I sighed and asked if it was a sin to be nostalgic. I can't remember if anyone answered me, I don't think it was a question I meant to be answered. We composite ourselves, connected but different. Someone says it this weekend, a few someones; it's commonplace to hear when we are all together: "I've never met friends like this before." I haven't either.



When I am far away, here in New York, I wish for friends like these again. I shut my eyes, click my heels, hope that what feels like home will be here at home, but it hasn't happened quite yet. But people keep saying, and I am beginning to believe them and be okay with it, that these are the sort you have for life, not the sort you replace with every new piece of realty.



Being far away from one another, representing eight states and more than enough mileage, we mark these weekends like sacred dates. Weddings have been the Hurrahs that bring us together this year, but we are at the end of the family weddings and so now we must branch off from here. Which makes me sort of sad. These four couples have married one another, but each of them belonged to us.


We have finished Makeshift Family Intermarrying, and those of us left move on to different pastures. We can always be friends, but friends don't always have to marry one another. Until now, all of the groomsmen and bridesmaids have been best friends with one another and the covenantal couple. This isn't real life, I know. But it's my life.


So many times this weekend the family of the bride and the groom say to us: "you know her/him better than I'll ever know them." And every time I tried to feel badly, like by being thrown together in a southern college town forced us to steal family from family.

But I don't feel badly, really, I don't. I feel thankful. I feel tearful. I feel grateful. I feel deeply. I feel lonely. I feel covered. I feel comforted. I feel like family. And it is good.


Shameless plugs for the photographers:
Myk and Julie: Sara Kristin Photography
Tony and Laura: Sara Kristin Photography
Steve and Sara: Me. Just me.
Amos and Cara: Charlotte McPherson Photography

I stagnate easily. By nature I'm of the phlegmatic tendency, which means for all my passive exterior, there is a very real, very aggressive, very adventurous spirit inside of me that barely ever escapes. It's easier for me to be passive, but it's more enjoyable for me to be passionate. I don't do new things, I never do new things, but sometimes I do new things and I am happier than I can ever imagine myself to be, until I worry that new things = bad things, and I retreat. In the spirit of antistagnating, however, I am doing some new things:

Everyone hates their hair. That's not true, some people love their hair. But everyone seems to hair their hair secretly. Or perhaps they love it secretly and just pretend to hate it in public. If that's not you, raise your hand.

I hate my hair. It's dull, it's brown, it's curly, but not always, sometimes frizzy, sometimes blah, sometimes, on very rare occasions, I look at it in the mirror and I say, "Now that's nice hair!" But not usually. Usually I hate my hair. In an effort to realize change, though, with regard to my hair (please note: normally I am not a hair/makeup/clothes/pretty-pretty sort of girl), I have been researching why exactly I wake up every morning and go to bed every night with a bed head: shouldn't there be a happy medium?

Recently I found a website that I've been meticulously creeping around on and there are some good tips that I'm hoping will yield some results. But they all take some time. I hate time. I've said that before. One of the things that nearly every "Curly Girl" scout's honor promises is that not shampooing is the key to healthy curly hair. So. Yes. I am baking-sodaing, lemon-juicing and brown-sugaring my hair. Yes. New Thing Number One.

I am a good Christian. Really, I am. Ask pretty much anyone and they will tell you that as far as good Christians go, I'm in. I read my Bible and pray every day. I memorize verses. I discuss Bible things and politic things and environmental things and church things and community things all in reference to Bible things. I'm constantly aware of lines and bars and principles and sin and righteousness. I'm a good Christian.

But I hate to fast. I do. Okay. I have this huge thing called Lack of Self-Control and when the urge to eat a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich on homemade bread RIGHT NOW hits, I cave. Especially if it's around. I also hate feeling light-headed. I also hate having to use the bathroom sixty-five times in one day because I'm drinking more water than a six year old learning to swim.

However, in the past month or so, I've been learning a boatload about habitual fasting. Not because I'm reading more verses about it, but because I'm using the cause and effect principle. We fast so that we are hungry so that we are reminded to [insert reason for fasting] in regard to God so that we hear Him when he speaks so that we know what to do with our lives and His kingdom. And it works! It does! I haven't really gotten an answer yet about anything, but there's peace. And lots of reminders. New Thing Number Two.

