From recent writings:

"And if contentment is all I need, and is all He's doing, than I hope He answers my daily prayer soon. I wonder how one can want contentment as badly as I do and still find it ever illusive. As I was driving home tonight I list the things that make me feel content: a daily, normal schedule, daily exercise, rising early, lots of writing, lots of color and indoor plants, gardening, my own house--or space bigger and more permanent than my current lot--and I think that these things can't be the catalysts for my contentment. They can't be! They're far too selfish, far too worldly, far too here.

But then I remember Richard Wilbur's poem, Love Calls Us to the Things of This World--and I think of laundry and housekeeping and bread-winning and daily schedules and gardens, and I realize that though we're not to love the things of this world, we're called to love and Love put us here on earth with a Garden to tend--the least I can do is tend my plot well. Even if it is just dirt."

This is my lesson daily. To tend my plot, to live by that punctual rape of every blessed day. To watch the hour hand rise and fall and rise again, its only hope a paycheck and a kept-to schedule. I'm learning about sweeping sawdust and waiting for 30, for release and a sense of what is to come.

Right now it's to be faithful with the little things, to weed that plot and keep dirt beneath my fingernails--proof that this life isn't clean and orderly and understood, but it is real and created and that I am a part of it.

Right now Love calls me to not know the end of the story, but to hang my heart, like laundry on lines, on the hope that certainty is the hour hand and the end. And that punctual rise and fall and rise again will yield another sort of hope that doesn't disappoint or be crowded out by weeds and failed seeds.

Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks

From all that is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,
"Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.''

I whispered a silent prayer and then one more while he stood a few feet from the machine. Already he'd slipped two dollar bills into the slot and maneuvered that miniature crane for the allotted 20 seconds per half-dollar, and already the illusive blue teddy bear had slipped through his grasp four times.

We were on the last dollar now and the last 20 seconds. His eyes followed the motion of the mechanic luck-of-the-draw and I shut my mine--and prayed. Perhaps it was silly, but blue teddy bears mean a lot to just turned seven year old little boys and blessing him was worth a silly prayer.

She slipped then, head over heels, down the chute and from our sight. His eyes opened wide and his face suddenly buried in my coat, small arms around my waist.

"We got it!" he said.
"I know." I replied.
"This is the best birthday ever." he said.

It's funny how the best we've ever experienced is the best ever, but I didn't say that.

All I said was "Thank you, Jesus." Not because the bear was so important, but because the prayer was. It wasn't silly, no matter what you think. I needed that bear. He wanted that bear, but I needed it.

I needed to know again that prayer works for the small things. That He hears me, that He listens to me, that He answers me, that I matter, and that small boys and blue bears matter.

Her name is Blueberry, "Do you like that name? Cause she's yours too, yours and mine." I like that name fine.

Happy Seventh Birthday, Benjamin. It was the best birthday ever for me too.

After tears wet my pillow last night I decided some things have to change.

They just do.

It's like the wicked stepmother, the one who stared into a mirror asking about the fairest of them all and seeing only herself, purple lips and black widows-peak, squinted eyes and wickedness. How could she look at that day after day after day and still believe it when the mirror said she was the fairest of them all?

Ugliness is not becoming no matter how you look at it. Its nature is to be unbecoming.

It's not that I've been convinced that I'm the fairest of them all, it's that I loathe what I see when I hold that mirror to my face. It shows me my heart, my nature, my deep disappointment in God and others, it shows me all the ugliness that I pretend isn't there when I walk away from that mirror.

Don't fool yourself into thinking that you are a listener when you are anything but, letting the Word go in one ear and out the other. Act on what you hear! Those who hear and don't act are like those who glance in the mirror, walk away, and two minutes later have no idea who they are, what they look like. But whoever catches a glimpse of the revealed counsel of God - the free life! - even out of the corner of his eye, and sticks with it, is no distracted scatterbrain but a man or woman of action. That person will find delight and affirmation in the action.

I calculate the times when the reflection has mattered less to me, when widow's peaks and pallid skin are not so noticeable, when the thing that draws me even to myself is the Imago Dei: the image of God. I am His and He is mine. I was created in His image and He is perfection without me. I am only a reflection of Him and imperfect even with Him. I think about the times when I feel that truth, not just know it.

And the truth is that the delight doesn't come from the reflection, the knowledge that the Fairest One of All is staring back at me. The delight comes from the action, the not forgetting, the constant reminder that I am regardless of how I feel. That He made me in His image, but with imperfections. That He made me to long for Him, but always be found empty. That He made me to hope, but to be familiar with disappointment. That He made me to see, really see, but sometimes forget.

But that He made me His.

I have them stashed in a dresser drawer, sitting on my backseat, slipped into a visor organizer, cataloged on my ipod. My world is wrought with albums not of the shrink-wrapped, shiny artworked, and $16.99 kind.

Mix cds, or, as we called them when I was but a wee lass, mix tapes.

