Every day I look at this page. I like this page. I like the colors, they're my favorite. I like lots of white. I like words. I like writing. I like that I've been keeping a blog for over seven years. I like that keeping a blog makes me think about things instead of just existing in things. I like that even though all of my paper journals are packed away with the rest of my proof of life, I can always click on a monthly archive in here and know what I was thinking about when. I like that even though I have a terrible memory, I can read almost any of the entries here and remember where I was when I wrote it, what specific thing prompted the writing, and what was prompted because of the writing. I like that.

I don't like that I rarely write in it anymore. I don't like that.

Partly because I don't know if anyone really reads it anymore. This isn't a ploy to get you to disclose yourself if you're there, but I do wonder sometimes.
Partly because I don't know if it's worth being read anymore. I'm bored by me, I can't imagine that you're not.

Today I drive to work in inspiring circumstances. How can you not be inspired by autumn in the northeast? It wreaks inspiration. I, however, was uninspired. Completely. Therefore there will be no talk of reds, vermillions, brandishing treetops, rivers, streams, or maple leaves. There will be no inspirational snippets and analogies. There will be no peeking over my shoulder, and certainly no eavesdropping on my autumn mind. Sorry.

I've been battling a cold for the past two and a half weeks (blame her boringness on that). Today when I was getting ready to hand in my timesheet I realized that instead of the normal 80 hour work requirement, I actually worked 108 hours over the past two weeks.

I remember being younger and dreaming of motherhood and crafting and dinner on the table by six. I vowed that I would never make a career my life. That work would never keep me from being available to the real priorities in life. But here I am, 27 years old, consumed with work. I wake up to work, I leave work at five to drive to more work, I work most evenings until late, and even when I'm at home I shelf my cell phone because work follows me there. Unfortunately, they all know where I live.

I talked yesterday with a friend about how the appealing thing about marriage, to me, is that there is identity in it. It's not the husband I want, sorry, it's the wifery, the motherhood. The status of being something, but not everything. Singleness carries with it this unspoken requirement that in this state of "concerned with the things of the Lord," we are therefore, concerned with everything. Nursery duty. Check. IT department. Check. Mentor. Check. Friend. Check. Sister. Check. Sole breadwinner. Check. Bill payer. Check. Worshiper. Check. Check. Check. Check.

I find that my tally marks of being everything are heavily weighted. On the side of just being though: empty.

Excuse me while I try to figure out what my life is supposed to look like in this season. I'm a little mixed up inside.

On that note, though, I sat on the couch the other evening and shared some things with her. When I finished, shrugging my shoulders like I normally do after sharing any possibilities (because I'm afraid that everything is possible, but nothing is probable), she stared at me. Then she said: You know, Lo, I don't know that this is necessarily the thing the Lord has for you. But I do know this: that you need to take steps. You are too prone to growing bored, leading to discontentment, leading to discouragement, leading to confusion, etc. But when you're in motion, heading toward something, you do much better.

So I think about that the past few days. I need to take steps. I need to move. I need to be available, not just scheduled and busy. I need to be headed toward something, because right now I'm headed downward, toward discouragement and all that entails. But I need steps to take. Not the small ones. I do those. Honestly, I do. But I've gotten so focused on the small things, the portion for today, that I've lost vision for the next five years.

So I don't know. Part of it has to do with my last post--trying to figure out what the Lord has spoken to me. Acting on those things. Being faithful with the small things, but expecting big things. Deciding to not shrug my shoulders, but instead be excited about possibilities.

I don't really know how to do that anymore though. It's going to take some learning.

Why do you say, O Jacob, and assert, O Israel,
"My way is hidden from the LORD,
And the justice due me escapes the notice of my God"?
Do you not know? Have you not heard?
The Everlasting God, the LORD,
The Creator of the ends of the earth
Does not become weary or tired
His understanding is inscrutable.
He gives strength to the weary,
And to him who lacks might He increases power.

Isaiah 40

During the spring and summer around here the water is white, deep and rushing, eroding the soil and smoothing the rocks. It is September though, and so we picked our way down the eroded sides and sat on the smooth rocks, surrounded by white and rushing shallow water. It didn't feel like we were shouting over the rapids, but when we'd brushed off our jeans and climbed back to the trail our own voices felt unnaturally loud.

I have been thinking about the voices in my head recently. This is better than talking back to them, so I console myself with that thought in the meantime. I have grown accustomed to other voices being unnaturally loud in my life (unnatural, because what about spirituality is natural?).

The Bible, of course. I tote mine around in a my bag of choice, its edges rough, the leather peeling back and its binding taped more than once. Pages are taped too. Sections fall out. I piece them back together. I am a sentimental fool when it comes to this precious book. It has weathered almost the entirety of my Christian Walk. I stand on it, live by it, swear by it, weep with it, hide from it, argue with it, and drink from it.

