Sunny California

I arrived in San Diego last night. I'm spending the weekend at my sister's. She had a baby two months ago, so now not only do I get to enjoy her golden retriever, but I get to hold a baby whenever I want! What could be better?? We've had a marvelous day: I woke up, held the baby, ran 3 miles, talked to Richard, went for a walk with sis, baby and dog, went to Starbucks, ate breakfast, did some work, watched TV, took a catnap, did a little more work, talked to my parents on the phone, and held the baby some more. And it's only 3pm! Truly, I feel blessed.

I wonder if I'll ever read this post and consider myself pathetic.

It's funny how just watching a baby smile and yawn and stretch is like witnessing a miracle. (Picture of me with baby. Photo credit: my dad.)



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Now it's 8:30pm and we've just watched a movie called "The Holiday." I really hate romantic comedies. They almost always make me angry, or anxious, or depressed, or all of those things combined. I feel dirty somehow. Maybe it's the three slices of pizza I ate, or the fact that my hands smell like dog. Something about sitting around all afternoon -- it starts out feeling like a lovely idea, relaxing, indulgent, and it ends up with me in a bad mood wanting to go to sleep early.

The good news is, I still have issues.

I've not posted in a while. The past couple of weeks have been interesting. Work is extremely busy and I feel distracted quite a bit. There is change in the wind -- the organization is shifting and I'm not exactly sure where I'll land but it seems like it's a good thing that things are moving. I hope and pray that when things are settled, I will be more productive, more focused, more capable of leading and making decisions. I pray I have not become complacent amidst uncertainty. I pray for a healthier work environment. God, I need you now. Always, but I know it now. Please be near.

odds and ends and in the dog-house

Lucky and I had company this week -- a couple (from a partner church in Oregon) that is preparing to move to Burundi to serve as partnership coordinators/communications people. They were great; we really connected with them. It was refreshing to be with another couple that shares a lot in common with us -- the husband was cynical and a little dark like me, but also a dreamer and a bit scatter-brained like Lucky. The wife was more detail-oriented, liked her space, and was eager to walk fast with me to work -- we bonded instantly.

Okay, I officially have to stop referring to my husband as Lucky. It's just not working for me. I am going to have to reveal his real name. Richard. There.

Richard arrived home from Egypt last Sunday night. Our visitors arrived the night before, so we didn't have any time to ourselves. Then Richard came down with a bug of some sort (cold/flu) and was down for the count starting Wednesday. I tend to be less-than-full-of-mercy when Richard gets sick. I always think to myself, "He had cancer, for goodness' sake. Why is he complaining so much about a cold? It'll be gone tomorrow." I'm getting better at letting him be sick and at having sympathy for him, but it's still not a great strength for me. Richard was hurt this week by my lack of attention and care -- I didn't call him a lot, I didn't bring him dinner Thursday night when he asked me to, I went to happy hour after work yesterday instead of coming straight home. It's true: I'm a terrible wife. I cannot deny it.

The unfortunate (or maybe it's fortunate?) reality is that I am largely motivated by guilt. Richard pointed this out to me when we first got married. The other reality is that Richard can be passive-aggressive. He doesn't tell me he's upset until it's too late for a simple apology and I feel like I should flog myself. I know he doesn't do this on purpose, and I also know that I should be more attuned to his feelings. Good thing we have our whole lives to figure out this marriage thing.

I just received an email from my boss's boss saying I should have introduced her to our visitors and let her spend some time with them. So glad she decided to tell me after they were long gone and there was nothing I could do about it.

It's interesting how fragile we all are. How disappointed we make each other. How hard it can be to express our needs and see how the other person responds. I think I deny that I have any needs, like it's easier to come across as self-sufficient and strong even if it makes me bitter and repressed. Richard knows me too well to believe that I am self-sufficient, but I still like to pretend I am at times. He gives and gives and I take without thinking about it, and then he gets upset that I don't give nearly so much back when he needs me to. I take him for granted. May God change me to love him better...

Another Day

It is hard when you don't really know where you're going. It's hard not to get complacent with where you are. You might completely and utterly hate where you are, but it's the only place you know with certainty and everything else is just could be, probably not, unlikely, might happen, pray about it. I'm not the sort of person who likes to brainstorm or dream about lots of different scenarios. I like to determine the best or most likely scenario and go with it. I must have some sort of deficiency in my brain, or my heart.

