drunkard’s Prayer that I’ve been listening to lately, maybe it’s the fact that I have had Elizabethtown on my mind, but I’ve been feeling melancholy lately in a good way. The kind that makes you want to “wallow in delicious misery” and “get into the deep beautiful melancholy.” My doctor talked about how sometimes, we here in America freak out when things are hard, because we buy into the idea that life is supposed to be happy and easy. I think that’s why I’ve been playing so much Drunkard’s Prayer (especially “Born,” which for some inexplicable reason is on my iPod twice) at work, because it’s both melancholy and hopeful at the same time. I think I’m learning how to be okay with being a little sad, instead of feeling like I need to make myself fight it because it’s not “right” to be sad. Being alone in the yard this morning watching the sun and the mist coexist, I felt like that was a picture of how I was doing inside. The sun was there, and things were green and growing, but there was an element that the sun hadn’t reached.

Meanwhile, other than forgetting to buy stamps on my lunch break, my list is complete. Movie night tonight, girls’ night tomorrow (complete with outdoor movie watching and a hot tub), and hopefully I’ll be squeezing some more alone time in there, too. And probably listening to Over the Rhine a few hundred more times.

Pour me a glass of wine
Talk deep into the night
Who knows what we’ll find

Secret fears, the supernatural
Thank God for this new laughter
Thank God the joke’s on me -OtR, “Born”

One of the reasons we’d been so intent on working on the fire pit area in our backyard is that, for a while now, I have been wanting to burn the journals I kept off and on from high school until about three years ago. It wasn’t for a ritual cleansing or anything like that. I’m not really romantic enough to be big on rituals. No, it was pure practicality. I didn’t want them around anymore. I didn’t want anyone to be able to find them and read them. In a small way, yes, it was about moving on and letting go of the past. I know I could have simply thrown them out, but I really wanted to make sure they were gone.

Mike, who once burned an old journal in the kitchen sink, understood my desire to get rid of the records of my not-so-exciting exploits. One of his goals this summer was to get the fire pit ready – ready for Birthday Weekend, ready to use in the fall, and ready for my journals. Saturday night was deemed the night, and my brother, being at the house, helped us start a really good fire. We then made him leave, since, well . . . journal burning is kind of private and needs no witnesses. He seemed to understand.

I had about, I’d say, 10 journals to burn. They weren’t all completely full. Some were daily journals and some were Bible study journals and some were notes I took on retreats or at meetings when I was in IV. Last year I went through and looked at a lot of it, and I decided it was just time to let it go. The daily journals were too embarrassing/incriminating, the notes on retreats didn’t all make sense, and I don’t really need notes from meetings that were held six years ago anymore. Mike and I ripped out page after page, crumpling them and throwing them into the fire. Occasionally he’d catch some words just as it burned, and I watched as he tried to make sense of it before it turned to ash. I read him my valedictory speech and snippets from the oldest journal. My personal favorite was when I started an entry by saying, “ER was a rerun tonight.” You can see how incredibly interesting my life was in high school.

I’ll admit it, there’s a part of me that is sad that so much history is now gone, but it’s definitely balanced out by the relief that . . . so much incriminating history is now gone. I’m not that girl anymore, not by a long shot. I did so much ranting and venting in those journals. Burning them was one more way of letting go of some of that baggage, of growing up. I don’t see things the same way that I did, I don’t feel or value the same things. It felt heavy to still have them around, as if I couldn’t really move on.

I was surprised, though, that after we had finished ripping out pages and sat down on the picnic benches, I felt kind of sad. All that time spent writing, and nothing to show for it but a lot of smoke and ash. I’m glad I didn’t do this earlier, in a fit of anger. It was planned out, and it was time. As we sat and watched the fire, I leaned onto Mike’s shoulder. He seemed to understand that I had mixed emotions about it all.

We plan to use the fire pit as much as we can, and we’ve made a good start already. I think Mike and I have both imagined sitting out there, roasting marshmallows, talking, listening to music. We’ve already accomplished the goals of spending more time in our yard and taking care of the weight of the past (one goal was a little more serious than the other). If spring is a time of starting over, well, so is autumn, at least if you’re still on a school schedule like we are. New shoes, new clothes, new books, new lines in a journal. As much as I love the long hot evenings of summer, I am looking forward to the cool evenings of fall we hope to spend with a fire. And now that the journals are taken care of, I like to think the fire pit is primed for autumn, too.

