Chronicles of a Purposeful Pilgrimage

2012-01-30T15:12:00.000-08:00

So I’m sure that millions of dollars in research grant money and thousands of hours of mind-boggling experiments and brilliant studies and brain-frazzling analyzations and graph-making parties have been poured into the study of how humans relate to each other, but today, as I was sneakily pretending to study and actually watching people cleverly out of the corner of my eye (I know, I know…my ingenuity surprises even myself sometimes), I observed something pretty basic that didn’t cost any research dollars (another fact of which, I confess, I am rather proud).

See, here’s the thing: when people—and by people I specifically mean a guy and a girl—like each other? It kinda shows. Even if it’s a super duper masculine burly type of a woman and her skinny white nerdy wussy-looking scruff-muffin of a love interest. And if people (and by people, I now mean socially awkward freshmen boys who are dreadfully and concerningly girl-crazy but have no clue how to go about getting any member of the fairer sex to cast so much as a favorable glance in their direction) would just watch the other people (other people referring to the love-struck duos who populate Liberty’s campus in numbers so large as to be semi-miraculous), Girl-Crazies could perhaps pick up some valuable tips from the Star-struck on how to read (and respond to) body language appropriately.
Just a few of the things I’ve observed in the past 24 hours.

Tip #1: if a girl likes a boy, she will stand close to him. So if a boy approaches a girl, and she looks happy to see him, engages him in conversation, and moves a hand/foot/her whole self towards his general direction during the conversation? That’s a good sign. The Girl-Crazy will probably never get this sign, but normal males could interpret this as an encouraging indicator. The converse is also true, and this is why many Girl-Crazies find that when they approach a girl, the girl will turn around and walk rapidly in the other direction. This is not a sign of affection, and no, she is not inviting you to pursue. She is praying that God will strike you with lightening.

Tip #2: If a girl likes a boy, she will laugh at his jokes. Even if they’re not funny. So if you tell a knock-knock joke and she falls off her chair and laughs for five minutes? That’s another good sign. (Except it may also be an indication of insanity, or a sign that you have a bug on your face). But if you tell a genuinely funny joke and it gets merely a stiff, barely-polite smile in response? That is absolutely not the time to try a second joke, or try to grab her hand playfully. She is on the verge of an emotional eruption, and she may also be seriously PMS-ing. Turn around and walk away.

Tip #3: If a boy likes a girl, or a girl likes a boy (yes, amazingly enough, this one appears to go both ways), they will touch each other. I know, I know, Americans don’t believe in ever physically laying hands on each other if at all avoidable (germaphobes), but friends—and especially lovers—will often breach this social regulation. That’s how you know they actually enjoy each other’s company and aren’t secretly planning to destroy each other at the end of 2012. It may be merely a playful swat on the arm, or a hearty handshake, or a high five, or a hug…but if people genuinely enjoy one another? At some point, they’ll probably touch. And again, the converse is true. If you go to hug someone, and they duck away and don’t respond in kind, or they simply hesitate and look uncomfortable? They probably don’t want to hug you. This is not an invitation to tackle them. It means keep your distance.

Tip #4: this one’s for the boy-crazy girls…because craziness definitely crosses gender lines. If a boy looks at you and smiles? This does not mean that he a) thinks you are the most strikingly gorgeous creature he has ever laid eyes upon, b) understands all of your emotional needs and wants to meet all of them ASAP, and c) is planning to marry you as soon as he can convince his parents that it’s a good idea for them to have both of you living in their basement bedroom. What is MAY mean is that he is 1) friendly, open to conversation, and has a lively personality, 2) just being polite—most people in America smile back if you smile first, 3) knows you already and thinks you’re cool, 4) thinks your mismatched socks and pigtails look ridiculous, or 5) is not even looking at you because he’s actually smiling at his friend, who happens to be standing right behind you, or 6) thinks you’re kinda cute and wants to make friendly conversation for the sake of boosting his male ego while simultaneously petting your feminine sense of importance. Please note that none of these is remotely close to a proposal of marriage and should not be interpreted as such, or he may run very quickly in the other direction next time he sees you coming.

2012-01-27T08:45:00.000-08:00

Yesterday evening, as I was flitting down to the second floor of one of the main campus buildings in search of coffee creamer, I came across a cozy little corner filled with mischievously-grinning college students. Two of them were personal friends, and so I felt license to ask them why precisely they were all wearing the I've-got-an-inside-joke grin as they sat around laughing knowingly.

"Well, we were just wondering if you were homeschooled...or if you're a homeschooler," piped up one bright-eyed little sophomore named Ian.

"Um, what?"

"Yeah. There's a difference. Here. You need to see this."

At which point, all of us (because apparently everyone in this little group had been homeschooled), crowded around somebody's laptop to watch this video...which I found amusing enough to share.

2012-01-09T06:40:00.000-08:00

It is perhaps one of the singular peculiarities of Christianity that often times when we are most struggling with something, God sends to us another person struggling with the same issue on a deeper level, and through the process of helping and counseling the struggling friend, we ourselves are most deeply reminded of all the answers and truths we already knew.

Two weeks ago, I was home alone one evening, and perhaps my mind had begun to play tricks on me, as it is wont to do when it hasn’t been properly tasked in the first place. I was thinking back over the past several months, and feeling more than a little discouraged over the apparent futility of much of what had taken place. When we’re little children, it’s so easy to have exalted dreams—it’s the living out of those exalted dreams in later years that sometimes leaves you feeling a wee bit brutalized, because you realize that big dreams require big sacrifice.

I was vainly attempting to put together a jigsaw puzzle that night, but my mind was in overdrive and making it rather difficult to concentrate: Why are you really here, Thea? What was the purpose, exactly, of the last 23 years? What are you trying to accomplish, and why is there so little visible progress towards that goal? You’re home on break now—and doing what exactly? Let’s be real—would the world really be any different if you had never lived? You can’t even fix the problems within your own family.

The voice inside was rather ruthless that night, and I was in a poor position to defend myself from the onslaught, having once allowed the questions to begin. Sometimes the overwhelming feeling of the insignificance of everything good we’ve ever said or done really, really gets to me, and in the darkness and the silence, I dropped my head and let the tears fall, feeling suddenly keenly inadequate to answer the charges rising against me in my own mind. Why exactly AM I here? I wondered.

My phone buzzed just then—a text message from a friend several states away. He was feeling discouraged, wondering why God had him where he was, what purpose he was supposed to be fulfilling, and why it seemed that everything he’d ever said or done didn’t matter anyway. Life was kicking him in the teeth, so what was the point of continuing to try? No one was listening to what he had to say, even when he was right—what was the point of this uselessness?

Wow. Ok. So maybe the devil works through isolation, and robs us of our joy and our sense of purpose by catching us alone, when we’re most vulnerable, and beating us over the head with our failures.

As I pointed out to my friend that often times, the ministry we think God has given us to one person may actually be God’s way of helping us to minister to another person entirely, I was pondering the irony of it all—strange that he should be struggling with the same thing, tonight of all nights.

Messages flew back and forth for maybe an hour. I pointed out that wisdom is not made less wise because it is ignored, and that our value as the counselor isn’t determined by the response of the one counseled—that sometimes, God allows us to be ignored, to feel impotent…in order to increase our capacity to trust that His timing is perfect, and force us to realize that we were never in control of the situation in the first place. I reminded him of Jeremiah—that many of the prophets were called to speak to people who not only refused to listen, but also hated the prophet himself and tried to kill him on multiple occasions. Talk about a nasty job with no visible results! And yet the far-reaching impact of Jeremiah’s obedience to God’s command to testify is still impacting the Christians of 21^st century America. Our faithfulness in the little things, like our sin, has the potential to impact untold thousands of men, women, and children in some respect or another.

And as I wrote these things, I realized that God had sent this friend to me tonight because I needed to hear all of the things that I was telling him—I needed to be reminded, and I needed to believe that they were true in my own life. Sometimes God speaks to our hearts through the questions that we ask others: Are you willing to be a Jeremiah of the 21^st century? Are you willing to be faithful even when it’s thankless, and you can’t see the results? Are you willing to believe that the God-honoring decisions that you make on a daily basis may be done on behalf of someone who will read about you in 350 years?

A week later, I was spending a few days with my sister and her husband in the Twin Cities. Somehow, when I spend a lot of time around couples, I become more keenly aware of the fact that I’m very much not a couple—and for me, there’s a natural tendency to begin to wonder why not, and what exactly is God’s timeline, and why isn’t it a little faster?

So all of these vague feelings of discontentment were rankling in the back of my mind, making ugly noises (and uglier attitudes!) when I got a phone call from a friend. She was struggling to believe that God actually had her best in mind—that He could and would make something beautiful out of her broken story, that He could or would prepare her for and give her a God-fearing husband and allow her the privilege of helping that man to raise godly children.

“How do I know, Thea?” she asked, the desperation undisguised in her voice, “and what if He doesn’t? What if I wait, and I do everything right that I know to do, and nothing ever changes? What if the waiting and the being frustrated just goes on forever? It’s not worth it—why not just have kids out of wedlock, because what if the real thing never happens?”

I appreciated her honesty. I think we all wonder those things at one point or another—maybe often, or nearly all the time.

But I asked her if she believed that God actually loves her. There was a pause, and then quietly, she admitted that she believes He does—100% of the time, 100% of His ability, which is infinitely greater than our finite capacity to even comprehend. Sometimes the best way to get through to somebody is just to keep asking questions.

“Do you believe that He controlled your past? That He knows your future? That He holds you right now in the palm of His hand? That He would ever plan something for you that was not ultimately in your best interest? Can you trust Him? Really? How much can you trust Him? Is He a God that’s worthy of our trust? Our love? Are you sure? Why are you sure? Historically, when we look at Scripture, how many times has He let down the human race? Oh really—none?! So what are the odds that His character has drastically changed in the last ten minutes? Look at Abraham—God promises him a son. And then he waits and he waits, and he waits some more—there are 25 long years between the time when God gives that promise and the day when Isaac is born. Were there times when Abraham questioned whether or not God really meant it? Whether or not he could trust God’s word? Whether or not he could trust God’s heart for him? How could there NOT have been times when he questioned all of the above? Where do we think Ishmael came from if there were no times when Abraham questioned? But did God come thru? And was His plan ultimately best the whole time? Is He the same God today as He was then? Can we believe Him when He tells us that He’s an unchanging God? Are you sure? How sure are you? Why do you think that God ordained the institution of marriage? What’s the purpose of marriage, when obviously people can have sex without being married? What if it’s protective—and what if He meant it to protect YOU, to help you grow, to provide an atmosphere in which you can be nurtured and loved, in which your husband can grow, and your children can thrive? What if marriage is God’s way of bringing glory to Himself? Is it worth it to wait, if you know beyond any shadow of a doubt that what God has for you is better than anything that you could ever get for yourself by refusing to wait?...”

By the end of an hour and a half, I wasn’t sure how much I’d gotten thru to her, but I knew that I was now convinced (and I also knew that I was running out of questions)—and again, I marveled at the wisdom of a God who sends someone to us for counsel in the area in which we ourselves are struggling. Crazy. In a genius sort of way.

And suddenly, I was really, really thankful for the fact that God didn’t give me a group of perfect friends, as I’d sometimes jokingly thought would be nice. He gave me a circle of people who are as broken as myself—because He understood from time immemorial that it’s in attempting to apply truth to the cancer of lies in the life of another that the lies in our own lives are most effectively exposed and confronted.

2011-12-10T09:25:00.001-08:00

I suppose that when we begin to pray for God to make us mindful of humanity’s woundedness, to increase the tenderness of our hearts towards the pain of others, and to give us opportunities to comfort others with the comfort with which He has comforted us…we should expect an answer. But I confess, sometimes? His answers—and the ways in which they come—are rather shocking to me.

Last night was one of those nights that I found the divine tweaking of my life plans to be rather…shocking.

It’s finals week here at Liberty…and as a result, I’ve been spending more than the usual amount of time in hibernation with my textbooks and my own befuzzled thought processes (the latter is possibly not a good thing).

However, each year, Liberty does a sort of campus-wide talent show—and you have to be rather talented to get in as a performer, so it actually is rather impressive to watch—on the Friday night of the first official day of finals. A kind friend had purchased a ticket for me to attend, but I guess yesterday, I just wasn’t feeling it—sometimes there is something inside of me that rebels at the thought of being surrounded by crowds of people when my heart and mind are desperately longing for time alone under a starlit sky—I call them wilderness moments…because sometimes, we just need to withdraw from the rest of the human race and spend some time listening for what God is really trying to say to us (it’s a pattern first modeled by Christ, and you know, He was a pretty cool guy, so...just saying).

Thus, at around eleven o’clock, when everyone else was just settling down to watch the wonders of Christmas Coffeehouse on Liberty’s campus, I was driving up the side of a mountain in the dark, humming under my breath, and only half aware of the millions of different thoughts churning around inside my brain.

As I turned onto my street, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that there was a young man walking alongside the road. He was dressed all in black—black t-shirt, black shorts—and no reflective anything on him anywhere.

That’s weird, I thought to myself, and kinda dangerous. If you’re gonna be out at night to exercise, at least wear something besides black so people can see you.

I kept driving, but somehow, something about the situation wasn’t sitting right with me.

Thea, a little voice nagged, you’ve gotta go back. If he was just out here to exercise this late at night, then why wasn’t he running? He had a backpack on.

So I turned the car around, and went back to check on him. As I pulled up alongside him, I rolled down my window and asked him if he was ok.

He looked a little dazed, and I wasn’t sure at first whether or not he was drunk. I was surprised by how young he was—he was just a highschool kid, at the most.

“Um, I’m…really not ok,” he mumbled, tottering a little bit as he headed towards my car.

As he got closer, I could see that he was telling the truth.

“What on earth happened to your face, man?!” I blurted. There was blood oozing from a number of abrasions on his head, and dried blood all around his mouth—somebody had obviously roughed him up a bit.

“Uh, a guy beat me up,” he said dazedly, staring into my face vacantly. “Can you help me?”

“Well, I can’t exactly leave you out here to freeze to death,” I retorted. “Get in the car.”

He’d been out in the cold for three hours without a coat, in his shirtsleeves and shorts, and it took him an hour just to stop shivering. Gradually, as I peppered him with questions and tried to calm him down, his story began to come out in bits and pieces between sobs and long pauses.

I have rarely seen desperation manifested quite as obviously as it was in this child. He literally leaned over and latched onto my arm like a frightened kitten, clinging to me and weeping for two hours as I cradled his head in the crook of my arm and stroked his hair and just asked questions, and listened, and prayed silently for wisdom to know what to say next.

Sometimes the depth of pain and hurt that humanity is capable of inflicting upon each other is so dark, so twisted, and so wrong on every level that when it confronts you directly, the shock of it is so visceral that you almost want to vomit. This was a kid that everybody had thrown away—his parents had ditched him, leaving him with an elderly grandfather who later died. Foster care had no answers and no place to really call home, and so when he turned 18, he fled the system. Kids at school told him he was a disgrace to his species and didn’t look human. And the one person he’d ever met whom he hoped might actually care—a girl he met at the mall and started dating—had dumped him that night, and then her step-brother had finalized it by trying to punch out his lights.

Sometimes there are no words to give voice to the emotions of the soul as you listen to a story like this and realize that it could have been your own. Is he a pitiful, broken, wounded, whiney, groveling creature? Yes. He’s not perhaps the kind of person that it’s easy to love. But it’s these people—the ones that require a lot more grace to care about? It’s these people that the church is called to minister to—and it’s also these people that we’re best at ignoring, dismissing, and secretly despising just as the rest of the human race does.

It’s not possible to undo 18 years of garbage in two hours on a Friday night. I didn’t even try. He was hungry and cold, so we fixed that, and then he just listened as I explained the fallenness of the human condition, what it is that we are saved from, and what it is that we are saved to, and what it means to serve a God who has declared us to be of value—what it means to serve a God who loves us, holds us, protects us, nurtures us, disciplines us, sees us as we really are—and cares enough not to leave us there in our own filth.

And then I took him back to the apartment where he lives alone, and gave him my phone number, and promised him that I’ll walk with him through the process of whatever it takes to help him start getting some things straightened out, and getting him plugged into some kind of community that actually cares.

What really made my heart sick as I drove away that night was that he told me that he’d been going to one of the local Lynchburg churches for over a year—but that no one knows him there. And maybe no one really cares, I thought to myself with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

I recognize that it’s not socially acceptable to open our arms, our homes, and our hearts to society’s social outcasts. But if the church—claiming to represent the loving compassion of an accepting, forgiving, holy, and just God—refuses to love this subset of society…then my question is, who is left? The rather sobering question that’s been on my mind all morning is, who picks up the slack when God’s people refuse to act on their responsibility to be messengers of mercy, and make disciples of all men?

2011-12-09T08:32:00.001-08:00

Liberty’s campus is relatively large—not so large, perhaps, as Duke’s campus, or Brown University, or something…but it’s biggerish. And parking is ridiculous…so in order to avoid the trauma of having to potentially find a parking spot more than once in a day? We walk. Everywhere. And doubtless, that is good for our characters and our cardiovascular systems, so no complaining on that note.

But yesterday, as I was walking from the cafeteria to the library, I was looking into people’s faces, like I always do when I walk, and I was struck—as I am frequently—by the fact that despite the fact that this is technically a Christian school, there is so much hurt in people’s eyes. And more than half the time, you can’t even catch the eyes, because the face is looking down—drawn, stressed, introspective, and insecure.

By the time I actually made it to the library, I could feel the tears welling up in the corners of my eyes.

“God, there’s SO much hurt here, even just on this campus. And we’re the ones that are supposed to have the answers, supposed to be offering hope—where do we start when it comes to mending the broken pieces of this generation, and what role do I—as the individual—play in this?”

It’s frighteningly easy for me not to care. In fact, for the last several months, despite the fact that I was technically doing everything right—spending time in Scripture, and praying for those around me, and being an active part of the church community and blah blah blah—I’ve kinda gone into survival mode, and I’ve had a growing sense of the fact that I was emotionally and spiritually disconnecting…that somehow, the truth that I was reading with the eyes of my mind wasn’t permeating to color the perceptions of my heart…and what I was doing with my hands wasn’t springing from a deep-seated sense of compassion or real caring.

It’s appalling how easily we can delude ourselves—and others—into thinking that going through the motions is the real thing.

God mercifully opened my eyes to the extent of my own callousness last week and gave me a glimpse of the direction in which my heart had turned in sort of an unexpected way. It was one o’clock in the morning, and I was sitting in a parking lot in a car, listening to a friend pour out some of the struggles of his soul…and suddenly I realized that this was the first time in weeks that I’d actively tried to care about somebody besides myself on any real level. And the realization was startling, and humbling…and as I sat there listening, I began to feel an overwhelming sense of shame. God doesn’t always speak in an audible voice, but sometimes…it’s almost audible:

“Thea, what on earth? How do you MISS it this badly for this long? How did you get so caught up in caring so much about what other people think of you, what other people are doing, and how they’re perceiving you that you lost three months of your life when you could have and should have been reaching out to people as they really are and caring for them as they really need to be cared for? Do you think I don’t know it when your heart isn’t with Me? Do you think I can’t sense your relational disconnectedness when your time with Me is just a ritual?”

As I drove home that night, the tears were rolling down my face and making little splashy tracks all over my steering wheel. The big plastic buttons on my coat probably thought it was raining. But somehow, the pain of God bringing us against the brick wall of a harsh realization is a pain that is redemptive, restorative, and freeing—and the tears were a good thing.

My prayer since then has been that God would keep my heart tender—that I would never become immune to the pain of others, that my eyes would never be able to ignore the needs, and that my heart would never be able to refuse to weep for those who are bleeding inside. It’s overwhelming to live this way. It’s beyond the handling capacity of my emotional and physical resources. But perhaps we were designed and called to live in a way that demands of us more strength than we have and more love than we are capable of giving so that we never come to the point of thinking that we no longer have a need for the One whose unending strength and infinite love have enabled men to do the seemingly-impossible since the beginning of the human race.

2011-12-01T09:13:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving. Giving of thanks. Noticing and appreciating the little things. Gratitude. Such simple concepts. Such an enriching way of approaching life. Such pathetically neglected and underused thinking in reality.

During the past week, as I was basking in the warm glow of being reunited at long last with my family after what feels like nearly a year of separation, I was challenged at times—usually by little things that people said or did—to ask myself if I have formed the habit of thankfulness, and whether I am actively cultivating a spirit of gratitude on a regular basis.

One instance in particular kind of stuck with me even as I deplaned on Virginian soil. See, I have two nephews and a niece, all of whom I am frightfully proud of, and five awesome siblings with two amazing additions by marriage—and often times, it is through one of these mediums that I am most forcibly reminded of my own need to sit back and reevaluate.

One of my nephews, Brock, is very nearly three years old. And he’s precious, and adorable, and possessed of a very compassionate and sensitive little heart. But as with most two year olds, he’s also very possessive of everything that he considers to be rightfully his.

I was a bystander one morning when he discovered that his baby sister, Lauren, was wearing a pair of his socks. Now, he had been running around barefooted all morning, and he had a different pair of socks stuffed inside of his little boots in case the notion to wear shoes might enter his tiny head, but somehow, all of this was completely irrelevant when it came to the fact that Lauren had been dressed in clothing items which he knew to be rightfully his.

“Mom,” he wailed, instantly very distraught, “did you think that maybe I would want my socks?!”

Ok, it was amusing. And yeah, I laughed. But then I had to do a quick double-take, and ask myself how often that kind of blatant selfishness characterizes my own thinking. The verse that came to mind was Proverbs 3:28, where Solomon or some other smart person is admonishing his readers, “Do not say to your neighbor, ‘Go, and come back, and tomorrow I will give it,’ when you have it with you.”

Maybe I’m not so much guilty of this one with my physical possessions…but with my time? Uf dah. Yeah, generosity in that area is a struggle, and I realized (a wee bit guiltily) that I definitely need to work on being more grateful for the time that people have chosen to invest in/share with me and to be more intentional in investing time in others.

On that note, I must say that over this particular break? I am especially grateful for the time invested by my tiny niece and new baby nephew, both of whom invested large quantities of sleep time and prodigious quantities of drool and baby urp in their oldest auntie. I miss it already, and I’ve only been back at school for half a week.

2011-11-17T09:53:00.000-08:00

Yet another semester has fairly flown by, and once again, I find myself plowing through that last week of academia before heading back to the arctic regions of Wisconsin to see my beloved family and friends. But as I sat on my bed this morning making a mental note of all of the things that need to be packed/organized/studied before I head out, I took a moment to stop and reflect on the 12 months that have passed since the last time that I made this trek halfway across the U.S. for this particular holiday. It’s been a year full of so many incredible memories, incredible experiences, and incredible friendships—a year perfectly orchestrated by an incredible God.

Last year, when I was preparing for this journey, it was with mixed feelings, knowing that I was going home to the craziness of wedding prep and the emotional chaos of trying to sort through what it was going to look like and feel like to give away my younger sister—who also happens to be my best friend—to her new best friend. For the rest of her life. It was one of those weird experiences where you feel both incredibly happy for the other person and yet inconsolably sad deep down inside…and yet you feel almost guilty for feeling sad, because you strongly suspect that your reasons for feeling sad are entirely selfish.

This year, in going back home, I feel somehow…more excited, but also more disconnected, more independent, older somehow—as though I’m a visitor rather than a resident at the home place now. And I suppose that’s what it always comes to when one has lived away from home for several years—but I was almost startled to realize that this change had taken place in my thinking. I suppose this is part of growing up—of being an adult (whether or not this means I’ve earned the right to jump up and down and excitedly proclaim the fact that I’ve officially “arrived” at adult status? Well, I’m pretty sure not).

But in the midst of this philosophical reflection on life in general, I was impressed with a tremendous sense of the fact that in the past 12 months, I have been soooooo blessed…in my friendships, my family, my mentors, my teachers, and in the random encounters that happen with an odd degree of regularity on an almost-daily basis. And I’m super duper excited to go home and meet both of the little munchkins that have joined the Beaty family since last I darkened the doors of the home place. Woohoo! I'm off to see the wizard.

2011-11-11T10:19:00.000-08:00

A belated but very warm congratulations to my beautiful sister and her handsome man on the arrival of baby Bobby...or "Blobby," as my sister has lovingly dubbed this round little feller.

Officially a family! Blobby's grand entry.

Bobby's first bath at home...an event which appears to be deeply fascinating to his wee philosophical mind.

Sleeping is Blobby's favorite activity. It's one of those great pasttimes that lends itself well to participation by the whole family--which is awesome.

Bobby has discovered at a very young age that the best way to keep camera flashes from annoying you is just to...sleep through the ordeal.

Aw, mom. No tickling.

2011-11-10T16:18:00.000-08:00

Tonight, as I was sitting in my corner of the library working on a patho for one of my lovely clinicals, a wee little man with blonde hair and strikingly blue eyes plopped his little bottom down in front of the computer which stood vacant on my left.

I confess I didn’t really pay him much heed. Just smiled absently, and nodded, and kept on typing furiously. I had my headphones in, and was listening to a couple of songs that really make me think…so I think I may have lapsed a little, and begun staring very hard at the wall of the cubicle in front of me, or in some other way indicated that my mind had taken a brief vacation.
My reverie was interrupted by a little masculine voice:

“Excuse me,” it said.

I looked to my left, and found myself staring rather startledly into a pair of very blue eyes.

“Yes?”

“Am I invisible?”

I wasn’t sure what to make of this question. Was he feeling ignored? Unloved? Pretending to be a superhero with special powers? Was I supposed to play along? I was suddenly at a loss. So I grinned, and shrugged.

“Well, were you hoping?”

He grinned back, and nodded.

“Yeah. For Friday night.”

Oh please. Has it come to THIS? Are we so desperate we now hit on random chicks in the library?!

I just laughed. And then he suddenly turned bright red, and dropped his eyes, and mumbled something to himself about that being a super cheesy pickup line. And I thought to myself, yes. My sentiments precisely. Maybe you should…listen to the little voices inside of your head before you venture to speak in real time...it might be safer for you, little friend.

Some people’s children make me laugh. Others of them make me want to poke them in the face and then laugh…all in the spirit of Christian love, of course. *sigh*

2011-10-27T08:22:00.000-07:00

One evening last week, when the stars were beginning to glimmer overhead and the frogs were excitedly croaking about the appearance of the moon, I emerged from my hole in the library desperately in need of a change of venue for studying. You see, sometimes, the austere towers of musty books and the hushed solemnity of the place get a little…nerve wracking. And this was one of those nights.

Thus it was that I found myself lovingly tucking my textbooks into the back seat of my car, like so many sleeping children. And thus it was that I found myself, sometime later, sitting on a park bench beside a stone table in the quaint, pedestrian section of Lynchburg’s downtown, reading about the marvels of human procreation and studying the developmental process of the embryo.

I hadn’t been there very long when a rather shaggy looking elderly gentleman with one whole tooth and one tooth that was merely pretending to be a half came sauntering up to the table where I was situated.

I glanced up briefly to see just what sort of a person it was who had graced my table with his presence…which he interpreted to be an invitation. So he plopped himself down across the table from me, and began, in a very good-natured sort of way, to tell me about himself.

I laughed quietly to myself as I listened, marveling over the fact that humanity is so delightfully quirky at times—and also quietly wondering if there’s a scientific reason that I seem to meet an extraordinarily high percentage of humanity’s quirkiest cases.

He informed me that he was sixty-three years old, and that his name was Gregg, and that he lived in a camper down by the river. He was feeling particularly proud of himself that night, because he had just finished fishing in the dumpster and had found a birthday gift for one of his friends—he told me happily that he is “very good” to his friends. I told him that he really didn’t look a day over sixty-two, and that he did, indeed, appear to be a most thoughtful friend.

