michigan, peoria and sufjan

I have made one of my husband’s lifetime dreams come true – and I can not even believe I am saying this but I am excited about it as well. I was able to buy tickets to a University of Michigan home football game at the Big House. Not only that, something that is almost as difficult, if not more so, is that I secured a hotel room in Ann Arbor for the night before! The husband has dreamed of going to the Big House and I have to admit, I am excited too…he looked like a little boy on Christmas morning talking about it…being there in person should be even more fun to watch!

I have been sick for almost two weeks and have found that I am completely drained, I feel like I don’t have much left to offer anyone right now. I want to feel better and thought that maybe I was pregnant – which I am not. That too leads me to feel discouraged and frustrated too and mad because I have no reason to be sick. I just feel kind of zapped – there are so many things going on in our lives right now and so many things that have no quick or easy resolutions. I feel bad because I feel like I don’t have anything left to give at home and that’s not fair, my husband assures me he doesn’t feel shorted, but I still feel bad. I just have to lie down and rest in the arms of Abba and know that I can not control anything and that He will sustain. That is always so much easier to say than do! And, to help my mom stop worrying about me, I need to also rest in his care and not worry so much – which is hard to do with the ones you love so much.

We head into a busy weekend, full of church activity. If we are meant to move on from this place I am beginning to feel less and less sad about it. But again, not within my control! We are having a “Summer Spectacular” celebration (Spectacular, Spectacular from Moulin Rouge is all I can think when I hear that) this weekend in conjunction with another church. We are having helicopter rides, food, games, worship service and a concert. The other church was responsible for advertising and I haven’t seen anything about this event anywhere so I am getting concerned. In addition, the weather is supposed to be “oppressively hot” per the weather-woman. I am trying to remain optimistic but the realist in me says that no one is going to come. I pray that I am wrong and that our small town is flooded with folks. We are going to be selling food to raise money for the Honduras trip and I would love to see us be able to raise a nice sum. We shall see.

Getting excited about small things is always good. We did find this week that we went to the store on Wednesday there was a new Buffalo Wild Wings in a strip mall where there had been no restaurant before. How excellent. We were in Peoria and the husband decided that he was meant to sing Sufjan’s “Prairie Fire That Wanders About” whilst driving around.

Peoria! Destroyia!
Infinity! Divinity!
For Lydia! Octavia!
And Jack-of-Trades!
The Cubs! Hooray!

The Opera House
Where Emma sang!
America! Oh will it play?

And Santa Clause!
The Great Parade!
Peoria!
You have it made!

Into the crossfire
faithfully run
Middle America,
one on one

Peoria!
We saddle the fun times

another post about reading?

I had all intentions in the world of posting yesterday and never found the time to do it…so here I am today, a day late but here, none-the-less. We had a restful and quiet weekend with my mom staying healthy all weekend, yeah! One out of four weeks isn’t bad. She is suffering from hepatic encephalopathy (your word for the day) and this is just something that we will have to work around and through each day, trusting and believing that there will be a cure in the future.

We came home from my parent’s on Saturday to one of the best rewards of living and ministering in the country – a front porch full of fresh, farm grown vegetables. I threw a bunch of the ears of corn in the freezer and we will partake of some of their goodness tonight as well…it is good to have farmer friends! However, as grateful as I am for fresh veggies, I still am not appreciative of how terribly horrendous their pigs smell, from miles away, on hot, humid evenings. The combination of heat and stench truly does take your breath away.

I finished “Plain Truth”, my August book club book. When I received it in the mail and read the back I realized that I had already read this book last year (I also keep a book journal from year to year…something that my mom and I started to do when I was little and didn’t like to read. We would compete to see who had read the most books in a year and the loser had to buy the winner a new book. It is also a good way to go back and see what you have read or to remember good reads…) and confirmed it with the journal. So, I pretty much skim read it – it is a pretty easy story so it didn’t take too much time. I felt unfulfilled after skimming it and am ready to sink my teeth into something else. I still have to finish Freakonomics and Gilead and my mom gave me Gift from the Sea as a gift and I know I need to read that too and then get started on my September book club book…will it ever end? I doubt it considering the mass number of books that live in our house – I am always so intrigued when I go to people’s houses and they have no books, how is that possible? They live in stacks at our house and in the husband’s office…where he is running out of shelf space too. I have always loved this quote, to end for today, “A home without books is a body without soul.” (Marcus Tullius Cicero)

leaving, thinking, reading

I have not been very good about staying on top of blogging but it seems lately that by Sunday evening I am wondering where the week before went. The past three weekends have been hectic with my mom becoming ill for the past three Thursdays – Saturdays. I told her jokingly that I think she is allergic to weekends but seriously, we pray that this week will find her healthy and refreshed this weekend!

