On the top of the brown wooden cabinet in the kitchen there is a half empty bottle of Chardonnay and a small box still wrapped in silver paper and a red bow. They have both been there for several weeks. My heart drops when I see them.

I think the line which rings in a most melancholy note for me is the last paragraph of Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte. Mr. Lockwood visits the gravesite of Heathcliff and Edgar Linton and says:

I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.

If you're not doing anything on Saturday, feel free to come help us paint.

A friend of mine, someone I love dearly, is going to have a baby very soon. A baby?! Her little sister prayed an amusing prayer last night. I found it hard to remain straightfaced enough to be a good example the to rest of the children to whom we had just admonished to sit quietly and listen with their hearts during prayer. Really Camilla.

While I don't think 20 degrees is warm, it sure is a lot better than 20 below.
I almost swore in that line. Which tells me three [3] things:
I almost swear far too often.
I think about almost swearing far too often.
I almost think about swearing far too often.

Hi. That was me being honest.

Who reads this again?

This is me tonight. A b s o l u t e l y Boring. That is supposing I am interesting the rest of the time, which, by my standards, I am not. But I have been told otherwise. I suppose though, that if you like people who have foot fetishes and like Pride and Prejudice along with a healthy dose of Monty Python; If your attention is caught by ones who drink green tea by the gallon and hates mushrooms; If you appreciate those whose only pet peeve is, as I have discovered, a venomous attitude toward processes; And if you like those who laugh with their mouths wide open, then I'm interesting. To me it is normality. Because that is me.

The things I find interesting aren't things like that. Well, maybe they are. Maybe they are on a different level.

What really interests me is a really good book, but even more, someone reading that really good book aloud to someone who really loves to be read to. What interests me are dark rimmed glass which get constantly misplaced and lost, yet, when worn, make the wearer so much more vibrant. Even without her already vibrant hair. What captures my attention is someone gets so excited about a subject that, even without the listeners rapt attention, they can talk about in such a way that the listener cannot help but become raptly attentive. It is interesting to me when someone sits silently in a corner, without saying a word, and still speaks louder than anyone in the room. It is interesting to me that some people can drink coffee like water, or rather, some people drink coffee like Jax drinks water. It catches my attention when I ask someone how they are and they answer in truth. I like that. I like it when people do things that not many people do. That is interesting.

So. Tonight I am boring. I suppose I usually am, but I like interesting things. And I like this. So tonight I am doing something I find interesting and you may find boring, but that's okay. Because we can.

I forget faith sometimes. I forget that it isn't just all circumstances and happenstances around us that make us grow, but that it is seeing them with eyes of faith that make us grow. It is looking at hopelessness and saying with certainly that we know this is a trial by fire and that, if only we look though faith colored glasses, the situation will look no less difficult, but with much more hope.

I've had to remind myself of that many, many, many times this week.

Tonight I stuck Jason Upton in my CD player. There are three albums which find myself gravitating to when in a spiritual slump of some kind: Jennifer Knapp's The way I Am, Rich Mullins' Liturgy, A Legacy, and A Ragamuffin Band, and Jason Upton's Faith. Usually I listen to them hoping to glean some sense of restoration to my pitiful Christianity and tonight was no different.

As usual the tears begin to well in my eyes and I know my heart will begin to repent and perhaps I will have to pull off to the side of the road, since the combination of tears and bad defrost usually results in bad car wrecks. But this time my heart did something different. 'You think you're the only one with the problems don't you? And you think that's how it should be don't you? You try so hard to not see anyone else's sins, calling it 'love covering a multitude' because you want to be so holy and pious, but you've forgotten that they're struggling too. You've forgotten that they need warfare too. You've wrestled so hard for your freedom and still they remain tangled in a net they can't seem to find themselves out of. Why don't you pray for them? Hmmm? Why don't you?

And right there I wept. I wept. I realized that three people I know and love are dealing with intense spiritual battles and I've chalked them up to stubbornness and sin, but forgotten to pray for them during the process. I haven't loved them through what might be the most difficult time of their lives also because I was too busy trying to make myself purer.

I haven't loved you. I'm sorry. I haven't prayed for you. Please forgive me?

I dropped an entire case of Nantucket Nectars at work today. An entire case. 24 bottles of half lemonade, half ice tea spilled all over the floor. 24 broken bottles spread from one side of the room to the other. One million shards of glass everywhere. I contemplated crying, but figured it would only make more of a mess, so I waited to cry until I sliced my finger on the xacto knife while cutting boxes up. I am such a baby.