He told me that he loves to meet people around town, and makes it a habit to speak to anyone and everyone (obviously)—but that he finds people become progressively less-friendly the longer they’re married. I wasn’t entirely sure how to respond to that, so I just smiled and kept silent, which he didn’t seem to mind.

We sat like that for probably ten minutes, with him talking, and me just smiling and nodding, and making random side comments if he seemed to expect them. One of my friends called just then, and asked if we could walk together, to which I said yes. I told Gregg politely that I was leaving, but his face looked almost wistful as I rose to go, and my conscience smote me.

Thea, here is a living, breathing, human soul…one who is longing to be loved, valued, respected, nurtured—just like everybody else on the planet. And probably all his life, people have come into his life and left again…just like you’re doing now. And he’s dirty, and smelly, and greasy, and unattractive, and so he’s ignored, and treated as if he’s not valuable, not desirable…not human.

I stood there for a split second as these things went through my mind.

I bet no one ever touches him.

I couldn’t give him a home. I couldn’t get him a job. I couldn’t undo all of the hurts in his past that had been perpetrated over the past sixty-three years. But I could touch him…and let him know that I viewed him as a fellow human, a man worthy of respect, a man with intrinsic worth and dignity.

I placed my hand on his arm, and smiled. “Greg, it was nice to meet you tonight. I appreciate your time. And your friends are lucky to have someone like you who looks out for them.”

His face lit up.

“You remembered my name!” he exclaimed. And then he reached up both arms to hug me.

I kinda smelled like a homeless person for the rest of the night…but somehow, it didn’t really matter.

2011-10-09T16:22:00.000-07:00

You know how sometimes you feel completely overwhelmed thinking that there just isn’t enough time in a day to get everything done that you have to do? And you start to mildly freak out in a major way, only very quietly, on the inside, where no one can see?

Yeah. Story of my life for the past…semester. But what I realized is that…it seems like, the more you have to do, the more you get done. So maybe what I really need to do is…add more to my to-do list.

So I think I’m going to go and get two full-time jobs. And maybe a part-time one too. And then I’ll be a full-time full-time part-time employee who’s also a full-time student. So hopefully, I’ll get a lot more done. Which would be awesome. Then I would feel like the silent freak-out parties in my head weren’t such a waste of time.

Yeah. And the cool thing is, the more coffee I drink, the more this whole idea makes sense. Coffee is this wonderful, mind-clearing substance that gives you marvelous new perspective on life. Super duper thankful to What’s-His-Face for deciding it was non-toxic and therefore could be consumed adults too (since children were probably drinking it for years before their parents caught on).

2011-10-01T14:24:00.000-07:00

This semester has been so ridiculously busy that it’s difficult at times to find the time for extras such as blogging—or phone conversations, or email, or facebook, or movies, or anything else, for that matter. (I really do love my life—I just wish days were longer and that sleeping and eating were unnecessary).

I had the opportunity to spend my weekend in the labor and delivery unit at the hospital, and I have to say that…no matter how many times you see it? The miracle of birth is still…miraculous. Messy, but miraculous. It gives me chills every time.

Today was the first time I’d been able to stand-by in the operating room and witness a Caesarean. The patient was the sweetest little thing ever—she and her husband were both so incredibly gracious and understanding throughout the whole process.

Surgical procedures are fascinating to watch (if you’re not one of those people who have an inconvenient fainting tendency at the sight of blood). Honestly, though, my favorite part of every birth experience is that magical moment when the parents get to meet their new little one for the first time.

In the operating room, it’s a little different because of all the surgery-related chaos that surrounds the birthing experience, but I remember looking up from the table at one point, and glancing over, and seeing that the dad had wandered over to the warming table where his new baby girl was lying.

The neonatal team had suctioned her and rubbed her down, and she was just minding her own business over there while everybody else was preoccupied with repairing the damage done to her mom…

She was a beautiful baby. Stunning, for a newborn. And as I watched her dad standing there, gazing down at her like she was the most incredible thing he’d ever seen, I felt a lump forming in my throat.

There’s nothing quite like the look that a new dad gives to his first baby girl. It’s a look that carries all of the fatherly pride with which he looks at his first son, but it’s mingled with a different kind of protective tenderness and awe—as if he understands, even as he sees her that first time, that he’s always going to need to protect her in different ways than he does his sons.

The father today stood there for a long moment, just looking at her…drinking her in. His eyes were glistening with unshed tears, and he kept having to look away to keep from crying. You could see the emotions chasing each other across his face…a sense of wonder, and fatherly pride…his yearning to touch her, to cradle her, to shield her from everything that will ever hurt her for as long as he possibly can…his compassion…his desire to be her knight, her guardian, her protector, her hero, and her mentor…his incredible love for her, in her state of helpless dependency.

I had to look away myself to keep from crying. There are some things which are so incredibly beautiful that it’s almost painful to witness…in a good way.

Thank you, Dad, for being my knight, my guardian, my protector, my hero, and my mentor. I love you.

2011-09-15T16:44:00.001-07:00

Today I met a lady from Delaware. She told me so very proudly. She was a most fascinating little creature…one of those ladies who shamelessly wear Hawaiian-printed button-up shirts with mismatched socks and clashing shorts.

She caught my attention as I was walking briskly into Goodwill to drop off some of the clothing articles I’d purged from my closet last week.

“Ma’am…do you know where the closest Salvation Army is?” she asked, smiling a bright, perky, expectant-sort of smile.

I explained to her that I was a student, and that I wasn’t originally from the area either, but pointed her in the direction of some other thrift stores that I knew of, and turned her over to the helpful, happy Goodwill employees who gave her step-by-step directions to here, there, and everywhere else.

She thanked me profusely (I think she forgot that she got more help from the Goodwill ladies than she did from me), and gushed to me that she “just LOVES!” thrift shopping. (She must have been telling the truth, because dude, who drives from Delaware to hit up Goodwill and Salvation Army?!).

I nodded, and smiled, and told her that I hoped very much that she would enjoy herself at Salvation Army as much as she apparently had at Goodwill.

As we were walking across the parking lot towards our respective vehicles, she suddenly stopped short and said with some forcefulness,

“Good luck in school, too, honey! That’s right. You just keep studying. You don’t need to be dependent on some man. You can make it all by yourself!” She was jabbing one stubby forefinger emphatically in my direction as she smiled and nodded enthusiastically.

I was somewhat perplexed by her comment, and the way in which she said it, so I simply nodded, smiled, waved, and got into my car.

But then I had to wonder…is that really what people think? If I, as a woman, choose to pursue higher education, does that automatically mean I’m doing it because I’m a feminist who wants to be able to live my life without being “dependent” on a member of the opposite sex, or—horrors!—burdened with runny-nosed, noisy little kids who might potentially get in the way of me doing exactly as I please for as many days as God please to give me?

But then I thought a little further, and realized that probably, beneath that dazzling Hawaiian shirt, beats the heart of a woman who’s been deeply hurt by failed relationships…the heart of a woman who projects her own failure and pain onto those she meets. And suddenly, I could feel only compassion for the eccentric little prophetess as I thought about what her life might have been…and as I realized that perhaps she awakes each morning to find herself yet again in a world of shattered dreams and broken promises.

So am I studying nursing because I’m hoping to live a completely independent life, “making it” all by myself? To be honest, that sounds like a dreadfully depressing existence to me. As humans, we were created to live in relational community, regardless of our marital status, career track, or dietary preferences, and I can’t imagine trying to flounder through life without the network of godly mentors, peers, and family members that God has blessed me with.

But the Hawaiian-shirted prophetess was alluding to something deeper. She was unwittingly highlighting the fact that here in America, we place a ridiculous amount of importance on self-sufficiency and independence. Why is it that we attach such a negative stigma to the concept of being “dependent” upon someone else, or to having someone else be “dependent” upon us? We see dependency as a weakness…an admission of inadequacy and ineptitude.

What we perhaps fail to understand is that our willingness to lean on others—to be “dependent”—when done in the proper way, is actually a manifestation of strength. With each passing year, I have come to realize a little more fully that it takes a much greater strength of character to live in community, to maintain closeness, and to be intentionally dependent upon each other than it does to lead a life of freakish independence, coming and going as we please without regard for the feelings, schedules, or priorities of others.

I hope that the men and women of my generation will become more dependent as we mature...first that we’ll have the wisdom to depend heavily on God, and secondly, that we’ll develop the character to depend on—and be dependable for—each other.

And some day? I hope we have the maturity to see that there’s no better legacy to leave than to raise a passel of runny-nosed, noisy little kids (who will inevitably get in the way of us doing exactly as we please for the rest of our lives)…to nurture them and guide them and disciple them and plant a vision in their little minds…to do our very best and to hold nothing back in order to instill in the generation to come an uncompromising character and unstoppable determination.

2011-09-09T16:23:00.000-07:00

Laughter is a gift. I'll be the first to confess that I love all that is light-hearted, funny, innocent, comical, and endearingly sweet. But sometimes, I'm confronted with things at which I cannot laugh. Sometimes, when I look at life, the reality of who and what we, as humans, are...is enough to make me want to put my head in my hands and just cry.

It is impossible to spend any great length of time on earth without recognizing that humanity, even at his most exalted and in his finest form, is sick—emotionally, spiritually, and psychologically twisted, deformed, and warped on a fundamental and intrinsic level. In each of us, much of what was once the divine spark has been obliterated, stained, darkened…ruined. Man as he once was—flawless, beautiful, fearless, and perfect—has been transmuted into something which is insidiously sinister, grotesque…even horrific.

And because man is not what he once was, the world is now what it is. Each one of us is part of an international community in which there are literally millions of people affected by pressing issues…men, women, and children who are begging for our attention, pleading for solutions, praying that someone, somewhere, someday will have the decency and the humanness to merely care.

This past week I had the opportunity to preview a film made by a couple of young people who had the decency and the humanness to care about what is perhaps one of the more pressing and increasingly pervasive poisons in American society. It was a film called “Sex + Money: a global search for human worth"…and it dealt with the issue of sex slavery in America.

It was challenging—and horrifying—for its honesty. I left feeling like someone had punched me in the gut…it was that sick, panicked, stunned sensation you get when you hit the ground after free-falling 20 feet.

Why? Because there was a lot that I didn’t know. I didn’t know that literally tens of thousands of middle school and high school girls are recruited or kidnapped annually and forced into prostitution all over the United States. I didn’t know that only one in three of those girls forced into prostitution at 13 or 14 years of age have parents who actually care enough to even report them missing. I didn’t know that the average clients—those who devalue, destroy, humiliate, and abuse these young prostitutes by using them instead of rescuing them—are married men…middle-aged citizens with children—perhaps with teenage daughters around the ages of the girls they’re using and then throwing away. Men with average marriages, average families, average jobs, who go to average churches, and lead average Christian lives. Average pastors. Average deacons. Average businessmen. Who go home to their families at night with a smile pasted on their faces as though man were not the product of his thoughts, his actions, and his values…as though the largeness of one’s pretense could make up for the smallness of his character.

Another thing that came out was that there is a frightening amount of evidence indicating that pornography addiction is the single biggest commonality shared by those who perpetuate the sex slave trade by serving in the role of client. Perhaps we, the American people, should do more than lip service to the reality of the fact that where we allow our minds to go is where our bodies will later follow.

The kids who put together the movie had learned and grown much through the process, and you could see in their eyes that the dark reality of what they had learned in the course of putting the documentary together had changed them. There was no going back to what they had been.

One of the distinct realities of life is that when we are exposed to something which appalls us by the very tragedy of its existence—when we gaze with anguished fear into the black horror of some monstrous atrocity—we are faced at that moment with a decision. We can choose to turn our back, and walk away, and let our actions speak to the fact that we simply refuse to care…or we can choose to feel every ounce of the pain, to let our minds and our hearts be revulsed by what we nonetheless choose to embrace, to feel the full weight of the despair and the hopelessness and the brokenness—to understand that to act will also require that we be encompassed by the blackness and scarred by the monstrosity of the battle in which we are called to engage—to know all of this, and yet choose to move forward with determination and purpose, knowing that it is better to die fighting than to die without ever having entered the fight…we can do either of those things. But we can never again say that we were unaware…that we didn’t know. We may no longer hide behind the protective veil of ignorance, because in the moment of truth, the luxury of innocence is forever ripped away.

You could see in the eyes of each person there that night that the luxury of innocence had been ripped away. And you could see in the tears coursing down the faces of many of us that were there that night that the issues of sexual abuse, pornography addiction, and the resulting devaluation of human worth are all issues which strike very close to home. Statistically, one out of every four people in that room had been sexually abused, raped, or molested at some point in his or her lifetime. From the uncontrolled sobbing that was elicited from some who were there in response to the film, I’d say the statistics are about right.

It’s incredible to me—in the most ghastly sense of that word—that humanity can be so noble at times, and yet capable of perpetrating the most heinous acts of compassionless destruction. To choose deliberately to degrade someone sexually…to use them and then casually throw them away…is one of the greatest horrors one person can perpetrate against another. To reduce man, made in the image of God, to a mere object to be abused, mutilated, and destroyed—both personally, emotionally, physically, and psychologically—is appalling for the fact that it is done openly, shamelessly, and remorselessly on a daily basis. We live in a world where human souls by the millions are tortured and sacrificed upon an altar erected to the god of human pleasure. And the question we’re left to face is whether we care enough to lift a finger—whether we’re willing to take part in a war that might cost us everything…whether we can live with the shame of choosing to turn our backs and do nothing.

2011-09-02T14:36:00.001-07:00

Woohoo! God is so gracious! It’s the beginning of yet another school year. Which means I’ve survived yet another 12 months of…life. Awesome.

I’m excited to be progressing, and slowly working towards a theoretical graduation date. But I also find myself wrestling with a rather massive case of senioritis—or maybe it’s I-just-want-to-be-done-itis. And it’s only the second week of school. Oh dear. This might be a very long year.

But it’s going to be a good one, because life is awesome in so many ways!

It’s amusing to be back on the college campus again…you start to notice patterns. Every year, there are crowds of eager freshman, just out of highschool, who are quite positive that they will find the perfect woman or the perfect man within the first 24 hours of being on campus. And if not within the first 24, well, surely within the first week. After all, the odds are truly in their favor, right?

Note: It IS true that the odds are in their favor. Experience shows that it is indeed the odd ones who are the most intent on showering favor, love-smitten glances, and marriage proposals upon anything that resembles a specimen of the opposite gender…especially if they’ve been acquainted for more than 24 hours. Oh. My. Word. That’s like, um, an ETERNITY to know someone. And if you don’t propose to her NOW, well, then, gracious, the next guy’s sure to snatch her out from beneath your very nose!

Seriously? Chill, guys. Relax. Take a deep breath. Maybe take some sedatives. Whatever it takes. But just give yourselves like…three years…to kind of get the hang of things, get to know her, yeah, you get the picture. And then think about maybe…asking her to coffee. No proposals on the first date. Bad idea. I promise.

And the sophomores, juniors, and seniors…well, the closer you get to the finish line, I think the more you begin to feel like you’ve got ants in your pants…and as you pore over your textbooks, you secretly are earnestly longing for the day when you will sell every last textbook to some naïve freshman and move on to the next phase of life. Maybe not. But I secretly feel that way sometimes. Especially when I read Pharmacology textbooks.

But I have to say that studying nursing has been an extraordinary opportunity. It changes your view of people—and your understanding of God. It’s crazy, in an awesome kind of way, to catch a glimpse of the intricacy of the systems which make up the human body as you study human anatomy…or to marvel at the miracle of new life as you hold a slippery, wriggling newborn in your hands in the delivery room…or to feel how deeply God’s compassion towards us must be as you stand beside the distraught family members of a patient who may not live through the night. These moments—these memories—are gifts. And the longer I live, the more I feel that this is so. And I’m grateful.

But right now…I’ve gotta go read Pharmacology. And as I do, I shall think about selling my textbooks to a freshman—and giving her a smile, and a hug, and telling her with a wink that I wish her all the best. And then…just because I’d feel mean if I didn’t…I’d give her my phone number and tell her to call me when she had questions…or just needed a hug. ;-)

2011-08-18T12:12:00.001-07:00

This past week, as I was bumping around Alexander County in my little car, delivering books to all of my customers, it was with mixed feelings that I realized that yet another summer has come and gone in a blur.

I’ve had an amazing opportunity to meet nearly 2,000 families this summer, however briefly. Some have been more memorable than others, for various different reasons.

For example, this past week, there was the balding, 60+ year old man with a Santa Claus beer belly and kindly brown eyes who informed me that more and more younger women are dating older men. I nodded absent-mindedly, and agreed that this might, indeed, be the case.

In hindsight, that should have been a hint or a clue, or something, but I was in book-woman mode at that point, and was thinking only of books and delivering books.

His next comment sort of caught my attention, though:

“So you’ve been down here for 13 weeks, and you still haven’t found a boyfriend?!”

I blinked, suddenly jarred slightly out of book-woman mode.

“Um, well, no, I haven’t found one. But to be frank, Shorty, that really wasn’t my primary objective in coming to North Carolina. I came to sell books, not to find a boyfriend.”

“Still,” he spluttered, “I’m surprised. A pretty girl like you?”

‘Oh please. Here we go again,’ I groaned inwardly, finally realizing where this was headed.

He proceeded to very generously offer to serve in the capacity of boyfriend for me, thereby remedying my situation quite dandily. He gave me his phone number, and insisted that we should keep in touch.

‘Riiiiiiggghhhhht,’ I thought, it’s always been my heart’s dearest wish to date someone old enough to be my grandfather. Or not so much.

Then there was the sweet little motherly woman who greeted me with the warmest smile I think I’ve ever seen when I returned with her books. She insisted on making me a tomato sandwich, and kept asking me if I didn’t want something else? And then, two days later, when I bumped into her at WalMart, she came racing over to give me a bear hug and ask me if we could keep in touch during the next school year.

When she turned to walk away, I stood there for a long minute, thinking wistfully that I loved her, and that I hope someday to be as warm, as welcoming, and as genuine as she is.

Each summer, there are people you meet out here on the field who shape you, influence the way you think, and challenge some of your long-held presuppositions…and this summer was no different in that respect. I’m incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity to serve as a member of the Varsity team for yet another year…and yet am still unable to comprehend the fact that classes officially start again in three short days. Where on earth did the time go?!

Whatever. Clinicals, here we come…

2011-07-10T13:33:00.000-07:00

Week 7 on the bookfield is just drawing to a close. I apologize to my lovely readers for not updating this sooner—didn’t quite reckon on the summer being as hectic as it has been. But when I say hectic, I mean that in a completely positive way. Of course.

This summer has been a whirlwind of interesting scenarios, hilarious moments, memorable conversations, and new life lessons. I thought I’d learned a lot after my first summer on the bookfield, but I’ve since discovered that you learn infinitely more your second year on the field.

We rolled into Hickory, North Carolina seven weeks ago—four girls from four different states, with 24 hours to find a place to stay before we started our 12 week summer going to door-to-door. I love sales! And honestly, this summer, I have truly loved being a bookwoman.

Initially, I was planning to post an update on here every week so my poor fambly back home would have some idea of what life on the field looks like. However, between leading a team this year, and working more hours than I did last summer, there hasn’t been a lot of spare time for extras like blogging.

But today, I just wanted to put up a quick little blurb to let you all know that I’m still inhabiting the planet. Woohoo!

There have been so many laughable moments in the past few weeks…my goodness. I wish I had time to share them all.

One of my favorites happened this past week…I had knocked on a door not knowing anything about the family who lived there. When the lady of the house answered my summons, she had a huge smile on her face…and a parrot perched on her shoulder.

Maybe it was the retarded blinking of the parrot, or the fact that it seemed a little out of place—but I started laughing really hard. Which was apparently odd. So the lady of the house started laughing too. And the bird got very excited, and began in her squawky voice to say, “Hello, Sunshine!” Which really made the whole situation more laughable.

I discovered that the bird’s name is Sunshine. Throughout the entire demo, as I showed Bird Woman my books, the bird sat above us on the porch swing, and every time we got to an exciting part of the demo, she would lean over and squawk and tell us her name, or bid us hello (I confess, I was sometimes a little worried lest in her excitement, she might poop on us…but she didn’t. Happy day!)

Ah, I love my job. Never a boring day…

Only five more weeks until the end of the summer—I can’t believe how quickly the time is going. But 75-80 hour work weeks leave little time for reflection. Maybe at the end of the summer. :-)

2011-05-08T18:35:00.001-07:00

One day this past week, after coming home from a long day at school, I was greeted at the door by a sunny little face with sparkling brown eyes and tiny pink lips that were turned up at the corners to form a beautiful little smile.

It was my landlord’s wee granddaughter, Isabelle, and apparently her family had dropped her off to spend the day with her grandparents. Well, and me, by default.

I had forgotten what it’s like to be a four years old girl, and to have the attention of a college student all to yourself. I’d never quite imagined what it would feel like to BE that college student, either.

We sat beside the kitchen table talking like grownups for a good while. Well, not entirely like grownups. Isabelle expresses her affection through touch, and her cute little sticky hands were always attached to some part of my person as we talked…until finally I began to catch on that what this constant touching was really communicating was, in fact, her need to be touched. So we started an on-going tickle fight that went on sporadically for most of the afternoon.

She was beside herself with delight when I told her that I was going to make tea, and asked her if she wanted to try some.

“Oh!” she gushed, “Ith it like the tea they have at McDonaldth? I jutht LOVE that!” (I love her lisp!)

“It’s a little different,” I said, “because this is hot, and it’s made with a tea bag…so it’s not sweet like that.”

She looked a little dubious at that point, so I told her I’d let her smell it before she tried it.

When I set the cup in front of her a few minutes later, she looked more doubtful still.

“It smellth thpicy,” she said, “and I really don’t like thpicy.”

“Well, I’ll just put a tiny bit into a cup, then, in case you don’t really like it,” I told her.

She stood there watching me with her head cocked to one side quizzically. I was trying not to laugh as I watched her take that first sip.

I really half expected her to spit it back into the cup or something—she’d been so sure that spicy was not her thing. But I think the fact that I was drinking it and apparently enjoying it might have influenced her reaction a little.

Slowly but surely, an awe-filled, rapturous expression spread across her face.

“My goodneth!” she lisped in her little four-year-old voice, “thith ith AMATHING!”

So we sat, and drank tea, and talked about her life. She asked me if I backwash when I drink tea. I told her I didn’t think so…but she thought she should probably look in my teacup to make sure, so I let her.

And then we put her hair in frenchbraids, and she asked if I wanted to play dress-up with her.

“And then after we get all drethed up, we can danthe for Grandpa! And he will pwobably say that we’re beautiful, and that he LOVES it!”

I just smiled, and thought to myself that if I dressed up and danced around in the living room for her grandfather, he would probably just think it was frightening and wonder if I had lost my mind. But I nodded enthusiastically, and told her that she was beautiful all the time, even when she wasn’t in dress-up clothes.

Her comment was striking to me, though: “he will probably say that we’re beautiful…and that he loves it!” I marveled to myself at how early this desire begins in the little feminine heart—the desire to be beautiful, the yearning to be admired, to be cherished, to be loved and treasured…to be thought exquisite, and unique, and desirable.

Oh, how fragile a thing is the heart of a child! How easily these little dreams are crushed.

As I finished plaiting little Isabelle’s hair and sent her off to be admired by her grandparents, I found myself silently resolving to do a better job of protecting the dreams of those I know…whether it’s a four-year-old who dreams of being someone’s princess, or a college student who dreams of becoming a missionary.

Because dreams are one of the things which make an ordinary existence both magical and extraordinary.

2011-05-01T10:32:00.000-07:00

It is a beautiful thing when we find others who have spoken beautifully and poignantly to the pain which is a part of human existence--sometimes putting into words things which we ourselves find beyond our ability to articulate. Such was my feeling when I stumbled across a number of quotes by Khalil Gibran this afternoon. And while I may not agree with his doctrine, I admire the artistic skill with which he weaves his words together.

I've been thinking much this week about transitions--about learning to love, and learning to let go...about learning to embrace the seasons of life with enthusiasm, but to let them go without resentment, although inevitably, it will not be without a sense of loss.

Gibran said a number of things that I found thought-provoking, especially in light of certain recent situations.

"Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars."

"When you are sorrowful, look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight."

"It takes a minute to have a crush on someone, an hour to like someone, and a day to love someone... but it takes a lifetime to forget someone."

"I have learned silence from the talkative, tolerance from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind. I should not be ungrateful to these teachers."

2011-04-29T15:13:00.000-07:00

Some days, when I go to the hospital to do yet another clinical rotation, I’m overwhelmed by the tremendous privilege that this is to be able to spend time with people who are hurting, sick, broken, and sometimes dying—to have the freedom to help mend those broken bodies, to have the time to talk with patients about their fears, to have the opportunity to speak hope and pour love into souls that are wounded and searching—this is an amazing thing to me...and an incredibly beautiful opportunity.

But sometimes, when you go into a situation expecting to minister, to pour out, to give, to build up, and to be spent, you find that in an uncanny way, the one who is actually ministered to is yourself.

Last Monday was that kind of a day.

The elderly patient that I was caring for was a former Navy corpsman. In his day, he was a man who commanded respect—when he spoke, men listened, and things happened.

But now, he’s a pitiful heap of bones with skin stretched tightly over top. His frail body is home to an equally fragile mind, a mind which wanders over many places, although none of these places relate to his current reality. His withered body is wracked by disease and spent by the years. He is dying.

Somehow knowing that someone is dying does not always prepare you for the reality of the death process, however.

As I stood in his room, watching his claw-like hands grasp at imaginary intruders at the head of his bed, I was struck deeply by the fact that someday, it’ll be my father in that bed…and then someday…it’ll be me.

How often we forget how brief our stint on this planet really is, I thought, taking the hand of the confused old man in my own and stroking his arm gently.

His tired, sunken eyes met mine, and a beautiful smile lit up his face for a brief second. It was like the sun bursting through clouds after a storm, and I had to choke back the lump in my throat.

His son came later to spend the day with his dad.

Sometimes, as a nursing student, it’s a little bit intimidating to have the family of the patient in the room when you’re providing care, but this time was different.

The son was a soft-spoken, gentle, middle-aged man with kind grey eyes that twinkled out from a friendly round face.

It was a pretty quiet day on the floor, so I spent most of my time just standing in my patient’s room, sometimes holding his hand if he got restless, or fetching things if he needed them.

The ancient Navy corpsman was delirious, and unaware of his surroundings, but he recognized his son’s face. Watching the two of them interact was an incredible thing.

The elderly father was very hard of hearing, and all of the nurses yelled in order to make themselves heard when they were in his presence.

But the son never yelled. Instead, he would lean over the bed, cradling his dad’s head in his arm as he spoke directly into the old man’s ear in a low, calm voice. For hours, he would stand beside the bed, one hand gently placed on his father’s wrinkled head, listening to his dad talk incoherently about myriads of different things from the son’s childhood.

Every once in a while, the son would turn to me, grinning slightly, and share a story from when he was little—things he remembered about his dad.

“He was an incredible man,” he murmured once, gazing fondly at the gaunt face on the pillow, “and there was nothing he couldn’t do.”

The old man opened his eyes slowly, looking around with a confused expression.

The son sat down on the bed beside his father, placing one arm gently around the old man’s shoulders.

“Dad, it’s me,” he said, leaning in close so his father could hear him, “I’m here. It’s ok. Just rest…I’m not leaving.”

He stayed there, seated on the bed, his hand placed tenderly but firmly on his father’s forehead.

