manic monday...

Where have the days gone…I turn around and it has been almost two weeks since I have had time to sit down and blog. I am not sure what I want to recount or capture on this dreary, rainy Monday morning. I do feel like we are on merry-go-round, never resting for a minute. We have both been so exhausted lately and are unsure what to do to make it stop. We exercise every day, eat healthy and go to bed early but it seems like there is never enough sleep to make us alert enough or to keep me awake enough at night. Last night I started reading my book, Blue Latitudes (which I don’t think will ever, ever end and whatever member of the book club claimed it was an easy read was really lying through their teeth!) and started falling asleep so, rather than read and fall asleep I decided to watch the Emmys and of course, fell asleep. So, I am not sure which is worse, falling asleep while reading a historical account of Captain Cook’s travels or whilst watching mindless television.

We went and saw the Counting Crows last weekend at the State Fair and were strangely enough, probably one of the few people there to see the Crows. The Goo Goo Dolls were dual-headlining with them and the crowd was really more into Goo Goo Dolls than the Crows, to the point that the crowd really thinned out by the end of the concert. Too bad for them because I though that it was an incredibly enjoyable show in which they reverted back to many old songs but didn’t play too many cliché songs – you had to be a true, long-term fan to appreciate most of their set. I think that maybe someday I will be able to make it through “Time and Time Again” without crying and thinking of my dearly departed friend Candace but, for now, I still sat and cried while my loving husband reached over and didn’t have to ask, just took my hand and held it.

We had dinner, on Saturday, with a friend of ours who lost her husband last year, the actual year will be this week. She is still trying to desperately figure out how to continue on with her own life (she is 40) without him. I know I don’t have any answers for her and have found it to be best to just be there to listen to her and offer our friendship – I am not sure what life should look like after losing a spouse at such an early age. I pray that she finds her place and solid footing.

I got into this interesting line of thinking yesterday when a congregation member wanted to add a praise to our prayer time because we had gotten rain and, “God saw us fit to bless us with rain.” I started thinking about that and then verbalizing some unfinished thoughts – which is still have. Does God care enough about a podunk town in the middle of nowhere so much that He would have it rain there? The husband said that line of reasoning can become twisted if you start to think about, does God care enough for Farmer Fred that he caused it to rain so that Fred can afford to grow a crop to feed his family…if we think that why, where does one draw the line. I am not sure, I know that God is bigger than I can understand or think about or rationalize – I just don’t know what that bigness and vastness looks like and how it always works. I guess that’s just part of the mystery….

sunshine on the journey...

The husband is bringing me along on this journey that he is on…I am not sure where it is going, I am not sure what the road looks like, I am not sure what the destination is. I would venture to say that he feels the same way. None-the-less, over Chinese on Sunday we talked NT Wright, in my normal way, I tended to question it all and ask the devil advocate questions. I know what I believe, I know why, I am open to this journey, I just take small steps it seems. I get lost in the semantics sometimes of it all, I want him to be patient with me, I know that he will and that he wants me to go with him.

Sometimes we struggle talking about “big” thoughts together – I get defensive, that shuts him down and causes him to retreat. We have had the hardest time in our marriage finding a balance of even being able to do a bible study together, I begin to feel like a student or a congregation member rather than his best friend. However, for about the last four or five months we have been using the Guide to Prayer for Ministers and Other Servants that we both we introduced to in college. It has been so good, being able to read pure scripture and a meditative thought for the day. I think that we have been able to find a common ground on this – so our next big adventure is that we are going to read a book together. I am a little hesitant because I want this to work and fear that I will cause it to fail. We are going to start small and easy and read “Gift from the Sea” together. I am not sure what the format will look like, I think we are going to take a chapter a week – I guess we shall see.

I so want to share in all of these things with him and fear that it is my own, strong personality that often gets in the way. We need to do this, I believe, to help bridge over the chasm we have when it comes to sharing our journey(s).

