A Traipse through My Literary Life

Here's a look at what I've been reading the past two weeks. If you can believe it, all of them were purchased by Kirk -- so I say he's got exceptional taste!

Crossing the Desertby Robert J. Wicks

Spiritual Direction: Wisdom for the Long Walk of Faith by Henri Nouwen

As has been clear from recent posts, I've been walking through a desert experience and, as a result, am learning to listen more closely to the life of the heart in this long walk of faith. As such, these two books have been a fitting and tremendous gift to take with me along the path.

Crossing the Desert shares wisdom from the Desert Fathers and Mothers about what happens when we move into the desert. The author applies four questions to the desert experience: What am I filled with now? What prevents me from letting go? How do I empty myself? and What will satisfy me yet leave me open to more? I'm sure you can tell from my recent writings how relevant these questions would be for me to consider right now. Perhaps they'll be relevant for you to consider, too.

The spiritual direction book by Henri Nouwen was published posthumously as a collection of his thoughts on the subject by two people who studied him extensively and knew him well. Some of the writings included in the collection were previously published, and some were excised from his private journals and notes. This book speaks quite sensitively to the life of the heart and how to live from a place of belovedness in Christ. Many sections made me feel as though Nouwen was speaking to me from across a table in a coffeeshop or armchair-to-armchair in his office. He writes with great tenderness and compassion, for he understands all too well the duplicity that can be found in our hearts and the aimless and useless striving we often employ to cope with the world.

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

A gifted and successful writer who wrote five years for GQ (and was nominated for several awards along the way), Gilbert gave it all up to spend a year exploring the balance between pleasure and devotion. The clincher is how she did it: by spending four months in Italy to learn pleasure, four months in India to learn devotion, and four months in Bali to learn a balance between the two.

This book is absolutely a gorgeous read, as well as funny, tender, and even heartbreaking. To be honest, I wrestled at times with her section on devotion (she follows the Yogic tradition), even setting down the book in a huff or wanting to throw it across the room at times because of our major differences in faith, but in the end I found myself grateful, stimulated, and challenged by what she learned from her struggles to attend more faithfully to her faith and meditation practice.

Becoming Who You Are by James Martin

Echoing Silence: Thomas Merton on the Vocation of Writing by Robert Inchausti

These are two excellent books more contemplative in nature.

Becoming Who You Are is written by a Jesuit priest culling primarily from the writings of Thomas Merton and Henri Nouwen on the subject of the true self. I appreciated so much the humble honesty the author brings to this discussion, especially in sharing his own journey to finding his authentic self and walking away from a life of falsity. His story and the gentle way in which he writes moved me to even try to track down his e-mail address online in order to thank him! (I was unsuccessful in this attempt.) In short, this is a great read for those wishing to live a life of true courage and authenticity with a willingness to walk away from the trappings that so often ensnare us. I finished this book in a few hours, which should tell you not only how accessible it is but also how stimulating and deeply felt the material can be if you open your heart to its message.

I'm only about twenty pages into Echoing Silence, but already it has been helpful for the writer in me. It pulls together everything Thomas Merton ever wrote -- either in books, articles, published journals, or letters -- about his vocation as a writer and how he struggled to marry it to his life as a Trappist monk. The book gives a revealing look at Merton's very human side in the ways he struggled with pride and arrogance and even anger at times. By seeing Merton's humanity, him being such a great teacher and modern saint, I am being brought to believe even more in Christ's power to transform hearts, inhabit our being, and even triumph over our inadequacies by ministering His power to others despite our own limitations and failures. Again, this is another great primer on finding the true self, and an encouragement to embrace authenticity.

Life of the Beloved by Henri Nouwen

The Selfless Way of Christ: Downward Mobility and the Spiritual Lifeby Henri Nouwen

I read these two at a monastery in Santa Barbara that we stayed in for a few days last week. Life of the Beloved was a surprise-find in one of their libraries and held me in its grip from the very first page. It reads as a letter Nouwen wrote to his young friend who was seeking the relevance of faith to a secular life (or one lived outside a monastic or religious calling). As you read this book, you are both rooting for his friend to be enlightened and transformed by the words while being enlightened and transformed at a deep and visceral level yourself. I felt fully engulfed in the love of Christ and my place in God's great heart while I read every single page of this short, remarkable book.

The Selfless Love of Christ has been a challenging read for me. As you know, I've been wrestling to "let go of my lists" and stop striving for acknowledgement and worldly gain. Just as its subtitle suggests, this book helps us understand how a life of downward mobility -- a stripping away of our fleshly desires (but not desire itself) -- is the heart and example of Christ, who is the very foundation and model for our faith. I haven't finished this one yet because, as I said, it's been hard! But I do believe it speaks true and tells a message that's worth our embrace. I plan to continue reading it in the coming weeks.

And, up next . . .

The Crime of Living Cautiously by Luci Shaw

Kirk handed this one to me tonight, and I look forward to reading in it about the importance of risk-taking in order to live the lives we were created to live. Should be a good read!