The tears welled up in my eyes as I watched. I thought of the many years during which this father was there for his son…the hundreds of times when he came alongside and put his arm around his son and assured him that everything was ok…because he was there…because he wasn’t leaving.

And now the father and son had traded places…and it was the younger with his arm around the elder, assuring him that everything was going to be alright…because he was there…and because he wasn’t leaving…because he understood the importance of being there to help his father die…because he understood that goodbye is something that you say with your actions, with your time, with your touch…not a few words that you mutter as you pause in front of the casket at a funeral.

It was a heart-wrenchingly beautiful thing to watch.

I wish that more children understood this version of love. I wish that more of us understood the importance of giving of ourselves—of giving back, of being available…even if it means just being there to hold someone’s hand as they die.

Because sometimes...it's the little moments that nobody will ever really know about that truly matter the most. And some of the sweetest lessons in life come through giving to those who can't say thank you.

2011-04-29T14:34:00.000-07:00

Today, as I was preparing lunch for the elderly couple with whom I live, a couple of the grandchildren stopped in. Being delightfully inquisitive little people with quick minds, they all congregated in the kitchen to supervise as I worked and share tidbits about their aspirations for the future. There are three children: Marissa is 11, Caleb is 8, and Isabelle is 4.

Isabelle, who is a charming little girl with big brown eyes and soft brown ringlets (which she finds keenly annoying due to the fact that they insist on falling into her eyes) was animatedly telling me about where she and her siblings are going to live "when they all grow up."

“Yes,” she said, nodding enthusiastically, “we’re going to have a big mansion, because Caleb and Marissa are going to make lots of money. Because they’re not going to get married. They’re just going to make money.”

Marissa nodded. My curiosity was piqued.

“So you’re the only one that’s going to get married, Isabelle?” I asked absently, dropping diced potatoes into a pot on the stove.

“Yes,” she said emphatically, “and you know why? It’s because Caleb and Marissa don’t like kissing on the lips.”

I had to try really hard not to laugh.

“Oh,” I said, “they don’t like kissing on the lips?”

“Yeah!” Isabelle’s face was oh-so-serious.

“What if they just didn’t kiss on the lips? They could get married then, right?”

Isabelle’s lips pursed as she pondered this. Finally, her face brightened, and I could see that her keen little mind had hit on something brilliant.

“Oh!” she said energetically, “I know! They could just kiss on the cheek! Or maybe the forehead. Or just the head.”

“Or they could blow kisses,” I said, shrugging, still trying really hard not to laugh.

“Yeah!” Isabelle was getting more and more excited.

“Plus,” I said thoughtfully, “Marissa might change her mind about kissing once she gets to be about 18 or 19.”

“No,” Isabelle shook her head decidedly. She was quite sure this would never happen. Marissa didn’t say anything.

“So you’re all going to live in the same house?” I asked.

“Yeah…and you…you can live with us too! We’re going to have a big house, with a huge, huge deck—bigger than Annie and Mark’s deck.” I nodded knowingly, although I have no idea who Annie and Mark are, nor how big their deck is.

“And we’ll have a pool!” Isabelle continued, “And a room for the boys, and a room for the girls. And I’m going to have lots of kids.”

“So you and Marissa and all of the girls are going to stay in one room, and your husband and Caleb and all of your boys will stay in the other room?”

She nodded.

“And we can build a separate room for you!” she squealed excitedly.

My goodness! What a tempting offer. I may have to seriously consider this option...in about 20 years.

2011-04-25T13:31:00.000-07:00

I sometimes wish that life were simpler...but in my saner moments, I'm incredibly grateful for the fact that it's not, because honestly, how does one learn to surf in an ocean without waves?

Ran across this quote by C.S. Lewis in a book that I was reading this morning, and it challenged me--challenged me because sometimes, in moments of selfishness, I feel like the easy way out is to withdraw, to love people less, to be more guarded, to care on the surface level instead of seeing the hurt under the surface...when in fact, that's a coward's response that refuses to confront the real issues.

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable." --C.S. Lewis

2011-04-07T10:48:00.000-07:00

There is a frustrating inconsistency in the way we, as Christians, view the history of our faith…one which I see often, and have experienced myself on several occasions.

You see, I have lost count of the number of times that I’ve heard a reference made in conversation to all of the “horrible things” that have been done “in the name of Christianity.”
Sometimes it’s verbalized by a Christian, who hangs his head slightly, and mumbles with a touch of embarrassment as he concedes that such is indeed the case. Other times, it’s an atheist or agnostic friend, who points somewhat self-righteously to the fact that religion clearly is not an answer if it is capable of being so atrociously perverted and utilized for such unjust ends.

I will not deny that atrocious things have been done in the name—or under the auspices—of Christianity. The Crusades are perhaps the most well known of the abuses perpetrated in the name of the community of faith, but for hundreds of years, Christians and non-Christians alike took part in other practices which have today been criminalized in our society, such as slavery, or the open demonstration of anti-Semitism.

Let’s be a little bit realistic, though. If things which our “modern” society now considers to be horrific have been done in the name of Christianity in the past, is this a reason to vilify the belief system itself? Are atheism or agnosticism better philosophical systems, if we base that judgment strictly on the effect which each system has upon mankind?

What legacy –what lasting imprint on the face of humanity—has been left by atheism?

While this is a question we may not often ask, it is a sobering one to answer, because in truth, atheism has left a bigger trail of human carnage in its wake than Christianity ever has or ever will.

There are the scars left by Hitler’s Third Reich…the legacy of the Nazis…the silent horror of the millions of men, women, and children who lived and died in the hells of Auschwitz, Dachau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka.

There is the ghastly reality of Russia’s Red Army…the anguish in the tears shed by the tens of thousands of innocent Russian citizens starved to death and brutalized under Stalin’s merciless political regime.

There is the legacy of Mao Zedong, the revolutionary under whose leadership 40 to 70 million Chinese men, women, and children were slaughtered.

There is the brutality of the genocides committed in nations like Burundi, Rwanda, Pakistan, and others…mass murders which have claimed unimaginable numbers of human lives, and left millions more homeless, destitute, maimed, and broken.

Have awful things been done in the name of Christianity? Sadly, yes. And worse things have been done in the name of atheism.

But this is not evidence for the defectiveness of Christianity as a belief system. It is rather a testimony to the brokenness of the human soul and the darkness of the human mind. I grieve for the fact that humanity is so badly broken. But I do not apologize for God...and I am not ashamed to call myself a Christian simply because, in the past, broken humanity has done tragic things in the name of a faith it did not understand.

Counting the Costs

2011-04-06T17:34:00.000-07:00

It is seemingly a cruel stroke of fate and one of the incongruous realities of existence that it is those whom we most love that we are, in fact, most capable of hurting deeply.

I have thought on this long and regretfully during the past year…and again during the past week. Sometimes I marvel sadly over the fact that we can wound someone more profoundly than we know through something as simple as a careless word, a thoughtless action, or a disrespectful attitude. How is it that, knowing all that I know, I still haven’t learned not to damage those around me? How is it that I still inflict wounds on my fellow man? Still mar those who have been—like me—made in the Divine image?

How we view others is perhaps largely a function of how we view God…and how we view ourselves.

Today I hurt someone that I love…because I lost sight of who God is, and I allowed my focus to shift to myself, my needs, my feelings, my insecurities…my rights. And according to the rules of my myopic, self-focused little world, I was justified in my impatience, in my lack of compassion, in my judgmental attitudes…in my lack of love.

What I so often fail to realize is that in my myopic, self-focused world, there is no room for others…and there is no room for a loving, compassionate, forgiving, and gracious God. There is room only for one flawed, sinful, broken individual…and there is no healing and no hope.

I wish sometimes that I could turn back the clock…that I could undo the thoughtless deed, the hasty word, or the judgmental glance, and replace it with something Christ-like. But the reality of it is that we can’t…that what is once done can never be completely undone, and what is once uttered can never be unspoken.

And so it is with humility and a keen sense of my own inadequacy that I echo the words of David tonight when he says in Psalm 19:14, “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O LORD, my strength and my Redeemer.”

After all, it is our words which expose us for who we truly are…as Christ says Himself, “A good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth good; and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart brings forth evil. For out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.”

May our words and our actions consistently bear testimony to the treasure which is within our hearts…and may we have the humility to admit when we are wrong, the grace to ask for forgiveness, and the persistence to seek reconciliation of damaged relationships...

2011-04-03T19:33:00.001-07:00

The evolution of human development throughout the life cycle is nowhere demonstrated so clearly as in our conversations. I was musing on this the past week as I observed a number of subjects, all of them at different points in the age spectrum.

At one point, it was a couple of toddlers squawking exuberantly at each other, waving their pudgy arms emphatically, and stamping their little legs to add meaning and emotion to their incoherent babblings. Both children were completely unaware of the fact that this sophisticated process was communicating approximately nothing to their audience.

Then there were the groups of giddy, giggling teenage girls. For this particular age group, every conversation must apparently be punctuated by laughter, whispering, or shouting, or it is much less meaningful to them, and naturally, much less fun as well.

Finally, it was the group of old men sitting in the corner at Hardees. They were very seriously discussing something of great interest, such as whether cows would ever have the capability of producing purple milk…but every sentence on the part of one member was followed by puzzled looks and several loud “Huh? What was that now?” comments from the other members of the group as they all reached up to adjust their hearing aids again.

Ah, humanity! What on earth would we do if men were truly islands? Failed attempts at communication are the spice of life.

2011-03-29T06:23:00.000-07:00

Two claw-like hands grasp my arm tightly, maybe because she’s unable to let go, or maybe because she’s afraid that she’s going to fall over as soon as she attempts to stand up. Her shriveled face is gaunt, with a vacant expression, while her body is stiff and permanently bent.

As I look at this woman, my mind automatically goes back to what she must have been before…before her mind left, before her body was wasted and crippled, before she was reduced to a helpless invalid with a child-like mind.

I have never seen her when she was other than what she is now—a shriveled, stiff old woman incapacitated by an invisible disease that slowly eats away at her mind and daily lessens her physical capabilities. But there were those who knew her then—when she was a capable doctor who organized departments, mobilized teams, ran her home, and raised her family.

Is she really the same person? I wonder, smoothing her hair out of her eyes and gazing thoughtfully at the gaunt, vacant face. What makes a person a person? If we become severely ravaged by disease…if our mind is gone…do we cease to be—essentially—who we once were?

In caring for this woman, there are many questions that have been raised in my mind. What is it to love someone forever, for better or for worse? This is a question that I often ask myself as I see her husband’s frustration with her. It saddens me that he seems to blame her for her current state—that he’s passively aggressive, or even openly aggressive, in the way that he responds to her increasing physical needs.

Could I do any better? I wonder quietly. Am I selfless enough to serve someone like this year after year without recognition or prospect of relief? Maybe not.

Is it ever right to starve yourself to death to avoid being a burden on someone else like this? Is this what old age is really about—being helpless, incompetent, dependent…to be a shadow of what you were, to be out of your mind, to waste away gradually and exist as a pitiable wreck? Why do I dread that? Are dependency and helplessness the worst things possible? When someone is in this state, is God using the condition to sanctify them, or to build character in others? When two people vow to each other to stay together for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, until death separates them…does that mean that you fight to keep your spouse’s body alive long after the mind has gone? What makes the person who they are? How do you practically cope with being married to someone who is nothing like the person that you married?

All of these are things that I wonder…and sometimes the questions themselves frighten me, because I can’t always answer them. But in caring for this elderly man and his ailing wife, these are, nevertheless, questions which cross my mind...

2011-03-09T17:02:00.000-08:00

It’s an overcast, cold, windy afternoon, and the sidewalks of Liberty University are bustling with thousands of students, most of whom are clearly absorbed in their own little world.

Yes, I confess—I watch them. It’s fascinating to me to observe the ways that students interact—or don’t interact—as they jostle through their daily routines. Often times, they’re elbow-to-elbow with hundreds of other men and women just like themselves…men and women whose names they don’t know and whose faces they probably don’t even recognize—because sadly, college campuses are home to some of the most sobering incongruities of our generation. College students are daily demonstrating the fact that it is entirely possible—maybe even probable—to live in close physical proximity to thousands of other individuals who are in approximately our same stage of life…and yet be incredibly isolated—almost as completely alone as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the sole human occupant of a lonely island, whose isolated stretches he wandered alone for years.

As college students, we spend prodigious amounts of time talking—moving our mouths—and very little time communicating. We long to be heard—and yet we rarely take time to truly listen and ask thoughtful questions. We yearn to be considered intelligent, significant, sophisticated, mature, and respectable—and yet we feed our minds with trivialities, mediocrities, and frivolities, and are completely oblivious to the fact that what comes out in our behavior and our words is a reflection of what we put into our brains in the first place.

We are eager to find people we can follow—people who will lead—because we ourselves lack direction. We want others to make all or most of the important decisions in life for us—because we are mortally terrified of failing…of messing up…or—horrors!—of having to reap the consequences of our own actions. We desperately seek for intimacy—for that magical someone who will love us unconditionally—and yet we fail to understand that we ourselves lack the capacity and the maturity to love in the ways that we demand others should love us.

We point angry fingers at the Church, and accuse her of frightful shortcomings and egregious moral failures—and yet we are incognizant of the inconsistencies and shortcomings in our own spiritual lives…and oblivious to the fact that we ARE the church…ignorant of the reality that truth must be lived honestly before it can be spoken powerfully.

Does it frustrate me to witness this on a daily basis? Sometimes. Does it hurt to see humanity wrestle—and often fail—in their struggle to begin to understand what it means to live in community—to live fully, and joyfully, and righteously, and well? Yes. But that’s probably the wrong question.

Maybe what I really need to be asking is, what part do I play in all of this? Am I part of the problem or part of the solution? And what does it look like to be a part of the solution?

It costs us nothing to point fingers. It solves nothing either.

But what would happen if we talked less…listened more…read more…thought more…asked more questions…realized that it’s ok to mess up as long as we’re willing to get up and try again?

I guess the only person that can really answer that for me is…me. And the only person who can really answer that question for you is...you. But I’m willing to venture a guess that when we make the decision to live as we would have others to live around us…life looks a lot different, both inside and out.

Are we willing to be the change? To live the difference?

2011-02-22T15:14:00.000-08:00

I was in line at the post office this morning behind a young mom and her wee daughter—an adorable little munchkin with huge brown eyes who must have been about 18 months old. Her fuzzy brown mop of hair stuck out crazily on all sides as though she’d stuck her finger in the power outlet in the not-so-distant past, and her tiny red mouth was perpetually formed into a wonder-filled O.

She was remarkably active, toddling all over the place like a tiny little drunk person, much to the amusement of the elderly men and women who were patiently waiting in line to mail their packages. While her mother was distracted talking to the clerk behind the counter, the fearless little explorer took it into her head to see the great outdoors. As her pink diapered bottom tottered out through the doors into the street, however, her adventure was abruptly terminated by a fatherly-looking fireman who ducked out right behind her and swooped her up into his arms. There was some general laughter as he returned to the post office with the wee prodigal, she looking up at him curiously, fearlessly, while he returned her gaze with kindly amusement.
Her mother thanked him profusely, and apologized, but I think he was rather enjoying the little midget, because he offered to hold her until her mother finished at the counter.

Thirty seconds later, an elderly woman came in with two identical twin boys in tow. The boys were probably a few months past their second birthdays—they were walking well, and starting to experiment with basic English phrases in cute lispy toddler voices.
As they came in, both sets of little boy eyes latched onto the fireman right inside the door…and then both sets of little eyes noticed the wee girl in his arms. She looked at them curiously, as though she had never seen little boys before. The boys, however, had clearly seen little girls before. Huge smiles instantly appeared on their faces.

“Ooo!” one of them cooed, lisping in his amazement and excitement, “It’th cuuuute! Look at du baby!”

“Yeah!” his brother nodded enthusiastically. The two little dudes stood there admiringly, stock still, gazing up at this small female wonder.

I almost lost it at that point—it was SO funny! These two little men were hardly more than babies themselves, but clearly they felt that they had long passed the point that this chick was at.

I suppose it’s a lesson that broadly applies to all of life—we tend to look back at those who stand where we stood—emotionally, spiritually, or psychologically—just a few short months ago…and we make comparisons, and think to ourselves how much we’ve grown, or how much different we are from these others…when in fact, there is probably very little that separates us…and if we find that we are allowing ourselves to focus on the differences, we’re probably missing the real point of our life journey anyway. So many incredible lessons to be learned from the commonplace!

Incidentally, if it weren’t highly illegal and just generally unadvisable, I think I’d go kidnap me a cute little pair of identical twin boys tonight…but I shall exercise admirable amounts of self-control instead, and refrain.

2011-02-16T19:44:00.000-08:00

Last night I had the privilege of sitting beside one of my best friends as we watched a number of men and women worshipping through poetry—poems that they had written, rap that they’d composed…it was fascinating. The audience and the participants were largely African American. I confess, I think I’ve grown up with a very ethnocentric, white Baptist view of what worship looks like, of what it is or is not…and last night was eye opening on several levels.

I remember watching one girl in particular—watching her more closely, perhaps, because I know something of her history, something of what she has struggled with, something of the ways in which she’s fallen in the past—and as I heard the words coming out of her mouth, I wondered to myself if this was her heart, or if this was simply words that she thought others wanted to hear.

The words of a Casting Crowns song came to mind as I watched: does anybody hear her? Does anybody see? Does anybody even know she’s going down today under the shadow of our steeple, with all the lost and lonely people, searching for the hope that’s tucked away in you and me…

How often do we force people to pretend to be what they are not in order to win the approval of those who don’t even really care? This is such a diminished picture of the rich reality of what relationships within the body of Christ ought to be…and yet it’s tragically commonplace.

I realized as I watched that I have often been unfair in judging people by their failures rather than choosing to value them and focus on their strengths. And I wondered to myself how often I really see people for who they truly are…

2011-01-20T03:55:00.000-08:00

Some nights, sleep is elusive…

I stared at the ceiling into the wee hours of the morning yesterday, listening to the muffled sounds drifting up through the floor boards from the conversation of the couple who lives below me, trying to ignore the endless streams of thoughts and questions whirring around behind my sleepless lids.

Homework, job situation, the outline that still needs to be fleshed out for tomorrow’s evening Bible study…I push the thoughts resolutely aside, and close my eyes, trying to will myself to go to sleep.

Not so much going to happen.

I had been thinking all evening about the concept of discipleship, about what it means to disciple someone, or to BE a disciple—what makes discipleship effective…or not? So many questions in my mind about this Son of Man that we follow…so much to marvel at in considering His characteristic attitudes, emotions, and reactions, when thinking of the wisdom of God, and the situation of man—His broken image-bearer.

Somewhere in there, sleep drifted in for a few hours, because I remember waking at some point before 4 a.m., and being unable to drift off again.

Sometimes God wakes us during the middle of the night because there’s someone—or something—that He wants us to pray for. So I waited. And listened. And the names—and the faces—began to parade through like some kind of odd funeral procession.

They were smiling faces…hundreds of them…people that I know, and care about, and some that I have not thought of for a long time…but their eyes were haunted, deep pools of unspoken emotion, mute witnesses which spoke of the pain of existence, the uncertainty of life, the tremulous beauty of hope, the struggle of growth, the shame of failure, the unquenchable desire for that which is deeper, fuller, more meaningful, most real…

There’s a story behind every face. Many stories, actually. Some of them, I know…and many, I don’t. But it was sweet to know this morning that my Father knows all of them. That He cares more deeply than I am even capable of imagining…that He has a plan for each one of these men and women…that He holds their futures in His hands, that He sees the hurts, knows the pain, and longs to heal and restore each one of them, and that He yearns over them all with a father love too rich to have a mortal counterpart.

It is an incredible thing to be upheld and undergirded by the hands of the Living God.

But right now...I think I'm going to go brew some tea, and head to my 7:40 class. Might be needing an awful lot of tea to make it through today. *laugh*

Sabbath day musings...

2011-01-16T13:22:00.000-08:00

There is a growing phenomenon amongst the men and women of my generation that has become increasingly and disturbingly apparent in recent years—a pervasive and subtly poisonous mindset that seems to be ever more common. Up until the past few months, I’ve been pretty much baffled when it came to trying to deal with or understand what I was encountering, but I was very much aware of the fact that it was there.

What am I referring to? People have labeled this as many different things. A fear of commitment. Personal insecurity. An inability to relate to others. Self-centeredness. Insensitivity. Callousness. Cultural myopia. Narcissism.

It may be all of those things. But what I’ve wondered for several years now is…why? Why is it that young people in THIS generation are floundering through relationships, messing up friendships, and fracturing family ties as if the concepts of human love and lasting trust were recent inventions still in the experimental stages? If marriage has been around for literally hundreds of centuries…why is it that forming and maintaining this relationship has suddenly become an unattainable form of rocket science to men and women of the 21^st century? How is it that such a high percentage of one generation could be incapable of really trusting enough to care…or caring enough to trust?

Last night, I curled up with a book and a cup of tea—still possibly my favorite pastime—to see if someone, somewhere, somehow, had cast some light upon our current perplexing state of relational affairs in the U.S.

The book which thus engrossed me last night was called The Love They Lost: Living with the Legacy of Our Parents’ Divorce, and I picked it out when meandering through the library because I have a number of friends who are the children of divorced parents—and I thought that maybe somehow this mysterious little volume would shed a bit of light on the struggles that children of divorcees face, as well as revealing some of the ways in which their friends can most effectively minister to them as they attempt to wade through the emotional wash of a fractured family situation.

As I read through page after page of first-hand accounts given by the now-adult children of divorced parents, poring over their descriptions of emotional responses and various methods of coping with the pain of their parents’ separation, a lot of things that I’d wondered about began to make a lot more sense. Each chapter was a succession of those “Wow! Are you kidding me?!” moments, where you’re excited by how much sense the new ideas make, but where you also grieve over the fact that you didn’t understand this stuff six or seven years ago…

There were a couple of recurrent themes that surfaced in story after story, though. One was that, when parents separate, there is an almost subconscious assumption of relational stability that is shattered in the minds of their children—and often times, they never recover from this. It’s replaced with an assumption that relationships are meant to be fractured, that trust will inevitably be irreparably broken, and that those upon whom we most depend are not truly dependable. Often, the kids spoke of being unable to face the emotions related to their parents’ divorce—so they simply didn’t. They stuffed it, sometimes not dealing with the depths of the emotional pain until decades later, or maybe not at all. And during those interim years, they simply didn’t allow themselves to feel—because they were afraid to feel, and had decided that numbness was a better option than emotional agony.

Maybe this isn’t really the answer, but it certainly made me wonder—do we live in a society where divorce and the resultant relational transiency has so warped and scarred our view of relationships that people are afraid to really feel, and therefore unable to really trust, and thus, as a result, incapable of forming meaningful, lasting, and healthy emotional ties?

Even for those of us who have grown up in nurturing, mostly-functional nuclear-family homes, the legacy of the skyrocketing divorce rates of our parents’ generation has affected us deeply, because we inevitably sense that there’s a lack of trust and a lack of trustworthiness in the average man or woman from our generation. We’re bombarded with dysfunctionality in the media. We hear about it on every street corner. We see it in the lives of our friends. We’re constantly surrounded by emotionally wounded individuals who are self-sufficient, suspicious, freakishly independent, and relationally isolated. They insist that this is the new normal, that this is “coping,” because they can’t or won’t admit that they don’t know how to be open in a healthy sense, don’t understand what it means to love—and be loved—unconditionally, or accepted for who they are, or nurtured and cared for without being afraid that it won’t last. And so those of us from nuclear two-parent homes begin to wonder if what we experienced in our own families is abnormal—if what everyone ELSE seems to be experiencing is really the way life is? Can we ever hope to repeat what we saw our parents do? Can we ever really find a spouse who shares our view of commitment as a life-long thing—do those people with a functional, healthy understanding of trust and dependability even exist in this new generation? Or is that asking way too much?

Are we creating a self-perpetuating monster? Are we unwittingly setting the next generation up for the same kind of emotional roller-coaster ride that we’ve experienced ourselves? Where does one go to heal from the kind of trauma that two or three or four decades of wrong relational paradigms inflicts on one’s soul? How do you teach someone to trust when the most rudimentary ideas of what trust really IS have been shattered before the kid reached five years of age?

And how do you help someone begin to feel things again—to find themselves, to experience real emotions in a healthy sense—when they’ve coped for years by simply burying their feelings and pretending they don’t exist?

I wish I had the answers. I don’t. And I doubt if it’s that easy anyway. But sometimes…I’ve found that the beginnings of the answers lie within the questions themselves—in the process of asking, the agony of trying to sort things out…in the willingness to wonder why, and how, and when, and where, and what next…

2011-01-13T16:49:00.000-08:00

Tonight I learned an exciting new crowd-control technique that I may find occasion to utilize in the future.

I was at the plasma center, having once again opted to exchange a percentage of my body fluids for cash—just because that’s so fun.

Donation is a fairly uneventful process, but tonight, as I was preparing to leave the center, a fellow donor came rushing through the door looking rather distressed. His right arm was completely covered in blood, and it was running down his forearm in little rivulets onto the floor, where it quickly began to pool in little red puddles. His jacket was a mess too.

Now, from my limited clinical experience, I have learned that when you remove a needle from a vein, like when you pull an IV, there’s always the possibility that profuse bleeding will result if pressure is not applied at the insertion site right after removing the needle. So you apply pressure for what you hope is long enough, and sometimes it IS long enough, and sometimes…a miniature geyser happens a few minutes after you take the pressure off. At which point, it’s always wise to reapply pressure. And get a mop to clean up the mess.

But apparently, this guy didn’t realize that the geyser thing is a possibility after needle removal. I think he might have thought he was dying (because, you know, bleeding all over, dripping on the floor, feeling woozy from fluid loss, getting horrified expressions everywhere you turn—I might think I was dying too…).

What was most remarkable to me, however, was that while the room full of people had been happily buzzing with conversation, with everyone involved in his or her own little universe, as soon as Bleeding Man entered, there was an instant hush, and all eyes were upon him. And all the facial expressions looked kinda like this:

Magical. I have rarely met an individual with such a commanding presence as Bleeding Man.

As the nurses bustled to get the guy sitting down before he passed out and plugged up before he bled to death, I headed towards the door...making a mental note to myself that if I were ever to need to very quickly get the attention of a very large group of people, the most effective way to do this would probably be to poke a hole in myself and then stand and bleed all over the floor in a conspicuous place with a very distraught look on my face.

I feel like this could be a very effective way to announce a toast at a dinner party. And thus, I shall keep this in mind. Maybe for the next wedding I’m asked to stand up in…because weddings should always be memorable...

2011-01-09T19:21:00.001-08:00

This weekend, as part of a meandering trip across half of the contiguous 48 states, I found myself taking in some of the sights and sounds of downtown Chicago.

There were two of us in the car; I had been accompanied to the Windy City by a thoughtful friend, and we had decided to head over to Michigan Avenue, the famous Magnificent Mile—composed of impressive shopping centers which rise towering into the air above you on all sides. It’s tempting—especially as a tall person who sometimes feels a bit like a tower herself—to look up…to let the lines of the architecture draw one’s vision to the top, to stand in the middle of the sidewalk tottering dangerously from side to side while gawking up into the air and looking frightfully much like a tourist who is about to collide with a light pole.

Everything about Michigan Avenue appears to be full of life: the shoppers bustle in and out with enthusiastic smiles, talking animatedly. The traffic moves along in one congested, tangled mass of chaotic motion, horns beeping, cars swerving, taxi drivers gesticulating angrily. The buildings themselves are lit, elaborate, ornate, silent—colossal monuments to the creative ingenuity of the human mind.

It was all new, exciting, fresh, and fascinating—a feast for the senses, and it was difficult to know where to look first.