We sat quietly for a while, only interrupted by the fireworks that the neighbors set off (real ones yet again. They were very pretty). And then he stood up, pulled me off the bench and said, “Come on. Let’s go inside.”

For my birthday, Andrea gave me a copy of Don Miller’s Searching for God Knows What. It took a little longer than I thought to finish it – I thought I’d be done on Saturday, and then Sunday, but I finally finished it this morning.

I am not the hugest Don Miller fan on the planet. I didn’t care for Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance (I was working at a Christian bookstore when it came out, so I remember it being promoted . . . and then being on the $4.97 shelf). I enjoyed some parts of Blue Like Jazz, but it didn’t rock my world (I remember one guy asking why I hadn’t recommended it to him after I read it, since he read it and loved it, and I was like, “I . . . just didn’t think to”). Of all his books, I liked To Own a Dragon the best, mostly because it gave me some insight into what it might be like to be a man without a father figure. This book was somewhere in Blue Like Jazz range – it had some parts that I enjoyed, but overall the book was just things I already agreed with that didn’t really change anything for me.

The first part that stood out to me was when talking about the fall. The chapter closes this way:

I happened to see Larry King interview Billy Graham shortly after the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. I had read an article the previous month about violent video games and their effects on the minds of children, desensitizing them to the act of killing. Larry King asked Billy Graham what was wrong with the world, and how such a thing as Columbine could happen. I knew, because Billy Graham was an educated man, he had read the same article I had read, and I began calculating his answer for him, that violence begets violence, that we live in a culture desensitized to the beauty of human life and the sanctity of creation. But Billy Graham did not blame video games. Billy Graham looked Larry King in the eye and said, “Thousands of years ago, a young couple in love lived in a garden called Eden, and God placed a tree in the Garden and told them not to eat from the tree . . .”

And I knew in my soul he was right.

How much do I love Billy Graham? So much.

The next part that stood out to me was in the chapter about the circus – Don Miller talked about how much he loves elephants. I’m not going to quote it here, but he talked about how being around elephants makes him relax, his heart slow down. They’re very calming.

I don’t have a deep spiritual reason for liking that passage, but it reminded me of how I feel about cows. I love cows. (As a girl, I should like horses. But I don’t. I like cows.) When I was a little girl, my grandparents still had cows. And my grandma would send me cards and letters telling me about her day and how much she loved me. My grandparents’ lives weren’t all that exciting, to be honest, because she would tell me things about their garden and how much rain they got. And she’d tell me about the calves, and how she’d given them their bottles. When I was staying with her, she’d let me go help give them bottles. They always had very “cow” names like Bessie and Bossie. (I’m not making this up.) So, to me, cows are these wonderful peaceful animals that I associate with my grandmother. When we go to the fair, I want to see cows. When we go visit my parents, I like to look at the cows that are in their yard (they don’t own the cows – they just let a man keep his cows on their land). I like their big brown eyes and the way they chew. I even like their smell, because . . . that’s how cows smell. For a while when I was growing up, there were horses in the field next to my parents’ house, and I took them sugar cubes and apples, but I never felt about the horses the way I do about cows.

And so I liked how Don Miller talked about the elephants, because it made me remember those days of helping Grandma give the calves their bottles. It’s so strange to me that my youngest cousins won’t have any memories of those things, because the cows were long gone before they were born.

In the chapter on the Gospel, Don Miller talked about how, once when he was teaching a class at a Bible college, he told them he was going to present a form of the gospel but leave out an important part of it. And so he talked about sin and depravity, and how the wages of sin are death, giving examples from our culture. He then talked about morality, about how choosing not to sin can bring such fruit into your life, about heaven and about how fulfillment on earth and afterward could be theirs if they’d just repent and turn from their ways.

None of the students in the class realized he had never mentioned Jesus. They couldn’t figure out what was missing.

On one hand, I can’t believe that. I just can’t. On the other hand, working at a Christian bookstore afforded me the opportunity to see a lot of that kind of thing – the idea that you have to work hard to be a good person and believe the Bible, but not always talking about Jesus. Brian and Sarah were over last night, and we talked about that part of the book, and how it was similar to Brian’s story from a few weeks ago where everybody was talking about hearing from God and nobody was talking about . . . the Bible. American Christianity can be so inwardly focused on how we feel, what we are doing, instead of being focused on Jesus. I would have to say that, if you look over the archives of what I’ve posted here, things for me spiritually have gotten better over the past few years in part because I have learned a lot more about Jesus and in part because I did stop focusing so much on myself and how I was doing, and I have been able to see Jesus more as a source of strength and guidance. In this chapter, Don Miller talks a lot about how the gospel is relational, not a list of ideas, and that has definitely proven to be true in my life.