Postnote: I just re-read this post and realized how very much of a book nerd I am. Kirk is, too. We're actually self-proclaimed book addicts. (Remember my post from a few months ago on this subject?) Just to give you a heads-up on our habits of book behavior, when we were on vacation last week, we had to have spent at least $350 on new books. This is more than we spent on food the whole week, I think. And to give you an idea of what this looks like in real life, we had to pack many of the "old" books we had brought with us on the front end of the journey in our checked luggage on the way back just so that we could enjoy some of our new finds on the homebound flight! So, yeah, we're dorks about this. We love bookstores and the feel of new books in hand, the anticipation of how they might help form our souls into what God's making them to be. And Kirk is especially good at finding unique and well-suited-to-the-moment books for both of us. We love this about each other, and we love this about ourselves, period. Can you relate to this at all??

To Be Found in Him

I spent a lot of time this past week reading Philippians 3. You know, the part where Paul says, "You think you've got stuff to brag about? Listen to what I've got." The part where he proceeds to rattle off a mile-long list of credentials that qualify him for saint status in God's Ineffable Hall of Greatness.

Since I've been clutching my own list of what-makes-me-great credentials these days, and fighting tool and nail with God to let me keep it, Paul's question reeled me in. And what can I say? I engaged.

Yes, I do have stuff, I said. See? And I pulled out my very own list -- not a long one, mind you, but a good one. One whose contents mattered, at least to me.

So then Paul pulled his out, too. Oh, I thought. He has a real list, and a long one. Whereas I'm just speculating here.

Because I'm the creator of this list. I'm the one who fawns and pets at it often. I'm the one who tailors it whenever it needs tailoring. And I'm the one hoping it gets me into that Hall of Greatness -- and maybe even nabs me a seat at the banquet high table on opening night.

Whereas Paul had legitimate stuff that even God couldn't dispute. I mean, come on: who else besides Jesus could claim blamelessness under the law?!

Reading Paul's list, I grew significantly smaller. Compared to him, I fell way short. Of course, this shouldn't have surprised me. Just a few days ago, after all, I fell short of Jesus, too.

But then, if you can believe it, Paul flips the tables again. "See this great list of mine?" he asks. "I count it all as trash. I'm throwing it away right now! Just watch me." Rip, rip, rip.

Why does he do this?! The only sane answer is the one he gives for himself:

"I count them as rubbish, in order that I main gain Christ and be found in Him . . . that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and may share His sufferings, becoming like Him in His death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead." (vv. 8-11)

Somehow, Christ's value is worth losing our lists for. And what's more, we're invited into an altogether mysterious life in return. Because let's face it: What, exactly, does it mean to be found in Christ? And what, after that happens, does it mean to be resurrected from the dead? I sure wish I knew. But I have a feeling I'm about to find out in a very real way.

What Happens in Death

On Holy Saturday, the day we usually remember the disciples and their grief, I remembered Jesus. I thought of Paul's teaching in Philippians 2, how Jesus so regarded equality with God a thing not to be grasped that He humbled Himself unto death, even death on a cross. Paul says we are to emulate this humility that leads unto death, and I couldn't help thinking of the death He is trying to accomplish in me as He leads me in this long trek across the grainy wilderness.

I sat meditating on that passage and my own little death for some time, astounded by the connection to this daily reality I have been living, until then a new truth emerged. All at once, like a windfall, it became so obvious that Christ's humility forever exceeds any humility He could even be asking of me in this death knell time. His righteousness was true righteousness, undeserving of death, yet He suffered to die for the love of us anyway. I cannot claim an inch of that kind of righteousness, yet here I kneel, grasping and fighting and kvetching to keep the shards of my life in my fists.

It is fitting that He brought this passage to my attention on Holy Saturday, or Low Saturday, for that is the day Jesus spent inside the tomb. It is the day that, for all intents and purposes, nothing seemed to happen. It is the day He was, truly, dead. A Christ-sized wilderness had sprung up in place of His life, and all that could be seen by the eye was desert and sand and plains devoid of life, leaving us all to grieve in a daze of wonder and confusion.

Yet what happened underneath what the eyes could see? That is where He descended into hell. That is where He overcame death. That is where, in the power and strength of the mighty hand of our God, He gathered the souls of the faithful into His arms and shot His way heavenward.

And that is where life -- the kind you would suffer and die for -- was born. In the seemingly paltry wilderness.

In the Wilderness

Sorry I've been lax in posting lately. It has to do with what I shared recently about being emptied out by God. This is cropping up in all areas of my life, not just writing, and it leaves me feeling empty, empty, empty, like a forever expanding expanse of barren land.

I know it serves a purpose. In fact, on Sunday I realized He's altogether quite intentional with me. I'm in the wilderness, but it's not the first time. The first time was about 10 years ago, when He helped me see I operated my life from the belief that I'm loveable purely for what I do, and do perfectly. He helped me see the folly in this. He helped me learn how to receive love for simply being. He helped me believe I was beautiful just for merely existing. It took about four years of confusion, tumult, anger, apathy, and pain to come into the light on this one. But He was faithful. And faithful even still, as I need to re-learn these truths even still sometimes.

The second time was when He stripped me of every thing and person in my life. When I thought I was moving on to grad school, I got denied entrance. When I turned to others for comfort, I got voicemail every time. When I was interested in new relationships, the roads before me shriveled up and disappeared. Eventually, He even led me to leave my job without another job lined up in its stead, no matter how irresponsible and unjudicious I'd always thought that to be. I was walking in darkness, and it was pitch black. I learned real quick I didn't trust Him that much. But I did eventually learn the true meaning of faith: choosing to walk into black, because you trust the One who holds you. What else could faith possibly be?

