Tattered Thoughts

A dose of perspective

2008-01-06T16:16:00.000-08:00

I've been trying to face my food responsibility issues with a little more proactive energy. I'm hoping to find ways to cook most of our meals on the weekend to freeze ahead for the week. I don't expect to do the marathon "Once a month" cooking frenzies that are described in many places on the net, but if I could get even 3 or 4 meals cooked ahead, that would ease some of the daily burden of cooking.

So this afternoon I'm sitting here planning my cooking, feeling a bit overwhelmed at just figuring out what we need. Then I go check my email, and read a message from my pastor that one of the leaders of our church died this afternoon. I don't understand quite what happened - something about a blood clot or intestinal blockage or something - he was only in his 30's and was a beloved member of our church family.

Please pray for his wife Amy and his parents and family, and for our church. There is much sadness and grief.

All of a sudden, having to plan our meals doesn't seem like such a big deal.

Today's thought - Self Care is Hard

2007-12-22T09:40:00.000-08:00

Wow, I was feeling overwhelmed and slightly flippant when I wrote that last post, and never went back to write my imagined follow-on post.

Right now I am trying to understand how to balance my need, desire, and obligation to care for others in my life with my need to care for myself. Too often in the last few years I have cared for others and not for myself. I can be fairly strong and disciplined in my care for others, but allow myself to be weak and undisciplined when it comes to my own well being. The end result of this path is not good for anyone.

So yes, there are a lot of varying food requirements in my family right now, which can be a little overwhelming at times. But I'm realizing that really the central issues for me are the interior issues of choice, control and communication. Can I choose to care for myself enough to plan ahead for issues like food planning, preparation and the like, rather than squandering my time and forcing myself into a crisis reaction mode? At the same time, can I let go of my desire for everything to work out perfectly (and to realistically know where compromise is acceptable)? Will I have the guts to communicate clearly with the others in my life about what I can and can't do, and what I believe they need to care for themselves? And maybe most importantly, will I face myself with honesty, letting go of my "all or nothing" thinking that I can either care for others or myself, and really face the reality of what I am responsible for, without whining or manipulating.

So that's what I'm thinking about today, along with my typical pre-Christmas busyness. Today I am living with compromise, trying not to be perfectionistic as I finish making some Christmas gifts and try to clean my house to have some friends over tonight.

Our Family's Current Food Requirements

2007-12-03T20:49:00.000-08:00

1 husband – no gluten, no dairy, no potatoes, no tomatoes, no broccoli/cauliflower or related veggies, no onions, garlic, or related foods (even the smell of these being chopped or cooked will cause stomach upset), no peppers or related foods, limited sugar and starches. High protein - but only chicken, turkey, some buffalo (lower fat red meat), limited tuna (gotta watch out for that mercury), a few mild white fishes, and eggs. Some fruits OK. No pork. Rice and buckwheat cereal are good, rice pasta not currently tolerated. Has “bumpers” between his teeth for new braces which do not allow his teeth to meet and can not chew his food, which means that all foods have to be mostly ground, flaked, or pureed (no salads for now, mostly pureed soups). Needs to gain weight. Everything should be organic. Special nutritional supplements taken 5 or 6 times daily (per nutritionist). Hates to shop or cook. Helps with meal preparation and dishes.

1 wife – no gluten (or very little), no dairy (or very little), no tomatoes, low (only healthy) fats, limited sugar and starches. High protein with poultry, some buffalo, most any fish (only watch out for mercury levels), and some eggs. Some fruits OK. Loves onion and garlic (see restrictions above). No pork. Rice & rice pasta are good, and salads are good (only no commercial dressing, should be made from healthy oils and lemon juice). Needs to loose weight. Everything should be organic, and specially washed before being prepared. Special nutritional supplements taken 6 times daily (per nutritionist). Fine with shopping and cooking (most of the time), only occasionally does dishes.

1 82-year-old father-in-law – would prefer mostly beef (NO buffalo, please, and new dentures not working out so well so only ground beef for now), ham, loves shrimp, tolerates chicken (learning to like it more – but none of these new-fangled chicken or turkey sausages, please), salmon is better than white fish, loves mashed potatoes, gravy, yams, tomatoes, peas and corn. Some rice OK (but far prefers potatoes, pasta & bread). Salads are good (chicken good in these). Loves to shop and loves sweets - especially pies, donuts, pastries and anything that is a really good deal at Safeway or Costco. Eyesight not so good for reading labels to avoid partially-hydrogenated fats and high-fructose corn syrup. Basically, no problems with weight. Loves to shop for groceries, but doesn't retain good understanding of family's food needs (and doesn't like the health food store) and frequently brings home foods that can't or shouldn't be eaten by most members of the household. Does almost all the dishes.

1 13-year-old daughter – would prefer very few vegetables (mostly broccoli, green beans, carrots, peas, corn, artichokes, and lettuce tolerated), no “evil” foods (as defined mostly by father – onions, garlic, bell peppers, mushrooms, raw tomatoes), potatoes and yams good. Beef (no buffalo, please), chicken, turkey, ham, white fish OK, salads are good in moderation, likes bread, pasta, rice (is OK) and some fruits, can eat dairy, loves sweets (especially almost anything grandpa brings home). No problems with weight. Needs to learn about shopping, cooking, and doing dishes.

1 9-year-old daughter – would prefer very few vegetables (see list for older sister), no “evil” foods (as defined mostly by father – onions, garlic, bell peppers, mushrooms, raw tomatoes), potatoes and yams good. Beef (no buffalo, please), chicken, turkey, ham, salmon OK, salads are good in moderation, does like pasta, does not like bread, loves rice, does not tolerate dairy well, likes some fruits (though not the same ones as older sister), loves pickles, beets, and sweets (especially almost anything grandpa brings home). Prefers to have separate foods and does not like anything “mixed up” (learning to tolerate soups on good days). No problems with weight. Needs to learn about shopping, cooking, and doing dishes.

Upcoming post - typical afternoon of food related activities for Mom.

63rd Marathon tomorrow!

2007-11-03T20:17:00.000-07:00

He's almost done it!!!!!

One more day!

63 days straight of running 26.2 miles. All to raise money for research for a cure for Ataxia-Telangiectasia, a rare degenerative genetic disease that affects children. Since September 3rd, Tim and his family have traveled all across the country in a motorhome, each stop and marathon-distance run planned by a family of a child with A-T.

I do not know how he did it, how they all did it. Tim's wife Michelle is a friend of our family, and I'm hoping and praying that Michelle and the kids have held up OK as well. From the itinerary it looks in the last week especially, they had to travel about 6 or 7 hours each day (with two kids age 1 and 3, in a motorhome), between daily stops on their trip. They must be so exhausted.

But the most amazing thing is how Tim has pressed through this physical challenge, all to try to help the kids who struggle everyday to overcome obstacles equally as challenging as running as a marathon. If you have a little time, check out the youtube videos of some of his daily runs and the families of A-T kids involved, at the AT Cure Tour website.

Is it really November?

2007-11-02T20:29:00.000-07:00

I think I lost October. I know I saw it around here somewhere, but it slipped by me so fast that I'm feeling a little disoriented.

So I keep clicking on the time in the top bar on my computer, reading again the date that is revealed and trying to convince myself that it really is November. That whirlwind of costume sewing and classroom parties and candy (so much candy) that happened earlier this week did actually culminate in Halloween, the last day of October. And now - November. November is starting a little slow - even the Great Pumpkin came to our house a day late this year, lazy guy that he is.

Does the Great Pumpkin visit your house? He only started visiting our house a couple of years ago, after I learned from a friend that a simple request to the Great Pumpkin hotline could result in yearly visits from this fine rotund friend. He is quite an accommodating holiday hero, tailoring his services to each individual household's needs.

At our house, the Great Pumpkin only visits after my children have sorted through their Halloween trick-or-treating haul and saved out only as much will fit into a quart-sized ziploc bag. Then they leave the rest of their empty-calorie-laden bounty on the table when they go to bed, and during the night the Great Pumpkin takes the sweets and leaves a gift. Reasonable gifts - a single DVD or a modest iTunes gift card.

My girls have made the transition to this holiday tradition quite easily, and the significantly smaller collections of sugar bombs hanging around our house has made me a much happier mom. This year my 13-year-old did finally have a problem with the whole transaction. A direct quote of her reaction to my handing her the quart sized bag: "But I worked hard to get this huge haul of candy!" After some not so memorable snippy comments back and forth, though, she agreed to trust the Great Pumpkin, and was happy with her new iTunes buying power.

OK - actually, the Great Pumpkin wasn't even organized enough to get an iTunes card - rather he left her a twenty-dollar bill with the note that it could be used to buy a DVD of her choice or used for iTunes downloads (her younger sister got a DVD). Next year he'll probably know to plan ahead and get a gift card, if he's not to sidetracked by other Halloween issues.

Well, now it's November and I need to convince my husband that the trash can is the best place for this huge bag of candy that he hid somewhere around the house the other night. I hate to be wasteful, but so far I can't think of any better options. Any ideas?

Redecorating

2007-10-02T22:42:00.000-07:00

I've been playing with my blog - decided it was time for some new wallpaper around here. Please let me know if it's impossible to read or has horrible formatting on your computer.

I found the beautiful background graphic at Squidfingers, via this famous blog.

Bento-inspired lunches

2007-10-02T16:53:00.001-07:00

I thought I'd post a couple of pictures of the lunches that I have made my youngest daughter in the last week. She thinks that I am very funny to be taking pictures of her lunches in the morning!

rolled sandwich and veggies
Originally uploaded by ChrisA

This picture shows a rolled turkey and tofutti-cream cheese sandwich in one tier of a two-tier bento box. The second tier has a selection of veggies and a few bread-and-butter pickles (one of my daughter's favorite treats). I'm not sure how nicely the veggies stayed in their places by the time this lunch was actually eaten, considering how backpacks and lunch boxes get thrown around at school, but I didn't hear any complaints!

mini pita burgers
Originally uploaded by ChrisA

This lunch has mini burgers made of meatball-sized chunks of meatloaf mix, slightly flattened and baked, which fit perfectly into the mini pita breads that I found at Whole Foods. The pitas were a little dried out, but the girls dipped them into ketchup (in the little container), and didn't care. Chunks of nectarines (dipped in diluted lemon juice & honey to keep their color), snap peas, baby carrots and bread&butter pickles finished off this lunch.

Mom's Overture

2007-09-30T21:06:00.001-07:00

Anita Renfroe has taken "what a mom would say in a 24 hour period, and condensed it to 2 minutes and 55 seconds".

This is SO funny!

hat tip to my friend Annette via email

update 10/2/07: I see I'm not the only one taken with this video. Since posting this, I've seen this posted on another person's blog, and now on the front page of Yahoo. I think Anita Renfroe's public visibility just went up a major notch! I read that she's speaking at the Women of Faith conference this week in San Jose - it would have been fun to see her, but I'll be out of town and I'm not sure if I would have attended the whole conference just to see her (and I hadn't planned on going otherwise), but I may be checking out her books and/or dvd's soon!

Wanna win a Wii?

2007-09-25T17:10:00.000-07:00

Can you say that 10 times, fast? I can't.

The other title I thought of for this post was "If it's Tuesday, it must be... Wichita Falls, TX?"

That's where Tim Borland ran today - Wichita Falls, TX - for his 23rd consecutive Marathon. As I mentioned in my post a couple of days ago, my friend Michelle's husband is undertaking to run 63 marathons in 63 days to raise money and awareness for A-T, a rare childhood disease. Tomorrow Tim will be running in Guthrie, OK. I've been watching the daily video updates of Tim's progress on the ATCureTour blog, and the glimpses into what an impact this effort of Tim's is making on the lives of children and families afflicted with A-T is very inspiring.

They just announced on the ATCureTour blog that they are running a contest to give away a Wii, and all you have to do to enter the contest is post the following section of text about the project, along with the appropriate links. Here's my entry in the contest - and if you have a blog or website and want to enter the contest as well, just follow the Win a Nintendo Wii link to the blog entry describing the contest and follow the directions for how to post the text on your blog. Please help spread the word about Tim's efforts!!

Ultra-runner Tim Borland is running 63 marathons in 63 days in order to raise funds and awareness for the A-T Children’s Project in their quest for a cure or life-improving therapies for ataxia-telangiectasia (A-T). A-T is a rare, neurodegenerative disease that affects children, giving them the combined symptoms of cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, cerebral palsy, and cancer. Children with A-T — born seemingly healthy — are usually dependent upon wheelchairs by the age of 10 and often do not survive their teens.

To run with Tim, join a tailgate party, or make a donation, please visit the A-T CureTour website. There, you can also view the daily video blog produced by filmmakers who are making an independent documentary on the A-T CureTour or enter a contest to Win a Nintendo Wii.

If you are at all interested, check the itinerary for Tim's tour at the ATCureTour website, and if he's coming to run near you you could stop by for a tailgate party and show him some support for his efforts! If you do, say hi to Michelle from "Chris and the girls from back at home"!

Bento Box Lunches

2007-09-20T11:43:00.000-07:00

Warning: long blog post ahead...

One of my desires is to live, shop and eat more responsibly and ethically. I am attracted to the concept of buying foods as locally as possible, and eating organic fruits and vegetables in their appropriate seasons. I also would love to decrease our use of disposable, unhealthy food packaging materials. This is not an easy shift to make, and I am making slow changes towards these goals.

The lunches that I was packing for my daughters (and my husband and I when we are working), have really bugged me in how much they missed the mark. We were not eating to the nutritional standards that I would hope for, and we were using an excessive amount of disposable packaging.

Then this summer I stumbled onto blogs and pictures of bento box lunches, and I am hooked. As best I understand it, bento lunch culture has developed in Japan into a basic standard for packing healthy lunches in attractive, appealing ways. The resources I have found encourage adapting these standards to our own, usually American-style, cuisine. I now find lunch making fun and creative, which makes the work involved much more satisfying.

So what am I doing different? I have purchased a few different types of plastic lunch containers (bento boxes), which I now use to pack our lunches. A Japanese $1.50 store called “Daiso” opened near me this summer, so I was able to purchase a few lunch boxes there very inexpensively (like these).

I also love my new lock & lock boxes from Target. They aren’t quite as cute as the other bento boxes but are very versatile (and the Target price was much better than what’s listed at the website I linked to).

I have not adapted to the bento practice of cooking hot food, letting it cool to room temperature in a bento box, then packing it up and eating it at room temperature three or four hours later. Evidently there is a whole body of knowledge developed in Japan around how to do this safely, but I am not comfortable with the practice – I still pack either cold foods in our bento boxes, or hot foods into little thermoses (we use these Nissan thermoses, they are truly dishwasher safe and very durable).

My favorite bento blog is Lunch in a Box. The author has put together a wonderful resource of ideas, techniques and supplies for bento lunches. Her blog is my main inspiration. I’ll try to put together a list of links of other blogs and resources that are inspiring me another day.

Most days, I am packing lunches for my daughters with usually either a rolled tortilla-type flatbread sandwich and a selection of fruits and vegetables, or I am putting some hot leftovers in a thermos and packing a small box of fruits and vegetables. When my husband needs a lunch, I am packing a lock & lock box with half chicken salad and half lettuce that he can mix together when he eats. I also sometimes make potato or pasta salads for protein and carbs. I send these lunches to school in lunch boxes with ice packs.

My daughters think that my obsession with the cuteness of the bento lunches and accessories is a little crazy – they do not share my love of “cute”, and will not consciously eat any differently just because mom put it into a cute box! What I have found, though, is that the natural influence of well-presented food is changing the way they are eating.

A typical lunch that I made last year would have included a small thermos of leftover spaghetti, and plastic sandwich bags with some baby carrots and some fruit, and maybe a couple of cookies. They usually would eat the spaghetti and cookies, most of the fruit and maybe one or two carrots. I was continually stressed at the amount of food that we wasted, as well as how many plastic sandwich bags we used up and threw out.

Now I will pack almost the same foods, but - inspired by the pictures of bento lunches that I have seen – I might use one layer of our two-tier boxes to pack maybe 5 or 6 baby carrots, a few slices of apple (dipped in diluted lime juice & honey to keep from turning), and 3 strawberries to go with the spaghetti or sandwich. Somehow, when they are presented with the food in this manner, they eat it all. I have almost dropped the practice of including cookies, and now give them very small reusable plastic containers containing a few xylitol mints to chew, which are possibly (according to some claims) quite good for their teeth.

Wow, I didn’t think that it would take that long just to write an intro to my bento obsession. I want to confess that we still have a long way to go towards really reducing our use of one-time disposable packaging. I still buy prepackaged snacks for the girls to pick for their snack recess, and we use disposable packaged drinks. I still purchase too many overly-packaged foods to begin with. But we are making small steps toward our ideals, we are eating a little healthier, and I am enjoying packing the lunches a lot more than I did before. I do need to work more consciously on streamlining my planning and preparation for lunches, to keep the time spent to a doable minimum – but it’s a fun challenge.

Knock, knock! Hello? Anybody out there?

2007-09-19T23:07:00.000-07:00

Hi again. It's been a long time.

I'm still not sure what I'm doing here, but I've missed at least giving writing here a try while trying to figure that out. So here's a quick update...

I'm in a much better place than the last time I wrote here. Though I still don't understand exactly what was going on with my body last spring, I am much healthier now and working on improving that even more. Both my husband and my parents had some very difficult health problems in the last year as well, and they are all doing much better now too. This feels like a very hopeful time.

I love fall and the sense of new beginnings it brings. I think I will always feel like fall is more a time of new beginnings than January - involvement in school systems of some sort has definitely had it's imprint in my life. My girls have been back in school for about 3 1/2 weeks, so we are beginning to settle into a regular routine. I've begun to pick up some substitute jobs, as well, and I am loving this work. This will be my second year of substitute teaching, and it is already so much easier and more enjoyable than when I began last year.

I have a fun new passion - learning to make bento box lunches for my family! I had never really heard about bento lunches (besides a few references to classic bento lunches in some children's literature) until recently, when I stumbled on blogs about them. There is a whole community of people who have adapted the bento box culture from Japan to a way to provide healthy lunches of all different types of food. I'll have to write more about what I have learned, and put up some links to some of the wonderful resources I have found. Our bento lunches are far healthier than what I used to pack, and much less wasteful of resources (I'm barely using any disposable products in our packed lunches now). With my husband's health issues and living in an extended family home, providing food has been such a time consuming part of my life for the last couple of years - it's fun to take something that has become a chore and turn it into something new and creative for myself.

I have one more thing that I want to mention here now. This is really what woke me up from my blog-fast - if anyone even reads this blog again, I want to tell you about my friend and her husband and what they are doing!!

My friend Michelle is on a trip across the country with her husband Tim Borland, trying to raise awareness and money for research for a rare childhood disease called A-T, or Ataxia-Telangiectasia. Tim is running a marathon a day for 63 consecutive days. It is unbelievable what he is attempting to do! He started on September 3rd at the Disneyland 1/2 marathon (which he ran twice), and today he finished his 17th marathon in Portales, New Mexico. Tomorrow he will be running in Austin, Texas.

Michelle has been my daughters' horseback riding instructor for the last couple of years, and we just adore her and her kids. Please consider keeping Tim and Michelle and their kids (who are only 1 and 3 years old) in your prayers as they attempt this project. Tim is being followed by a couple of documentary film makers, and they are maintaining a video blogs with clips from each day's run and event here. The entry from the beginning of the blog does a good job of explaining the whole undertaking. The clip from day 15 shows my friend Michelle and her children.

The itinerary for the tour can be found here at A-T Cure Tour website. Please keep Tim and Michelle in your prayers, and tell your friends about this! It would be so wonderful if Tim could get a lot of support for all his efforts. Consider going out to cheer him in from his run, if you live near one of stops on his itinerary!

Taking a break

2007-06-18T23:31:00.000-07:00

I have tried over and over to start writing here, and just keep erasing what I write. I’ve always tried to avoid writing “why I haven’t written” blog posts, but I’m not sure what else I can say right now.