Sometimes I feel like I have to explain myself to people. Not explain who I am or what I am, but I like to make excuses for who and what I am. Unfortunately, after the explanation I usually have to make more excuses for the explanation. It is better to not even say a word.

Sometimes I get so tired I can't see straight and I feel like throwing up. Sometimes I live a week or two at a time like that. Sleeping doesn't help and no, Jax, more water and green tea don't help. Sitting down and taking a few deep breaths doesn't help and neither does taking vitamins. I think what would help is to die and live in heaven - where there is nothing to tire or stress you out. Unfortunately, I am fairly healthy, just tired. Sometimes it helps to lie down on a kitchen floor and just lay there silently for a few minutes. I'm not sure why this works, but it does. I always feel better afterwards.

Sometimes it just helps to cry like there's no tomorrow. I'm not sure why that worked either, but it did. At least for tonight.

Killingsworth had good things to say on his brothers blog about looking at our own noses and painting like Monet. Check it out [January 25 2003].

Balancing the book Bitter Waters: Life and Work In Stalin's Russia on my head and whimpering my feeble request to my mother in the next room. My hands rest empty in my lap and I am surrounded by six cardboard boxes full of books and, by my calculated estimations, about 13 boxes left to pack still on the bookshelves. 'Can we move these to the new house?' I ask, pointing to the shelves. 'Loree - they're built in', she states pointedly as if I didn't already know they are screwed to the walls and ceiling. Can't we still move them?

I look at the bare green walls marred only by my brown messenger bag hanging on a porcelain hook. My violin case leans up against my brothers bedroom door and a trash bag against that. Strangely the bag is filled with high school graduations cards - I only kept three, papers, poems and art from the past few years. Memories are nicer than memorabilia - they only take up space in your mind instead of your closet.

Josh Groban belts out Latin words I do not understand downstairs and I hear the Malibu's engine start. I smell evergreen and there is the usual apple scent our home retains. Benjamin's baby monitor hums and I hear him sigh in his sleep. I find a pewter plate bearing my name as the 1997 winner of the Clover Leaf award. How important that highest honor was when I won it. How much dust it now gathers sitting in a box, unlooked at, unthought of for five years. There is a scratch on that antique mirror behind my door. Is it even my mirror anymore, even though I know that scratch better than anyone? Every door in my house sounds completely different than any other. I know all of their sounds. Only one of the floorboards in the hallway squeaks loudly; don't walk on that one. There are six and seven foot icicles hanging off our eaves, but it is thawing out and all around I hear them crashing down to the porch and the sunroom roof. There is an earring on my nightstand; it's not mine. I don't even wear those Birkenstocks very much anymore. Have I ever worn that sweater? Thanks Preston for letting me have the basket - I really do like it. There is a rainbow colored slinky on my floor and a bottle with cranberry juice beside it.

I am moving.

I take Bitter Waters: Life and Work In Stalin's Russia off my head. It's hard enough to balance one thing without trying to manage two.

I'm not sure. It seems like progress is made when we choose for it to be made. But sometimes I wake up and find that somewhere between yesterday and today, I've changed. Sometimes it seems like when nothing is changing it is because we are choosing to remain at a standstill. I am choosing to remain at a standstill.

These past few weeks, the hardest in my young life [maybe?], have been nothing if not progression. It seems strange to say so, since it's all been so turbulent and tearful, but growth happens whether we give it permission to or not. I haven't chosen for the things which have stretched and torn me over the past five years to happen and, if given the choice, I'd say give me the easy route any time. Of course that's not true. I'd choose the growth, but i'd choose the growth after the growth. I don't look at the next three years and say 'sure, how 'bout you rip that to shreds and yeah, while you're at it I wouldn't mind you taking this away and leaving me utterly dumfounded. And by the way, I have this really great thing going on, yeah, and I'm kind of wishing you'd stop blessing me that way.' Hi. No.

I can only look back and say, yeah, it's been hard. It's been more than I want to ever deal with again. It's been rough and it's been not at all fun. But it's been the single thing that has grown me in a way I could not have chosen by myself.

Danica called them 'duh revelations' this morning in church. Revelations which we should know and which we should have grasped long before now. But nothing becomes real to us until it becomes real.

I guess that was a little confusing.

