all the grown-ups, raise your hands...

The husband and I sometimes find ourselves pondering and musing why our marriage works so well when so many others do not. We have our moments of disagreement, of course, but nothing that is foundation shaking. We don’t fight about money and/or sex, the two most heavily debated issues in marriages (per most research) and we find that after more than six years of marriage we are sill blissfully and happily married. Often times we joke about not fighting about money, that how can you really fight about something you don’t have an overwhelming excess of?

My internet home page is MSN, and this is today’s top story, “How Many Is Too Many?” The article begins with, “Credit card use in the U.S. is growing, with 14% of Americans holding more than 10 cards, a survey by one of the giant credit-reporting agencies has found. That's up from 2004, when 10% had more than 10 cards. The study, released today by Experian, identified two groups of heavy card users: the 14% who own more than 10 cards and another, at times overlapping, 14% who use more than 50% of the credit available to them. This last group alone holds an average of nearly seven cards each, two more than in 2004.”

Maybe that’s why people fight about money – 10 credit cards, can you even begin to imagine? Perhaps you can, I don’t know. We have one, we use it for online purchases and usually pay it off at the end of the month but have been known, in the past, to carry balances when there were big items (such as airlines tickets) that had to be bought. But 10 credit cards - that would put stress on anyone, let along a married couple. While I found the article overwhelming I am also not all that surprised, I guess.

For a quick update on our life: Things are moving along in our home, we continue to live in this state of flux, not really sure what we are doing, where we are going. We need to make some decisions about what we want to do so that we have a nursery ready for Miss Bailey, but don’t want to place any undue expenses on the church should we move in the next couple of months. Ms. Bailey had a check-up and is healthy and fine and we are both doing well, just pulling into the final stretch, about 10-11 more weeks to go. The husband has been accepted into a Doctorate program, I am so proud of him I could burst and I so admire his intellect, dedication and enthusiasm for schoolwork! I told him, getting a doctorate is something that only grown-ups do. I suppose we are gown-ups. Maybe having a baby will finally make us feel like we are…who knows!

happy birthday to me...

So, today I turned 30. It is not as traumatic as I thought it would be – 25 was really bad and thus I was not looking forward to 30. Per haps I would be more upset if I had had the chance all week to talk about turning 30 before it actually happened but, since I am sans husband, I haven’t really had a chance to dwell on it with another person.

I am sad that I can no longer use the phrase, “in my twenties” anymore. But, the more and more the husband teaches the freshmen college students, the more and more we realize that we are getting older and not the twenty-something year olds we thought we were.

How can I complain about being 30? I have a wonderful best friend and husband who loves me more than I deserve or could even begin to comprehend, I have a family who loves me just as much, I am going to be a mom this year and I have done pretty well for myself in my career path. I am happy, content, alive, healthy and taken care of. I can not be unhappy about any of that and so, I will celebrate being 30!

I am going to celebrate tonight with my parents and then my mom and I are going out for “girl time” tomorrow to the spa and shopping. She and I have not been out and about, just being girls, for months and months due to her preceding illness. I don’t care where we go, I am just excited that we can go out and spend time together again, she is my best girlfriend!

quiet prairie home...

These wonderful people are getting to spend this week with my husband. He took a group of four from our church and they will not return until late, late Sunday night. What I do know is that they arrived safely this past Sunday however, their luggage did not. They were hopeful to pick it up today while in the city.

Having grown up an only child and being a fairly independent person, I don’t have a hard time being alone but without my husband I realize how very quiet our home is. He fills it with such a presence that is sorely missed and entirely noticeable when he is gone. I miss him so very much but know that this is an incredible opportunity for him. I am excited to see him when he gets home, anxious to have him wrap his arms around me, and anticipating all of his stories, lessons, gleanings, etc. that he has had in these past eight days.

I am reading a great book, because I promised I would, called Mudhouse Sabbath. I am really enjoying it and am challenged by it as well. It is written by a Christian who was a devout Jew and she is recapping a lot of the strict Jewish customs and putting them into a fresh perspective. Her point is not so much that we should adopt them, but maybe understand a deeper and more important/intimate connection between our lives and God through our actions, our hospitality, our grief, observing a Sabbath and more.