We were driving, paused at a red light, conversing excitedly with each other about various aspects of all the marvels that surrounded us…and then I saw her.

She was alone, sitting beneath a gigantic statue erected to honor the memory of someone who has now been forgotten. Her dirty blanket was wrapped around her tightly, and a worn duffel bag sat beside her on the pavement. Her eyes were closed against the cold, and even from across the street, I could see that the muscles of her face were tense, drawn against the semi-arctic cold of a bitter Midwestern winter.

What was most startling to me was not the fact that she was homeless, alone, destitute on the streets of Chicago on an afternoon cold enough to give frostbite to a polar bear. What assaulted the senses and saddened the mind was the fact that people were walking right past her without even noticing that she was there. Not so much as a passing glance as they walked by three inches from where she sat with her little sign. No smile, no look of pity or compassion, no kind word, no offer of assistance.

“Look over there,” I said, almost desperately, “look at her. She’s homeless.”

My friend’s eyes followed my pointing finger, but the comment was met with a shrug. “Yeah. Homeless people. They’re everywhere in Chicago.”

As the light turned green, the car moved away in the endless swarm of insistent city traffic, but the picture stayed in my mind…and all through the long hours of the night, as we drove, I wondered what Christians are truly called to do, say, and think in the face of the abject poverty and obvious physical need on our own doorstep.

Maybe it’s not possible to give a car, a house, and a job to every homeless person we meet…but surely we have a responsibility to do something?

There’s a passage from James 2, where the apostle asks, “what good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead…”

What does that practically look like? What does it mean for me, as a Christian, in how I relate to the homeless? I’m honestly not sure at this moment. But I know that somehow, on many levels, it does relate. And while I’m not entirely positive what Christ would have done with a homeless old woman in downtown Chicago, I can’t help but think that He wouldn’t have just passed by without noticing her. Because on a deep, significant, and life-changing level, He would have cared. About her situation. About her. And because He would have, we must—because Christianity is not a passive, comfortable faith, but a pro-active, life-giving, heart-changing, effort-requiring, transformational reality that should cause us to think, speak, and respond differently than we would have before…

2011-01-03T06:00:00.000-08:00

Each day we are given 24 hours—to breath, to think, to laugh, to speak, to learn, to invest in others, to experience life, to walk with God…to make memories. And these memories that we form and the experiences that we have in the course of each day are gifts, much like the day itself.

Each day is different. Some are filled with the seemingly insignificant. They leave no definite impression upon the mind in their passing. Others are more memorable. They change the course of our lives, alter our thinking, or mark us with memories that time will never erase. Sometimes the making of those memories is painful and cuts deep—and other times, the experiences behind the memories are so meaningful, so significant, so beautiful and so breathtaking as to be almost painful.

Yesterday was all of those things—meaningful, significant, beautiful, and breathtaking by turns. Because yesterday, I had the tremendous privilege of standing beside my little sister, the most amazing young woman I have ever known, as she pledged herself in marriage to an equally amazing young man who has earned her love, her trust, her respect…and her hand.

For my little sister, yesterday was the fulfillment of many dreams…and the beginning of what I hope is a long and rich journey. The morning hours of preparation were a blur, but time seemed to move in slow motion once the wedding ceremony itself began.

There was the seating of the grandparents, the close relatives, the mothers…the procession of the bridal party…and then, for one long moment, all of the bridesmaids and groomsmen were standing at the front of the church, and there was silence as all eyes gazed expectantly towards the door at the back of the sanctuary.

As the hauntingly beautiful melody line of “Be Thou My Vision” filled the sanctuary, my little sister appeared on my father’s arm, gliding towards the front of the church slowly, gracefully, wearing a smile more radiant than any I have ever seen.

Beside me waited a young man for whom this moment was the culmination of a dream…and the beginning of a new life. The degree of his nervousness was almost as apparent as the intensity of his joy, but the glow in his eyes was mirrored only by that which sparkled from the blue depths of my sister’s gaze.

And then she was there, beside him, her hand in his, eyes gazing trustingly up into his face. For twenty-one years, God had been uniquely preparing her for this moment, to join her life with that of this man, to minister together beside him for as many years as God chooses to give them. And for twenty-one years, God had been preparing him to lead her, to love her, to protect and provide for her, and to grow in grace with her. The intentionality of our Creator is a marvelous and beautiful thing.

As part of the wedding ceremony, Michelle and Joel wanted to have the congregation join them in singing “In Christ Alone.” The lyrics are absolutely beautiful, and I remember looking over during several of the verses to see my sister, eyes closed, worshiping, singing from the depths of her heart, hand in hand with the man who will worship God beside her for the rest of her life…it is a sweet, sweet thing to me that Michelle and Joel were so intentionally aware of the fact that yesterday was not about them as a couple—that weddings, like every other part of life, are to be centrally focused on the message of the cross, because the marriage which follows the wedding must be focused there as well.

And as He stands in victory

Sin’s curse has lost its grip on me

For I am His and He is mine

Bought with the precious blood of Christ.

Michelle and Joel’s wedding was one of the most worshipful ceremonies I’ve ever been a part of, and it was a whole lot of fun to boot. I am so, so happy for them, and totally excited to watch them grow together as a couple during the years that follow this one!

And now…maybe the Beaty family can sit back and take a few deep breaths, and not have any weddings for a while, because the younger boys have some growin’ up to do before they’re ready to go wife-shopping. Phew.

Censored! Oh wait...they're allowed to do this now. Woohoo!

2010-12-23T11:38:00.000-08:00

The Christmas season has come again. I know that because a) it’s December, b) everyone and his brother and his brother’s uncle’s friend’s pet dog is wearing festive red Santa hats, and c) the WalMart greeters have taken to saying “Merry Christmas!” instead of “have a nice day!”

I’ve had probably a hundred people wish me a Merry Christmas in the past week. It’s kind of heartwarming. Brings a smile to my face every time. But do they ever stop to wonder what that phrase means? Do they ever think about what this holiday really stands for, or what it really looked like to the characters who were most intimately involved in the story of the Christ?

There are many things that we think of when we hear the name “Christ.” Who is this Man to us? He is the Messiah. The Savior. The Lion of the tribe of Judah. The Root of Jesse. The Hope of Israel. Immanuel. The Prince of Peace. The Redeemer. The Ruler. The fulfillment of an age-old promise of redemption given to our forebears at the beginning of time. He is God incarnate. He is perfect man. He is the author and finisher of our faith. He is our High Priest, the one who sanctifies us. He is the Payment of our ransom, the Restorer of our standing with God.

And yet, who was Christ to the men and women of his day? An illegitimate child. The son of an unknown father. The bastard offspring of a lowbred woman, raised in a town of no consequence, part of an insignificant family made up of working class men and women.

And because of who He appeared to be, the Jews and the Gentiles alike missed the reality of Who He truly was. They failed to recognize that our God is a God who uses the ordinary to accomplish the extraordinary, that He allows our frailty to showcase His strength, and that He possesses a wisdom which confounds the minds of the wise.

I thought of this as I was out running errands yesterday, watching the endless streams of humanity bustle about doing their last minute Christmas shopping.

Each one of these men, women, and children appear to be one thing or another, I thought, and yet, who are they REALLY? If I could see deep down inside, could read the thoughts, could sense the emotions, could know their past, could feel the inner hurt that each one feels, could understand the struggles they face…what would I find? WHO would I find? Who would they find in me? What enormous depths of meaning am I missing as I look merely on the outside? If Christ came today, would I pass Him by?

I left the mall that day somewhat sobered by the realization that I, like many others, often fall into the trap of judging the man by his appearance, by his family, by his geographic location, by his hobbies—how often do I really invest in people and get to KNOW them like they deserve to be known?

It’s a question I can’t afford not to answer. Because today, just as for the Jews of 2,000 years ago, it is entirely possible to pass by Christ without recognizing Him. He tells us that what we have done to the least—those that society didn’t value, couldn’t see the worth in—we have done to Him.

I hope that this Christmas season is a valuable reminder for each one of us of the fact that how we treat the most vulnerable members of our society—the least desirable men and women, from a social standpoint—is a reflection of what our character really is, what our values truly are, and what effect our love for Christ has truly made on us as persons…

2010-12-20T14:46:00.001-08:00

A few days ago, a friend and I set off in a little white car from Lynchburg, Virginia, to make the nearly 20-hour trek to Wausau, Wisconsin for Christmas break. It was exhilarating, to be sure. But more than that, the numerous quiet hours stuck behind the wheel of a car, listening to the steady hum of the engine and bemusedly watching my weary travel companion attempt to sleep in the seat beside me, provided a much-appreciated opportunity to think.

It has often seemed to me that the human existence is somewhat cyclical with regard to the emotional states an individual passes through. There are seasons in life when it feels like the heavens are silent, like God has hidden Himself, like the answers which we so desperately seek are nowhere to be found, and furthermore, like no one particularly cares--that we are abandoned to struggle absolutely alone through the moments of our greatest necessity and despair. (Granted, this sensation is just a feeling, but for the vast majority of humanity, feelings are, in that particular moment, their reality).

There are also seasons when one feels that the sun, the moon, and the stars have all propitiously aligned, that the world is only beautiful, and never horrifying, that God is particularly close, that His love is exceptionally real, that the answers to life’s deepest and most critical questions are within reach, that humanity beams upon us with affection and approbation…in short, that all is right with the world.

I have come to realize, over the course of several years and many conversations, that this sequential ebb and flow of the emotional tides is not unique to me—rather, it seems to characterize the vast majority of human kind to a greater or lesser degree, especially in our spiritual walks. And I begin to suspect that this is by design.

After all, the facts—the foundational truths upon which our worldview and our lives are constructed—don’t change. Our circumstances might, and our feelings definitely will, but if we act based upon the Biblical truth that we know, and allow what we know to rule our feelings, this creates an emotional maturity and stability that creates a solid foundation for the building of a robust character…

These were the thoughts that were spinning around behind my eyeballs as I drove through the long hours of a frigid winter night…and somewhere around hour twelve of the trip, I was reminded of a passage from The Screwtape Letters in which Lewis offered some characteristically perspicacious insight into the matter. This captures the perspective of a demon writing to his nephew, Screwtape, with some words of advice regarding the best ways in which to destroy the human soul:

“You must have often wondered why the Enemy does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree He chooses and at any moment. But you now see that the Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to override a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. For His ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve. He is prepared to do a little overriding at the beginning. He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. But He never allows this state of affairs to last long. Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs—to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish.

It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best…He cannot “tempt” to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there, He is pleased even with their stumbles.

Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks around upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken…and still obeys.” –Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis (p. 39)

2010-12-17T13:47:00.000-08:00

It is commonly hypothesized that before setting out on a long and arduous journey to the nether regions of the world, one ought to look over his or her vehicle in order to ensure that all of the parts of aforementioned vehicles are functioning properly and in order.

It was on account of this hypothesis that I found myself at Walmart this morning, hunting up and down the automotive aisle to find windshield wipers to replace the rather dilapidated set which had come with my car.

Now this whole process of thinking about cars and doing things with them required a somewhat different kind of brain power than I am accustomed to using in my little library world, and perhaps this is why I began to feel a bit overheated at some point prior to the beginning of the wiper shopping process, but however that may be, I had decided before entering the store that I no longer needed my coat, so I was traipsing around in my shirtsleeves, bemusedly watching these poor Virginians shiver in the sunny, slushy, sloppy weather.

I found the automotive aisle in Walmart, (this was a somewhat momentous event), and with a great deal of much-appreciated and much-needed phone coaching from my awesome dad, I was eventually successful in selecting two black rather rubbery things which looked wiperesque in nature and were apparently of the appropriate size for my car. Step one complete. Check.

Purchase wiper blades. Check.

Find car in parking lot (why on earth does EVERYONE drive white cars?! Makes this step so confusing!). Check.

I decided to put the new wipers on right there in the parking lot, since the sun was out, and the world was happy, and I…was also happy, mostly because I’d found my car.

I managed to get the old wiper blade off of my vehicle, but the instructions on the back of the new wiper blades were somewhat incomprehensible to me. I’d been standing there for several minutes, fiddling with the new wiper, feeling very blonde and very female, and looking inquisitively at certain aspects of the old one with my head cocked thoughtfully to one side, when a friendly middle-aged black dude strolled up with a confident smile.

“Darlin’, are you havin’ some issues?” he laughed, not even waiting for an answer as he took the wiper blade out of my hand. Apparently he’d been watching me struggle for longer than I knew.
I grinned a little sheepishly, and admitted that I was apparently lacking in many of the basic car skills that every competent woman ought to possess (silently vowing to myself to spend a number of hours in the garage with my dad over Christmas break to remedy these grievous deficiencies). He laughed again, and looked at me sideways as he effortlessly snapped the wiper blade onto my car.

“Are you a college girl?”

I nodded.

“Waell, then, I wouldn’t worry about that too much. In college, all most girls know is gas and go.”
“I, uh, know how to check the oil…?” I mumbled, distracted by his apparent proficiency in changing wiper blades.

“Are you a mechanic?” I asked finally, a wee bit envious of his skill.

“Naw, I’ve just been around, lived some life, you know? You’ll get there.” He laughed again, finishing his installation of the second wiper blade. He grabbed an alcohol wipe from his car then, and carefully explained to me that after installing a new set of blades, one should “wipe the rubber coating” off so the windshield won’t streak the first time you use them. I watched in silent admiration, and listened to everything he said, and nodded appreciatively, and thanked him for his time, and marveled to myself at how nice some people will be to a complete stranger.

“Now honey, you just take these old blades, and you throw ‘em away…and for the love of heaven, put a coat on yourself! And you have a nice day.” He gave me an enthusiastic high five, and with that, he was off, smiling, whistling a little under his breath…leaving me behind with a rather broad smile on my face as well…and an armful of trashed windshield wiper blades.

I love my life.

2010-12-14T13:05:00.000-08:00

This morning I found a box outside my front door…with my name on it. I love it when that happens. It always feels like the beginning of a big mystery to me. Although, the mystery usually ends as soon as I open the box. Whatever.

Using my clever deductive reasoning skills, I gathered—from the return address—that this particular box came from my beloved family. Now, which family members, I still didn’t know. But at least, it was a start, because knowing the home of origin eliminated some billions of other possibilities—as well as decreasing the probability that the box contained explosive devices designed to help me meet my Maker sooner.

Inside the box, there was a letter, well, actually two of them…and a bunch of other stuff. The first letter, which was from my dad, opened as follows:

“Dear Darling Thea,
Mom says I can’t send candy, as you are more practical now and we need to send more practical stuff—don’t know what that has to do with it…”

I laughed. My dad has been sending me massive boxes of candy since I first left for college some three or four years ago. And not just space-filler candy—my dad is one of the best candy shoppers out there, and if he sends you something, it’s gonna be good. In fact, he was the one who single-handedly kept my entire hall supplied with Snickers candy bars during finals week of my first semester freshman year.

I could tell that he was somewhat disappointed that Mom felt I had outgrown the need for candy…I strongly suspect that he used to kind of get excited about the candy shopping thing more than he wants to admit. (I’ll admit that I was always pretty excited to be on the receiving end…it’s like…Christmas. Only you don’t know it coming. Awesome!)

So, partly to be funny, and partly to prove a point, and partly just because he’s random like that, my dad had put together a box of practical things for me. Made. My. Day.

The first thing I pulled out of the box was an MRE…which, I have to admit, is going to be highly practical at some point. Very, very practical. Plus, I’ve never actually HAD an MRE, so I’m pretty pumped about this opportunity to create a new life experience. (Score two for dad!)

The second thing that tumbled out onto my covers was a number of little boxes. Three of them were tea, and two of them were the same KIND of tea (I think this may be his way of telling me that I’m supposed to acquire an addiction for Sweet & Spicy Good Earth tea), and then, just for good measure, there was a box of hot cocoa mix. Whoa. Again, very, very practical. Not gonna lie, I was feeling pretty impressed by this point about my dad’s ability to pick out practical things. The third thing that fell out (and landed on my foot and tried to murder one of my toes) was a little jar of hand cream that I strongly suspect was my mom’s idea. Totally useful. I’m deeply grateful. And again, definitely practical. Good going, guys.

And the fourth and final thing was a little Ziploc bag on which my dad had written “Practical Stuff.” It was packed with gum, and a pen, and GermEx, and toothpaste, and Emergen-C packets, and cough drops, and…dried cranberries? I really laughed then, because I KNOW that that one was assembled just to prove a point to my mom.

And then it was time to go back and do second inspection...after all, what's actually in an MRE? And do I really want to know?

Yeah, you're right. I really don't want to know.

After all, anything that's wrapped in brown plastic and labeled "vegetarian" is sure to be healthy AND tasty, right? Of course right.

Thanks guys. You never cease to amaze me.

2010-12-11T20:25:00.000-08:00

A couple of days ago, a bunch of spontaneous college boys and a couple of their naïve female friends packed into four cars and drove to Devil’s Marble Yard to engage in the age-old pastime of mountain climbing, a somewhat mind-numbing sport that pits man against the unforgiving incline of an apparently never-ending upward slope of earth and rock.

It was a Thursday afternoon of finals week, and I wasn’t sure that I could afford the time—but I reminded myself of the fact that time is a gift which we must invest in memory-making as well as studying, and then came to the conclusion that I couldn’t afford NOT to invest the time wandering around the mountain with this lively group of young people, because who knew when or if the next opportunity would come?

To be honest, this past Thursday, I needed the mountains. There are periods in our lives when we need to climb—to feel our strength draining away into the remorseless stones of a stolid and silent mass of rocky barrenness… to grit our teeth and work until physically we have nothing left to give, and we’re forced to stop and wipe the sweat out of our eyes and listen to the silence and the eerie moaning of the wind, and let the vastness of our surroundings sink in deep and permeate to the very depths of our being…

As I stood alone on the side of the mountain, surrounded by boulders the size of young elephants, there was no one within sight or earshot, and I was reminded of something that Elizabeth Elliot wrote in her book, Passion and Purity. She explained that “waiting silently is the hardest thing of all…the things that we feel most deeply, we ought to learn to be silent about, at least until we have talked them over thoroughly with God.” She’s right…but sometimes holding everything inside requires so much effort that the thoughts you attempt to hold back threaten to strangle you the minute your guard is relaxed even the slightest shade.

For the past two weeks, I’ve been wrestling—almost subconsciously—with an ever-increasing sense of loss. I realized it that day on the mountain…and again today, when it finally got the best of me, and I spent a few bittersweet moments sobbing over a philosophy assignment at my desk.

Why? Because I’m going home in a week. Going home because my little sister’s getting married. And I’m gonna miss her. A lot. Maybe even more than a lot.

All semester, ever since last summer, I’ve been running from the fact that this change was going to become a permanent reality…that eventually, she was going to leave—for good—and start a new life somewhere else. Subconsciously, maybe I thought that if I just kept busy with school, with ministry opportunities, with whatever or whoever would keep me from having time to think, the change would never become permanent. But now that break is less than one week away, the illusion of permanence and stability and changelessness is crumbling rapidly.

I know that when I go home, on some level, it’ll be to say goodbye to her…I know that after this, we won’t see each other nearly as much, won’t talk as often or as long, won’t be close in the same ways that we were…and I know that that’s ok—good, even…probably great, beautiful, and wonderful. But as with most major transitions in life (at least, the ones that I can remember), there’s a keen sense of loss, a dull aching emptiness that you feel in the moment…until it subsides with time, or until something else takes its place.

There will be something that will come to fill the void. I know that, because there always is. It’s the nature of our God to take us, and comfort us, and show us a new aspect of His character and His compassionate heart for mankind in the moments when we are most vulnerable and most needy and most alone... and then He gives us a new task, fills our lives with different people to pour into, and transplants us to give us more room to grow.

He will do all of those things in the next few years, both for Michelle, and for me. There’s a part of me that wishes I could know what that process will look like, but I’ve come to understand that often it’s the process of waiting without knowing that prepares us to better appreciate the gifts that God gives to us in His own perfect timing.

And so I wait. And I promise myself that I will learn to love the waiting, and the uncertainty, and even the pain…because I know that I know, in the deepest, most private corner of my heart, that our God is one who makes all things beautiful in His time…

2010-12-11T17:29:00.000-08:00

Had a conversation in the library with a friend named Darryl who…frequently sees things from a different perspective than I do.

We were talking about dating relationships, because Darryl has a rather pessimistic outlook on life and relationships and many things happy. (He has just a bit of an argumentative streak, too…meaning most of our conversations would look like arguments to the average observer).

I don’t remember how it came up, but I told him at one point in the conversation that I hoped he married someone who was super sweet and would never argue with him. His face registered shock, and then deep dismay.

“Who’d wanna marry someone they couldn’t fight with?!” he protested. “That would be BORING.”

“I think it’d be good for your character,” I said absent-mindedly, not really watching his face.

“Fine!” he fumed, "I hope that you marry someone who will never fight with YOU either, then!”

“I hope so too!” I said, laughing.

Darryl was seriously put out by this point.

“Gosh!” he spluttered, “that’s the most selfish thing I’ve ever heard IN. MY. LIFE.” And with that he picked up his book bag and stormed out of the library…

I was laughing too hard to really notice where he went…

2010-12-11T07:18:00.000-08:00

Last night, I had the privilege of going to a Christmas party hosted by one of my lovely nursing professors and her equally lovely family.

It seemed as though a lot of people must have been going to Christmas parties last night, because the roads were crazy…as in, really crazy. I almost felt like I was driving in D.C., except in D.C., there would probably have been more Smart cars weaving maniacally in and out of traffic. So I was glad that I was in Lynchburg.

I was on the phone with my sweet little mother as I drove, which may not have been helping my already-directionally challenged self to navigate to this new and unknown location. I was armed with mapquest directions, however, so I felt somewhat confident in my ability to eventually find my way from point A to point B.

During a particularly intense point in the conversation with my mom, I had come to the point where apparently I needed to take a right on Cottontown road. I saw a sign up ahead that read “Cotton…” something, but a telephone pole was obscuring the second half of the word. I assumed, and took a right.

It was one of those roads that started out ok…and then there was a railroad track…and after that, the road got really bad rather quickly. I have never seen such large potholes. Neither has my car, apparently, for a few moments later, I felt the bottom of the car hit the top of the earth’s surface with a rather sickeningly-solid, grinding thud.

Yeah. That…wasn’t my road. It was Cottonwood road. Very crumby road. I would recommend you don’t take it unless you’re riding a fourwheeler, or a camel, or something.

I found the right road, found the right house, met some awesome people, had a lot of fun watching Elf with them, heard their stories from the seasons of yesteryear, enjoyed some really incredible culinary delicacies, and finally decided that I had better see myself off to home before the clock struck midnight.

My instructor’s adorable little eleven-year-old daughter, Katie, and her twelve-year-old son, Jessie (who is every inch a boy, and one of the most hilarious little dudes I have ever met) had been conversing with us off and on throughout the evening, and now as I stood at the bottom of the staircase buttoning my coat, Katie was standing on the stairs just above me, smiling almost wistfully.

“Thank you for coming,” she said in her sweet little girl voice, “I’m really glad you came. I enjoyed it.” And she meant it. And I was touched, and wanted to grab her up in a big hug…I remember what it was like when I was that age, but I doubt that I was half so charming as little Katie. (She, like her brother, is possessed of social graces far beyond her years).

I went with Katie into the kitchen to say goodbye to my gracious hosts and some of the other Liberty faculty members in attendance at the party. As we exchanged hugs and Christmas blessings, one of nursing faculty smilingly shared a couple words of encouragement that brought a smile to my own face, and a bigger one to my heart. (We forget that we can be generous with our words, but in fact, our praise and affirmation is perhaps the single biggest gift that we can give on a consistent basis).

Maybe my head was a little off as I left, or maybe I’m just still very much in need of practice with reading directions in reverse, but…I got lost on the way home. Like, really lost. As in, stop-for-directions lost. As in, had been driving somewhat aimlessly for thirty minutes lost.
It was almost eleven o’clock on a Friday night as I pulled up in front of one of the few houses on the street that had its lights on and still looked somewhat alive.

I cringed as I rang the doorbell, hoping that the person inside was not the frazzled mother of a colicky baby that I’d just wakened with the bell.

There were voices moving around somewhere upstairs…happy sounding voices full of life and energy, which was especially impressive given the lateness of the hour.

The person who eventually came to the door was a pudgy, cute-as-a-button little black girl who peered curiously out the window of the door without seeing me. She opened the door then, and leaned out, looking first to the right, and then to the left. As she turned to the left, she caught sight of me standing there for the first time.

I’m not sure what she expected, but I was apparently not it. She jumped six inches up and possibly as many more to each side, and her heart visibly leaped into her throat from its former perch inside of her chest. Her beautiful brown eyes got wide as saucers, and a shrieking gasp burst from her mouth as she clutched the door frame with both hands and stared for a wide-eyed moment.

I smiled what I hoped was a reassuring smile, explained my predicament, and asked if her mom or dad were around to give me some pointers as to how to get back into Lynchburg.

She smiled proudly then, tossing her little head with its proliferation of braids, all of which ended neatly in a series of brightly colored plastic beads.

“Oh, AH can tell you THAAT,” she drawled in a friendly little accent, “You just git raaght on this road here, and ya fallow all the cuurves, and you don’t tuuuurn, and then, yew’ll git to the CVS, and that’s Lynchburg.”

I assured her that she had been most helpful, and that I was grateful. And then I left thinking “I’ve been all the way to the end of this road. It ends in a cornfield…”

But I resolved to find the CVS of which she spoke, regardless of how many turns it took, and eventually, I found it—and I smiled, remembering how much I’d loved to give directions when I was a kid about the same age as my little friend with the braids…like her, I usually managed to leave out most of the necessary turns, but if you say something confidently enough with volume and conviction, it doesn’t really matter, because people believe you anyway.

There were several things for which I was very thankful as I drove home last night. I was thankful for my mom, whose words of wisdom have very much blessed my heart and straightened my thinking during this past semester. I was also thankful to be back on familiar territory, headed towards a known location—that was awesome.

I was thankful too, for children. For little boys. For little girls. For the fact that their young hearts are often so tender, that they’re so gifted as listeners, as empathizers—so much more than we often give them credit for. Inside of each one of them lives a man or a woman who will one day walk a path very different than what we can today imagine for them…but I was challenged last night to remember always to treat each little one as an individual, to converse with them in such a way that they know that they matter to me…

You never really know what children remember from the social interactions they have, but I know that when I was younger, before I hit my teen years, there were a couple of college kids who took it into their heads to take an interest in me as an individual…and it changed my life. And somehow, in some way, I wanna pass that on…not just to kids, because I guess we need to be relating to every individual in our lives as though they matter, as though we genuinely care…but I want to be especially aware of it when I’m relating to kids. Because they do matter…so much more than they know.

2010-12-07T17:21:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, in the craziness of daily life, the confusion of the inner struggle becomes a dull roar, and the voice of reason and truth becomes very difficult to hear in the midst of the chaos. Today I had to ask myself why it is that, knowing all that we know, we still wrestle with and fight against the truth that God brings to our attention. Why is it often times so difficult to submit to and be changed by what we know to be right?

Perhaps because we so quickly forget that to refuse to submit to God's draw on our lives is infinitely more painful and significantly less profitable in the long run. Perhaps because I lose sight of who it is that I'm serving...or where it is that my focus must be consistently fixed.

Today, I am reminded again of how blessed I am to have mentors in my life who point out to me the areas in which I'm refusing to submit to the truth of what I know, the ways in which I'm not being consistent to the worldview I claim to espouse...

As I ponder tonight, I realize yet again that while truth is sometimes painful, it is also healing, purifying, and helpful.