This time it's a barren desert. There is light this time, but no signposts. I feel Him on the wind and sense Him in the sand, but it is gritty and dry and lonely and empty. I don't have any reserves of my own. All that I have is given by His hand. All I can do is wait.

I don't know how long I've been walking this wilderness road, to be honest, but I can see sprinklings of it all the way back to December when I wrote this post. And I can see that this turn in the journey plunges deeper than the other two ever did or even could have. The first one toppled outer idols of performance and pleasing others, even God, but it was about opening my eyes to a graven image I didn't know I worshipped in the first place. The second one was a stripping space, where every security and hope and dream vanished so I could turn to and trust in Him alone.

But this third time, oh, this third time. It's a deep and interior and alone time. It's a scooping out of every conscious sense I've carried about myself on the inside. It's about dying to myself and all my thoughts, every single last one of them, for they are idols, idols, idols . . . and in His grace He wants to banish them from my soul.

Solomon and the Lizard

This one's a shout-out to Erin, who promised to comment on my next more trivial post. Well, girl, here it is.

A tiny lizard scooted in the front door of our house this afternoon and had no idea he was marching to his almost-death. He was simply never going to be a match for our hefty boy, Solomon. See?

Sure, that lizard may have been quick as a fish, tucking inside the door faster than Kirk could say "Whoa!" but he vastly underestimated Solomon on two counts:

1. Solomon has nowhere else to be but in this house.

2. Solomon is easily entertained.

Well, maybe not so easily entetained. Mostly, he's just bored, sleepy, and hungry. But lizards? "Where's the fork and napkin?" he cries. "Let's get on the move!"

The lizard snaked into the house, around the table, and under the entertainment center in a flash . . . and then Solomon staked the perimeter.

"Beware," Kirk warned as I walked in a short time later. "We have a little friend in the house -- but don't worry! I think Solomon's got it covered."

And you know what? He did. In fact, we were pretty impressed with our boy. He did not desist from that post next to the entertainment center for one solid one hour. Granted, he lays in fixed spaces for longer periods than that most days, but hey, he doesn't usually stake it out on the concrete floor. Beds are more his style. They remind him of, well, you know: sleep.

And we had drastically underrated Solomon's tenacity. Because you know what he did next? He hulked his massive, gotta-be-at-least-twenty-five-pound mass under the entertainment center -- a space just five inches high but two feet deep -- which means he had to spread himself real thin, which must have been a true first for him, in order to go after that jumpy-legged lizard!

Next thing we knew, he had contorted himself alongside that skinny space and then flushed himself back out of it, covered from head to toe in . . . purple lint balls. Gross! I wiped them off and smoothed him down, but you know what? He went right back to it. He dove back under the entertainment center and yo-yo'd himself around for a good five minutes, popping out every once in a while for breath. I am telling you, the boy is tenacious. He sure can be relentless in his pursuit of the heftier dinner meats. Who knew?

Of course, he got the prize. When we found the two of them together a short time later, Solomon was sitting as pretty as can be under the coffee table, his arms folded underneath him and a superior air of satisfaction emanating forth. The mostly-dead lizard was pleading its life beside him. So what did we do? We did what only a humane couple would do: we grabbed some paper towels, scooped the lizard up, and deposited him outside in the world where he belongs. Only right now he's making his way in that outside world without a tail . . . a tail we trust Solomon will likely expel for us sometime in the night on the carpet. Good grief.

Swimming with Dolphins

About three weeks ago, Kirk took me to Discovery Cove as part of his Valentine's Day gift to me. This is a unique theme park in which you can snorkel with stingrays, sharks, and brightly-colored fish; laze your way through a long, winding river with two waterfalls and a gentle current; sit on the soft-sand beach to watch the trained dolphins swim at their leisure in their three lagoons; and, best of all, swim with the dolphins yourself for a surreal 30-minute block of time.

So, meet Coral, the six-year-old dolphin we got to massage, pet, kiss, and even ride on that great afternoon. She's very friendly. And she's also got a boyfriend who is quite the ladies' man around town.

It was pretty amazing to not only pet and befriend Coral . . . but also to hold her fins as she rode through the water with great force!

Then, the next weekend, as part of our Discovery Cove package, we got free entrance into Sea World, a theme park that, despite my being born-and-bred in Southern California (which also has a Sea World park in San Diego), I'd never visited. We saw pilot whales, more dolphins, walruses, sharks, and even manatees that kiss!

But the most amazing part of the day was, hands-down, the 30-minute "Believe" show with Shamu. I've heard about Shamu my whole life, and I've never been one to hype up on amusement park shows at all, but this one holds an exception. The show is about Shamu and her four other killer-whale friends. They're huge! And so beautiful and powerful.

About twelve handlers run the show (it takes that many to contain the whales!), and their love for the animals is so evident in the way they ride and pet and feed and talk about them. Perhaps what made the show so powerful, besides the tricks and the great visual effects of the four rotating screens on the platform, was that the show was built around story. There's a visual component that tells the story of a boy who loves whales and befriends them in the ocean, and this paves the way for him to be "transformed" into one of the handlers who runs the show.