The part where he lost me was, I confess, the last chapter, the one on Romeo and Juliet. I remember there being a big debate about this chapter at the time the book came out, and I wasn’t able to participate in it because I hadn’t read the book at all. Now I feel qualified to weigh in with my opinion. I am sure you were all waiting with bated breath, were you not? In this chapter, Don Miller uses Romeo and Juliet (specifically the balcony scene) as an allegory for the gospel. I think he makes some compelling points, and if he’d stopped there, I would have enjoyed it. But, in a few places, he seems to say that Shakespeare intended for it to be an allegory, and I honestly think that’s a bit of a stretch. I wish he hadn’t pushed it quite that far, because I think a discussion of how Romeo and Juliet could be seen as an allegory could be a valuable one, but, from what I remember, people didn’t really discuss that part since he claimed it was intentional.

Anyway, the book gave me some stuff to think about, which I appreciate. I always hate to express any kind of opinion on Don Miller, because, for whatever reason, he’s so controversial. But, for me, it was a nice in-between book – I had been reading some light light chick lit, and I’d been planning to start A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but I needed something to bridge that gap. (How is it that I’ve never read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn? I remember it always being around when I was growing up, but I’ve never even started it before.) It wasn’t the best book I’ve read all year, but it certainly wasn’t worthy of some of the contemptuous things that I’ve seen written about it, either. Many thanks to Andrea for getting me a copy.

On the 4th of July, I found myself standing by the side of the road (under an umbrella) watching two sets of fireworks go off, one to my right and one to my left. The car stereo was cranked up, patriotic music was playing, and, oh yeah, the two guys I was standing with had patriotic bandanas draped on their shoulders. For whatever reason, people driving by were looking at us kind of strangely. Go figure.

And that probably wasn’t even the weirdest thing that happened this weekend. After all, the setting off of fireworks is enough to make an entire city come to a screeching halt. We weren’t the only car parked by the side of the road, even if we were the only car on that particular road. One of the things I love about the 4th of July is the relentless pursuit of fireworks. People angling for the best spots, people camping out for hours beforehand. Why do people (except Dawn) love fireworks? Why do we drop everything to watch them?

Fireworks make me feel like a kid again, like the last day of school before summer break. Like catching fireflies by the trees at the edge of our yard. Like homemade ice cream at my grandparents’ house. Like I do on my birthday, which is one of the reasons that fireworks and I have such a great relationship. In middle school and high school, we stopped going to see the fireworks quite as much, but I am glad Mike has helped restore the tradition of cheesy music, patriotism, and angling for the best possible view.

You don’t care about any of that, though, do you? You just want to know what could possibly be more strange than standing by the side of the road blaring “America” by Neil Diamond while people drive by giving you pitying looks. There are a few candidates:

It could have been when my shirtless next-door neighbor offered to let me, Adriene, Andrea, and Alisa (Kari and the Three A’s) get in his hot-tub. We declined. Actually, I declined for everyone else, finished playing with sparklers, and told the other three when we got inside. Much squealing ensued. Which was exactly why I didn’t tell them when we were outside. Sure, we can mock him, but we have to do it in the safety of my four walls.

Perhaps it was the real fireworks that people in our neighborhood were continually setting off all weekend long, much to the chagrin of whoever lived next door to them (or so I gathered from the yelling). I remember people setting off fireworks at their houses, but never big real ones. It was especially exciting when one apparently went off while still on the ground, and the yard was sprayed with colorful sparks. There was an extra-special bout of yelling after that one.

But it was probably the proliferation of glowsticks (that almost kept Mike out of the amphitheater), American bandanas (that helped Scott make friends in Target and Mike make friends at the grocery store), and embarrassing dancing that took place at the Kelly Clarkson concert. I very rarely go out in public and act foolishly on purpose, but apparently Kelly Clarkson brings out that side of me. We sang. There was dancing and jumping. There was no way for people to know that . . . we don’t always behave like that. Nor do we always wear glowsticks to concerts. Or accost little children and demand to have our picture taken with their Kelly Clarkson posters. So I’m pretty sure that everyone around us thought we were a truly weird group of people who are freakishly obsessed with Kelly Clarkson. Hence all the, “KELLY CLARKSON, WOOOOOOOO!” yelling. Instead, I think we are a truly weird group of people who are mildly obsessed with Kelly Clarkson. And Adriene, the photographer who does not judge us. At least while we are in earshot.