Kinda like that grape-flavored cough/cold medicine that my parents used to give us when we had stuffy noses...tastes disgusting at the time, but helpful later on...yeah. Perspective. Very important thing in life. ;-)

2010-12-03T08:12:00.001-08:00

There were two note-worthy experiences that occurred over Thanksgiving break which were memorable in…very different ways than the rest of the break.

The first occurred before I even got home. You see, I’m currently enrolled in an online philosophy course, and since it’s only an 8-week course, it doesn’t break for holidays. Thus, there were assignments due over the week of Thanksgiving, and so I decided that my time in the airport would be well-spent if I used it to read for my philosophy class (we read a book every week…more reading than I’ve done in quite some time for one class, but…enriching, doubtless).

So I was reading a fascinating book about the art of Metaphysics while I sat at my gate. I would glance at my watch every little while to see how close my plane was to departure. I remember at one point looking up and thinking, “Odd. Why are they not boarding? It’s definitely time for them to be boarding.” I decided—in a rather naïve display of lack of airport savvy—to go check one of the flight screens in the hall, to see if the gate had possibly been switched without them announcing it.

The gate hadn’t been switched. The screen read that my flight was “boarding.” Oh. Ok. By the time I got back to the gate, I could see the plane slowly backing away, headed towards the runway. Fail.

First time I’ve ever missed a flight because I was reading in the airport. I groaned inwardly as I rescheduled for a flight that left seven hours later, realizing that my five siblings would never pass up such a prime opportunity to tease their oldest sister about acting blonde. (They didn’t, either). But I was grateful that there WAS another flight going to Wisconsin that day—would have been a bit more of a bummer if missing the first flight would have meant spending the night in the airport.

The second incident occurred the morning after we got back (my poor father drove until nearly two in the morning to get us both home from Milwaukee that night in time for my sister’s bridal shower the next morning…he was SOOO wiped)

When we got home at almost two, several of my family members were still awake—plus my sister’s fiancé was over, and his younger brother had tagged along. Oh goodness. A party. I just love those!

I’d only managed to get about four hours of sleep the night before, however, and thus, despite my desire to enjoy the company of my long-lost family, I was shortly forced to go to bed by my circadian rhythms and my concerned mother.

I remembered to take out my contacts. I was rather proud of myself. Since approximately half the herd at the home place has or wears contacts, there are bottles of contact solution all over the place, and nobody’s terribly possessive of any of them, so you just grab the closest one when you happen to be in need of contact solution. Which is exactly what I did. I didn’t really look at the bottle that closely, because all of the bottles, historically, have been the same stuff…normal saline solution that you can use as eye drops or contact solution or spider drowner, as the case may be.

Well, unbeknownst to my not-quite-coherent self, this bottle was…different. I didn’t find that out until the next morning, when I put my left contact in and experienced an odd burning sensation unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in the past (or hope to experience in the future). That was possibly the fastest I’ve ever removed a contact.

I thought to myself that I must have somehow still had shampoo on my hands from showering, or something, so I washed my hands veeeery thoroughly, and splashed some water into the eye to try to stop the burning, and waited for the little fellow to calm down and chill out…which he eventually did.

Michelle came in to stand beside me at the bathroom sink right about then, and instantly noticed my dilemma. She explained to me that that particular bottle of solution was peroxide-based and acidic, and thus, contacts must be thoroughly rinsed in regular solution prior to insertion. Um, thanks. I appreciate that tidbit. You have no idea how much.

So the second time, being one of those individuals who attempts to learn from previous errors, I rinsed the contact in regular solution…and put it in.

Ok, so it didn’t burn as bad…but it still burned. Quite a bit. So that contact just went into the garbage, and I opened a new set.

The eye, however, was irritated and watering for the rest of the day. Michelle had a bridal shower that morning, as I stated, however, and I had been asked to MC, so there was really nothing for it, I thought, but to just suck it up and go and pretend the eye would recover if I ignored it long enough (I am told that this is classic nurse thinking, for those of you who may have been wondering).

It was a lovely shower, and we had a lot of fun eating, and singing, and crying, and laughing, and watching Michelle and Joel open gifts, and for me, it was an opportunity to meet people that I’d not seen in over two years, which was special.

By the end of the shower, it was early afternoon, and the eye had gotten progressively worse to the point where I could only squint out of it. It had been watering away like an Artesian dribbler all morning, and by one o’clock, it had swollen almost completely shut and wasn’t overly comfortable.

My Dad is a wonderful, merciful, compassionate man, and thus it was that when he came to the shower towards the end to help with clean up, or whatever (I confess I was a little out of it by this point), he decided that he and I should just go home.

I thought maybe if I took a nap, the eye would miraculously get better. So I took a nap. And when I woke up, the eye was swollen completely shut and I could hardly see anything out of the other one either. Fail.

And so we decided that perhaps, we should have someone medically trained take a look at it. The only thing open that night was the emergency room, so…we went to the ER.

I was holding a washcloth over one eye, and the woman behind the desk looked at me with concern. “What do you have in that eye?” she asked. The look on her face suggested to me that she was expecting to see a knife protruding from the globe of my eye when I removed the washcloth. I was oh-so-tempted to say something like “well, my little nephew and I were fighting with forks at the dinner table…” but sometimes, you realize that the situation is just not appropriate. So I told her it was a chemical burn, and Dad showed her the bottle of contact solution, which he had brought along for show-and-tell.

After a lovely visit with my dad in the waiting room, a man in beautiful blue scrubs ushered me to a sterile-looking back room and asked me to please sit in the funny looking chair in the middle. He was a third-year resident named Ken Ugalali, or something like that…I think perhaps he was Kenyan. Whatever he was, he was certainly quite amusing to me that night. He towered above me, topping off at about 6’6”. Looking down with his black face full of deep concern, he asked what I had gotten in my eye. I told him the story, and handed him the bottle of contact solution.

He turned it over and over in his huge hands, reading the list of active ingredients.

“Number one in comfort,” he read slowly, reading the label on the front. He looked towards me. “Well, not for YOU,” he noted matter-of-factly. I cracked up.

Another doctor burst through the door at that point. He needed supplies from our room, and, while apologizing for his intrusion, he headed towards the medicine cabinet on the back wall to get what he needed.

“Oh, it’s quite alright,” I said, “We welcome any and all visitors. Thank you so much for stopping in!” He looked a little bit confused, and then he kinda laughed, and said he’d never heard that before.

Ken Ugalali wanted to examine my eye, so he had me sit opposite one of those big ophthalmoscopic machines like you find at an eye examination place. He sat on the other side of it, and tried to figure out how to turn it on.

I confess, I was very much amused by the process. He flipped a few switches, and then smacked it with his hand.

“Aw,” he grumbled, “it never works for me. And then the other guys come in, and it turns right on!” He smacked it again with his palm, and then started fiddling nervously with a bunch of knobs whose function he clearly didn’t quite understand.

“Maybe if you flip that switch right there?” I offered. He flipped it, and a few others, and eventually a light went on.

“Good job!” I said. “It’s working.” He grinned proudly, and nodded, and if he’d been a fellow-nursing student, I would have high-fived him. This medicine stuff is so much more complicated than people realize, you see.

He needed to look at my eye, but the eye was swollen shut. This posed a problem, one which he was unsure of how to fix. He took a very long q-tip, and poked at my eyelid, trying to get it to stay open. Not so much working. (I really wanted to suggest to him that we just use a toothpick to prop it open, but I was afraid he might not understand that I was joking).

Finally, looking very uncomfortable, he decided to just use his thumb to hold the eye open. I was laughing really hard on the inside by this point.

After completing his examination, he went to get his senior doctor to verify his findings (I actually am not sure if he found anything…but he gets props for doing the examination in my book).

The senior doctor came breezing in and did the same examination all over again. The look on Ken’s face was precious when the senior doctor reached out without hesitation to hold the eye open with his thumb. That time I laughed out loud.

Eventually, they reached the conclusion that I had a chemical burn of the cornea, and after irrigating the eye with two liters of saline solution, they decided that I could go home.

I was completely soaked at that point, because the saline had all kind of run down the back of my neck rather than running out into the little tray that they put under my head. It was really cold that night, snowing outside, and I was wearing about five layers, so I decided to just take some of them off before I put on my coat.

The attending nurse was ok when I pulled off the hoodie and said I didn’t need to be wearing a soaked sweater. Then I decided I didn’t need to be wearing a soaked shirt, either, so I whipped it off.

His face registered shock. “How many layers do you have ON?” he asked. I just laughed, and said probably more than the average person, cuz I’m still not used to Wisconsin frigidity. He left shaking his head. He’ll recover. And so did I. So thankful for the fact that corneas mend themselves rather rapidly.

2010-12-01T12:06:00.001-08:00

You know how sometimes the cleaning frenzy strikes people, and they find themselves unable to rest, chew gum, or do homework until everything within the line of sight is spotless and neatly arranged in symmetrical patterns? Yeah. I suffered an attack of I-must-cleanitis two days ago, for no particular reason that I could identify upon much reflection.

This is why my room is now spotless, and, secondarily, why I am unable to find half of the items I’m accustomed to using on a daily basis. Fail.

2010-12-01T11:41:00.001-08:00

I met an adorable little dude in the library a few weeks ago. On that particular night, he was working feverishly on a massive research paper covering the historical development of certain doctrines within the church—apparently this brain exercise is part of the degree completion plan for a Master of Divinity program.

Now, there are lots of adorable little men and women who work feverishly in the library on a regular basis. This is hardly outside the realm of the normal and expected. What was particularly striking about this little fellow, however, was the fact that his dad was working with him, helping him to edit the paper, and as they worked, they were conversing together in low tones, sometimes even bantering back and forth. I was intrigued.

I was working on a paper myself that night, but when the little dude took a quick water fountain break, I took the opportunity to strike up a quick conversation with his dad. I’d assumed that his dad must be a pastor, if he was helping him with the paper, but not so much—Little Man’s dad smiled at my assumption, and informed me that he was, in fact, an engineer, qualified to edit papers simply by virtue of the fact that he had written and read so many of them himself. He told me also that his son was an undergrad student, that he was enrolled in a Master of Divinity program online through another university, and that this massive paper was due at midnight (it was about 10:30 at this point). I was impressed that Little Man would enroll fulltime at two different schools, but he returned from the fountain just then to resume frantic work upon his paper, so that was the end of the conversation.

I’d mostly forgotten about Little Man until I bumped into him (not quite literally) outside the elevator yesterday. He has a full head of intensely black hair, with large black eyes that are equally intense and appear to be always observing. He’s a rather quiet sort of fellow, and thus, when I nodded in his direction, smiled, and said, “Oh hi!” he simply gave me a puzzled look, and said nothing. Apparently he was quite positive that I couldn’t have been speaking to him, or else he was secretly wondering whether I was a lunatic (in which case, he may also have been wondering if he should run in the opposite direction very quickly while screaming for assistance).

He did neither, however, and so we stood in very awkward silence for a long second, and then I laughed, and explained to him where we’d met before, and asked about his paper, and how it had turned out. His face lit up with recognition then (much to my relief—it would have been excruciatingly awkward and irresistibly funny otherwise), and I realized that perhaps his silence was simply the result of a little mind trying desperately to remember where this tall strange person would know him from.

He politely introduced himself, began talking animatedly about the paper, and answered a few questions about his student status. He told me bits and pieces about what it was like to be a commuter student, and how, although his sister is older, he’s the one who has the car—he grinned a little when he said that, shrugged, and said that maybe it was luck (or perhaps a state of affairs decided by virtue of the fact that he possesses a Y chromosome, but I didn’t ask). And then we were at my classroom door, and so we parted ways of necessity, and he went off smiling to find whatever it was that he was looking for…

But as he strode away, the thing that stuck with me was his intensity. Perhaps part of it is just his being rather shy (although it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s a bit outgoing when he’s with his family) or the fact that he has piercing black eyes, but the youngster—I discovered that he goes by PJ—was one of the most focused little dudes that I’ve met for quite some time. His walk, his tone of voice, his facial expressions—everything conveyed a sense of urgency which spoke of an inner drive uncommon in today’s average college student (it may also have been caused by a mild case of indigestion, but I doubt it).

I found myself shaking my head, and wondering…wondering how he’d been parented, where he’d gone to middle school, what he wants to do with his life after Liberty, what his parents are like, and what the family dynamic might be…because from surface appearances, it would seem that his parents have done some things very, very right.

2010-11-30T19:35:00.000-08:00

Tonight I sit and listen to the moaning of the wind in the shrubs outside my window. There’s a misty sort of coldness in the breeze, and a melancholy fog has settled into the low places in the road. The last of the autumn leaves are rustling amidst the skeleton branches of the trees out in the yard, and the clouds have obscured the light of the moon and the stars.

Yesterday the moon was beautiful and the stars were bright. Yesterday there was no rain, no fog, no moaning wind to interrupt the stillness of a crisp night…but yesterday is gone.

All of the yesterdays are gone.

It’s incredible to me—sometimes frightening—how quickly things can change. Babies are born, children grow up, young folks marry, create new homes, new families, new lives…and then one day, they die…and the cycle of life continues.

But somewhere along the line, I hope that there comes a moment in time when each man or woman wonders keenly—maybe desperately—what it is that he’s really living for. I hope that in that moment, every woman thinks about what exactly she’s pouring into each 24-hour period of her existence…and I hope that every man realizes that every day, he’s trading 24 hours of his life for something…and I hope that this realization startles them, challenges them, changes them…frightens them.

Today I wondered about what it is that I’m trading my life for. What’s the legacy? Is it God’s vision...or I am trying to force His hand? Am I living life fully, and am I living it well?

Perhaps the key in answering that question is to zoom out, to remind ourselves what the big purpose is, so we can better understand the little part that we play.

Isaiah 45:5-7 clarified some things for me tonight:
“I am the Lord, and there is no other, besides Me, there is no God; I equip you, though you do not know Me, that people may know, from the rising of the sun and from the west, that there is none besides Me; I am the Lord, and there is no other. I form light and create darkness, I make well-being and create calamity, I am the Lord, Who does all these things.”

It’s comforting to be reminded of the fact that He equips us, that He doesn’t ask us to do anything that He hasn’t done Himself, that He understands every nuance of everything that we feel, that He has personally wrestled through the same struggles we fight on a daily basis…in short, that He has designed us, commissioned us, and cares more deeply about us than we will ever fully understand. He’s not just the coach who tells us how to run—He’s also the dad who meets us at the finish line with outstretched arms.

And to live in light of that knowledge ought to change the way in which I view the cycle of life. May we learn to make each day count as an accomplishment from an eternal perspective…

Snippets from the Homestead

2010-11-26T21:33:00.000-08:00

For what seemed the first time in many ages, I had the privilege of returning to the home place this past week. In many ways, it felt momentous. Like the turning of a page, or maybe the end of a chapter…or the beginning of a new book in a series whose end I cannot foresee.

You see, my baby sister and I went to the bridal shop this past week to get dresses fitted and pick out jewelry for the upcoming wedding. Her wedding.

There was something incredibly sweet, and yet strangely heart-wrenching about seeing her stand on a pedestal in her wedding gown, glowing as she tried on different necklaces and played with her veil, dreaming all the while of the blonde blue-eyed groom who will claim her as his own in six short weeks.

I have seen many brides in my time, but none quite so special to me as this one (not many as pretty either, but I’ll admit I’m biased). She has been my playmate, my companion, and my best friend from the first moments that I can remember. She is my sister, I thought, smiling wistfully as I watched her. And yet somehow, while she is still my sister now, she is less…mine. Because she is more his, and it really cannot be both ways.

Not that she was ever mine to keep. But I liked to think to myself sometimes that we shared a special relationship, a unique bond, a rare kind of intimacy, a unity of the soul. They say that nothing can break the sister bond, and in a sense I believe that—but at the same time, I have come to realize that, like every other relationship, the sister bond will change over time, and the role of the sister is never the same from one year to the next.

There is a part of me that resents the change, if I am honest with myself. There has always been a small place in my heart that protests loudly when things begin to change from what they have always been. But there is a bigger part of me that is intensely happy—wistfully, painfully, wonderingly, sincerely happy—for my little sister. It’s sweet to see the perpetual sparkle in her eyes, the glow on her face, to hear the almost-giddy laughter which seems to spring unbidden from her soul these days. It’s amazing to realize that this is God’s way of answering the prayers of many people, prayed over the course of many years. It’s awesome to see that God has given her His best, that He has carefully prepared a man uniquely suited to minister to—and be ministered to by—my little sister.

For all of these things, I am deeply and truly grateful. And yet…it hurts to see the boxes stacked in the corner of our bedroom…to know that in six weeks, she’ll leave—for good. To know that never again will we be just two sisters walking hand-in-hand under the moonlight, wondering aloud about an unknown future. To know that when I come back to the home place from now on, her bed will be empty…that there won’t be any more of those long sister talks into the wee hours of the night.

I will miss all of those things keenly. And yet, I would not for a moment turn back the hands of time. So on her wedding day, I will stand beside her with a smile on my face and tears in my heart, like sisters do, and I will rejoice in her joy and share in her laughter and send her off with much love to begin a new life with another…and it will hurt, but it will also be good, and right, and beautiful. And I’ll always be glad it happened the way it did.

2010-11-22T20:35:00.001-08:00

I was in the library on Thursday, before coming home for Thanksgiving break on Friday. It’s quite possible that I may have been working on an assignment for philosophy, or for any number of other classes. However that may be, I distinctly remember that I was attempting to study.

On my left was a little Kenyan dude named Vincent, who was sitting there with his perky little dreadlocks sticking out all over the place as he worked feverishly on his computer, a look of focused concentration on his face. With him was a decidedly not-Kenyan friend, a little blonde-haired blue-eyed kid named Ian who was supposed to be assiduously taking notes and learning a great deal about the mysterious world of higher mathematics from the enlightened Vincent.

We were all studying, in some sense or another (ok, ok, Ian may have been merely pretending). But occasionally, one or the other of us would lean over into the other’s cubicle and make a joke, a smart comment, or a helpful suggestion. We all had class at 3:35, however, and thus as that fateful hour drew nearer, we all began shuffling stuff into our bookbags to leave.

Ian had been making jabs at Vincent for no particular reason during this packing process, and as we were pushing back our chairs to leave, he attempted to get me to take his side by nodding in my direction and then saying to Vincent, “Dude, she hates your guts!”

I decided that perhaps Ian was in need of some instruction regarding appropriate social interaction, and thus, in order to take advantage of this teachable moment, leaned over to explain to him that there is a difference between an attack on a behavior and an attack on a person.

Vincent, however, was not in the mood for teachable moments. Slamming one fist on the desk in front of him, he bounced slightly out of his chair, black dreadlocks bobbing as he said with great conviction, “That’s right! You preach it, sistah, and I will collect the offerings after!”

Needless to say…that was the end of any serious point in the conversation. But I left feeling richer…because I am SO going to use that line somewhere in the next month. Maybe on someone I barely know to give them the impression I’m Pentecostal…

2010-10-06T14:13:00.000-07:00

As part of an education at Liberty University, each student is required to put in a certain number of hours of community service each semester. Part of my community service is to sit at the local public library each week and take people’s blood pressures. And I happen to wear a white lab coat while doing it. Which apparently qualifies me to answer questions on anything from blood pressure to parenting how-tos. It is incredible to me that simply donning a white lab coat instantly makes one a medical guru.

News flash: they sell white lab coats at Goodwill. I saw them there. So I know. And that means that anybody or his brother or his uncle’s cousin’s monkey could go and purchase a white lab coat for approximately $3.00. (They might charge the monkey more than that for coming in without shirt or shoes).

And people would assume upon the authority of the white lab coat that its occupant was somehow qualified to pass out medical information (or create large chemical explosions…people in white lab coats do that too, I think).

It sort of made me wonder about how much stock I personally put in appearances.

Am I more ready to take advice from the man behind the pulpit simply because he’s there, behind the pulpit, in a suit? Do I respect someone’s opinion more depending on the school he graduated from, the kind of clothes he’s dressed in, or the kind of car he drives?

Do I say I believe in absolute truth and live as though I believe it’s conditional, relative, and situational?

In my friendships, am I partial to those who dress better, talk smarter, and appear to have it all together? Do I look beyond what’s merely skin deep? Do I take the time to know the heart hidden beneath the suit? If not, shame on me. That makes me little different than the medically uneducated who religiously consult quack doctors and drink large amounts of snake oil. Or the Biblically illiterate “Christians” who naively accept as truth anything which proceeds from the pulpit. Or the annoying mosquitoes that refuse to be repelled by bug spray. Wait, maybe not that last one.

But you get the picture.

Christ says in Luke 6:45 that a man speaks “out of the abundance of his heart.” What we say reveals the content of our character, the depth of our thinking, and the motives of our heart.

It’s time to move beyond the immature fascination with the white lab coat and really listen to what people are saying…forget how they look. Is their character good, are their thought processes biblical, and are their motives honorable?

Life is too short to refuse to go deep in our relationships, dealing with the sometimes-ugly realities rather than our comfortable assumptions about people. May we all learn to listen…with our brains turned on and our hearts intensely compassionate.

Solitary Sundays...

2010-10-03T20:51:00.000-07:00

This morning I drove to church. Alone. It’s the first time in a good while that I’ve gone to worship the Lord by myself, and somehow, there was something almost painful about the solitude of the car ride. I guess it’s just that I’ve gotten accustomed to the reality of worshiping God in the company of friends. And this morning, when the friends were all busy elsewhere, I suddenly realized how large a part each one of them has come to play in this day that I claim belongs to the Lord alone.

As I drove, listening to the radio playing in the background, and absent-mindedly glancing at the other drivers on the road, I wondered silently to myself why it is that we, as humans, are often times so afraid to face the harsh reality of being alone.

What are we afraid of? I whispered. What am I afraid of? What is it about myself that I’m unable to face in solitude and silence? Am I running? Am I trying to crowd out the voice of conviction? Is God attempting to speak, and am I really listening?

I glanced into my rearview mirror and saw a sporty little blue Corvette preparing to whiz by me on the left. I shook my head.

We live in such a state of frenzy that we don’t allow ourselves time to think…to listen, I thought ruefully.

Over on the right shoulder lay a deer—dead, bloated, swollen with decay under the rays of the October sun.

Maybe that’s what we’re afraid of, I whispered. Afraid of being separated from the pack, of falling victim to our circumstances, of being forgotten, of being insignificant…of being left to rot while life goes on all around us.

It’s true. As humans, we desperately want someone to care. To care about the individual within us, to care about our circumstances, to care about the burdens of our heart, to care about the emotional wounds and the psychological scars…we yearn to encounter someone who loves deeply enough to come alongside us with Christ-like patience and humility, and—upon seeing us lying there in the mud with bloody knees and tear-stained faces—who will have the compassion to reach down, grab our hand, and pull us to our feet again, reassuring us that the race can be won, that the goal is in sight, and that the battle is worth fighting.

As I watched the deer fade into the distance behind my car, I was struck with the realization that if indeed this was what I wanted, then doubtless everyone else wrestles with that same yearning, on some level or another.

I head something whisper, in the back of my mind, that this desire—perhaps the most intimate longing of our hearts—is filled not by seeking out those who will give us attention, but by first seeking the heart of God, and then seeking to meet the needs in the hearts of others...

And so it was that God placed me this morning beside a young woman who was frightened, shy, and alone…a beautiful fragile soul in need of a reassuring smile and some words of encouragement.

I had to laugh about the whole situation as I drove home—alone—after the service. Because God is so much more capable of meeting our real needs than we can even imagine. And He's so faithful to stretch us outside of our comfort zones to show us our weaknesses as well as our strengths...

Hallelujah. What a Saviour.

Quote of the Day

2010-09-30T11:01:00.000-07:00

"By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you'll be happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher." --Socrates

If this were really true, there would be a whole lot more miserable people philosophizing. It appears, however, that they are just...miserable.

2010-09-28T20:07:00.000-07:00

Inspiration comes in many, many different forms. One of the people who has always been most inspiring to me on rainy days is Dave Barry. So I'm sharing some of the profound statements that inspired me today.

"Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy, overweight Protestants, today it's open to anybody who owns hideous clothing."

"Dogs feel very strongly that they should always go with you in the car, in case the need should arise for them to bark violently at nothing right in your ear."

"Eating rice cakes is like chewing on a foam coffee cup, only less filling."

"Geographically, Ireland is a medium-sized rural island that is slowly but steadily being consumed by sheep."

"It always rains on tents. Rainstorms will travel thousands of miles, against prevailing winds for the opportunity to rain on a tent."

"Life is anything that dies when you stomp on it."

"Magnetism, as you recall from physics class, is a powerful force that causes certain items to be attracted to refrigerators."

"My problem with chess was that all my pieces wanted to end the game as soon as possible."

"Skiing combines outdoor fun with knocking down trees with your face."

"The leading cause of death among fashion models is falling through street grates."

"The simple truth is that balding African-American men look cool when they shave their heads, whereas balding white men look like giant thumbs."

"The word user is the word used by the computer professional when they mean idiot."

"We'll try to cooperate fully with the IRS, because, as citizens, we feel a strong patriotic duty not to go to jail."

2010-09-23T22:12:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, I was driving down the highway when I suddenly became painfully aware of the fact that my car was running a bit low on petrol. However, as this is America, there are gas stations everywhere. So Thea pulled into the closets BP station and inserted the magic wand into her car before heading inside to talk to the nice little man who stands behind the counter and gets paid to take people’s money.

As I was exiting the gas station, a mildly-stunning black dude appeared from somewhere and held the door for me. Charming. I was touched. Well, I was almost touched. But I WAS appropriately grateful for his gesture of gentlemanliness, and I told him so. That apparently is not normal.

He looked at me hard, and then got a really big grin. “Are you single?”

I thought I heard him wrong. I thought he’d asked if I was ill, but I wasn’t sure, so I asked him to please repeat.

And then I wished I hadn’t.

What is up with this?! I can only speculate that the hands of Cupid’s clock have finally landed on that magical month in which it is suddenly appropriate for college girls to be randomly propositioned by unknown strangers in fast food joints and gas station parking lots.

I laughed, told him I was, and that he should have a wonderful night, and then I hopped in my trusty car and drove away. And as I drove, I thought of all the things that I could have and perhaps should have said:

“Are you single?”

“Well, yeah, because…oh, well I might as well just tell you. You remember Mike Tyson, the boxer? Yeah. That ear biting thing? He kinda…got that from me. Bad habit. Just haven’t been able to kick it. Most guys just…don’t understand that. So yeah, I’m still single.” (followed by a puzzled shrug)

Or I could have given him the clueless stupid stare look for a torturously long moment…and then said, “um, duh!” before turning and getting in my car.

Or I could have chuckled, shook my head a little bit, and assured him that if he would just brush his teeth a little more often, he wouldn’t have to resort to such desperate measures for finding a date.

But I didn’t do any of those things, because deep down, I labor under the delusion that social interactions ought to be governed by some undefined standard of normalcy, simply for the sake of not causing needless psychological damage to unsuspecting strangers...

Of dreams and nightmares...

2010-09-19T15:53:00.000-07:00

Supposedly we always dream when we sleep. We simply don’t normally happen to remember what we dream—at least, I know I don’t. But last night was exceptional—even a bit startling—for the fact that the dreams lived on in memory even after I’d awakened.

Maybe it had to do with the fact that I got up at 4:30 to bake scones…or that the essay I’d been working on the night before had slightly twisted some of the synapses in my brain. It was only about 5:30 in the morning when the scones had been safely removed from the oven and left on the counter to cool, so I decided to catch forty winks before seven o’clock rolled around.

