better stories

i am itching.. my mother calls it the "three year itch" - i've been in one city, at one job, for nearly three years. is it time to ditch the stability i so craved four and five years ago??

am i crazy?

i don't know. there are bits of me that are ready to see what's next this year, and then there are parts of me that sense that God may be planning to keep me where i am for a little while... which makes me wonder: why am itching?

is it because i'm being stirred by His Spirit to follow Him elsewhere? or is it because i'm growing discontent with the stories i can tell... am i fidgety to flit to the next thing, whatever it may be, just to gather better stories to spin at dinner parties? because that's just not a good enough reason.

i've been reading in John's gospel lately, and a recurring theme could be labeled "things that Jesus does that i just don't understand." example: judas complains when Jesus is anointed with perfume before His death, because he (judas) wanted the money for said perfume to go to the common money bag (en route to judas' own pocket). surely Jesus knew that judas had been stealing money like this - but it doesn't say that He did anything to stop the crime.

surely Christ knows about the suffering i just read about online - how appalling numbers of children in India have been abused by trusted adults (thank you BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6539027.stm). and surely He knows how horrible genocides happen. how water runs out in Yemen (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/6530453.stm). how the guy in my neighborhood was pushing that girl around on the sidewalk last week. He, our omnipotent God, knows about these things... my heart cries out with the psalmist who begged God to see and to act, knowing that He is never unaware, never less than sovereign (Psalm 10)! in my limited understanding, i can't bear the juxtaposition of injustice in this world and a just God in heaven. but this last week, as His church celebrated His Son's crucifixion and resurrection (for our salvation!), i was reminded of how His glorious, beautiful plans make little sense to my finite, earth-bound eyes. surely i would have been right there with the disciples, questioning everything Jesus did, exhibiting little-to-no faith that God's plan was being carried out in His way and His time. i would've been with Peter, who tried to stop Jesus from washing his feet, only to hear Jesus say, " 'You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand.'" (John 13:7). (i love that.)

seeing a piece of His plan for salvation, i gotta trust, for all things big and small, that He has plans bigger than i can see or imagine - designs that transcend my understanding - big plans for justice for the oppressed, for mercy for the suffering, and small plans for my life tomorrow, and the day after that. i chafe at the not-knowing, but by Christ's grace and intercession, i want to come to the Father and ask Him to raise my earth-bound eyes to faith for heaven's plan. He promises in James 1:5 to give wisdom to those who ask for it, and I want His wisdom -- because His stories are the best stories, and the ones i want to learn to tell.

pots

i love my friends. though i agree with benjamin franklin (favorite son of my adopted city) that beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy, i think that friends are proof that God loves us and wants us to be holy.

i treasure these people. in their presence, i am regularly and alternately encouraged and humbled. most recently, the humbled bit has come through...
tonight was the first really gorgeous bit of spring in philly, which comes out in exuberantly mild, flowered glory this time of year. i wandered over to the park with five friends, and sometime along the way i realized (i think it was halfway between the conversations about 15 inch toads and anti-malaria medicine) that i realised that i am the only one of our merry little band (there are something more than ten of us) that has never lived overseas. (i take that back - there's one other girl. but she's engaged to a guy who's lived in multiple countries and plans to live in another one with him at some point soon, so does she count? (c:) . anyway, tonight i was the only one.

i so enjoy hearing my friends' stories about life in south america, the middle east, and southeast asia. to hear them talk about the foods they've eaten, the mountains they've climbed and - most importantly - the people they've known feeds and comforts something deep in me. i get to know them in a way that is so good - hearing about the experiences, and the conversations, and - again - the people that have made my friends who they are is a treasure to me - like the stories of watching the sun rise and set over the south pacific, or of bargaining in the markets of the middle east, or of snorkeling in the indian ocean. but i have to admit, sometimes i get jealous!

i grew up in a small city in iowa. IOWA. as i often tell people, it's a lovely place to have grown up, but when you're swapping stories with friends who spent significant portions of their childhoods overseas, it's easy to wish for better stories. y'know? i had a blessed childhood of comfort, raised by parents who love God, and who live out that love in their city in that state. blessings, all. but it means that my stories are stories of suburbia. oooh.

but i, like my friends, am a pot. should i the pot say to the Potter, why have You formed me out of the black soil of the midwest? why did you not form me from the sand of the egyptian desert? or the lava of the pacific islands? or the rock of the andes? why instead am i formed from earth that grows tame, trimmed seed-grass??