I didn't expect to get so caught up in one of these shows, especially one with lots of hype and based on a killer whale. I mean, it's just a whale, right? But I loved it. My day would have been made if that was the only thing we saw all day. I guess the bigger blessing is that we got to see all those other things, too. What a one-two punch! This happy couple had a blast.

How He Sometimes Strips Us, or What Writing Means to Me (Part 8)

This past weekend, in celebration and remembrance of our engagement that happened on St. Patrick's Day last year, Kirk took me to our favorite Orlando hotel, the JW Marriott, which I have shared about a few times before. (For those inquisitive types out there who may be somewhat new to this blog, you can read more about those times here and here.)

We spent time at the pool, enjoyed the luxurious bed (I can never get over the splendor of their fabulous beds!), and shared a fantastic meal on Saturday night. It was a meal replete with soul-stirring conversation, a glorious bottle of wine, and melt-in-your-mouth desserts.

The restaurant was a new experience for both of us and, like I said, a fantastic one. The place is high-class, and they serve perfect portion sizes of the most perfectly prepared food, all of it organic and grown either in the garden right outside their doors or brought in from local farmers and fishermen. (For those of you un-health-conscious types, this is not to say that "organic" and "locally grown" translates into "boring" and "blah" food. On the contrary, actually. I enjoyed a very light and tasty shrimp scampi linguini, while Kirk enjoyed fall-apart-in-your-mouth sea scallops and asparagus spears. Yum!)

That was one fantabulously perfect meal, I tell you. I would love to re-live it again.

But the most important aspect of the weekend was quite outside all these things. The most important part of the weekend was the way God showed up when we asked Him to. On our way there, as we were driving away from our home toward the yet-undisclosed-location, I said a prayer out loud in the car that invited God deeper into our time away. We had previously voiced that this weekend was set aside as a devotional one, filled with worship and closeness in Him and the seeking out of His face, so I prayed that He would reveal the deeper heart of His plans for us over the course of the weekend, no matter what that might mean. And in His faithful way, He did just that.

He did this in a number of ways, but I want to share one of the life-crashing ways He did it with me. For some context, I should say that for the past two and a half months, I've been committed to a writing partner I have never met. She contacted me through a mutual friend toward the end of last year, and she lives in Iowa. We agreed to work on "pages," as we've come to affectionately call them, and to send them to each other for review at regular intervals through the mail. Just what this agreement actually means to both of us has morphed several times in the near-three months we've worked at it, as each of us have had to clarify again and again to ourselves what, exactly, our projects are. It has been exciting at times, and it has been flat-out exasperating at others. We've said things to each other like, "I resent your presence in my life, even though I choose for you to be in it" and "I like the way e-mail can keep me from dealing with you." All said in the most affectionate of tones and with the greatest of respect, of course.

The truth on my end of things, though, is that I've dried up like a stick. I'll commit to a project, write ten pages on it, send it to her, and hit that infuriating wall. So then I'll commit to a different project, tell myself, "Yeah -- this is what I should have been committed to doing instead," distance myself emotionally from the previous project, only to slam up against that blank wall of a page a few days later. Pretty much, it's awful. Pretty much, I hate it. Pretty much, it makes me loathe myself.

You know what it feels like? It feels like I've gone all the way back to that writer-poser self I thought I had so successfully sloughed off of my skin. (You know, the one I wrote about here and here.) But as I've faced the fright of the blank page with absolutely nothing soon in coming, the terror of having nothing to say has grown worse and my resistance to sitting down and continuing to try has only grown stronger.

Has my worst nightmare descended finally upon me, I've wondered slowly. Am I a writer with nothing to say?

All of this came to a head this past weekend. As part of our commitment to the devotional aspect of our weekend, Kirk brought along some ivory cardstock cards and proceeded to lead us in a time of giving-over on Saturday night, after we'd returned to the room after dinner. As we sat with these cards, we kept asking ourselves the question, "What would He have us commit to His care and His lordship?" We then would take turns writing things down on the cards before signing and dating them.

On my second card, I wrote, "My writing -- whatever it's meant to be and to be for." I signed and dated it. I put it in the pile. I affirmed in my heart that He means my writing for Him and that He wants to dictate what it becomes. I brought my will into agreement with that belief and went to sleep peacefully upon it.

I did not, however, realize what was waiting just around the corner.

In the morning, Kirk and I left the hotel and stopped by a restaurant for breakfast. We had a great conversation that stirred up a bunch of energy and excitement, and so we decided to stop at Starbucks before going home so we could work out some of that energy in productive activity. He was going to work on his business idea, and I wanted to work on my writing (even though I had no idea, at that point, what that actually meant anymore). But as we drew nearer the Starbucks, the more my enthusiasm faded with every mile and turn. I felt a sinking in my heart. I felt a dense, cold, clay rock begin to ball itself up in my stomach. In actuality, I wanted to throw up.

We decided to sit outside, and Kirk went inside to order our drinks. I pulled out my laptop, opened it up to a brand-new blank page, and stared blankly at the screen. I blinked a few times, since the sun was hitting it, then moved around to a better angle. I stared at the screen some more and then realized: I didn't have anything to say.

