Counting my blessings in like-manner:

:.The weather has been the sort of wonderful that makes all the badness disappear. It's been in the seventies, overcast, with spritzing rain. I love it. I shed my jacket walking to school today, draped it through my back handle and breathed deeply. I'm learning that breathing deeply might be the only respite I see in my day and so it needs to be enough.

:.I dropped my car off at the mechanics yesterday expecting a phone call a few hours later saying that there was no way my car would make it back home, let alone across town (the last diagnosis was pretty much that). Just before class began, though, my phone vibrated and it was a sweet lady saying "I don't know, but your car is in tip-top shape. We checked everything and checked things that we don't usually check and I think you'll be fine to take it home. Potsdam, New York and all the places in between, eight days and counting!

:.For a WHOLE month!

:.The verdict is probably in: a few friends from here will be visioneering in the New Year with us up there! You already know a few of them, but some are new and waiting expectantly to visit.

:.My senior portfolio sat, stacked seventy pages high, on my dresser yesterday. Now it sits in a file marked Lore Ferguson: Portfolio in the English and Modern Foreign Languages office. This isn't so amazing, I mean, really it's just a bunch of papers I've worked on for the past few years. Except, this is the blessing part, my hard drive, and everything on it, was lost a mere two weeks ago. I've been scrambling to find and retype and rewrite all of this in order to get it in by the deadline (tomorrow). And it's finally done.

:.I found out two days ago that all of my finals are finished on the 8th of December (that's four days before the end of Finals Week) which means I am coming home four days sooner and get to enjoy one more blessed Sunday at CFC!

:.I honestly meant to go food shopping when I got back from Chicago on Saturday night, but there hasn't been time and I haven't had the energy. But somehow eating humus and whole wheat tortillas and eggs and granola bars has been sufficient. Tomorrow, I promise, I'll go fruit and vegetable shopping.

:.Finally, and this is the best I think: there's this boy who goes to school here whose name is Harrison. He's kind of the boy everyone knows, you know the sort. He clears everyone else's trays in the cafeteria and gets to class a half an hour ahead of everyone so he can open the door for them. He's the sort of kid who isn't just good at everything he does: he's stellar. You know, writes the best editorials, smiles the best smiles, designs to coolest posters. I don't do Facebook, but someone started the Harrison Keely Facebook Club just because the kid is so great. I haven't seen him around campus much this semester, but I think that was more my fault than his. But today, as I walked past the Conn Center I heard a cheerful "Good Morning!" and looked up to see Harrison holding open the chapel door for a slew of kids who pretty much ignore him, he's like a doorstop to them, predictable, dependable, disposable, and my heart was glad. Because Harrison is like a mascot. But more than that, he's an inspiration.

That no matter how close to the end of the semester it is, how overloaded and overwhelmed everyone feels, how overcast and cloudy it is, and how ungrateful everyone might be, there are absolutes. There are consistencies. And sometimes those things are people. And they're the best kind.

Gmail is awesome. It sorts. It keeps, and keeps keeping. It searches. It chats. It invites. It shows me what I should buy and makes me glad I don't buy much. And best of all, in my inbox it shows me all the drafts I have waiting to be finished. There are a lot and they are all in red. So if you are:

Janine Bergey
Michael E. Owens
Danica Dunphey
Nancy Hull
Dr. Brown--Advisor
Mom
Louissa Sinclair
Cara Ivarone
or
Dr. Graham

Please accept my apologies. I am thinking about you. Just not enough to finish what I've started.

One thing I love about home is the constant influx of people in our house. Growing up we were the hub of the social circle and every home in which I've lived since leaving my first home has been an epicenter of gatherings. Whether it's the food, the fellowship, or the freedom, I'm not sure. But for all my designs on the introverted lifestyle and fantasies of quiet and peace, it's the opposite that finds me.

This week is no different. I'm here in Wisconsin at the home of a family who I've known for five years and missed for two, visiting with another family who've offered me a place to call home for the past few years, accompanied by adopted siblings and extended family. One bathroom. But I believe someone else has already expounded on the pleasures of that.

Today I stood in a gallery of the Art Institute of Chicago and viewed a medieval painting of The Last Supper. Rich colors and angular faces around a table of broken bread and breaking bodies. Last Sunday the sermon was on those first Christians who went from house to house, breaking bread, and sharing all things in common. We were exhorted to live lifestyles emulating that and it reminded me of a girl who stayed at our home this past summer. As she was leaving she hugged me tightly and said she'd never met people like us before, never been in a home that was so welcoming and so filled with community, "It reminds me of the Book of Acts!"

And I smiled inwardly. The same as I'm smiling now.

We're not family, though some of them are. We don't have that covenant that I long so much for--that absolute certainty that there is nothing under heaven or earth that can separate us, but we have community. And maybe I'm too idealistic and the desire for that covenant here on earth is hoping for too much. But the longer I long for home and stability, and the less that either are my cup or portion, the more I realize that covenant is an extension of community. Community, like that bread broken at the last supper, represents something much more tangible, much more certain. It represents promise and it represents hope.

