A Road Less Travelled

There is a saying that goes something like “Before enlightenment- chopping wood and hauling water. After enlightenment- chopping wood and hauling water.” It is very true.

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 For most of my life I’ve thought that it would be a lot simpler if I had one all consuming interest. You know, the one thing that I would obsess about and I would know that I could serve God best by just working on the this one thing and studying it. For a lot of girls it seemed to be horses. I read several books on horse-girls and considered having this be my all consuming passion, but I never really got into it. For a while I was intrigued my geology and read up on gems and Moh’s scale of hardness and such things, but that phase passed. I dabbled in butterflies, coin collecting, collecting baskets, medicinal herbs, and at various stages planned my life as a gymnast, figure skater, private detective, actress, singer (yeah, yeah, I know–I’ve given up on that one), chef, or famous author. Writing was one of the things that carried through as a strong theme, but it shared the limelight with reading, baking, and all kinds of handcrafts, which really didn’t help narrow it down to my one all consuming interest. I decided this meant I was meant to be a homemaker and gave up on any other kind of focus. But still, it seemed like it wouldn’t hurt for a homemaker to have a specialty, and I couldn’t figure it out.

Fastforward to the present (give or take a couple of days): I’m watching a DVD on organizing the family, which Theresa suggested might be helpful for me personally. This guy (Patrick M. Lencioni) talks about core values and strategy and your three strategy anchors. The idea is you write all your strategy points that come to mind–these are basically all the things that are true about what you’re doing with your life or things that important to you. Then you kind of squint at it and say, “Well, I’m doing this because of this one…” and draw a little arrow. (Like, we live in the city because community is important to us. Just to pick a random example.) Pretty soon two or three of the things you’ve written down will have lots of little arrows pointing to them, and you’ve discovered your anchor strategy points. He has a couple of examples of this with lovely little arrows which all line up neatly pointing to the proper anchors.

Uh huh. Sure. It looks all simple when he does it–that’s because he planned it out beforehand. So I give it whirl. Next thing I know things are sliding into place. “No wonder I do crafts–it supports three of my other strategy points! And of course I read because I like stories, but then the stories feed into appreciating beauty…” Pretty soon I have three core strategy points that strike me as almost, but not quite, blindingly obvious.

The first one is appreciation of beauty–I lump this in with looking forward to heaven because they’re very closely linked in my head. Then is lifelong learning, then community/friendships. So I look at these three and think, “No wonder I’m intrigued by the idea of Christian culture and art–even if I can’t figure out what it’s supposed to look like.”

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A short collection of recent quotes:

“There’s not much you can do with a sock and rubber band!”

“You need to put away your math book now, and come empty the dishwasher.” (It needs to be understood that this happened on a Saturday afternoon, when the culprit had apparently opted for some recreational math.)

“I’m juggling too many fictional universes.”

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“I quit!” I said as I walked down the stairs. “I just quit! I am going to march up to Seth and Crystal and inform them I quit. And there is nothing they can do to make me change my mind!” I figure once a day is enough for any toddler to strip his diaper off and defecate on the floor. But twice?! And then he went and took his brother’s diaper off just for good measure. This was more than enough. It was more than too much! So I quit and there is no way anyone can change my mind.

I’ve stormed to the bottom of the stairs and I open the door. And Justice, who is only so-so on his relationships, says, “Mommy!” and sounds delighted to know I exist. Well, so much for quitting, I guess.

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Theresa mentioned on her blog that she’s starting a new writing curriculum with the children. I’m sitting in on the exercises (hup, two, three… no wait, wrong kind of exercises), the first one of which was to fill out a questionnaire about writing preferences and write a vignette about someone. Probably the most interesting question turned out to be, “Where do you like to write?” My first thought was “Outside, definitely.” Then I stopped. I don’t write outside. I write holed away in my room. Huh. Why don’t I write outside?

