The Path to Light and Life

The past few days, I feel like I've been sinking into a quagmire from which I haven't known how to scrabble my way out. I feel like one of those plastic accordion toys from childhood that springs up really long when opened but, when closed, needs to be compressed down real tight, so tight it fits into the palm of your hand once the task of closing it has been accomplished. It takes a little jiggering with that plastic toy to get all the layers of the accordion to fall, one on top of the other, behaving enough to be squashed down flat.

That's how I feel in this place: like I'm jiggering with my heart, trying to squash it down flat, trying to make it behave. Only when I say "behave," I'm really saying that my heart doesn't get to have a voice. That instead, it needs to hurry up and get things back together. That it needs to make other people happy instead of sad, in whatever way it can figure out how to do that. That it needs to fix whatever it broke, and fast.

In other words, I turn on it, disowning it, castigating it, shaming it.

I become so fixated on this -- figuring out some way (any way!) to fix what I have done, to reverse the pain I'm causing, to smooth down these rough edges I've now made sharp by speaking aloud some dark and scary thoughts in a relationship -- that I barely notice what is happening to my heart. It is being squashed like an accordion, forced to fit into perfect symmetry so it can be closed down into watertight quarters. It is being covered with my fist and turned over and over like Play-Doh that's being smashed into a tiny ball. It is being lowered into a deep, dark well, looking up at me from the slowly lowering bucket, my silhouette a shadow in the light of life above, my hand on the chain its own betrayal, a quick flick of my wrist upending the bucket as my heart freefalls into the watery depths below where it will go nowhere but down, down, down.

When I was at the monastery last week, there was a brief 12-hour period on Thursday when I was set free from these chains of suffocation and despair. I felt like some invisible string had been cut that allowed my heart to roam free and breathe the fresh, clean air under the blue sky in a dandelion-filled meadow. And in that period of time, you will not believe the kind of life that sprang out of the many little nooks and crannies of my heart. First, it was thoughts like, "This is who I am" or "This is who I am becoming" as I stumbled upon or remembered different thoughts or truths of myself. Then it moved to thoughts like, "This is what matters to me in relationship" and "Maybe I will do this or that with my life."

The world felt full of possibility. I began to feel industrious and productive. I felt incredibly creative and willing to try things I was averse to before, especially in my writing, willing to tinker and play. I felt greater ownership of who I am as an individual and where I am going. I felt responsible for myself and my life, and that was a good feeling instead of a scary one. I felt aware of my separateness from every other human being on this earth, and was faced with the idea that such separateness was right and good. I thought about what made up my idea of relational health, and I felt an awareness of new life in owning these values in my life and relationships.

Unfortunately, that romp through the meadow slowly came to a close that evening. I could feel the darkness and the fear closing back in, perhaps in the dawning knowledge that we would be returning down the mountain the next day. The dark clouds of doom that stifle my heart moved in and hovered for a handful of days. I felt helpless beneath its cover, cowering to its demands like a limp, wet rag. Every timid attempt I made to remember the light and life of that day of play in the meadow was stamped out, like a thin breath expiring through a tiny opening that is present for a moment and then gone.

Last night, though, I caught sight of that playful, romping girl in the meadow. We had been in a small car accident earlier in the evening, a hit on our bumper after one of the signal turns on our drive home from school. In the pressure of the moment at the scene of the accident, we made the decision to let the other driver go. The cars were undamaged, and no one was visibly hurt. The other driver didn't appear to speak much English, nor do I believe he had insurance. He seemed positively nervous that Kirk was calling the police to file a report.

In a state of grace, we decided not to finish the call to the police and let the man go. Yet after he drove away, we were immediately bombarded with second thoughts and doubts. Not to even file a report? Not to get any insurance or contact information at all? Not to even have the freedom to file a claim and allow our insurance company to cover what it could of potential medical expenses? If we woke the next day with damaged necks and shoulders due to whiplash, this meant we were solely responsible for the financial repercussion. In the moment, we had accepted that possibility, but later we regretted its brazenness. Kirk, especially, mourned not having secured better options for us.

Through the evening, we exhibited gentleness toward one another. We kept icing our necks. We prayed for God to be present. I confess that it was hard to sit with the aftermath of a decision that maybe wasn't the wisest to have made, and to watch Kirk wrestle with his own part in having made it as the male protector of our family. But I was also aware that we had made the decision together and that, no matter what, I love this man. One decision would not alter our life in some irreparable way. One decision would not define either of us in God's eyes or the eyes we have toward one another. One decision could not stack up to the many decisions we make every day in care of each other.

And that is where the romping girl in the meadow showed up. We were laying in bed later in the evening, talking quietly and gently with one another, and I said, "I love you." My mind began spinning on love and what it means to me, how that day it had meant choosing to forgive a quick decision because of what I knew of the bigger scope of who Kirk is and the love we share, how it had meant speaking words of gentleness to soothe the pain of shame and regret in his eyes, how it had meant choosing to be in each moment, present, with the unfortunate reality and the love that we share, coexisting. And it felt good to choose this approach to my life.

I guess what I am learning is that living in accord with the stifling accordion's demands seems only to deplete life from my heart, while living with my hands open to the possibilities of who I am becoming, what is important to me, the values I will inculcate in my life, and the way I want to nurture and invite life into my relationships seems to produce a vibrant sense of light and life. Choosing to live each day in light of this second path is difficult because it means leaving the toy accordion back home in the corner of the playroom, perhaps discarded forever, and stepping outside into a world that is fresh and new with very little experience in that world yet behind me. But I think it is worth it. Worth it enough to give it a try. Worth it enough to begin to carve my own distinct, individual path to light and life in my world, whatever form that life and light may take.

A Swollen Toe, a Bruised Tailbone, a Pinched Elbow, and a Discombobulated Bag

After about nine hours of travel through the night, in which Kirk did not sleep at all and I only slept one hour, and during which I attracted all of the above-mentioned maladies, we are finally home.

We were zombie-eyed as we shuffled from the terminal to the baggage claim, just hoping the discombobulated bag made it here safely. Thankfully, it did. (This was an issue with an oversized duffel that we purchased for carting our Christmas goods home, the zipper of which chose to break in the baggage line at the airport, forcing us to leave it in the hopefully capable hands of the baggage officer to fix for us after she sifted through it for any no-no items.) And then we dragged ourselves to the taxi line at the curb, thankful to let the cabbie load our bags into the trunk as we fell into the back seats and let him drive us home.

Now that we are home, we and the cats have spent the day piled on the bed in sleep and reacquantaince. After I post this, I'll be heading back to bed, resting my body, resting my mind, resting my heart.

Thank you for all your kind and tender comments on my last post. It has been a difficult seventy-two hours, starting with one of the most difficult conversations I have ever had in my life with someone I love very much. I carried the conversation with me to the monastery and pretty much carted it around with me everywhere I went. It was always on my mind. It was always plaguing my heart. I was trying to see my way through it. I still am, and probably will be for a while. For now, I alternate between a slow, leaden feeling in my heart and in my gut that makes me feel like I can't breathe and that I'm going to be sick, and a lighter reprieve that tells me this step was important and will be gotten through. The periods of reprieve are less frequent, but I think they have much to teach me. Perhaps in the coming days and weeks and months, their place in my life will grow larger and more representative of the place I will henceforth call home for my heart.

I realize much of what I'm writing here may not make sense, is rather vague, and quite unexpected. Some of that is intentional. Other parts of it are simply the truth of where I am: in vague, unexpected, unsensical-ness. But I trust that I'm making slow progress, and I'll be faithful to watch and learn as I go, and to share what I can, when I can.

For now, it's back to bed for me. Love to all of you. And thanks for your care and your love and your prayers. They mean more to me than you can know.

It's Been a Hard Two Weeks

I haven't posted much here in the past two weeks. This is partly because we've been on vacation and doing things with other people and away from our usual routine of life at home, which affords me the time and space to think regularly of blog posts and upload photographs and just generally be on the scene. But it's also partly to do with this having been a difficult trip for me in unexpected ways, and I haven't known how to think about this or talk about this, much less write about it in this open space here.

But it's true. In all my expectation of a restful, joy-filled time of visiting with loved ones for two straight weeks, the airplane plopped down on California soil and I proceeded to have an emotional, raw, ragged time of it. My heart's been bleeding open. I have felt a continuous swirling confusion. I have felt pain. I have felt anger. I have felt scared.

I. Did. Not. Expect. To. Feel. This. Way. At. All.

I have wanted to run and hide and not let this be true. I have not -- and still do not -- feel up to the challenge of facing all these facts and feelings, much less surrendering myself to the long process of growth that it will take to move through it and emerge on the other side, somehow stronger and more fully alive. It feels too big and too scary. But I am going to try.