I entered the dream world without realizing it…sometimes everything is so realistic you can’t help but fancy that it’s happening in real time as it plays out in your head. I remember standing on the doorstep of my house, clutching a 300 lb. book bag in one hand and fumbling with my keys as I tried to open the door. When I touched the handle, I found that it wasn’t locked. Strange, I thought…although sometimes Stephanie forgets to lock the door if she’s the last one to leave…

My car was the only one in the driveway…which meant that I was the only one home. I remember walking down the hallway in the dark towards my room, still holding the book bag. I remember putting my hand on the doorknob to enter my room. I remember the door swinging open, and I remember noticing that the covers on my bed were lying in a heap in the middle. That was made when I left this morning, I thought, the alarm bells beginning to go off in my head. Something felt off about the house…there was an eeriness I couldn’t explain. Who had been in my room? It was at that instant that I felt—or sensed—the pressure of someone on the other side of the bedroom door.

I remember feeling a sense of utter panic as I realized that there was no one within earshot. I jerked my hand off the doorknob, and stepped back, screaming, as a man in a black trench coat and a ski mask yanked the bedroom door open from the inside. I turned to run, and slipped on the linoleum…and then he was standing over me, and I was staring down the barrel of a sawed-off shotgun…

And then I woke up, sweating, mumbling feverishly in my sleep, with my heart pounding away inside of my chest as if it was trying to escape. It took me about five minutes to realize that it had been a dream…part of me thought I’d been kidnapped and was now in a body bag being shipped to California, or something…

The most disturbing thing about the whole scenario is that as I lay awake pondering, I realized that if I were in fact placed in that situation…I would be just as helpless as I felt in that dream. God, are You warning me? Are You trying to tell me what’s coming? I asked silently, staring at the dark ceiling.

Was it forewarning? I don’t know. I honestly don’t. I sincerely hope that it wasn’t premonition—but if it was, then I hope that I remember in that moment that God has a sovereign purpose in all that He allows to happen…and that I’m merely an instrument with whom He can do as He wills.

I drifted off to sleep again…and dreamt that a cookie monster sneaked into the kitchen and ate all of the scones while I slept. When I woke up, that one hadn’t come true either. Phew.

baby steps & childhood scars

2010-09-19T15:51:00.000-07:00

I have a good friend who was raised in a highly dysfunctional home. She’d experimented with cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, cutting, abusive relationships, and a number of other self-destructive behaviors by the time she had hit her sixteenth birthday. Her home life had disintegrated, her personal life was meaningless, and she was drowning in an ocean of depression—possibly going under for the last time—when Christ touched her heart and transformed her mind like He’s so very good at doing.

But last night she said something that rocked my world. We were sitting next to each other on a couch, talking about life, and she looked over at me, and sadly remarked, “Thea, sometimes I think I would trade my salvation if it meant that by doing so I could just have experienced a normal childhood.”

I was stunned. Shocked. The magnitude of what she’d just said stopped me in my tracks.

“Whoa, hold on,” I said slowly, silently praying for wisdom as I gathered my thoughts. “Let me explain something to you. Each one of us has a different home situation. Some people have what looks like a ‘normal’ family. Others of us grow up in homes that are clearly dysfunctional. But there’s something that I need you to understand: All of us grow up broken. Talk to any man or woman that grew up in an apparently perfect family, and they will tell you that they feel scarred, that they’ve had their hearts ripped open and trampled on, that they’ve felt dirty, and defiled, and worthless…because that’s what life does to everyone. Yeah, if we grow up in messed up homes, we feel more messed up. The scars are bigger, the pain runs deeper, and the sin is more obvious, perhaps. But those of us who grew up in idyllic families are broken in many of the same ways. Ask anyone on this planet, regardless of their home situation, and they will tell you that life hurts. It’s excruciating. It scars you. And sometimes the very pain of the brokenness of life causes you to doubt yourself, your worth, the love of others, their character, God’s heart...but in the end, it’s the pain of life that brings us—weeping and hopeless—to the foot of the cross where we find redemption and healing. No childhood, however perfect, has the capacity to spare us the pain of life. It’s only in redemption and forgiveness that we find the meaning and the joy that helps us to make sense of our childhood.”

I don’t know that she believed me. But as I thought about it later, I realized that sometimes God causes us to say words not because someone else needs to hear truth, but because we need to hear those words ourselves. And that night, I needed to see the events of my childhood from His perspective.

Memory Lane...

2010-09-14T17:30:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it’s difficult not to look back with heartfelt longing at what once was…to want to return and relive our sweetest and most meaningful memories.

Today was one of those sort of dreamy days when I look back with wistful eyes at some of those significant childhood moments…and I must remind myself that I’m not that child anymore. Those days have served their purpose, and they have passed into history…for better or for worse.

While there is a part of me that would summon them back—a part of me that wants to curl up in the big armchair and be a child again in my mother’s arms, or spend an hour out in the garden picking beans with all my little siblings yammering around me in the heat and occasionally breaking out into tomato-splattering competitions (there’s a reason our barn was always red)—I must submit to the fact that while those moments have left an indelible mark on my character and my person, they’re not a part of my current reality…and God knew what He was doing when He planned life that way.

And so we’re called to move forward with both eyes eagerly and expectantly fixed on the path that stretches away into the distance before us, all the while acknowledging that we’ve been shaped, chiseled, molded, and strengthened by all that lies behind us…

But be that as it may…I think I’m gonna go get a big Snickers bar and whip out my old journals tonight to take a walk down memory lane.

the Problem of Pain...

2010-09-11T09:59:00.000-07:00

This week, I had the privilege of listening to several online episodes of Ravi Zacharias’ program, Let My People Think. I have always valued Ravi’s wisdom, his insight, and his compassionate heart for humanity, and I was challenged this week by one of his itinerant pastors, Arun Andrews, who did a two-part series called “My God, My God, Why?” He addresses what he calls “the memories we cannot erase, and the feelings we cannot escape.” At one point in his address, he remarked, “There is this pain we go through in which we feel that life is not fair to us, and we discover, as this pain strikes us, that we are locked in a struggle of sleepless nights, the desire to hide away from all people, the scary nightmare of depressive thoughts and even suicide, and the realization comes to us that time does not heal—it only makes the reflection deeper.”

I wondered for a moment if that were really so. Is it true, that when we say, “time heals all wounds,” we are merely lying to ourselves, trying to create an illusion of future relief to help us cope with the agony of the pain we are experiencing in that moment?

It’s September 11. Nine years have passed since the day when hundreds of men, women, and children stared in disbelieving horror at the image on their television screens and realized that their lives had changed forever. Maybe they lost a father, a brother, a sister, a mother…or maybe it was simply their illusion of security that had been forever shattered. Does time heal those wounds? Does it ease the pain of remembering? Do we forget what it felt like to experience that kind of desperate agony—the moment we realize that someone we loved is never coming home again, never going to walk through that front door and smile, never going to say the words “I love you.” Does time heal that pain? Or does it merely change it?

In speaking of suffering, Arun brought up the story of Elie Wiesel, one of the young men who, by virtue of his being Jewish, was taken to the living hell of Auschwitz…and then Buchenwald…and somehow survived.

As he remembers the horror of passing through the gates of Auschwitz for the first time, Elie says this:
"Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.
Never shall I forget the smoke.
Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw turned into smoke under a silent night sky.
Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.
Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.
Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God himself.
Never."

Does time heal this kind of pain? I don’t think it can.

Elie speaks of a time when he was made to watch the execution of three Jews within the camp…two men, and a small boy. The three of them had been hung, while others in the camp were forced to look on.

Elie describes it thus:
"The two men were no longer alive. Their tongues were hanging out, swollen and bluish. But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing...
And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes. And we were forced to look at him at close range. He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet extinguished.

Behind me, I heard the same man asking:
"For God's sake, where is God?"
And from within me, I heard a voice answer:
"Where He is? This is where--hanging here from this gallows..."

Arun points out that such, indeed, is the nature of our God. Not that He ignores our anguish, or refuses to feel our pain…but that He suffers with us…that He is the God who is right there, hanging from the gallows.

Does it lessen our pain to know that we have a God who understands and experiences it with us? Perhaps not. But if should give us a sense of purpose and hope in the midst of that pain. And it should motivate us to DO something with that suffering. Elie expresses that better than I could:

"Better that one heart be broken a thousand times in the retelling …if it means that a thousand other hearts need not be broken at all."

It is our most painful moments which most powerfully transform us, which change us into something we were not capable of before. For Elie, the horror of Auschwitz was the agony which drove him to challenge the way men think:

"We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph."

"I've been fighting my entire adult life for men and women everywhere to be equal and to be different. But there is one right I would not grant anyone. And that is the right to be indifferent."

"We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must - at that moment - become the center of the universe."

For each one of us, there are going to be many moments in life when we are confronted with a situation where our actions determine the spiritual, emotional, or physical fate of a human being. And we need to take that seriously. That situation needs to become the center of our universe. For most of us, the problems we deal with may not be as dramatic as the pervasive horror of Auschwitz, but may we have the courage to stand up and testify for truth in the face of whatever twisted darkness we are called to confront…because our faith is supposed to change us, to make us different…and cause us to care in a way that leads to action.

Weekends in Lynchburg...

2010-09-04T18:17:00.001-07:00

This post is dedicated to my parents, on the odd chance that they might someday suffer from a fit of morbid curiosity and wonder what on earth their firstborn daughter is doing with her time these days.

This is my bookshelf. It is filled with my best friends. We spend LOTS of time together every day. These friends are inanimate, which is both good and bad...good in that they don't talk back, and thus I'm hopefully not picking up bad manners from them, but bad in that they have no personality whatsoever, which gets rather tiresome when you try to hold a conversation with one (something I've been doing more often of late, I confess).

This is...my bed. I make it a point to try to use it every night, unless I need to spend more time with my best friends.

This is my desk. This is where my friends and I mostly hang out, although occasionally we take a fieldtrip to the library. It's very exciting there too.

This is me, with one of my best friends. He's a beeg beeg one, who hopefully will impart prodigious amounts of valuable information to my sadly unedumacated head. (His name is Theo, because he's a theology textbook).

I'm thinking...next weekend? I'm gonna actually leave my room.

Life is about what you believe, right? Of course right. And next week, I believe I will be so organized that I will have no homework to do on Saturday. It will be amazing. I shall be free to do something interesting like...go get a job. Ooo, that would be both fascinating and lucrative...I can hardly wait.

2010-09-04T11:03:00.000-07:00

Last night, I had an opportunity to spend some time with a few of my favorite Liberty students when Fish Hsu invited a couple of Varsity teammates over to her apartment for a taste of real Chinese cooking (she told us later that they toned it down considerably for our sheltered American palates).

One of the things that I LOVE about spending time with foreign exchange students is their English. They say the cutest things!

As we were sitting around Fish's living room, marveling over the flavor of several wondrous culinary inventions of whose ingredients we remain entirely uncertain, the topic of conversation turned to the furry little rodentian pet in the corner.

It was a chinchilla, one of those almost squirrel-like animals which were originally native to the Andes mountains in South America, and were presumably transported to the United States to serve as pets because of their exceeding cuteness or their general stupidity, both of which are endearing qualities.

Now, chinchillas very very soft, and rather touchable, and so pretty soon there was a crowd of curious college kids crowded around the cage...and a few of the rather curious college kids have a rambunctious side...so somewhere in the process, a pillow fight started, and the poor chinchilla's cage appeared as though it might end up in the mix.

It was at that point that Fish swooped in to rescue the chinchilla, carrying him off and locking him in the closet.

When she returned, she very solemnly informed us that chinchillas must not be badly frightened, or "they will become psychic!"

Poor Fish. She meant psycho.

She stood there looking mystified while the whole group howled with laughter until we couldn't breathe anymore. For the rest of the night, anytime someone mentioned a psychic chinchilla, it set the whole group off in fits, and Fish would just sit there shaking her head...

2010-09-03T12:33:00.000-07:00

You know, I had so much fun selling plasma the first time that I decided to go back again today and repeat the experiment.

Only, being your typical savy college student, I thought to myself that it might be wise to eat/drink something BEFORE I went this time, to avoid potentially passing out on their nice clean linoleum floor. However, I was coming directly from school, and I'd forgotten to pack anything before I left this morning, so...that's right. Thank You, Lord, for Taco Bell.

I hadn't been at a Taco Bell for...I don't know...a year? I noticed immediately that the staff of this particular place in downtown Lynchburg was remarkably friendly, especially for a fast-food restaurant. Maybe it was just the fact that I was a girl, and I was alone, or maybe I just have "SUCKER" written across my forehead, but either way, I had to kind of chuckle at the enthusiasm of the young man who beamed down upon me with warm benevolence as he proudly handed me two tacos.

All I wanted was to get something with a little protein, grab some fluids, eat, and then get out, but no sooner had I sat down at a little table off to one side than the resident PR man came striding proudly up to my table. He must have been in his early seventies, and his name was Irvin. He asked me if I was from these parts, and when I said I haled from Wisconsin, his face lit up and he proceeded to tell me enthusiastically everything that he knew about Wisconsin from his brief tour through the state.

His enthusiasm and earnestness were endearingly cute, so I kept him going with a few questions here and there as I ate my tacos. I think perhaps he was lonely, and I've a bit of a soft spot for lonely old people (hey, some day I might be one myself, you know). He stood beside me talking animatedly, with me nodding appreciatively since I couldn't get a word in edgewise anyway, until his sense of duty pulled him away to speak with other guests of the establishment.

As soon as Irvin had moved on, the young man who had so smilingly handed me my order came breezing out from behind the counter and politely asked if he could take my tray, if I was through with it? I smiled, and said he might, and marveled to myself at receiving that kind of service at a Taco Bell. As he walked away with my tray, he called back over his shoulder, "I'm Jake, by the way."

Hi Jake. Nice to meet you. Thank you for clearing my tray.

I sat for a moment longer, looking out the window at the traffic, enjoying my sweet tea, and pondering the deeper lessons of life.

Irvin came back to chat for a few moments--he was on his second round of the establishment, and the other five people in the place hadn't been much for conversation, apparently.

We talked a few moments, and then Jake came over. Irvin nodded to him proudly, "This is Jake. He's my pupil. I'm teachin' him stuff about PR."

"That's so great," I told Irvin jokingly, "You guys probably know everything there is to know about this place."

Jake nodded, and Irvin just looked slightly confused. A moment later, Irvin wandered off to continue his second round of PR visits, and Jake just came and stood beside my table looking rather awkward.

"Hey," he said finally, "I was wondering if I could call you sometime." He had to repeat it three times before I heard what he said, because he was so nervous he was mumbling, and talking reaaallly quiet.

Inwardly, I was thinking, really? Are we now SO desperate for prospects that we proposition the stray college students who come into Taco Bell?

I joked around with him a little bit, and eventually he realized that despite the fact that I was blonde and feel comfortable talking to pretty much anyone, I'm not so naive as to be giving out my phone number to every Joe, Larry, Dick, and Harry and their distant cousins.

So he very generously gave me his phone number instead, and told him that I should just call him. Um, yeah. Definitely will be getting RIGHT on that, buster.

As I drove away, I wondered if I should have taken his humanity a little more seriously...maybe sat him down, asked him some questions, explained why I don't date, told him why it's probably an unwise investment of time to have phone conversations with people one doesn't know the first thing about, and asked him where he was headed in life, what his purpose is, and whether he's ever personally encountered the love and grace and forgiveness of the God who binds up the broken-hearted and comforts the chronically single...

But the other side of my mind told me that it wasn't my place...because he's a guy, and because his motive in asking for my number was probably not that of seeking for genuine conversation with an individual who cares more about his humanity than his gender and the amount he can benchpress.

All in all, it gave me something to think about this afternoon as I watched my lifeblood oozing away into plastic bottles...because in an odd sort of way, it's funny to think about the emotions and drives that make us tick--that cause humans to do the crazy things that we do.

On a different note, musing on how strangely we sometimes behave gives me a new perspective on--and new appreciation for--the patience of my friends and family, and the long-suffering persistence of God as He continues to walk beside each one of us in the long and often tedious process of sanctification...woohoo!

2010-09-01T12:16:00.000-07:00

As a college kid who's still currently in the job search, I've been keeping my eyes open for time-efficient opportunities to earn a little extra gas money. Which is why I found myself in line today to sell plasma. (People do crazy things for money, seriously.)

It was truly a most interesting experience, and one from which I am still apparently recovering as I sit here munching saltines and patting the pretty blue elastic bandage wrapped tourniquet-style around my left elbow.

After a bit of meandering around trying to find the building (this is normal for me...I'm directionally challenged even when armed with Mapquest directions), I discovered a squat looking little brick place in the center of a strip mall that, from the sign outside, was apparently a plasma donation center.

Found the place. Check.

I was greeted inside the door by a jolly plump black matron who squinted one eye at me, raised an eyebrow, and asked, "Did you play basketball? How tall are you? You probably get that question a lot, don't you?"

I told her that I: 1) don't play basketball, 2) am approximately 6'1" tall, and 3) don't get asked about basketball more than ten times on an average day, so no worries...it's a very original question.

This introduction was followed by a barrage of paperwork that lasted about an hour and forty-five minutes...after which point a shriveled little Oriental doctor with a cute little mouse-like face beckoned me into his office to ask...you guessed it! more questions. But he was really nice about it, and asked politely if he could please check a few things (presumably to make sure I wasn't dead or dying...which I wasn't).

Part of the exam is a deep palpation of the kidneys...did I mention that I'm REALLY ticklish? The poor little doctor started palpating my stomach to try to find my kidneys, and I busted out laughing...which of course tightened all of my abdominal muscles, making it impossible for the missing kidneys to be located...

The little Chinese physician cocked his head to one side quizzically, and then nodded understandingly as he said, "It ok! I very ticklish too."

But apparently I passed the physical, because another plump black matron escorted me into the back room, where dozens of squishy green chairs were lined up, some of which were filled with people of all shapes and sizes who had, like myself, chosen to let their lifeblood be drained from them in exchange for filthy lucre.

Everyone was terribly nice, and the whole situation was really almost comical. I began to have second thoughts right about the time that I saw the phlebotomist coming towards my arm with a needle the size of a small ice-pick.

"Um...what gauge is that needle?" I asked, trying to smile nonchalantly.

"It's a 17-gauge," she replied equally nonchalantly. "It has to be big, so we can return your red blood cells to you, because we just keep the plasma."

17? Did she say SEVENTEEN? The biggest I'd ever seen was a 12 gauge, but I nodded, my head keeping time with the flipping of my stomach. You know, Thea, other people are doing it, and it hasn't killed them yet. Except for that little old lady over in the corner. Ok, kidding...she wasn't quite dead yet either.

Once they get the ice pick into your arm, tho, it's really not all that bad. And apparently Liberty students are their primary source of plasma. Now that I think of it, maybe that should tell me something about the intelligence of college students, but...whatever.

I felt pretty good as I walked out, until I got to the door...then I kind of almost passed out, which was fun too, because all the voices suddenly started to sound kind of echoey and really faaar away...and I remember thinking to myself, Self, you should probably sit down...or, as one of my professors likes to say, 'You'll be horizontal veeery soon.'

So I sat down, which was kind of an admission of weakness, but several of the employees bustled over with Gatorade, and the shriveled little Chinese doctor came running in with one of those spinny office chairs and offered to wheel me to my car. Yeah right. I'm approximately twice his height...I mean, never underestimate a Chinaman, but seriously?

I told him I was good, which I was after just a few moments. One of the plump black women placed a concerned hand on my shoulder and told me I should eat something as soon as I got home.

"Oh don't worry," I chirped, "that's one of my favorite things to do!"

She got a taken-aback look on her face, and then she tsked at me, and laughed. "Sure, dat one of yo favorite tings to do. You ain't nothin' but trouble, girl!"

If she only knew the half...my poor parents.

But at that point, I bid all the friendly blood-sucking employees a happy adieu, and came home to eat saltines and drop crumbs on my floor and do homework...in that order.

The summer in review

2010-08-27T19:00:00.000-07:00

Now that I'm officially back at Liberty, I feel like I ought to try to do at least some sort of photo review of the summer. Granted, most of the truly life-changing moments that happened during the past three months didn't look like anything special, and there's no pictures to express all that they meant...but some of my teammates were amazing at capturing the Kodak moments that occurred when the team was together on the weekends. A special thanks to Fish Hsu and Jared Yax for sharing these shots!

This is me and Hannah, who was my cheerleader, my pal, my partner in crime, my sister in Christ, and one of my best friends this summer...only at this point, we were newbies who didn't know each other and had no clue what we were going to find out there in Bedford county...

As the summer went on, the people that I had known nothing of in the beginning began to become my friends...

Sharing a moment with Bethany Lake...

I began to realize that I really, really liked the people on my team. They were stinkin' funny.

I don't remember what I was laughing at in this shot...I just remember that there were lots of laughs any time the team got together.

Several individuals were unfortunate enough to have birthdays while out on the field...so yeah, of COURSE we made them do embarrassing things in front of the whole team.

"Lisa! Over heeeeeerreeee!" Glenn's lucky he still has his nose. Lisa was pretty quick with that stick...and clearly didn't have a real good idea of where that pinata was...

And finally, the last week of our time together, we all took two days to go to Fort Bluff Camp and do some recreational stuff as a team...which was incredible.
Lisa and Adriane discussing something important moments before being launched off the Blob...

Yeah, I'd never done a water slide before...but good grief, I'm from Wisconsin, and it's not hot enough there that you need water slides...up there, we settle for spraying each other with the garden hose.

To be perfectly honest, all of the kids on the team became almost like family to me this summer...we knew each other well enough that sometimes we got on each other's nerves...we knew each other's weaknesses, and we could admire each other's strengths...

...and I think that's why I came to love each one of them almost like siblings.

I'm gonna miss each and every one of them in a different way, but I'm so grateful that God gives us incredible things even when we don't know exactly what we want...that He uses others to fill the needs of our hearts even before we're aware of what those needs really are.

The relationships that I've formed this summer with my teammates are some of the best friendships that I've ever had, and I've been incredibly blessed to be able to serve out there on the field with each one of them. :-)

2010-08-12T20:37:00.000-07:00

Today the words from Aaron Shust's song, "Give Me Words to Speak," kept running through my mind as a prayer...

Lord, give me words to speak...

...to the woman whose father raped her when she was ten, and destroyed her faith in humanity, her belief in God, and her sense of personal worth...

Give me words of comfort to speak to the dad whose wife just left him for another man...

Give me words of wisdom for the woman who doesn't realize that her yelling, screaming, and cursing at her kids is hurting them deeply in ways she can't begin to fathom...

Give me gentle and loving words for the woman whose son was killed in a car crash...who doesn't know how she's gonna be able to go on.

Give me gracious words...and O God, give me Your words...because I have nothing left to give of myself.

2010-08-11T21:10:00.000-07:00

Crazy how much can change in a mere four weeks! This is now the middle of week twelve on the book field...where on earth does the time go?!

Two of the memorable moments from the past four weeks:

I sat down with a man who had lost his wife to leukemia…she had died two weeks before I knocked on his door that morning. When he showed me her picture, and started to cry, I lost it…sometimes all you can do is put your arms around somebody and cry with them. He’d lost two of his three children within the recent past…a daughter to cancer, and five months later, his other daughter had been murdered in her home…and then leukemia took his wife. He was one of the most broken-hearted men I’ve ever met, but in the midst of the tears, of the suffering, of his anguish, there was a quiet gentleness about his grief that bore testimony to the fact that our God is a comforter of the broken-hearted. We talked for a long time...he let me read the eulogy that his surviving daughter had written for her mother’s funeral…and then we talked about his wife, who she was, how much he missed her…and as we talked, we cried. He told me I reminded him of his wife, that I looked like she had when they’d first met. He insisted upon giving me a jacket that his wife had loved…and made me promise that when I wore it, I’d think of her and pray for him. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to wear the coat, in all honesty, because I can’t even look at it without tearing up…

On a completely different note, my baby sister, who also happens to be my best friend, my hero, and one of the most amazingly Godly young women I’ve ever met, became rather suddenly engaged to one of the coolest young men I’ve ever known…which I’m pretty excited about, although her cute little text message (“Just wanted to let you know that I’m engaged!”) rather shocked me in the beginning (just being honest, sis!).

My hearty congratulations to Joel Flage, one of the few guys to whom I’d be willing to relinquish someone as amazing as my little sister. If he wasn’t a pretty awesome guy in his own right, he never would have had a shot, so all I can really do is tell him well done. *laugh* And Michelle, just wanted to let you know that I love you, and I’ll miss you like crazy, but I’m awfully happy for you, and I’m really, really blessed to have been given such an incredible little sister. Not lying when I say you’re my hero. *grin*

Lessons from the book field…Week 8!

2010-07-20T10:25:00.000-07:00

Every week for the past eight weeks, I’ve had the privilege of meeting hundreds of people in their homes, of talking with them about their families, their pets, their careers, their relationships, their heartaches—in short, the Varsity internship has been an amazing opportunity to listen, to look myriads of people in the eye—men, women and children—and hear about everything that they’re most passionate about in life (even if that happens to be the two pet turtles out on the front porch—they kinda smelled, but they obviously had thrilled one little four-year-old heart to bits). I’ve had the opportunity to see how people live, how their decisions play out in their lives, and how their attitudes affect their destinies. In some ways, it feels like I’ve learned more about people and about communication in the past eight weeks than I had in the 22 years previous to this summer, but I know I have a whole lot more to pick up in the weeks to come.

This past week, though, I met two women who blessed my heart in a special way.

First was Shelley, the middle-aged Catholic lady who met me at the door at 7:45 on a Thursday morning with a bubbly smile and a contagious enthusiastic giggle. Within two seconds of meeting her, I could already tell that she was in love with life, that she’d made a decision to be up-beat and enthusiastic about anything and everything that happened to her each day, regardless of whether she liked it or not. She was invigorating to be around. Just having her smile at you and seeing the twinkle in her sparkly blue eyes made you feel as if life was infinitely better than you’d ever dared to imagine. When I stood up to go, she turned to me quickly and said, “Honey, it’s so hot out there! Can I get you a bottle of water?!”

I told her she really needn’t bother, cuz I had a thermos in my car, but she insisted…and when she came back, she placed an ice cold glass bottle in my hand and handed me something wrapped in tinfoil.

“Dinner,” she winked, “I made it. It’s zucchini bread, but it’s great for the road.”

As I drove out of her very loooong driveway (they’re all the rage here in Tennessee…keeps the dogs from chasing so many cars), I was honestly and sincerely touched.

“Someday,” I whispered to myself, “I wanna be remembered for being that kind of person…”

The second lady was Karen, an equally vivacious little lady. It was early on a Saturday morning when we met…I’d accidentally waked her up with my knock on her back door, but she graciously invited me to sit out on the screened in porch with her. As she talked, and as I listened, I began to realize that she was gracious and bubbly by choice—she’d had awful, terrible things happen to her over and over again throughout her life, but she was one of the most joyful people I’d ever met.

As I drove off that time, a couple of things were beginning to churn around in my head.

What makes these two different? I asked myself, jogging my steering wheel slightly to the right in order to hit a centipede. They haven’t had better lives. They’ve just had better attitudes. They’ve chosen to view things in a positive light, and it’s changed the way they view their circumstances.

Goodness. This was good. Could it possibly be that one of the key differences between those who succeed in life and those who don’t is simply the way they view their circumstances and what they do as a result of the way they view them?!

With all of the families that I meet each week, one of the main differences that I see between those who are going places, doing things, and making stuff happen and those who are simply actively failing at life is their level of emotional maturity. Emotionally mature people know themselves, their tendencies, and their weaknesses, and they don’t hide behind their emotional state instead of taking responsibility for their actions and their words. Their marriages last, because their word means something—it’s not based on an emotion, but on the facts.