I do not trust people. I've said it before and if you know me you know that I hold my cards close, answer in monosyllables when asked questions and generally pretend to think that people are satisfied with my answers. Well, they seem to be anyway. I trust a few people, I do. Honestly. They know who they are (Wave to everyone, guys!) and it's seemed to work for me in the past.

It doesn't seem to be working so much anymore. Whether it's because my ideas are shifting or their lives are shifting or my life is shifting or when we trust people we expect them to trust us back, and that's honestly a lot of work--being trusted by somebody, I don't know. But it's not working. But the other night I sat across from a lovely lady in McDonalds and I determined to be very honest with her. And I was. And I stuttered a lot. And she ate her cheeseburger and I played with my fingers and she asked me lots of questions and it was very, very good. Because I had to answer all of them. New Thing Number Three.

Maybe there will be more New Things. I hope so. I really do. But for now, these are helping me to pick my feet out of the mire and move on.

I've just finished Mudhouse Sabbath: An Invitation to a Life of Spiritual Discipline by Lauren Winner. I confess, I bought the book in the name of the author only, I knew nothing about Mudhouses nor was I craving a more disciplined life. Good thing, too, the book mentioned the former only once and the latter was so cleverly woven in that I didn't know I was being disciplined at all!

Winner grew up in the south, daughter of a Baptist and a non-practicing Jew, allowably went through what any child of that sort of union would wrestle with, landing comfortably in Orthodox Judaism until her twenties when she switched over to the other side. Which is the truth, but, from reading this book, one would think she was still quite infatuated with her former religious bent.

She seamless correlates themes in Judaism with Christianity--takes what we call the Law and turns it into a Labor of Love. And somehow blows the dust off of age old traditions and into the faces of Christians who poo-poo Old Testament practices in the name of New Testament freedom.

There's always been something so appealing to me about the Law. While most people putter out of their Read Through The Bible in a Year around Leviticus, I usually get lost somewhere around Psalms. I'm serious: 150 chapters feels much more daunting to me than lists of Dos and Don'ts. If there is one habitual sin in my life it is the sin of the Law. Binding them so tightly to my doorposts that I couldn't see the blood of the lamb if it was painted over my head. Grace feels far away, the Law feels tangible.

In Mudhouse Sabbath, Winner teaches us silly Christians how the law wasn't a list of Must Dos, as much as it was a gift from the Creator to remember Him. Isn't it easy to forget? Because we shun the practices and the cleansing habits, we forget He created us and knows our innermost beings. Because we know He wants obedience more than sacrifices and fasts, we wander aimlessly searching for a command to obey, losing sight of the discipline in hearing that fasting affords. Because we abhor empty rituals and written prayers, more comfortable with speaking our own language to God, we stop praying altogether because who of us always has the words?

There's no implore to discipline in this book. I never once felt I was being coerced into yet another Path to Freedom in Christ (through this very specific list of rules). Instead, Winner tells the story of her ancestors and of God. She teaches history to we who have forgotten, ignored, or just never knew. She has remembered her creator in the days of her youth, so when the evil days come, she won't be one to say "I have no delight in them (Eccl. 12.1)!" This book is refreshing delight all the way through.

It used to be easier to say what was going on here. At first, well, no one read it. It's easy to be transparent when no one can see you anyway. Then, well, it felt like a mass email to everyone in the world who already knew me, a way of telling stories from Guatemala and then down south. It was a daily fill-in. I'd tell you what you're wondering about and some things you didn't care about too.

When I left home and moved into my first apartment, you read every detail of that adventure. When I left for Guatemala and lived there, learning Spanish, making a habit of stomach bugs, and when I came home saddened and guilty, I told you all about it. When I was accepted to a university in Tennessee, you were the first to know. You were, I told you first. When I was happy beyond belief, when I tasted what I thought was love, when I made the sort of friends that will stick the way these have, when I wrestled with principles and beliefs and ideas and when I loved nature the most, you walked through it all with me.

And there have been seasons where it was so very hard to share, so hard in fact, that I just didn't. Hibernating under silent cloaks of pride, fear, void, I don't know. Just. Not. Here.

But I don't think there has been a time like the past year of my life, when I have been so protective of myself in real life that this white page on the web is an even paler representation of who I am and Who is shaping me. It is easier to stay silent in the same way that it is easier to say to those who ask what's new, "Nothing."

