unending faithfulness

We sang this song today, and in the (rare) quiet time that followed, the words felt so true to me.  

Your love, oh Lord, reaches to the heavens
Your faithfulness stretches to the skies
Your righteousness is like the mighty mountain
Your justice flows like the ocean's tide

And I will lift my voice
To worship you, my King
And I will find my strength
In the shadow of your wings.

Other conversations after that raised questions for me about how to search for (and encourage) spirituality at EMU, and in light of that, my hope is that this feels like a prayer to you too.  Whatever our differences are, this is still true.

generations

Today I listened to a speech about how we should care for the elderly people that surround us.  We're pretty good at caring for them physically, but I think they are often emotionally neglected and devalued, and this is becoming increasingly more near to my heart.  The other day I stood behind an old woman in line at Red Front and watched her arthritic fingers undo the clasp on her wallet, and I thought, She's still beautiful.  I wonder if she knows that she's still beautiful.  I didn't tell her, but I hope she knew.

plastic wasteland

This morning both of my classes contained a "Here's something terrible about the world that will make you really depressed and angry, but instead of feeling horrible, you should do something about it" moment.  This is the first one:  plastic bags.

I could spend a long time despairing about the horrible-ness of what we have already done to our beautiful earth, but here's a quick summary.

• Globally, we use 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags each year.
• You can recycle them, but it's way expensive.  (It costs $4,000 to recycle one ton of plastic bags, when they can be sold for about $32.)
• They do eventually break down (after about 1,000 years), but then they become even more toxic and pollute the soil.
• Our oceans are literally filled with them.  Every square mile of ocean has about 46,000 pieces of plastic floating in it.  Thus, they are also dangerous to wildlife.
• They are disgusting, toxic, and unnecessary.

So!  The point of that was to be real, not to be too depressing or guilt-inducing.  And the point of this blog post is to challenge myself and you to do something different!

Entire countries have banned plastic bags.  (Ireland, South Africa, Australia, etc.)  U.S. cities (Seattle, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., etc.) have started to either ban plastic bags or tax them to encourage people to find alternatives, and many of those changes have happened within the past year.  Which is exciting!  It means things are getting better.

We've basically messed up our entire planet in a lot of ways, but there are changes that will make things a whole lot better.  We can still start caring for our earth and all its creatures, plus our brothers and sisters all over the world.

Personally, I think it would be awesome if we moved away from plastic bags in Harrisonburg.  I know not everyone would be excited about it (in fact, a lot of Americans are surprisingly angry at the prospect), but there would be plenty of ways to do it that would make it semi-painless (subsidizing paper bags, providing cloth bags to consumers, etc.).  And I've been really encouraged by all the community-focused, globally-minded things that are already in place in Harrisonburg.

What do you think?

love

I had this book on my list of books to read and I wasn't sure why (other than a recommendation from a friend).  Then I read this quote, and now I know why.


"Love is a temporary madness.  It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides.  And when it subsides you have to make a decision.  You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part.  Because this is what love is.  Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion.  That is just being "in love" which any of us can convince ourselves we are.  Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.  Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two."


-Corelli's Mandolin

awake, my soul

I know it's been a while.  Sometimes I'm struck with a sudden fear that the things I spend my time doing are completely pointless, so this was my way of cleansing.  Still, there is something in me that needs to express my life in words, so here are some highlights from the past 6 weeks or so.

To start, here's a life lesson:  If you decide to eat a banana as a snack before your third class, you should not put it in your backpack for the duration of your first two classes.  If you do, it will squish itself into banana mush all over the inside of your backpack, and your stomach will make embarrassingly loud grumbling noises during Creative Writing.

I actually love Creative Writing more than I thought it was possible to love a college class.  My first story was terrifying ("It has to be PERFECT, oh I love this idea, no wait that sounds dumb, I should use this phrase because it's awesome, how did it get to be 11:30 already?!"), but since then it's become more and more satisfying to write my two-page story every week.  I realized pretty quickly that I actually have a voice.  No, really, and I have stories!   And I can tell them!  And so can you.  It was so exciting/liberating/surprising to find a deep well of "story seeds" somewhere in my imagination, just waiting for me to let them out.

Last week I was stricken by a mean nasty stomach-flu demon that necessitated that I confine myself to a mattress, sleep about 18 hours a day, and give up eating for the better part of a week.  I also learned that roommates make good mothers.


My 7-year-old violin student gave me girl scout cookies and a pink decorated pencil. I got a gift card to the Friendly City Food Co-op for Valentine's Day (thanks parents!), and I can't wait to spend it on things like soy milk and Greek yogurt and peanut butter and tea. I get excited to be at church. My friends and I spend Sunday afternoons putting together puzzles on the living room floor. I started running and it makes me feel thankful.