The last couple of months have been pretty hard. Evidently, I finally reached the place where the accumulated stress of the last few years has started to affect my body and I’ve had what I believe are a flair-up of the residual effects of having had Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS) eight years ago.

GBS is fairly rare auto-immune disorder where the body’s immune system attacks the peripheral nerves, resulting in varying degrees of weakness and/or paralysis. I had a fairly mild version (no complete paralysis or problems breathing) originally, and healed rapidly after treatment to stop the progression of the nerve damage. My neurologist told me then (and still believes) that basically once you reach whatever degree of healing you will after the initial event, you are healed, and there is only a extremely rare chance that you will be affected by GBS in any way again in the future. I loved that prognosis.

But as is the case with most auto-immune issues, I’m finding that I now don’t believe it’s all that simple. I “hit the wall” from stress a few months ago, and began to have lots of fatigue and eventually a return of some of the neuropathy (nerve tingling and some pain and weakness) symptoms that I experienced with GBS. My neurologist believes it doesn’t have anything to do with the GBS and looked for other explanations for the neuropathy I was experiencing, but couldn’t find any. Thankfully, the worst of these symptoms have gone away again, though not all of them.

So I’ve been resting a lot, still dealing with more fatigue than I’ve ever had before, and researching a lot of stuff online. Many in the community of people that I have reconnected with at the GBS Foundation forum believe that there is probably a post-GBS syndrome, very similar to post-polio syndrome. I have met many people online who, like me, thought that they were completely healed from GBS for many years, only to struggle with fatigue and neuropathy issues years later. In this possible post-GBS syndrome theory, it seems that the nerve healing that happened after the GBS doesn’t necessarily last your whole life, and can break down with age and/or stress.

What I haven’t felt able to do was write. In many ways, writing is what I want to do most right now, but I feel very blocked. It’s time for a radical re-ordering of priorities in how I spend my time and I’m not sure how to go about that. Thankfully, it’s summer and the school-year pressures of kids in school and working part-time as a sub are gone for now. We’re about to take off on a 2 ½ week road trip for a family reunion and to see my 104-year-old grandmother. I hope to write during this time, but I probably won’t be blogging much still.

So I'm officially acknowledging what's been obvious here for weeks - I'm taking some kind of break from blogging. Have a great summer, and I'll see you when I see you. And if you are experiencing stress in your life, I encourage you - as I am saying this same thing to myself - to look at how you are ordering your life and what you can do to counteract the stress. Too much stress is not good for our bodies.

Moving Slowly out of the Tomb

2007-04-10T20:01:00.000-07:00

The woman who leads my Ignatian Retreat group warned us ahead of time that we may not feel very joyful on Easter. And I’ll admit it was not a very joyous time for me, though it was very meaningful. I had expected to feel more joy on Easter (despite the warning), after having walked so closely with the Story these last few weeks.

My Ignatian group met on Sunday evening, and I sat and prayed with the scripture from John about how Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and found the stone rolled away, then after running to tell some disciples, came back and stood outside the tomb weeping. Those linen clothes lying in a heap in the tomb were what spoke to me the most. Before Mary looked in the tomb and saw the angels sitting there – what must have gone through Mary and the disciples’s minds when they first saw those strips of fabric lying there?

As I imagine it, those disciples and followers of Jesus did not move from their grief to happy dancing in one stroke of the clock. I find it interesting that even though we as a church have rituals that somewhat follow the timeline of events leading up to the crucifixion, we do expect to jump straight to joy and celebration on Easter morning.

Now, I’m not really complaining, because with the wisdom of time and hindsight and the scriptures telling us the story of what the disciples learned from Jesus through the resurrection and after, we do know now what the empty tomb signifies. Or at least, we hope we have grasped it. So we can celebrate on Easter day in a way the disciples weren’t prepared to. But for me this year, I’m still moving a little slowly out of the grief of the tomb and into the joy of the new day, as I try to follow along with the Story.

Imagine that!

2007-04-09T11:39:00.000-07:00

Lent is over, Easter has come and gone – but I’m still moving slowly out of the tomb.

I’ve been learning to “pray with my imagination” through this last seven months of participation in an Ignation Retreat. What a different experience this has been for me! As we have followed the church calendar into lent and Holy Week, I have imagined myself there at the scene – walking with Peter and John to find the man with the water jar, sitting with Jesus’ disciples while he washes everyone’s feet, praying and sleeping in the garden, and watching as the horrendous scenes of beating and torture unfold, walking through all those stations of the cross along the leading right up the to crucifixion, and now beyond that.

I have learned a lot about myself through this time, especially when I realize I can relate to what I imagine different people in this story might have been feeling. I think of Peter, walking into town to follow Jesus’ instructions to prepare for the Passover. We know now the story of what an emotional time awaits Peter in the next few days, and I imagine that maybe he is already conflicted by the intensity and complexity of his emotions – did he miss his boats, his fishing, his old familiar life? That’s what I imagined – his dreaming of the peace of his old life, maybe a little worn out by the stress of this new life he had chosen. And I realize that I too often tire of the new challenges that life brings me, and it is tempting to look back at my “old life” as something that was better or at least easier. And I know that I might not live up to my highest ideals in the future, even as Peter goes on to deny being a disciple of Jesus. I am not alone in my struggles.

I identified with Pilate. Can I claim that I have never turned a blind eye to injustice, never “washed my hands” of responsibility for situations where I know that there is unjust suffering, because it just seems to hard to figure out what could be done? Because there is too much public pressure to ignore the injustice? It grieves me to realize that I have that much in common with Pilate. I am still pondering that one, holding this knowledge before the Lord.

And I want to explain what I mean by “still moving slowly out the tomb” – but I promised my daughter I would help her clean her bedroom this morning, and I need to stop now. Through lent I have been trying to learn to keep my “online” time in perspective in my life- and this is part of that. Trying to find a way to read blogs and write my own posts, without letting it take over. So I’ll stop for now.

It's wonderful to be back! I missed reading all your blogs more than I ever expected.

Lent, fasting, and how I spend my time

2007-02-23T14:48:00.000-08:00

I am not good at making commitments to discipline. There is a good reason that the only New Year's resolution I made was to give up all chips for the month of January - it was doable. Not necessarily easy for me (I love chips, they are my comfort food), but I deliberately decided on a resolution that would be only mildly challenging, and I did it.

I have never fasted for Lent, partly because I wasn't sure I could follow through with the commitment to self-discipline required by most typical choices of fasting, and partly because of motive - I didn't really feel called but rather I mostly felt tempted to follow the choices that others whom I respect made to fast, in the hopes that I would somehow become more spiritual if I did it too. Sometimes I was tempted to fast from chocolate or alcohol (or chips) because if I gave them up I might loose weight. But these motives never made me feel like I would really be honoring Jesus, so I reasoned - what was the point?

This year things are different for me. I don't feel any more "spiritual" than before (what would that look like, anyway?), but I am much more serious than I have been for years about trying to spend time praying and journaling daily, and in trying to understand and follow what I think God wants for me. I also am seeking to understand more deeply the experience of Jesus during the time leading up to the Crucifixion, and it seems appropriate to me this year to be more conscious of my experience of Lent.

So when I read about Lisa and Will Samson's decision to give up blogging for Lent (and in searching for those links I stumbled on the fact that another favorite blogger of mine, Katy McKenna, is also blog-fasting for Lent), something really struck a chord in me. I thought at first that this was just another case of "oh - aren't they spiritual? I'd like to be like that, to do that too!"; but after thinking and praying for a few days about this, I have decided that I feel called to this same action. Blogging has been a wonderful blessing to me over the last few years (even though I am only a sporadic blog writer), but I also struggle with an ongoing tendency to use my blog reading as a "numbing agent" - it's all too easy for me to spend hours at a time reading blogs, when I know I should be doing other things.

At this point, I think that it is a good choice for me to face myself during those times when I want to "numb out", and see if I can chose to use my time differently. I am going to attempt to spend some time daily in creative expression (something I have felt a call to), as well as make a stronger commitment to my attempts at daily prayer and journaling.

We have been on a family vacation for the past few days, away from the Internet. My decision to fast from blogging was about 90% made during that time (I know - Lent started on Wednesday, I'm coming to my decision a little late!). Today, as I fired up my computer for the first time after a few days, I started to look through my feed reader at all the blog posts I have missed over the last few days, and the familiar draw to escape by reading starting tugging at me and I didn't like that feeling. I think now is a window of opportunity for me to learn something that I need to walk through.

I'm still not sure I've got the best motivation, but that's OK too. I'm just going to try. So I'm going to turn off my feed reader and not start it up until after Easter. I will be checking email, but I'm also committing to not spending more than 1/2 hour at a time on the Internet, except for writing emails when that is called for. I can check some news headlines, but no hours-long forays into web searching or reading of articles. Instead, I plan to try to spend more time being creative, and in my daily commitment to prayer and journaling.

I'll miss you all, a whole bunch. I'll especially miss reading about the many different expressions of faith surrounding Lent and leading up to Easter - that's one of the things that I have loved about blogging, that it has exposed me to so many varying faith traditions and experiences.

I hope you'll leave the light on for me!

Teenager in the house

2007-02-05T21:41:00.000-08:00

I am now the parent of a teenager. My oldest daughter (of two) turned thirteen today. That is so hard to comprehend in some ways, and at the same time not at all surprising as teenagerhood has been obviously approaching for many months.

I am so proud of my daughter. She is intelligent, an independent thinker, and very caring and giving. For the last few months she has worked hard most days to get her homework done as soon as possible after school so that she can go to the house of neighbor who is a newly divorced young mother with four young children to play with the children and help out this mother. She works as an aide in her school office and has earned the nickname "the best aide", because she really works hard to help out the staff rather than treating the time as a chance to socialize or goof-off. These kind of things are not the only things I value about her, obviously - but they are sweet to see. I really look forward to watching her grow through the next few years.

And now I am exhausted from subbing in a kindergarten classroom all day, followed by a mad couple of hours of cleaning and cooking, and the out-of-the-ordinary experience of an extended family birthday dinner on a school night. It was a good day.

Like being in a family

2007-01-22T21:32:00.000-08:00

Last night I was listening to the Speaking of Faith program from December 28, 2006 called "Approaching Prayer", and I loved this quote from theologian Roberta Bondi:

We often have a kind of notion as part of this highfalutin, noble picture of ourselves as prayers that when we pray we need to be completely attentive and we need to be fully engaged and we need to be concentrating and we need to be focused. But the fact is, if prayer is our end of a relationship with God, that's not the way we are with the people we love a large portion of the time. We simply are in their presence. We're going about our lives at the same time in each other's presence aware and sustained by each other, but not much more than that.

Well, let me tell you a story about when I first started teaching in the seminary where I teach now. And I would just find when I came home at the end of the day I would be so exhausted that I could hardly contain myself. And I would be met at the car, usually, pulling into the driveway by my two children and my husband, who would all come out to tell me all the things that had gone wrong in the day, like the washing machine had overflowed and the rug in the dining room was soaking wet. And I would think, "Oh, I just want to go back to school." I would come into the house, and Richard and I would fix supper, and then we would sit down and eat and I would fall asleep with my head in the mashed potatoes. But the fact is that I knew all along that, however it was, it was better that I was there than that I wasn't there, that my family needed me, that being part of a family means showing up for meals. And prayer is like that. However we are, however we think we ought to be in prayer, the fact is we just need to show up and do the best we can do. It's like being in a family.

Movement and Body

2007-01-06T01:07:00.000-08:00

I had the wonderful opportunity to go see a friend of mine dance tonight. She's a part of a modern dance company here in San Jose, and the evening was a delight. It is so amazing to watch these dancers use their whole body to tell a story and communicate such depth of emotion.

During the last few weeks, I feel like I have been learning more about living in my body. Bobbie had a great post a few weeks ago about this topic, with some links to great articles about body issues.

I feel like God has led me through a series of events that have helped me to connect more deeply with living in my body, and at the same time to connect more deeply with Him. This week I attended two yoga classes for the first time, and that was a very powerful experience for me. I really enjoyed the stretching, movement and breathing involved, and I loved how moving my body had an impact on my sense of God's presence during the meditation/prayer time.

Tomorrow I go on a half-day retreat. I am really looking forward to this time, eager to see what else God will reveal to me.

My current favorite scripture

2007-01-04T10:54:00.000-08:00

1 Corinthians 13:12-13

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known.

But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love.
(NASB)

We don't yet see things clearly. We're squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won't be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We'll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us!

But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.
(The Message)

Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
(NIV)

For now we are looking in a mirror that gives only a dim (blurred) reflection [of reality as [in a riddle or enigma], but then [when perfection comes] we shall see in reality and face to face! Now I know in part (imperfectly), but then I shall know and understand fully and clearly, even in the same manner as I have been fully and clearly known and understood [by God].

And so faith, hope, love abide [faith--conviction and belief respecting man's relation to God and divine things; hope--joyful and confident expectation of eternal salvation; love--true affection for God and man, growing out of God's love for and in us], these three; but the greatest of these is love.
(Amplified Bible)

Ahora vemos por espejo, oscuramente; pero entonces veremos cara a cara. Ahora conozco en parte, pero entonces conoceré como fui conocido.

Ahora permanecen la fe, la esperanza y el amor, estos tres; pero el mayor de ellos es el amor.
(Reina-Valera 1995)

Now we see things imperfectly as in a cloudy mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.

Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.
(New Living Translation)

For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.

And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
(New King James Version)

Happy New Year!

2007-01-03T20:21:00.000-08:00

a little belated, but sincere nonetheless...

I am feeling so un-original, so classically and predictably drawn to hoping for a fresh start for the year with shiny new resolutions and hopes and dreams. But I don't like the feeling of failure that often accompanies my resolutions after about three or four months (or maybe weeks, or days) into the year.

So this year, though I hope for and plan to strive for many good things, I am resolving on one thing:

I will not eat any chips during the month of January. No potato chips, no tortilla chips, no wonton chips, and no pita chips. No chips. For one month.

Do you have a resolution?

This left my emotions spinning

2006-11-26T18:15:00.000-08:00

Last night I was finally able to watch the movie "Lonnie Frisbee: the Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher". This movie tells the story of Lonnie Frisbee, from his conversion experience while on a drug trip during the late 60's, through his incredible influence on the growth of both the Calvary Chapel and Vineyard church movements, to his death from AIDS in 1993.

I can't begin to describe the jumbled mix of emotions that kept me awake for a long time afterwards. Sadness - an incredible sadness - had to be at the top of the list. Lonnie was an integral part of the founding of the Calvary Chapel and the Vineyard movements, and it was bittersweet to see all those pictures from the early days of both churches and stranger still to hear this portion of the history of the Vineyard portrayed on TV.

My history as a Christian is so tied up in this story. Not as a central character, by any means - but this story is part of my story. I prayed to accept Jesus in March 1979, after talking to a guy I was supposed to be studying with while hanging out in the student union at Cal Poly, San Luis Obsipo. Within a few weeks, I started attending the rapidly growing Vineyard church in San Luis Obispo. I had been to church very little prior to that time in my life, but what I experienced at Vineyard was very different than what little I had known of church before that. We were a group of mostly college students led by a very young pastor. There were no pews or choir - we were packed into a rented Oddfellows hall and the pastor led worship with a guitar.

So when John Wimber invited Lonnie to come and lead the famous (in Vineyard history, and now in this movie about Lonnie) "Mother's Day Service" at his Calvary church in Yorba Linda in 1980, I had been a part of the San Luis Obispo Vineyard church for a year already. I have a really bad memory for that time period in my life, but I do remember how John Wimber, and I think often Lonnie, began to come visit our church and lead us in the beginnings of learning to pray for healing and the move of the Holy Spirit. It was an incredible, exciting and heady time, even before Wimber's influence began to impact and shape the direction of the church.

This is something that I have often remembered when reading about and watching the growth of the emerging church. Much of what I read about the emerging church reminds me of those early years of the Vineyard. A few times I have mentioned this on blogs or forums, and I feel like I have been told "Oh no, this is not the same at all". But I suspect that those people only equate the Vineyard with John's ministry of Signs and Wonders, and miss the fact that there were Vineyard churches ministering to us young people, speaking our language and reaching us in a way that we felt was authentic and relevant to our lives, well before the Signs and Wonders ministry began.

It was heart wrenching to watch this documentary about Lonnie Frisbee. I remember hearing at the time that Lonnie was being pushed out of his role in public ministry in the Vineyard, but I was oblivious to any more than that. There are other stories of how incredibly human and flawed some of the people involved in the very public ministry of the Vineyard of the time were. I think it is sad and shameful that Lonnie's failings (and I am sure there are many different definitions of what those would be) were treated differently and with much less grace than most others'. This has reminded me to look at the entire chain reaction of recent events in the blogging community surrounding the Haggard affair with much more humility.

It is hard to understand how other people, who's stories are not so intertwined with the story being told, will view this documentary. And I can only imagine how those who's stories are much more intimately involved in Lonnie's story will feel about this movie. I'll be watching this one over again, and asking God what he wants to speak to me about my life through it.

links:
the website for the Frisbee movie project - the FAQs section is very interesting...
the KQED program that ran the documentary has another summary of the movie

This encourages me today

2006-11-06T08:58:00.000-08:00

I picked up Richard Rohr's "Everything Belongs, The Gift of Contemplative Prayer" again recently, and some things I read are really sticking with me and encouraging me.

As an introduction, he starts with:

We are a circumference people, with little access to the center. We live on the boundaries of our own lives "in the widening gyre," confusing edges with essence, too quickly claiming the superficial as substance.

and

Our "skin" is not bad; it's just not our soul or spirit. But skin might also be the only available beginning point for many contemporary people. Earlier peoples, who didn't have as many escapes and means to avoid reality, had to find Essence earlier -- just to survive. On the contrary, we can remain on the circumferences of our lives for quite a long time. So long, that it starts feeling like the only "life" available.

And here's the gem that's talking to me today:

The ordinary path is a gradual awakening and an occasional quieting, a passion for and a surrendering to, a caring and a not caring at all. It is both center and circumference, and I am finally not in control of either one. But we must begin somewhere. For most of us the beginning point is at the edges. This reality, felt and not denied, suffered and enjoyed, becomes the royal road to the center. In other words, reality itself, our reality, my limited and sometimes misinterpreted experience, still becomes the revelatory place for God. For some reason we seem to prefer fabricated realities to the strong and sensitizing face of what is.

Oh Lord - today, let me look full on into the strong and sensitizing face of what is.

A Rant about what I want

2006-11-02T22:12:00.000-08:00

I want to not be tired and worn out.

I want to not lose my temper when I come home from being gone for an hour late in the evening to find my girls and grandpa watching a movie which I assume they must have started much earlier, before their dad/son left for a meeting, only to find out much later that they must have just started right before I got home, and then hurting grandpa’s feelings because I am so upset that my girls broke all the rules and manipulated their way into staying up an hour and half past bedtime on a day when everyone is already fighting colds and need all the sleep they can get.

I want to not be frustrated with everyone in my family.

I want to not be worried about my mother, undergoing daily radiation treatment and fighting exhaustion brought on by other underlying health problems combined with the radiation, fighting the exhaustion brought on by a doctor mistakenly not believing that this other underlying condition could be responsible for a few hours of disorientation and his temporary (probably, hopefully, almost assuredly mistaken) fear that cancer had spread to her brain and our fears that cancer had spread to her brain.

I want to not be tired and worn out.

I want to not be overweight, always tired, a messy housekeeper, a procrastinator, and too often grumpy.

Did I mention that I’d like to not be tired and worn out?

I want to be above all worries about money, health and relationships.
I want peace and joy and happiness, with liberal doses of laughter.

But really,
I want to come to peace with the life I have, which is not necessarily the life I thought I would have.
I want to accept reality, live in reality (even with worries about money, health and relationships), and love.

Straight Up

2006-10-27T11:06:00.000-07:00

Please first read previous post: I am a picky reader. I wrote that to bring some context and background to my observations here.