Kirk and I are heading up to Santa Barbara today. We're going to spend two days at our favorite monastery, on top of a hill overlooking the vast ocean, participating in the hours with the brothers living there and taking hikes together. I went to this monastery for a solitary retreat when I first learned I was getting a divorce several years ago; it is the place I went to sit with grief and anger and questions with God. It is the place where I first learned that grief is a process that will double back on itself through the time it takes to move through it. Now I am in a different place, and I am no longer grieving my divorce, but this feels like grief of a different sort. And I am thankful for the quiet time to let it speak, to enter in. I pray that God will meet me there, and hold me, and sit with me in full acceptance and love.

The Spiral Staircase

After spending this past week busy with family and friends -- coffee with Kate (twice!), Joan of Arcadia episode fests with Mom, helping to decorate the family Christmas tree, silliness with You Tube videos with my brother and his fiancee, a blessedly full eight-hour day of conversation with Sara, Christmas at Mom's and Christmas at Dad's, plus introducing Kirk to my 30-plus-member extended family on Christmas night -- Kirk and I set off in my dad's truck this afternoon for a little bit of "us" time. Which led us promptly to our local Borders bookstore. (Of course.)

Kirk intended to pick up a few DVDs since they were having a 3-for-2 sale, but he didn't find what he was looking for. I intended to pick up the classic text on boundaries, since they've been on my mind of late and I think I'm moving into a new season of reestablishing more of them in my life. But along the way, I also picked up a book I didn't expect to find. It's called The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness, by Karen Armstrong.

I've seen Karen Armstrong's books around the bookstores for many years, and especially noticed them when I was managing a Barnes & Noble a handful of years ago. She's a guru on comparative religion, with books like A History of God and Islam: A Short History to her credit. For some reason, I have always shied away from her books, and I think this is because I have often confused her for Elaine Pagels, who writes often on the gnostic gospels and whom I therefore have not had much interest in reading.

But when I saw about seven copies of The Spiral Staircase on the shelf today, I picked it up. (As a former bookstore manager, I know seven copies of one book -- in paperback, no less -- equals something probably important, given how limited bookstore shelf space actually is.) I was intrigued by the subtitle's reference to the author's climb out of darkness, which was obviously spiritual in nature, given that the book was in the general religion section. But what specific kind of darkness, I wondered?

Then I read the back of the book, which shared that Armstrong entered a convent at age seventeen in 1962, eager to meet God . . . and left after seven years. The story contained in this book was about her journey into life once outside the convent walls, though it was a journey fraught with difficulty, disillusionment, confusion, illness, and pain. And yet, by the subtitle's promise, it was a journey out of darkness into light.

I sat down on a leather chair and began to read the preface, and I was hooked. She speaks disarmingly about her decision to enter the convent, about what she thought she would find and why she wanted to find it, and about the political tensions of the day, both within and without the Catholic church. Her words carry weight. And her willingness to share with boldness and honesty about the road she has walked, facing even the errors and the pain dead-on, sparing nothing, moved me.

Now I own the book and have just finished the preface. This feels like an important book in my life, in much the same way that Kathleen Norris's The Cloister Walk was important in my life several years ago. I am not exactly sure why this is so, but part of it may have to do with how one learns to have perspective about one's life. For instance, Armstrong shares in the preface that after writing her first book, Through the Narrow Gate, about those seven difficult years she spent as a nun, she published a second book about her first years outside the convent called Beginning the World that she now considers a mistake, saying, "It was far too soon to write about those years. . . . I was certainly not ready to see this phase of my life in perspective." The Spiral Staircase is her attempt to retell that story.

I guess what I love about finding this book is not just the chance to hear her story, which I find intensely interesting, but also how she learned to take a new perspective of her life as she grew through it, even sharing near the end of her preface that "we should probably all pause to confront our past from time to time, because it changes its meaning as our circumstances alter." Fascinating. And somehow laced with grace.

I Just Unsubscribed from All My Business Blogs

As I shared in my Bloglines review post, I've been using Bloglines to keep up with favorite blogs and new blogs, and to weed out blogs I discovered I didn't actually want to follow. I shared, too, that it didn't take long to unsubscribe from the nonstop strings of news feeds because keeping up with them made me feel like I was in constant hyperventilation mode. And just today, after four weeks of letting the posts in my business blog category pile up, one on top of the other so that they were chock full to overflowing, I finally went through and unsubscribed from each and every one of them.

Man, does that feel like an amazing, declarative act.

More and more these days, I'm gaining clarity that leaving full-time work in June was not so much about answering a call to business as it was about embracing the way God made me: with a heart that cares for people and their journeys through life with God. I've been wondering in recent weeks if it's actually a call to ministry I answered without knowing it. (And just saying "call to ministry" feels weird, because it's not as though I ever see myself becoming a pastor or a missionary or holding some specific church role someday.)

I continue not to know where all of this is heading or where I will end up, and I'm okay with that. It's enough for me to have a firmer grasp on who I am and what's important to me, flowing out of the way God made me, and to keep going along for the ride, trusting that each and every part of this journey will play an important role in the stops ahead. Somehow, business school will be important, whether in an obvious or not-so-obvious way. Somehow, my work on SC will have been important, whether it comes to see the light of day or not. Somehow, God is leading me along somewhere, whether I get to know the destination spots in advance or not. And all of that is okay by me these days. I'm content with the not-knowing, knowing that this is all still leading me somewhere good and right and real.

But none of that means I have to keep up with the world of business through business blogs and continued subscriptions to Inc., Fast Company, and Fortune magazines. I know enough now to know this much: that world just isn't for me. What freedom such knowing brings. What relief.

One Happy Girl

Well, the camera fiasco has been resolved, but not anywhere near in the way we thought it would be.

After working for three days with Fedex on the phone and getting no information, Kirk finally settled into detailing the situation to the vendor in an e-mail. (He had tried to reach them by phone yesterday, but for some reason they were closed.)

While he was composing the e-mail, I noticed there were gardeners working in the yard next door.

"Hey, maybe one of them knows something," I said to Kirk. "Maybe one of them is G. Ramirez. Should we go out there and talk to them?"

Of course, by "we," I meant "him."

So Kirk went outside on a mission. When he came back, he looked dazed and said it was kind of strange. He had asked the men if anyone there was named G. Ramirez, and they all pointed to one of the older guys. Kirk approached the man and asked if his name was G. Ramirez, and the man said yes. Then Kirk asked if he had signed for a package last Saturday, and the man said no.

"Well, we have a signature for G. Ramirez on file for a missing package," Kirk said, "and you happen to be G. Ramirez. Are you sure you didn't sign for anything?"

"No, no . . . no package," the man said in broken English. "I no sign for package. When I sign for package, I put on front door."

"Okay, well, don't worry about it," Kirk said, and then casually mentioned that since my dad was a cop we were sure to get it resolved. And then he came back to the house.

When he relayed all of this to me, I couldn't believe it. Here was a man who said he was G. Ramirez, and he was right there in front of us, and yet he denied having signed for it, meaning we couldn't do anything more. I just couldn't believe the craziness of this situation, and neither could Kirk. We stood there at the front window, staring at them.

A few minutes later, Kirk got on the phone to call Fedex again. He was hoping to get more answers than the call us back tomorrow line he had continued to get every time he called.

I went in the other room to unpack some of our bags. Suddenly, right outside the bedroom window, it sounded like someone had started up a lawnmower. I looked outside, and sure enough, the same men working next door had now moved into my mom's yard . . . which means not only does G. Ramirez do the yard for the lady next door, but he's also one of my mom's yard men! Even more proof that he was probably the same guy who signed for the package. Who else could have been at my mom's house with that exact same name when she wasn't here??

I wanted to confront the man again so badly, but really, what could we do? Force the guy to bring the package back from his house? No. Call the cops? That seemed a little extreme, especially since he denied having done it. And would any of that hoopla have been worth it? Probably not, especially since we were likely to get a claim resolved between Fedex and the vendor, even if it took a long while to do it. I just kept thinking about that man's daughter, how happy she would probably be to get such an extravagant gift from her dad on Christmas morning, something totally unexpected and beyond what he would normally be able to give. It made me sad, but it also drove me crazy.

So I did the only thing I knew to do: I called my mom. (She had left earlier to clean out her classroom at school.) When I told her what happened with the yard men, she said I should try to talk to the main guy, Alex, who owns the business and is in charge. She said he speaks good English and is very nice. And since she had a question about her bill that I could legitimately ask him, it would be easy to break the ice.

I took a printout of the Fedex signature with me and went outside to talk to him.