I may not ever see the completion of a covenant family here on earth, my brothers and I may never live all in the the same state again and marriage may not ever be my portion; partial, makeshift and adopted families may be the extent of my familial portion. But this I know and of this I am sure, I have the certainty of covenant and the promise of communing with Jesus Christ wherever I am.

She wasn't the first, and most likely won't be the last. But as she sat there beside me, one hand gripping my hand, the other on her temple, and confessed the insecurity that comes from given and stolen purity, my heart broke in half. He wants a spotless bride and within the heart of every girl there lies a furrowed desire to be spotless, to be clean, to be pure. She scrubs at the stains and scars, things which in their very nature cannot go away. Her eyes pool with tears as she hears me call her clean and then they drop down in the confession that she doesn't feel clean or beautiful because she has been cast aside in favor of other girls or shiny bare spreads from magazines and computer screens. How can a girl feel beautiful when what is beautiful to him is not real?

The sting of lost or stolen purity. The hurt of being the projected ideal of someone's fantasy. The desire to take it all back, curl up, keep what is the thing only we girls have: godly femininity. Whether it is an electric shock of hands brushing, a mere kiss, or virginity, each progression into a deeper intimacy with someone who won't keep their end of the bargain. And why should they? We haven't kept ours. The opportunity for the pure and spotless bride was lost the moment Eve decided that being better was better than being obedient. And so it appears we are in a mise en abyme--lost in the hopelessness of the cycle of the sin nature.

But tonight was different, not because this girl was different, but because the sudden realization that this girl, in the same way that the purest virgin on this campus, is still the Bride of Christ. There must be something that makes them different, different dollops of grace perhaps? Different jewels in the crown? Sat on different sides of the Father? What is it that separates these two, that makes them equally spotless when in the eyes of the world they are a goddess and a harlot? It cannot be, then, something intrinsic to these girls. It has to be something about the Lord, else we really are in a works dependant religion.

The bible doesn't just say that the Church is to be a pure and spotless bride, the Bible says that Christ will present us blameless. Present us. Give us. Offer us. Show His Father what He's got up his sleeve. Yeah, you thought we were stained, scarred, ruined for anything but the dregs, but He's still proud of this Bride, this offering, this presentation. What makes us clean then? Mere white robes cannot cover the sin that this body houses, a crown cannot erase the thoughts upon which this mind has dwelled; no, in and of myself I am lost, utterly impure, akin to the harlot, given over to fleshly lusts and the boastful pride of life.

This is why we do not present ourselves. This is why the Bride of Christ, the Church, is presented blameless to God, by Jesus. Jesus who covers our impurities, our inadequacies, our lacks, and our guilt. Jesus who lifts up this girl's eyes and says to them, "You are not pure because you have kept your virginity, your heart, or your soul clean from the world. You are pure because it is I who covers you."

The Church has too long been covering her lacks with self-help programs, good music, and choir robes. She is unclean, impure and crazily attempting to cover up her stains and scars with things that the world uses to cover its inefficiencies. Like my young friend today, she needs to lift up her eyes and see that a return to purity is impossible, sin has entered the world and it only leaves one way--Jesus. Sufficient Jesus.

Knowing that you were not redeemed with perishable things like silver or gold from your futile way of life inherited from your forefathers, but with precious blood as a lamb, unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christs For He was foreknown before the foundation of the world, but has appeared in these last times for the sake of you who through Him are believers in God, who raised Him from the dead and gave Him glory, so that your faith and hope are in God. Since you have in obedience to the truth purified your souls for a sincere love of the brethren, fervently love one another from the heart, for you have been born again not of seed which is perishable but imperishable, that is, through the living and enduring word of God.
I Peter 1:18-23

Last night I was holed in a practice room, my haven place of late, my Bible opened to Luke and my eyes falling on this verse:

As he looked up, Jesus saw the rich putting their gifts into the temple
treasury. He also saw a poor widow put in two very small copper coins. "I
tell you the truth," he said, "this poor widow has put in more than all the
others. All these people gave their gifts out of their wealth; but she out of
her poverty put in all she had to live on." Luke 21.1-4

And the last three pages of this year's journal filled quickly with questions about why? Why is the Kingdom built more expedientially when we give out of nothingness? Yesterday in chapel the speaker spoke about a peerless Kingdom--one in which the principles that work for the kingdoms of the world cannot work for the kingdom of heaven because we are made to be different. On the way to church last night I listened to an old sermon tape from home, about sowing and reaping, about the continuance of sowing, even when there seems to be no return.

Logistically, continual sowing, yielding no return, affords poverty. And this woman, the woman Jesus commended to his people, was still sowing, even into her poverty. Why? Why were we created to walk out this life in the habit of sowing, without a return, trusting that the return can be Jesus and nothing more? This woman wasn't only a minority already, as a woman in that culture, but she was a widow, a poor widow, in poverty---and, which is more than all of that, she gave all that she had to live on.

