Enough of these bullet point posts. I read an article a few weeks ago, one paragraph particularly catching my heart:

The second thing on my mind was to encourage the young man not to think of these days as wasted--a lost parenthesis interrupting so-called "real life." Every day he trusts God is real life, and something good is going on behind the deceptive sameness. One day it will erupt into the visible, as God brings about a new and beautiful thing when the time is right.

There are a few notable verbs in that smidgen: encourage, think, trust, bring, and my personal favorite, erupt.

I like the idea of erupting. I like the idea that someday while we are riding our bikes or skipping over cracks in sidewalks, eating chicken salad or tying our shoes, answering the phone or twinkling our eye, that there will be something instantaneous. I like the idea that it will happen quickly and surprisingly. That the parenthesis of our lives, the dash between the dates on a headstone, all of it will suddenly be so meaningless. That the dead in Christ shall rise right then. I like that.

But here we are still, in the meantime, bated breath catching on real life and seemingly wasted days. Here we are tying our shoes and riding our bikes and working 9-5 and paying our bills and twiddling our collective thumbs. I am not so good at the Every Day We Trust God is Real Life. I like to think that it's preparing me for real life, that this hurdle is only a minute scale of the real hurdle yet to come. And perhaps it is, but what if it's not?

What if yesterday was preparation for today and, really, that's it? Isn't that enough? If I had somehow skipped yesterday, wouldn't my today be muddled up and frustrating?

And something good is going on behind this deceptive sameness, this computer monitor and three color logos and ten 10 minute jobs. And I don't know what the new and beautiful thing is, or when the time will be right.

But I know it will erupt. It will surprise. And it might not be for a long, long time. But it will be worth all the days punctuated by questions and quotes.

Period.

34 hours of driving: check
A depleted ipod battery: check
Many hours of Louie Giglio, David Crowder and good tears: check
Security check at Fort Jackson: check
Hours of driving around base: check
Hours of sitting on grass just being: check
Lots of physical touch: check
Lots of hugs: check
Lots of stories: check
Cups of coffee consumed: 12. check.
Adopt-a-niece met: check, an oh so adorable check
Bad food for me consumed: a lot. check.
Pics uploaded to facebook: check
Pockets of grace: check
Hours of sleep total in four days: 15. check.
Flowers bought: check
Surprise three boys: check, check, check!
Presents delivered: check
The Scarlet Pimpernel and Co. seen: check
Arrive home finally: check

Piles of pride in my heart: Yup. Piles. Heaps and piles.

Coldplay says summer is coming.
So does an open sunroof.
And flipflops.
My friends Brent and Christina are coming to visit me for a week in May.
Then Brent will go to grad school and be smart.
And Christina will spend the summer with me.
We will dangle our toes in the river and eat bad things for us, like ice cream.

Louissa and I moved our office furniture around.
Peoples' reaction to this are varied:
What is this, a dorm room?
Do you like being so close?
Why would you want to have your monitors back to back,
doesn't it annoy you to see each other all day long?
I don't care what people think.
I like our office
and I like seeing my favorite person all day long.

I am driving to South Carolina in two days.
For two days.
That's 34 hours of driving in four days.
Stupid.
My brother is graduating from Boot Camp Basic Training
in Fort Jackson.
So it's worth it.

I ran out of vitamins two weeks ago.
I'm feeling it now.

I'm practicing something and I think it's working.
This is what I'm practicing:
Yes, why, yes! I DO like my job!
In fact, I love my job!
My bosses are Fives.
My coworkers are Fives.
My church is Fives.
My friends are Fives.
My life is Fives!
Only I started doing this before anybody mentioned anything about Fives.

I have friends.
For the first time in a year and a half.
I have local friends who I actually like hanging out with.
Who I have great conversations with.
Who I'm going to miss in a few weeks.
When they all leave.

Not everything is perfect, just so you know:
People sin.
Me too.
People are graduating and leaving.
But not me.
I still feel far away from things that I want,
people I love,
and
certainty.

But I think something is in the air,
and it's changing things.

I've been thinking about the church recently. Goodness knows, I ought to be. It consumes 45 hours of my week and The Church consumes the rest of my waking hours.

But I've also been thinking about March too. It's consuming 24 hours of my day, which is to say I am immersed in it. Everywhere I look is March. I walked long yesterday wearing an open sweatshirt and I woke this morning to a half inch of ice on my car. The lion and lamb are bipolar methinks.