And yesterday and today I've been discovering that a significant amount of the pressure I feel about life comes from me.  I don't really want to explain it except to say that it was kind of a shock to realize that I'm my own enemy, but hey, that seems pretty fitting with what I've learned about life.
So here's to becoming my own solution.  I’m gonna start acting the way I say I want people to act.  How’s that for radical?

In the words of this week's Spiritual Life speaker/artist/songwriter/child advocate, this is how I feel about life currently.

The sun is coming out
in me.


I hope you feel the same.

new year's goals

I don't like New Year's resolutions because I believe in making myself change more often than once a year.  Still, I like setting goals regularly, and the new year seems like a good time for it.

This year, I want to love as if I have always been loved in return, try new things (especially things that scare me a little), and throw myself deeply into life.  More specifically, I have three goals:

I read through The Simple Way's list of 50 Ways to Become the Answer to Our Prayers again, and it was challenging and inspiring and terrifying, as always.  This year I want to pick at least ten of those ideas and follow them.
Along the same lines, the idea of sponsoring a child keeps coming back to me.  I'm torn between financial responsibility (I hate it, but it's still so compelling sometimes) and the commitment to real change.  C.S. Lewis's words from years ago keep coming to mind again and again:  "You must give more than you can afford to spare."

I want to make at least three new friends who are a different ethnicity than I am.  To some of you this may be so natural it doesn't have to be a goal -- but although I do this sometimes, I want to be much better at interacting with people who come from a different background or culture than I do.

And I want to keep a prayer journal.  I just like the idea of being more intentional about talking to God, and for me writing is always a way of solidifying things.  For example, I'm writing this blog post.  :)

What are you going to do this year?

closeness

These days I often say, "God, come near to me."  It has become both a comfort and a challenge:  a certainty that God is there, and a willful suppression of my inner chaos.  Sometimes it is when I'm falling asleep at night; sometimes when I'm walking across campus; sometimes when I close my eyes and listen.
And God always comes.

some more thoughts about music...

...so you can skip this if you're tired of them.

My junior recital is in a week.  (December 2!  7:30!  Martin Chapel!  You should come!)  So today when I was practicing I decided to play through everything straight, the way it will be next week, without stopping to fix mistakes, so I can tell what I want to work on between now and then.  And it wasn't perfect, but it was exactly what I hoped for.  Because after I was done I knew I got it.
Music isn't about perfection, it's about passion and joy and expression.  I can't expect every note to be in tune and clear and the way I want it, but today I knew the right feelings were there.  And that made me completely happy, because what more could I ask for?  I just want to give the music what it deserves, and I just want to make people feel something, and I just want to lose myself in the emotion of it.

In String Pedagogy on Tuesday, Joan told us horror stories about people who play for professional orchestras, and let me tell you, if I had ever been thinking seriously about auditioning for one, I'm not planning on it anymore.  I don't want to be part of anything where people can lose their job for one mistake or slash each other's tires from the pressure of it.  To me, professional orchestras like that have lost the essence of what music means to me.
Anyway, the moral of the story is, I'm learning to find pure, simple joy in my music.  After years of striving for perfection, it's nice.

colors

Last night I sat in the front seat of a car reading a wonderful book about love and beauty, and when I looked up, I saw that the entire sky was consumed in a glorious sunset.  The horizon from the far left to the far right was awash in brilliant color, as if God had drawn his fingers across the sky from the south to the north.  And in the center, right in front of my spellbound eyes, was the brightest, hugest, most incredible blending of orange and pink fading into purple and gray and blue.  It shone through our car windows and into my heart like the culmination of everything, and in that moment, it seemed to me that there was nothing more I could possibly want.

enriching the earth

The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry has become my occasional breakfast companion, and I love this one especially.  Make sure you read all the way to the end.

To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass

to grow and die.  I have plowed in the seeds

of winter grains and of various legumes,

their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.

I have stirred into the ground the offal

and the decay of the growth of past seasons

and so mended the earth and made its yield increase.

All this serves the dark.  I am slowly falling

into the fund of things.  And yet to serve the earth,

not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness

and a delight to the air, and my days

do not wholly pass.  It is the mind's service,

for when the will fails so do the hands

and one lives at the expense of life.

After death, willing or not, the body serves,

entering the earth.  And so what was heaviest

and most mute is at last raised up into song.

our stories matter

Last night was the coffeehouse for Take Back the Night week, the time when everyone is invited to share stories, poems, and songs from their experiences with sexual violence.  As always, these stories brought both pain and healing to those of us who heard them.

I heard a girl tell the story of a family member raping her thirteen-year-old sister, and all I could think was what if that had been my sister.  I cried until my eyes were sore at hearing all the stories of abuse (so many, many stories) and felt bewildered at my own reaction.  A small part of me was asking, what right do I have to cry?