We received a phone call last night from an absentee church member who was calling to check on us – he said that he had heard that our church was pushing us out and getting rid of us. Man, you are always the last to know, aren’t you? We received the call while we were with one of our Elders and his wife and that sparked a conversation about some of the people who left our church and have been bad-mouthing and tearing us down in our own community and in others as far as 20 miles away. I felt convicted of rehashing the past, of even talking about it again, like a broken record and then something in this morning’s devotional caught my attention and made me realize that I need to just be a bigger person, to avoid even talking or revisiting these things again. I found the Message’s version of the scripture and I love it even more than what I read this morning. It is a challenge, a charge and an encouragement. I have included it at the bottom of the post.

We packaged and mailed another resume and set of sermon tapes to a church about 15 miles from where we are now. Time will tell, there are many mixed emotions about it (some saucy thoughts from the husband on his blog) and also, we are trying to learn how to be sensitive to our community when the time to leave does come. For good or for bad they have become a family to us and it will be hard to leave some of them behind. We have a group going to see Doug and Molly in February so, God will need to work the timing out where the husband can still lead the group there – be it from this church or another. I am not going, we are believing and trusting that by February I will be pregnant and will need to stay stateside. But, hell, our plans are thwarted everyday so, who really knows, I have given up pretending to know!

Today is my dad’s 50th birthday – Yeah! We are heading to town to have dinner with my parents to celebrate. We are very, very fortunate to have such a wonderful man in our family and I am very thankful for him. On Sunday my parents celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary – 30 years, enough said. I can only hope and pray that we will be as blessed.

In closing, here is Romans 15 for some thoughtful reflection:

(starting at verse 1) Those of us who are strong and able in the faith need to step in and lend a hand to those who falter, and not just do what is most convenient for us. Strength is for service, not status. Each one of us needs to look after the good of the people around us, asking ourselves, "How can I help?" That's exactly what Jesus did. He didn't make it easy for himself by avoiding people's troubles, but waded right in and helped out. "I took on the troubles of the troubled," is the way Scripture puts it. Even if it was written in Scripture long ago, you can be sure it's written for us. God wants the combination of his steady, constant calling and warm, personal counsel in Scripture to come to characterize us, keeping us alert for whatever he will do next. May our dependably steady and warmly personal God develop maturity in you so that you get along with each other as well as Jesus gets along with us all. Then we'll be a choir—not our voices only, but our very lives singing in harmony in a stunning anthem to the God and Father of our Master Jesus!

the written page

I went to my book club last week and partook in a lovely meal cooked by a wonderful woman named Joyce who owns a little lunch shop in the town where I work. Good food, good company and good discussion about books. I think we talked more about literature when we weren’t discussing a certain book we had read! Each person brought as many recommendations to the table for books to read for the next year as they wanted and I was sure to write down names of all of them to expand my sphere of reading. I was so impressed with these women, they started whipping out book reviews and articles from the Tribune, etc. about books that caught their eye.

