Saturday

I realized today that Saturdays are hard now. In a different way. They used to be hard because we were trying to prep for church spiritually and clean the house for church and do necessary errands and we were pretty much guaranteed to hang with a little kid or two for the day. Now, I wake up when I wake up on Saturdays, not when a little voice gets me up. I look at the day ahead and it looks comparatively empty. Not that I feel any boredom, and not that there aren't millions of things on my need-to-do list. It's just crazy different. I step into the hallway and glance toward the living room, immediately aware that only light cleaning is needed to prep it for church. The days of trying to shovel our way through toys and various other things to just find the sofas have passed. Even before cleaning, the living room looks fine. Really. Probably part of the lack of mess is due to the fact that I haven't learned how to live in those front rooms again yet. I still find myself doing almost everything in that same little spot on my bed. I have forgotten what all that space is for. The space in the house, the space in the Saturday.
One morning this week I suddenly became aware of the reason that the other half of our bedroom is piled with huge stacks of everything under the sun. The boxes and books and papers and clothes are all there for one reason: Em's crib isn't there. This is true not just in that sense that unoccupied space draws clutter like a magnet
but also because I have not been able to bear the obvious absence of the crib. Of course, we had been planning for the crib to move out for quite a while, but I realize now that all of my plans for rearranging the room still involved making a sleeping space for Em somewhere in there, just without the cumbersome crib. Thus, the piles of junk have been more comfortable to deal with than an Em-less rearrangement or worse yet--an empty space--would be. So I am no longer thinking in terms of clearing everything out of those piles or rearranging our room. I'm just going to try, a few times each day, to put five or ten things away from those piles. Baby steps.
My hope is just a habit.

As usual, great thoughts from David Lose at workingpreacher.com this week:
"When I was in graduate school, one of my teachers, Dr. Cleophus LaRue, would regularly address me as "Dr. Lose." Eventually it made me uncomfortable enough that I said to him, "But Dr. LaRue, I haven't earned my doctorate yet. I don't think you should call me that." "Dr. Lose," he patiently responded, "in the African-American church we are not content to call you what you are, but instead call you what we believe you will be!" Blessing. Unexpected, unsettling, nearly inconceivable, yet blessing nonetheless.
So here's the question I am left with this week, Working Preacher: What would it be like just to bless the congregation. To tell them that God loves and adores them, that God wants the very best for them, that God esteems them worthy of not just God's attention but God's blessing.
Whatever we do, we need to think hard about how to help people hear and believe that they are blessed because, as Dr. LaRue knew, we become what we are called, and calling our people blessed will over time transform them to be God's blessing in and to the world."

birds of a feather

You know how being surrounded by sleeping cats makes you think it's exactly the right thing to sleep all day? I think I have that kind of misguided connection with characters in the books I'm reading sometimes. If I'm reading about a writer who scribbles poetry down on napkins, that behavior suddenly seems so much more "normal" than usual. So I'm thinking it is not a good thing that the main character in the fluff novel I'm reading on the bus is a 16-year-old-girl who is excluding people from her life one by one (for their own safety of course). At least I wrote it down. Good news is that I'll be done with this book tonight. Maybe I need to choose the next bus fluff more carefully, given my tendency toward over-identification with characters.

1,2,3,4, Really?

I was counting out copies of a worksheet for my class and got this song stuck in my head: "1, 2, 3, 4 monsters knockin' at the door." Yes, Feist via Sesame Street. I promise we have not played that youtube clip once since Emersyn left in November. And yet . . .

What happened to the UNsilence?

I know. Looks a lot like silence around here. And I'm not making any promises to be less silent. I feel like I may be moving into a cocoon for some transformation, and cocoons are pretty quiet.
Emersyn the two-year-old who was sharing our room, moved out with her family in late November. Thus, no cute Em stories to post. I still miss her every day, but I have gotten past the point where I burst into tears every time I hear a toddler cry or have to redirect my shopping cart away from its habitual path toward the diaper aisle. Who knew NOT buying diapers could make you cry? But I know that I still walk around with a gaping hole near my heart.
I still have a full and incredibly blesses life. My 12-year old daughter is one of the most creative and open-hearted people I have ever known. As I sit silently hidden away in our room, I can hear my remarkable husband having theological conversations with whichever twentysomethings are around at the same time that he paints walls and washes dishes. My classes at El Centro Community College made and are--as usual--filled with delightful students from a huge spectrum of backgrounds. I feel so fortunate to still have both of my precious parents just a few hours' drive away. Our twentysomething guys seem to be making positive steps forward in their lives. The people who I am privileged to be church with locally are amazing.
But still, the cocoon calls.

Advent tnoughts

I am grateful to be able to be more fully present in advent this year than I was in lent. Although we are feeling a lot of joy in our lives and are so blessed by the love and support of so many people, the dominant feeling of the season is definitely longing. Longing for peace and justice and the Kingdom come on earth. Probably partly because our soundtrack this season seems to be Andrew Peterson's Behold the Lamb of God. The whole CD, which starts the Christmas story back in the Old Testament, is so rich, but we're especially moved by "Deliver Us" just now.
Our hands-on lesson in active, faith-ful waiting: We are repainting our living room. Part of the room will be deep redwood, which is a few shades more intense than the color we had there before. But when I opened the paint container and saw the paint, I almost freaked out. Really--it was fuschia. (If you don't know this, we are really not big pink fans around here.) I kept stirring and stirring it, but it was still fuschia. Brianna said, "The guy at the store said it will change to the right color as it dries." Still, covering our walls with anything that color just felt so wrong. But we kept on --doing our part of putting the paint on the walls anyway and waiting for change to come. I am wondering if we are really quite slow at getting the point of this lesson since this paint job has required a full 2 coats and in some places three. Each time we raise the fuschia-drenched brush to our wall is painful for me. But we keep painting and waiting, and our walls are now deep redwood. May we be as faithful in all the less visible ways that we are called to actively wait this season.

'Tis the season in Dallas

Generally, there is just not a much better way for me to start the day than by eating pancakes and listening to Frank Sinatra with the homeless people at the downtown Dallas McDonald's. It is one of the few places in Dallas where I really feel "at home." This morning, however, even the homeless people and security guards are in the midst of passionate (read: loud)debates about professional sports events. Sigh.
"It's autumn in New York."
A couple of guys are even getting testy with each other over the sports section from today's newspaper. But they're on their way out.
"I get along without you very well."
But since I am settled in for a while to grade papers, I am still there when these guys head out and a woman comes in, sets down her assortment of bags, smiles, and says to me, "Doesn't this music just put you in the right frame of mind?"
"Don't change a hair for me, not if you care for me."
She leaves her stuff while she goes to get some breakfast. She comes back and addresses a fashionably-dressed college student: "Are you from Texarkana?" The befuddled student looks blankly at her and finally says, "Uhm, no." "Oh, 'cuz you look like someone from Texarkana." Ah, the right frame of mind.
"Let's face the music and dance."