To Care and Not to Care

It's hard to pick out the "highlights" of this year, so I thought I'd write an ode to the year. It's all a bit of a blur, but here we all are. Ben and I, Amos (who just turned 5) and Nathanael (who just turned 3). Lindsay, our housemate (who just turned...j/k). At times we make the best of it, other times we don't. And that's ok. For the beauty of the earth, how she groans as if in birth. For the beauty of the skies, sparrows meet our eyes. For the love which from our birth, we are shaken into this groaning earth. For love over and around us lies over and around us lies. Our train of life comes to an abrupt halt, redirect. Where? How? Now? Lord of all to thee we raise this our hymn of joyful praise. Where is this "joy" you speak of? Look for the pain, and there you'll find it. How time has alluded us, tricked us. For the beauty of the hour, of the day and of the night. Time deepens in this moment, in the great generosity of the flower, and th...

 It comes in waves doesn't it? There's a loneliness that's risen to the surface in our lives, exacerbated by a cold, wet blanket of a Pandemic that surges on. The tide has gone out. We have no more breathe.  Figuratively and literally, sadly. There's loneliness in Covid. There's loneliness in our small celebrations of life and holidays. There's loneliness in our friendships, as a lot of them drift apart like continents in a vast oceans. We can only maintain so many. There's loneliness in the guilt and shame that whispers in our ear, "You haven't been a very good friend." There's loneliness in the hurt. The parenting, the teaching, the relationships and marriages, the sons and daughters, the childless, the houseless, the sick and dying.  There's loneliness in not knowing how to respond to yet another death. There's loneliness in the grief.  There's loneliness in the accused and the accuser, the oppressed and the oppressor.  This ...

Asleep My body moves in and out of dishes and babies and prepping meals, meals, meals. My ears catch snippets of news. More shootings, refugee resettlement act repealed, fires, ice melting. I turn an ear, shake my head and return to wiping up the spilled food. Moments of alone time are filled with other lives, fiction and nonfiction.  Nudge There's an unsettlement in my chest. Why is the Lord poking around in my heart? The Spirit prays within me. Give her the grace to give a damn. Give her the courage to believe that everything she does matters. Gentle. Compassionate. Powerful. Anger as Grace I am awakened. Grief and injustice overlooked, it is inflamed in my gut, hips and back. It tells me to pay attention. What happens when I start paying attention for the first time in years? Anger can take the form of many things - blame, grief, fear - and if these were the only forms I'd be limited ...

It's true I never really thought about anger until I had kids. I was going through life pretty darn comfortable without anyone poking and prodding all of my senses at once. But when I felt my body tensing and blood rushing to my face, I was alarmed and scared of my own anger. What is this ? Apparently I've never cared so much about my own peace before.  I decided to reach out and find a woman in my local church community to help me on my journey of anger discovery. I wanted to know what healthy anger looked like. So, for the past couple of months we've been reading The Enigma of Anger: Essays on a Sometimes Deadly Sin by Garret Keizer. The title alone captured my attention. I didn't want to read a how-to book. I didn't want to be fixed. I wanted something that I could come alongside and grow in grace and mercy. Friends, Garret Keizer has been doing just that. In a strange poetic way, he upsets and rattles my assumptions and forces me to wake up and join Christ i...

So I'm fasting from social media right now. For Lent. You could say it's a spiritual maintenance thing. My uses for social media (mainly Instagram and Facebook) are multiple, but mainly they are a source of not dealing with my feelings. What I realized only 3 days in was that although I'm not on them alot collectively, I am on them for short bits several times throughout the day. My phone is usually on the kitchen counter, available and always in sight - triggering me to check something. (even my 3 yr old son will say "I just need to check something). On my 3rd day of fasting, in a moment of frustration with my kids I went to tap the alluring Instagram app. I immediately stepped back, alarmed at myself. Every time I have unwanted feelings and/or feelings I don't know what do with, I tap that trusty app. I zone out for a couple minutes. Then I jolt myself back into reality, having not dealt with whatever emotion I was trying to escape (in myself AND in my children)....

"If a bird abandons the eggs she has been sitting on, she prevents them from hatching, and in the same way monks or nuns will grow cold and their faith will perish if they go around from one place to another." -- Amma Syncletica I used to be deathly afraid of buying a house. Of having a fence and a two-car garage. I saw the feigned satisfaction of my fellow society with their fences and two-car garages and accruement of "things you must have" in order to be considered as a stable, responsible  person. Stable and responsible. It was (and still is) really confusing. Who doesn't want to be considered as stable and responsible? I did. And I still do. But what happens when such words carry so much weight with my identity, and I observe other people who describe themselves as such, and I want nothing to do with them? Or at least their idea of responsibility and stability. They looked frazzled and exhausted, making sure everyone around them knew that they were r...

For at least this past year, I've been wanting to try and put into words the beginning of a dream and how that dream became a reality. I'm not the best writer and I know that shouldn't matter but I always let it get in the way of me writing anything. The other struggle for me is that I have a lot of input in my life and not a lot of output. I love gathering information, thoughts, pictures, stories of purpose. But the thing is this, they're starting to get all muddled and I'm forgetting what their purpose was in the first place. And I really don't want to forget. I don't want to forget what my and my husband's dream was and how suddenly we've found ourselves doing a little bit of what we were made to do. So with this written piece of transition, this blog will take on a different purpose.  Our house now is serving as a space for sabbaticals and rest for people involved in the never-ending work of the Gospel. These are people who have been sent out b...