I have settled into routine, monotony, life in and out and over and over and over again. I berate myself for being greedy, wanting more of out of life, and defend myself with the one thing I am, if nothing else, a Christian single. Isn't now the best time to exist without routine? I read stories and hear podcasts of people doing the things I imagine myself to do. Not big things, just different things.

I woke myself up last night, early. It was barely light, a thin strip of orange ringing our earth. I had a dream and all parts of it still stick to my insides, my mind plays it over and over again. I was me, but everything around me was not me. It was all that I've passed over, been enamored by, forgotten, lust after, ignored and wanted. And at the end of the line was the one thing I want more than anything else, but I couldn't see it. I just knew it was there and that it was for me. A flash of red, blue, sand, bigger than me, but I couldn't see it. Instead I made my way down the line checking over my options like a farmer at a livestock auction: which one will do the job for me?

And that is what this life, this website, these decisions have all been, for me: mere options because I couldn't see the real thing.

It's a blustery autumn day outside, frustrated with hail, peeking blue skies, and fragile leaves hanging on for what's left of their dear death. Today is filled with complexities, paradoxes, and promises. Walking out of joy and into fear, into possibilities struck down by impossibilities. We open the vault that protects hearts, leaving the door open to vagrants and tremors of the nasty kind. I lean over the table in our office, breathing deeply, feeling the weight on my shoulders. It's going to be okay, she says. I say the same thing later, after we pray, then she leaves closing the office door quietly behind her.

But we don't know. Life is a paradox in motion. Certainty lasting only as long as the euphoria does, fear present as long as the promises return void.

Years ago I heard an exhortation on the sixth chapter of Isaiah. We all know about a prophet who saw God, a man of unclean lips, among a people of unclean lips. An ordinary man amongst ordinary people thrust into the presence of the Lord, seated high and lifted up. He saw God. In this sermon, though, the speaker let his tongue wander to the angels present there too, their sole vocation to shout "Glory to God in the Highest. The Whole Earth is filled with His Glory!"

What are we doing with life?

Even with all our schedules, meetings, lattes, lofty ambitions and laziness, certainly not that.

I am thinking about the ordinary recently. Things that feel so normal that we've lost sight of the extraordinary. The super-ordinary. The out of the ordinary. I am thinking about how to get a grasp on this, all of this, and still call it good. Because that is extraordinary in practice. That is somehow what makes the difference. He already knows we are feeble, we are human, we with unclean lips. He never said for Isaiah to call it like it wasn't.

And I don't know if this is making sense, I'm not sure it matters -- I am a person of unclear thoughts and I live among a people of disorientation and limitations.

But we are learning to see God, to say Glory in the Highest, even when we are at our lowest.

When we are near death with this life, when we're hanging on, but barely, and when we are pushed from all sides.

Someone, somewhere, is employed by eternal praise and we take our cue from them.

Glory in the paradox. Glory in the frustration. Glory in the pain. Glory in the middle and glory in the end too. Glory in brokenness and glory when, at long last, all the promises are Yes and Amen. Glory when we will join the ranks of our heavenly counterparts shouting singularly "Glory to You in the highest. For all of this, everything, all of it, is filled with Your glory."

Early this morning I stumbled up our College Life Center stairs. It was barely dawn outside and there were candles and low-lighting throughout the main room. Students sat on the floor, on couches, in folding chairs, mixing coffee, reading Bible verses, they stood with hands lifted and the words of life on their tongues.

Many times I am in this building and I wonder what the masses think as they drive past these large storefront windows. From times of worship and prayer to cell groups, classes, meetings, ping-pong tournaments, etc., this place is in constant activity. This morning, though, I am overcome by the spirit of peace that inhabits this place.

Today our world is accosted by promises of change and failures to deliver. Peace is far from us wherever we look. And I'm not sure that it's supposed to be any other way--didn't He say that hard times would come? And so they have. But He never said that all things sacred would be omitted, and so we find it here, in the College Life Center, in people of prayer, in moments of peace. And for the masses looking in the windows, we offer that to them too.

It's a peace that the world cannot offer.

And one we cannot vote in.

On tomorrow:

Hoping in something bigger than just a man this election.

The Lord has promised good to us
His word our hope secures.
He will our shield and portion be
as long as life endures.

So cast your ballot tomorrow, but remember that a man can't promise good or change or hope or life. Hope in God. Alone.