Alex was so kind. Very honest. I could tell within ten seconds that he knew nothing about the situation. He said they hadn't even been in the neighborhood on the day the delivery happened. He also said he didn't have an employee by the name of G. Ramirez and proceeded to point out the names of everyone there. No G. Ramirez among them. (It turned out that Alex was the one Kirk had talked to before, and he had somehow misunderstood the question about his name being G. Ramirez.)

I showed him the printout of the signature, but he didn't recognize it. Besides, most of the guys who work for him don't know how to write. And since the question I needed to ask him on behalf of my mom required that he write something down for her, I was able to see his penmanship, too, which was nowhere close to matching the signature on file for the package.

During this time, the lady next door had stepped outside and was standing in her driveway watching us talk. She's somewhat eccentric and not altogether friendly, so I waved to her from the curb to let her know I wasn't there to do any harm. She yelled something at us in her usual crabby way.

When I was done talking to Alex, I decided to go up and talk to her. Who knows? Maybe she received the package by accident. Sinec she's not the most friendly neighbor in the world, I wouldn't have put it past her to refuse to deliver it to my mom, to just wait my mom out until my mom came calling around the neighborhood looking for it.

Turns out she remembered a Fedex delivery truck stopping by last week. They had parked right in front of her house, she said, and then walked over toward my mom's house. No, she didn't remember seeing anyone at my mom's house when this happened. And "oh crap," she said in response to my telling her about the missing package. "That's ridiculous," she said, standing there in her nightgown and her oversized glasses. She was quite the character.

So I trudged back to the house with no further clues as to what had really happened to the package but at least the knowledge that it wasn't the lawn guys after all and that my mom's neighbor hadn't received it by accident.

When I got home, Kirk had good news. He had finally gotten through to a Fedex representative who was helpful. She said no one had even yet looked at the trace on the package, so she did it for him right then. Said the package had been left with a cleaning lady at a home with a wheelchair ramp.

Well, that was certainly not my mom's house. In fact, the house across the street has a wheelchair ramp.

The lady said she would contact the driver, who would need to be the one to retrieve the misplaced package if Fedex was going to continue being involved in the proecss. Meaning, if we tried to retrieve it ourselves from the neighbors across the street but something went wrong and they refused to give it to us, then Fedex would no longer be willing to work with us on a claim. We would have taken them out of the loop.

So all we could do was wait. And stare at the house across the street from the window in the front room. And tap our fingers. And wonder how long it would take the driver to come around.

Ten minutes later, there she was on our doorstep.

"You're here!" I cried, so glad to see her. (At this point, Kirk was on the phone with another company about yet another package we discovered had been delivered with a problem.)

"Hi . . . I'm your driver," she said. "I was just around the corner when I got the call, so I decided to come right over. Can you help me understand what happened because I'm almost positive I delivered a package to this doorstep last week."

I explained about my mom's leaving town with the first notice in her hand, about the signature being required but the person who signed for it not being anyone we knew. I told her about the wheelchair ramp and the house-help comment that the representative had mentioned on the phone. Then I showed her the copy of the signature.

All of this started to bring the driver's memory back. She snapped her fingers and said, "I'm on it. Just give me a few minutes while I go down the street. I think I know where I left it." (Turns out it wasn't the house across the street after all.)

Another ten minutes later, and she was back, package in hand. I jumped up and down and let Kirk do the honors of signing for it. I wanted to hug the girl, I was so happy. We were so relieved!! She even said the lady who received it had placed a call with Fedex to come and pick it up, since she was too frail to walk it down to my mom's house herself. Isn't that nice to know that she had tried to right the situation, too?

Of course, as soon as the driver left, Kirk opened the box and handed the camera over. "No need to wait until Christmas on this one," he said. "You deserve to receive this gift right now."

And you know what? The camera is perfect. It's a metallic pale pink, just like my phone. It's super-cute in its tiny pinkness, the perfect size to carry around in my purse, and has all sorts of features that will help me develop my creative photographic chops beyond the mere point-and-shoot method. It even has a surprisingly large LCD screen, despite its tiny size.

Want to see?

Pages and Pages and Pages

Whew! I just finished a research paper for my negotiation and deal-making class that marks the final paper in a long string of papers this month. We wrote five memos based on face-to-face negotiations conducted in class, this research paper, and an additional paper that analyzed the negotiation techniques utilized by a real-life negotiator that we interviewed. In just three and a half weeks, I churned out close to 60 pages total in work for this class!

It feels good, though, to have endured the discipline of so many written assignments . . . though I confess that I'm longing for the refreshment that more soulish writing brings. (And on that score I'm pleased to share that I've moved into "active mode" on my book project, which is a huge triumph for the month, and perhaps even the whole year!)

I have more thoughts I'd love to share, but right now this tired girl is heading to bed . . . !

Crummy News

I hate speaking of crumminess in such a wonder-filled holiday season of love and joy, but this is just plain crummy.

For months, I have been wanting to get my very own digital camera. Kirk has one, but it's more professional than I need and bulky to tote around. I've been dreaming of a sleek, streamlined, easy to use camera that I can carry around in my purse, as I catch myself in so many candid moments where I'm thinking, "If I just had a camera in my purse, I could pull it out and capture this great moment!"

Knowing this would be a big investment during a modest financial season of our lives, I held off expressing the fullness of this desire out loud too much. But it just kept growing. Finally, I told Kirk that this is what I would really love to receive for Christmas, in place of any other gift at all.

So, he did it. He got a sense for the features that were most important to me and went to town looking for a suitable fit. He landed on what he says is the perfect one, and he purchased it. He walked around for a few days after that with a smile on his face, so pleased was he with what he had found, and he shared his excitement about watching me open it for Christmas.

Because we'll be in California for the holiday, we decided a couple weeks ago to do all our Christmas shopping online and have everything directly shipped to my mom's address. The gifts started showing up on her doorstep. Then we got the news that my aunt in Minnesota passed away; she had been battling cancer for many years, but took a quick turn for the worse at the end. My mom packed her bags and headed out to be with her sisters for a few days. She arranged to have her neighbor pick up packages left on her doorstep each day.

Just before she left for the airport, she found a notice on her door for a Fedex delivery. She decided to take the notice with her so that she could call and have it held until she got home. Except that when she did make the call, she learned the package (which, of course, turned out to be the package with the camera in it) had been delivered and signed for by some unknown "G. Ramirez" shortly after she had left for the airport.

Who in the heck shows up on the doorstep of other people's homes to sign for and steal special packages intended as gifts for actual loved ones? Who does that? Crummy jerks, that's who.

We're having the package traced and also put in a request to talk to the Fedex driver about his recollection of what happened on that day. Who knows if we'll somehow track it down or receive any information that's actually helpful or makes us feel any better. More likely we'll file some claim with Fedex for reimbursement or struggle to some agreement with our credit card company. Or else we'll try these routes and get nowhere, eventually (maybe) purchasing a second camera that ends up costing us the price of two when all is said and done.

I'm bummed. Kirk's bummed. My mom's bummed. We're all pretty upset, too, both at the jerkiness of people and at the irresponsibility of Fedex leaving the package with someone for whom the package isn't named. It's so frustrating, too, that it happened in a situation already charged with such emotion and that could not have been avoided at all. We're praying, though, both for G. Ramirez and our own angry hearts not to be overcome with that anger in a season that's not about gifts anyway.

Heightened Sensibilities (Part 3)

On Monday night, Kirk and I had tickets to see David Wilcox. Neither of us had ever heard his music before, though I have friends back home (and one in particular -- you know who you are!) who have recommended him to us for quite some time. We looked forward to hearing what he was all about.

He's a folk artist who blends storytelling with his music. When I talk about blending storytelling, I mean just that: he tells a lot of stories, both in between songs (as he stands there picking his guitar so lyrically and hypnotically) and through his lyrics. He also has a smile a mile wide that flashes at you just before he ducks his head in amazement at the appreciation the audience offers him at the end of his songs. And his laugh . . . well, his laugh will blow you away. It's so totally unexpected, quite high-pitched and sudden and wild. It makes you laugh out loud yourself, to hear it. It makes you smile a mile wide.

The David Wilcox concert was a gift to my heart. On the most superficial level, this is obvious: he talks about heart and story and journey and spirit, and speaks a language of life that is second tongue to the life Kirk and I live every day. It felt like refreshment of the spirit to find another who speaks this language, and one who is called to gently lead others along into this road through his stories and his songs. The audience was completely captivated by him. Most of them were hearing him for the first time, too.

But on another level, it felt like a gift just for me, deeply personalized and wrapped up in a spectacular bow, then dropped right down in my lap. And that's because, as David led us through an hour's worth of his song stories, my own heart took a journey.