I received my copy of Lisa Samson’s new novel “Straight Up” a couple of days ago (and I want to say that I only “know” Lisa through her blog). I had been dealing with some very painful news all that day and was quite ready to be transported to another place for a while, so I allowed myself to set aside my “shoulds” for the evening, and dive right into reading.

I finally put the book down, finished, at about 12:30 a.m.. And I didn’t regret it the next morning, even when the alarm went off at 5:30 a.m. and I had only had about 4 ½ hours of sleep.

Let me just say right up front that I really liked this book. I was a little worried when I started reading, because Lisa uses the technique where chapters switch between different characters’ point-of-view – and that is often not a favorite style of mine to read. I think it takes real skill on the author’s part to lead us through those transitions between different characters and how we have visualized what is happening with them. If the transition happens too quickly, we feel jerked around and discombobulated; if it is too long between switches, we have a hard time transitioning back to the details of the characters. I think Lisa nailed those transitions pretty well with this book, and the multiple points-of-view really enhanced the story.

My favorite aspect of this book is that the characters that Lisa portrayed rang true-to-life for me. They were rich, with emotions and actions that were often contradictory. Like in real life – or at least in my life and the lives of my friends – their faith was not cookie-cutter, did not seem written out of some stereotype of “how a Christian should think and act”.

It was also very fun to see the echoes of some of the life situations that, through their blogs, I have read of Lisa and her family living through. This may have helped to lend an air of credulity to some of the scenarios for me.

The book takes a rather surprising turn mid-way through, that at first I was afraid would set off all my “I’m being emotionally manipulated here” bells. But as the novel went on, this situation really seemed to advance the story and definitely was not a “cookie-cutter” predictable scenario, and did not lead to an entirely predictable resolution.

More than just appreciating some of the literary techniques – I really liked that the story portrayed Christians who come from different backgrounds in their faith, who have made mistakes and who have to live through the consequences of those mistakes, who wrestle with their faith and their doubts, and who continue to pursue understanding God’s call and purpose for their lives well past early adulthood.

So I say a big "thank you" to Lisa Samson for writing a book that was a joy and an encouragement to read. I will be recommending it to my friends.

I am a picky reader

2006-10-27T11:04:00.000-07:00

I grew up reading voraciously. Starting in college, I began limiting the number of books that I would allow myself to read, because once a book grabbed me I had very little self-control and would stay up all night reading, at great expense to the rest of my life. I found that, especially as I slowed down the steady diet of books, TV, and movies that had characterized my teen years, I became ever more sensitive to the emotional tenor of these books and media.

Now, almost thirty years later, I very rarely see a movie in the theater (a complete sensory overload for me) and I don’t watch many on TV, either. I’m quite selective about the TV shows I watch. I still struggle to put down a book once I am engaged in it, and the cost to my 40-something body of staying up all night reading has become much more severe. I usually am compelled to continue reading a book, even if I am frustrated by how it is affecting my emotions.

My family and friends are often mystified as to why I get so angry when I read a book that I feel is overtly manipulating my emotions to achieve some conclusion that the author has in mind. I don’t completely understand it either, but I know that I get very upset at books that seem gratuitous in their attempt to grab hold of my emotions, who take those emotions and drag them up and down mountains or into the gutter. Especially if it’s done in a manner that seems unnecessary for the telling of the story, or if I feel that they are blatantly trying to push me to come to the some specific (and by implication “correct”) moral, spiritual, or emotional conclusion. I hate that.

I recently read a Christian novel where it seemed that the only characters to display depth, complexity, and richness were either the non-Christians, or in a pre-Christian state. Once the author began to describe the Christians, or especially when a character became Christian, the character became shallow and dimensionless, completely predictable. I long to read Christian novels about characters that are more real, that show some complexity, some depth, some uncertainty in their faith. I don’t trust people who tell me that all their doubts, all their fears, all their problems disappeared after they became a Christian – and I don’t want to read a book that portrays that either.

In defense of all Christian writers – what bothers me in a novel is probably not the norm for most readers. I’m not saying that the way I am sensitive to books or movies is any better – or more morally correct – either. I actually can tolerate many things that might be on a list of Christian moral “don’t”s – some bad language, some expressions of intimacy. It’s the sense of being manipulated, beyond what is needed to make the point of the story, that angers me. I don’t completely understand this sensitivity, and there’s a good chance it springs from some of my own emotional need for healing rather than some place of greater discrimination.

And as far as writing about Christians in a shallow manner, I’ll brazenly give my take on what this issue is about. I think it’s one of the great challenges of any creative process in our culture right now, to bring art that is Christian back into the realm of real depth and beauty and richness, not narrow predictability. I think that we Christians, many of us who consciously attempt to grapple with the awesome creativity and richness of the divine, have created a language and culture around our faith that somehow doesn’t translate well into art, into fiction. Our images are too packed with meaning for us, and we don’t know how to unpack them for someone who doesn’t share our background. I know that many people with much more understanding and knowledge than I have thought about this, though, so I don’t claim to have any great revelation here – I’m probably just reflecting back what I have absorbed through my reading of other’s ideas about this issue.

So – I have become a picky reader. I try not to start books that will, almost like a addiction, compel me to stay up all night reading only to leave me angry and frustrated.

From the news

2006-10-09T22:44:00.000-07:00

I don't think I've ever blogged about the news before, but two stories I read tonight really struck me.

When I left my high-tech programming job over 12 1/2 years ago, to take a break for a few years to be a stay-at-home mom, I don't think I would ever have guessed that my break would stretch out into a permanent change. The world of technology has changed incredibly during those years and the cutting-edge company that I used to work for is no longer cutting-edge. Still, it is sad to hear of the passing of Ray Noorda today, and even though he had moved on from his original company quite some time ago, it really feels like the final curtain on an era for me. I still sometimes miss that emotion of being wrapped up in working on the "next, new thing" and being a part of attempting to "fight the evil empire". It was an exciting and heady time.

Since then, my break has morphed into a gradual career change. Part-time volunteering in co-op preschool with my first child has grown gradually into my immersion into the public schools as an almost full-time commitment (part-time working and most of the rest of the time volunteering). I now love working with children and really appreciate that I have been able to grow into these great jobs of substitute teaching and volunteering. Only I never thought that these environments, where I am sending my beloved children daily, and where I am choosing to work and volunteer, could be so dangerous! Four shootings in U.S. schools in less than 2 weeks? This is not right.

First Day

2006-10-03T16:12:00.000-07:00

Woohoo! I just finished my first day of working as a substitute teacher! I got to work with a second grade class, and it was very fun. Sometimes challenging - but mostly pretty darn wonderful!

I think I'm really going to enjoy this job.

A run-on sentence just describes this best

2006-09-25T17:33:00.000-07:00

You know that feeling you get when you find out that the six weeks of radiation treatment that the doctor prescribed for your mother, who just had a very large tumor removed, is basically considered only "insurance" against the possibility of the spreading of cancer cells and that over all her prognosis is really, really good?

It's a great feeling.

Like an open book

2006-09-20T17:18:00.000-07:00

I've been unsure whether to blog about one of the things I'm doing now. I've joined a thirty-week "retreat" doing the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius (there's a nice explanation here). This is a huge commitment for me and while I am very excited about it, I am also rather overwhelmed by the time and emotional energy that it takes. I think I've been afraid to write about it here because a) it might seem like bragging or some weird contorted emotion like that, b) I probably won't be able to write much about what I'll be going through in the retreat anyway, and c) it's always scary to admit that I'm attempting some new level of discipline (what if I fail?).

Today, though, I was really moved by an experience with God that came while working on my exercises for this week and I wanted to write about it. Part of this week's instructions called for me to pray to see what were the major turning points of my life, as if through the eyes of God (and through the lens of having meditated on Psalm 139).

Well, I've read Psalm 139 plenty of times - "you formed me in my mother's womb" and all that. Today though, as I sat outside my favorite coffee shop nursing a latte, I observed the world right around me. I looked at the tree leaves wiggling in the breeze and watched a pigeon with a shimmering purple collar walk around my feet looking for crumbs. I listened to the sounds - the snatches of conversations as people walked by, the intermittent bird-song-like chirping of the cross-walk beeper, the car noises of brakes and gears shifting and tires on pavement. I felt the warmth of my coffee cup in my hand and the lovely, almost bitter taste of the drink in my mouth. All these things of creation speak to me of a wonderful and loving God. When I have a hard time believing in God, I look at these things and their complexity and beauty and I find my faith renewed.

As I thought about different major events in my life, I asked God to give me the eyes to see them as He did. While I have known intellectually that He was there throughout my life, I haven't always known it emotionally. What does God see as the major turning points in my life?

This is when I suddenly had one of "those" kind of moments, one of those mysterious experiences of the supernatural. All of a sudden the picture in front of me didn't fit together any more. The cars were driving by, but they didn't make sense. People were talking, but I couldn't quite understand them. It was as if all of life was like one of those mosaics of tile that come attached to a canvas backing and suddenly the tiles got up and danced around a bit, then didn't quite fit back together again the way they had before.

I realized that in the past when I have tried to see that God was with me throughout my life, I have looked at my life through my own memories and impressions, and tried to superimpose an understanding of God being there and his love for me on those memories. What I feel like God was inviting me to do today was to let my understanding be shaped by his view of my life, to let him shake things up a little. Not to negate my memories, but to allow him to enhance (and maybe complete) them. To accept that sometimes, what I thought was a known picture of events might turn out to fit together a little differently than I remembered. I feel like I was invited to peer into God's memory scrapbook, to see my story from his point of view.

Like an open book,
you watched me grow from conception to birth;
all the stages of my life were spread out before you

Wow.

Who am I?

2006-09-16T09:11:00.000-07:00

Once again life is changing almost more than I know how to handle it.

Did you have any stereotypes about middle-age when you were a kid? I remember thinking middle-aged life would be all settled and normal and boring. There were all those stories of men going through "mid-life crisis", of buying fast cars and chasing younger women, which seemed to happen mostly because their life had settled into such boring monotony. Funny, too, how the mid-life crisis stereotype rarely included middle-aged women. I expected, if I thought about it at all, to be happily living the life that I had been preparing for all my youth and young adulthood.

Well, I'm here now - full middle-age - and my life is anything but what I expected and it seems like things are always changing.

For years my husband, children and I had settled into some very regular routines, ways of communicating, ways of doing things. Then at the beginning of this year my father-in-law moved in with us and much of our routine has been thrown into disarray. Along with this new complexity has come a deep richness - it is a good thing - but it can be very challenging sometimes as well.

One of the hardest things is that as I have gotten older the introverted part of me has grown and I have craved more time to be really alone. This has been hard for the last few years as my husband has been unemployed for much of the time, but now I can never really predict when the house will be busy or empty. While in theory I value the idea of a healthy vibrant household, with people coming and going, I have found that adapting to that reality is more challenging that I imagined. One of my major goals right now is to be purposeful about spending time alone, and it's been hard to do.

So many other things have been changing this year. My husband has been pretty ill with gut problems and very time-demanding special dietary needs (requiring countless hours of planning, shopping and cooking). Thankfully we may be seeing the light at the end of the tunnel with that - we finally found a good nutritionist who is helping us a lot - and my husband is feeling better and hopefully will get even better soon.

This is just in time, as there is a potential for my husband to work into a job in an area he is passionate about (and which is a complete change of career for him). He has been volunteering in this area for years and it would be wonderful if he could get this job! It is a good time for him to be feeling better.

In all of these issues, the one constant has been that we don't really know what is going to happen next - not exactly my old image of a settled and normal middle-age.

At the same time that my husband has been pretty ill, and my kids have their regular needs for structure and school preparations and etc..., my mother has had surgery to have a very large tumor removed. I went to my parent's house for a week to help them through the surgery time and we are still working out how they will handle her transportation and care needs during her upcoming weeks of daily radiation treatment. My mom has had the care-taker role for my father in his illness for many years, so it is challenging for everyone in our family for her to be going through this. She's also one of my closest friends, so this has been hard emotionally as well as logistically.

It seems like life is all about change right now, in things big and small. The part-time job that I thought I had, then I found out right before I expected it to start that I didn't have after all, and with that the loss of the sense of having a place that was "mine" that I could count on going to three days a week. The lessons that I thought I had all arranged for the girls, only to find that the instructors had life changes and nothing is set and scheduled any more. The sunday school teaching partner that I thought I was scheduled to work with again this year, except that I must have goofed in communication and I may need to start over and work with a new partner.

David asked me why my new profile asks "Who am I?" I think I have too often defined who I am in my life by the roles that I have. I also think it is easy to confuse "calling" and "roles" and our identity in Christ. So every day now I am asking God to help me see who I am in Him, to sense what He is calling me to in this phase of my life, to understand what my roles in life are right now and how to best fulfill them. I do not feel like I can take anything for granted - though I constantly find that I have.

Playing Around with Blogger

2006-09-13T22:56:00.000-07:00

It's been really hard to write recently, as the scarcity of blog posts here over the last few months can attest to. But the lure of new whiz-bang gadgets and simple editing led me to convert to the new Blogger Beta today. This may be kinda fun, and I'm hoping it will help to kick-start those half-formed posts lurking at the back of my mind.

My one dilemna is what to do with the now dis-connected haloscan comments. I probably won't have the time to figure out how to move them over into this newer version of my blog - so I apologize if I have left behind a comment that you made here. I have treasured all of them.

First Day of School

2006-08-23T06:58:00.000-07:00

It doesn't seem possible.

It's a day of new beginnings and unknown adventures await. One of my daughters is entering 7th grade, the middle year of middle school. The other daughter starts 3rd grade today, the last year of lower elementary, the last year of being in a small class. This morning is full of showers and new clothes, new shoes, new backpacks, shiny binders and folders.

It would have been my first day of work as a school librarian, but - as can happen easily in this kind of job - things have changed. There was a lay-off and someone with more seniority had the right to the job. I loved the work so I am a little sad, but I am grateful for the time right now to spend time with family who are dealing with health problems, and I look forward to starting substitute teaching in a few weeks.

Time to run and keep up with our new morning routine. Adventures await!

Unstructured Time

2006-08-02T15:47:00.000-07:00

Does anyone else struggle to stay moving and at all productive when you have unstructured time? Any tips?

Going back to work part-time in the last year and a half has been really good for me. I love the rhythm that the part-time work schedule has brought to my life. It helped me make major leaps and bounds out of the stuckness and vague depression that used to grip my life and left me sitting in front of my computer for hours on end.

I am thrilled to work in the school system and to be home with my kids during the summer, I really value being home with them. But I am feeling very stuck again right now. I'm staying up WAY too late at night, sleeping in too much, and it's hard to get up from my computer... There are things that I really want and need to do before we get back into the school year busyness in a couple of weeks, but I'm having a hard time getting things done while I have the time.

So I'd love to hear any tips! Though if you tell me that you simply decide to do what needs to be done and you just do it - I'll praise God that there are people in the world who are able to do that, but I'm really hoping to hear some tips from people like me who aren't sure that method will ever work in their lives...

Hot

2006-07-22T16:07:00.000-07:00

A friend called me yesterday afternoon and invited me to bring stuff over and join them in a garage sale today. Since I hadn't really planned for it I was up until 1:00 a.m. sorting and pricing stuff, then went over very early to set it all up. It was already so hot and humid at 6:30 a.m. that I was drenched in sweat just setting my things up.

I sold quite a bit of stuff, but even more important to me was that I was able to recycle some used items to people who were glad to get them for cheap, rather than just having to throw them away (like old kid's bicycles that had been left out in the elements too long). By noon I was so hot I had to stop.

It wasn't until a few hours later that I noticed what the temperature is 110 degrees here today!! I'm glad I didn't realize that it was that hot when I was out in it, I would have felt even worse. It was a crazy day to do a garage sale!

We have two downstairs rooms in our house that are just bearable right now (from a small wall air-conditioner), but the upstairs rooms are over 90 degrees right now. I think we are going to try to find some kind of air-conditioned restaurant to go out to dinner at tonight, and I may try my mom's trick of putting ice in front of a fan tonight to be able to sleep upstairs tonight.

I don't think I've ever seen it this hot here before. I know there is a heat-wave happening over most of North America and at least Great Britain as well, I'm not sure about other places.

I hope you are surviving the heat well!

A strange practice

2006-07-16T16:13:00.000-07:00

I had a hard time in church today. It was hot and as I was sitting opposite the doors that were open in the front corner of the auditorium where we meet, my eyes kept straying to stare out the doors and windows at the trees gently swaying in a breeze, and the blue sky beyond.

I didn’t want to go to church today. I haven’t had enough sleep the last few days and I woke up with a headache. I went because – well, it’s what we do. I want to like going to church and often, I do.

But today, I kept thinking about how this crazy story of a man named Jesus who lived 2000 years ago (who we believe was God), has led us to do this strange thing called church. I mean, think about it – weekly we drive to a building, sit down with a bunch people, sing some songs that would make no sense to anyone not indoctrinated in the story, send our kids off to a class where they are taught the kid’s version of the story while we sit and listen to someone tell us some more about the story (referring to a the book that tells about the story). We drink some coffee, eat a bagel or a donut, chat with a few people, gather up the kids and head back for home. Your rituals and structure may vary.

So maybe that sounds a little empty, and we like to think that our experience of church is more meaningful. Maybe the worship music at our church is really good (whether it’s classic hymns sung by a choir or raucous rock music), the songs really move us, and we feel that something really mystical happens when we sing these songs that talk about the story, that the actual presence of God can be felt. Or maybe the person who talks to us is really gifted in teaching and communicating, and we are challenged in our understanding of the story and learn something new about ourselves. Or maybe this doesn’t describe your rituals at all, and what you do is deeply meaningful to you.

As I stared out the window at the trees, and the sky, and the cars driving by on the road in front of our church – all I could think about is how strange church is. What connection is there really in all these practices to the (God-) man Jesus, who lived 2000 years ago. How can we be certain – so certain – of our understanding of this story, of how we are supposed to read the book that we get the story from, and how we are supposed to respond to it today.

We sang a song today that makes no sense to me. It talks about “the wondrous cross”. The “wondrous cross”? The way I read the story and in my understanding of history, the cross doesn’t seem so wonderful. There’s some pretty incredible stuff that happens in the story after the cross, but the cross itself seems pretty terrible. That song makes me very sad.

I listened to a youth ministry presentation about a recent mission trip the high schoolers when on. They had wonderful stories, and it seemed like a very powerful time in the kids’ lives. And yet – I struggle with the process, with putting my children into a community who values teaching the story to children in no uncertain terms, while I struggle to be certain of anything about the story.

So I sat and stared at the leaves and the sky. These speak to me of a God who cares, who is involved with our story here on earth. I watched the variety of people who walked through our doors and sat down together to worship God. Their very faces speak of a history and a story that (with most of them) I will probably never know, and yet they speak to me of a God who cares. I was able to hug a good friend, and talk to another about getting together this week, and the love of these friends speaks to me of a God who cares.

I want to like going to church, I really do. I miss the assurance that I used to feel that these rituals are a very good thing, the right thing to do. I want my children to grow up loving God and understanding the story of His love for them. But some weeks I wonder if I can really keep participating in this strange thing called church.

Things I'm thinking about: Summer plans

2006-06-27T00:00:00.000-07:00

My husband, the girls and I are heading to my parents' house for a 10-day stay tomorrow. It's going to be a very long drive through some very hot country-sides, and I haven't finished packing yet.
I need to gather up a bunch of my beading supplies to take with me on our trip. I'm hoping to spend some time there playing with beads - though I often have that plan when I head there for a visit, and usually end up busy with other stuff or just hanging and watching TV.
It's going to be very hot in the desert. Thank you, God, for air-conditioning.
The summer is going to go by very fast. After we return from the desert, the girls will be in some swim lessons and a music camp. After the three weeks of camp and lessons, there will only be 3 1/2 weeks left before school starts again. And I will probably start working again even before school starts.
I think that I am going to try to sign up for the 2nd day of the BlogHer conference, unless it sells out before I can decide. The first day is already filled, but the second day's seminars really caught my eye. I can't really afford it - but I'm thinking of going to the seminar on building a craft business using a blog, and I could use some of my meager profits from past jewelry sales to pay for the registration. It would be an investment in my business, right? Or is that just an excuse to get to go see some of these women in person that I've only read about... and would that be such a bad thing?
If I do go to BlogHer Day Two, the problem is that I want to go to all the seminars offered during the first session - almost more than any of the other ones offered the rest of the day! Practically all of the seminars would be interesting in some way, though...
I want to clean my house this summer. Housecleaning is my nemesis, or has been. I am hoping to remember the energy that I felt cleaning the library in the last week, and translate that into cleaning my own house. I desperately need a good, deep spring cleaning, followed by some re-arranging of how space is used to match the way we live now that the kids are getting older and my father-in-law has moved in with us.