Below are the books we are reading, some I am not very excited about, others seem interesting. Two of my suggestions were taken (Severe Mercy and Nickel and Dimed). A lot of diversity, it seems, between not only fiction and nonfiction but “highbrow” reading and not so much (i.e. March). I ordered the first five books already so that I am prepared and don’t have to try to do crunch time reading before the first of the month. Here are the picks, in no particular order:

Plain Truth – Jodi Picoult
Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before – Tony Horwitz
The Attack – Yasmina Khadra
Terrorist – John Updike
Digging to America – Anne Tyler
Everyman – Philip Roth
My Antonia – Willa Cather (which never fails to get me humming My Antonia by Emmylou Harris/Dave Matthews)
The Pursuit of Happyness – Chris Gardner
March – Geraldine Brooks
A Severe Mercy – Sheldon Vanauken
Nickel and Dimed – Barbara Ehrenreich
The Year of Magical Thinking – Joan Didion

Regarding literature, Corbin started an interesting thread of discussion on his blog regarding the top ten greatest pieces of literature. His discussion is going to take some more time to digest and think about…I might add the Bible and Civil Disobedience (book or essay?) to the list…

One book I know that I am going to get and read because have been putting it off is “Love in the Time of Cholera”. This book first sparked my attention through two different John Cusack movies where he talks about it and it keeps popping up as a “great” piece of literature. Ahhh…so many books, so little time!

new bathrooms, new girlfriends and new books

I believe that we, the husband and I, have made a monumental shift in our relationship…we conducted a sizeable home improvement project without a single fight! We painted our bathroom and did so in good spirits and without any bickering. I think that this ushers us past the “newlywed” phase (which some people still insist on saying, oh, you’ve only been married six years, you are still newlyweds…) or else it means that we are both mellowing out as we get older. I tend to think it may be a tad bit of both. The end result is a bathroom that is a bit more “minty” green than I had hoped for, I was wanting something more “sage” but, we have what we have. I guess one way to look at it is that we know we won’t live in the house forever since we don’t own it so, I won’t have to look at the walls forever. I am now in a quest to find new curtains and rugs that pull it all together.

Painting the bathroom was a must because the wall had cracked and needed repaired and the paint was pealing off. We had been putting it off (me for fear of choosing a color I wouldn’t like, oh well, and the husband because he wasn’t thrilled with the idea of painting). But, we are having company this weekend and the wall was looking pretty trashy…but more importantly, we are having very special guests this weekend. Our best friend is bringing his girlfriend to meet us. His first official girlfriend in years, the only one he has had since we have known him. This is pretty big for him and we feel like parents with a 30 year old child who is bringing his girl home to meet mom and dad. But it’s cool, I feel honored that our approval means so much to someone, who means so much to us and we are excited to meet Beth!

I am finally getting back to my book club tomorrow night, I have missed it the last two months. We are having dinner and putting together our reading lists for the next year. I am taking two suggestions with me, one I have read (and wept over) and one I am working on reading (per the husband’s recommendation after seeing Marilynne at a conference). The first is “A Severe Mercy” by Sheldon Vanauken and the other is “Gilead” by Marilynne Robinson. I am anxious to get back to it, since I have been encouraged to read books that I would not otherwise have picked up. We shall see what the next year brings to my literary palette!

welcome home...

A quick re-entry into back into reality as the close of our summer vacation found us last night having drunk a chilled bottle of Spatlese, a little too fast, on somewhat empty stomachs, while lounging on the couch and counting down the hours until the inevitable happened and the alarm went off this morning.

We had a wonderful vacation, enjoyed being away from our life and being removed from work and church and the small town. We spent a lot of time in the sun, doing nothing, being with cherished family members, eating and drinking oh-so-good wine and really not doing much that was constructive. I didn’t even pick up a book all week which is out of the ordinary for me. Rather, I just listened to the sounds of summer at the pool. I did however pick up a book of soduku puzzles. That was a mistake, I have such a compulsive personality that I don’t want to put something down, like a puzzle, if it isn’t finished. So, I became rather consumed with the puzzles and felt compelled to finish one before I could stop.

The mother of one of our church members passed away while we were gone and the family wanted my husband to do the funeral (this was Tuesday, three days into our trip). Not that it makes a difference but the parents are not church members, just their son. We didn’t return for the funeral and our Presbyterian friend conducted the funeral in the husband’s stead. This, of course, was not welcomed by the son and he is hurt and offended because, as he said, he thought he and the husband “were closer than that”. That ushered us into a conversation yesterday concerning putting others before yourself but also maintaining a balance of health within your own family.

Where is the line, is there a line? How do you prioritize without hurting people? Everyone believes that they should come first so how do you go about prioritizing without making people feel like less than they are? Thoughts to mull over on this very warm Monday.