Kirk came out with our drinks. I made an effort to smile. (It was a pitiful effort.) Shortly afterward, I closed the laptop and asked if he could pass me a notepad from his backpack. Perhaps if I write it longhand it will come, I thought. Nevermind that I hadn't written in longhand in probably at least six years, but maybe this would do the trick in freeing me up to land upon an idea.

I wrote about a paragraph that was a puking, mewling attempt at prayer. It was riddled with complaints and cries. It testified to my very lost self. Pretty soon, I gave that up, too, and began drawing in the margins with my purple felt pen, making designs and then blotting them out. Kirk watched me for a while and then gently suggested we make our way on home. I shrugged and then let him lead me to the car like I was a blind girl who needed to be steered.

When we got home, I curled up on the couch and faced the wall. I pulled a blanket over my body and closed my eyes tight. I have nothing to say, I admitted to myself in a tiny, tiny voice. I want with everything in me for this not to be true, but it's true. I don't know what to say.

You want to know the point of this whole story? It's to say that even though, in theory, I wanted my work to be God's, what I actually wanted more was to have work. To have written. To have something to say.

"I want to be shiny," I confessed to Kirk a little later, after I'd come to grips with this truth inside myself. That about sums it up.

Because He loves me so much, I believe God is allowing me to come to the end of myself through this whole process. I believe the point is to begin to realize how insufficient I am to control or dictate my own life, and even my own measly words. I believe it's to have absolutely nothing left so that all I have is this big gaping hole that needs Him and Him alone. Because that is His greatest joy: our need of Him, His own sufficiency.

I am only beginning to scratch the surface of what this might mean. But I have hope that the surface is there, that I'm scratching it, and that it's leading to more. I hope you'll accompany me along in the journey. Amen.

One Year Ago This Weekend

Want to know what Kirk and I were doing one year ago this weekend? For one, we were celebrating our first anniversary as a dating couple. As far as the rest goes, I'll let the pictures do the talking . . .

On Friday evening, we were having dinner at Manuels on the 28th, which is -- you guessed it -- a restaurant on the 28th floor of a highrise building. The Bank of America building in downtown Orlando, to be exact.

Kirk reserved a table that overlooks Winter Park, the setting for so many of our visits over the preceding year, and also where he's lived for most of his life.

Can you say, "About to be engaged?" I knew the proposal would likely happen that weekend, but I didn't know it would happen that evening over dessert!

What's this? What's this? It's proof -- that's what! Taken on the beautiful Chain of Lakes Boat Tour, which is one of our favorite things to do on a gorgeous day in Florida.

Before heading over to the downtown Winter Park art festival, we went snooping around the property of an old abandoned home on one of the lakes. Very dangerous trespassing!

And finally, on Sunday, we went to hear the Kiev Symphony Orchestra play at the Bob Carr Center in downtown Orlando. Here I am, in the hotel ahead of time, all dressed up and ready to go!

***

In all, it was quite a weekend, full of wonderful surprises. And this weekend, Kirk has planned a surprise. Yesterday, he sent me a cryptic text message that said, "Be ready tomorrow by noon." When I called to ask what the message was all about, all he said was that we're taking an overnight trip. And when I came home and asked for more information, all he said was, "You'll need to bring something nice for dinner, but also pack your bathing suit."

Curioser and curioser! I guess you and I will have to stay tuned to see what happens!

Lessons from the Pool

When I was a sophomore in high school, I went out for the swim team. My brother and I both did, figuring that swimming since age three for both of us was bound to count for something, and we were right. After a week of time-trial tryouts, we both landed swiftly on the team.

At my first meet, the coach put me in the 500-meter event: twenty laps of the freestyle stroke. In case you don't know, this is the event nobody watches, as it runs over five minutes at its quickest and upwards of nine at its slowest. Couple that with its being run four times in succession -- twice for boys and girls JV and twice for boys and girls varsity -- and it is, hands down, the point at which everyone stands up and takes a break. Except, of course, those poor souls inside the pool.

The first time I swam this event, I didn't know all these things. I didn't know this 500-free event was the most ominous and foreboding of them all, not to mention the most boring. All I knew was that my coach had put me in it, and that meant I would swim it.

Except that about three minutes before the girls JV event was to start, I found out I needed a lap counter. That's right: a lap counter. This event is so long and disorienting, it requires asking some merciful person to stick around for the whole event and count your laps with you. It means having them dip a huge, white, rectangular board with the bold, brazen, blue number of your lap into the pool every time you reached the far end so you don't lose count and can perhaps plan a little speed strategy.

I had no idea I needed one of these lap counters. In a scramble, I ran to a friend and asked if she'd be there to count my laps. Having just learned what this mammoth of a swim actually meant in the first place (twenty laps, really?!) and that I was actually going to swim it, I waited with dry mouth and jumbled nerves for her to say yes. (She did.)

And so, shaken and very nervous, I assumed my position on the mark board. I looked at my friend at the other end of the pool, now sitting there with the lap counter boards and looking very small across that wide expanse of water, and realized I was about to jump into a literal pool of the unknown. I had no idea how I would do it. I had no idea if I had even the strength to do it. All I knew was that once that shrill whistle sounded, I would jump in the water and then put one hand in front of the other again and again and again. All I knew was that I would do what I had been trained to do: swim.