The result of this train of thought is that I am now leaning up against a post in our yard, swatting mosquitoes and letting the damp grass stain my clothes. I think I’m going to like this…

The vignette, we were informed, should be a brief glimpse of what a person and his or her life is characteristically like. I thought the writing in mine was only okay, but I like the impression I got across. I don’t have it in front of me at the moment, but as best I can remember, it went like this:

Gabrielle’s vibrant orange dress swished around her legs as she swept into the room, child on one hip, cast iron skillet in the opposite hand. “So,” she said, turning the on faucet in the kitchen sink full blast as she slipped the skillet in, “I had this great idea!”

Oh, and besides these writing exercises, I got another writing assignment from Seth. So, um, when I finally finish that one, anyone up for playtesting a roleplaying game about creating fairy tales by committee?

As far as writing outside goes, while I was sitting here I had a bumblebee either fall asleep or die on my pant leg. Has anyone else ever had a bumblebee decide to sit down and die on them? Is my writing really that boring? Or is just my sparkling personality? Sigh. Maybe I should move back inside.

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I am in the middle of writing a story. I’ve been in the middle of writing this story for about a month now. And I just don’t want to go back to it. I know what will happen next; it isn’t that hard to describe. But it’s heart-breaking. And I just don’t want to go through it.

This is the second time I’ve sat down to write without any thought in my mind as to what story I’ll write. I start typing and just let words and thoughts wander out my fingers. Last time a little boy lost his voice, couldn’t communicate with his mother and was about to be evicted from his home. I made myself cry with that story. It ended happily, but I dragged these poor people through the dirt to get there. And now I’m in the middle of another story with another character who is about to be shown yet again that her father hates her. I am pretty sure the story will end up okay for her, but I just don’t want to write this next part. I sit down at my computer, I open the file, picture what happens next and just freeze. I want to swoop into my own story and rescue this sweet child.

I’ve wondered why I write sad stories. In fact, I’ve had some very harsh conversations with myself about why my brain seems stuck on the vale of tears. I don’t actually enjoy suffering, you know. So why is it that sorrow and sadness are what I write about if I don’t focus very hard on something else?

I said to Seth once that I was glad he was finishing up Dirty Secrets because now he could get himself out of the gutter and stop seeing all the evil committed under the sun all the time. He told me that in some ways constantly seeing evil and sorrow is the life he’s chosen. He has chosen to see the evil people do to each other and to notice the broken left in its wake. And he has chosen to put himself and his family right in the midst of those broken people so that we show them the love of the Healer Who puts people back together.

I chose to live in the same place. It wasn’t ultimately my decision, but Seth and Crystal asked my opinion and I said I would follow them where ever. And I asked God to mold me to fit where I ended up. And right now I live in the midst of broken people who have been brutally hurt by those who were supposed to protect them. Sometimes they have been so hurt they don’t even understand that they’re wounded. For them life consists of broken promises, broken hearts, and broken skin. And we are here to tell them it doesn’t have to.

Sadly, I don’t think many Christians look for the broken or love them when confronted by them. The world certainly doesn’t care about the broken. I know there are some in our neighborhood who see the drug dealers and drug users as completely worthless. “If we could just get rid of the roaches and fill the neighborhood with good people like me then Heaven will have come to earth” pretty much sums up this opinion. But “roaches” are people too and they bear the image of the Healer. Roaches are just people who are broken and need someone to love them enough to put them back together. But the “good people”, whether Christian or not, just turn their eyes away.

So I write stories. I write stories that break my heart because I know they aren’t fantastical or exaggerated. I write stories so that maybe someone else will read them, see the image of God in the broken and want to go love them. I write stories so that maybe the broken will see the healing that could be. I write stories because in the middle of evil and sadness is where I have chosen to live and I must never forget that or the One Who called me here. And I pray that He would use my stories and my life to show healing and love to the poor, the weak, the oppressed, to those world calls worthless who have never known either.

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I have been wanting to write a post about this restaurant we ate at while we were on our trip, but somehow the words haven’t been lining up for me. I was very happy to see then that James had written the post I’d wanted to. Enjoy.

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I don’t swim. I’m rather fond of water, but only up to a point, and that point is about at my chin. Wandering around in shoulder high water is rather fun. Putting my face underwater is a horrible experience, not because of the actual water, but because of the suffocating panic which assures me that the water is trying to kill me and I’d better find some air NOW.