Other than that, just dealing today with why things are allowed to happen, where He is sometimes in the darkness and hurt, in the sorrow and pain, and attempting to hold onto hope that all things work for good, eventually, and in His time, not ours. A friend of mine is undergoing a stressful pregnancy, they found two white spots on their baby (called Echogenic foci), one in the left ventricle of the heart, the other in the bowel. These are considered soft indicators of chromosomal defects, the most common one, of course, Down’s syndrome. She and her husband have to wait 7 to 10 days for test results and have already lost one baby earlier this year. Some days even when the sun shines down from the sky, it does not provide warmth or comfort or give way to the shadows that are in our lives.

learning to sleep...

We had the most refreshing weekend being lazy and not accomplishing much. Yesterday I laid down on the floor and started falling asleep and asked my husband, it’s ok to not be productive, right? Sometimes I feel like I need assurance that it is alright to just be and not be doing.

We had already been at church from 8:30 – 11:30, gone to a neighboring town for lunch and when we came home, I made homemade polenta for dinner. He said, I think that you have already accomplished more today than other people have…he had preached (my poor attempt at paraphrasing an excellent sermon) about God sustaining His children in the desert with manna, that Jesus continued that tradition of sustenance for our every need with more insight and depth than that. From that he also talked about how the desert wanderers were to keep one day as a Sabbath and that we should also take time to just be with family and friends and relax…not a very good synopsis but, it still resonated with me. I am very bad at slowing down but getting better – I did sleep away the afternoon yesterday, that’s a start.

We went to the State Fair on Friday with a teen who we have “adopted” from our church. We are her younger and somewhat cooler “parents”. She had never been to the fair and we felt an obligation and duty to introduce her to it. I did win a first place, blue ribbon for the before-mentioned cake that my husband so graciously cradled in his lap during our car trip last week. We surveyed the competition for the other categories I had entered and not faired as well in, introduced our teen to the wonders of beer battered cheese curds, Prairie Farms ice cream, deep fried Twinkies, the butter cow and being suckered into playing games that the husband assures me no one can ever win, in an attempt to win a giant stuffed monkey. Strangely enough, as we exited the fair grounds our pockets were lighter and we were sans monkey – I guess he may be on to something. We are headed back on Saturday for the Counting Crows concert...and perhaps some more cheese curds?

Saturday was our anniversary, we slept in late, the husband made homemade pancakes for breakfast and then we lazed around all afternoon, watching movies. We headed out for an incredible dinner, at an absolutely wonderful restaurant in Peoria called Jill’s on Galena. It was superb – and we finished the night off with a bottle of champagne. I am very thankful for my husband and all that he does for me – and am very, very proud that he was able to keep our dinner location a secret (we are both very bad at secrets). Thank you for a wonderful anniversary and I hope that we have at least six more….and six more after that….and six more after that….

the last six years...

I have been allowing Ellis Paul to soothe my soul while I drive to work the past week or so and I feel nice and mellow by the time I get there….if you haven’t had the chance to soak in his live cd, I would highly suggest it.

We shared a quick weekend visit with Corbin, I had prior commitments to see a community production of Meet Me In St. Louis which was a very rudimentary play that lacked a lot of things including microphones so that the audience could hear the actors and actors who could sing in key. However, the company I went with was the most enjoyable part so that made up for it. We so enjoy having Corbin as company, if you haven’t spent quality time with him, I would suggest you do that as well (quite a few suggestions from me this morning!). He is gracious and earnest, he is an incredibly gifted listener and has so much interest in other people, he is completely and utterly genuine (and I hope that the next time we see him we will also get a chance to see Susan again as well).

I spent yesterday afternoon baking for the State Fair and we took a jaunt down to the fair grounds last evening to drop it all off. My husband is gracious enough to support me in everything that I do, even if it means holding a cake, in a basket, for 45 miles, in front of the air conditioning vent in order to get the chocolate that was drizzled on top to firm up before dropping it off for judging. I am blessed to have a husband who is willing to do that and more for me…we will have been married for six years on Saturday.