First David talked about a two-year trip around the country he and his wife and his son just completed, tooling around in their silver Airstream with a new vista out their window every day. Now, I have never dreamed of taking this particular kind of trip myself. It was fun to rest in gladness for something that meant so much to him and his family without feeling the need to join in.

But this first story spoke to me of freedom, the insides of yourself and the outsides of yourself completely open to all things new and fresh experiences found each day on a long road laid out before you. Again, I feel no need to now go cruising around the States, free of trappings and toils, because Kirk and I feel free of traditional trappings and toils in our life now, plus we love where we live. But I began to think on an interior kind of freedom with this story, the kind of freedom that keeps me, too, open to all things new and fresh experiences found each day on a long road laid out before me: the road of a long life lived with an open and free-filled spirit. Given the conversation Kirk and I had just shared on the previous day, the notion of such interior freedom was a ripe fruit ready to be plucked down as juicy ambrosia for my parched and expiring spirit, a spirit that had lapsed into trying with all its might to play a role it was never meant to play.

Freedom. Mmmm.

David went on to sing of a close encounter with a secret sun, where all our darkness comes undone, leading up to a party of wonder . . . and I felt my own heart come undone, the darkness spilling out as it faces the sun of the enduring love of God, and how such security nudges me into a wide-eyed wonder of life and all that I can see, all that I can feel, all that I can love. I want that kind of wonder, the kind that only comes through a freedom and security found in a love that endures beyond all barriers.

It shouldn't have surprised me that David then led into a song of the mind/heart dichotomy, how the heart wants to say, "Let's go," but the mind says, "I don't know," how the mind can stand stock still, wishing it knew where all the particulars are leading to, how it stands to work and work and work at the courage to jump . . . only to be lost in contemplation, running out of time, about to miss the train that will swiftly carry it along to a new adventure. I do this so well: contemplate, consider, scuff my feet and say that I don't yet know, keeping myself from the fleet-filled jump that will hurl me onto new tracks, out of control yet resting in a greater, sturdier, bulkier control that carries me in its frame as it carries me along to where I need and am meant to be.

The next-to-last song was the capstone of my experience. He spoke of a girl who danced as if moving through liquid music, how the music knew her and moved through her as though the instruments were listening to the music that she played, moving as one body, the music and her soul, as her physical body played out the melody.

When I heard these lyrics, my mind flew back to one beautiful, moon-filled evening I shared with Kirk early in the life of our love. I had flown to Florida for a weekend visit, after months of e-mails and wireless phone signals flying across the country at rapid speed, to see what we were like in real life. On the second night of our visit, he cooked dinner for us at his 1920s-era house: vine-ripe tomatoes and buffalo mozzarella drizzled in balsamic vinegar and basil, sauteed and seasoned green and yellow squash, chunks of marinated beef, and a bottle of red wine. Good conversation. Three huge and brilliant sunflowers in a vase on the table between us. Eva Cassidy playing on the stereo behind us.

Later that evening, we turned down some lights and let the moonlight fill the front room through the wood-slatted blinds and cranked up some grooving music so that it filled the house to bursting. And we danced. Danced. I felt like the girl in the song David Wilcox sang, letting the music flow into me and through me, moving like liquid music in the moonlight, letting my spirit fly unselfconsciously and with grace, eyes closed as I snaked around the room, arms raised, body twirling. Glorious. Free.

Standing here today, struggling as I am with an old perfectionist bent I thought I had finally kicked, I'm not sure where such free-spiritedness has gone. Perhaps, as I shared in a comment on my last post, it must be relearned in this new place as my identity has grown to include wife, student, explorer, writer. Perhaps receiving those new roles has taken its own fair share of time and attention, and now it is time to integrate.

Whatever the case may be, I certainly feel myself on the verge of integration. It will take time and patience and much grace, but here I am, jumping off, risking, trusting in the stronger arms that will catch me and carry me along to where I'm meant to go.

Heightened Sensibilities (Part 2)

On Sunday, I sat up in bed and stared out the stained glass window for a while, unsure what to do with myself. Since I had spent most of Saturday in online shopping mode for Christmas, I wanted Sunday to be a day of redemption and contemplation and heart. But where to start?

Eventually Kirk joined me in this place (he'd already been up and getting things done that morning), and I told him I felt restless, like I wanted to work but didn't want to feel driven. Like I wanted to bow to the holiness of the day but also wanted to be fully alive in it. I told him I felt drawn to work on my book project, but unsure (again) where to begin.

Most people, when I share that I don't know where to begin on this book, tell me that I should break it into smaller chunks, like chapters or individual stories. And perhaps that is the way it will eventually play out. But isolating stories isn't helping me get started right now because of the many angles from which those stories can be told. I feel like if I don't know the ultimate angle and theme of the book, I can't write the story so that it drives toward a meaningful end. It feels like relaying mere facts and movement and dialogue without any undercurrent of truth.

Kirk said he thinks my perfectionism is getting in the way of all this. That I seem afraid of letting things get messy. That maybe it takes a willingness to let myself freewrite without any knowledge of where things will go, trusting that eventually I will hit upon gold. Isn't that the way most authors work -- in darkness? Have I ever known an author to do otherwise? Can I maybe trust that the process itself is beautiful, that it's just as much about who I become along the way as it is about what finally gets written?

He would be right. I don't want a messy, unformed, confusing mass of process. I want to know the thing I'm about, to write it out completely, and then to send it off. Pronto, presto. And, no, I don't want to trust in a process that rests in obedient blindfulness. What if it doesn't turn out all right? What if I freewrite 300 pages of crap? I screwed my face up and shook my head, even crunched my body in half at the thought of writing badly for a really, really long time.

As we talked, though, some of his words stuck with me, and eventually they helped me to reopen my eyes and sit up again and ponder. First, there was the notion of messiness. Then there was the trust in a process. And then there was the beauty to be found in all that messy process.

All these words and notions seemed very familiar. And slowly, it came back to me. These are the same truths I learned through my first go-round with perfectionism, when God first began working at my heart's overhaul. These are the same deep-seated values I embraced on the other side of that long discovery, heartache, rebellion, and healing. They are the mercies I eventually bowed in gratefulness to receive, and they are the mercies I sought to offer with hope and understanding to others imprisoned by chains.

Haven't I learned that life is one big process of learning, healing, and growth that plays on repeat, the old issues just showing up in new places, every few years? Haven't I learned that my knee-jerk reaction to the unknown, to the fear of my failure, to the fear of my overwhelming inadequacy is to torque and tweak and harpoon my mind around until I've somehow mastered a thing and believe I cannot fail? Haven't I also learned that this is my attempt at the superhuman, at negating the truth of my humanity, at rejecting the reality of my existence, at turning my nose up at God's intention for me, proclaiming it just isn't good enough? And haven't I learned the utter mercy of allowing imperfection, the heart-searing beauty of a soul who does not know all things, the relief to be found when we allow ourselves as common equals, uncomprehending every nerve of existence, and the compassion we can offer and receive as great treasure as we shoulder together in this curious and ever-unfolding life?

I felt sad that I was in this place again, struggling with perfectionism and coping in just the same old way. But I knew enough of my previous experience of growing through it, remembered enough of the conviction I eventually held about the prize of this messy, disorganized process to be willing to step my toe into its waters once again. It will be hard, and I will have to keep remembering and choosing. I will catch myself back on dry land without knowing how or when I got back there, and I will have to willfully venture back to the shoreline, entering into the water again with only a belief in what I used to know. I will have to keep believing that what I learned before is more true than the feelings I feel about all this right now. And I will dare to hold onto a hope that this new spate of fumbling and blindness will also one day, too, serve its good purpose.

Heightened Sensibilities (Part 1)

Last Thursday, Kirk and I were looking for someplace to set down our bags and study. He had a midterm, and I had a paper. We wanted the freedom to get online. We needed to eat dinner. Usually we would head on down to Panera to fit this bill, but then Kirk suggested we try a new coffee shop we'd heard about through a classmate. Cup o' Soul, it's called. Free wi-fi. Coffee and sandwiches and soup. Owned by Christians, from the look of their logo (where the "l" is an upended ichthus).

"Ooooh," I said. "Wouldn't it be cool if we walked in and there were soft couches and dim lighting and it felt like . . . like . . . like a living room or den in someone's house?!"

"Go check out their website," Kirk said, with an air of mystery. (He'd already checked it.)

So I did. Here's what I found: "We saw a need for a place where people could meet, connect, and serve each other, and what better way to do that than in a living room environment, enjoying coffee house music and a great cup of soul straight from our kitchen." Cool, huh?

Even cooler is the actual place. As soon as we walked inside, it felt like we were stepping into someone's cozy home. Red comfy couches. Red cylindrical hanging lights. Mocha-colored walls. Abstract artwork on the walls in warm colors. A dark wood bookshelf that looks like an oversized stepladder leaning against the wall. Brown leather, art deco-looking stuffed chairs. Big windows that face the street. Trunk-sized coffee tables with trays of decorative stones on top. You know, good stuff, all.