I think the other problem is that I don't really know where I want to go. And when you don't know where you want to go, it sure as hell isn't fun to brainstorm about it. Makes me want to crawl up into a ball and disappear. Makes me think of the musical, Stop the World, I Want to Get Off. Seriously. Stop.

Reflections on a Day in the Life of...

My husband has been out of town for a week now. I've been living on popcorn and oatmeal -- except for tonight, I splurged on sushi. I feel a little gross. Not because of the sushi, more because of the overwhelming build-up of carbs in my system. Is it possible they've built up?

My friend Beaner and I used to talk about writing a book that would be called "The Anti-Atkins Diet: White and Refined," to honor our love for bread and other carbohydrates. We used to be involved in a ministry that would serve dinner each week, and the woman in charge would bake the most amazing bread -- it was dense as a rock, a very soft, rich, buttery rock, and it would sit warmly in the bottom of your stomach for hours, reminding you how important it would be to engage in physical activity the next day when you were able to move about normally again.

Beaner and I took a long walk today. It was an astonishingly beautiful morning that turned into a windy but still lovely afternoon. We went to a store in Fell's Point that makes us wish we had more money so we could buy useless but strangely appealing things like $38 scented candles and soap carved into different breeds of dogs. Actually, we discovered we're just as happy mocking such things and our culture that markets them so successfully. Beaner told me she went to the farmers' market this morning and offered a homeless man an apple. He responded that he had no teeth. She was at a loss for words.

After our walk, I felt compelled to go jogging because it had been my plan to go jogging today and darn it I had to follow my plan. So I put on my spandex pants and my jacket and jogged through Patterson Park, running past couples walking their dogs, groups of boys playing football, mothers yelling at their kids to stop doing whatever they were doing. There was a man sleeping on the bench -- he didn't look homeless, just like he'd gotten bored of whatever he started out doing and decided to take a nap in the sun. I couldn't blame him. I ran past a pair of couples and I wondered if they were all happy. I ran as fast as I could at the end -- Lucky always encourages me to "sprint" at the end to get my heart-rate up. I went until I thought my heart might push through my chest and I wanted to throw up. It was a good run.

I have to lead Chapel on Monday at work -- we have Chapel every Monday morning and each department takes turns leading. I somehow got assigned to this one. I'm unsure what to talk about. My life is about running for no apparent reason, about shopping for nothing, about looking at beautiful things, about being constantly behind on emails and phone calls and meetings, about desperately wanting a plan but never having all the information I'd like to have to make it. My life is about feeling incompetent in the workplace, in my marriage, in my pursuit of Christ. My life is about messing up in the same things, going around in circles, being ungrateful for the life I've been given. I think about the people suffering in Mozambique due to floods, people suffering in Burundi due to famine, people suffering in Darfur due to ethnic conflict and inexplicable evil, people suffering in Congo due to a host of disasters. The suffering doesn't ever stop. And today I went jogging. I feel like the only thing I could talk about in Chapel would be the mystery of life, an utterly incomprehensible mystery. What is an appropriate response, when the best we might be able to do is offer a toothless man an apple? What is an appropriate response when we don't have any answers, any insight, any clarity?

I don't know.

No Comfort Zone

This weekend, I attended my first women's retreat. There are reasons I avoided them in the past: I don't like crowds, I can't stand forced interaction, I hate the way the focus is inevitably on women as housewives and moms, and I don't like a lot of women. But my dear friend Beaner and I agreed to go together, so on Friday I had no choice but to get in the car with her and drive to Lancaster, PA. I should have realized that Beaner would know far more women there than I would, that she's been to 6 or 7 of these retreats, and that she's far better than I am at pretending to be an extrovert. I used to feel very uncomfortable as an introvert, but I have mostly embraced it now and will only try to be extroverted in special situations or when I'm inebriated.

That being said, this weekend was way outside my comfort zone. I don't mind that -- I tend not to feel uncomfortable so much as I feel numb and wait for it to end.

Some highlights: getting to know 3 or 4 women whom I only knew in passing before, and finding I would love to spend more time with them; attending a seminar on healing prayer that is leading me to seriously consider pursuing healing prayer at my church (or at least to start writing out the things I think I may need healing from); watching Beaner and a group of women do "praise hula" to the song "Amazing Love/I'm Forgiven" -- it was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.

This weekend came at a good time for me. I've been feeling particularly tempted in one area of life and it was beginning to erode my faith. I pray this weekend will be the start of God giving me the strength I need to be wise, to resist temptation, to continue following Him rather than turning away as I'm so prone to do. Remarkably prone. It is what I know how to do better than anything -- obedience and perseverence are much more difficult, much more foreign.

