No energy to write. No energy to read. No energy to do pretty much anything.
Pray for me if you have a chance. I feel like I’m fading into the Shadow.
Reflections
Thankful Thursday: A Day with Joanna
Today I’m thankful…
…that I was able to spend the afternoon (and some of the morning) with Joanna, quilting
…that both of us managed to get a great deal done on our respective quilts
…that we had some wonderful conversation on books, jobs, friendship, dating, eHarmony, marriage, childbearing (of course, we WOULD discuss this topic!), and life in general
…that I am not an Asian elephant, who has a twenty-five month gestation period
…that I do not have foot long fingernails like the woman in the Guinness Book of World Records
…that I’m one of those “readers” with an insatiable curiosity for life–and a desire to try everything
…that at least ONE person thinks I have a sense of humor :-P
…that if there’s a guy out there who can fit my absolutely ridiculous standards, God knows it and has him ready (for just the right time)
…that if there’s no guy out there who can fit my absolutely ridiculous standards, God knows it and has me ready (to make the most of my singleness)
…that God knows what He’s doing with me, even if I don’t know what He’s doing with me
…that I have a great friend who’s traveling with me along this unknown path
Then and Now
Several years ago, I picked up an etiquette book from the 1920s at a garage sale. I’ve rifled through it every now and then, but haven’t really read it–at least, not until just recently.
What I’ve found has been most entertaining.
Some things stay the same, other things change.
In a chapter on dinner parties, the author suggests the following as an acceptable way of taking leave:
“Good-night, Mrs. Carr. I must thank you for a perfectly delightful evening.”
To which the hostess may reply:
“We were glad to have you, I’m sure, Mrs. Roberts.”
Perfectly polite in the ’20s. Ridiculously snarky in the next millennium.
Just read the sarcasm: “I must thank your for a perfectly delightful evening.” “We were glad to have you, I’m sure.”
Ah, the differences between then and now.
Time for a little whine
I know I’m just complaining and I know I ought not. But seriously. Something is wrong with my life. I just wish I knew what.
I’m beyond tired. I’m exhausted.
I’m impatient. I want to be done with my RD exam, done with my grading, done with this infernal Master’s degree. I want to be on to a job search, a house search, a family.
I feel like I’m piddling around, wasting time. I don’t have any time to do anything I want to do–and I don’t seem to be getting any closer to being able to do what I want to do.
I’m just here. Tired. Overworked. Frustrated. Impatient.
God, are You listening?
Help!
Short of humility
Every so often, I’m tempted to get a big head. Like when yet another woman from my department remarks on what a great teacher I am. Like when the guy in front of me in biochemistry thinks I’m a Ph.D. student. Like when another classmate in biochem thinks I’m a professor (really?)
Then I try to take a more objective look at things. So I’m a good teacher. Maybe I am. But it’s not by any personal merit. I love teaching, I love the material, I love imparting knowledge. It makes me come alive. But this is what teaching does to me, not what I do to it.
And why would people think I’m so much smarter than I am? No idea. But it’s just an illusion. I look put together. I sound like I know what I’m talking about. I ask questions to clarify what the professor said to make sure that I’m understanding the information correctly. Not that I’m actually that smart. A Ph.D? Even a Ph.D. student?
Not that I haven’t thought about it. But, truth is, I’m a (2nd year) Master’s student who’s currently overwhelmed by school and hasn’t even written her thesis proposal.
In the euphoria of teaching, I consider the further education to be just a tiny hurdle to overcome. But when I come off the buzz, even just finishing my master’s seems insurmountable.
The thousand dreams compete with one another for first place, and I think in a moment of stillness: maybe I’ll just drop out of school and get married and spend the next ten years barefoot and pregnant.
Problem is, I want to do that and STILL have the master’s degree, and get to teach, and run a church-based community center, and have a ginormous library, and write the great American novel, and bike across the state of Nebraska, and be a world traveler, and be a lactation consultant, and be a doula, and be a player in the political scene, and, and, and…
I’m caught in the difficult middle between a fierce pride that wants to do everything well and a false modesty that states that I do nothing so well as I’d like.
C.S. Lewis suggested that a truly humble man would be quite unprepossessing, not at all interested in what others thought of him, far more interested in others themselves. I am definitely not that humble man. I care way too much about where I fall on my own and others’ charts. I’m proud to have topped theirs, humiliated that I have fallen so short of my own. Neither is anywhere near humility.
My car is an audio-terrorist
My car has a convenient automatic-lock-feature, with a not-so-convenient side feature. Say I’m getting out of my car in the Walmart parking lot and want to make sure my doors are all locked. So I open my door, get out, lean over, and push the automatic lock button on the inside of the door. Then I shut the door.