Today I drive slowly on ice covered roads, stuck behind school buses and snowplows. I'm not listening to music, but I'm thinking it. I'm thinking that Surely We Can Change. If March can change so quickly, so violently, than surely we can too.

I'm having good conversations recently. Nothing earth-shattering. Nothing awakening. Nothing life-changing. But good. The sort of good like the sun beating on your back while you sit on a deck in March, staring at your toes and talking about fear. Good like holding friend's babies and not just talking about community, but living it. The sort where friends get indignant and call me at the office to shake some sense into me, or at least shake the phone at me. The sort where I nod and try to formulate the thoughts, but mostly just need to listen to theirs. I'm talking about The Church. I'm talking about small changes, slow changes. Small mindsets, slow awakenings, cracking through the veneer of ice and finding living, breathing earth below.

Asking for seeds.

Saying I don't have the answers and I can't explain the weather. Saying I don't know why I'm here and why you're there and why the sun isn't here either. But I know it's changing. I know it's coming. I know the Kingdom is in us and I know we're bringing it to earth. And I know that this is what it is, this church, This Church, this people. Incomplete and insufficient. Wrinkled and mussed. But won already. Love is for the Springtime and He's done that for us. He's said it's time to change and he's already set it in motion. So we wait out March, expectant and sure.

Because it will all change.

Once we went camping up in Chilhowee, the swiveled mountains of eastern Tennessee. We brought two tents because there were enough of us, but they still weren't nearly enough. We meant to have a campfire and laugh and howl back at the woodland creatures, but it was one of the most torrential downpours of that autumn. We entwined, curled around one another and huddled for warmth and surety. There is a picture from the following morning, boys in the back, girls in the front, and we are waterlogged and happy. Deliriously happy.

Another time, with another friend, we took a class in Wilderness Leadership and Survival and proved our prowess in both. We slept under tarps in 30 below weather in different mountains of the more northern sort. She got frostbite and I held my bladder for over thirty hours, sure that if I bared my skin to the elements I wouldn't feel it again. When we got home it was to shouts of "Welcome and don't you ever do that again!" But I believe we both pulled some of the only 4.0s in that class. I know for sure that our small group of five was the only group who slept on the summit.

I love camping, I do. And these are only two stories of the dozens that mark some of the best times of my life. This week I've been thinking about that. A lot.

See. A lot of someones have been asking me if "this", their fingers pointed in the general direction of something they deem as less than satisfying, is what I really want to do with the rest of my life. And I squirm and say no, of course not, would you? But later, when I have crawled under my down comforter and set my cell phone alarm and check my email, I think of the constants. The things that I really love to do.

And they include things like canoes, tents, dirt under my fingernails, and a million lessons in a million creations.

I worked at summer camps for ten years of my life, trying my hand at counseling, lifeguarding, directing, and bystanding, and it's in this environment that I feel fully alive, fully me, fully immersed in Who God Is and What He Has Created. And I love that. But because it was always a summer thing I have it in my mind that it could never be a full time thing.

But maybe it could?

Maybe deluges and snow that has formed a mold for my sleeping body and ghost stories and Tin Foil Dinners and the Glorious Greatness of everything out there could be what I do.

I'd be happy with that. I would.

I said it before, but I'll say it again. Because this post is about remembrance. Former things. Other things. Said things and implied things.

John 14 is my bread these days. I chew it. I mull over it. I forget it easily. I need it the moment I think about it again. And, like bread, when I am full, I forget it again. Case in point, I had to look the following verse up. I've let the crumbs from my bread spill all around, making a mess of my spirituality.

I always think of Christ as the end-all, the principal, the phenom of all that is good. He was sinless, homeless, and mud and miracles were his drugs of choice. He was the Rabbi, the Master, the Teacher, and the Hider. The crucified and the betrayed. He was all good. Nothing short of good. But even He knew that His 33 years of goodness would be a hard sell for thousands of years of disbelievers yet to come.

Don't get me wrong, the work of the cross completed the work of the cross. I'm not adding to His perfection. But He did.

These things I have spoken to you while
abiding with you, but the Helper, the Holy Spirit,
whom the Father will bring to you, He will teach
you all things, and bring to your remembrance
all that I said to you. John 14.25-26

Even if Christ had spent every moment of those three years with His disciples just teaching, instead of doing miracles and loving the masses too, He couldn't have finished the ongoing Word of His Father. We needed more. We needed the Holy Spirit.

So I'm remembering all that He's said to me, but I am also learning new things, and I think they're part of the all things.