Realizing grace comes easy when we stop seeing what should be and start seeing what is.

Tonight my fingers found a song they hadn't for a while. In the key of D. Written by Katharina von Schlegal and entitled Be Still My Soul It was the anthem of my life for one year. I played a copy of a tape from some kids from college who sang it with a guitar and three part harmonies over and over again until I had all three parts memorized and the words burnt on my mind. The lines 'Leave to thy God to order and provide - In every change He faithful will remain' repeated again and again until I finally came to the point where I could leave to my God; what other choice was there after death was laid cold in the grave, there are some things you can argue and win with and death is not one.

Be Still My Soul. Bear Patiently the cross of grief. The Cross of Pain. Thorny ways lead to a joyful end.

Thorny ways lead to a joyful end.

How could she have known? How can you know? You can't. I can't. I couldn't and I still can't. My end hasn't come yet. And though his end was bittersweetly joyful, his way was never thorny. Does she mean us? The rest of us? Us, the left behind ones? It's a song about death, there is no doubt, but more, I think, it is a song about assurance. About trust.

About knowing that above all He knows death.

Today I say in a conversation, I would rather die than my child die. That is, in context, I would rather die than them dying of sickness or accident, but how could I stomach the death to which I was the force? His son died. His son died while crying out to His Father and, while we stood in the crowd of jeering, mocking, perverse humanity, His Father closed his eyes and pointed to us saying it was worth His death to save us?

Our sin presently. But his choice ultimately.
And I stand amazed.

Thorny ways lead to a Joyful End.

I find myself, for the first time in about five months, growing excited with the prospect of life. That is not to say I have been suicidal or standing on the brink of death recently, but apathy and stagnancy had set in and I had fallen into a dreary pit of legalism and cynicism. This past week, though tired and overworked, I have been impassioned with a new appreciation for redemption and completion. I cannot wait to see which direction this will take in the coming months.

Today a divine appointment.

I listened to Cake very loudly in my car on the way home today. So creative.

Okay. That was nice. I spent today thinking about things and not writing about them in my head. Of course there were a few things that could not help but be written about in my head:

I raced the 5am train on the way to work today. As usual, I won. But there was a moment or two where it was quite neck and neck.

There was a sale at Rite Aid today on Altoids. Five for five dollars. Anyone who's anyone knows this is quite the sale and since I have recently discovered I am someone who's someone, I realized it was quite a sale. I bought five. I picked out one wintergreen, since that is my usual kind, two spearmint, since I have never tried them before, and one each of the sour Altoids. The verdict is in; Wintergreen is still the best, no matter what Jax and Steven say. Peppermint is too curiously strong and spearmint is gross, who ever heard of green altoids - it's almost sacrilegious! They look like toothpaste! The sour ones taste suspiciously like regular hard candy and there is nothing curiously strong about them.

No, thank you sir. I'll stick with the same.

Now what to do with the rest?

I bought new pens today.

We have a green front porch. Today, and probably for the next 58 days, it will be white; white and eight inches taller than normal.

Even so, spring weather, come quickly.

I’ve just gotten home from a long weekend in Saratoga. My thoughts are a few. My analytical ramblings are probably too much to write about. But I’m going to try to at least mention them.

A few weeks ago, while at the New Attitude conference, one of the speakers said something which has caused my mind to take another look at my heart and my motives. I wrote it down: God is not calling us to humility, He is calling us to reality. That is, the moment we think that we’ve somehow attained humility, it is that second that we haven’t. But, living with a realistic view of what is and what matters, keeps us constantly in awe of His presence, thus, we are humbled.

A conversation I had with a friend last week began the rumination of this all over again. I am so consumed with idealistic diagrams of how life ought to look that when life doesn’t resemble even a bit of it, I am shaken at the core. Perhaps not quite that drastic, but at times it seems like it. The moment I hold my lofty aspirations up to the light, I find that the once perfectly tightened weave of idealism is about as closely woven as cheesecloth. My hope crashes to the ground. I speak mostly of small things, like my never list [I will never slow-dance; I will never drink coffee; I will never go to Les Mis without a husband; I will never visit Disneyland; and I will most certainly never buy a cell phone.], the things I find if I ever did, it wouldn’t change my person, it wouldn’t change my character, it would only change reality a little more. Is that so bad?