To my surprise -- and the surprise of everyone else! -- I placed first in that event. I placed first the second time I did it, too. By the third time around, my coach pushed me up to varsity, and that's point at which I began to lose. Badly. From that point forward, knowing I would lose and how far I had to go, swim meet days became almost unbearable.I still participated in meets (I had to, to stay on the team), but it was the 5:30 a.m. morning practices and the afternoon swim period practices I craved. It was the missives from the coach to swim a 200-free or a 100-breast or some kind of inordinately hard speed drill that I gobbled up like candy. It was, in no short order, the practice, not the meets, I loved.

It has been twelve years since that time, and I haven't swam serious laps since. At least, not until this week. This past Saturday, Kirk and I were at Sea World. The Sunday before that, we were at Discovery Cove. Both of these are water-intensive theme parks, and both of these are filled with animals who love to swim. I gawked at their magnificence and marveled at their sheer love of the water. And what can I say? Their ethos for the water got to me. I came home from Sea World last Saturday and headed straight for the gym, swim suit in tow.

I'll say right off the bat, having completed two workouts of twenty laps each, that I am nowhere near as good a swimmer as I was twelve years ago. My form is off, my breathing's shallow, and my muscles have a long way to go to glide me smoothly and swiftly back through the water. But I'm choosing my love of the water and the movement of my body within it over all these other things. I'm exploring what it feels like to let my body and the water -- and not my brain or expectations -- do the talking. I'm asking myself to swim each day for love of water. To swim for love of the feel. And maybe, just maybe, I'll learn to apply this same grace to life outside the pool just someday soon.

Our God Is So Ingenius

As many of you know, when I first moved to Winter Park I was going to write full-time instead of working a regular job. After a couple months, I discovered that was a plunge I was not ready to take. So, I started hunting for work. Where did I direct most of my hopes? Relevant Media Group.

As many of you also know, Kirk has been working on a degree in Entertainment Business over the course of this past year. (And he just completed his last class on Saturday. Bravo for him!) Along about three-quarters of his way through the program, he started thinking about life after Full Sail. Where would God have him go? One night over sushi, he shared that if he ever worked for someone else again, he would want it to be Walden Media.

And you know what? God gave both of us those dreams but in unexpected channels. Instead of working for Relevant, I got to write for them. Instead of working for Walden, Kirk got to independently contract his services to them as the marketing coordinator for Amazing Grace here in the Orlando area. And what's more, both these gigs were centered on Wilberforce's story -- something we've both cared about for longer than this film's been around or even in the works. Pretty cool, huh?

When Kirk pointed this out to me tonight, we got dazzled by God's genius. After that, we scratched our heads. What on earth is God up to with us, anyway? He sure takes us along the most inventive of roads on this journey of life we are sharing together. I, for one, am glad to be upon it.

Pushing Wilberforce a Little Further

An article I wrote for Relevant Magazine Online just went live on their site. In it, I put forth a challenge to take Wilberforce's legacy one step further. Will you take up the challenge and answer the question? Will you share your thoughts with the rest of us?

Worshipping with Chris Tomlin

On Saturday night, Kirk and I were privileged to see Chris Tomlin in concert with some friends at a local church. Let me tell you, it is one incredible thing to be led in worship by the man who has almost single-handedly changed the face of worship as we know it in the past 10 years.

Oh, and the guy who is credited with the other half of this amazing feat? His name is Matt Redman, and he was there, too.

After starting us off with two high-energy songs -- I think they were "Your Grace Is Enough" and "Glorious" -- Chris greeted the crowd and said this was going to be a night of praise. "Tonight is not about us," he said, with utmost sincerity in his voice. "It's not about you, and it's not about me. It's about worshipping our God and King as the body of Christ, right here together."

Which is exactly what we did. For three full hours. We sang "Indescribable." "How Great Is Our God." "How Can I Keep From Singing Your Praise?" "Blessed Be the Name." We sang the very first song he ever wrote, "We Fall Down," which I heard for the first time ever in a chapel during my college years at Biola. And we sang his beautiful rendition of "Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone)" that was released alongside the Wilberforce film earlier this month.

What an amazing privilege it is to sing the praises of our God alongside the physical body of Christ! It is a privilege that is in no way lost on me.

What Writing Means to Me (Part 7)

I've written bits and pieces of my journey as a writer in this series, but I haven't talked much about actual progress. Or actual projects, I should say. This is where it gets comical and highly revealing. In the interest of authenticity, and in order to shed light on where I am today, I thought it high time I shared.

As I've already detailed previously, I took a creative writing class geared toward short stories in my senior year of college. (Rebecca took that class with me, too, in fact.) I wrote three short stories that semester, all of them pitiful, and left the class in a greater quagmire of self-loathing and confusion than when I began. I had officially entered my "tortured artist" phase.

The following semester, I took a class on writing for children. Besides reading lots of great contemporary children's lit, our first assigment was to come up with five high concepts for children's novels, which basically means creating story ideas that can be boiled down into a sentence. After this, we had to pick one idea and develop it into an outline. Then we had to write the first 30 pages, pitch a query letter to an actual publisher, and wait and see what happened.

Mine was one of two novels that got a favorable response from a publisher: Scholastic wanted to see the full manuscript -- wow! The only trouble was, I had written just 30 pages. I was about to graduate from college. I was looking for jobs and trying to finish a senior thesis. I didn't have much time for writing a novel.