We drove home today as heavy snow (for the mid-Atlantic) fell. It was beautiful, it made me glad to be alive, which I don't often feel. Something about snow-covered trees and white-topped rowhouses makes me happy.

I hope and pray for God's protection and healing -- Richard is away this week, in Egypt, and already I feel lonely and bored and ready to do something destructive to keep the feelings away. Strange. I do not really understand myself. One of the teachings this weekend was about being fully known by God, and that when we get to heaven we will finally know who we were truly created to be. God reveals that to us in this life as well, but we only learn it in bits and pieces, as we are faithful to ask and listen. I want to do more of that -- asking and listening to God about who He has created me to be, and who He really is.

This post is a little scattered, I apologize. I feel scattered.

He Knows My Name

I go to a church in the suburbs that's pretty much your typical "mega-church" -- at least mega by Maryland's standards (in California or Texas, it would probably be more akin to a housechurch). The worship music is modern, the pastor is energetic and the messages stay fairly simple. The thing I notice about the music is that we tend to go through phases with songs. Like a modern radio station, we're unlikely to sing a song that was really popular five years ago, even if it's a great song. Of course we'll always throw in an old hymn or two every now and then, but certain songs are simply passe. I find this very sad, but not that surprising.

I don't know if it was this morning or last night, but I was thinking to myself about the song, "He Knows My Name." It's a pretty old-school song, not the most profound of lyrics, not the most haunting melody. I don't recall ever hearing it at my church, but I've heard it a couple of times at other churches and, most memorably, at a dinner celebration one of my organization's church partners held to conclude a Cambodia conference. The song touched me deeply that night in September -- I think because it struck me how God knew (and knows) the names of all the Cambodians who died in the genocide in the late 1970s, how he knows the names of all those who suffer in that country today, how he cares about them and is present to them. The song came back to me this weekend (as it does from time to time).

It often happens that I'll think of a song or be singing a song during the week and then we wind up singing it that weekend in church. I feel like it's a whisper from God, a personal touch of His hand. This morning I went to church and some members of Sandtown's New Song Community Church -- an "inner-city" church -- were leading worship. The third and final song they led was "He Knows My Name." It was so beautiful, so personal, so confirming and sweet. I am so thankful just for that song.

He knows my name
He knows my every thought
He sees each tear that falls
And He hears me when I call

I wonder when I'll become a faithful blogger

It has been so long since the last post, I almost feel tempted to quit and someday start over. Who wants to read a blog that's so inconsistent, so unreliable? And who wants to write it?

My temptation to quit makes me think of how it is when a friend calls and I don't call him/her back immediately, and then it gets to be one week and then two weeks, and pretty soon it's been a month or longer and I am afraid to call at this point, feeling like it has been too long, the waiting period has been too ridiculous, I no longer deserve to call. A good friend who moved to California this fall called me some weeks ago and I've not called her back. I mourn her absence, I miss her dearly, and yet I can't pick up the fricking phone. It is pathological.

So I resist the temptation to give up blogging already. I trust that nobody is reading this yet anyway...

The past month has been...interesting, hard to characterize, a bit up-and-down, a bit nonstop. Again, it makes me feel like a very unsteady, unreliable person. Who knows what mood I'll be in from day to day? Who knows if I'll feel like talking to my husband (let alone anything more intimate)? Who knows if I'll pray and be obedient or fall into bad habits and be consumed by whatever it is in my life that offers to consume me? Since returning home from Christmas break, it has been work that has taken over my life -- this is nothing new. It's my default addiction. Along with it are the ever-present Need for Approval, the Desire for Attention, the Fear of Failure, the Feelings of Incompetence. I'm like the bad case study at the beginning of a self-help book. The good news is I seem to have "gotten over" the miscarriage and am not nearly as devastated as I was 6 weeks ago. The bad news is I probably just replaced one fixation for another and I'm not sure if burying myself in work or whatever else is the same thing as completing the grieving process.

I have this constant, nagging idea that God is disappointed with me, that he's tired of me, irritated, done with me. Like he can't believe how ridiculously ungrateful I am, how repetitive my sins, how slow to learn, how quick to turn away. Does he grieve for me? Is he angry? Does he feel anything about me? I hope he feels something more than frustration. I hope his Word is true, that he does forgive and transform me. I join the man in Mark who says "Lord, I believe; help my unbelief."

I should call my friend.