Being sufficient with reality. Being comfortable, but never content, with the sin my being commits. Facing the small things that make us real and make us human. Knowing that as a human, I will always long for acceptance, and this needs not be something I must fight ascetically against. I must not force myself to be something other than what I have been created to be. I know someone who emulates the purest, most honorable character I have ever known a person to have, but he still has hobbies and he still laughs at jokes. He runs out of money and sometimes he gets depressed. He doesn’t like some foods and that’s okay, because he likes other foods he probably shouldn’t. He is the most human person I know and I think this is why he is the most humble person I know.

I have been reading Thomas Merton’s Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander this past week and some of his thoughts on this issue are this,

We have to remember the principle that certain desires and certain pleasures are willed for us by God. We cannot live in the truth if we automatically suspect all desires and all pleasures. It is humilty to accept our humanity, pride to reject it.
Von Hugel, in one of his letters, write of W.G. Ward ad an “Eager, one-sided, great, unintentionally, unjust soul” who on his deathbed saw the mischief of his life – he has consistently demanded that all others be like himself.
This is the root of inhumanity!
It is often more perfect to do what is simply normal and human than to try to act like an angel when God does not will it. That I, when there is no need for it, except in the stubborn passion of our own impatience with ourselves.
It is not practical, it is not honest, it is not Christian to fly from every desire and every passion that is not explicitly pious.
For others who are human enough to be ascetics without losing any of their humanity, it is all right to risk things that seem inhuman. For one as deficient and self-conscious as I am, the ordinary ways are safer. They are not just an evasion to be tolerated; they are a more perfect way.

And this from a man who lived a life of celibacy, reclusion and silence so as to know God more!

Another of my weekend thoughts resembles this, I am not who I am in spite of my background. You are not who you are in spite of your mistakes a
nd your past. I am not a daughter of a messed up marriage first and a child of God second. You are not what other people say you are, even if sometimes we feel like it. We are who we are because of our mistakes, because of our past and because of our messy rooms. Because we have been redeemed and we have been adopted, the only extra baggage we carry around is the slip of paper, which can be easily shown to anyone who asks, proclaiming our adoption. Proclaiming our sonship and proclaiming our redemption.

I am not stopping this weblog. I’ve gotten quite a few worries that I am, and quite a few questions on why I haven’t yet. I’m not. I came home and our computer is on the blink and for that I am quite thankful. I am taking a break. I may pop up here and there and I may begin posting quite regularly again in a week or so, but today I am taking a break. Tomorrow I am taking a break. I’d like to think it’s because my creative juices have dissipated and I that am no longer creative, but since I don’t even know if I was in the first place, that can’t hold water. I’d like to say it’s because suddenly everyone has a weblog and I’m not interested in what everyone else does, but I just wrote those few paragraphs on being human, and my humanity does want to do what everyone else does. I’d like to say it’s only because the computer has a virus or something, but I have access to the computer I’m on right now. There really aren’t any reasons that will suffice anyone, so suffice it to say, today I’m done.

I like these words put together:

You see I dream of many things,
Of floating, solitary kings,
Of pawns and people with blue sequins through their hair....
The jester sings, the bishop brings
The queen a hollow following;
And all the pawns and people stop, and people stare...


I think I have yet to find a more clever log entry than this [September 10th 2002]. It remains one of my all time favorite and proves that I am still a romantic at heart. I saved it when I first read it and sometimes I still go back and reread it.

There are a few things that cannot be packed away. Things which cannot disappear for deaths sake:

We have a stain our on library carpet. It is black and not obtrusive, though it would be if the sofa didn't cover it most of the way. It is there as a result from a spill of oil based black model paint. I think he was painting a plane.

In the downstairs bathroom, when you wash your hands you notice a yellow smiley face smiling up at you from the spigot. He opened the top of it and stuck the paper in there a few days before he died.

When you play Monopoly, there are three pieces of cardboard in the box, bearing his little block handwriting: Metateranian Ave. Baltic Ave. Indiana Ave. [misspelling his]. I guess those three real-estate cards were missing.

And I think that coat, which we've been wondering who it belonged to for so many years, is his. I found a picture of the four of them snowshoeing, and he is wearing it.

People say the memories fade, and I used to do mental exercises to prevent that from happening, but nothing has faded. Has it not been long enough? Did I live with him too long? I still can picture his face and his voice only takes a moment to recall. Sometimes I hear Joey come down the stairs and think it is him, but it's not, it's just that Joey has reached the age that he was when he died and his stature and awkwardness are a bit the same. He giggled a lot. None of us giggle. Do we? He did. His tiny shoulders, which didn't fit the rest of him, would shake and his eyes would crinkle at the corners, like mine I'm told, and he would belt out a small giggle.