Things I'm thinking about: Work

2006-06-23T19:40:00.000-07:00

I loved being a children's librarian this last year, and I really like working in the school system. It was so fun to grow into the library being "my" place, learning all the details that go into keeping the place running smoothly, and learning to feel more self-confident in a community that can be a little intimidating to outsiders.
I think I read stories to children, from pre-schoolers to 10-year-olds, over 400 times during those nine months. That's a lot of stories. I had to learn to nuture my throat.
I don't even want to know how many books I shelved. Recruiting more parent volunteers is high on my to-do list for the beginning of next year.
I just finished spending a lot of hours of my own time in the library (after school let out for the summer) cleaning, sorting and organizing. It was so satisfying to chuck old catalogs and legacy "stuff" left over from the last librarian, and to leave things in good order for the next year. Not all the "projects" are done - I don't think they ever will be in a job like that - but there shouldn't be any hidden surprises.
I'm not sure yet if I'll have the library job next year - my seniority in the district is very low, and I think they have to offer my job to a couple of other people who lost their jobs last week. But I haven't heard any news yet, so it's looking promising that I'll keep the job.
I'm planning on finishing my paperwork for substituting this summer, and I'm going to try to fill many of my off-days (the library job is only 3 days per week) with substituting. That should be an adventure! If I lose the library job, I'll just sub more days per week.
Yeah for summer break! It really starts for me tomorrow!!

Rebeca's Red Coral Necklace

2006-06-20T17:02:00.000-07:00

Rebeca's Red Coral Necklace

I did finally start to make some jewelry! It's always easier to start when there's a specific purpose, and my friend Rebeca's birthday is an excellent reason to make jewelry.

The picture is only a quick scan of the piece, made minutes before going out to lunch for my friend's birthday. Someday I need to make a good photo setup for jewelry.

Now I have quite a mess to clean up, and lot's of inspiration to keep making more.

It's time to make things

2006-06-11T23:59:00.000-07:00

I'm posting this here mostly as a challenge to myself.

It's time to create.

I've laid aside most of my creative endeavors for the last year or so. There were lots of reasons. Life has been busy and stressful. Fear. I had started a small business selling jewelry, and frankly, it scared me. I'm not sure why - fear of failing, fear of complications, fear of how to handle it all? I don't really know.

But I need to start making things. There's an itch in my soul and in my fingers. It's time.

One more week of school and work, then it will be summer break! Yeah!!

I already have quite a todo list for the summer of both necessary chores and fun things we want to do. But I need to make the time to create and I need to make it a priority.

Anybody else feeling the itch to make things? What do you like to create?

willing to be moved

2006-06-06T17:28:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago we had another Cafe evening (I wrote about the last one here) at our church. This time our Cafe was focused on prayer, and it was a really good time.

We decided to lead the prayer time with some pre-written prayers. Today, Michael posted the prayers that he wrote for that evening. They are wonderful. They are worth the time to click through and read them!

Read Michael's prayers here

Happy Mother's Day

2006-05-14T16:13:00.000-07:00

This morning in church our Women's Pastor read some quotes from Mother Teresa in honor of Mother's Day. I was so touched by them, that I wanted to quote some of them here. So in honor of all who mother, or parent, others:

It is easy to love the people far away. It is not always easy to love those close to us. It is easier to give a cup of rice to relieve hunger than to relieve the loneliness and pain of someone unloved in our own home. Bring love into your home for this is where our love for each other must start.

We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.

Everybody today seems to be in such a terrible rush, anxious for greater developments and greater riches and so on, so that children have very little time for their parents. Parents have very little time for each other, and in the home begins the disruption of peace of the world.

Mother Teresa

Does it depend on how you look at it?

2006-05-02T17:50:00.000-07:00

It has been a really hard time for my husband and I in the last few weeks. Our struggles in life have really come close to overwhelming us. Praise God that I think we have reached a turn-around low point in the last few of days, and that there are strong rays of hope for some ways to begin climbing back up out of this pit.

Sunday I was really distressed, and I ended up talking to one of my pastors for a long time about what we had been going through recently. He said one thing that has really stuck with me. It was something like "You and your husband have always been in crisis for as long as I have known you." Which is true! There were some big bumps in the road for us previous to this time, but it's been very hard since my husband lost his last permanent job in high-tech five years ago. Our jobs and financial situation, our emotional and physical health, and our extended family situations have been a painful, frightening roller coaster ride.

When I heard my pastor say that he'd only ever known us in crisis, I wanted to scream. That is not what I want to have define me!

So I've been thinking. Maybe I can reframe this time? Accept the roller-coaster ride that we seem to be on as just the way life is for us right now, and try to figure out how to go for the ride without fighting against it so much? Maybe much of my experience really does depend on how I look at it?

I know that's not an answer to all hard or bad things that happen in life. But this experience I'm in is not about abuse or injustice. I think part of my struggle is rooted deeply in my expectations of God and life, expectations that He would provide me with the life that I had dreamed of and planned for in my early adulthood. I don't think that dreams are bad. But maybe, being unwilling to accept life taking me in a different direction than my dreams is bad.

I'm still thinking, trying to understand, trying to be willing to change and live in the present reality that I find myself in. I'm really tired of feeling in crisis most of the time, and I'd like to find a way to move beyond that. I can't do much to change most of the circumstances, but maybe one of the things I can change is how I look at them.

And moving another step deeper - can I acknowledge and accept my feelings about these losses and changes, and yet not dwell in grief? Not stuff my feelings, yet live in the reality of my life today without railing against it?

Such Sadness

2006-03-27T11:16:00.000-08:00

I do not understand death and disease, or God's actions.

Blogging and Eating

2006-03-25T12:31:00.000-08:00

Today I'm thinking about the parallels in my life between blog reading and eating.

The opportunity to read and interact with people who inspire me in their faith and in their desire to pursue God's healing and truth in their lives has been the fuel in my engine these last couple of years. But just like with food, it's a fine line between engaging in this activity in such a way as to promote health, and allowing myself to slip into unhealthy behaviours.

I suppose it's not just like food, in that I wouldn't die if I stopped blogging (and I don't mean that I'm considering that!). But I do need to interact with people, and I feel like I have found some mighty fine people here to interact with.

Nothing more here to say, really. Just musing, after probably spending just a little too much time this morning sitting in front of my computer and not enough time doing things around the house and spending time with my family...

Emerging Evangelism?

2006-03-21T18:30:00.000-08:00

I've blogged before about my struggles with the way I have recieved and responded to most of the teaching on evangelism that I have heard in my life. Right or wrong - I am not comfortable with the pressure to be a "salesperson" for the church, or even for a typical evangelical Christian lifestyle.

Recently I've been reading some of Ryan Bolger's blog (and would love to read the book he co-wrote called "Emerging Churches"). Here's a quote from his blog post today called "Workplace Evangelism -- More of the Same in Emerging Churches?", where he attempts to answer the question from a friend "when the average emerging church person goes to work, do they do anything differently than your typical Christian?":

Because of an emphasis on Jesus and the kingdom, and the recognition that the sacred/secular split ought not exist, the perspective on workplace interaction changes dramatically (just as it does with the school, the neighborhood, the club, the pub, etc). Instead of a sole focus on individual evangelism with a possible invitation to church, the kingdom-minded person thinks within other categories. What would it look like if Jesus were here? What would it look like if the marginal voices here got a say in things?

And again:

This is a proclamation of good news that knows no bounds between sacred and secular. Evangelism becomes an invitation for others to live in this redemptive way as well -- to embody servanthood, hospitality, and freedom in contexts that are anything but.

Oh my gosh - I love this, I love the whole post - go read it! This inspires me, makes me want to understand ever more how to follow Jesus in my day-to-day life.

Late nights

2006-03-21T00:04:00.000-08:00

Staying up late is one of my drugs - it's addicting, and I use it to avoid painful feelings.

Reading blogs is one of my major late night temptations.

Tonight I am frustrated that most of the blogs that I read regularly are written by people in the US who live in earlier time zones than I do! I'm pretty much all caught up on my regular blogs, and you all have gone to bed already and are not posting any more tonight!! This is very annoying!!!

OK, OK. It's been a hard day. Sorry... I'm going to bed now.

Maybe I'm glad that you all are not up later than me, leaving tempting blog posts laying around even later at night...

What we did with a sunny afternoon

2006-03-19T18:13:00.000-08:00

We enjoyed a lovely sunny afternoon today. My husband and daughters and I went to late service at church, then out to lunch together afterwards. It was nice to do something with just the four of us. Meanwhile, my father-in-law visited the place he calls his "church" - Home Depot - where he brought home more plants for the backyard and enjoyed his solitary hot dog lunch from the food stand outside the store.

A side note: adding in another adult to our family is like learning a whole new dance - with a new dance partner. It's going really well, but it can feel a little overwhelming sometimes.

After our lunch out, we came home and all worked in the yard for a while with my father-in-law. The girls and I mostly weeded - I'm hoping to plant a vegetable garden in an unused corner of the yard. I have wanted to do that for years and years, and I'm hoping that I'll actually do it this year! It's so nice to have some momentum for working in the yard, and it's wonderful to see our yard being so loved after having been very neglected for many years.

Something I really wanted to do today was to paint. Just paint anything. But I also wanted to help my girls to paint. They received "artist's studio" kits for Christmas - portable wooden easels with drawers full of "real" paints. They are really cheap and will probably fall apart very quickly - but they are just the thing to inspire creative dreams in little girls (and big girls)! It's mostly been too cold outside (and they are definitely an outside activity!) until now to really use them, but this afternoon we spent an hour getting them all set up for the first time. The girls happily painted for almost two hours, while I worked on putting a meatloaf in the oven and cooking the rest of dinner.

So I didn't get to paint today after all (unless I get some out later tonight) - but it was still a very satisfying afternoon. Church this morning was wonderful, but I'm having a hard time remembering exactly why. Our pastor has been preaching on justice - it seems like a change of focus from previous years, and it is ministering to my heart so strongly. I wish I could articulate more than that - maybe sometime I'll be able to.

Recipe for a relaxing afternoon break

2006-03-13T15:54:00.000-08:00

1.Brew a little bit of good, strong coffee (decaf if caffeine late in the day bothers you at night).
2. Pour a largish squirt (sorry, no exact measurements here!) of Trader Joe's Midnight Moo organic chocolate flavored syrup in the bottom of a big mug, followed by a dash of organic heavy whipping cream.
3. Pour in fresh, hot coffee, and top with a squirt of whipped cream (from one of those cannisters) and a dash of Ghirardelli's ground sweet cocoa.
4. Take drink to easy chair, put up feet, turn on Van Morrison's Avalon Sunset and sip drink slowly while listening to Van Morrison and Cliff Richards sing these words:

Whenever God shines his light on me
Opens up my eyes so I can see
When I look up in the darkest night
I know everything’s going to be alright
In deep confusion, in great despair
When I reach out for him he is there
When I am lonely as I can be
I know that God shines his light on me

Reach out for him, he’ll be there
With him your troubles you can share
If you live the life you love
You get the blessing from above
He heals the sick and heals the lame
Says you can do it too in Jesus' name

He’ll lift you up and turn you around
And put your feet back on higher ground

Reach out for him, he’ll be there
With him your troubles you can share
You can use his higher power
In every day and any hour
He heals the sick and heals the lame
Says you can do it too in Jesus' name

He’ll lift you up and turn you around
And put your feet back on higher ground.

5. Hum along sporadically, between sips of warming drink. Best done with eyes closed.
6. On a really hard day, it might be necessary to repeat the entire process.

Doin' church stuff

2006-02-12T23:14:00.000-08:00

After years of barely being involved at church, I have started helping with one ongoing project - a 4-times-a-year evening "event". We do different things at these events, but it has evolved into having a common theme of being a "cafe" night.

Tonight we had an "art night", or "An Evening Celebrating God's Creativity". One of our worship bands played a few songs - and we projected images of original artwork (paintings, drawings, photos) from many people in our church during the worship time. The lights were out, only candles and a few strings of lights - it was very fun. Then we turned up the lights and invited everyone to make their own art - we had some clay tables with air-dry clay, some watercolor painting tables, some "crayon doodling" tables, and some lego tables (in case there were people who wanted something possibly less threatening to create with).

After an hour or so of making art, we invited people to hang and display their art in our "display grotto" area. We all enjoyed walking through, seeing the work of our collective hands.

And through it all we had coffee and snacks - good Peet's coffee with flavoring options, served by our own teenage "baristas" (instead of "get-your-own"). I have fun each time we do this trying to create some of the atmosphere of a coffee shop, using only the rectangular folding banquet tables and folding chairs available to us in the facility that we rent (plus accessories that I bring). We do not own or lease our own building - so when we do these evening events, we have to have the room completely cleaned out and everything put away before we leave for the night. Michael, who is one of the people I work with on these evenings, has called the whole thing a form of performance art - it's an amazing transformation to see the empty, old, school-cafeteria/auditorium room when we are done cleaning up.

It seemed like the people there were having a good time. I think the combination of being able to appreciate the diversity and excellence of art from our congregation, being able to make something with our own hands, having good music (different musicians from the band serenaded us throughout the evening), and plenty of time to drink coffee and talk was really enjoyable.

I was completely burnt out by the time the thing started. So many last minute crises of organization, mostly of my own making... Nothing that was a show-stopper - and there were plenty of little details that worked great. I am not an organized person - even though I spent a LOT of energy planning for this thing, there were many more things I should have planned better for. I learned a lot, and will hopefully be that much better prepared the next time. I am really exhausted, though, and my feet hurt. I dread cleaning out my van tomorrow morning.

Emotionally I usually struggle after doing something like this - I am plagued by the "what-if"'s, the "what did they think"'s, and the "if-only"'s. Tonight, I am only slightly in turmoil. I hope I can make it through tomorrow morning's clean-up of stuff and finishing up loose ends without a full-scale slide into those feelings. I think I will be fine, actually. Next time, we will do something a little simpler.

Wisdom of the Waiter

2006-02-06T13:54:00.000-08:00

If you haven't found the WaiterRant blog yet, you're missing something. I check this guy's blog every day, and this is one of the reasons why.

Silence

2006-02-02T23:17:00.000-08:00

There isn't much of it in my life right now - yet silence is somehow appearing here, at my blog! I think it's slipped out of my grasp and is hiding here.

Abruptly adding another adult into your family and home is an interesting process. It has been going pretty well since my father-in-law moved in a month ago, but it has been very tiring. I'm working on finding ways and times to be in some solitude without loosing too much sleep to do it.

We are slowly working things out, and working towards some balance. My father-in-law is a "doer" - he relaxes by working on projects, especially yardwork. My husband and I are "sit-still'ers" - we relax by sitting still and reading or thinking. It's amazing to me how much activity has gone on around our house and yard in the last few weeks! My husband and I are definitely being challenged out of our "overly comfortable" zones, and overall it has been a good thing. I never thought that it would be this challenging to keep up with an eighty-year-old man!!

It'll also get easier as my father-in-law's eyesight improves. He had developed cataracts that he hadn't been able to take care of, and his eyesight had gotten bad enough that it's really not been safe for him to drive. We've been working since he got here on establishing new insurance and doctors, etc..., and yesterday he had his first cataract surgery, which was completely successful. Next week he has his second surgery, and soon he will be able to drive safely again. It will help him so much to be able to see clearly, and to have the freedom to drive himself around as much as he wants.

I'm glad that my husband hasn't been working these last few weeks (and I sure didn't expect to feel this way, even just a few weeks ago). It has been wonderful for him and his dad to be able to spend this time together, and that wouldn't have happened if he was working. So once again I am praying for God's mercy and to trust Him, and that He would work out the timing for my husband to be able to find work.

Even with all the changes that the last few years have brought to our lives, I still struggle with such a change to my expectations of how life should be. While I am truly happy to offer my home to my father-in-law - this matches my ideals for family support, as well as the fact that he's a nice guy and I like him - the change has not been easy to come to grips with. Occasionally I am hit with a wave of grief - grief for the loss of our nuclear family with just my husband and I and our daughters. We may not live like that again before my girls are grown and moved away.

I am realizing again that change, especially to expectations and plans, is probably the one constant of life. I don't know that I am accepting the changes any more easily, but I am coming to expect it and live with that reality a little easier. Maybe.

So much going on

2005-12-30T23:32:00.000-08:00

There has been so much going on in my life, I haven't known how to write here. I can write words that summarize the basics, though I don't know how I could even begin to describe the emotions that have been involved.

December was way crazy with kid activities and commitments and illnesses, with Christmas preparations, with library work and volunteer work. My husband was busy with his father and the complexity of activity that has resulted from his step-mother's death in October, while still struggling (since September) with being very stressed-ill himself. This has involved numerous day-long driving trips, taking his dad back and forth to his old home to take care of business.

We drove the six-hours to my parents' to spend a few days over Christmas, which was really nice but would have been even better if I hadn't gotten very sick with the flu (this is a really stressful thing to happen, since my father's health is pretty precarious and we try not to visit if we are sick). I'm still trying to recover this week - I hope the coughing won't go on for too long.

And this week we are cleaning out our spare/craft room, trying to make room for my father-in-law to come and stay with us, at least for a while. He has been with my brother-in-law since Thanksgiving, and the plan is for him to spend some time with us next. The story is long and complicated and not mine to share, but he doesn't have a home anymore and it's very uncertain where he will be staying from now on, but possibly he'll be staying with us. The family communication around this issue is complex and a little scary in it's potential for hurt feelings (which are already happening).

Cleaning out my craft room has been a miracle. I have tried and failed to find the emotional and physical energy to clean this room out for years, and now we have just about done it. We have piles of boxes all over the house, as we are getting rid of "stuff" and shifting more "stuff" around. Each of our bedrooms have had to absorb storing some of the stuff that was in the craft room, at least for now. Also, my father-in-law brought me ALL his Christmas decorations, and they are piled, along with all the Christmas stuff I already had, around my dining room table until I can sort them all out and store them away. This sorting and cleaning project will be going on for a long time to come, and our house feels very small right now (even though it's not really).

Running through this busyness, my husband has had the first good potential lead on a job that he's had in a long, long time. We are waiting to hear the results of a phone interview that he had last week - please pray for us! In my understanding, it would be a wonderful, miraculous answer to prayer if he could get this job. I have no faith in my own understanding about this subject any more, but I do have some hope that it will all work out OK. Please pray for us, the timing would really be a blessing if he could get a job soon.

Well, that's the basics. I could write paragraphs and paragraphs on the emotions that have accompanied all this, but I will just say that it has been very hard. I'm hoping for an easier year in 2006.

Hi!

2005-11-28T22:35:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I posted, and that's because life has been crazy - and it's going to stay crazy for a while.

We had Thanksgiving dinner here for some extended family, and it was a cleaning and cooking marathon. The end result was a lovely time, though the combined stress and excess of food made my husband rather sick again and he's still struggling to recover.

The next two weeks look to be equally crazy. There's just a little too many activities that come together at this time of year. This next weekend, for example, my 6th grade daughter will be marching in two parades, one on Saturday and one on Sunday (and both are pretty big parades). These will be her first marching band experiences, and as a trombone player she is placed in the middle of the front row of the band (what pressure!). On both Saturday and Sunday afternoon, after the parades, we will drive to church for play practices and both girls will be in the children's play at our church on Sunday evening (and the 6th grader is singing a small solo). And that's just two days!