I really can not believe that it will have been that long, most days it seems like it just happened but then I am overwhelmed when I think of all of the things that have happened in the span of that time, we have: been on staff at three churches, were somewhat forced out of the Nazarene Church, attended school at three different places and completed two master’s degrees, lived in three homes in two different states, have bought three cars all by ourselves (and felt more grown up each time), I have worked for two different organizations and he has worked for seven (ranging from church to retail to maintenance to teaching), we have suffered through the loss of two friends and a miscarriage, we have taken in two abandoned pets, have made new friends, lost touch with old friends and have become reacquainted with lost friends, been to two class reunions, have walked the shores of the ocean and two of the great lakes, have driven thousands of miles, and fallen asleep side by side over 2,000 times. We have shared and done so many, many more things that I can not even begin to describe or put into words...but with each one, I become more and more thankful for the husband I have been blessed with and with each one, I continue to learn to become a better person, wife and friend.

I love being married to my best friend, and once again, I would suggest it to anyone who has found their soul mate – and that is my last suggestion of the day!

you can learn a lot in a wal-mart aisle...

A lot of days you never know what someone else is hiding inside. A lot of times I like to watch people, imagine who they are, what they are doing, why they are at the gas station, with out of state plates, wearing a wedding ring, but traveling alone…it makes me realize how little I am that so many people are experiencing lives all around me and most of them I don’t know what that life is. I don’t know what makes them happy, I don’t know what weighs on their mind every morning when they get out of bed, I don’t know if they have a happy marriage or a child who they haven’t heard from for weeks and they don’t know where they are…we just don’t ever know what people hold inside.

I was at Wal-Mart yesterday waiting to use the digital camera machine to print pictures. The family in front of me was printing off wedding pictures so I stood for quite a while, which gave me a good chance to just watch people. I saw a little man who looked like my grandfather in his pressed dress shirt and creased “dungarees” with a little cart that had bread and lunchmeat and Tylenol in it. Was he sent on a grocery store run by the wife who pressed those creases into his blue jeans or was he a widower, picking up dinner for the next week?

However, what really made me pause to reflect about how we never know what other people are dealing with and going through was this younger, tan man in dirty jeans, boots and a t-shirt with the arms ripped off. He was swaggering down the aisle in his t-shirt that read, “The liver is a bad thing…it must be killed”. I would assume that this was in reference to killing off vital organ parts with alcohol but I just kept starting at him – he probably thought I was admiring his swagger – but he walked by a couple of times and I got really mad the final time he walked by. I was so angry at his shirt, I wanted to tell him to take it off, that he was ignorant and rude, that he had no regard for what that really meant. I wanted to tell him about my mother who has non-alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver…I wanted to ask him, “Really, you want to kill off your liver, so you can live with the realities of liver disease and the ramifications that it brings to your quality of life, your family, really, that’s funny to you?”

But you know what, that shirt probably is hilarious to him, I can’t imagine why else he would wear it. He doesn’t know that a girl in Wal-Mart would be so taken aback by his shirt that she would think about it all day.

It challenges me to really be more patient and caring with people – to take more time with people because we don’t know, nor could we ever know, what all someone is living in, with and through. I get probably three or four solicitation calls a day at work from head-hunters, investment companies, recruitment firms, software companies, you name it. I am not as gracious on the phone as I should be. I do not always smile and say good morning to the person sharing the elevator with me. Sometimes I avoid certain people at church because they have nothing positive to ever say, I just can not bear the burden of hearing their on-going, self deprecating stories of woe week after week, while dealing with my own life.

But, I need to take these moments to be human to someone else because it just may be the worst day of someone else’s life and a smile or a pleasant “no thank you” might be all they need for that moment. That church member may be a in a marriage where her husband treats her like a commodity and she is just that sad and has no one else to talk to about it. I need to be the hands and feet and ears and smile of Christ (as cliché as that it). I need to bear the burden of others who do not understand the grace of His taking their burden, so that I might help them to turn to the one who can take it all.