No, the memories haven't faded. Because once someone has lived, and truly lived, that is putting yellow smiley faces inside the spigot head and hiding his toothbrush so well that it wasn't until a year after he died that we found it, they can never be erased. They can never be forgotten. There will never be any question in our minds as to what kind of brother, son and friend he was. He just was. And sometimes still is.

I absolutely get a kick out of watching people look for our refrigerator, as if we don't have one. They scan the kitchen in search of it, when they don't see it they peek around the corner into the front dining room [and who keeps their fridge in the dining room?]. "No, not there? How about the back room? No. Hmmmm. . . Where could it be?" Then their thought process takes a whole new dimension, and you can almost see it. "Well," they think, "they have a cookstove and they can their vegetables, maybe they don't believe in refrigerators?" Then of course, logic takes over, as it is wont to do, and they remember they are holding a cold gallon of milk; cold must therefore equal a chilling factor. They muster the courage to admit to their poor observation skills and ask sheepishly, "Ummm, I can't seem to find your refrigerator." To which I laugh uproariously. And point. To the pantry.

Reconciliation, redemption, and sanctification all whispered in my ear tonight driving through the blizzard home. I cursed the roads, damned my defrost, sang with Cosette, Marius and Javert, squinted to see even one painted line on the road, simply to get my bearings. The snow, which was not only mashed up all around me, compliments of the state employed snow plow men who get up early and stay up late, was also coming down, blinding me any more than thirty feet in front, forcing me to drive in that annoying speed right after third and not quite forth. And than I remembered Isaiah.

I remembered why it was that I like Les Miserables so much, what it is about it that caught my interest when, at age 16, I saw someone wearing a t-shirt proclaiming its fame. It is a story of redemption. A story of a wrong made right. And of course wrongs can never be made right, but this was a wrong which found itself redeemed, made like new. And suddenly the snow was no longer my curse. Suddenly I thought about where the snow fell from and heavens winter gift to us. My sins can never be right, but they are whiter than the snow under which my feet stepped on at midnight tonight. Perfect, new, white, pure, simple, individual, perfection. And tomorrow, it, like my sins, will all be gone. Melted away and never come again.

That's the thing about the Christian Life. That is what makes it, really, so enticing. I will not always be excited about evangelism. I will grow weary of relationship. I will tire of worship here on earth. But my humanity will continue to make itself known and my sins will always need redemption. I will selfishly always desire perfection of my own shortcomings and failures. And they will continue be washed away in streams made from the white snow which they've been made like.

Isn't it beautiful?

I am fascinated in observation. I claim no people skills and you that know me, know that I couldn't claim them if I bought them fair and square, but the art of watching people and creating stories in my head will never grow old to me. I am typically wrong, ask anyone and I'm sure they could give you at least one of many stories, but it broadens my horizons a little I like to say.

Recently I have been fascinated by watching people serve. That is not simply taking others burdens from them, alleviated their responsibility, but service in such a way that you need not be noticed or validated for carrying an extra burden, not yours. Carrying it in such a way that it seems to not even be a burden; in fact, it almost appears as if you are carrying less than the one you've taken the burden from. Can it be that service really is what we've been created to do? I feel so heavy under it sometimes, as if I am serving to make others loads lighter, instead of serving simply because it is what I have been called to do.

Along with my thoughts on Les Miserables, snow and redemption tonight, I also spent time weeping for the grace that is so evident. I find myself falling so short of the expectations I set for myself and others rising far and beyond the 'right' thing to do. What fuels them but grace? A realization that they deserve nothing and have been given everything, what more could they ask for? Once grace is truly understood there is no stopping you. Simply saying you understand it, but not rising above the normalcy, is not understanding it at all. The very knowledge of it shakes you at your core and forces you to serve, give, relinquish, surrender. I cannot even say I know a piece of it.

All the things that have changed in my world in the past 24 hours:

My brothers, for the first time in their lives, will enter a classroom and remain there all day, every day, beginning this week.
My father will now be only involved in our lives as much as the court will allow.
My brother got his ear pierced.
I will be moving in one month.
I have new and aligned tires finally.
I am 600 dollars poorer.
I ate chicken for the second time in a month.
I feel, for the first time since this fall, absolutely in the direct will of My Father in heaven.