A document saved as Prophetic Words. It dates back to the spring of 2000, before I knew what prophetic was, when a man walked passed me and doubled back to put his hand on my shoulder and tell the boy next to me that my ministry someday would be a prophetic one. I laughed behind my hand and sat down uncomfortably. Throughout the past eight years that document has filled with dozens of confirmations and encouragements, predictions and promises. I trust in the Lord, but I'm glad that He speaks through men.

There is one voice, however, that feels naturally quiet though. And that is the voice of the Lord to me.

I sat on the back porch the other day and bargained with God: If you can tell me something and it comes true, then, then I'll believe you. Otherwise, you're turning me into a disillusioned, bitter soul with all this talk of promises and all this empty return.

And, He brought me up from the valley, where His voice felt unnaturally loud. Because I've been so accustomed to straining to hear it amongst all the other noise.

And He reminded me of those times when He did speak and I did know. And showed me things I'd forgotten, promises that haven't returned void, just because they haven't been completed. And, honestly, I won't lie: it's hard to trust Him.

It's hard to remember promises He's made to me, things I know that He spoke, it's hard to keep trusting for those things. Because things look bleak. Grey. Dull. Impossible. Improbable. Disheartening.

But it isn't hard to remember that He speaks. I just have to get to a place where He doesn't have to shout to be heard.

Speak, Lord, for Your servant is listening.

Autumn brings with her a torrent of colors and emotions. I am not a stranger to either. I said last year that I am autumn and I mean it again this year. I think there is always the awareness that I am in a living limbo, but never more than when September hits. Life hits squarely and I work my fingers and heart every waking moment.

Today I pause, sort of, at a table with people I like. They tease me and beg me to stay longer, sit with them and laugh, befriend. Be friend. I say flippantly that their flippant words hit a chord, but I still get up and leave.

Because, I say to another later, because I am afraid.

I live in a place that is a passing through place. Somehow my passing through turned permanent, but mostly, they all just pass through. We call our church a sending church, which is an exciting thought, but partly just a salve to our souls when we "commission" people called elsewhere.

We are a sending church, but we keep sometimes too. And I am kept.

I don't know why. I don't know why I taste other nations, other cultures, other states, and other families, and why none tastes like home like here. I don't know why when everything else in my head feels upside down, here, with all its foibles and opportunities to fall flat, still rights my equilibrium. I don't know why I am so convinced that being faithful with the small things is still radical. And I don't know why I am kept here.

But I am.

And maybe it seems that being kept isn't such a great thing. Like a kept girl or a kept marble, a kidnapped child or a secret memento. Horded. Tucked. Hidden. Captive.

But today I meditate on the Keeper of my soul--the real home of my heart. I think about what my Bible calls A Song of Ascents. I lift my eyes up, off the green hills of Northern New York, from the helplessness of my stuck feet, and I see One who neither slumbers, nor sleeps. No. He keeps.

And so I will be kept.

I will lift up my eyes to the mountains;
From where shall my help come?
My help comes from the LORD,
Who made heaven and earth.
He will not allow your foot to slip;
He who keeps you will not slumber.
Behold, He who keeps Israel
Will neither slumber nor sleep.
The LORD is your keeper;
The LORD is your shade on your right hand.
The sun will not smite you by day,
Nor the moon by night.
The LORD will protect you from all evil;
He will keep your soul.
The LORD will guard your going out and your coming in
From this time forth and forever.

Today we're singing about how He conquered the grave and we picture crosses and tombs and crying women in gardens. But today I take my hands out of the air and open my eyes, struck with a thought that hasn't occurred to me before: He chose His final miracle to be a repeat. He'd already done that trick before. Jesus, we know this one, remember? You've shown it to us already.

So today, all day, I've been tucking that thought in the back of my mind. Through communion and birthday parties and spaghetti dinners and chance meetings and planned ones, I take the thought out and wonder quickly before I put it away again.

And the truth is, I don't know why. I don't know why His final hurrah was just as pedestrian as the last man he'd raised from them dead. Old hat, old faith, stand up and walk sort of stuff.

I cried the other evening. I'm not a town crier, wailing my woes to whoever will listen. I hold my woes close, licking my wounds like a golden retriever, loyal but jaded. But I sat at the kitchen table while she bustled around the kitchen and I cried, still wiping tracks of salted water from my cheeks an hour later in the car.

I need to dream bigger, I'm told. I expect small things because bigger things only leave more room for disappointment. And because I'm afraid that dreaming bigger things will make me more discontent than I already am. And I'm afraid that dreaming bigger things will take me away from here. And just because my dreams don't come true.