I am trying to be deliberate in how I do the things that I do - each day can be overwhelming right now, in it's busyness and in emotional stress, but each day is really do-able with God's grace.

On another note - my 6th grade daughter, who often has a hard time going to sleep, just came out from her room to ask me what she should say if a boy asks her to the dance that is happening at her school this friday evening. That was easy - I told her to say "No!"

I can't believe that my baby is old enough (according to her school's standards, anyway) to go to a dance! And some of her peers are going with dates!!! She's only 11 years old!

No. It really is a simple answer to that question. She's fine with that response. She asked me about it more because she can't imagine what it would feel like if a boy did ask her out. Oh. My. Gosh. I'm not imagining it well, either...

Twenty years ago today...

2005-11-16T19:45:00.000-08:00

...we said "I do".

Twenty years.

I'm having a hard time
comprehending that.

They have not all been
easy years, but
I'd say the same words
today.

To my beloved:

Commit to you,
I do.

Love you,
I do.

There's something in the air

2005-11-07T21:44:00.000-08:00

I've never read any of Anne Rice's books, the themes of vampires and witches didn't hold any interest for me. But after watching Anne's interview with Charlie Rose the other night, I think I'll be reading her newest book "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt". I have the interview recorded on my TiVo, and went back to copy down some of the parts that really caught my attention.

In the interview, Anne talked about how she had been raised in the Catholic Church, but had become an atheist when she went away to college and started asking questions that challenged her old understandings. Then, years (and many novels) later, she had returned to her faith and to the Catholic Church. She said something like:

"Around 2002... I was in church and I was talking to the Lord about my work and what I was doing. And what I was saying, essentially, is 'I really want to do it all for You. I don't really want to write anything else except what's directly for You.' "

And she went on to talk about how the simplest thing to do was to just do it - write a book about Jesus' life, an autobiographical novel.

The other thing that really caught my attention in the interview was when they were talking about the research she had done for her book, and Charlie Rose asked her what was the best book she read about Jesus. She unequivocally answered that it was N.T. Wright's book "The Resurrection of the Son of God", and that N.T. Wright is "absolutely a monumental scholar". Knowing that so many emerging type people talk highly of N.T. Wright's books has led me to want to read his books as well, so I was really encouraged that he had such an influence on Anne Rice.

So I think I will be reading, or listening to, this book soon. It seems to be getting mixed reviews, but that does not surprise me. I think I will just go ahead and get the book from Audible and listen to it, since I have a book credit there - I'll let you know what I think when I'm done. If you follow this link to Audible, you can listen to a sample of the novel.

The final interaction from the interview that I'll quote:

Charlie Rose: "Do you think there's something in the air about religion these days?"
Anne Rice: "There must be, people are far more responsive to this than I ever expected they would be."

Update on two kinds of housekeeping...

2005-11-07T17:45:00.000-08:00

First - I've blogged a couple of times about my struggle with clutter and housekeeping. I just wanted to report that I have reached a new level of freedom about getting rid of stuff. With the help of a new friend (someone who has gone through this process before), I have started a de-cluttering and de-junking program. In the last two weekends I have gone through my 25-year stash of fabric and have gotten rid of 95% of it. I am ashamed to confess that this was truly a monumental task - I couldn't believe how much fabric I had hoarded!

This leaves me with a very interesting feeling - it is very freeing, yet not all that exciting - it's just what needs to be done.

I have a specific, short-term goal for my de-cluttering this time. We are trying to make room for my father-in-law to come stay with us. It will probably only be short-term, but I want to make enough room for him to feel comfortable and welcome. This is giving me much more energy to stay focused on my de-cluttering - that and the help of my friend.

Second - some blog housekeeping. I apologize if my blog comments have been confusing for the last, oh, year or so... I thought I would be tricky and put the haloscan comment code inside the flag for turning comments on and off in Blogger. It basically worked - but I also didn't really turn off Blogger comments, so I've had both being used. My apologies to those who left their comments in Blogger but never saw them show up on the blog itself. They do show up if you click in just the right place (the time stamp for the blog entry), but they don't look like they are there otherwise.

I have had a strange reluctance to delve back into the template code to fix this up. As a former programmer, I thought when I started blogging that playing around with and doing "housekeeping" on my blog would be really fun. Instead, I find it very hard to face messing with. I also struggle with replying to comments left to me - not that I don't appreciate them! I do!!! While I sometimes reply quite verbosely, I usually just get all shy and weirdly introverted - my desire to respond somehow taps into my shame issues and I get all stopped up...

All of that to say - I am now consistently getting peppered with comment spam through my Blogger comments. Just a steady enough trickle to be really annoying. So pretty soon I will need to either a) really turn off the Blogger comments and just use haloscan, or b) switch completely to Blogger comments and add in the word verification option. I'm not sure which way I will go, but there will probably some kind of housekeeping changes going on here at TatteredThoughts in the near future.

Life, Death and the Great Pumpkin

2005-11-01T09:34:00.000-08:00

This afternoon we leave town to drive four hours to my step-mother-in-law's funeral. While not unexpected, her death does throw our family into some turmoil, unfortunately. I am praying for grace and wisdom in my communication with our family, and for my father-in-law with his wife's family as well.

I am exhausted. Halloween is fun, but whew!! I am glad it's over. We added a new Halloween holiday ritual this year, one that I learned about from a friend - a visit from the Great Pumpkin. After we were done trick-or-treating last night, I allowed my children to pick a few pieces of candy from their trick-or-treat bags to save. After putting those into a separate bag, they left their big loot-bags on the table in anticipation of a visit from the Great Pumpkin - who came in the night, took the candy, and left small gifts in their place.

My older daughter transparently understood what I was doing, and the younger one obviously chose to just accept the story of the Great Pumpkin without questioning, and they were both surprisingly happy to give up almost all their candy. They now have enough candy to have a piece in their lunch for a few days and a couple of treats, and they each got a long-desired DVD from the Great Pumpkin. It was definitely a success!

Now the Great Pumpkin really has to sneak that candy out to the garbage can before she is tempted to eat it herself...

Also - if you are considering trying this holiday ritual in your family, my friend informs me that the Great Pumpkin is very casual, and doesn't always come on Halloween night - sometimes you have to leave the candy out for a few nights before she/he comes to your house (leaving plenty of time for last minute shopping...).

Evangelism

2005-10-23T17:33:00.000-07:00

I think that this word, this concept, has given me more struggles, qualms and guilt than almost any other word in our Christian language lexicon.

When I became a Christian in college, I hung around with friends who were part of one of those Christian college organizations, and evangelism was their favorite past-time, almost like a sport. I remember sitting with friends on a balcony off the student union overlooking the main plaza where kids hung out between classes. We would pray and look around for a potential victim - oh, uh, I mean for that person that God might be leading us towards sharing with. If we felt like we had been given the green light, we would make our way down the stairs and over to where the chosen target, uh - student - was sitting and strike up a conversation and ask them about their relationship with God. We always had a few spare copies of the Four Spiritual Laws hanging around in our backpacks along with a bible, of course, in case we needed to refer to a higher power while convincing them of their need for Jesus. Not only did we participate in this hunting sport - we kept score, we put notches on our belt to record how many people we had "led to Christ".

Are you cringing yet? I am. I did. I hated it. I hated the constant pressure that I felt from my Christian community to participate in this ambush sport. Not that I couldn't see that occasionally it produced good fruit - I had prayed to receive Jesus in a pretty similar situation myself. But more often it just produced painfully awkward social situations and hurt feelings or anger, and I would experience a deep sense of shame.

Fast forward a few years, and we added some new variations on this game. Relationship evangelism. Servant evangelism. Both of these, in theory, are based on a quite beautiful concept. Sharing the gospel should come from a place of relationship with the person whom you are talking to, or from a place of having served them, of having done something good for them without any strings attached. But there were strings attached. Church attendance was usually the goal. We might pass out cards with our church's address and meeting times, hoping that the people we were talking to or doing something for would find the experience so compelling that they would want to come to our church and meet more such wonderful people as ourselves, and eventually find relationship with Jesus. Or we were so driven by Jesus' command to preach the good news to all the world, that this seemed to be the truest way that we could follow our God and His will for us. For some of us who struggled with the sense of manipulation that these practices seemed to involve, well - the ends justified the means. Was there anything more important than seeing our friends and neighbors come into a relationship with God? What ever it took would be OK (and we'd have more notches on our belts).

And so... I still struggled. I hated the underlying sense of manipulation, I just hated it. Yet, to do any less seemed like a failure to comprehend and accept God's command that I share the good news with those around me. At least I felt like that was the message that the church community was giving me. I struggled with shame, still not being able to live up to the standard set before me and hating the pressure, yet feeling a sense of revulsion at what I was being pushed to do.

Now I am reading and am in conversation with people online and in my church, about a different kind of evangelism. At least, this is how I perceive it. I love the emphasis I have found in my online exposure to emerging church conversation of movement away from measuring success in our fulfillment of the gospel by numbers. I began to have hope that my feeling of calling and ministry through service to my community in our local schools and through relationships with the families where I live, might be something worthwhile.

When my church announced a few months ago that we were going to be talking about a new church "mission statement", I thought cynically to myself "Oh no - here it comes again. More pressure to evangelize, to spread the word, to rack up the numbers on our belts". I prepared myself to experience another shower of guilt and shame, and wondered how I would respond. I entertained the possibility of giving up on going to church, of joining the growing number of my friends who have walked away from institutionalized church. Instead, I was surprised by the open-ended, gracious statement of mission that our church has adopted: "To extend the transforming love of Jesus to our world". The conversations and sermons that have ensued have been extremely motivating and encouraging. I am more enthused about being a part of my church now than I have been in many years.

Still, I am trying to sort out in my mind the messages I have heard through the years. I have asked myself if my excitement about a calling to love and and be in relationship with my neighbors without an agenda isn't just a cop-out. Could I just be looking for a way to avoid rejection and be liked by all? Could I just be too fearful of speaking the truth of the gospel? Could all those old "tapes of shame" that play through my mind be true?

Today, in talking about this with some friends from church, I feel like I finally saw a part of the answer to that question. Maybe this will be a simple known fact to most of you, and I am just a slow learner. But I realized that if I am in a real, honest relationship with someone - then I will, at some point, be sharing the truth of my life with them. For to deny the hope that I have in God, through Jesus, would be just as much a deception as it is to try to maneuver someone into relationship just for the chance to tell them about God's good news. What I see before me is a call to live in love, honesty, and real, deep integrity - and the more that I can do that in all my relationships with my family, with friends and neighbors, and with God, the closer I will be to living the gospel.

Maybe I will find some day that I've still missed the point. But today, I feel a motivation to follow Jesus and be a part of expressing His love for the world in a way that frees me like never before.

All Your waves and breakers

2005-10-03T10:14:00.000-07:00

Deep calls to deep
in the roar of your waterfalls;
all your waves and breakers
have swept over me.

By day the LORD directs his love,
at night his song is with me
a prayer to the God of my life.
Psalm 42: 7-8

I went to a half-day women's retreat on Saturday, at a lighthouse/youth hostel on the coast near here. It was good... If you could hear my voice, you would hear the hesitation in it. Not about the retreat - it was wonderfully designed, full of time for contemplation and worship - but about my experience. I still have the memories of when attending an 'event' like this would consistently bring an experience of intensity - of joy, of wonder, of worship, of connection. Now, I experience mostly a sense of quietness mixed with small doses of both hope and resignation, and tinged with a thread of disappointment. Gone are the days of loosing myself in singing or of prayer that seemed lift me right out of my body.

So, yes - it was a good time. I spent some lovely time in quiet contemplation, I enjoyed talking with the women I talked to, I had a great time on the drive over and back with a friend. Yet still, there is a tinge of sadness, a sense of something missing...

During our quiet time of contemplation, as I sat in various places near the cliffs and looked out over the very foggy waves, I wrote this:

God -
are you the ocean?
Deep and wide, full
of life and strength
beyond my comprehension?

There is a fog that restricts my view.

I hear the thundering of your voice,
but no words are articulated.
Relentlessly, you cry the pounding echoes
of wisdom deeper than time,

But still I hear no words.

I long to see your vastness
to know how your presence extends
beyond the horizon, farther than I
will ever comprehend.

But I see only a few feet in front of me.

I want to feel your presence
like the mist from the waves
that settles so gently
on my cheeks and neck.

But all I feel is the ache in my back,
and the tiredness in my heart
as I perch here on the cliffs;
And a teeny, teeny sliver of hope.

God -
do I believe you are the ocean?

I don't know.

But just as the ocean,
with it's mystery and power
continues to draw me,
so I am drawn to You.

---------

One of the things the retreat organizers did was to bring a big basket of shells for us to pick from, something physical and tangible to hold and keep to remind us of our time there. As the basket finally came to me at the back of the room, I picked up one really big, gorgeous shell - trying to move it out of the way to look at the rest of the shells in the basket. My friend holding the basked said "Go ahead, take it!", and I realized that I could keep that big, beautiful shell - and I did. It is bigger than the palm of my hand, and I can wrap my hands around it - it has perfect grooves and bumps for my fingers to fit in.

I realized during the last worship time before the retreat ended, that I could also "hear the ocean" in this shell. I am going to keep it beside my bed, something to pick up and hold and listen too when I am feeling lost. Maybe I need to acknowledge and remember that it is a time in my life where I am hearing God differently than during the years of spiritual ecstasy and highs. Maybe the distant sound of his voice in the echo of the waves is enough.

Being a Librarian

2005-09-21T07:20:00.000-07:00

I get to really be a librarian with the kids for the first time today! I'm finally basically caught up on the administrative stuff and learning that I had to do first. Today I'll read books to classes and check books in and out. I'm looking forward to beginning our relationship as students and librarian, and I'm hoping I can make it a special one.

Thanks for anyone who saw my cry for prayer last week and prayed - we are doing much better now. Real healing - physical, emotional, spiritual - takes time, but we're heading on that journey... The emergent cohort was wonderful, as well. I've wanted to write about it, but haven't had time and energy to do that justice.

Meeting Emergent folk tonight

2005-09-17T09:53:00.000-07:00

We're going to our first official "Emergent" meeting tonight, the Bay Area Emergent Cohort. I've been reading Emergent and emerging church stuff online for 2 1/2 years now, but besides my friends the Toys and a few families from our church, and Chris Monroe & Benjy from Barstow, I've never met any other Emergently inclined folk.

I've been excited for weeks about this meeting, but now I'm not sure what I think. This last week was so stressful, it's hard to imagine talking about "churchy" stuff. On the other hand, that's part of the draw of emerging church discussions for me - you don't have to be "churchy".

I'm confident that it will be a good time. I always like hanging at the Toy's house (and so do my kids), so I know we'll be comfortable. I'm just not at all sure what to expect beyond that, and I'm not sure how well my husband and I will be able to relax and socialize.

In the face of such social uncertainty, I think of cooking. The meeting's a potluck, and there are people coming from all over the Bay Area - which can be a very long drive. So I'm going to fix something kinda substantial, in case most people are bringing easy to transport foods like salads or deserts. I'm planning on roasting a couple of chickens and some veggies. That'll give me something else to think about this afternoon...

Update: Argh!!! I started planning what I would cook early this morning, then dilly-dallyed around as usual... now my chickens and veggies are in the oven and I am LATE! Why do I always do that?

Exhausted

2005-09-14T20:49:00.000-07:00

It's been a wild couple of days. My husband hasn't been feeling well for a week or so, but he only admitted it on Monday and made an appointment to see his doctor for this morning. He was struggling with indigestion, nausea, shortness of breath, stomach and chest pain, and anxiety. Only we didn't end up just waiting until his appointment - last night he was so sick I had to take him to the emergency room, where we spent over 4 hours getting tests run. Thankfully, it wasn't any kind of acute problem requiring surgery or something like that. In the early morning hours they finally sent us home after giving my husband some antacid and a vicodan. We were exhausted, and so were the friends who had run over to stay with our kids while we went to the hospital. Good friends like that are a blessing!

This morning we kept that doctor's appointment after all, and she basically told my husband that this illness was his body's way of telling him that prolonged unemployment is very, very stressful. She offered him some choices to consider for ways to get some help with the stress and anxiety, and some recommendations for medications to help with the acid problems associated with Irritable Bowel Syndrome. He slept all day today and was finally, with the help of the medication, able to eat some pureed veggie soup tonight without feeling horribly ill. He's looking much better.

After getting my husband settled, I worked all day at my new job. Though the job should be pretty even-keeled in the long run, it's pretty stressful right now trying to come up to speed and get the library ready for checking out books by next week. I got a chance to spend some time with the old librarian today and that helped a lot. I'm hopeful that I will be able to get everything functional in the next couple of days. Right now, I'm just really looking forward to getting a full night's sleep.

Is it possible?

2005-09-11T22:26:00.000-07:00

I just updated some software on my computer, including a new version of itunes. When I restarted my computer, there was some kind of pop-up add about new music and dvds... I saw an offer for a free view of the new Simple Minds video, and I thought "I think I remember them, that might be interesting...", so I clicked through to watch it.

As I'm waiting for the page to load, I'm trying to recall why I remember this band, why it's triggering something inside... then the image of their video comes to me, the one that I watched on MTV so many times, years ago. What was that song? The guy stood in a room with stuff strewn all around him, and there was something else...

The page has finally loaded, and I click to watch the video. Wait. Who are these old men? This can't be the band I remember!

I go on a quick internet search, and I realize that the song I was remembering was "Don't You Forget About Me" from "The Breakfast Club" - there were scenes from the movie interspersed in the video. The video was from 1985, the year that my husband and I were married.

My brain does the math, and goes immediately into disconnect mode - a feeling like two opposing magnets. If those young men from that earlier video look that much older in only twenty years... Is it possible that I have aged similarly in almost twenty years of marriage? I don't feel that old! Honest, I don't...

Oh, help!

I think it's going to be an interesting fall, as I approach this anniversary...

Cleaning the front of the fridge

2005-09-10T15:04:00.000-07:00

We're organizing today. Clearing out old school papers which should have been tossed months ago, working at cleaning up and making some organized spaces for the daily flow of homework, school papers to read and sign, and lunch boxes to be emptied and filled.

I have checklists for the kids - lists of those daily actions that they need to be responsible for to help life run smoothly and healthily. I decided to clean off the front of the fridge, so there could be a neat and clean place to post the checklists for each week. I wish that I had taken a picture of the fridge before I cleaned it off. It was a snapshot of my life - bits and pieces of the last few years left to linger on in layers of artwork, old field-trip permission slips and birthday party invitations, and many-years-old Christmas card photos. All came down, the magnets were weeded out and the fridge scrubbed until it is almost white again (why would they make the surface of a fridge textured?).

One of the things that I took down was an old Baby Blues comic that I had taped to the fridge years ago when my oldest was about to turn two years old. In it, the dad and mom are sprawled exhausted on the couch - the mom holding an infant, and a toddler racing through the house in front of them. The mom says "Which do you want to do... A) clean up the kitchen, or B) get the kids ready for bed?" The dad imagines two scenarios: slaving over the sink surrounded by heaping mounds of dishes, or struggling to get pajamas on a toddler while changing a baby's diaper. He turns his wife and says "What happened to C) none of the above?", and she replies, with a strained expression on her face, "It was replaced by D) In your dreams."

This comic had represented for me the angst of being a stay-at-home mom. The sense of being utterly overwhelmed and desperate in the face of a life ruled by dishes and diapers. I love my kids, and still wouldn't have chosen a different path than staying home with them these last eleven years - but I am ready to move on to a new phase. A phase where I do some work that brings a different kind of sense of achievement, and where I am held accountable for something other than just being somebody's mom. I've been making the slow transition to this new phase for months. Taking down this comic from my fridge feels like the end of an era.

Click here if you want to see the comic.

Un-sticking

2005-09-08T22:16:00.000-07:00

I started a new job today as a school librarian! It's only part-time, and all the hours are during my children's school hours. It should be very fun, though right now it's a little overwhelming trying to come up to speed quickly with a late start on the school year. Today was absolutely exhausting, but fun.