Tomorrow watch for an update on my eye color, they will changing from a lifelong blue to chocolate brown.

Instant peace, albeit somewhat undesired, is usually a positive sign of surety. The changes that life demands of us are so hard to reconcile, at times, with the ideals we have nurtured in our minds. Weighing choices that are neither good nor bad, right or wrong, but both and neither at the same time, is so difficult, so beyond my minds capability. This is why the Holy Spirit has graciously offered Its presence in my life. I am ever grateful for it and still sometimes confused at the necessity of it; if things just went the way I thought they ought, I'd never have need of counsel, direction or gentle whispers. Thank God the way I think they ought is most times the wrong fork in the road and the Holy Spirit faithfully sends a Do Not Enter sign, in bright orange, blocking my entrance.

Then peace, the kind which passes all understanding, beyond my control, beyond my reasoning, beyond my desires of perfection, reaches down through the muddled mess of life, or at least my life at present, and gently scoops up the remaining rags of a robe I've tried to weave myself and places them back on a loom of unexpected circumstances to create a garment of not perfection, but protection.

I sigh in relief.

I offer thanksgiving.

I am in awe.

So many phone calls tonight. The proof of friendship lies not in companionship, not in comrade, not in commonness but in the sole facet of selflessness. I find more and more that my truest and most trusted friends are those whom I do not need constant reminders of their friend status from, but those who rejoice when I rejoice and mourn when I mourn, those who understand the importance of meaningless things to others and those who buy me chai. Perhaps not the last, but chai represents a piece of friendship to me. Isn't that silly?

I have precious friends. I am blessed beyond what I could ask or imagine. I say this not to prove to you all who read this that you are my friends and that I love you, only that I am humbled, I am truly humbled, to be counted as someone you care to care about. I am amazed that I have been chosen as one to which you choose to be selfless towards. I stand in wonder that you concern yourself with the things that concern me.

Thank you.

Have just gotten home this afternoon. I haven't much to write on the conference, or my thoughts on what we heard, only that I hope to be processing it all for quite a while. Even this morning driving home through Rochester, I read over my notes and was just overwhelmed with all the stuff I'd heard. Learning freshly about Who God Is and the awesomeness of His Personhood.

I will have thoughts to write down eventually.

For now I am only tired.

There is nothing more disheartening, I think, than being an idealist. If I weren't so consumed with how things ought to be, than I don't think it would be that disappointing when things aren't that way. It's not perfectionism, I certainly cannot boast in that, as much it is simply a desire to have things be right without putting the effort into making them that way.

I realized this weekend that my family, who we are and how we represent, is the thing that I take the most pride in. The single thing that dominates my idealist musings. I can take or leave any other thing I'd like to see happen or not happen and it won't bother me in the least, but I have certain ideas and certain directions I want to see us as a family moving in. But it's not happening that way. I take as much or more blame in that, but I have been so stuck in a rut of analyzation and idealism that I've not taken the steps necessary to make my part in that a little more meaningful. I've not honored them in my desire for a cleaner house, less media, more respect, more time spent doing the things I've always thought a family ought. I've not honored my parents and I've not honored my siblings.

Wake up call.

Time to take up the cross again, but why does 'take up' have to be such an action phrase?

Was reminded of this entry on the way home. I wrote it in a time where I saw changes inevitably rounding the corner of my life and knowing that I could either take the changes and eek every lesson I could from them, or I could ignore the changes and hope that I'd learn by osmosis. I wrote that I'd take them and learn, but I didn't follow through.

Or if I did follow though, the lessons weren't as ground into me as I'd like.

During small groups at the conference [of which I have never been a fan of, but these ones were quite good. Beneficial, interesting and personal all at the same time. Stirring one another on to love and good works.], I was once again awoken to the fact that my people skills are sorely lacking. Danica and I talk about how it is because we are idea people and not people people, but this is still no excuse. I am simply not interested in asking people questions about their lives and this is what I processed through on the way home; It is not that I am not interested, I am, I simply am not interested in the effort it will take to maintain a relationship with them. THIS is alarming and I hate that it reflects selfishness and pride. Yuck! I am passionate about discipleship, as long as it doesn't cut into my personal space. I am enthralled with relationship, as long as I can do it in a fifty mile radius. I am interested in everything, as long as I can pursue it on my own time.

Selfishness.