And even better than all this were the people we met. Bob, the owner, introduced himself and stood talking with us for a good half-hour. We learned that he used to attend our church but now attends a church started by our pastor's son across town. When his wife came in a bit later, the four of us chatted in the main area about their vision for the shop and some of the challenges they've faced in these opening days.

Soon after we began studying, a young guy sitting across from us commented on our Mac covers (mine's green, Kirk's is red), which led into a conversation on film and art and faith. Jonathan shared some of his story with us, and also a few of his short films. (He does the film work for his church, which is the same church the owners attend.) When he showed us a short film he made of their recent baptism event at a local beach, just the looks of joy on the faces, along with the strong feeling of family projected forward from the film, made tears flow down my face. It felt like home. It felt so much like the spirit that surrounds my church back home, a spirit I've missed so much as I've been struggling to find a place I belong here. I felt an incredible ache deepen on my insides.

We left that evening in ultimate bliss, feeling like we'd just met family. And we had -- spiritual family, that is. As we drove away, Kirk and I first talked about our mutual desire to help this little coffeeshop succeed in the small ways we are able. For instance, Kirk scheduled a business meeting with a friend today in the small conference room at the back of the shop, instead of where they would usually meet down the street. I have plans to meet a friend for coffee there tomorrow night, and we've already been back to visit a couple more times ourselves.

But more than that, I hesitantly shared with Kirk that this visit to Cup o' Soul opened up a desire in me to give Summit Church a try, which is where the owners and most of the staff and customers attend. The church we now attend is wonderful in many ways, and it has been Kirk's home church for about fifteen years, so I wasn't sure he would feel the same way I did about trying something new. But Kirk understood my desire and suggested we try visiting after the first of the year.

I titled this post "heightened sensibilities" because this last week has provided a handful of experiences that have cracked my heart open in new ways, exposing desire and ache and longing for things that have long been there and things that are new. I look forward to sharing about these unique experiences in the posts to come over the next few days. Until next time, I'll leave off by saying that this first experience, the inaugural visit to Cup o' Soul, widened the gaping chasm in my heart that longs to be filled with community in this still-new home of mine. Hopefully it is just the beginning of something more yet to be filled.

Short Film: All About My Dog, Marimo

For anyone who has ever loved a dog, this video will no doubt make you cry. So beautiful . . .

(Video runs about 11 mins.)

My Life with Bloglines

About two months ago, I signed up for Bloglines. Have you heard of it? You probably have; I'm usually behind the times on most tech stuff. For instance, just last week Kirk and I had a conversation that went something like this:

"Do you think we should get iPods?"

"I don't know. It seems like the thing to do these days, doesn't it? Like, the way to keep up with music?"

"Yeah."

Silence.

"Seems like a lot of work, though, too. Downloading, syncing, memory space."

"Yeah."

"Hmmm."

With no decision made, whatsoever. Oh, except for on Thursday, when Kirk reluctantly shared that he might like an iPod for Christmas . . . only to change his mind by evening's end.

So it wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that most of you have been on Bloglines for years. But for me, it's a relatively new thing. (For those who don't know, Bloglines is an online service that tracks all your favorite blogs and news feeds in one place, so you don't have to visit each individual page to find the new content yourself.) And with two months of experience behind me now, I'm ready to share what I've learned.

I signed up for Bloglines for three reasons.

First, now that I have the lovely Mac to go along with our ancient and crotchety PC machine at home, it was becoming quite discomfiting to keep blog bookmarks current on both computers, especially as I continued to discover new blogs. Then factor in the additional challenge of keeping all those bookmarks in the same order on both computers so that my blog-browsing experience was consistent from computer to computer. (Anyone else out there feel strongly about reading blogs in a certain order? And changing this order as your interests change, even in the most subtle of ways?) I so appreciated that a Bloglines account would allow me to access all my favorite blogs in one place through an internet connection, no matter which computer I was using.

Second, I was becoming painfully aware of my world events illiteracy. Perhaps this awareness has heightened since we've gone without a television for six months, although I'll confess that I've never been good about keeping up with the news or reading the printed newspapers, even though I know I should. Or perhaps it was due to my finance class, where I showed up each morning only to realize that I had nothing to contribute to the daily discussion about current events in the financial sector. And with an election year upon us and the ever-increasing interplay of globalization on the economy and our daily lives, it seemed pretty lame to just keep sitting in the dark. I knew all the major news services provided free RSS feeds for their content, and Bloglines was a way for me to easily turn the lights back on.

Third, and probably most importantly, it was becoming just too time-consuming to run through every single bookmark on my toolbar several times each day to discover new content. The seconds it took to click on the bookmark toolbar, scroll to the next blog in line, wait for it to load on my screen, then check for any new content or any new comments, only to repeat the process again and again times the length of my bookmark blogroll really began to add up, especially, again, as I continued to discover new blogs to add to my list. I was becoming increasingly aware of just how much time I was devoting each day to checking my bookmarked blog lists.

Something had to be done. Enter Bloglines. Signup is free; all it requires is an e-mail address (which is your sign-in -- I've never gotten any actual e-mail from them). Once you sign up, you can subscribe to all the major newsfeeds already indexed by them. You can also download a button that gets installed on your bookmarks toolbar; anytime you visit a blog that you want to add to your Bloglines feed, you click on the bookmark button once you are on that blog's page and it automatically gets added to your feed.

The cool thing about Bloglines is how much time it saves. No longer must I visit each and every one of the blogs I love several times a day to check for new content; now I just wait for Bloglines to let me know when my favorite bloggers have posted. So easy!

Having this new system in place after a year and a half on the "old system" has made it easy for me to determine other highs and lows of this new Bloglines life.

First, the lows.

One downside is that when it comes to subscribing to news feeds, it is easy to fall way behind, way fast. I made the mistake of signing up for a variety of news feeds that Bloglines offers when you first open your account: I started with the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, CNN, and the BBC, not to mention Slate, Salon.com, and about ten pages of feeds within the New York Times itself (such as international news, business, technology, art, movies, literature, and opinion). I wanted to get as broad a spectrum of perspectives on the news as I possibly could, since I know each news service has its bias. But all of this was a mistake, at least for me.

Here's how it finally dawned on me: by thinking it through. I mean, news is breaking all the time, right? And in the electronic age, this means that news now gets transmitted instantly. That's why every time I checked my Bloglines account, it seemed my news feeds had ballooned like the Pillsbury Doughboy. And instead of simplifying my life, this part of the Bloglines experience began stressing me out. It made me feel constantly behind and like I was doing something wrong, not to mention revealing that what I really wanted to see when I opened my Bloglines account was not news updates but whether any of my favorite people had written anything new. If you ever take this route and discover yourself feeling the same way, I suggest that you do as I finally did and unsubscribe from those unending strings of feeds. I decided it was more worth it to check the news pages directly, at my own volition, rather than having it foisted on me the several times each day I checked Bloglines for a personal blog fix.

Another downside to the Bloglines life is that blogs can easily become "out of sight, out of mind." Once someone publishes a new post to their blog, a live link for that blog shows up in the left-hand column of your Bloglines page. When you click on that link, a new pane opens in the main section of your Bloglines screen that shows that blog's name and the new post's title. Then the live link in the left-hand column disappears, never to reappear until the blog author posts a new post. Out of sight, out of mind.

This can be particularly disorienting if you have been used to tracking not only new content but also comment threads, especially on blogs where the authors like to leave tagback comments for each commenter. I've had to adopt a hybrid system, making mental notes of the blogs I must remember to revisit once I leave a comment and then scrolling through my (woefully un-updated at this point) blog bookmark list on my hard drive over the next few days to re-check those blogs. This is quite an inefficient system on the back-end of the blog experience that doesn't entirely eradicate the problems at the heart of the first and third reasons I signed up for Bloglines in the first place.

Incidentally, Blogger has recently added the feature to request e-mail updates on comment threads for their blogs, but I've personally found this option cumbersome to my inbox when I've tried it. Another way to address this problem is within Bloglines itself. Bloglines offers the option to either display your entire list of feeds in the left-hand column (highlighting the blogs with new content in bold) or only the list of updated feeds that actually have new content. I've found that I prefer to list only the updated feeds because one of the reasons I subscribe to Bloglines is to save time. I like being able to see which blogs have new content in one split-second glance instead of having to scroll through my pushing-50 list of blog subscriptions to search for the boldfaced ones myself. In other words, I want Bloglines to work for me, not me for it. So for now, to keep my favorite blog authors from disappearing from my peripheral vision, I stick to my hybrid approach.