Taking this job was a simple decision - it's fun, it's a regular schedule, and I still have some time to myself. On the other hand, this is the first long-term job commitment I have made in over eleven years and that's a little intimidating. It also doesn't come close to solving our financial problems, so it takes a lot of trusting God that it was the right thing to commit myself to.

Getting un-stuck is not an easy thing to do. I'm hoping that making this move will bring some momentum and help my husband and I un-stick in other areas too.

Edited to add: Yeah - I'm tired... I just re-read this, and I wonder if I could have found a way to add in the word "fun" any more times? I must really think I'll like this job and that it's going to be... fun!

New Beginnings

2005-08-29T11:26:00.000-07:00

We made it through the hectic and exciting morning of the first day of school! My husband took my oldest daughter to start her first day of Middle School at 7:30 a.m. this morning. She was worried about whether her dad would park and walk in with her - she didn't want to be just dropped off - then when she got there she zoomed right off, she was so excited. A teacher standing at the entrance passing out pencils said to her "Aren't you going to say good bye to your dad?" as she started to rush past him into the school. Hopefully she found the room for her first class without incident - I'm sure she did! Her 7:30 a.m. start time seems way too early in the morning, but that is the price she (and we) pay for her involvement in the band program. I'm just glad they have a daily band program, and one semester of an early class this year is an OK trade-off.

Then we took our younger daughter to her first day of 2nd grade and spent some time chatting and catching up with other parents at the principal's Coffee Chat. I'm already knee-deep in volunteer work, trying to recruit parents for the volunteer art program that I help to run at the school. I've actually spent many hours in the last few days trying to finish up responsibilities from last year's commitments, getting ready to pass those off to another friend who is doing that job this year. Last night I stayed up late getting some paperwork ready for this morning, then I couldn't get to sleep I was so wound up! The alarm came very early at 6:00 a.m. this morning after only a couple of hours of sleep.

Our summer slipped by very quickly this year, and I wouldn't have minded some more time home with the girls before school began. But here we are anyway, and it is so exciting to be starting a new school year. I love this time of new beginnings, where the potential for good things to happen seems so bright and clear. My husband is out of the house doing some of his community volunteer work right now, and I am sitting quietly with only the sound of the keys tapping on my laptop and the clicking of the cuckoo clock echoing in the room. It is a beautiful feeling.

I am not invisible

2005-08-23T20:18:00.000-07:00

I think I've talked before about my feelings of being invisible in many social situations. Don't worry - I don't mean psychopathically! But that all-too-familiar feeling that comes most often when I look back at a social interaction and realize that I felt invisible, not aware of being seen or heard, not sensing that the other(s) in the situation were really aware of my presence. This can happen to me even in one-on-one conversations, when the evidence is clear that the other person saw me! I'm pretty sure that I'm not alone in feeling this sensation, which I believe is rooted in low self-esteem, though I don't really know how many other people feel this.

Today I was talking to a trusted friend about this (who does also know this feeling). We talked about how it is linked to rejection and for us, it started in our experiences of being overweight as young girls. She mentioned the feeling of sitting in class with her hand up, and being ignored as teams were picked - looking at her hand and thinking "what, am I invisible?". I think that even deeper inside than that kind of direct experience of "being invisible", my sensation of being invisible is a coping mechanism to avoid the possibility of the pain of rejection. More than something others do to me, it is my own negative adaptation that persists beyond the situations where "teams are being picked" and into any social situation where I am not already completely secure in my feelings of acceptance.

So what to do with this? I have heard the message many times through my Christian life that I should not be feeling this way. That if I truly grasped the grace and love and acceptance that Jesus offers me, these feelings of low self-esteem would not, could not persist. As I am a "visual image" thinker, I usually responded to such a message by "seeing" in my mind a picture of Jesus as a loving man, reaching out to hug me - though the picture didn't really reach me, rather I was represented in the visualization by some image of myself. But these "mind pictures" or caricatures do not work any more, do not reach the inner me that is working to know God, to seek and walk in truth.

Today I realized how much I appreciate the language that women like Anj and Steph often use when they write about seeking God - that of "being in the Light". When I think of being in the Light, I don't imagine caricatures or masks - there is no hiding in the Light, no darkness, no way to be invisible. I am known as I am: overweight, middle-aged, sometimes loving, sometimes selfish, sometimes smart, sometimes stupid. To know that I am loved in the Light - what an amazing thing!

So I have decided that part of my daily spiritual practice will be to choose to be in the Light, and to practice knowing I am visible to other people, to remember who and where I am. I am a physical, emotional and spiritual being, and I am here. I am not perfect, and I may be rejected by people. Can I risk the possibility of rejection as the price of inhabiting my own body?

I am not invisible.

Miscellaneous thoughts on a hard day

2005-08-16T20:53:00.000-07:00

Today was a hard day. I woke up to a phone conversation with my mother-in-law's stepson about multiple financial and legal problems regarding her care. My mother-in-law has very advanced MS, and is living near us in a nursing home. It is amazing to me that she is still alive, her body keeps fighting, against all odds. I am hoping for God's grace over this whole situation, it has been a tough one to deal with in many ways for over ten years now, and may be getting tougher.

Then my parents, whom we are going to visit tomorrow for a couple of days before school starts, called to describe how their family room was flooded last night in a freak heavy downpour. Thankfully, though they are stressed, the problems are all just practical issues from the flooding. My dad had a very hard time with his health in the last 12 months, with 4 major hospital visits and some pretty tough times for us all. Hopefully he will be able to rest and recover from this flooding stress without incident. I'm looking forward to visiting them tomorrow, though not looking forward to the six hour drive to get there. I'm also hoping we are all truly free from flu and colds - two years ago we accidentally brought a summer flu with us on an August visit (we didn't see my daughter's nose running until the middle of the car drive down), and my parents were sick for over six weeks.

Last week we visited my father-in-law and his wife. She is currently living in a hospital bed in the living room of their house. My father-in-law brought her home from a nursing home that seemed to be doing it's best to kill her a little over a year ago. Her health has improved amazingly, a huge bedsore that should have killed her is now shrunk until it's almost gone, but still we wonder how much longer it can go on, the work and the stress are incredible and she is still very ill. We are hoping that my father-in-law doesn't loose his health in his fight to keep hers, and also that he will consider coming to live with us when she does eventually pass, though this is something that it's hard to get him to face at all at this point.

And some good news - today my husband had a second interview for a contract job. The prospect of this job is more than just a little overwhelming, so we are really praying that God will only open this door if it is a job that would be a good thing. It could be a wonderful thing, or an awful thing, and it is really hard tell... but it's just about impossible to walk away from anything that's offered in his career field at this point. We won't find out more until probably at least next week. I'm also waiting to hear from the principal at my daughter's elementary school about the possibility of another part-time job there this year. Struggling with a little sadness that this year the kids starting school will then mean that I have to be disciplined and busy too, rather than just have a whole bunch of free time to myself - but knowing that the structure of the part-time job I had last year really helped me move forward in my struggle with depression. It was definitely a net gain for me.

It's been so tempting to give in to depression these last few days. Adding on to my own life stressors are the heavy sadness of stories like Jordan's and other online and IRL friends, and all the drastic health and family issues they are facing. I have been staying up WAY too late on a regular basis, which is a common practice for me when I'm in a place of avoidance and hiding... I also have to fight the temptation to abuse my "drugs of choice" - alcohol, food and caffeine. I'm winning the fight against the temptation of alcohol, mostly winning in the fight with the draw of caffeine, and eating way too much (as well as staying up too late)...

It's also strangely been a day of thankfulness for me. As I've been grappling with the feeling that life can JUST BE HARD SOMETIMES and wondering how I could have lived so many years without REALLY understanding this before - I've come to a realization that it's absolutely worth it. All these parents in my and my friends lives who are struggling with illness and end-of-life issues - what would the alternative be? Not to have lived? And while I could wish that we would all live easy, happy lives and die peacefully and painlessly in our sleep at some convenient elderly time - that's just not the way life works. It's messy. It's not fair. It's hard. And it's oh so good. Not something to be taken for granted. Something for which I am truly grateful.

Sorry if these ramblings are moaning and then pollyannaish. This is how I think about it, how I cope. Acknowledging the hard things, and then looking for the good, the light in the darkness, gets me through. That, and God's grace.

A Prayer

2005-08-15T23:59:00.000-07:00

Lord, please heal Jordan.

Thoughts on water bottles

2005-08-03T22:22:00.000-07:00

One of the ongoing mini-struggles that my husband and I have is over water bottles. He hates the waste generated by empty plastic water bottles, and the waste of money spent on them. We have good, filtered water, and plenty of ways to hold and drink it. I understand and agree with his views, yet often end up buying bottles of water because they are so dang convienent!

Then tonight I read this post by Wendy Cooper, and I am re-dedicated to drinking filtered tap water, using our lexan water bottles when we're out, and to avoid buying bottled water as much as possible. These statistics are incredible - $46 billion spent on bottled water globally each year - and only $1.7 billion more annually (than is currently spent) would be enough to provide clean drinking water to everyone on earth? There is much to think on here about what I can do that might make a difference...

Recycled books

2005-08-03T21:35:00.000-07:00

We took a family outing tonight to a great used bookstore, Recycle Books, in San Jose. I love used bookstores, even though my nose gets a bit itchy from the dusty smell. They always seem so full of character and potential. The books in used bookstores have their own story to tell, not just the story of their words, but of their history and their path and their people. This bookstore has such a sense of character and identity of it's own, with it's resident cats, comfy chairs, and piles of books everywhere. I really love going there.

I picked up some very inexpensive copies of Chiam Potok's The Chosen and The Promise. I read these books in college and I've been wanting to read them again. I can't remember who was blogging about reading them recently, but I haven't been able to get them out of mind since then!

I also perused the Christian section of the store and found Thomas Merton's "The Wisdom of the Desert", St. Teresa of Avila's "Interior Castle", and a copy of "The Rule of St. Benedict". I guess I'm drawn to the writings of Catholic contemplatives right now.

Many of the books that I looked at in the Christian section, including two of the ones I bought, were from one man's library. They have his name and an embossed marking on the first pages. I wonder who he is or was? Was he a pastor or priest? Did he die, or just get rid of a lot of books? The book in my hand feels different, knowing that someone else also bought it, read it, thought about it. I love that. It helps me to remember that many, many people have read and thought about these things.

Well, I can't write or read blogs for too long tonight - I've got some reading to do! And all for the wonderful low price of $11.06 plus tax! Like I said - I love used bookstores!

Chat Room Madness

2005-08-02T00:59:00.000-07:00

Today (yesterday now, it's late!) I spent too much time chatting at Real Live Preacher's new blog chatroom, but oh - what fun it was! I love his new website, it mirrors the warmth and approachability of his writing. I got to say hi to RLP in the chatroom, met Chuck Sigars and some other neat people, but I especially enjoyed chatting with Reverend Mommy and Dylan. There is something different and wonderful about connecting live in a chat room experience as compared to the disconnected-time communication of blogs and email. Not better, but a great supplement. I had the same feeling last fall when I got a chance to talk to deb from abiding (whom I miss terribly) in a chat room at RLP's virtual book-signing - it was wonderful. We had talked then about looking into starting a chat-room at the Habbo Hotel (inspired by tallskinnykiwi's Suddenly Seminary room), but never followed through with it. Maybe someday?

Of course, this opens up a whole can-o-parenting-worms! When my 11-year-old daughter sees me on a chat room on my laptop, she wants to do it too! She about flipped when she saw the 3D church scene the one time I checked out the virtual online church that Ship of Fools ran for a while last year (oops, I guess it's still there, I thought it had ended), and I'm sure habbo hotel would be equally appealing... that space between us, the "you can't do it because you're not old enough" space, is narrowing in so many areas. She's so innocent, and the world of online interactions is so appealing... we're a tech-crazy family, we are at our computers and on the net a lot... these are new waters to navigate (though all of parenting my first child has felt like that). The only real rules I know for my girls so far are: 1) all internet activity happens in the open in the family room - if she wants a computer in her room, then no internet; and 2) she can't sign up for ANYTHING without asking us first (and we haven't said 'yes' to much).

A Good Day

2005-07-17T22:46:00.000-07:00

It is so nice to end the day with a mostly peaceful feeling, especially after the incredible stress of the last few days. My husband and I have been struggling, each in our own way, with fear and despair about our work/income/careers situation (for a couple of old posts about this see here, here and here). It's been a year now since my husband's last contract ended (and he's only worked about 12 months out of the last 4 years). I don't really understand how we have made it so easily through the last few years, it is truly a miracle of God - which I try never to forget! But lately the pressure of the situation has really begun to wear us down. Depression is a constant temptation, and hope can be hard to find.

Today, though, was a good day. At church a friend listened to me spew my latest fears and anxieties, and prayed for me for a long time. It was so nice to talk to someone who could listen, who could understand much of what I am going through, and yet who let me own my pain and fear and didn't try to minimize it or give me pat answers. I left church today feeling much more hopeful (and if the pastor who preached today were ever to read this - which she won't! - I apologize for skipping her sermon and hanging out with my friend in an empty room! :) ).

This afternoon turned out to be a blessing as well. My husband and I were able to support each other in some house-cleaning and sorting, and I cleared out 3 or 4 boxes of old papers and stuff that had been hanging around for over a year. What a shock to realize that there were really only a very few things in those boxes that we needed to keep - and many bags of recycling and trash! I am hoping to keep that momentum going, and continue to clean and organize my way through this house. My dream is to get the kids rooms set up better (which involves clearing out the black-hole of my old "craft" room and rearranging which rooms are used for what), and do some painting before the school year starts.

If any of you are the praying sort - I would appreciate your prayers for our job situation. For wisdom, hope, direction, and good communication mostly, and - unless God has something different out there for us - for a job for my husband. Thanks.

p.s. The ants are almost all gone! A change in the type of ant bait seems to be doing the trick!

Arghh!!!!

2005-07-12T21:26:00.000-07:00

Ants. Everywhere. Tiny little, barely visible ants marching through my house.

Is it totally self-centered and myopic to ask for prayer that I can get rid of the ants in my house?

We are inundated with little ants that I can't even see most of the time unless I put on my reading glasses. When you spray them with something (I usually use the non-toxic spray Orange Guard) they just melt into teeny-tiny little black blobs.

This triggers all my house-keeping shame issues, since we keep finding little piles of ants under anything on the floor, and there are quite a few piles of "stuff" around our house... It also triggers my money issues, since I prefer to only use non-toxic pest services when I do have to call in help - and they are far more expensive, and I had been trying to avoid calling them in.

It was very hot here today, and the ants just moved right in. Tomorrow we will be cleaning and cleaning and cleaning - which was already on the agenda anyway, but it's still no fun to be trying to compensate for an invasion... And I will probably end up calling the pest control company, which will just increase our stress about money and lack of income... sigh...

OK. I'm feeling a little self-centered and ridiculous. A whole blog entry complaining about ants.

This afternoon I attended an "advisement session" at the local state university to hear about the options they offer for obtaining your teaching credential. It was a lot to take in - so many options, so much paperwork, so many decisions about what kind of credential program to enter that will influence the type of work I would be doing for a long time to come. It's a little overwhelming to be considering adding all these responsibilities to my life, when I can't even keep the silly ants out of my house...

I'm off to help clear the toys from one daughter's floor, so that the other daughter can sleep there tonight since her room is where the ants seem to be having a happy late night party (kinda like the dogs in the end of the Dr. Seuss book "Go Dog, Go": "Where are they all going? It's a party!"). I'm hoping for an easier tomorrow.

CCM for Adolescents?

2005-07-11T19:45:00.000-07:00

So my oldest daughter is about to enter Middle School, and has moved from the Elementary Sunday School program up to Youth Group at our church. So far she seems to be really enjoying it.

I'm realizing, though, how "between cultures" we have raised her. It's becoming more and more common for her friends at school (including the ones from Christian families) to give her a bad time because she doesn't know much about their culture icons - celebrities, music, TV shows, etc... On the flip side, she's starting to realize that she doesn't really fit in the "young evangelical Christian" scene very easily either - when asked in youth group who her favorite Christian musicians were, she answered "Dave Matthews and Sting" (yes, these artists get a lot of airplay in our house!). She was a little embarrassed when she later realized that those artists probably wouldn't be considered "Christian" by most of the people she was with.

So I'm torn and a little confused. Should we just continue on our merry way, listening to what we enjoy, not watching much TV, being our geeky little selves - and just let our daughter deal with the chips as they fall, find her own way in the cultures she's a part of? We did explain to her why we listened to the music that we did, and she seemed to understand, but I still think that she really wants to fit in to the "youth group" culture more - and I'd rather encourage her in that direction than towards much of what she'll be exposed to at school.

Really I want to encourage her to think independently, to hold her own opinions - and she does that fairly well. But she still wants to fit in, she's still a normal 11-year-old with a strong drive to find her social scene. I'd rather start by supporting her in finding something like some CCM that she would like, while I still have some influence over what we purchase and can steer her towards what we might tolerate listening to as well!

So any recommendations for adolescent-accessible CCM music or groups that don't drive you musically crazy?

My Mom and DMB

2005-07-03T23:55:00.000-07:00

We're visiting with my parents for a week or so - summer relaxing in an air-conditioned house in the desert heat, watching TV, beading, sewing, swimming, cooking, shopping - time spent together. One of the rituals of summer for my family for the last few years. I'm thankful that my dad is still with us (after 4 major trips to the hospital in the last year), doing pretty well, and that we get to have another summer vacation time together.

Tonight I had a wonderful time with my mother. My mother and I are pretty close, and this is usually a wonderful thing - only occasionally do I wish there were a little more distance between us, for with closeness comes... complexity, I guess. But that complexity is worth the price, because the closeness is a wonderful thing. I am truly grateful for my mother - for her generosity, her love, her intelligence, her creative talent, for her friendship.

And tonight - such a surprise. Last night my husband and I watched a concert special by the Dave Matthews Band on TV. Finding the Dave Matthews Band in the last couple of years (yes, we were very behind the times!) has been the instigation of a resurgence of the importance of music in our lives. Music was a huge part of our lives when we first met. My husband played jazz music some and ran sound for a world class community college jazz band when we met. Going to concerts and shows where my husband ran sound, or going out to hear local jazz musicians, was some of our more memorable dates. As we were first dating and then as newlyweds we were very involved in music in our churches - my husband ran sound and sometimes played keyboards, and I sang in our worship band. It was a huge part of our lives.

But about 13 years ago we burnt out. On church, on bands, on sound, on the whole scene. As we started having kids and getting involved in the daily cares of life, making and listening to music took a bit of a back seat in life - but it left a gaping hole. In the last couple of years we have begun to seek out music again, and one of the main instigators was when we listened to an interview with Dave Matthews on a PBS show (Charlie Rose). We were taken by his humility and niceness, and by the power of his (and his band's) music. We now own quite of few of his CD's and DVD's of the band's concerts.

So tonight - at dinner I was telling my parents about watching the Dave Matthews Band on TV last night, and that we had recorded the concert on their TIVO and wanted to copy it to a video tape before we leave. As we talked a little about the band, my parents said they would like to hear some of the concert. We warned them that they wouldn't like it (they like Frank Sinatra, Barry Manilow, Barbra Striesand and Neil Diamond, OK?), but they still wanted to hear it. And shocker of all shockers - they liked it! My dad, who went to bed after a fairly short time, probably wouldn't want to listen to it a lot, but he still appreciated what he heard.

The big surprise for me was how my mom responded to it. We listened to the whole concert together, and another short concert DVD that I happened to have with me because it came in a CD that we had brought with us for the car ride. One thing I never expected to share with my 74-year-old mother was my love of watching the Dave Matthews Band perform! We spent the evening drinking one too many glasses of wine, eating a little chocolate, and talking about the incredible musicality of the band as they performed, and appreciating Dave's charismatic energy (which she compared to watching Frank Sinatra perform as a kid). She only complained that she couldn't understand most of the lyrics!