I had a week of swimming lessons once. All I remember is desperately thrashing around in the motions I’d been told to use, hoping that if I thrashed hard enough I would beat the water into submission and it wouldn’t kill me. (This probably says something about my approach to life in general. Over the weekend I had a chance to use a Wii for the first time, and while it was a lot of fun, spectators were continually reminding me, “It’s supposed to be a tennis racket, not nunchucks. It’s supposed to be a baseball bat, not a sword. You look like you’re trying to kill the ball.”)

So, when someone at our church offered swimming lessons, I thought, “Hey, that would be nice. I’d like to not feel like I might drown anytime I get near water.” I also had a wordless thought that went along with that, which was along the lines of, “Oh, no, I have to do battle with the water again.”

I practiced kicking off the side of the pool, something I don’t remember learning in my way-back-when swimming lesson experience. I figured out that I wasn’t going to drown because the pool was only four feet deep. (I knew this when I got in, of course, but I also had to figure it out as I went. Water can be sneaky, you know…) Then, one time when I kicked off I felt something I’d never felt before. I was moving through the water, and the water was holding me up.

I wasn’t thrashing. I wasn’t even moving, except by momentum. I was just slipping through the water near the surface. I don’t think I’d ever believed it was really possible until that moment. I’d probably still drown if you threw me the ocean without a life preserver, but give me few days. I’m pretty sure this whole swimming thing could actually work now.

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I just noticed, and not for the first time, that we have a category called Thoughts About Being Single. If you click on this link you will find eight posts. Together, Raquel and I have written over seven hundred posts. There are a hundred and seventeen posts on Friends and Family, seventy-six posts on Poems and Stories, thirty-eight Real Life Quotes and even fourteen posts on Words. This blog is defined by us talking about this road less travelled we’ve chosen by being stay-at-home single young women and yet we don’t talk much about being single. And we talk even less about being Womanly.

I think I have an answer to this odd discovery. I can’t speak for Raquel (actually, I can, but I am choosing not to), but the reason I don’t write much about being single or about being womanly at all is because I have just about no idea how to do these things. I feel like I muddle through trying to be single to the glory of God and at the end of the day still have no idea what I did or if it was effective. So why would I want to write about it? I can write about words, family, poems and stories. I understand those things and can enjoy them. This single thing is just confusing to me.

Please don’t misunderstand me; I am not upset. I only had this thought or bothered to write it out because I was casting about for something to write to reassure both of you who read this blog that I at least still care. But it was odd when I noticed the number of posts in the Thoughts About Being Single category because it didn’t surprise me at all. I have no idea how to do this sinlge thing; why would I write about it? There are a multitude of books out there on how to be single well. Some of them are even good. I’ve only read one that was at all helpful. Maybe everybody else is just as confused I am. I think I’ll just assume that; it’s makes me feel better.

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I’m told turnabout is fairplay. To that I say whatever, but I ran across this post Raquel had written and decided it should really be posted. When I asked her about she said she thought it needed a complete rewrite. I talked her down off of that ledge mostly by being loud (over IM no less) and she said I could post it. Enjoy!

I’m halfway convinced that somewhere in Heaven is a little room lined with filing cabinets with a pool table up front, draped with a tablecloth.

Our congregation is getting too big for the room we meet in. I suppose it’s not really ideal anyway, and at first I assumed that I was looking past all the little inconveniences of this particular meeting place. But now we’re reaching the point where we need to move soon and I realize that I’m going to miss this little room. I’m not really sure what it is about the room, except the idea that memories are connected to places, and we’re going to leave behind some memories in these walls.

It was a good place. It was mostly a good place because of the people, and they’ll be at the new building, but this is also a sign of changes that I know will come in the future. I suspect that our church will plant daughter churches at some point which will split up our congregation geographically. I’m also trying to resign myself to the fact that certain people will probably be moving away in the next few years. Children will grow up, and people will die, and nothing will be quite the same.

So I remind myself that all good things are just shadows of Heaven. And maybe there aren’t really filing cabinets nor a pool table, but all the good things about that room will be there. No one will ever move away and there will always be time to say hello to those people I usually forgot to greet. I’ll never have to agonize over saying good morning to people or wonder if they want to talk to me.

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