And my car honks its horn.
It drives me nuts. It’s absolutely pointless. And horn-honking is by far the most inappropriately used noise on earth. A horn is intended for one purpose and one purpose only: to get someone’s attention in order to avoid a collision. Despite the common usage of horns, they are not supposed to be used to convey your frustration with another driver, to get the attention of the person beside you so that you can wave at one another, or to leer at a walking female. And they DEFINITELY should not be used to say “Hey, I just locked my doors.”
The term “audio-terrorist” (so far as I know) was coined by my father years ago in reference to the unhappy habit several of us children possess: the habit of making noise that is absolutely bereft of meaning. “Audio-terrorism” is making noise for the sake of making noise. The term encompasses beatboxing, singing at the table, randomly clapping one’s hands or tapping one’s fingernails, and a whole host of other noises. An “audio-terrorist” is one who participates in audio-terrorism.
As a recovering audio-terrorist, I never really understood how frustrating and truly terror-inducing audio-terrorism can be. At least, not until I bought a car that happens to be an audio-terrorist.
Now, I live in fear of accidentally unleashing my car’s terrorism act on the world. I go to great lengths to avoid audio-terrorism. I do the auto-lock BEFORE opening the door. That way I know all the doors are locked. Then I have only to unlock my own door, get out, and re-lock my door. Or I circle my car, unlocking each door despite the presence of the auto-lock button.
The worst thing, though, is when I supervise a new driver and forget to warn them not to hit the auto lock button. The horn goes off and I feel as though I’ve unwittingly started a Madrasa of audio-terrorism training. I’m afraid that they’ll get the impression that it’s “cool” to honk for no reason. I’m afraid I’ve accidentally pushed these children towards this practice I have come to abhor: audio-terrorism.
Wamma-Wampa’s
I can’t say when we started calling Grandma and Grandpa’s house “Wamma-Wampa’s”. I imagine it was someone’s early lisping first phrase–a corruption of “Gramma and Grampa’s”. But it caught on and now we rarely call it anything else.
In the past when we’ve visited Wamma-Wampa’s, it’s been at least a half dozen of us–if not throwing in several families together to make a couple dozen. Dozens is the way they come at Grandpa and Grandma’s house. They had a dozen children, and their dozen have been faithful to multiply.
Which is why today’s visit is so unusual. Me and Mom and Dad join Grandma and Grandpa and Aunt Ruth to make only a half dozen even. The three of us arrived less than half an hour ago, after the others were already in bed. Mom and Dad found the bedroom in the basement–and I was left to pick my room upstairs.
To pick. Imagine it. To have my choice of the three upstairs rooms (not including the landing). I didn’t have to determine whether it would be best if girls or boys stayed on the landing, who needed to be in the three-person room or the two-person room or the one-or-maybe-two-if-necessary room. I could just pick. I chose the three person room–the room I’m most familiar with.
At many a previous visit, I slept on the short twin bed by the door while Anna and Grace shared the full by the window. Now, I have set myself up on the full bed, just me. The window is open and I know my head will be congested by morning, but for now I don’t care. For now, I’m just enjoying the quiet that isn’t really quiet of the country.
No train whistles, no traffic, no car alarms, no domestic disputes. I can’t make out a single cricket, but the combined music of hundreds forms a pleasing lullaby, begging me to leave behind my city-folk worries and just be a child at Wamma-Wampa’s again.
Alas, in this too, this trip is different. I’m here on break, but not really. I have fifty papers with me to grade, four texts to peruse, and a sheaf of journal articles to review for my thesis proposal. This is a working holiday, and I’ve borrowed my sister’s laptop for the journey.
Which is yet another way that this trip is different. Instead of being unplugged, I’m more “wired” than I ever have been before. With wireless internet throughout the house–I can now blog whenever I please. But I also have to respond to students’ e-mails, input grades on blackboard, and maybe get some research in.
I’m already weighed down with the tasks I have for this weekeng; but I’m wishing, longing, hoping for something beside. I’m hoping that I can take a moment, just a brief breather, to enjoy some sort of holiday. I’m hoping to just once lose sight of all that must be done and spend some time just being.
As life grows busier, it becomes harder and harder to find that place. But if that place can be found, I’m pretty sure, I’ll find it at Wamma-Wampa’s.
Dreaming and Doing
Some people dream to the exclusion of doing.
Others do to the exclusion of dreaming.
I vacillate between the two.
Heartsick because of hope deferred, I shut off the dreams and exhaust myself in doing.
Worked to the ground, I look up to the sky and ask “Is this really what I dreamed of?”