Tomorrow I will find her some of the lyrics (most of which she probably won't appreciate! But who knows - she really surprised me tonight...) and play her some more DMB. And while DMB lyrics are not anything like the conventional CCM lyrics that I used to listen to (which my mom never really liked, either), they are very soulful and honest and searching, which is something that I have come to appreciate incredibly. I am drawn more to those who ask deeply honest questions, than I am to those that profess to have all the answers...

I'll leave you with a short segment of Bartender, by DMB, that has become my prayer in the last two years...

"Bartender, please
Fill my glass for me
With the wine you gave Jesus that set him free
After three days in the ground"

Late Night Quizzing

2005-06-27T00:08:00.000-07:00

Your IQ Is 135

Your Logical Intelligence is Genius
Your Verbal Intelligence is Genius
Your Mathematical Intelligence is Genius
Your General Knowledge is Exceptional

A Quick and Dirty IQ Test

Oh - that's funny! Not very accurate, but funny! It does kinda illustrate, though, why I enjoyed tutoring kids this year on how to take tests - I've always been drawn to the logic involved in reading test questions, maybe kinda like some people are drawn to figuring out crossword puzzles (which I'm horrible at!)...

Have you been counted?

2005-06-25T20:59:00.000-07:00

Enjoying Creativity

2005-06-25T01:01:00.000-07:00

My girls and I went to see a modern dance company perform tonight. What a treat! A new-ish friend of ours (the girls swim with her son) is a dancer in this company, and this is the first time we have gone to see her dance. It's the first time I have ever been to a professional dance performance, actually. I was a little nervous whether the 7-year-old would be able to sit still and quiet that long, but she behaved wonderfully. It was a joy to share the experience with my girls, listening to beautifully played Rachmaninov on a grand piano in a small, intimate theater, watching dancers dance modern and ballet pieces.

I have not gone to many stage performance events, but the few that I have gone to have been such moving and satisfying experiences. I struggle so much with watching movies for entertainment - somehow I do not process the sensory stimulation in a movie theater well. Even when taking my girls to see a children's movie, I usually have to spend some time with my eyes closed, practicing deep breathing, to keep from feeling like I am going to explode (blood pressure problems? anxiety? ADD related sensitivity? I don't know...). But watching people on a stage, acting in a play or dancing, engages my brain in a completely different, and safe, way. I can feel the experience deeply, but somehow the emotions that real people on a stage can produce are within what I can process, while the extreme sound and visual stimulus and manipulation of most movies are not. I am glad to be reminded this evening of the deep joy of going to a good stage performance.

After I got home tonight, I read this post by Pat Loughery. In the first paragraph he writes about N.T. Wright: "Wright, in his Creation and New Creation lecture, makes the point that expressing creativity is in fact participating in Gods creation, nearly at the same level as practicing compassion and justice and mercy." Then, at the end of his post, Pat says "Theres something life-giving about creativity, and especially skilled practice of creativity." This so wonderfully summed up for me the joy that I experienced tonight.

Refreshed and Tired

2005-06-23T16:05:00.000-07:00

We just got back a couple of hours ago from a 5-day (motorhome) camping trip. We left the day after the girls' school finished, in a hectic flurry of packing, food shopping and organizing, and headed south only about 20 miles, to a members-only campground that had offered us a free three-night stay if we would listen to their sales spiel. We figured this wouldn't be hard to say no to at all, and since RV campground fees can get rather expensive it seemed like a great solution for a cheap way to get away for a few days. We made reservations for two-nights at one of our favorite campgrounds a little farther south near the beach for right afterwards.

Well the experience didn't work out quite as easily as we had hoped. The campground was actually delightful, much nicer than we had expected, and the sales spiel was much harder to say "no" to than we had planned for. Rather than relaxing and leaving behind the cares of daily life and the worries of unemployment, we spent hours getting emotionally hooked by fancy vacation dreams (membership included access to cheap condo deals) and visions of being able to frequently relax by the pool in this spacious and comfortable campground and others like it. This was followed by hours of cost/benefit analysis and a review of our financial situation, only to reaffirm to ourselves what we had known all along - there was no way we were buying a membership (especially a new one) at this time! Then we had to have the persistence to tell the sales people, over and over again, that we could not buy a membership right now, and that they didn't need to keep coming up with more generous finance schemes because we were not going to go into debt for this (we never even went into debt to get the motorhome, my parents gave it to us when they couldn't use it any more). It was exhausting.

In between all the agonizing, we did enjoy the campground. We took walks, saw deer in a nearby field and baby birds in a nest near the store. The girls and I swam in the pool, while my husband surfed the net, using their new wireless service, from the poolside (I only had time to read one or two blogs!). We BBQ'ed and relaxed. Even the stress of discussing finances and future uncertainties was not all bad, as it opened the door for some conversations that my husband and I needed to have. We were glad, though, when it was time to move on to the other campground. I wonder if we will ever end up getting a membership to that campground and returning? I really don't know. I do know that it's not worth stretching ourselves beyond our means for!

Our time at the next campground was exhausting, but fun. We were met there by our good friends and their three young foster children, who are quite a handful but who we really care about. The children may be returning to their birth parents soon (which may or may not turn out to be a good thing), so we enjoyed getting to spend this time together with them now. The children have become very attached to my girls over the last few months, and we had a great, if exhausting, time together with them playing on the beach and visiting the Monterey Bay Aquarium before they returned home last night.

This morning my husband, the girls and I hiked out to the beach from the campground and sat in the misty, cool morning breeze, playing in the sand and watching the waves. We saw numerous kinds of birds - small black water birds bobbing in the waves, a huge V of some kind of black birds flying low over the waves, seagulls, and pelicans. We saw a few sea otters popping up and down in the kelp beds. We also saw our favorite sight at this beach - a pod of dolphins swam by, the lead dolphins jumping and leaping through the waves, followed eventually by a smaller and smaller trail of more sedate dolphins.

That time on the beach this morning, and the time yesterday with our friends, helped me so much to center back on what is really important. Fancy vacation dreams that we can't really afford right now (or the other things in life that I sometimes moan about not being able to afford) are really not important! Watching those dolphins cavorting through the waves, I thought "look at how wonderous this world is, how rich and abundant in life and resources God has made it!" Spending time with my friends, seeing their love for those children and their pain at the probability of loosing them to parents who have such a little likelihood of staying clean and straight and able to care for them well, reminds me of what a precious thing my family is. Today I returned to a home which is a mess, to chores and errands and work to do, and I am so thankful even for this. What a precious and wonderful life we have.

You've got to find what you love.

2005-06-17T22:10:00.000-07:00

A friend sent me this link to the text of the commencement address that Steve Jobs gave a few days ago at Stanford, with the comment "good words". I agree.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Dissident

2005-06-07T17:23:00.000-07:00

adj 1: characterized by departure from accepted beliefs or standards
2: disagreeing, especially with a majority
n : a person who dissents from some established policy.

I first looked up what this word meant last year when it seemed like everyone was reading "The Dance of the Dissident Daughter" (which I've still not read). Then bobbie mentioned it again a few days ago and it has really stayed in my mind.

The changes that I have gone through in the last few years have been life-giving for me, for to deny the questions that plague me would be a kind of death. Yet it has been hard to talk about much of this with people at church, and I have walked in a measure of fear of other people's opinions. I think it is time for me to risk expressing what I am thinking, feeling and believing in a more concrete way.

Tomorrow I am having lunch with my church's Children's Pastor, to talk about Children's Ministry at our church and about how I might be more involved in helping her. I am praying for the ability to express to her clearly my changing beliefs and faith struggles, and my fears about how they may impact the work that she has asked me to consider doing. Somehow, I do not think that she will be unduly shocked at my dissident views, but it is still a huge challenge to consider trying to verbalize and summarize what I want to tell her. Her husband is the pastor who asked me to consider praying more at church, so this is in effect the beginning of that conversation as well.

I can imagine all kinds of ways in which my pastor might be disappointed in my views and choices, based mostly on how I would have viewed them myself in years past. But it's not very honoring of her if I project opinions onto her before actually talking to her. So I'm praying for peace and clarity.

Update 06-09-05: We had a very nice lunch and discussion. We are looking at ways that I can help her more with kids ministry stuff in a way that I am comfortable doing where I am at. It was a very encouraging discussion.

Feeling Vulnerable

2005-05-29T19:22:00.000-07:00

Warning - this is a long ramble...

I don't talk much about my faith, or my church, on this blog. This is not really intentional - I thought when I started this blog that I would be writing more about faith. I found, though, that I am at such a place of change, of shift, of vulnerability in my faith that I do not feel like I have anything to say. I have been feeling very shut-down - not by the voices that I know in the blogosphere, but rather by the voices in my head and the imagined voices that might come from "out there"...

Why? I'm not completely sure, though I know it's an attempt to protect myself. I have gone through a lot of changes in the last few years. When I became a Christian and joined the fledgling Vineyard movement 26 years ago, I was a relatively unchurched young person, hungry for God and truth and meaning. I adopted the values and goals of my community fairly whole-heartedly, though there were always some areas where I felt "less than" and didn't feel like I lived up to expectations, especially in areas where a more extroverted person might be more comfortable - public evangelism or ministry. I learned though, to value these things and to press through my inhibitions in many areas. My husband and I were involved in worship ministry, we hosted and led small groups, I prayed for people in ministry times, we set-up and tore-down chairs and sound equipment for years and years (we've never attended a church that had it's own permanent space, except for maybe about 1 year), etc., etc...

Shift forward about 15+ years or so... When I chose to give up my software engineering job and stay home with my first daughter, I found myself in a time of radical change. So many of the things that had propped up my ego, my understanding of myself, were gone. Not only could I no longer claim I was a "router developer" when someone asked what I did - we had recently left a church because of some deep misgivings about the church and some hurts, and we were in "hiding mode", not involved in any visible ministry in our new church. I had no more socially acceptable titles to give myself, except "stay-at-home mom" - which for all that I valued this job more than any I had ever done before, I struggled to feel acceptable in claiming as my only role.

So all of this happened to me as I was moving into my late 30s and early 40s, which I now believe is a time of great interior change for most women. Stripped of my roles and titles, I struggled with depression and facing my own true feelings and thoughts. Eventually I found that if I was honest with myself, I really had many doubts and misgivings about much of the "story of faith" that I had worked so hard to adopt whole-heartedly from my church community. As I worked at being honest and true to what I was feeling, I found that it was harder and harder to fit in easily in my community. Not that they are a super-closed minded group, far from it - but you never know what level of certainty you are going to run across about any one issue with the average church member. And certainty was something that eluded me.

There is one incident that stands out in my memory as representative of this struggle. I was preparing to teach sunday school with a youngish group of 5-to-8 year olds, and the curriculum suggested a very graphic flannel-graph portrayal of Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac, complete with large knife in hand. Knowing that I was passionate about using age-appropriate materials in teaching, the Sunday School director mentioned that I didn't need to use this graphic representation if I wasn't comfortable in presenting it to the children. I made an off-hand comment about how I wasn't even sure that I believed that this was a factual historical event, that I believed that the depth of the violence in that message was a pretty adult concept, and that it was a relief to me to not feel like I had to teach the children using that specific flannel-graph. Another mom (and sunday school teacher) in the room practically jumped down my throat in her hurry to tell me how she believed that the Old Testament was an entirely factual historical account, and that she didn't have any trouble in teaching it to children as such.

This interaction had a pretty deep impact on me. My fears that I was not really qualified to be teaching the children of my church were brought right to the light. How could I teach what I struggle to believe? I have continued to do so, probably out of a sense of duty and obligation as much as anything. I don't mean that to be a negative thing - I fully believe that if my family is involved in a church, and I expect it to minister to me and my family, that I have a duty to participate in the functioning of that community. Without this kind of mutual support and participation, a church can become a pretty unhealthy place. I have worked hard to find ways to teach the curriculum's messages in a way that does not compromise my beliefs or my best understanding of my church's beliefs. Of course, half the time I don't really have any idea what I do believe any more...

I've been trying for years to sort out this jumble of thought. Today I was asked by one of my pastors to consider praying for people during our "ministry time". I confessed to him that it has been very hard to do this in the last few years, as I have struggled in my faith. I believe that people who come forward in church for prayer often have expectations of those praying for them, expectations that I am not at all sure I can live up to. I know that any healing or message that God brings in prayer is entirely up to him, and not dependent upon the state of my beliefs - yet the process is also one that requires vulnerability and trust by the person who wants prayer, and that is something that I don't want to violate. This area of Vineyard-style prayer ministry and beliefs about healing is also an area where I have gone through radical upheaval in the last few years, and I still struggle to find any firm understanding of what I believe. Though I didn't express all this to my pastor, he did suggest that I could at least pray with one of the pastors, and that maybe I might want to talk more some time.

I think I am all written out for now. I'm not completely certain why I have written this, except the thought of talking to my pastor has brought tears to my eyes all afternoon. I have learned that this is my body/soul/spirit's way of telling me that this is something important, something that I should not ignore.

I have no idea who will really read this, or what your background or beliefs are, but I would love any feedback. I can get quite circular in my thinking, wondering what is really God leading me and what might be deception, and how the heck do I sort out all these confusing thoughts. I think I am going to continue to try to unpack this some more in the next few days, as a way to prepare to talk to my pastor and as a way to continue to grow in truth and integrity. I have talked to a few trusted people about this, but I know there is much more I need to do to continue to grow in God. I want to be willing to be corrected, but I'm not interested in being "fixed" - for I don't believe that admitting my doubts, or that I might not believe exactly the same way as many in my tribe do, means that I am broken. I long to find a community, online or in real life, where it is really safe to discuss these things. Of course, I'm not sure I've said anything concrete enough to discuss, so maybe you can just pray for me to learn to be coherent!

Whew!

2005-05-24T21:22:00.000-07:00

What a crazy couple of days (and weeks)!

I've mentioned before about the elementary school volunteer art program that I am involved in. Tomorrow is the culmination of a year's work, our annual Art Show. The last couple of days have been a mad whirlwind of non-stop activity, with some major crises narrowly averted and lots of running around. As of now, our school's cafeteria is filled with kiosks (which kind of look like old cube walls covered in crushed velvet), running in zig-zag rows down the cafeteria. The kiosks are about 95% covered with art by now, with a little more to go up tomorrow morning.

I got to work in my daughter's 1st grade class this year. We learned about the elements of art - line, shape, texture, color and value - and we made special art projects that emphasized each of these elements. We also studied our featured artist Vincent van Gogh, and drew "Expressive Line Portraits" in the style of van Gogh. Tonight I hung the artwork (including some of the styrofoam block-prints that I talked about before) that was the result of this years efforts, and it is amazing to see what these 1st graders have done.

Tomorrow should be fun. It's our school's annual Dance-Fest in the evening (along with the Art Show), where each grade performs a dance that they have been working on all year. It's wonderful how community-building dance can be - to see all these kids out dancing together is an amazing experience. Dance has become a part of the culture of this school, and it's an inherently cooperative experience. So far I've only actually seen some of the practices and rainy-day dancing, as it's our first year at this school - so I'm really looking forward to tomorrow night's celebration.

So what does this all mean to me? I am exhausted from all the running around and stress of getting everything together. I've come close to really hurting my lower back, though thankfully it's doing better today. I wonder again, as I do every year, how much is the right amount to be involved? Am I over doing it?

Thankfully, I don't have to answer those questions today or tomorrow. Tomorrow I get to walk through the Art Show and see little kids pulling their parents along to see their art hanging in the show, mounted and labeled and honored. Kids who have no idea about the work that so many adults went through to make this happen, and many parents who don't really see that effort either. And that's OK, 'cause it's about the kids. Their art. Their dance. Their lives. To honor them. And it's a beautiful thing.

Another layer off the onion

2005-05-14T00:27:00.000-07:00

Well, it's been three weeks since my last cup of leaded coffee. I'm not completely caffeine-free, as I still have some tea and the occasional coke, but these do not come anywhere near the level of coffee drinking that I was indulging in. Indulging in? It was more like a desperate dependency, a vicious cycle of addiction. Drink coffee, get tired out, drink more coffee, get tired out, don't get enough sleep, get up in the morning so tired out and drained that I had to drink more coffee just to wake up... Rinse, repeat. For years.

My doctor was right. I do feel better after stopping that endless loop.

The really amazing thing to me is the emotional cleansing that giving up my coffee addiction seems to be bringing. It's another layer off the onion of hiding. I am continually faced with the reality of my body and my emotions. If I stay up too late and don't get enough sleep - when I get up in the morning, the reality is that I am tired. I can't hide from that by craving coffee and using it to stimulate myself past that tiredness. I have to face the fact that I AM tired, and live with it. If I am stressed and anxious - I can't just run to Peet's for a quick latte fix as a way to sooth my jangled nerves and hide from the reality of my stress.

I am not at all confident that I will be able to keep living longterm without coffee. I love it, and I still miss it. But I am also loving experiencing a deeper level of honesty with myself, and that has a powerful draw.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes....

2005-04-30T23:37:00.000-07:00

Time may change me
But I can't trace time

Do you ever think about your perception of time?

I do. My favorite realization about time was when my husband once explained to me his understanding (not unique to him!) of why time seems to get faster the older we get. He explained that we perceive time as a proportion of our memories, and the older we get, the more time we have to compare any one unit of time too (a day is a much smaller proportion of your life at 40 than it was at 4). I have loved this theory, and it helped me to reconcile the strange phenomena of time passing faster through the years. I especially think of this in the fall, when it seems like all I do after school starts is blink once, and it's Halloween, blink twice and it's Thanksgiving, then blink a third time and it's Christmas.

While I have loved this explanation, I don't think our only experience of time is of it going faster through the years. Of course there are those moments of extreme emotion or stress, where time can drastically speed up or down in our lives. But even aside from these phenomena, I have been noticing other ways that time is changing for me. In strange little blips, time is slowing down again.

Partly, this is due to my kids getting past the toddler/very young child stage. With really young children, I had to kind of look at the day as broad sweeps of time, and remember to keep only general goals for what I was going to do during those times. Depression also used to affect my perception of time, for when it feels like every step you take is like walking through molasses, you can't have very high expectations for how you are going to use your time. Time slips away, ill used.

But lately it feels like time has slowed back down a little. Or more accurately I think, the time has a different quality. Richer. Fuller. Not always, and not nearly often enough - but it's happening. There are days when I can look at a short amount of time and think "hmm, I could do this and this, and have a cup of tea and read a little, then do that other thing, and still get to school on time to pick up the kids without stressing." This kind of possibility thinking about time isn't something that I have experienced much of in the last ten years.

I don't mean that I am just looking for ways to get more done in the time that I have. What I am thinking about is more like a desire to savor my time like I savor the flavor of a good glass of wine, breathing it in, sipping it, tasting it fully. I'd be lying if I didn't say I am also hoping to get more accomplished in my new approach to time. But mostly I feel that I am more able to appreciate time and make conscious choices about how I will use my time. I want to experience more of being present to the time that I have. Not worrying, not stressed, not shut-down. Just present.

Strange fascination, fascinating me
Ah changes are taking the pace I’m going through
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes....*

"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life? Matthew 6:25-27.

*I don't know exactly why thinking about writing this brought these old David Bowie lyrics to mind, but now they won't leave - so I thought I'd share them with you! :)

Transition time, again

2005-04-28T17:16:00.000-07:00

Today was the last day of my temporary job working in my daughters' school. I can't believe it went by so fast! I really loved working with the kids, and thankfully the principal has started talking to me about the possibility of another part-time job next year. I'm also planning on getting qualified as a substitute teacher, which will bring more flexible options.

I'm so grateful to have some more time to myself now, before summer vacation! I have so much to do: clean my house, make some jewelry and work on organizing the beading business, organizational stuff for the art program I help run at the girl's school, and regular classroom volunteering that I haven't been able to do while I was working there. I'm also hoping to start exercising on a regular basis.

Guess I have a lot of expectations for myself for the next couple of weeks, I may have to spend some time praying about what's realistic... I am looking forward to caring some of the momentum that this job gave me into these other areas, though!

Not that, please!

2005-04-18T22:44:00.000-07:00

"I'd like you to give up coffee," she said.