I don't have a story, but I feel like I do.  A wise friend of mine said, "We are the stories we've heard."  I feel like a victim because I know far too many people who have experienced sexual abuse, and because I have carried their stories with me, and because I feel other people's pain when they share their words like this.  Another friend told me that secondhand trauma is real and justified, and maybe that's me.

But I know that I'm glad I feel these things -- I don't ever want to cease to empathize with another's pain, because that is when we cease to embrace our shared humanity.  We are human together, and we walk with each other through darkness and light.

No-buy November

Who wants to do this with me?  :)

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=269469573077264&ref=ts

top 10 books

I am and always have been a lover of books, and as a way of embracing this part of myself, I have written a list of my very favorites.

1.  To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
      I read this first in seventh grade and again in eighth, and then came back to it my junior year of high school and loved it beyond words.  It's one of those books that speaks to you in different ways at different times in your life, and although I could mostly comprehend the story as an eleven-year-old, it is much more meaningful to me now.
2.  The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
     The stories of the women of a missionary family in the Congo, growing and changing together and apart.  Barbara Kingsolver is one of my favorite authors all-around, and this book is one of her best.  One of the things I like most about it is that each chapter alternates between the perspectives of a mother and her four daughters, and each one has a unique voice.
3.  I Am The Messenger (Markus Zusak)
     I first read this in tenth grade for an extra-credit book club.  I started it one afternoon intending to read the first quarter, our assigned reading for the week, and read the entire thing straight through.  It's that kind of book, and every time I re-read it I never fail to be amazed at its clarity, humility, and truth.  The very idea behind it inspires me to be a better person.  
4.  The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
     It's about a girl who, after living with an abusive father following the death of her mother, runs away and finds healing in the home of three sisters who raise bees.  Because it is set in the South during the Civil Rights Movement, she also learns about inequality and love without boundaries.  The story may be simple, but it resonates with a kind of gloriousness and truth that many good books lack.  The essence of what it communicates can be found in every human soul.
5.  Blue Like Jazz (Donald Miller)
     This is a collection of humble, inspiring stories about life and following Jesus.  Like many books on this list, it is simple and deeply profound.  If I can live my life with anything that approaches this kind of honesty and grace, I will have touched many people's lives.
6.  Chronicles of Narnia (C.S. Lewis)

     This is obviously more than one book, but I'm listing them as one entity because they are all so wonderful.  They are an extraordinary blend of imagination and depth of meaning.
7.  The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
     I first read this when I was probably in middle school, after my mom told me she loved it.  My response after reading it was something along the lines of, "I don't get it.  What's the point?"  Then I read it again this summer and it made me cry.  It is so simple, really a children's book, but once you get older it echoes in you like childhood and eternity together.
8.  The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Muriel Barbery)
     The writing in this book is simply exquisite.  The story is good, but it's actually irrelevant sometimes; what's more important is allowing yourself to sink into its words.
9.  The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
     This is another exquisitely written story about redemption and finding our common humanity.  It's difficult to read at times, but the issues it presents are real and relevant.  The difficult moments are woven together with beauty, and the ending is timidly hopeful.

I'm aware that my list of 10 favorite books only has 9 on it.  That's because although I can think of many other amazing books, none of them quite fit in at the level of these.  Also, I know that there are hundreds of wonderful books out there that are still waiting for me to read them.  As always, I would love to hear your suggestions.  :)

some words I like

1. Take my life and let it be
   Consecrated, Lord, to Thee.
   Take my moments and my days,
   Let them flow in endless praise.
2. Take my hands and let them move
   At the impulse of Thy love.
   Take my feet and let them be
   Swift and beautiful for Thee.
3. Take my voice and let me sing,
   Always, only for my King.
   Take my lips and let them be
   Filled with messages from Thee.
4. Take my will and make it Thine,
   It shall be no longer mine.
   Take my heart, it is Thine own,
   It shall be Thy royal throne.

fall thoughts

I am feeling tentatively secure.  And no, that's not an oxymoron.

I'm learning to admit the fears and insecurities that sometimes try to follow me through life.  I'm learning that everyone else suffers from them too, and to admit to them is not weakness but strength.  I am teaching my inner self to say, without even a shadow of a doubt, I am rightfully loved.
So when I find myself fallen and shaky and unsure of the next step in life, I am trying to find the courage to say out loud that everything is not okay.  Because I've noticed that there are people in my life who seem to care an awful lot about me, and blessings like that should not be distrusted with the fear that these people want me to be perfect.
Instead, I've started telling the truth and I'm going to keep on telling it.  I am happy, but not always; I am loved, but sometimes I forget; I am content with myself the way I am, but sometimes I let myself down.  And all this is okay, because every soul on earth struggles with feeling hopelessly inadequate at one time or another.  The worst thing we can do with this feeling is keep it inside, which is what I used to do, and it doesn't make you feel any better.  Henri Nouwen said that what is most personal is most universal, and I'm going to start living that way.