For every season of our lives we hold a soundtrack, perhaps Radiohead on repeat or No Doubt on loud. Dixie Chicks with our favorite chicks and Our Song for our first date. The strains are heard and we are tumbled back into fun and tumultuous and difficult and fear and oh sweet memories.

I have a stack of mix albums, "Music for Chicas in Guatemala," "Good Songs," "My Favs for My Fav," "Road-Tripping I, II," "TN Mix," "Remember, Remember Too, Remember Again,"and more--mementos of times and friends and relationships. Some tell stories with the music, some make it up as they move along, some walk me through my life like a wax museum--strange likenesses of a life that really was and now just isn't.

Each one breaks off a piece of the artist, the real artist--the one who coupled these songs together, Latin near Jazz, followed by Folk and Instrumental, finished with Worship and Soul--gives himself when he makes a mix album. It's not just favorite tunes, it's a part of us, pieced together in our apartness by music.

So when I leave one stage of my life and head to another, and a friend slips a CD into my pocket, my luggage, my hand, I hold to it tightly. It is the soundtrack, sometimes the only way I know that I lived, really lived and laughed and loved and then left a place I called home.

They are a timeline of my life.

Sorry about the lack of writing around here--I could just make up an excuse, but this time I really have one.

I broke my finger and typing is, at best, inconvenient and at worst, painful. There. You see. I'm not totally full of baloney.

I have stuff brewing in my head though, so if I can work out the kinks and rid what I get down of annoying typos due to typing without the use of a principle finger, I'll have something for you to read.

Excuse me for not taking you seriously--I thought you were a joke. Really. When my friend first suggested you to me, I laughed in her face, perhaps it was your initials, as laughable as my own, though opposite in nature. I'm not sure.

But sitting here, next to the woodstove, a wrapped scarf around my neck and a cup of coffee in my hands, a horrible case of the sniffles and scratchy throats, and the inability to think through much of anything clearly--I begin to take you seriously. I Wikipedia you, stopping for long moments to stare outside at whiteness everywhere. White sky, white ground, white ice-tipped trees. I continue reading, stopping only to sip my coffee and blow my nose.

Suddenly realizing that while you may always be a joke in my book, you feel very real. Secretly I will rest knowing that you only attack in the winter--though up here winter is the majority--secretly I will rest knowing that this monochromatic atmosphere will melt, fade, and sink deep into the earth.

I know light and green and life and growth will come again. I've got that on you.

Like a child poised for surprises only whispered about in hallways and behind closed doors, I wait. There's nothing but the whispers and quickly hushed conversations at my presence to let me know that the surprise is for me. I don't know what it is and I haven't even a clue. My only action is to wait.

Feeling strongly like inaction.

When I moved home from Tennessee I won't deny the feeling of expectation brimming about my edges. My toes, it felt like, were inching over the start line waiting for the pistol shot reckoning go! I was a caged pigeon with a message for the world, or at least Potsdam. I was something waiting to happen.

This week marks the six month anniversary of graduation into the real world. I only know that because my loan repayments start in two days--a looming bill that feels like the ribbon holding me back from crossing that starting line. I have celebrated the six month anniversary of many things, but this is not one of them.

In this town it's hard to not be surrounded by college students, they're everywhere. In every direction I see students studying, meeting, greeting, thriving, scheduling, pursuing--and all I wish for is to be back there.

Back there it felt safe and sure. A certain goal was worked toward and certain parameters were laid and met. Here it feels like decisions have to be ascertained and solidified and felt every single day. Every single day I have to re-question whether I am doing what it right and good and true for today. Here there is no solid goal being worked toward, there is only great space in front of me.

I don't like that feeling.

Because it feels very unsafe and I don't like unsafe. It feels very precarious and I don't like precarious. It feels very aimless and I hate aimless.

I'm struggling to find footing here, to be honest. I do my job, I do it well, I enjoy my work, I enjoy my church, I enjoy my family, I enjoy my plot of soil to till, but I want to see fruit--I want to know what I'm working for. I want to know that my labor isn't in vain, it isn't just bulletin boards and hours on the phone with customer service and teaching grammar and paying bills. I want to know that there's an end to this. That there's settling down and still running the race.

I want to really know that between 12 and 30 we don't see Jesus because he was sweeping sawdust and getting splinters. I want to know that 30 is coming soon.

Tonight, over a romaine and cranberry salad and conversations about daydreaming and the status of sickness in our household, I read a National Geographic article on Francis Collins. I know--a light dinner reading material.

Francis Collins is the head of the Human Genome project, an ongoing project dedicated to helices and DNA and, his personal interest, the ethics of it all. He's the author of a book called The Language of God. He also is a hero of mine recently.

I'm not sure why, we all know science isn't my strong-point.

But this guy directs a program that meets heat every day from those more concerned with genetic dispersion than with genetic originality, or more succinctly, more concerned with defacing the image of God than valuing it.

Which isn't surprising--since most of them deny the existence of God at all.