Another thing to expect when signing on for the Bloglines life is the learning curve of figuring out how you best like to experience each blog on your subscription list, and that's because you always have three options. First, you can choose to expand and read each new post right there on the Bloglines screen. This is great in a pinch and also works well for those blogs that don't foster an emotional connection for you. I tend to read news and business blogs this way because I subscribe to those feeds for information, not personal connection.

But when you do want a personal connection with the person via the look and feel of their blog, you have two choices. As I said earlier, clicking on the live link in the left-hand column will refresh your main Bloglines screen with that blog's name in large type and the new post's title below it. Both the blog's name and the post's title are live links, too. If you click directly on the post's title (instead of the plus sign right beside it, which is what expands the text within the Bloglines pane itself), a new window opens to display the static page for that post on the person's blog. Alternatively, clicking on the large type of the blog's name will open a new window that takes you to the main page of the blog itself.

It took me a while to realize that I almost unilaterally defer to this latter option of opening the main blog page on personal blogs because doing so allows me to feel like a continual part of the ongoing conversation that person is carrying. I can scroll down to check for updates on previous comment threads at the same time, and I feel a greater expansiveness by participating in the whole experience of the blog, rather than being limited to one post's static page. However, the static-page link can be a great option for those blogs that require you to scroll through quite a bit of information before getting to the new content, as it allows you to bypass that extraneous information completely. It's also great when it's a blog would normally choose to read in expanded form on the Bloglines screen but the blog author has selected not to make the full content of their posts available this way.

Another downside I've experienced, which may or may not be an issue for you and which really says more about my personal insecurities than any deficiency in Bloglines, is that living the Bloglines life makes you more aware of your own blog-related shortcomings. For instance, you begin to notice how frequently and faithfully certain bloggers post new content . . . and how infrequently and unfaithfully you do. Also, every time you look at a particular blog's newest post information in the main Bloglines screen, you are also presented with the number of subscriptions that blog currently carries. And if you subscribe to your own blog (as I do), it's tempting to feel a growing sense of your own insignificance when comparing your own blog's subscription base (2??) to that of others (36 . . . 51 . . . 456 . . . 5125?!).

One cool thing about Bloglines that I didn't expect is the way it helps you clarify your true blog-reading preferences. For instance, there are a number of blogs that have been sitting in my Bloglines feed for two weeks. I haven't clicked on them once. The number of new posts on those blogs just keeps growing, and still I do not click. It's revealing: I don't actually care what those bloggers have to say. Or for another example, I subscribed to a few new blogs that I thought I would really enjoy, only to discover that every time I got an updated feed for their blog, I dreaded clicking on it. Or I walked away from reading the new post feeling worse. At some point, I just get tired of feeling that initial dread or that bad feeling afterward. And guess what? Unsubscribing from those "boo blogs"* is just one painless click away. Bloglines makes it easy to wipe painful or discouraging blog-reading experiences out of your system entirely: just click on the latest live feed from that boo blog, click "unsubscribe" on the main Bloglines screen page once for that blog it loads, and you're done. Bad feelings, over.

I've listed a lot of up-and-down considerations from my personal Bloglines life, but I hope they will take some of the sting out of your own fledgling experience, should you decide to try it yourself. Really, I'm glad I switched over. It has simplified my online experience of life considerably, most especially with regards to saving time. I love that it does the hard work of combing the internet for me. I love that all the new content gets delivered to my doorstep, letting me choose the new blog content I would most relish reading first but keeping the other ones live until I'm ready to read them later. And I love that it has made the ongoing growth of my blogging life, as I discover new blogs to gather and follow along, so very easy to do.

*I've been planning to write this Bloglines review for some time, but Penelope Dullaghan's recent post in which she coined the term "boo blogs" lit my fire to finally get the review written and posted. Thanks, Penelope! I really enjoyed reading your perspective, and also discovering that I'm not alone in the way I experience blogs sometimes!

Burned Out, Baby

I have been trying, since we got back from Georgia a week and a half ago, to get back in the swing of life. This doesn't seem to be working so well. After a full night's rest, I get up and go to school for a few hours. Then I come home and go to sleep for another three to four hours. I wake up feeling so, so tired. My eyes hurt on their backsides. I feel a long, dull headache across my forehead and into my sinus area. I have no energy for homework. I have no energy for blogging. I have no energy for doing much of anything.

At first I thought I was recovering from the holiday trip. Being away from home always takes more out of me than you might expect, as I'm quite a homebody and also an introvert. So when I came home and slept for four hours each afternoon last week, I figured it was due to my body and soul's need to recover quiet and inward focus after five days spent out of my usual, comfortable space.

But then the weekend came and I spent most of it, too, in bed. That this excessive need for naptime and sluggish feel to my body has only continued well into this week has given me no small cause for concern. What is going on??

The author and poet David Whyte writes in his book Crossing the Unknown Sea about learning the antidote for exhaustion. It is not rest, as we might think. It is wholeheartedness.

I've been thinking on this notion the past few days, as the reality of my exhaustion has dawned on me. Why am I exhausted? I am committed to less external activity than I have been in years. I do not work; I have no children. I go to school for a couple hours each day, and that is it.

Perhaps what is going on is the slow dawn of my soul upon the truth of itself. Business is not the world my soul was meant to inhabit. I am in business school because of obedience, not deep desire.

My realization last month of redirecting everything toward soul care has had the consequent effect of turning my heart even further away from the business world I currently abide. I feel fiercely protective of what SC is meant to be, fiercely loyal to those it is meant to serve, and fiercely antagonistic against any route of life that would oppose what it is meant to open up, the room it is meant to help create in someone's heart. Unfortunately, the propensity of the world in which I find myself right now feels truly opposed to this nature. Business school does not nurture the soul or honor the space it needs, much less respect that it even exists.

But here I am: learning business. It is strange, I know, as so many friends and family are still keen to tell me that business school is the last place they ever thought they'd find me. And perhaps what I am feeling now are the lingering fingerprints on my soul from a daily reality that is not my true home. Perhaps what I lack right now is wholeheartedness.

Hold the Phone!

My dear friend Kirsten is coming all the way from Washington for a five-day trip to Florida to visit yours truly next month. Can it possibly be?! I am so, so excited, I'm pretty much doing a little dance as I type this news. You should have heard the squeal, the shout of joy that burst from my mouth when I heard the for-sure confirmation. She already made the reservation, and we were just exchanging tentative e-mails about dates this morning! And this on the heels of some light banter back and forth in recent e-mails about our need to sit across from each other for hours in a bookstore or a coffee shop and just share, share, share to our heart's content. Oh, dear girl, the beauty of this tree is just a glimpse of what you'll see while you are here.

Ahhh, Kirsten, how thrilled I am at your coming. We will sit down beside each other, across from each other, over coffee, over sushi, over Thai, and on a walk, and we will talk and talk and talk until our mouths fall off our faces, just like you said. Thank you for this gift, the bountiful gift of your presence.

And to think all this transpired because of the marvel of technology in blogland. What a gift!

Apprehending Reality

Sometimes I'm struck by how utterly brazen it is to say we believe in anything at all. I mean, how we do know what's real? Take Christianity, for example. Over the last few months, I've struggled off and on with my belief in this faith. I've been reading different chunks of the Scriptures regularly -- the Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Matthew, and now Acts and Mark -- and besides drawing me close to God and His heart in and for the world and for me, it has also raised for me many troubling questions. For example:

Why did Israel not recognize Jesus as the Christ, if they knew the Old Testament scriptures backward and forward? Where, if anywhere, do we get any advance indication that God planned for the Christ to come down here twice, not just once? Why does He often say nothing happens without His making it happen, and yet just as many times He seems surprised and dismayed at what Israel chooses to do? Why did God choose Israel in the first place, but then go back and forth in anger and love, regret and forgiveness, despair and embrace with her so often, only to eventually open His arms to all people the entire world over? Why does Jesus preach the teachings of the law so stridently sometimes when He not only came down here to fulfill it for us but also seemed at other times to eliminate it altogether? And finally, why does Peter not figure more prominently than Paul in the New Testament letters, when Peter was the one upon whom Christ said He would build the church?

For a few weeks, I struggled hard with these quesitons. I teetered on the brink of despair. I wondered if Jesus was a fraud. I thought about Judaism, about other religions, about no religion at all.

Eventually, through the help of Kirk and my friend Sara, I settled into my questions and decided I was okay with having them. If what I believe through the faith of Christianity is true, God knows what He is doing in this whole big landscape of our questions and has folded all of reality into His infinite understanding, which He may or may not choose to share with me -- with any of us -- ever.