It's not that I want to live a small life; it's that I want to be content with smallness if that's all there is for me.

We're turning onto Main Street, facing the river and the park and a horizon of deep red leaves reflected in the water below. I breathe and exclaim "Oh!"

This is why I love here, Potsdam, the north, my home. Because we may endure a full winter of white and weeks of below zero temperature, but we slowly ebb into an autumn that still takes us by surprise every day of its existence.

So today, I will think about a Savior who saved through the ordinary (as ordinary as resurrection can be). I will think about a Savior who modeled for us, enacted for us, and then handed us the responsibility of making the extraordinary simply ordinary.

Not so that we would miss it in its normality, but so that we would expect it in our mundane.

And still be surprised by it every single time.

Call me fixated. I get that way.

After a few night excursion in the Big Green to my right, a friend and her entourage spent the night at my house the other night. They were laughing at my lack of balance as I tripped out the door, exclaiming something about the weather and coffee. My friend cited my post on balance and how true it was, not just of life, but of me. I grasp for it and shed it constantly. It constricts me and frees me simultaneously.

Moving on: I am fixated recently on another song from the same album as the song we're all loving recently. It's not that I'm afraid He's gone, it's that sometimes I'm afraid my soul has.

Lewis said, "You do not have a soul. You have a body. You are a soul." You can take issue with that if you want. I won't. Because if the war between the worlds was fought by my body and spirit, it would be a stalemate. My soul knows, though, that it's the only one that ultimately wins.

I remember having hazy ideals of Casper-like forms floating to heaven or slinking to hell when my grandparents died. The soul taking flight or crashing below. But I've sat through enough of Dr. Wilson's dynamic classes on death and resurrection to hold to an unpopular belief of what really does happen when our eyes close for the longest sleep. But during life I hold to this belief:

Our souls are caught between a flesh and a faith that dictate what the dash looks like on our headstones. Some give in to their flesh completely, some somehow maintain a simple piety marked by faith. We in this Christian Life, though, take our cue from David.

We know our souls cry out, we spend half of our lives trying to shush them. We know our souls feel crushed, we spend the other half of our lives trying to revive them. But unless we're acknowledging their presence, instead of trying to exist on flesh and spirit alone--we'll always be surprised when joy abounds and when disaster hits. It's our soul that identifies with these things.

It's that mystical marriage of flesh and spirit, the joining of two opposites, the reason we sit under slumped shoulders and the cauldron holding all of our greatest joys. It's the command we give to Bless the Lord, it's the heaviness that's carried in the pit of our stomachs, and it's the restoration place of even the most broken.

It's the place I have to remind to encourage, to build up, to bless the Lord, to not faint, to express thanksgiving, to have a hope and an expectation. It's the white flag of surrender to my spirit and the firm shield against my flesh.

Oh My Soul. What is yours crying out today?

We're driving into New York, crossing borders like kids and cracks in the sidewalks. Careful, mindful. Each state borderline takes us further from the people with whom we built a family for a few years. We know we are leaving the south behind because there haven't been sixty foot crosses glaring at us from the highway sides in hours and the gas prices keep climbing. We know we're leaving the south behind because the temperature is cooling, or maybe it's just that the sun has gone down and our hearts too.

It's always hard to leave. It's always hard to come back. It isn't here or there, though, I am realizing. It's everywhere.

We blitzed our old town hitting every hot spot for drive through hugs and hurried How-Are-Yous? In the car I said to him that I don't why it's taken so long for me to realize that homesickness isn't a malady with a cure except heaven. We're meant to be homesick.

He laughed from his seat and reminded me that he's been telling me that for three years. What can I say, I'm a dunce sometimes. And this is one lesson that could only be taught by moving back to the place I previously thought couldn't be topped. Nowhere is home. Even if it feels like it on weekends.

And it used to be that because I always felt homesick, I never felt at home, but I think I'm realizing (again) that home is just the place where I feel things the deepest. And I can do that anywhere. So there, in Potsdam, New York, where I am driving toward: it's home because there I am taught and pushed and drawn out and used and sucked dry and filled up again. But there, in Cleveland, Tennessee, with the Makeshift Family: it's home because there I love and laugh and encourage and question and am funny and get enough physical affection to fill my love tank for months. And wherever else I'll find myself in life, I'll find things that hurt and are hard, and things that are lovely and memorable. And I'll experience things that will notch my belt of spiritual lessons and things that I'll never know why I have to experience them at all.

But wherever I am, I'll always know lack. I'll know want. I'll know the goodness of God, but not His completeness. I'll be homesick, but my homesickness is for heaven, not for earth or New York or mountains or my church or my Makeshift Family or my real one or Starbucks or my favorite used bookstores.