What I love about this article is that Dr. Collin's interviewer, a professed agnostic, continually tries to tangent with his questioning and Dr. Collin's continually brings it back to one thing: it isn't about how much we know, how much science can prove or disprove, attain or lose. Every statement is filled with this unknowing certainty--unknowing because he's a scientist, certainty because he's a Christian. Unknowing because he's a Christian, certainty because he's a scientist.

It's this beautiful marriage of truth and, well, truth, co-existing and complementing.

I hate to use my blog as a platform for politic reform. And I hate to use your tithe dollars up on writing a few sentences on my blog. And I hate that somehow our voter-registration forms got lost on the bottom of a pile of paperwork here at church and so we, two of his loyal supporters, can't even vote in today's primary.

But vote Ron Paul.

Who is Ron Paul? What, is your head in the sand?

Or do you just listen to all the media hype they don't give to him anyway?

Broken systems don't have to break me. This is the thought that puts me to bed, wakes me in the morning, trickles down my face in the shower, and catches up with me all day long.

The wind has been knocked out of so many of my sails: dreams of missionary life, family life, marriage, motherhood, sisterhood--all of these great callings thwarted by circumstances and systems that don't work like the manual said they would. I think of nights heaving on a cement floor and a subsequent plane ride back from Central America nursing my Gatorade and my pride. I think of nights weeping on various apartment floors, wanting an intact family. I think of evenings on a front porch swing, talking, deciding, breaking, hurting, leaving, and finally healing. I think of crashed disappointments and fallen hopes; methodical plans that ended in chaos.

And I think, in the end, it is better to have seen the system break, than to see a person break.

Systems can be remade. Remodeled. Redone.

People have to have the wind knocked out of them, crumble to the floor, confess that their hope isn't in the sail at all, but in the Wind--and that never stops blowing.

Want to hear a secret?

I don't have this figured out--I'm figuring some things out this week. That's my plan. I want to explore Purple Hearts and walking wounded. I want to understand why the Israelites still don't eat the hipbone. I want to think about how very badly I don't want to be a victim, but I always want to remember the grace that pulled me through it all.

So over the next week I'm assigning myself this topic: suffering.

Don't have grand illusions, I'm weak in this area and I promise no great illuminations. I promise that I'll read and pray and think and then write.

(Also, last night there were 100+ people at my house witnessing what was possibly the greatest catastrophe that my team has ever experienced. This is why there was no writing. Not because I was avoiding it, but because there wasn't a square inch of our house that wasn't taken up by all the sweaty college students I love. I promise.)

"Write for your own time, if not for your own generation exclusively. You can't write for 'posterity"--it doesn't exist. You can't write for a departed world. You may be addressing, unconsciously, an audience that doesn't exist; you may be trying to please someone who won't be pleased, and who isn't worth pleasing."

Joyce Carol Oates

Write your heart out. Wring it out and leave it to dry, hanging over the railing like underclothes, delicate and washed by hand. My heart doesn't wring out so well, I find that more often recently. Conversations are hard and feel forced, opening up another's heart is just as difficult--it's hard to be transparent with someone who's not. A lesson I should know.

The truth is that there is so much to say, to write about, but I don't even know where to start. The things that used to pulse through me at the speed of children on bicycles, slowly, methodically, suddenly, haphazardly, now pulse through me barely.

My blood pressure is low, my heart-rate is low, they always have been. Finding a radial pulse is met with frustration--I should be dead, more than one nurse has told me. But it's there, if you press hard enough and in the right places, it's there. If you feel and wait, you'll find that evidence that I am alive and that lifeblood curses through me.

I am alive.

With a weak pulse.

That is how I feel. Honestly. I spent a few hours on the road today, running errands, picking up, dropping off, getting pulled out of a snowy field by a good Samaritan in a blue fuel truck, I had plenty of time to think, reflect, to write in my head what I would write tonight--but I didn't. I just set my thoughts over that weak pulse and reminded myself that it is there, whether I feel it or not. The first attempt or the third. I am alive inside.

So writing my heart out will seem cold in the next few days, lifeless, but we warm our toes by the fire before feeling comes back, so suddenly hot that we jump back, afraid that we've burned ourselves. But really, it's just that startling realization that there is feeling. That our toes weren't dead, only very, very cold.

I am here. Yes. I know that today is February 1st. And yes I know that I promised a full thirty days of writing. But here's the deal--30 days wasn't a completely random number, it's just the average amount of days in a month--and how could I help it that the upcoming month happened to be the shortest of the year?

I couldn't. Honestly. So it's 29 days of writing.

I'll admit, I'm a bit wary of telling you that. See, my flaws are already evident enough, without exemplifying them on the internet. Where even those of you who don't see those flaws every single day in person will see them the moment I forget decide not to write.

But accountability is thought to be the way to habit changes.
That and 30 continuous days of new habit forming.

Which means I'm already behind.

But here we go. Today's writing exercise is behind me; let's hope for more tomorrow.