In that place about two months ago, it came down to one ultimate question for me: Does what I believe make more sense than anything else I could choose to believe? Because, ultimately, we have to put our trust in something. If I chose not to believe in Christianity, what would I replace that with? And how would I know that new belief was true, and more true than Christianity?

Eventually I decided that Christianity made the most fundamental sense of reality that I could understand at this time. It made the most sense intellectually, and it made sense at an even deeper level of knowing, beyond my mind's grasp. So I kept going.

My freaked-out-ness diminished. I kept living some more. I went on for another month or so just doing my thing. And then, as I'm wont to do regularly out of habit and fear, I started veering toward life in my own strength. I faced yet another course correction along that historic line. I had more conversations with God about the vocational trajectory of my life. He talked to me, and I talked back. We danced together a few more days.

And yet, for reasons I may explain in a future post, I reached a point over this past weekend where I was questioning His realness again. Not in the same theologically mind-bending way as before, but in a profound, deep place inside my heart. (That's not to say that the earlier theological questions hadn't penetrated me at a deep soul level; they had. It's just that this next time around, it got even more personal.)

We were staying at Kirk's mom's house for the holiday weekend, ten hours up I-75 in Georgia, sleeping in a tiny attic room with a square skylight that looked high up to the sky. Having evaded God in prayer for a number of days, one night I found myself sitting straight up in bed in the dark, long after Kirk had fallen asleep, talking at God feverishly out loud and spilling out all the reasons I didn't even realize I had been avoiding Him all those days and every single thing I feared inside that moment.

Like I said, maybe I will talk more about what led me up to that point sometime soon. For now, I will just say that I ended that prayer with one final, bold request: that He would somehow prove that He was real to me. I felt sheepish making this prayer, as I didn't like the way it sounded, me asking the God of the universe to prove Himself to me. But then I kept thinking that He says He wants my heart, the truth of who I am in total, a real and true relationship with intimacy and honesty, and in that place, all I truly wanted was to know that He is real.

Having made my peace by speaking all that was in my heart out loud with Him directly, I lay back down on the bed, my head sinking into the fluffy feather pillow, the stacks of thick down comforters and flannel sheets hemming me in warm and tight on all sides, and I fell fast asleep.

As I slept, I dreamed. I dreamed that a group of young men were following me, trailing me like a gang of men up to no good. I tried to escape them by ducking into a busy Barnes & Noble bookstore, but they folowed me inside, all the way to the back, where I fearfully slipped into the women's restroom.

I hid inside a stall with the door closed, yet somehow I could see through a one-way window into the men's bathroom, where the youngest of the three men had gone to wait me out. He didn't know I could see him, and he couldn't see me, and so I sat there watching him watch the door for me to come out. (Of course, this being a dream, he somehow had the ability, inside the men's restroom, to know if I had left the room next door.)

My fear increased, even though I was temporarily safe. I didn't know what to do. I felt trapped, Then, just before I was going to break through the door and make a run for it, another man entered the men's restroom. He was wearing a furry woolen hat cropped close on his head, and he entered a stall nearer the transparent glass to me. He had effectually put himself between me and my intended assaulter.

I knew in a flash it was Him. It was Jesus, come to rescue me. He came into that forlorn and dangerous place to save me, and I knew it. Without ever having seen His face, without ever having locked my eyes with His, without ever having heard a single word fall from His lips, I knew it was Him. He was as real as the heavy laminate stall door I was pressed up against. He was as real as the turtleneck sweater hugging my neck. He was as real as the air.

I never saw how the dream ended, but it didn't matter. When I woke up, I could think only one thought, over and over again, all morning long: He is real, and I know Him.

Giving Thanks

Meet Brownie (right) and Snap (left), two beautiful horses who live next door to Kirk's mom and whom we look forward to meeting again this weekend. As a sidenote, Brownie and Snap were self-named by me. I have no idea what their owners actually call them. But that is part of the fun, now, isn't it? :)

* This year I am thankful for my sweet, my love, with whom I never cease to feel wonder, whose thoughts and perceptions astound me every day, whose love buoys me up so I am cherished and held exactly where I am, who makes me laugh real hard, especially when I need to the most, and who fills my days with so much joy. I love you, sweet.

* This year I am thankful for my family, for renewed connections with sister and brother, for an ever-expansive and love-filled relationship with mom, for an engagement in the family, for a new and just-right life for older brother, sister-in-law, and new baby Ava, and for renewed hope and the gift of time and greater security for dad and stepmom.

* This year I am thankful for a season of expansiveness, exploration, creativity, expression, and heart.

* This year I am thankful for Sara and Kate and Hannah and Rebecca and Kirsten and Sarah and Laura and Erin and Charity and Lauren and Cyn and Amy and Heather and Danielle, and all the many more beautiful women who fill my life and heart and make my world go round.

* This year, too, I am thankful for the astounding depth of relationship that e-mail and long-distance late-night phone calls and these bloggy spaces bring into my life, maintaining old relationships and nurturing tender, young, new ones, which my heart craves because it is still learning how to live and thrive and be known in this new place (meaning, an entirely new state, across the country from my long-time, real-life community).

* This year I am thankful for Solomon and Diva, two cats I never knew I could love so much, who really are like funny little kids, who make us laugh with their antics and innocence, and who break our hearts with their vulnerability and the precious gift of caring for them each day.

* This year I am thankful for a little English cottage that is exactly what we need and makes us feel closer to our artistic and dream-filled hearts.

* This year I am thankful for student loans.

* This year I am thankful that Zoey, my spunky white Jetta, has made it one more year.

* This year I am thankful for the gift of words, for the ability to grow in my ability to express them, and for the space to do so faithfully, with ever-increasingness, on this blog space.

* This year I am thankful that God never lets me go and always bears me up and teaches me more and more of His love each day, who gently ushers me into the space He has for me to inhabit, which is always, always safe in the center of His will and always in the comfort and surety of His very own arms.

Take Me Back Into Memory

For those of you who followed along in my (very long!) post a couple days ago about my spiritual wanderings and how they eventually landed me in new territory with my business and my writing in the last two weeks, you know that, in the end, I agreed to embark upon a journey into a long-time-coming book. You also know that the writing of this book will be a journey I can't take alone; somehow, I will be getting it written and eventually finished with God's help.

This is a good thing, as shortly after committing myself to this process, I realized that I'm about to write about a ten-year period of my life for which I have no record. Meaning, journals. I've kept journals my whole life, with a diary or a bound journal or even a spiral-bound writing notebook always nearby, on my nightstand or in my purse, in order to record my days, my private thoughts, or my prayers . . . except not for this ten-year period, at least not in any substantial form.

I very clearly remember the first few days of my shift into this journey I'm supposed to now write about -- the first few days of realizing my spiritual life, and therefore the future trajectory of my life in total, was about to change. When this realization hit me, I stopped journalling on purpose, and I did this for two reasons. First, because what was happening was so massive that I couldn't begin to try putting it into words, even for myself, even for a sustaining prayer. And second, because a large part of what was being accomplished in me through that shift had to do with doing less, in order to learn how to just be. Part of doing less included a full-stop on words. (I've shared a bit about this full-stop period here.)

So, no words. Just one very long season of growth and paying attention, only without writing anything down. Very weird, and very hard. Especially now, as I sit staring at a computer screen, hoping to write a book about what happened in that whole length of time and why it even happened in the first place.

Day 3 of this venture found me starting a new Word document. I titled it "One Girl's Drum," just a working title for now, as I need something to call it through this writing period and also need to make it more real by giving it a real name. I put a header on the document that includes the title, the page number, and my name.

And then I sat there. And sat there. You writers know what I'm talking about. Besides not now writing for instant publication (meaning, for this blog space, which always gets the creativity flowing without a problem, ever), I was also having to learn a new method to my madness: writing in conjunction with the Supreme Being of the Universe. No pressure there, of course.

After sitting for about five minutes, I gave up and shuffled off to bed. I crawled into bed, discouraged, and let Kirk wrap his arms around me. I told him I had no idea how this was going to happen or how it would work. He reminded me of a line from a combination of verses I claimed for myself a couple of years ago: "I am the Lord's handmaiden, created to will and work according to His good pleasure."

When he reminded me of this part about being the Lord's handmaiden, it was then easier for me to go to God in prayer. I found myself sitting at His feet, and He was seated on His throne. I was wearing a cream linen peasant dress, and my hair was long around me. I stared up at Him and adored His face. And eventually, I spoke.

"I'm scared," I told Him. "And I need Your help. This all just seems so big, everything You've done, and I don't remember all of it. Will You help me through this?"

He smiled at me, His eyes so full of the love they always hold. My mind went back to those initial days of the journey, which are so familiar to me and which therefore I know will be hard to capture fittingly in words. My mind then moved to a couple random moments in time, until it landed upon a very specific memory I had forgotten about. A key moment. A closely cherished one.