It is very, very cold here as it is a lot of places and we received about 5 inches of snow. Some neighbors were kind enough to dig out the pregnant lady’s driveway for her and shovel a path to her front door. I know I lamented in my last post about the lack of goodness in people but now I have to bite my tongue as I have also seen the innate goodness of people who give for no reason but to give. I like when I can be proven wrong.

today, I am embarrassed to be a part of mankind...

I am just overwhelmed with sadness for mankind today, I am overwhelmed with the utter lack of compassion that many people chose to lead their lives with. I am overwhelmed by this and yet saddened by them. I hurt and ache for these people.

I have been looking inward at two situations today, one being at work and the other the online reactions to a news article in our local newspaper. The two are so radically different yet, they are so intertwined because of the callousness of people’s reactions.

We have been experiencing bone chilling temperatures here for the last week or so, yesterday it was only seven degrees when I went to work at 8am, the shining sun did nothing to warm the air. There was a front page article in our local paper regarding the homeless population that, in growing number, are seeking refuge at the city’s library at night. Due to the shape and structure of the building, it blocks a considerable amount of wind and provides shelter. The article was just focusing more so on how the social service agencies in the city have upped their bed capacities to fight the cold nights. The article focused on one woman who said she would rather sleep outside because she didn’t like the curfews of the shelters. She was not being critical, she was simply stating why she hadn’t sought indoor shelter.

The paper allows for online postings in response to their articles and this one unleashed pages of comments. Some of them were just unreal and so incredibly heartless that I was embarrassed for the person writing it. Here’s one (and it is a direct quote so I am not sure what intrangients are to the author): “The people who are homeless for reasons beyond their control are getting help and are in a shelter. Those around the Lincoln Library are the intrangients who refuse to life within society's rules. They do not deserve pity they deserve to be shown the way to stop imposing their way on others... “

There were many about how the women who wanted to sleep outside shouldn’t be allowed to because there were shelter beds and just because she didn’t like the imposed curfews, who cared, she should be forced to get off the street. She was homeless and had no right to disagree or dislike the curfew – I guess I forget that once a person becomes homeless they lose all sense of like and dislike. It just reminds me of when I was on the Joe Noonan trip working in a soup kitchen and someone from our group was appalled that a person in the line said they wanted a sandwich with no mayonnaise. As if, just because this person was utilizing a soup kitchen, they couldn’t dislike a food item…how dare they still have personal choices?! The negative comments so outweighed the positive ones that I just stopped reading them because I was getting more and more angry.

The second issue is that in one of the departments at work there is a women who is a bit of a loner and she doesn’t make very much money and doesn’t have a lot of clothes or very nice shoes or even a car. One of her coworkers continues to complain to the manager because she thinks that she is smelly, sloppy and yucky. The complainer is early twenties, very fashionable, has the right shoes, style pants, etc. She obviously spends quite a bit of money and time on her fashion choices for work. She just does not really like this other woman because she doesn’t have as nice of stuff as she has (and this is really how she put it, in not as many words).

It angers me to hear people act like that, to think like that and then it just makes me plain sad. The manager and I were talking and I said you know, the complainer thinks she has it all together because she looks good but you know what, we all don’t have it together, none of us do…we all are missing it somewhere. Just because she looks good, as far as she thinks, she is all together but you know what, she is one of the most miserable persons I have ever met. She is someone you can meet in the hallway and speak right to and she will just ignore you – but hell, at least she looks good, right?

I know that not everyone lives with the love, grace and compassion of Christ in their lives. I know that not all those who claim to be Christians have love, grace and compassion. But where do we find compassion for a fellow human being just because that’s what they are, a fellow human being? How can we be so immersed in our own lives that we can not see that the person with the out of style clothes who can’t afford a car, the woman sleeping at the library or the person in line at the food pantry are there because they lack some basic need(s) that we ourselves, perhaps, have to spare? It just breaks my heart, I am saddened for us as a people.