[how can i assume such an arrogant posture?]

how can i tell that for which i have been formed? how do i know what i the pot have been made to hold, and for what purpose the Potter chose what materials He did? i cannot; of course i cannot. i am silenced.

i am silenced, and i am thankful: thankful for the range of pots i see on the shelves around me and eager to see the purposes for which they have been created. what will this one hold? and that one? for what purpose has He shaped my friends? how will their design bring Him glory? yes, eagerly i wait to see these questions answered, though i know heaven alone may tell. i see my friends; i rejoice with them; and i am humbled by what their stories reveal in my heart. they are my proof that God loves us and wants us to be holy. i see that He has made all with deliberation and intent, and i want to wait humbly for the revelation, piece by piece, of His intent for me His pot.

semi-solo

I just spent my first Christmas alone.

and it was really really lovely.

before i sound like a total Scrooge, i should explain that my parents, my brother, and my sister-in-law-to-be all had a family Christmas celebration hard on the heels of Thanksgiving. My parents, who live in Iowa, came out to philly to be with us kids, and we had our Christmas in November. my bro. and sis-in-law spent the actual holiday at their parents, and i flew solo.

sort of.

moving out to the east coast, away from family (especially for the first two years, before my brother joined me), has deepened and expanded my ken of "family." i never realized, before, how important people are - how much more important they are than place. i moved here and thought i didn't really need to have a travelling band of friends - that i could be enough on my own, for myself. when i moved, i was ready to be rid of some people - one in particular who had broken my heart in ways i didn't understand - and flying solo sounded pretty great.

but solo is never really so.

i had no money when i came, and only a small stipend on which to survive grad school, so i boarded with a lovely woman, a widow who had worked for years at my museum, named Esther. my dad drove out with me, settled me into my little room, and flew back to Iowa. immediately, Esther invited me to her family's backyard barbeque - the first of many family gatherings in which i was unquestioningly included. of course i should come - why not? her family was used to having her students join in to grandchildren's birthday parties, soup potlucks, and card-players' gatherings. come, and welcome.

but still - no family needed, thought i. the next summer, i packed a suitcase and headed for new york, to research my thesis and work at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. i'm a girl of the world, thought i, i'll do new york on my own and i'll do it with style. but even to get up to the city, my idea of solo was kindly tempered by Jim, husband of pauline, one of my professors. i was their default house-sitter, and they were my default holiday plans. jim offered to drive me up to new york, bought me lunch along the way, and wouldn't let me give him a penny for gas. pay it forward, he insisted, but don't pay me. i chafed at this, but began to ponder...

as i lived in new york that summer on my own, i tried even to hack my faith solo -- i stopped in at a good church most Sundays, and tried to read my Bible. but i didn't try to hold on to anyone for help and encouragement -- didn't tell anyone how i was doing or ask anyone for prayer. i ended the summer in a state of spiritual exhaustion and came back to my church in glen mills that fall begging God to make it home for me - to knit me in so i would not be solo. another semester passed, and soon i was panning for jobs up and down the east coast. in a near panic, i realized that solo would no longer work - it had never really. even when i had sought life alone, God had shored me up with family in my house, my program, and my church. people who had never clapped eyes on me twenty-four months earlier were suddenly among my dearest relatives.

in the two.5 years since, my sense of solo has been challenged repeatedly: i sold my car and relied, grudgingly at first, on friends' kindness and wheels. i dated a boy and learned what it means to show someone even your ugly parts (and then watch him stay anyway). i hosted a book club and saw it morph into the tightest group of friends i've ever had. when moved, i watched them carry every stick of my furniture down from a third floor walkup, across town in a philadelphia july, and up to another third-floor walkup (three days after they trooped up the same stairs to slog paint on the walls where they now spend at least one long evening every week).

this Christmas, i got to share a meal with some of them, playing cards into the wee sma's on the night of the 23rd, attending church with them on Christmas Eve before going out for lunch and then coffee, conversing, laughing, and sharing silence by turns. on Christmas Day, i shared dinner with a couple in my new church and four other "Christmas orphans," watching my family get a little bigger still.

i came home last night to reflect in front of my wee lit tree on my first solo holiday. solo, i think, may be a fallacy in my mind. by God's grace, even the times when i have felt most alone, He has surrounded me with people, dear ones who show in their lives that He has not forgotten me. He knows me intimately and has placed these in my path to help me remember that He sent His Son, His Immanuel, to be "God with us." that has made this holiday the sweetest of all.

grey//gold

i found myself on kelly drive today, coming home from work along the schuylkill, and the wet, damp grey of the concrete was brilliantly set off by the sun-gold of the maple trees along the roadside. tucked between rocky cliffs and the road, the black bark-brown of the tree trunks are topped, for a little while longer, by the fluttery leaves that shake loose in the wind of a new storm.

grey. november. gold. the words seem to go together, somehow. i love november.
really, i love november in my city:: concrete//nature//urbanity//people//color.

**sigh** november in the city, in a place like kelly drive, is beautiful to me in the way that a violin in a minor key can knock your breath out with its understated { - - - }. do you know what i mean? it was one of those days when you ache for the beauty in the world, when your soul wants to stretch wide enough to comprehend it all, and you can't -- you know that there is a greater joy to the sound you hear and the image you see, but this side of heaven, you groan at your own incapacity to comprehend their wholeness.

do i approach God with that same longing -- deep, un-nameable yearning -- to understand His whole beauty? His whole grace? love? perfection?

ooh

The city is a discourse and this discourse is truly a language: the city speaks to its inhabitants, we speak our city, the city where we are, simply by living in it, by wandering through it, by looking at it. (Roland Barthes)

***********

i want to let that roll around in my head for a little while, but isn't there so much there?

hmmm...