I planned to write a post about all the many things I’ve dabbled in, dreamed of, done. But as I started writing, the dreams rose in my throat to cut off my air.
Remember the days, Rebekah?
Remember the days you dreamt big dreams? Remember dreaming of identifying with Christ to the point of sweating drops of blood like He did? You were such a zealous little girl, swinging on the swings at Tanker Hill while the adults in the church prayed. You dreamed of an army of children, passionate for God alone. Remember dreaming of a revival sweeping our nation, transforming every public and private activity? You were such a passionate teen–and you wanted to see the world changed.
Remember the dreams, the plans, the desires of your heart? Remember the designs, the plans you wrote up? A haven for missionaries on furlough. A refuge for those struck by natural disasters. A nursing home that was a HOME instead of a “facility”. A year-round camp. A support school for home-schoolers. A church-based community center. A church without walls, a church that never sleeps.
Remember how you hungered not just for knowledge but for experience as well? Remembering dreaming of traveling to each of those exotic places you read about? Remember wanting to work in the factory, wanting to build the computer, wanting to go into space? Remember wanting to see the animals first hand in their natural habitat? Remember wanting to learn the dance, do gymnastics, figure skate?
Remember when God told you your dreams were too small? Remember when He told you to dream bigger? Remember when God told you to start dreaming again? That wasn’t that long ago–but you became disappointed too soon.
June 10, 2006 passed and you weren’t married. You’re approaching 25 and you don’t own a house. You have school loans you didn’t plan on accruing. You haven’t been all those places you planned on going. You haven’t accomplished what you hoped to accomplish in your first quarter-century. So you immersed yourself in doing and let the dreams die.
O heartsick one, revive again. O downcast head, be lifted up. Awaken to dream, to yearn, to delight once more.
Rise above the busy pit that would never have you see the light. Arise to dance again. Arise to sing again. Arise to dream again.
Traveling a Trail of Fears
Today, I rode a trail where less than a month ago an attempted rape had occurred in broad daylight.
I rode it mostly as a manifesto against fear.
Having spoken my silent piece, I took a shorter path back: the road.
There I discovered a different danger. Instead of a nameless, faceless man intending to perpetrate a great crime against womanhood in general and me in particular, I happened upon a harried mother, intending no evil but capable of inflicting great harm.
No doubt she had other things on her mind as she came up to the intersection I was riding across. Perhaps she looked both ways, perhaps she didn’t. If she did, she looked right through me. Because she turned her SUV directly in front of me, cutting me off. And then she stopped, nearly forcing me to run into her.
Two different trails–one traveled with trepidation, one with confidence. On one trail, nothing occurred. On the other, I could easily have been killed. On one trail, I feared intentional harm. On the other, I was almost the victim of unintentional harm.
Try as I might like, I can never escape the dangers of this world. I cannot escape the fears that might overcome me–there are things to fear everywhere. So I have choice. I can travel the trails of fear, forever in bondage to potential harm; or I can entrust my life into God’s hands and travel the trail of faith.
“Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?” Luke 12:25
In looking for a link to said attempted rape, I discovered that police later issued a recall of the statement, saying that the woman who claimed to be attacked had lied.
Exclamation Mark
I’m reading Ravi Zacharias’s Cries of the Heart (Good book, by the way). Ravi quotes Lewis Thomas from Medusa and the Snail:
The mere existence of that cell should be one of the greatest astonishments of the earth. People ought to be walking around all day, all through their waking hours, calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that cell….If anyone does succeed in explaining it within my lifetime I will charter a skywriting airplane, maybe a fleet of them, and send them aloft to write one great exclamation point after another around the whole sky, until all my money runs out.
The quote impressed me with the author’s sense of wonderment–and my own lack of such wonderment. The cell is but the least of the wonderful things that I could spend my whole life astonished at. What of the new life being wrought in my friends Jolene and Jennifer as they reach the last trimesters of their pregnancies? What of the orderliness of the universe and the fine-tuning of every law to permit human life? What of the intricacies of weather systems that bring life and death, beauty and destruction? What of the miracle of regeneration?
Yet I rarely stop to wonder, much less spend my every day wondering. And I believe I have lost much in my blase grown-upness that thinks it knows the answers and therefore fails to ask the questions.
Oh, to embrace wonder once again. To return to the child-like astonishment, that on hearing why the sky is blue, asks yet again, “But why?” For indeed, the first explanation is rarely the end, it is only a springboard for a deeper sense of wonder.
May I look at life today through different eyes, through the eyes of wonder. May I take the time to wonder, to be astonished, to gasp in awe at the greatness of my Father displayed through all His creation. May my life be a grand exclamation mark, repeated with every breath–an exclamation mark punctuating the grandness of my God.