Having been to see Coldplay with a similar group of people (Susan, that was supposed to make you feel sad twinges. Did it work?), let me say that the overall crowd was much more fun at this concert. And by “much more fun,” I mean “much less drunk” and “much less crowded.” Which made it much more fun. No drunk frat guys looking for diamond rings they dropped. Nobody walking through our huge pile of snacks. Just good times with friends and fun pop music.

Scott pointed out that the weekend was all-American: baseball games, American Idols, and, well, I didn’t make apple pie, but I did make peach cobbler. Close enough, right? I made flag cake! Surely that should count for something!

Last year after Birthday Weekend, I thought a lot about how great my friends are, and the only thing I can do this year is repeat that sentiment. I had such a great time this weekend – my only regret is that there weren’t more hours in the day so there could have been more sleeping. But there was so much I want to remember about this weekend – the quiet night in with the girls where we played with sparklers and talked. Going to church with Scott, where we had an excellent discussion about Elizabethtown. The cookout that was attended by so many people I care about and who care about me, which made it much more fun than stressful. Seeing different parts of my life integrate pretty successfully (but how could they not when two adorable little girls were involved?). The s’mores we made as we initiated our new fire pit. Shopping with Dawn and Adriene. Going to Target for snacks (per our concert tradition). The sheer volume of fun of seeing Kelly Clarkson with a bunch of 13-year-olds. Taking Adriene to the airport (and being hungry for pizza at 8am). Watching The Office with Scott and Mike (Dawn was asleep) while baking a cake. Yelling “WAFFLES” with friends who don’t think I am ridiculous for doing so – and having Adriene on the phone when the Waffle House Strikeout Victim actually struck out. And wrapping up the weekend by watching fireworks by the side of the road. It went by so fast, and I’m so glad there are pictures to tell parts of all the different stories that took place. I’ve sort of gotten to the point that this entry has said all I can say right now, even though it’s not everything that could be said by any means.

Mike asked me what I was going to title this post, and I said, “Just ‘Birthday Weekend 2006.’ Should I subtitle it something like ‘This much fun is impossible to top?’” And Mike’s face suddenly looked both happy and sad, and he said, “Yeah, I don’t know if we ever will.” Thanks to all of you who came and made it such a fun time, or sent supplies and presents or called or just enjoyed the many pictures. You are greatly appreciated.

I always wonder about those “Slow: Funeral” signs. Should I actually slow down? Is it rude of me to continue on at my normal speed? Does anyone even notice? Do they have the signs in other parts of the country? When my mom’s cousin (who lives across the street from my parents) lost his father, they put “Slow: Funeral” signs on the road, and people really did slow down. I remember being impressed, just a little bit, that those signs work. Of course, the people slowing down didn’t know if it was our house or their house that was experiencing grief, but it was very nice of them just the same.

I was all set to say that it’s an antiquated custom, but then I remembered something from a book I read a long time ago. In it, a man was remembering how his mother died when he was very young, and he was shocked that the milkman delivered the milk just the same and the mailman didn’t seem to know. How could everything be the same when his mother was gone? When something painful happens, like losing a loved one, it can be completely shattering. It seems that the whole world should know that everything has changed, because everything has changed for you. And the very least I can do, as a fellow human being, is acknowledge that grief by slowing my car down, as if to say, “I don’t know you, but I do know a little bit about the human experience, and I’m sorry for your loss. I hope it was someone who lived a full life, and who didn’t suffer at all. I hope you have friends and family to support you during this time.” (I have time to think all those things, because I’m driving slowly. I have time to look at their well-cared for yard and their front porch with its rocking chairs and the tall trees in the backyard. I have time to notice instead of being lost in my own thoughts or singing along to whatever is playing on my iPod.)

So, I’ve decided I like the “Slow: Funeral” signs. The part of me that likes them is the same part that chooses not to do self-checkout, that likes going to a small church. It’s important to be connected to people. And because of that, even if I don’t know the people who live in the house across the street from my neighborhood, I have slowed down when I passed their house this week, to acknowledge that grief in a small way. It’s a bit of an inconvenience, but it’s inconvenience for the sake of being a little more human.