Oh, no - not that please! My blood pressure's not that bad, is it? I know I need to loose some weight and commit to more regular exercise. Talk to me about my diet - about increasing my fresh veggies and cutting down on sugars - but please don't ask me to give up my coffee!!

"And no decaf, either."

I like this new doctor, she's easy to talk to and seems very understanding. But to give up coffee? How will I wake up in the mornings... how will I make it through those long afternoons on a hard day without a trip to Peet's for my favorite latte?

"You can drink as much green tea as you want!"

Oh... green tea. I like it, but it's not the same as a cup of good, strong black coffee or a latte... the thought of green tea isn't very encouraging.

"Do I really have to?", I ask her.

"Well, your blood pressure is a little high,"

hmm... maybe I shouldn't have had that large latte this afternoon before my check-up...

"and it'll be easier to loose some weight, your bones won't loose as much calcium, and you'll feel better. I really would like you to."

Oh....

OK.

I'll try...

...at least to cut way, way down.

My little girl

2005-04-03T21:21:00.000-07:00

My little girl, the eleven-year-old, is growing up. Today we went to Barnes and Noble and got a book that she really wanted, an American Girl brand book about going to Middle School. All evening she carried it around and read to me tidbits about how to organize a locker and the best places to sit in a classroom (the 'T' zone, where you can see and hear the teacher). Next year is going to be such a change, and I'm glad that she's looking forward to it and anticipating the changes with excitement.

I'm a little scared for how it's actually going to go for her, though. Today we also talked about how disappointing it is for her that none of her friends at school like to play "imaginary games" any more. She's the last one left who still wants to invent kingdoms where there are good guys and bad guys (and unicorns) and exciting things happen during recess, instead of just playing basketball or giggling about the boys. There's one girl who will sometimes talk about horses, and that's almost as good as playing imaginary games, but not quite as good, since she doesn't want to run around and pretend to be a horse or a unicorn.

I so love that my daughter still has an imagination, that she still wants to explore her dreams, that she still wants to play. She is bright, articulate and creative. She's not interested in fashion or fads, and she can be quite independent. I'm trying to encourage her to write stories as a way to channel her imagination, and she'd like to. Hopefully we will really work on that together, not just talk about it. She's still human, though, and longs to have more friends, and I'm not sure these qualities of hers that I so appreciate will bring her much social acceptance in Middle School.

My little girl is growing up. I'm praying for God's grace to be with her, as she navigates these coming waters. And I'm praying for wisdom as a parent, because I want to both encourage her uniqueness and innocence, and to support her in finding friends. These are lessons I'm still working on for myself, though, so I'm feeling challenged to guide my daughter through them.

Tonight I read Roxaboxen again and cried a little, and wondered if my daughter will one day have her own such story to tell...

Turning my face towards the Light

2005-03-20T01:31:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting with the laptop and the kitty on my lap, and I just realized that it's already 12:30 a.m.. Oh well, I didn't make it to sleep early tonight!

Today (or yesterday, actually!) we celebrated my oldest daughter's 11th birthday. Her birthday was early in February, but for various reasons we weren't able to have a birthday party with her friends until now. This morning I loaded up the van with my daughter, four of her friends from school, and one of the kids' mother, and we drove to Monterey. My husband and younger daughter drove down as well (we couldn't all fit in one vehicle). We spent most of the day in a crush of bodies at the Monterey Bay Aquarium (the great white shark is incredible!), followed by a short romp on a very windy beach, then came home. It was exhausting, occasionally frustrating, and very fun. I think it's going to take me quite a while to get all the popcorn out of the cracks and crevasses of my van...

I've just been sitting thinking tonight about how my life has turned out so different than I ever expected it to. While there have been many hard things to adjust to in the last few years, I can see how good most of this has been for me. I am feeling worn out, though, and tired of the struggles and the anxiety. Anxiety was not something I ever expected to struggle with, and I've only begun to really recognize it's presence in my life. One of the side effects of anxiety has been that I am having a hard time reading books. I can read blogs and surf the net just fine! But to really sit still, focus, read, listen and absorb a book has been really hard. I've been trying to read Parker Palmer's Let your Life Speak for months, and it's been very slow going (and it's not a long book!). What I've absorbed so far has been very good, though, so I'm gonna keep trying.

I've spent hours over the last few days, perusing university and California education websites, looking into options for possibly starting to teach. This is so challenging. I'm not sure what parts of me are driven by true desire, or by anxiety about our circumstances and grasping for solutions. Actually, I think it's a combination of all those things, and more. Working with kids these last few weeks has been a real pleasure, though, a gift. I just wish I could have some idea of what was the "right" path for now, for next week, for the next year... Living with the ambiguity, with the unknown, with only knowing what I am doing today and maybe tomorrow, is hard. It's forced me to examine my faith like nothing else ever has done, though, and turn my face towards the Light.

Lovin' those fresh veggies

2005-03-17T21:09:00.000-08:00

Yesterday we got our first box of the season of "fresh from the farm" organic produce from a local CSA farm. We received: Green Onions, Meyer Lemons, Green Lettuce, Roots (2 kinds of turnips and a black radish), Escarole, Dandelion Greens, a large Butternut Squash, golden Chard, and Broccoli.

It's an interesting challenge to see how much of this variety of interesting veggies my family will eat. My kids are pretty typical kids (read "picky"), and I haven't prepared many greens for them through their lives (I haven't eaten many, either!). My 11-year-old daughter did ask to try a piece of the dandelion greens raw last night, since the boy in one of her favorite books, My Side of the Mountain, ate a lot of dandelion greens. She decided after a bite or two that she would not survive in the wilderness if that was all she could find to eat! I did enoy them sauteed with a little pasta and some romano cheese. I love new food adventures!

Tonight we had the butternut squash and a tri-tip, roasted with butter and maple syrup, and a wonderful green leaf salad with some grated turnip and carrots. How I snuck the grated, raw turnip into the salad without complaints, I'm not sure, but it worked! It is such a delight to eat veggies that have flavor.

Now I need to find the time to read more about escarole and how to fix it. If anyone was any great tips, let me know! I gather that sometimes it is eaten raw like a lettuce, and sometimes it is cooked like a green. Mine is pretty hearty looking and I did sautee some a little and it tasted good. I should probably just try eating it raw to see how that is too!

My biggest fear in signing up for this program (I'm just on a 4-week trial now) is that I wouldn't be able to use enough of the vegetables. Not only do my kids not like "unusual" foods, my husband has many food sensitivities to vegetables (no onions, garlic, bell peppers, or anything remotely spicey!). But I've realized that even if the rest of the family can't or won't eat many of these (to us) more "exotic" veggies - I can enjoy them myself and that the challenge of using up these veggies will help me to stick to my goal of a diet high in fresh vegetables. And hopefully we will all expand our palates a little through this adventure.

The tide is still and shallow today

2005-03-12T12:58:00.000-08:00

OK, so I may be able to catch those waves of energy on some days, but on some days the tide is so still and shallow.

I hate housework. I have so many deep and painful emotions surrounding housework, that to choose to do most simple chores is like peeling a scab back and digging around in sore places once again. I hate that. So I try to trick myself. I set small goals, I turn on the music loudly, I try to think about other things. But it's a lonely, lonely process. Sometimes my husband works with me, and for a short time that is wonderful - then the painfulness of the emotions buried within me begin to overtake my thoughts and our interactions, and I have to walk away from it. I hate that. Friends have offered to help, but again the shame is so powerful that the few times I have actually tried to work with friends on my "stuff", we haven't gotten very far. I hate that.

You probably can sense here that I have a slight problem with housework and shame, and probably with my attitude about it all, as well. I have spent years trying to understand the "hows" of housecleaning (you should see my bookshelf crammed with "how to" manuals for housecleaning), and years trying to understand the "whys", as well. I don't think I am really any closer to answers, and I am deeply disappointed that this is still a struggle. This is one of the major reasons that I resonate so strongly with the descriptions of what it's like to be ADD, those stories of chronic disorganization are the first I've heard of that really seem similar to mine.

Can I share something that I've been thinking about a lot recently? I have friends who, when I share about this struggle, say to me "Oh - I struggle with the same thing! We all hate housework!" But when I see their houses, and almost invariably they are beautifully clean and organized, or at least fairly so, I think "No - you don't know what I struggle with!!!!!" Now I know we all have struggles, and I appreciate their attempts (honest, even) at empathy. But the result is just more discouragement for me. 'Cause if what we struggle with is the same thing - then the way I see it, it means that I must just be a loser and a failure. Ugh. I've just confessed all kinds of layers of bad attitude here, I'm sure. Forgive me.

Well, I think it's time to go take an Advil for the headache that all of this has given me, and go face another one of those piles of papers that I need to sort through. I have cousins who I care about deeply and rarely get to see who will be coming through town in a couple of weeks. I really want to see them, and they may want to come here to visit us (or we might meet at another family member's house, I'm not sure yet). Goals like this are usually the only way I finally get motivated to do something about my messes (pure desperation). I've got a really long way to go, though, this time. And with this house now housing a full family of 4, with lot's of interests, hobbies, and toys, there isn't the room to just hide the "stuff" any more...

How do you relax?

2005-03-11T22:49:00.000-08:00

I have two (almost) daily entertainments (aside from my blog addictions, but I don't really consider that "entertainment") that help me to relax. These are not "high" entertainments. Just everyday, fun things that make me smile.

The first is my daily fix of the For Better or For Worse comic strip. I have enjoyed reading this comic strip for years, but especially in the last couple of years since I found that I could follow it online each day. I keep that link as a bookmark on my main toolbar so I can easily click there to keep caught up on the lives of the Pattersons. Lynn Johnston does such a good job of capturing the complexity of family life, and I am amazed at how well she keeps the ball juggling from so many generations' point-of-view. I appreciate how she exposes foibles, yet honors each character's unique story.

My second favorite entertainment is the Ellen DeGeneres show. Oh my, that woman makes me laugh! Through the wonders of TiVo technology, most week nights I watch this show right before I go to sleep. Did I mention that Ellen makes me laugh? I don't watch very much TV other than PBS, or go to movies very often - so I really appreciate this show that entertains me and helps me keep a finger on popular culture. I had actually heard of most of the movies, actors and actresses who were up for Academy Awards this year, which hasn't usually been the case in most recent years. I love the way Ellen dances in the show, she makes me want to dance more and that's a good thing. I also really, really love how she makes me laugh!

Momentum

2005-03-11T21:37:00.000-08:00

I'm embarrassed to admit how much working just 12 hours a week is helping me. I love and value the work that I have done for the last 11 years, being home with my daughters. This new little bit of structure, though, is really bringing back some momentum that has been lacking in my daily life.

I wish I had picked up on more surfer lingo in my college days, 'cause I could probably use it now to help describe what this feels like a little more creatively. I feel like there are these waves of energy flowing in my life, and I am learning to catch them and ride them in. They're not perfectly regular, but they are fairly consistent. I miss some, I fall off others, and sometimes I really crash and burn. But I have the opportunity, almost daily, to try again to catch that wave, and the energy feels really good.

A big part of my new discipline work continues to be my choice to go to bed earlier and get more sleep. This is a hard, hard thing for me, and much of what I am having to give up is my blogging and web surfing time. I hadn't really recognized how much I was blogging really late at night! I'm looking for a new balance that allows me to stay connected but where I don't allow myself to fall down the hole of endless hours of computer time (and that's always a temptation for me). I'm also making time for other types of relaxation, which is something that I think I will write about in another post...

Hi, Friends!

2005-02-28T22:25:00.000-08:00

Just a quick "hi"!

I'm enjoying my new part-time job, and working hard to bring some stable routines into my life, beginning with more regular sleep habits. Unless you have ever been a late-night-addicted night-owl like I have been, you won't know how incredible it is if I tell you that I am overjoyed that I'm starting to feel like I am really sleepy and tired by 11:00p.m. (or even earlier sometimes). We're working through some of the backlogged piles of paper and junk around here too, so it's a good time.

Looking forward to my church's annual Women's Retreat coming up this weekend. I'm hoping that it won't rain the whole time, so that I can spend some time just sitting in silence in the redwoods (it's up in the Santa Cruz mountains). Thanks, Anj (and Henri Nouwen), for this lovely reminder about Holding Space - I think that I will have opportunity to practice all these this weekend.

Thus, [Spiritual] discipline is the creation of boundaries that keep time and space open for God. Solitude requires discipline, worship requires discipline, caring for others requires discipline. They all ask us to set apart a time and a place where God's gracious presence can be acknowledged and responded to.

As you wish

2005-02-20T17:17:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I introduced my 11-year-old daughter to The Princess Bride, which I hadn't watched in a long, long time. What fun that was!!

Isn't it funny how old movies, or songs, can trigger memories? When The Princess Bride came out, I was fairly newly married and out of work because the small computer start-up I had been working for had folded. I actually worked without pay for over a year, and finally quit when I couldn't take the stress of working out of my boss's house as the business faded away and his marriage failed. It was great technical work experience, but not the best emotional time.

So I was home full time for a while, and able to spend more time with some of my other stay-at-home women friends from church. One of the things we did was to watch a new (at the time) soap opera called "Santa Barbara". That was (and still is) the only soap opera I have ever watched. I remember two women, one a young mom, beautiful and put-together, until that time well-off (they had just suffered financial troubles) - the other was older, overweight, wizened, poor and hard-lived, sensitive to the Spirit's voice and often prophetic, yet not always stable and balanced. It always made me laugh to hear that they would call each other on the phone every day after "Santa Barbara" was on, to talk about what happened that day on the soap.

We prayed together a few times, for "emotional healing" for my beautiful friends' checkered past. This is one of my most painful memories of prayer. It felt like we performed open heart surgery on this woman, then somehow - as she lay there on the operating table bleeding and exposed - somehow, we didn't have the tools to help bring about healing. I have never felt so inadequate in prayer.

I have completely lost touch with both these families since that time, but I have often wondered how my friend has fared, as her family went on to experience many more trials after that time. I am not too concerned about that specific painful prayer time, as I am confident that God was continuing to bring healing and love to my friend. But I have retained to this day a cautiousness about prayer and supernatural "words", as I have experienced how limited we can be in our understanding. I believe that God still speaks, but I know that we are human, and any words that come, come through our very human filters.

If I were really clever, I would now find a way to tie this back into that great line from The Princess Bride - "As you wish"! But I'm not that clever, and this is just my ramble for the afternoon. Actually, I'm probably just avoiding thinking about tax paperwork and other things that I have to get done...

(UPDATE 2/21/05: I totally forgot to mention the main connection between these ramblings - that the actress from The Princess Bride played on the soap Santa Barbara. Silly me!)

Grace is enough

2005-02-20T14:20:00.000-08:00

Well, it's Sunday and our week of vacation is almost over. My daughters' elementary school (and my new place of employment) was closed this last week, so we had a week at home. We were planning on visiting my parents for my dad's birthday, but illnesses caused us to cancel the trip. Thankfully it was colds and mild flu, not major health issues for my dad, that changed our plans.

I had hoped that I could use this week to rest and prepare for the busier schedule which starts for us this next week. Instead, I have lazed about with a low-level flu that won't quite go away. My husband and one daughter had it as well this week. I accomplished very little on my "to do" list for this week, and I still don't feel very rested. We will have a busy afternoon today, trying to finish up what has to be done before tomorrow. We may not be very prepared for our visit with the tax accountant tomorrow afternoon, bah...

In many ways, this week was a reality check for me - an open view into my weaknesses. Anxiety, depression, ADD, perfectionism - I'm tired of trying to understand labels that might define the what, how, and why of my struggles. If God is true in what He says that His power is perfected in our weakness, then I only know that I must be a living example of His power in ways that I just can't see right now. God's grace is what it's all about, I see that ever more in my life.

Because of the extravagance of those revelations, and so I wouldn't get a big head, I was given the gift of a handicap to keep me in constant touch with my limitations. Satan's angel did his best to get me down; what he in fact did was push me to my knees. No danger then of walking around high and mighty! At first I didn't think of it as a gift, and begged God to remove it. Three times I did that, and then he told me,

My grace is enough; it's all you need.
My strength comes into its own in your weakness.

Once I heard that, I was glad to let it happen. I quit focusing on the handicap and began appreciating the gift. It was a case of Christ's strength moving in on my weakness.

2 Corinthians 12:7-9 (The Message)

I'm tired of fear

2005-02-12T19:53:00.000-08:00

I'm tired today, worn out from a busy, busy week, and possibly fighting some kind of bug. This leaves me achy, with a slightly "raw" feeling to my nerves. These are all normal sensations, shouldn't really be anything to worry about.

The problem is that I don't really trust that it'll stop there. Almost six years ago I ended up in the hospital a couple of weeks after a bout of the flu. My immune system had turned traitor on me, was somehow tricked into thinking my nerves were the flu virus and was attempting to kill off the invader - by killing my nerves. I was incredibly lucky that my case of Guillain-Barre Syndrome was basically mild, my paralysis was relatively minor, my recovery after treatment ostensibly complete.

But in truth, I do have some lasting damage. When my nervous system is stressed, I can "feel it" in some of the areas where my nerves were most affected - a physical sensation of slight "rawness" that stays at a level where I'm not really sure if I'm feeling it or imagining it, that I don't remember experiencing before the GBS. Even more clearly - while the experts say that I have just as much a chance of ever having GBS again as you have of getting it - I don't really believe that. I'm sure that anyone who has suffered from an auto-immune disorder or other un-explainable illness must have asked the same kind of question - "how could my body betray me that way?". It seems like there must have been some reason, some tendency or condition, that made my immune system susceptible to this syndrome.

Every time that I have gotten sick since that time, I struggle with some degree of fear that it will happen again. It's never been debilitating fear, and it continues to lessen through the years (unless I go read people's stories about GBS, which do include stories of recurrence, that can spike the fear again!). My fear today, with my slightly raw nerves and tired body, is really pretty minimal - but it's there.

So why am I writing about this? I worry there's an element of wanting your attention, and that's probably partly true. But I also know that we all have something, whether it be physical, or emotional, or circumstantial, that affects our ability to trust God. And that's what it comes down to - can I trust God to care for me? Whatever the statistics might be, whatever the condition of my body - can I trust that God looks on me with love and care, and will take me through whatever comes?

I hope so.

I wish I could claim more faith than that.

Icing on the cake

2005-02-12T10:10:00.000-08:00

It's been a great week, though I'm a little tired this weekend! The work itself isn't too tiring, but it all requires a type of organization and activity level that I haven't experienced for a long time. Of course, if you fit in taking one vehicle to be serviced this week, visiting with my good friend before she returned to England, and the 11-year-old's first band concert, plus various afterschool activities, carpools, and meetings - there was a lot going on! I'm so glad we have a week of vacation this week!!

I really liked the work. Working with kids, without all the organizational responsibilities of a teaching job, is like getting to eat just the icing on the cake (if you like the icing, that is!).

Babies grow up in the most interesting ways...

2005-02-08T21:50:00.000-08:00

Found on the white board that sits in the hallway, in the 6-year-old's handwriting:

I +. am +. proud +. of +. the +. Good +. news +. because +. it +. is +. the +. wer +. God +. uses +. to +. save +. who +. belives.

Mom: Wow 6, did you write this?
6: Uh huh.
Mom: Where'd you learn that?
6: In sunday school.
Mom: Wow, that's great...

Mom: what are these little marks?
6: Space marks, so that I leave enough space between the words.
Mom: Oh, I see... I really like that you spelled the word "because" correctly! Where'd you learn to spell that?
6: Oh, I learned that in school...

a few moments of quiet, as Mom & 6 ponder the writing...
Mom: (pointing to "wer") What's this word?
6: (after thinking for a few moments and reading through the sentence a couple of times) Wer... Wer... Oh! That's supposed to be "power", I must have accidently erased the "p" (quickly inserts "p", making "pwer").
Mom: This is really great work, 6, I'm impressed that you remembered all this.
6: Thanks, mom!

a few minutes later...
Mom: 6, do you know what the "good news" is?
6: (with a quizical expression on her face and a shake of her head) No...