So I asked my professor for his advice.

"Do you realize how rare it is to get a response from a publisher?" he asked. "Especially when your query was unsolicited and unagented?"

"I think so," I said in a small, small voice.

"You have to finish it," he said. "How could you possibly not?"

I agreed with him and kept on writing. I took a graduation trip up north to do extra research on land deeds and farms. (My novel was set on a farm in Central California during the Great Depression.) In all, I wrote about 30 more pages but then stopped. I got stuck, or I got feedback -- I don't know which -- and never finished. I still wonder how things would have turned out if I'd actually finished that book. Maybe someday I will.

Over the next two years, as I was working out my thoughts on calling and vocation in real life, I started a new novel about a girl who -- surprise, surprise -- was working out issues of calling and vocation in her life, too. I moved to Missouri and, while there, petitioned into a members-only writer's group and kept plugging away at this book. When I moved back to California not long after, I gave this entire book up. I had, again, hit the 70-page-mark wall.

I should probably mention here that I was living in my writer-poser phase this entire time. I was enamoured with the idea of being a writer, being an editor, and being in publishing. I was stunned by the freedom of expression I could find in writing, since I had been a rather shy, repressed person in my younger years, but I didn't know what this meant. You can't just move from sharing nothing to sharing anything and/or everything in one fell swoop, you know. At least, I couldn't. I felt tortured, totally hung up on my own hang-ups and unable to see my way out of them.

Along about this time, after I'd moved back to California, my writing aspirations went underground and my hopes for an academic life bubbled up. This post here details the way I was led eventually back to the page in that long saga. And if you want to know what I've been up to ever since, you're going to have to stay tuned . . .

Kirk on the Radio!

Kirk was interviewed today, along with Ken Wales, the executive producer of Amazing Grace, on a local radio talk show that streams live to the internet and across the nation. It's called Steve Brown Etcetera.

The segment with Ken Wales starts at 20:00, and then Kirk takes over at 29:00 to discuss the modern-day movement to eradicate slavery. (You can scroll forward to these times on your media player once you download the show.)

My hub does a perfectly polished job. Check it out!

Gleanings from Amazing Grace

This is probably obvious from the trailer, but with all the talk about modern-day slavery we've been having and the connection this film has to the Amazing Change campaign, I thought I should at least clarify something: this film is not about the modern movement. It is, in the purest sense, a historical bio-pic.

That said, here are some of the manifold encouragements you will receive when watching the film this weekend:

1. You will see that faith does not require a retreat from the world to be effective and substantive.
2. You will see that a person can have influence in the exact sphere in which he or she has been gifted. (What sphere has He given you?)
3. You will see the strength that's gained from community when a group, however small, unswervingly commits to something bigger than itself.
4. You will see that unity in one point is sometimes more important than unity in every point, as demonstrated by Wilberforce and his band of co-belligerents.

And finally, you will see humor. You will see friendship. You will see fervency and passion and love and pain and heartbreak and victory. When you get back from the theatre, stop by and share your thoughts!

Meeting My Diana?

As some of you may remember from this post here, I have been waiting for a kindred spirit for a long time now. About a month ago, I thought I spied her inside my local Starbucks. I felt a connection with a girl sitting across the room on an overstuffed couch while I sat next to the window at a table, typing away on my computer. I made eye contact with her a few times, and we even exchanged a few smiles. This is significant, since I do not often smile at strangers and even less frequently make prolonged eye contact. Eventually, though, she got up and left, and I had done nothing about it.

That same day, right after she left, I started an essay that began, "I think my Diana just walked out the door." I titled it "Waiting for My Diana." Though I never finished that essay, the story serves as a good illustration for the hope I've continued to hold that a Florida-based kindred spirit will stumble on into my life.

Tonight may have been the night. I met a girl named Lauren. She and her husband were our invited guests to an advance screening of Amazing Grace. Kirk has known them for years and even told me about her two and a half years ago, when we first met on the cruise to Ireland. When I met her husband last month at an arts gathering for our church, he spent about five minutes with me before echoing the same thing Kirk has been saying all this time: "We really need to get you and Lauren together."

Well, tonight that finally happened. While Kirk distributed information about the film to the line of people outside the door, I was privileged to spend some time with Lauren. And here is what I learned about her. I learned that she loves writing and that her favorite kind of books are the nonfiction spiritual reflection type, just like me. I learned that she loves Anne Lamott, Donald Miller, and Lauren Winner, who are among my top favorites, and that she's been meaning to re-read Winner's book Girl Meets God, which is a book I read five years ago and just started re-reading this month. I learned, too, that she majored in English and is not native to Florida, either.

These are just the surface details, but perhaps the most telling thing is that I opened up to her about my writing in a way I haven't done with a stranger in a very long while. (Usually I have trouble describing the kind of work I'm attempting to do.) After a prolonged bit of time sharing about myself -- and, specifically, at a depth of sharing how God's recent work in my life is affecting my writing -- I got self-conscious and said, "I need to stop blabbering!" And do you know what she said to me? She said, "No! Go on! I want to know everything about you!"

Wow. I've never had someone say that to me after knowing me just thirty minutes. In fact, I'm not sure I've ever had someone other than my husband say something that direct to me before. It really made my jaw drop.