"Oh," I breathed. "I had forgotten about that." I sat with the memory for a moment, remembering its specialness to me, its specialness to me and Jesus. I offered up thanks that it had happened. And I realized what had just taken place: we had begun working together. He was giving me a place to start. "Okay, I can do that," I said. "I will start there."

The next morning, I got up and sat with the memory again, trying to go back into it. I could recall only bits and snatches. This surprised me, given how profoundly moving a moment it had been, how crucial it was to the foundation, how I'd even shared it with a few different close friends since then. You would think the telling of it would have branded it into my memory that much further.

This is the point at which I realized I had no records from that period of my life. This realization scared me, and I knew that I needed God again, so I opened my Bible. Mine is an ESV Journaling Bible, meaning it has ruled lines along the outside edges of the pages for you to journal your thoughts and notes as you read. I am reading my way through the psalms and journaling prayers in the margin after each day's reading, so I opened up to the next psalm. I read it aloud a couple of times and then plunged directly into the prayer bubbling up in my heart:

We are on this journey together, are we not, Lord? I really got a sense of that last night when I was scared of stepping out into this unknown land of writing a book. I really felt I could come to You, could tell You I was scared and that I wanted to run to other comforts that are not the true Comfort: You.

Kirk was good to remind me that I am the LORD's handmaiden, and so I sat at Your feet, just worshipping and adoring You. I felt so vulnerable in that place, all my controls over life slipping away, yet in that slipping still indicating they are there.

We sat together in that place, and we communicated with few words. You reminded me of that time You met me in the wood by the river in the mountains, how we sat togther in safety, how that was my first time ever imagining myself with You in my mind, in an image.

Please remind me, Jesus, what was spoken in that place between us and how it formed that moment of my journey. It was pivotal, I know, and yet I do not remember the particulars. Remember that I had stopped journalling? This is where my memory fails me and makes me afraid to write. Do I have any true memories left? Can You teach me about my memories as we write these chapters together? I'm so scared because this means that it is so much more out of my control. Help me, Father, in the way You want me helped. Amen.

So this, now, is my prayer: that He would take me back into memory, restore to me the images and words that made up all the important days that have preceded my coming to this moment, the specifics of the times I can't remember. I've never asked God to restore to me my memory before. This is wholly new, and this is where I do know now, for sure, that we indeed are writing this book, Him and me, together.

The Case of the Mysterious Nighttime Visitor

Okay, when I really think about what I'm about to tell you, I get totally freaked out and scared. So I'm going to tell it either matter-of-factly or with a light touch, just to keep myself sane. Agreed?

Last night I was home alone. I was exhausted after a very long class. Kirk needed to go out to get some stuff done for his class, but I just wasn't up to leaving the house again, so he ventured out on his own. I stayed in bed, propped up by pillows, my trusty laptop on my lap and, of course, the kitties lounging beside me. A cold front had begun to move in, so before Kirk left he raised the blinds and cranked open the facing casement windows in our bedroom. I sat there feeling very cozy under the bundle of covers, cool air brushing against my face and the sound of wind creaking through the trees outside the window, and started making my way through this wonderful English girl's blog archives.

About an hour into this quiet and blissful night, I heard a noise. Crunch, crunch, crunch, went the sound of footsteps on autumn leaves behind our house, in the little crop of space wide enough for one person and which ultimately ends at our bedroom window.

When I heard the crunching of leaves (by two feet, not four, which would have indicated it was a dog), I went still. I heard the footsteps approach, getting louder, until they stopped just outside my big open window. Since the warm light from the nightstand lamp was inside the room with me and it was dark outside, I couldn't tell if anyone was standing near the window, looking in.

"Hello?" I called out, leaning forward and straining my eyes. I thought (hoped! hoped!) maybe it was Kirk, returning from his classwork and sneaking up to say hi to me in a creative way. No dice.

Crunch, crunch, crunch, went the sound of footsteps retreating.

Now, this is scary enough, right? But then I remembered that our bathroom window in the next room over was broken. Just this past weekend, when we tried to crack it open for the first time since the outside of the house was painted in summer, the hinges got bent and we couldn't re-close the window. Since that small window doesn't have a screen, we've been living bathroom life with a wide open window for this past week.

Put that together with this stranger walking along the backside of our house, and I was really scared. What if they decided to climb through the bathroom window and into the house? What would I do then -- throw Solomon at them? Solomon wouldn't even know what to do; he's a big roly-poly cat, and he prefers males to females anyway.

The first thing I did was get up and screw the casement windows closed, and then locked them and lowered the blinds. (I can't believe I was so brave, but I was shaking as I did this.) The second thing I did was step into the hallway and listen for sounds. The kitties seemed alert, like maybe they'd heard a sound in the house coming from the direction of the bathroom, so I put my ears on high alert too and moved stealthily against the wall. I couldn't hear anything unusual. I got to the bathroom, peered around the doorway to look inside, and found it empty. Phew.

Then I went back to the bedroom and picked up my phone to call Kirk.

"Hi. Where are you?" I asked when he picked up.

He said he was on a street near our own.

"So you're in your car? Coming home?"

"Yes. What's wrong?"

I told him what had happened. He asked if I was okay. I told him I was a little shaken up and could he please hurry and get home. And when he got home, I was a basketcase for about 30 minutes.

Thankfully, all the windows in our house are either sealed shut or have locks on them, and all of them are now locked and will remain that way unless both of us are home. I always keep the door locked when I'm home alone as it is. And the handyman came by this morning and fixed the bathroom window. So hopefully that means all will be okay.

We can't, of course, live like two basketcases together in the house, only going somewhere if the other person goes too, but in times like this I kind of wish we could.

How Not to Soft-Boil an Egg

Normally I relish the morning routine that allows me to drop Kirk at school (we gave up our second car when we embarked on grad school life together) and then come home to the quiet house to immediately power up my Pride & Prejudice soundtrack and get the hot tea brewing.

This morning, probably because I was still hungry when I went to bed last night, I wanted something of substance for breakfast. Something besides my old standby of hot tea and a small bit of chocolate, which I usually take as I read at the table.

Mmm, eggs, I thought as I was driving home. Soft-boiled eggs. I wonder how you make them?

I tried calling Kirk to get instructions, him being our resident chef, but when he didn't answer his phone I had to figure an alternate plan. Google! I thought. Of course, Google. You can find anything on Google.

Into the search bar went the phrase "how to make soft boiled eggs," which returned a gazillion hits, on down even to the details of how Julia Child herself likes them prepared, and I figured I could handle what seemed like a simple formula:

1. Boil the water.

2. Ease in the eggs.

3. Time for 3 minutes.

4. Remove.

Easy enough.

Many of the recipes said to watch the timer diligently, to even use an egg timer if you didn't trust yourself, so by the time three minutes were up, I was hovering over that boiling pan of water like a mom hovers over a new baby.

Except they didn't look done. They were tapping on the bottom of the pan in the heat of the boil, and the tapping still sounded quite fragile. I decided to give them another minute or two.

About a minute and a half later, I eased the eggs out of the water and into a tupperware bowl. One attempt at peeling back the first shell was enough to remind me that it's probably a good idea to run them under cold water first, in order to save your fingers. Okay, done.

Now it was time to really peel them back. But as soon as I began, I knew it was a failed experiment. The egg whites were too malleable. I felt like I would puncture them with the slightest inadvertent jab of the shell's sharp edge.

Carefully, I peeled the shells off two of the four eggs anyway (I had made two extra as a backup, and I'm sure glad I did -- two of them exploded upon entry into the scalding hot water). Once shelled, I plopped the eggs in a ceramic bowl. Except one of them broke in half in the process of shelling (you can see its lonely other half sitting in the tupperware bowl of shells in the photo above), and that one's yolk went streaming into the bowl.

These eggs really weren't done.

But what's a girl to do? Put the other two eggs back in? I doubt it. Besides, those other two casualties were already gushing guts through cracks sustained the first go-round in the pan.

Instead, I seasoned the shelled eggs in the bowl with some pepper and salt, grabbed a fork to mash them down -- really, it was more like stirring at this point -- and sat down at the table to eat them. I'd wanted eggs, right?

Now, probably this was all psychological, but I swear the eggs tasted . . . organic. Not in an "I bought organic eggs at the supermarket" kind of way, but in an "I don't think I cooked these eggs enough and they still feel alive" kind of way.

Gross. I ate only as much as I could stomach but eventually tossed everything out.

There really is a reason I don't cook, and this morning's experiment goes to prove once again why that is so. Thankfully, I've still got a stash of hot tea and chocolate waiting for me in the pantry. I'll stand by that option any day. Hot tea, I can handle.