Unfortunately, I also meet a lot of folks who haven’t ever learned to rule their emotions. They make good decisions when they’re emotionally high, and they make bad ones when they’re down in the dumps. They might be on their fifth, sixth, or even seventh marriage. They sometimes have five kids by five different guys, or they have a spouse who’s in prison for meth dealing. Ultimately, they’re often living miserable lives that are a direct result of their emotionally immature decision making.

What is it that makes women like Shelley and Karen different? I’d like to think that at least part of it is just that they’ve learned to rule their emotions, instead of letting their emotions rule them. And I’m convinced that each and every person out there is capable of learning the same lesson—but it takes work.

May God give us the guts and the gumption to buckle down and learn to act, speak, and live as emotionally mature individuals—in our relationships, in our work, in our free time...and possibly in our driving habits? I think I probably need to stop chasing squirrels and opossums with my car…

Independence Day Musings

2010-07-05T18:59:00.000-07:00

Week seven on the book field…wow, half way through the summer already! There have been so many incredible moments shared with a vast array of different kinds of folks during these past several weeks. Sometimes I come in off the field at the end of a long day just shaking my head incredulously, laughing, and thinking, “Really?!”

Twice in the past month I’ve had people offer to adopt me (but I like my own parents quite a lot, so I think I’m good). Yesterday I met a very solid and very large pit bull who apparently demonstrates his affection for strange visitors by bodyslamming them—wow. He almost knocked the wind out of me…but it was so unexpected that it completely cracked me up, and I laughed the whole way down the driveway as I left the house.

Then there was the little old lady with the highly over-protective German shepherd, who came zipping out through her doggy door to latch onto my tennis shoe with a heart-stopping growl and an emphatic shake of his head. He let go of my shoe after a few seconds, and then started circling me, looking for the next chompable location on my person…I was just about to knock him out by hitting him rather hard on the head with my bookcase when his elderly owner tottered out through the screen door to restrain him. Not gonna lie, it took me about five minutes to get my hands to stop shaking enough to write. But the owner was super nice. I love grandmas.

I’ve met more people out here in Tennessee than I have in the whole year previously, I do believe, but it’s been amazing, challenging, heart wrenching, and encouraging all at the same time.

For example, several days ago, I met David, the Hazmat guy, who told me that his job was to clean up biohazardous materials. From first impressions, he wasn’t exactly the type of guy that you’d expect to have a serious, compassionate, and sensitive side. There were tattoos all over his arms, a cigarette hanging from his lips, muscles rippling all over his arms, and a somewhat hardened look on his bronzed face as he met me at the door. As we stood on the doorstep and talked, however, I began to realize yet again that there’s much more to a person than what meets the eye. We talked for almost an hour…because sometimes, people just need to say what’s on their mind, and they want someone to listen. So I listened.

I had come to his door not knowing anything about him, his past, or his future—simply to see if he would be interested in something that pertained to the Bible. Sometimes, though, when you start asking questions, you uncover a whole can of worms…

“Thea, you know what it means when somebody works in Hazmat?”

I admitted to him that I didn’t.

“Most people don’t know this, but the human body is considered a biohazardous material. I’m the guy who goes in and decontaminates before the paramedics get there when somebody pulls out in front of a semi on their motorcycle and gets smeared all over the road. And I believe in God, but honestly, I struggle a lot with Christians…Thea, I see all these perfect Christian families…with their perfect marriage, and their perfect kids, and their perfect church. I see those perfect families go to church every Sunday, and go back to their perfectly manicured houses, and take their three perfect children to all their baseball and soccer games…and then I’m the guy who gets to go in and clean the brains off the wall when that perfect church wife goes ballistic and blows her husband’s head off because she finds out he’s a pedophile who’s addicted to kiddy porn, you know? And I see this all the time. So who are Christians kidding, you know? Where is God in all of that? Where is God when a woman takes her two year old and puts him in the oven and we find him with third degree burns over ninety percent of his body? My kids are the only thing that keeps me grounded. If it wasn’t for them, I think I’d just go blow my head off, because people are so horrifically, unimaginably awful…I drive down the street on my motorcycle, and I know that people judge me because of how I look, but when I look at them, I just look and think, ‘yeah, you’re another hypocrite,’—somebody who’s pretending to have it all together, but who’s actually a whole lot worse than I am, because they’re just pretending to be somebody they’re not, when at least I’m honest about who and what I am.”

Then he looked me right in the eye for a long minute and asked if I thought the Bible was actually true. Inwardly, I was crying…because I recognized that here was a guy who had seen so much hurt, so much pain, so much brokenness that he didn’t know how to handle it anymore, or how to respond. And as I answered, I prayed silently that somehow, in the midst of the darkness, God would provide David with a glimmer of hope—a glimpse of His own compassionate heart for humanity.

“David,” I said earnestly, “I don’t know what you believe about God. But I believe that God is perfect, and that He has a plan for each person, and that He put us here on earth for a reason. And I believe that it’s consistent with the nature of God for Him to provide us with a book of instructions that explains what He expects from His children. See, one of the beautiful things about our God is that not only is He holy, but He is just…and because He’s just, He doesn’t demand something of us without telling us what His expectation is. And so yes, I believe the Bible is true, and I believe it was given to us because our God is so compassionate and so loving and so just that He wouldn’t place us here without giving us guidance about how we’re to live…”

It was an intense conversation, and parts of it were pretty dark and pretty emotional…but as I left, there was a wistful sort of smile on his face, and shaking my hand firmly, he said softly, “Thanks. You’ve given me a lot to think about. I think I’m just gonna sit out here on the porch for a while and process.”

As I drove away, all I could see was his dark silhouette against the white frame of the house. He waved until I was out of sight.

Then there was Susan, who met me at the door and firmly announced that she had no use for any sort of Bible, because she was an atheist. Tennessee is in the middle of the Bible belt, and thus I was a wee bit taken aback at her announcement, but I like to know the why behind peoples statements, so I decided to press her a little further.

“Susan, I respect where you stand, and I’m not questioning that, but may I ask how it was that you reached that position? I mean, was there a time in your past when someone left you feeling betrayed, or personally attacked, and it just kind of turned you against the whole concept of organized religion?”

She blinked twice, and looked at me incredulously. Inwardly, I laughed, realizing that she hadn’t quite expected that.

“Well, Thea, it wasn’t really any particular person. It’s just that I work with a lot of Christians, and I don’t see their faith making any difference in their lives. You know, if they were nicer better people, or something, I would maybe consider the idea that God exists, but the majority of the Christians that I know aren’t nearly as nice as the non-Christians I work with, so why would I want any part of that? I mean, it really doesn’t make any difference in their lives, so why would I want that? I used to board horses, and one of my clients was a pastor…I was really excited when I found out, cuz I thinking, ‘Oh, finally, somebody who will be able to answer my questions intelligently,’ but he was a complete jerk, and that was kind of the last straw, because I just realized that it doesn’t even make a difference for the ones who are in leadership.”

Ouch. Big ouch. What hurts more is that I know she’s right. As a door-to-door sales rep, I meet lots of different kinds of people, and by and large, the pastors and the pastors’ wives have been the most obnoxious to deal with, while the Bible-believing church folks are often times more suspicious, less welcoming, and less Christ-like than the Buddhists and Native American spirit worshippers I meet. What’s up with that?!

As a church, as the body of Christ, we have some serious work to do in the area of accurately representing Christ’s message and His character. Don’t sick your dog on me and slam your door in my face and then invite me to go to your church, because seriously, at that point, there’s absolutely no reason why I’d ever want to darken the door of the sanctuary where you claim to meet God and be changed by Him. I grieve with the many folks out here who are desperately looking to see changed lives, and are met instead with a cheap counterfeit Christianity that consists of going to church three times a week so that you can tell folks where you go, how spiritual you are, and how you simply don’t have time to care about them and their problems because you’re so involved with your church sewing circle.

We’re called to live life in Christ, and to live it abundantly. And we need to put some serious thought into what that looks like, and follow that serious thought with some serious action. God never intended for His children to live lives of quiet, frustrated mediocrity. May we never be content with the good when God yearns for us to experience His best, and may we always remember that in as much as we have done it unto one of the least of these His brethren, we have done it unto Him…

2010-06-07T19:56:00.001-07:00

Oh. My. Goodness.

You run into the craziest things out here on the field. It's now the beginning of week three on the book field. To date, Thea has experienced many firsts:

1) first time to see a rattlesnake up close and personal
2) first sighting of a dead armadillo--roadkill makes me laugh
3) first summer where being attacked by egotistical chihuahuas has become a daily norm
4) first summer where being covered in dog slobber is just to be expected
5) first time I've sweated this much for this many days consecutively--Tennessee is HOT
6) First time I've met so many remarkable and amazingly friendly people in such a short time span

There are certain days when I doubt my own sanity for undertaking this internship--and then there are moments when you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it's all worth it.

Two days ago, I pulled up in front of a house and went up to the door to speak with the matron...but I noticed her hands were shaking, so I asked her if she was alright...

Turns out, her twenty-year-old son had gone missing the night before...he'd never showed up at the friend's house where he was planning to camp out for the night, and since he'd disappeared, she and her daughter had been receiving strange phone calls saying that someone was trying to call them collect...only when they tried to put the call through, the line would just go dead every time.

Then there was the house where the grizzled old smoker who answered the door told me that his daughter had been killed in a bad accident when she was 12...he'd been driving...it was raining that night...they were on their way to church so she could sing in the children's choir...but they hydroplaned coming around a curve...and there was a car in the on-coming lane...and his daughter and her little friend didn't make it. He spent several weeks in intensive care, drifting in and out of consciousness. He told me that one time he woke up, and Jesus was standing at the foot of his bed...and his daughter and her friend were there, and they were laughing, and they told him that they loved him, and gave him flowers...and then they turned and disappeared into the wall.

Tears were streaming down my face as I listened to him talk...I can't imagine how much it would hurt to go through something like that. But at the same time, I'm so glad that God has given me the opportunity to listen to stories like that...it changes one's perspective on life...

2010-06-02T18:57:00.000-07:00

Phew! It’s officially the end of the first week on the book field, and a crazy week it’s been! But honestly, in looking back, what’s most deeply impressed upon my mind is how much I have to be thankful for. Yeah, it’s tough work—I have a new respect for people who go around knocking on doors and talking to people all day long—but it’s also an opportunity to learn a heap of lovely things, to meet a ton of new people, and to develop some character in the process.

It’s a lot of long days, but I’m starting to adjust to the schedule…so much so that this morning, I couldn’t sleep in past 6:30 a.m. even though I tried. Heh. Mixed blessing? ;-)

We drove into Shelbyville last week not knowing what we were up against, or what we were going to be facing this summer, or where we were going to be staying, but God always comes through the most obviously in those moments when you haven’t got the least clue what’s supposed to happen and when. Awesome!

Long story short, we “just happened” upon a number of very helpful/hospitable people within the course of our first 48 hours in Shelbyville, and found an amazing host family who offered to give us the use of their spare bedroom for the summer—wow!
My roommate here in Shelbyville is named Hannah, and she’s the most “kipper” person I’ve ever met. Even though this week threw some pretty tricky curve balls her way, she’s been consistently upbeat, cheerful, funny, mature, and driven…and she has the world’s best laugh, which is rapidly endearing her to my heart.

This first week has been filled with the unexpected and slightly crazy, but I’m loving the randomness (most days). During the past six days, there have been a number of moments that kind of made me scratch my head and think, “Really?! What am I doing out here again?!”

For example, one time I stopped at a house and the owner wanted to show me his horses. (Tennessee walking horses are HUGE news out here—I’m rapidly discovering). And I like horses, and I like people, and I thought if I could make the person happy by seeing the horses, then hey, why not, right? So off we went to see the horses.
Only he didn’t mention to me that it was a 200+ acre pasture. So it took a little while to find those horses, but hey, we did find them in the end, so life was happy.
As we were heading back up to the house from the pasture, chatting about life and horse stuff, he suddenly stopped talking and reached out a warning hand.

“Get back,” he hissed at me, beckoning with his hand. I was already walking a few paces behind him, so I just obligingly backed up a few more, secretly wondering if I had onion breath or something…it was right about then that I looked down the path ahead of us and realized that there was a five foot rattlesnake three paces in front of us. Woohoo!

My trusty guide had a fun but rather fruitless time trying to kill the serpentine intruder…after which point the snake was just generally in a very bad mood…I’ve never heard so much rattling in all my life. It sounded like Godzilla’s baby had gotten its hands one of those rhythm shakers they use in Latina music, and I wondered silently to myself how fast a really ticked-off snake could crawl if they happened to be in the mood for a chase-and-bite session…heh.

That was a couple of days ago, tho. I’ve since adjusted to the realization that yes, there are indeed rattlesnakes here in Tennessee…I think the friendliness of the average Tennessean makes up for the presence of unfriendly reptilian inhabitants, though.

One of the most memorable things about this state is the dogs, to be honest. I’m not entirely sure why this is, but people in Tennessee appear to believe that if a dog is man’s best friend, then the more best friends you can get, the better. It’s not uncommon to go up to a house and be greeted by a pack of ten dogs, ranging in size from Chihuahua to Great Dane…it cracks me up every time.

Today I stopped in at a house with a puppy about the size of a small pony. He didn’t realize that his very large size and his over-the-top exuberance made him somewhat of a weapon of mass destruction—-he was cute in his innocence, but annoyingly obnoxious, and to keep him from interrupting our conversation, the gracious lady with whom I was visiting invited me inside to sit in the living room. I didn’t want to dirty her floor, though, so I slipped my sandals off and left them outside the door.

I remember thinking at the time, “I wonder if this is a good idea?”
Heh. It wasn’t. When I came back, I found...one sandal. And one very happy dog. The other sandal is, at this moment, still MIA.

And that’s why I spent a few hours this afternoon knocking on people’s houses with bare feet…got some weird looks out of it, but when I explained what had happened, they always were nice enough to laugh with me…

2010-05-14T12:36:00.001-07:00

After a whirlwind tour of goodbyes yesterday and this morning (most of which were comfortably casual and callous, and a few of which were uncomfortably tearful and painfully real), I set out today for Johnson City, Tennessee, to begin an internship which will last...all summer. Not so excited about my first summer away from home, but looking forward with nervous anticipation to what God is going to do through the whole experience.

As I was driving the six hours from Lynchburg, Virginia to Johnson City, Tennessee, I passed several interesting signs that deeply impacted my inner psyche in ways that I still have not fully processed.

For example, I passed one sign on the outskirts of Johnsonville that read "Leave Johnsonville." So I did. But secretly, I thought it a rather rude sign.

Further along, as I continued to drive down the road, eating blueberries out of a carton and thinking about how driving in the mountains is a hair-raising experience at times and pondering the rudeness of the Johnsonville sign painter, I saw something else that was just as fascinating as the Johnsonville sign, albeit in a slightly more abstract sense. It was a white picket fence, with huge white painted lettering:

MYTHIC ALPACAS

My knowledge base doesn't extent to the realm of the mythical alpaca, so I texted my handy little sister, Michelle, to ask her expert opinion:

Michelle: Um. I think they don't really have alpacas. It's just a myth. But they really like alpacas, so they put up that sign...

Great. I really like tea. I'm gonna start a mythical tea farm where glass cups and china pots grow on trees...and then I'll invite all my friends over to drink imaginary liquids with me. Dude, I thought people in the North were weird...

Mother's Day Reflections

2010-05-09T10:07:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning feeling keenly aware of--and incredibly grateful for--the fact that nearly 22 years ago, my mother was willing to give me life. And I was brought to tears by the fact that in the decades since then, she's continued to impart life by nurturing me spiritually, preparing physical nourishment for me, and guiding me to grow academically and personally--my mom and dad are awesome, and I think the world of both of them--even more so now that I'm in this frightening balancing act which the world refers to as "young adulthood." Independence is often times a terrifying reality, but you take that for granted when you're a little kid and your parents are there to face it first and break the ice...I'm so thankful that they were.

All of these thoughts were going through my mind as I rolled over and jumped off the top bunk onto the linoleum to start the day. I was feeling pretty mushy and sentimental as I walked across the tiny dorm room to grab a washcloth from my dresser, which serves as a night stand/dressing table/dish & food storage unit, and a few other things besides. I was still a wee bit drowsy and not quite fully alert as I glanced over the random assortment of things on top of the dresser...and that's when I noticed something strange in my glass cereal bowl. I had washed it before going to bed, and left it to air dry on my dresser. And for some ridiculous reason, a centipede had decided that my bowl would be a really dandy place to camp out for the night and just make himself right at home.

Ew.

My sentimental feelings don't extend to the insect world...and I really wasn't thrilled to see this little thing...at the same time, I wasn't sure how to discretely dispose of him. I flicked the bowl. He didn't move. Rats.

So I turned the water on in the sink and let it get as hot as it would...and put my bowl in the sink. The centipede didn't seem to be ok with the hot tub concept. So he died. It was tragic.

An hour later, I was sitting in church, listening to the children's choir sing, looking around at all the beautiful women beaming beside their husbands as they sported corsages on the lapels of their brightly colored dresses...and I thought to myself what a beautiful thing it is that God allows us to live in a multi-generational context, where we have this incredible opportunity to learn from those who are older and wiser, and minister to those who are younger and filled with uncertainty. I wished quietly in my heart that my mom could have been there. I miss her.

Later still, in the Sunday school class that I attend, we were told that one of the class patriarchs had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. My heart bled for Dick and his gracious wife, Jean, as they continue to deal with this diagnosis...and I was struck by the irony of the fact that those upon whom we lean most heavily will at some point need to lean on us. I thought of all the people on whom I have leaned--sometimes desperately--throughout my life...and I was grateful and saddened at the same time. Grateful because they'd been there. Saddened because I know I've taken them for granted many, many times.

I found one of the other girls from the class crying in the bathroom. She'd been really close to Dick and Jean, and this was the first that she'd heard of his illness. I don't know her very well, but sometimes, it really doesn't matter...I put my arms around her, and we just cried together. Because sometimes, life hurts.

My mind was churning, and my heart was full as I drove home alone this afternoon. And as I sit here now, I write this with tears in my eyes and a smile on my face...because life is beautiful and complex and painful all at the same time. And because, as humans, we're broken and hurting and often lonely...and yet, in that very moment when we stand despairingly on the brink of our own personal hell, we find ourselves face-to-face with the gracious, loving God who made us and longs to redeem us, heal us, and transform us.

I'm thrilled to be alive today. I'm grateful that we're given so many second-chances to learn from our mistakes. I wish that I had always appreciated my Mom the way that she deserves, but today, I want to say to her, and to the rest of you moms out there, Happy Mother's Day. Because what you're doing matters, and it's infinitely more important than what people give you credit for. :-)

I love you Mom.

Magical moments

2010-05-03T16:10:00.000-07:00

You know how at the check-out lines in WalMart, they always surround you with tempting little items that might lead to a last-minute impulse buy before you walk out the door with the 257 things in your cart, 5 of which you actually needed?

Yeah. They do the same thing in cafeterias. I'm not sure why they push the sweets, but seriously? I'm convinced that they do. Because in order to walk out of LU's cafeteria, after you walk the gauntlet past all of the people-watchers who just sit there for two hours every meal time watching people and commenting on their hair styles (or lack thereof), the first thing you come to is the cookie island.

As if one kind of cookie weren't enough temptation to resist, they usually have two or three different kinds--every dentist's nightmare.

And if you make it past that, then there's the icecream machine. With six different flavors. Well, actually, usually only three, but still...that's three more than zero, so...that's pretty decent.

While approximately 50% of LU students (I reached this figure by joining the people-watching crowd for an afternoon and staring at my fellow students for uncomfortably long lengths of time) successfully make it past the cookie island without snitching, only a rough 15% make it past both the cookie island AND the ice cream machine. Huge percentages can't resist the temptation to grab that little soft-serve cone to enjoy as they walk around campus. Or, in the case of a surprisingly high number of LU students, a soft-serve cone to throw at the nearest squirrel as soon as you exit the building (this is the only thing I can think of to account for the ridiculously high number of yucky ice cream cone puddles around campus).

Two days ago, I was NOT one of the 15% who exited the building without icecream or cookies. That is to say, I found myself in line for the ice cream machine. And for whatever reason, that particular day, we had some very little members joining our cafeteria, so the little dude in front of me was an adorable black boy who was maybe about six years old.

He courageously approached the machine, quaking as he faced the steely grey monster with his rather unimpressive empty icecream cone. I watched as he lifted it gingerly to place it under the spout, as he pulled down on the lever...pooof! the icecream machine sometimes attacks people and tries to blow the cone out of their hands by spewing out icecream in such high volumes at such high velocities that the person drops the cone. And this time, the ice cream machine was sure giving it a valiant effort.

To his credit, the little man held onto his cone. But he didn't end up with the great and glorious glops of icecream on top of that cone that he'd clearly anticipated in his sugary dreams as he entered the cafeteria. As I stepped up behind him, he looked up at me with a somewhat pitiful expression, unsure of what to do with his unsatisfactorily-small cone.

I had an empty cone too. And I wanted to put a little bit of ice cream in it, because I wasn't planning to plaster any squirrels, and I simply hoped to eat it. But the icecream machine was still pretty excited, so when I pulled down on the lever, it came out really fast. And I ended up with a really BIG cone...one with nice, even glops that glooped smoothly and deliciously in large even layers.

The little kid's eyes popped almost out of his head, and his mouth formed a big O.

"WOOOOWWWW!!!" he said, looking in amazement from my cone to his.

I laughed, and then I had an un-nurse-like thought (it didn't involve germs, for a change).

"Hey buddy," I said, "Do you wanna trade?"

His face lit up. "Yup! Sure!!!" he beamed enthusiastically, handing his cone over like it was yesterday's moldy toast.

I left the cafeteria laughing inside. And he probably left it with a MAJOR sugar buzz, and his mom may not be my friend for a very long time. But she has one super cute little man to call her own, and talking to him made my day.

P.S. It was really good icecream.

Coffee house conversations

2010-04-09T20:43:00.000-07:00

Tonight my sweet little sister is in Lynchburg with me. And that is an AWESOME and beautiful thing.

Lynchburg is kind of a small town, and not particularly interesting until you look beneath the obvious and poke around a bit in the dust of the obscure. But tonight Michelle and I felt like doing a bit of poking, and with that in mind, we drove downtown to the historic (aka slightly-rundown, rather ancient--for America) parts of the city where the streets are still cobblestone and the architecture is reminiscent of another era.

In the process of our meanderings and snooping, we found a quaint little coffee shop where they play live country twanger music and have beautiful shelves stocked full of books upon every topic imaginable. And--wonder of wonders--people could go in, and order rather nasty coffee (or very tasty mochas), and sit and talk, and peruse the marvels of aforementioned books, and be enlightened, depressed, amused, or confounded, as the case might be.

Michelle and I ordered one rather nasty coffee and one very tasty mocha, and sat down to ponder our surroundings, enjoy each other's company, and be secretly amused and amazed by the intellectual pursuits and fascinating conversations all around us. We had apparently stumbled upon a rather well-known college hang-out, because several dozen Liberty students meandered in and out during the course of our three hour stay.

To be honest, tho, we hadn't come in search of human subjects to observe, or great literature to read, or wonderful atmosphere to absorb, although all of these things were to be found there. We had come to get away from campus for a bit, to sit and look each other in the eye, and talk about things that really matter. And we did. It was the most incredible conversation that I've had all semester. We laughed. We cried. We remembered. We read Scripture together...and we prayed. As sisters. As friends. As two women who love each other more richly, more deeply, and more genuinely than anything else that I've ever experienced or hope to experience.

I came away with one over-arching thought...and it was this:

Truth doesn't change. God's nature doesn't change, and the truth of Christianity exists objectively regardless of our individual experience of it or how deeply we understand it. (I fully believe that there are many Christians who, sadly, exist without ever experiencing, on a personal level, the full transformational power of Christ.) But when you meet Christ face to face and are suddenly confronted by the truth of Christianity in a personal way, you absolutely cannot walk away unchanged. It is no longer merely an ideology, merely a way of life, merely a belief system. A personal encounter with the risen Christ rattles you at the very core of who you are and forces you to rip away the constructs and the rules that often times serve as replacements for a deep and meaningful relationship with the God who exists--the God who is really there, and Who created mankind to be in relationship with Himself. This encounter transforms you. It purifies you. It changes the very core of who you are on a deep and permanent level, and confronts you with the stunning reality of the justice, mercy, and love embodied in the cross. It opens your eyes to the fact that salvation itself is a heart-breakingly beautiful miracle--that God could completely love a finite creature who is so completely broken, and that, because of His love, He would offer to completely heal, completely forgive, and completely restore so that mankind would someday once again be completely whole...this is salvation. And this is grace beyond what I have the capacity to understand. And when one is overwhelmed by the vastness and the realness of such a God and such a gift, it is impossible not to passionately share the magnificence of such a hope with those around you.

Of Raindrops and Mudslides...

2010-03-29T09:39:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, as I was heading home from the library after several long hours of studying for Tuesday’s theology test, I was suddenly struck by a note-worthy craving for some type of Good Earth tea—something with a bit of punch on the fore-end, and a zingy afterbite…oooh yeah.

Now obviously I could have chosen to ignore the craving, but we recently watched a lovely video in our psychology 201 class about the stages of pregnancy, and one of the things which very strongly came out was the fact that some pregnant women have cravings—most of which are apparently life-threatening and relationship-destroying things if not instantly fulfilled. Therefore, although I didn’t feel that my situation was life-threatening or relationship-destroying in urgency, I decided I ought to start practicing the whole finding-creative-ways-to-fulfill-a-craving thingamajig, just in case some day I were ever to wake up and find myself with child and dying of a particularly awful craving for mint toothpaste. (Always best to set some sort of historical precedent BEFORE one is actually placed in the situation, you know).

So I dropped my 300 lb backpack in my room (I seriously think they started making textbooks and laptops heavier in the past five years), kidnapped a few trusty friends who were up for a bit of psychotic shopping, and we set off in the rain, huddling under our umbrellas like a bunch of shriveled Chinese grandmothers wearing Inuit mukluks…

It’s uncommonly difficult for two people to walk under the same umbrella, we discovered, even if that umbrella happens to be a massively-huge golf umbrella with double layers and a highly-sophisticated plastic hand grip.

But we made it to WalMart, greeted the greeter, and set off to find the tea aisle feeling rather proud of ourselves. (Thea is directionally challenged, so it was a good thing her friends had come along to help her with that part, or she might still be wandering the aisles of the electronics section looking for tea bags… )

Walmarts in Wisconsin have lots of tea…presumably because Wisconsinites have highly-developed palates when it comes to the art of tea consumption. Walmarts in Virginia, however, do not. This is presumably because everyone in the south drinks a somewhat nasty substance known as “sweet tea,” and therefore, they do not have refined palates when it comes to the art of drinking real teas. Thus, when I finally entered the longed-for tea aisle, and stood before the measly little selection of nice cardboard boxes, I discovered that there was not a single box of Good Earth tea to be found in Lynchburg’s pitiful excuse for a WalMart. Alas.

I hardly knew what to do. I lowered my head and had a moment of silence for the death of my tea dream. (the WalMart clerks were just relieved that I had finally stopped talking out loud to myself for a few seconds…apparently this is NOT normal shopping behavior). And then I thought a whole bunch of friendly thoughts about WalMart, and the state of Virginia, and after that, it was all good. So my dear little friends and I picked out some other items, just to show WalMart that we weren’t the kind of people who hold grudges about poorly-stocked tea aisles.

As we were meandering up and down the long cart-racing tracks of which WalMarts are composed, we perceived (due to the dull roar) that the heavens had opened above Lynchburg, and that what had once been a gentle sprinkle had turned into a regular ark-requiring torrent outside. Heh. Good thing people aren’t made of sugar or earthworms…neither of which seem to do very well in the rain.