aptly named

last week, i overslept (slightly) pulled on default overslept-need-something-that-won't-look-funny-and-be-comfortable outfit (fuzzily) stumbled down the stairs (groggily) and walked out the door (rotely). i could see through my morning fog enough to look forward to the train ride, which i had been missing for the past month as circumstances made it sensible to drive. passing the crowd gathered for the bus in front of my house, i turned the corner to walk to the trolley stop. ipod playing, sun shining -- i was just beginning to wake up.

two blocks into my eight-ish block walk, the toes of my perfectly-normal-default-comfortable-wouldn't-hurt-a-fly-much-less-trip-me clogs sent me straight. down. to the sidewalk -- flop -- rotating me ninety degrees until knees met concrete aggregate.

ouch.

like a seven-year-old, i looked down at my left knee and found my wool dress trousers shredded, and the skin below, too. like a twenty-six year old, i had to stand up and walk back to the house calmly, realising that i would not be taking the train that morning, and find other trousers to put on.

i got up the stairs to the apartment, walked in the door and -- to my roommate's quizzical why-are-you-back-didn't-you-just-leave look, simply pointed to the knee and silently teared up. yes, they are just trousers, but this was the latest chapter in my onogoing, bi-annual spill-for-no-particular-reason-and-ruin-whatever-skirt/trousers/various accessories-you-might-be-wearing habit. it does seem to be a habit -- **sigh**. and it was just the thing to put me over the edge to teariness that morning, which came in one of those sorts of weeks/months. ...

as i relayed this story to a co-worker yesterday, he very kindly told me of a theater choreographer he knew who claimed that dancers were the biggest klutzes, because they were used to moving gracefully through lots of (level) space. that did soothe my ego a bit -- i danced for a while, before giving it up (why??) to ride the pine as a third+-string shooting guard. so i always feel that i am dishonoring my ballet training when i fall, but now maybe not entirely...

anyway, that's my latest trip, and the latest proof of the blog name.

prairie space

mellow...i think that's the best way i can describe my last week... i just got back from spending time with my parents in my iowa hometown. my goodness, but it's fascinating to move between east-coast urbanity and midwestern... non-urbanity!!

flying in to my local airport always fills me with something not quite nostalgic, but -- hmmm -- maybe familial? i'm not talking about warm fuzzies of anticipation for seeing my mom and dad... there's a feeling -- quite visceral, really -- that one gets toward the landscape of one's childhood. there's a beauty to the fields that i nearly loathed as a child. i remember very distinctly that i cried the day we ended our northern michigan vacation in 199x -- i wept for the lack of forests around my house! in one day, we had driven from somewhere like escanaba, michigan (on the u.p.) through green bay (with a side trip to lambeau field -- worthy of another post all its own), over and around the rolling dairy farms of southern wisconsin and back to... iowa. the prairie state. to my twelve year-old mind, it was the antithesis of beauty: it was flat and utilitarian (corn, soybeans, hogs; repeat), windy and hot -- and nothing like the cool, shady, vacation-linked beauty of the upper great lakes.

in one of my favorite books (Giants in the Earth), norwegian-american/minnesotan author Ole Rolvaag places his protagonists in the middle of the unbroken Dakota prairie and tracks the impassioned reactions that husband and wife have to its sheer, unbounded expanse. he is kindled, sparked by the opportunity that rolls before him like a carpet of prairie grass. his very steps are heavy with potential, with limitless possibility. she is terrified, undone by the absence of anything to hide behind. over and over, she circles the space with the frenetic energy of a prairie dog chasing down its burrow -- but finds nothing that can shield her from the open.

somewhere between his unbridled anticipation and her bottomless dread is my spectrum of feeling for the flatlands... having lived east for four+years, i understand now that the open space of the middle is something special -- something unique. and affection for the space has grown exponentially as i've experienced near-claustrophobia in the patches of corn that pass as fields in the mid-atlantic. there is a rolling rhythm to iowa's fertile patchwork (it does, indeed, resemble an earthy quilt from the sky) that grant wood captured most nearly... sonically, it resonates with the guitar sounds of U2's Joshua Tree. When i was in college, i would drive along highway 30 in my 2door V6 coupe, sunroof and windows wide open, and six-speaker stereo channeling the Edge's transcendent guitar -- the blue sky could not have been bluer against the green (is there a way to make green any greener? this would define it) GREEN fields of corn and beans, punctuated by faded red barns and grey-white four-square houses. Few places, if any, have been for me more exhilarating (even the ocean).

i'm not exactly sure why, as i can have very little in common with Rolvaag's hero -- I am not a farmer; nor am I encountering the prairie in its unbroken wildness. but there is a feeling of being able to move with freedom and abandon that is unique to that part of the country where you can see ten miles in any direction (without the aid of a mountaintop) -- and where roads strip out, stick straight, in cardinal directions for hundreds of miles.

this week was the first time in three+ years that i've been home not at Christmas, and to see the crops still in the fields and the leaves still on the trees was lovely... i sent a postcard to a friend and wrote that perhaps it's a landscape only a native could appreciate, but i am such a native -- and i will unashamedly love that land.