I read a passage of Oswald Chambers to a friend the other day; I can't remember it exactly, but basically it said that we have been saved from hell and eternal damnation and we quibble over the mere sacrifices God requires of us? Let it not be so! Let us be in a place where all that we have to live on is Jesus and He is more than we deserve.

It's no secret that I've been thinking about Abraham and obedience lately. Like the clay turned gold of the fairy-tale prince, death and sacrifice seem to be the product of everything I touch recently. I always have that odd sense that Oswald Chambers must always be peeking over my shoulder and into my heart--or the spirit of God. Today's entry reads this:

Abraham did not choose what the sacrifice would be. Always guard against self-chosen service for God. Self-sacrifice may be a disease that impairs your service. If God has made your cup sweet, drink it with grace; or even if He has made it bitter, drink it in communion with Him. If the providential will of God means a hard and difficult time for you, go through it. But never decide the place of your own martyrdom, as if to say, "I will only go to there, but no farther." God chose the test for Abraham, and Abraham neither delayed nor protested, but steadily obeyed. If you are not living in touch with God, it is easy to blame Him or pass judgment on Him. You must go through the trial before you have any right to pronounce a verdict, because by going through the trial you learn to know God better. God is working in us to reach His highest goals until His purpose and our purpose become one.

I guess I've convinced myself that anything worth having is probably worth giving up, home, family, security, hope, life, all of those things that that bring some sort of hope and future, like Isaac was for Abraham. He was the incarnate being of Abraham's seed, his descendants, his fruit, his hope. All the things Abraham had been promised rested in that small boy, that delight of his soul, that gift of God. And Abraham questioned not the command of his Father because he understood that hope didn't rest in a thing, it rested in a choice.

The choice to choose obedience without counting the cost, even without even choosing the cost--if that can be. My head and heart have a difficult time swallowing the cost, even if the initial obedience seems impossible to ignore. It is the cost that causes me to doubt the Word of the Lord, the repercussions of obedience. The loss and the ache of the heart. For Abraham the sacrifice itself was not an issue, it was the act of obedience that determined whether his heart was centered on the Lord.

Last week I heard someone pray, "Lord, we need you to center us." And never have I felt someone else's prayer touch me so deeply. Lord, we need you to center us. Take us from self-chosen sacrifice for God or from no sacrifice to God or from acetic sacrifice for God or whatever it is that takes our eyes off of God Himself and the only thing He requires from us in order to center us. He asks obedience. He asks us to accept the mission. He asks us to do so with immediacy and constancy.

God is working in us to reach His highest goals until His purpose and our purpose become one.

Even so, not my will, but Thine.

I am the worlds biggest slacker. I'm not a fan of cheesy superlatives, but "biggest slacker" is really the only descriptive term I can apply to the person who is me this week. Suddenly the past four years of hard work and scholastic initiative have been depleted and I am happy to slough off every bit of homework in preference of quiet and rest. Perhaps it's the knowledge that because of the amount of credits I have (enough to have both a BA as well as an MA) my GPA can't be touched whether I get all B's or all A's. And the desire to do things excellently pales in the desire to just be done with school (why, then, am I applying to graduate programs, you ask? I don't know, I answer). Hanging over my head at present:

A whopping Shakespeare paper.
An annotated bibliography (one page per source) on Grammatical Parallelism in Postmodern Poetry.
About 250 submissions to the Lee Review that need to be tossed/accepted/edited and/or at least read and commented upon.
A Lee Review website up and running by Friday.
An Advanced Grammar exam for which I have not studied a lick.
A placement exam for Mathematics (hopefully I'll be able to test out of taking this class, but my math skills are sorely lacking in view of a nine year absence of use).
A stack of grad school applications and 45 page essays to be written.

And I have been sitting here for an hour staring at a Word Document, having only accomplished this so far:

Lore Ferguson
Dr. Sabord Woods
ENG490: Shakespeare Analysis
11, Nov. 2006

I personify the world's biggest slacker. Or an almost-twenty-six-year-old-not-yet-graduated-from-college-senior. Whichever you prefer.

However. I will graduate with a Major and three Minors in five and a half months. That's got to be a little encouraging.

I'm okay. She and I sat across from one another at the dining room table today and it was the first time in months I could say honestly that the fear or the residue of it in my heart was gone. Certainty and trust and faith and life abide there. Obedience does that, I guess.

From a borrowed CD, a song on repeat today:

Cause I can think too much
I can think you away
Now that I've crashed hard
Can I see how you save?
There's a small cloud in the distance
So I'll keep on walking
Til Your grace sings so loud
I can't hear myself talking

And I tear hard this brittle bone
And I drink deep this wine
I live rich on the meat of this table
Cause it's here where I can find
The grace of a saviour
The face of a lover
The abscence of what I fear
I'm not alone, for here I've found my home

And suddenly the tears fall, in grace, in faith, in newness, in trust, in the only real and true certain thing I've found. The grace of a savior, the face of a lover, the abscence of what I fear. It's all there, or not there, and it's suddenly all going to be okay.

I'm okay.