The sole male member of our party wanted to walk half a mile up the highway to get something hot to eat, because he hadn’t made it to the cafeteria before closing time that night…a sad occurrence which tends to leave people feeling rather hollow in their innards.

So off we went, with the rain trying in vain to dissolve our umbrellas, and the little rivers in the parking lot successfully soaking through our boots. We nearly got run over on three different occasions, and each time, we made a mental note to ourselves of the fact that walking on highways in the rain without a sidewalk after dark is probably one of the more high-risk behaviors engaged in by Lynchburgian college students…oh well.

One fine young chap from campus stopped to ask us what on earth we were thinking, to be thus walking around in the rain, and he offered all of us a ride in his truck. However, the only available riding space happened to be in the very-much-open bed of his truck, and therefore, we decided that, rather than riding home in the moving kiddy pool which had magically appeared in the back of his truck, we would simply take the risk of walking on our multiple sets of feet.

Which we did. Only, rather than walking back all the way that we had come, Thea thought it might be a smart idea to climb up the embankment behind the restaurant and take a short-cut through the woods. It wasn’t a good idea. But we did it anyway.

Virginia has a lot of…dirt. And when dirt gets wet, it makes…mud. So we were trying to climb up the 20 foot embankment behind the restaurant…which was made out of dirt. Which had become mud. And it was so, sooo fun. But very, very dirty.

Gabi, my Argentine roommate, had come along for the grins and giggles. At this point, she was thoroughly convinced that the concept of climbing the embankment was a ludicrous aspiration, but one worth attempting nonetheless. After a few memorable near-death sliding experiences, we had made it up the first embankment…and found ourselves facing a very, very long set of train tracks. I like train tracks. They’re so…solid.

Directly on the other side of the train tracks was a ditch. Only it was raining really hard. So the ditch had become a stream…which was significantly wider in some places than in others. Being intelligent college students with stunning deductive and inductive reasoning skills, we naturally looked for the narrowest point in the stream at which to cross. But we couldn’t find it. So we ended up just finding a slightly skinniesh looking section and jumping. And…Gabi kinda didn’t make it and landed in the water, but by that point, our boots were so thoroughly soaked it didn’t really make a hill of beans’ worth of difference.

There was another embankment right on the other side of the stream…so we linked umbrellas, got a run at it, and half-hauled, half-pushed each other up to the top, where we landed in a delightfully slimy stretch of reddish-brown something-or-other (which may or may not have had substantial nutritional value for the resident earthworm population, none of whom were visible at that moment…perhaps they were all out practicing the breaststroke in the local earthworm swimming puddle. Btw, the earthworm population? Desperately in need of qualified lifeguards. None currently appear to exist.)

After shaking ourselves off doggy-style and wringing out our rather bedraggled umbrellas, we raised our precipitation-filled eyes several centimeters and discovered that we had emerged from the woods almost directly in front of our dorms. Oh, life is full of beautiful surprises!

As we walked back into the dorm, Gabi looked at me with eyes full of wonderment. “Thea, in all my life, I have never done something like this. My mom would have said it was crazy, but really, I had a lot of fun!”
I assured her my mom probably would have said exactly the same thing. Apparently moms are kinda the same in every culture—who ever woulda thunk it?!

But regardless of whether or not I am lacking in saneness, it was a memory-making experience, which, although sadly lacking photographic evidence due to the lackage of underwater cameras available for use, shall remain a part of our Liberty experience.

Thank God for sane mothers, warm showers, crazy friends, and WalMart.

2010-03-25T17:37:00.000-07:00

Tonight I ought to be doing homework. (Technically, I am, because it's the thought that counts, and I've been thinking about homework for more than thirty minutes now.)

But tonight something else happened, too. It was profound, in a small, insignificant sort of way. You see, we have a box of oreo cookies sitting on top of one of our dressers here in the dorm room. Occasionally my roommates and I don't eat them, despite the fact that they are very much there--and we feel proud of ourselves in those moments for our tremendous exhibition of self-control. At other times, however, we do eat them--and we rejoice in the fact that mankind has discovered the toxic process of extracting unhealthy sweet substances from sugar cane and corn products in order to pollute the world of food with substances which are both deleterious and delicious.

Tonight I opted out of having self-control, and having thus purposed to myself to indulge in a circlet of chocolatey greasy sweetness, I opened the top of the oreo box and pulled out a cookie. Only this cookie was unlike any oreo that I have ever seen. It was subtle, but definitely there.

Every oreo has an Oreo imprint on both the top and the bottom of the round black crunchy sections, as everyone knows, because someone decided long ago in a faraway factory that people would enjoy oreos just that much more if they happened to have little ridges all over them. Which apparently, people do.

However, with this particular oreo, one side was perfectly smooth...like the inside of the cookie is supposed to be, if you happen to be one of those individuals who opens your oreos to scrape out that weird greasy sickeningly-sweet white stuff in the middle (I used to do that, I confess, but I've matured since then).

And that's when I realized that somebody, somewhere, had gotten distracted during their long day at work...and they'd flipped the top of the oreo so the wrong side was up. Only I'm ok with smooth, so I wasn't sure I considered it wrong at all...just different.

I sat there staring at this oreo in silent wonder, thinking about the process of making these cookies (a process which has most likely been outsourced to India by now) and wondering about the cute little woman who doubtless was daydreaming about her wee kiddos back at home and thus accidentally inverted an oreo.

Or maybe it was a socially deviant teenager who wanted some cookie-eating person somewhere to receive a subtle message that would tell them it was ok to be different, to stand out from the crowd.

However that may be, as I sat there holding this cookie, I was reminded of the fact that life is kind of like a box of oreos. All the days look more or less alike from our vantage point...an endless series, kind of like the brown circles that stretch on in neat little rows inside of an oreo box. But, just like the cookie in my hand, each day has something unique, special, and memorable to offer to the person who takes just a moment to consider what exactly it is that makes this day special.

I stood a moment longer, mouth watering over the faint chocolatey scent of the cookie, mentally wandering back through my day. There had been a lot of people in it. There were the hundreds of people walking down the sidewalks as I was on my way to class this morning, most of whom I didn't know...but many of whom had smiled back and exchanged a friendly good morning. (I love America. People smile here. They wave. They say hi. So friendly. Just amazing! It's beautiful. Warms my heart every time).

There were the myriad classmates...many of whom I do know...with whom all manner of meaningful or simply psychotic conversations had taken place that morning. I had taken part in discussions on everything from the destructive powers of racism to the unfortunate nature of the fact that earthworms are so stupid that they inevitably come rushing to the surface to breathe during rainstorms and then end up drowning in mud puddles despite their best efforts at survival. (What can I say? Stinks to have no brain. Fail!)

There were the teachers, some of whom earnestly desire for us to learn many deep. profound, and life-changing truths, and some of whom merely earnestly desire for the day to come in which their students will stop asking inane questions.

But throughout that whole day, no two people interactions had been exactly alike, as far as I could recall. And no two of them had been exactly like any two that had taken place any other day in the past...presumably because no two people are exactly alike, and on top of that, every person is a little different today than he was yesterday.

And as I ate my unique oreo with great relish, I marveled over the fact that our lives are, in truth, remarkably complex, no matter how simple they may appear from the outside, for mankind himself, in the very essence of his person, is inimitably intricate and complex beyond our human capacity to fully know. And there are millions of such people on our planet, several of whom we brush shoulders with on a daily basis.

I wiped some brown crumbs off the dresser top, thinking solemnly of how little we understand the incredible treasure of human intellect and personality to which we are exposed hourly. Behind every smiling face is a broken person yearning to be fully known, mercifully cared for, unconditionally loved, and completely accepted. But so often, when I witness the seemingly endless streams of humanity around me, I fail to look for the uniqueness of each individual. I see just another long row of oreos--identical, uninteresting, not worth my time.

As I pack my bag to head to the gym, I am reminded of what an incredibly gracious thing it is that God searches the depths of every single human heart...that He cares enough to know details...to know (and care about) the subtle differences between all the human oreos in all the boxes in all places throughout all time. Wow.

May God give us the character to be people who notice the details and care.

And may God give me the self-control to break a rapidly-forming oreo addiction. Oops.

2010-03-06T18:41:00.001-08:00

So there are a number of important questions that I've been asking myself this semester. But two are especially pressing, given recent events here in Lynchburg:

First of all, should I be concerned that when someone flushes a toilet on campus, the water pressure in the nearest drinking fountain is significantly reduced?

Secondly, if two people are running down a very long flight of stairs together, and the second one falls into the first, creating a domino effect, how does one ensure that he lands on top when the final destination is ultimately reached?

Oh, the mental agonies! College brains are ill-equipped to wrestle with such deep, meaningful, and impactful questions (the second question being especially impactful).

the Year in Review

2010-01-07T19:41:00.001-08:00

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. So today I thought to myself, "Self? Why not post a thousand pictures to give everyone the basic idea of what the last year was like?" And then I thought, "Now, where on earth would I get a thousand pictures? And why would I want to be THAT verbose?!" So I'm not posting a thousand pictures. I'm just posting a few...to give ya'll a brief overview of some of the memorable moments from the first semester at Liberty...

To kick off the semester, we had an all-night-of-prayer, committing the campus, the students, and the academic year to the only One capable enough to handle all that that entails...and after thus spending the night, people went to various local businesses for breakfast...

...the nice thing about being up all night...is that it makes everything seem funny.

Lenn and Rachel, possibly the most entertaining pair of debaters I have ever met...she practices her kick-boxing skills on him, and he...shows off his evasion tactics while slinging sarcastic insults over both shoulders. I'm crossing my fingers they both survive the next semester...

Gina and Gabriela, after our first (and only) roommate swim outing...

and...Gina had a birthday! We love birthdays. So we got her a cake. And we put candles on it. And then we found out that candles aren't legal in the dorms. Oops.

Anthony and Andre went with me to WalMart one day, just because...and by the time we'd gotten to the vitamin aisle, we had done some skillful deductive reasoning...and that's how we realized that we were ALL wearing red t-shirts. So we took a picture...

...and Anthony texted it to all his friends...

...and we discovered that texting causes Andre's blood pressure to rise. Or maybe it rose because we were threatening to confiscate his chocolate milk. (trying to help him break the addiction...duh. That's what friend are FOR)

And then, a few weeks later, we went on a dorm outing, taking a whole lot of girls, and about half as many boys. The purpose of this gathering was to encourage the formation of deep and meaningful friendships while engaging in possibly brain-damaging or life-ending activities...

So...we went to the little creeky thingee with the big rock doohickies? And we jumped off the rocks...in order to show how much intelligence, common sense, and general wisdom we had gained from our college experience thus far. It. was. amazing. Especially if you didn't jump out far enough to avoid the rocks at the bottom. Heh.

And then, a few weeks later, just because we could...we decided to do a "Nerd" theme for one of our hall meetings. Yeah. Kelly doesn't always wear those glasses. She doesn't want to frighten other students with her obvious intellectual abilities.

The umbrella was really a nice touch. Some people can totally make an umbrella look nerdy...

The conglomerate effect of nerd night was quite...overwhelming. Never before have I seen so many pairs of glasses with tape covering the bridge...

Adieu to 2009

2009-12-31T21:32:00.000-08:00

It's officially the turning of a new year. As we stand at the close of the first decade of a new century, there is much to reflect upon, many yet-unanswered questions hanging in the balances, much uncertainty, much pessimism, and yet...SO much for which we can be thankful.

As I sat tonight in our warm living room, surrounded by the impish little faces of a lot of smallish Kulps and a few rather biggish Beatys, I was made mindful yet again of how much meaning, security, and satisfaction is given to us through relationships--first and foremost that which we have with our Heavenly Father, but secondarily, through those which we have with the hundreds and thousands of people whom God places in our lives for us to pour into and learn from.

In looking back over this year, I realize that over and over again, in those times when I was really struggling, wrestling with big questions, or just feeling overwhelmed by the unknownness of life, it was often through relationships--through people--that the faithfulness and love of God was poured into my life when I least expected but most needed it.

Plus, life would be so much less interesting if there were no other humanoids--for real.
Tonight, for example, as our lovely guests were packing up and getting ready to head out the door, we noticed that the youngest little dude was MIA.

We found him upstairs...dribbling finger nail polish onto the floor with a fascinated expression on his wee face. There was something so delightfully comical about the whole thing--he'd given himself a bright pink goatee, was standing uncertainly in a large puddle of pinkness, of which still more was dripping from the upturned bottle in his chubby hand, and every few seconds he would gingerly lift one tiny sneaker, his mouth shaped into a wonder-filled "O" as he set his foot down in a different spot, gazing in amazement at the small pink print left behind on the linoleum behind him. It'd been approximately three minutes since we'd lost sight of him--these little people are ridiculously efficient in their uses of time, I'm telling you...

It was sort of a unique idea...I mean, it's a new year, so why not change the interior decorating a little, right? If splotches are in for the walls, why not carry it over to the floors? Think outside the box. Or the bottle. Whatever works for you.

So yeah. I'm excited about 2010. Cuz while I don't have all the answers, and I really have no clue what might happen during the next twelve months, life's an adventure that's pretty much out of my hands, and nothing takes our God by surprise.

Therefore, I wish you all a marvelous New Year, and hope the next twelve months are filled with unexpected blessings and plenty of growing experiences. In the meantime, I'll be upstairs in my bedroom slippers decorating the floor with blue fingernail polish...

Two Heads are...Better than One?

2009-12-29T16:00:00.000-08:00

Somewhere in her many global trottings, my lovely sister picked up some new games. And one of them was sort of a He Said/She said type of thing, where one person writes down a name, folds down the top of the slip of paper, and passes it to the next person, who writes down another name, and then repeats the process until the little epistle contains the name of a boy, the name of a girl, the location in which they encounter each other, what he said, and what she said, and finally, what happened as a result.

We had the better part of the Beaty family playing this lovely game during the past two days on several different occasions, and some of the results were most remarkable.

For example:

Joel Flage

and Susan B. Anthony

met in Athens, Greece

and he said, "Well, am I ever pleased to meet you!"

she said "Touch me and I'll bite you!"

So they just sat pondering their wonderful new relationship.

Santa Claus

met Liv Tyler

on top of Old Smoky

he said, "How about a date?!"

She said, "you have got to be kidding!"

So he flanged her down 70 times 7...

Ben Beaty (my brother)

and Laura Kulp (his mother-in-law)

met at a computer store

and he said, "Darling, I have an important question!"

and she said, "Can it, Bucky!"

so they went dancing on the roof of someone's house.

An old German farmer

and Taylor Swift

met in her grandfather's safe

and he said, "Turn on the lights! I can't see."

and she said, "Oh! You have a wonderful smile."

and then they had to spend five years in counseling.

Al Capone

and Cinderella

met while scuba diving

and he said, "I need a beer."

and she said, "Oh boy, I'm not sure what to think!"

so they stepped on a mine and were blown to a beautiful alien planet.

You never realize how many inside family jokes exist until you start playing a game like this with your siblings...heh. Think what we'd be missing if we all truly could only live in the moment and there were no such thing as short-term or long-term memory...

2009-12-25T18:25:00.000-08:00

There are so very many things to love about Christmas breaks!

Not the least of these would be a small nephew, who, in his rapid march towards an antiquated state, will be attaining the impressive age of 12 months two days from today.

This charming young individual adds huge amounts of interest to life in general, and he's mostly a joy to be around. Except for when one happens to be unfortunate enough as to upset the little man...he has a rather interesting habit of roaring indignantly with mouth opened to approximately the size of a small hippopotamus as he lunges forward to bite the nose of the offending relative/former friend. Typically this results only from a food-related offense, though, so--we just don't take his cookies away from him, and then it's all good.

On another note, though, the days at home have been a lovely break from the routine of academia. It's been an opportunity to step back, to take stock and evaluate, and to see some things from a new perspective. And sometimes that's a really humbling experience, because more often than I care to admit, I'm guilty of things that I can't exactly look back at with pride. This whole growing-up-and-taking-responsibility-for-my-own-actions thing is sometimes painful, sometimes embarrassing, and other times just plain ol' overwhelming...but I am every day more thankful for the grace of a God who loves unconditionally and is not only capable but willing to redeem my mistakes.

Today I read a really well-written article by Nathan Zacharias that dealt with the topic of failure and our Biblical response to it, and he said a couple of things that particularly resonated with me this week. He writes:

"...when faced with failure, the road to recovery can't be taken until I first recognize that I need to recover in the first place. So in those painful moments of realizing what I've just done, it's important that I take heart in the fact that feeling that emotion of regret in the first place is a major part of the battle in overcoming my failure.

After some of life's breakdowns, it's tempting to throw in the towel on what the future holds. Sometimes I think that we've messed up so badly that God will never be able to use me to do any good. That thought, though, warns me that I'm seriously underestimating the redemptive power of Christ."

It's the thought of the redemptive power of Christ that gives me hope even on the days when I feel a little overwhelmed by the sad lack of Christ-like character which appears to plague many of us who call ourselves Christians.

So as I finish out 2009, surrounded by those I love best (who are exceptionally special simply because they know what a dork I am and choose to still love me anyway!), my prayer is that God would give each of us the grace and the strength to live by the truth that we know, the humility to admit that we don't know it all, the strength to face our mistakes, own them, and allow God to redeem them, and the character to accept, cherish, and forgive those who are at different places in their journey than we are.

May God bring about a revival, and may He begin it in my heart...

2009-12-07T19:50:00.000-08:00

I distinctly remember beginning this year with the honorable aspiration to update my blog at least once every two weeks. Which does not explain why, nearly an entire semester later, I have only managed to update the aforementioned blog a grand total of…two times. Shameful.

Virginia is blissfully warm compared to the weather that those of you in the northern states must be experiencing on a regular basis. I do not apologize for this fact, but I do extend my heartfelt sympathies to those of you who live with snow out of necessity rather than love. ;-)

During the past several weeks, I have been continually reminded of how blessed I am to a) live in a warm state, b) have amazing family and friends both near and far, and c) be serving such an awesomely faithful and gracious God.

One day last week in my Economics class, our teacher was solemnly discussing with us the most recent statistics on divorce in the United States. He and his lovely wife have been involved in pre-marital counseling for almost two decades, and they have a great deal of conglomerate wisdom. He was explaining to us the importance of a couple discussing their money matters together as a couple, and he told us all in a very solemn tone indeed that if we were considering marrying someone, and that person happened to refuse to discuss their finances, we should most definitely seek a new potential spouse and drop that girl/guy like a hot potato. We all nodded dutifully, very much impressed by his profound wisdom and experience in this matter.

We then began to discuss then the struggles of relationships in general, and he made the comment to our class that out of the five girls in our class, one of us would most likely not marry, statistically speaking. Ashley’s hand shot up: “That’ll be me!” she blurted. “I just want to live alone in a house with my fish forever.”

We rolled our eyes, knowing that it had been only a few months since she ended her last dating relationship. The teacher smiled, and shook his head, bemused by the impetuosity of college women.

Then he turned to the class, and asked very slowly, “But really, guys, what do you think the number one cause of divorce is in the United States?”

Ashley’s hand shot up again: “Marriage!” she announced energetically.

We laughed. Very hard. For a very long time. But she’s kinda right. And so, I thought to myself of how grateful I am that my parents were willing to take that risk…and to make it work! Woohoo!

I love you, Mom and Dad!

2009-08-28T21:03:00.000-07:00

In our Evangelism class this afternoon, we took a look at Joshua chapter 7, and spent some time thinking about how this passage applies to the lives of college students. And I came away thinking, for the umpteenth time, ‘Wow. There is SOO much hidden in each and every passage of Scripture…how do I keep forgetting that?!’

Joshua 7 is chronicling the story of Achan, and takes place directly after Joshua 6 (no duh, eh?! oh, how exciting…numerical order is such a beautiful thing) where Jericho falls to the Israelites…and so the Israelites have just come off of this tremendous, amazing victory…and they get comfortable, and maybe a little cocky. And there’s this little town called Ai, and they think, pht, we’ll just send a few guys up there to wipe these dudes out, and we’re all good…sweet thing we’re such a powerful, imposing military force, right, Joshua? Woot, woot! And maybe there were a few congratulatory chest thumps…and then they were off. Only they didn’t wipe Ai off the map. And at the end of the day, thirty-six Israelite men had been killed in a battle where they probably didn’t expect to have even a single casualty. What happened?!

As we discussed the passage, there were a few (ok, maybe more than a few...I am SO far from succint on these things, alas!) key take-away questions that we came up with…things that we need to be asking ourselves every single day, and questions which, if unasked, can lead to Ai situations in our own lives. And because these questions made me think critically about who I am today, where I’m headed, and what God’s plan might be for my future, I’m posting them for you…and hoping that at least one of them challenges you to sit back and think about your purpose on this quirky planet, and about how awesome our God is.

So here we go, with additional blonde commentary in red italics, which does not mean it was divinely inspired:

1. Have you relaxed and let down your guard? Are you vigilant even in the “easy” times…when everything is going well? And what do you do in your free time? What does/should that tell you about where your heart is?

2. Have you underestimated or failed to recognize the “real” enemy? Am I willfully mislabeling sin in my life in order to pretend everything is all good? Or am I “fighting the good fight” on the forefront while allowing an ungodly friend or unhealthy relationship to sabotage me from behind?

A poignant demonstration of the phrase "Unequally yoked." Sorry. I really couldn't resist when I found this photo...

3. Have you lost track of your vision and purpose in life—to follow Him regardless of the cost? Am I so sidetracked by “ministry opportunities” or so busy flitting from here to there socializing that I’m drifting all over in my spiritual life? Am I living with vision?

4. Have you focused too much on pleasing yourself rather than God? When I hear myself speak, how often does the word “me” or “I” come into that conversation?!

5. Have you passed the buck of responsibility by playing the “Blame Game”? Am I owning up to my problems, and am I willing to take responsibility for my faults and make things right when I’ve blown it?

6. Have you forgotten the seriousness of sin? Do I grieve when I’m confronted with my own sin? Can I say with the broken-hearted humility of King David, after Samuel came to him regarding Bathsheba, “Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin!”

7. Like Achan, have you chosen to disobey with no regard as to consequences? And do you care? Am I rebellious? Do I stubbornly live in the sinful pleasure of the moment in the face of Biblical mandate rather than requiring myself to live up to God’s standards?

8. Like Achan, have you forgotten the importance of accountability? Deified your own desires? Remember: you are hurting others. The correct question is not “is it hurting anyone?” but rather, “is it helping anyone?” You never sin in a vacuum…when you sin, you ALWAYS hurt other people, and there are ALWAYS eternal consequences. When I’m in a situation where my will and God’s will conflict…who wins?

9. Closing charge: If you do not want to become a statistic, if you want your life to count, you must seek purity and obedience. That is, dig the foundations for the pillars of your character deep. Protect your heart! Make up your mind to follow Christ—and then do it.

So yeah! That’s probably not any new information for most of you, but sometimes we forget—or at least, I forget—so this post was for me. Because it’s so imperative that we remember. :-)

2009-08-23T22:00:00.000-07:00

Today was officially the last day before classes start for the fall semester! We're not sure if we're ready, but ready or not, here we come.

These two beautiful young women beside me in the photo below are my roommates, as we appeared two nights ago on an emergency ice-cream run to Coldstone at midnight: Gabriella, from Argentina, and Gina, from New York. What a hoot! I'm so blessed to have these two as my housemates for the next several months!

Gabriella and Gina again--amazing smiles, amazing women!

Shortly before our impromptu photo session, we were amusing ourselves by launching ice cubes across the parking lot with our straws...er, I was amusing myself. They were watching, and pretending I was mentally stable, which was nice of them.

You know how those nifty round ice cubes that you get in an iced coffee from Coldstone have holes in the middle? Yeah. They do. And if you stick a drinking straw through the hole, and flick your wrist just right, you can really make those ice cubes fly.

However, when I launched my last one, it landed next to a yellow jeep which was parked some 30 feet away from us. At the precise moment that my icecube hit the pavement beside the left front tire, all of its lights started flashing like crazy, and it started making odd grunting sounds, as though having some sort of gastrointestinal difficulties which are apparently experienced only by jeeps.

Gabby and Gina's jaws hit the pavement, and I confess I was more than a little flabbergasted myself. Seriously? An ice cube sets off that thing's security alarms?!

It was then that we noticed the portly little man emerging from the shadows, wielding an ice cream cone in one pudgy hand and a car remote in the other...

2009-08-09T22:15:00.000-07:00

Today was officially the last Sunday I will spend in Central Wisconsin for a long while, and I'm not precisely sure how I feel about this fact. However, it appears that my feelings don't really factor into the equation at the moment, because plans have been laid, and Lord willing, aforementioned plans shall be executed in due fashion, meaning that Thea and Assorted Junk will be moving out of Beaty House and into Possibly Messy Dorm Room in rather short order...Liberty U, here we come.

This afternoon, however, as part of the home-leaving grieving process otherwise known as "bemoaning this rather soon departure in the company of friends," I found myself sitting at a corner table in Wausau's illustrious King Buffet, eating soggy sushi and lovely white rice in the company of two friendly little Mexican dudes. One of them was moodily informing me that he would be so depressed after I left that he would probably kill himself...to which I replied that that would be a tragic and rather pointless waste of his perfectly good life, and that I could think of better things to die about...although I'm not sure how well that last point translated into Spanish. Oscar looked slightly mystified after I said it, but he didn't say anything in reply.

Instead, he looked down at his plate for a second just to make sure the lamb chops hadn't suddenly come to life, and then he leaned over and whispered,

"Thea, ¿sabes quien es San Pedro?" (Do you know who Saint Peter is?)

I looked at him blankly. "Sabes quien es San Pedro? ¿Qué clase de pregunta es esto? Um, yo sé que él está considerado ser un santo..." (What kind of a question is that? I know he's considered to be a saint...?)

He winked, and nodded towards the other side of the room.

"He's sitting right over there," he hissed to me in rapid Spanish.

I looked where Oscar had indicated with one eyebrow, and saw a veritable old sage of a chap with a long flowing gray beard and vacant light blue eyes, picking absent-mindedly at his sesame chicken and dribbling egg-drop soup down his whiskers as he conversed thoughtfully with his female companion.

"Oh my word, Oscar," I thought to myself, "I do believe you're right...we've found Saint Peter."

The waitress couldn't for the life of her figure out what we found so funny...

I think we all came home feeling full of soggy sushi...and vastly more socially well-rounded.

2009-08-06T20:58:00.000-07:00

They say that more is caught than taught.
Having early grasped and understood this important concept, my three younger brothers decided to invest some quality time in the process of teaching Nephew Brock music appreciation and fashion sense today while I was at work...the poor child.

It started out, as always, with the innocent victim sitting unsuspectingly in the armchair with an elfish expression on his cute face...

...at which point, Unc Trevor whisks the little man away to the piano, and shows him the fine art of banging the ivories...the harder the better...

...sometimes it's better to put your WHOLE body into things. At least, as much of it as you can fit up there...

...ooo. Camera. Shiny. Distracting...

Posing...losing interest in the music enlightenment session...

Time for a class in career options and fashion design! Brock was apparently lovin' the idea...

Career options?

...well, there's always the super cool punk/bum/loser/rabid Brewer's fan thing...

...or the cop thing? They arrest punk losers, I think? But Brock seemed uncertain that this was the career path God had chosen for his life...

...there is also the slightly creepy drugged-up-hippy-having-a-gender-identity-crisis look...but Brock was apparently not so much into that one either? Possibly just because he knew he could never pull it off in quite the same way as a certain uncle of his...

Josiah is now ready to become a member of Mall Security here in Wausau. He'll fit right in.