Needless to say, Lauren's warmth and enthusiasm and definitely her shared interests endeared her to me. After the film we exchanged phone numbers, of course, and I plan to call her this weekend to set a coffee date. I have great hopes she is just the kind of friend I have been praying for all this while.

Oh, and by the way: For those of you who have no idea what I mean by all that Diana stuff, I highly recommend that you visit your local library this weekend and borrow the Anne of Green Gables DVD.

Be a Modern-Day Abolitionist

It's been a long time coming, but here is some information about modern-day slavery and how alive and well it is today. This article says it way better than I ever could, plus the writer is someone we met at the Wilberforce conference, so I know she knows what she's talking about. :)

Article on Wilberforce and the march to end modern-day slavery

Tomorrow, over 5000 churches across America will unite in singing the hymn "Amazing Grace" for Amazing Grace Sunday. Pastors will share about the film and the modern movement from the pulpit, and people will sign the petition to end slavery, in its many mutilated forms, now, once and for all, forever. You can be a modern-day abolitionist and sign the petition, too, by visiting the Amazing Change campaign website.

The film opens this coming Friday. We hope 7 to 10 million people go see it. To be more specific, we hope you go see it . . . and walk away changed, with great hope in your heart for the way small groups that band together can really change the world. Perhaps you, too, will belong to one such band someday.

What Forgiveness Means, Maybe

In case you were wondering, I am still working on forgiveness. I don't do a great job of it most of the time, but I do think my heart is moving in the direction required to offer it up eventually. Want to know why? Because this thought keeps resounding inside my head:

Perhaps forgiveness means trusting God is big enough to handle it.

What this means is that perhaps when a person chose, and kept choosing, to do something that ripped my heart to pieces and made me wonder if my heart, soul, and body were, in fact, worth anything at all, God saw it happen, knew how small and discarded and alone it would make me feel . . . and allowed it to happen anyway.

What it means, perhaps, is that despite assaults against my very soul, God's goodness is bigger still, for all that He's provided in return: a time to heal, the gradual replacement of lies with truth, great love and affirmation from those around me, and the granting of dreams bigger than any I'd ever have dreamed for myself.

Perhaps it means that we are, each one, upon a journey only He can determine the end of, and that it's His job to weave it and ours simply to follow. Perhaps this applies even to those who wounded us.

Perhaps, in the end, it means He is about our greatest good and that He intends, ultimately, for us to trust Him. Perhaps it means that what He intends for us -- wrapped up in a plan that may even include those wounding moments that tripped us up from believing in His plan in the first place and got us thinking we'd be stuck in that abused and painful place forever -- is big enough to overcome all that happens, ever, because He is just that sovereign and capable and intentional and big.

Rumoriffic

I just found out a rumor's been spreading about me back home: that I am pregnant. Ha-ha-ha. That's hilarious! But so not true.

It's weird to find out people are talking about you when you're not around. Kind of like an entity separate from yourself has gotten up and begun a new life for itself in the world without your knowledge or even your input, having an effect nonetheless on other people. It feels kind of icky, actually.

Of course, true friends, like the one I talked to today, go straight to the source, and heck if I should care what all the rest should think. But still, it's odd. Has that ever happened to you?

Find a Stranger, Pick Them Up?

While driving to pick up dinner from the best sushi place on the planet last night, I saw a middle-aged black woman standing at the bus stop right across the street from the restaurant. She was wearing a long, heavy coat, and she had a small roller suitcase propped beside her. I wondered if I should ask if she needed a ride somewhere but decided to wait until after I picked up the food, since it was almost time for the restaurant to close.

When I stepped outside my car, I heard music coming from across the street. The music was kind of off-key and a cross between praise songs and 80s hits. It was the woman; she was singing to keep herself warm. I stared at her for a moment, totally taken in by the freedom she was apprehending by doing this, and then stepped inside the restaurant.

When I came out, she was still there, and still singing with gusto. I smiled and made my way to the car, wondering again if I should offer to give her a ride wherever she needed to go. I thought again of her heavy coat and the cold air and wondered if a warm cup of coffee wouldn't do her some good as well. I turned the car onto the street, made my way up to the stop sign so I could turn around, and felt incredibly jittery. I'd never done something like this before! I wasn't sure I had the guts to pull it off.

Then I looked ahead and saw, making its way down the street, a big purple bus. I wondered if it was coming to pick her up. I waited at the stop sign to see if it would stop and let her in. It did, and she did. And there went my opportunity to help a stranger in need.

I'm wondering if any one of you has ever chanced into a moment like this -- an opportunity to help someone or simply offer kindness to a face you don't know. Did God show up in the moment? Did He overcome your fear of rejection, ridicule, or being taken advantage of? Did you know it was a moment you had to take? Did you ultimately decide not to take it?

I'm asking this for two reasons. One, I'm surprised by how taken I was by this woman and wanted to somehow connect with her. Was it a moment provided by God? Did I fail by not ensuring I found her before the bus did? And two, as I've shared in comments on two blogs now, Laura's and Al's, I've stumbled upon an idea to do even more of these things with complete strangers and am entirely scared of doing it. Laura and Al have been asking people to think of something they could do with $100 to expand the kingdom of God in their own sphere, and my idea is to buy coffee for 20 different people and offer to share a conversation with them. How do I muster the courage to do it?