My homesickness isn't wrong and I wish I had figured that out a lot sooner than now.

It's my prod to look heavenward.

Some might call it the end of a long weekend. The bride and groom left the cabin a few minutes ago, after we all stood in a circle and prayed out the weekend and in their future. The rest of the Makeshift Family watches Mystery Science Theater. I opt out, sitting instead with a Macbook and a good vantage point.

I can see them all from my perch. The best view.

More than one, or two, or three people said it to me today, in one way or another: I've never seen friends this close before, it's remarkable, really. I smiled and agreed. I'm supposed to agree, it's polite. But the truth is that it IS remarkable. That ten people can know and love and be and stand and fall and live, really live, like we live when we're together—it's remarkable.

So we eight stood by two, aching muscles from five days of shoveling mulch and building barnwood benches and raking grass and trudging through muddy fields, but hearts more full of joy than anything else. We voiced our agreement when charged with the responsibility of upholding this couple. We joined our voices in worship, our hearts melded together by purpose and the Spirit.

Because covenant is remarkable.

He took me by the shoulders before he and his bride left, his eyes filled with tears, and said he'd trust me with his life. She and I sat on the edge of the tub and wept unashamed, expressing what treasures we've found in one another. I know that tears are normal, and part of emotionally charged moments—but I can't help but think that the reason we cry is because we need to pause and think about it all. Tears make us pause.

This week has really been about pause for me. I drove down on Tuesday putting myself on pause on purpose. I breathed deeply, didn't complain when I and a thousand other cars were paused on the highway for two hours. I was glad to know that soon I would be in a cabin on a mountain-side, away from technology and demands. But there have been other moments this week: questions posed, answers sought, knowing looks, laughter in copious amounts, and tears too. Tears that lend to pause.

No. I wouldn't move back to Tennessee, the Makeshift Family represents too many states now to think that moving to just one would make a difference. I'm happy in Potsdam. People talk about never feeling like they're in the center of the Lord's will: I don't feel like that. I know I'm meant to be there.

But sometimes I need to pause. And maybe this isn't real life: this cabin in the woods filled with strawberries and gerber daisies and people I love. But maybe we pause so that we can remember that heaven is so much more than days and meetings and schedules and life.

Maybe we pause because we need to feel most at home away from home.

The world wakes slowly, rubbing sleep from its eyes and rolling back the blanket of mist. We are in a cabin. In the woods. Without cell phone reception or internet. I don't miss them a bit. It makes staying here, only miles from bustling commotion even more appealing. I don't have to leave if I don't want to. And I don't want to.

The family partly converged Wednesday night, and piled four more into the mix last night. Today we'll expect a few stragglers, conscious always of the ones who couldn't make it. Life infringes smelling like boot camp and family commitments, time constraints and finances. I am never happier for my singleness then when I stretch my wings and they brush against people I love and who love me.

We'll celebrate the third wedding of this Makeshift Family this weekend, looking forward to the fourth one coming in November. Last night I sat at the table watching the old married couples play card games wondering where the time went. I smiled. I am glad for it, more than anything I think. I'd rather be here, in the center of joyful covenant than with young, discontent radicals or middle-aged disillusioned pauches of saggy skin and balding heads.

But I'm sure I'll love then too.

There's a song about the world spinning madly on and sometimes I feel like that. Even here, in this cabin in the middle of nowhere, where we touch no one in the world but the family around us, I still feel like the world spins madly on. I read this morning in John 18, where Jesus clarifies that his betrayal is part of the cup he'll drink. I guess I never thought about that. I just equate the crucifixion with the necessary evil—but betrayal too? And so I investigate in my head. It wasn't just the death that hurt so badly, it was the last days, the thorns, the whippings, the sip of bitter vinegar and the looks that Peter didn't send Christ's way. It was all of it. The stripping down of His glorious ministry. The accolades were gone, the crowd who worshiped Him with palm leaves and crippled faith, were shouting his death warrant and turning away.

His world spun away. Not on, just away.

The other night I slept in the middle of the road. I don't think I was the only one, a thousand cars stopped on Interstate 81, we turned our ignitions and our lights off, raindrops our only sound. I'm not sure why there was a holdup, whatever caused our spontaneous cease fire was gone by the time we finally crept forward. For two hours we sat there, sharing a forced experience, which somehow made it all okay. I don't mind sharing captivity.

Which is why we have friends I think—because somehow we need to make sense of all the traffic jams in life, the ones where we never really know why they happened, they just did. So this week, I'm nested amongst my friends, those who've shared life (coffee, card games, dance lessons, Mystery Science Theater, front porch conversations, and toothpaste) and I think to myself this morning: if we have to be in the world, captive to living life instead of skipping ahead to heaven, I'd rather stall with these folks than anyone else.