Author Archives: Life is For Living book

Ruminations and A Little Adventure

Posted in life, travel by

Yesterday I was ready to walk out the door after attending a women’s conference in Holmes County, OH. One lady told me goodbye and said, “I’d like to sit with you awhile because I think you have lots of stories behind you.” I told her she can read the stories on my blog, but right now I live a very normal life with no exciting stories. I was shaking my head and chuckling, surprised at how odd but fine it felt to say that.

For so long, I was the girl who lives far away and has Adventures. Now that girl lives in the sticks of gray PA and has no sweet little grandmas pressing money into her hand for fish for Christmas, and doesn’t fall into (many) atrocious language mishaps. Her car shimmies badly and gets dirty, and her orchid is pushing buds. Every day, she has very honest discussions with God and quiet, deep chats with people , but none of that stuff is story material or blog-able.

She has a lot of Thoughts and wonders about a lot of things.

  • Someone needs to write a Mennonite philosophy of the body.
  • What is to be done with songs with lines like “send grief or pain” or “I’ll trade sunshine for rain, comfort for pain–that’s what I’ll be willing to do”–when no sane person would say any of that.
  • What does it mean to mirror God’s image of creativity in us?
  • We can observe the ripples of traceable influence from Amy Carmichael to Jim and Elisabeth Elliot, but who’s next? Who will the next Christian heroes be? Are we walking among them now? How will their stories be preserved to influence and shape the next generation?
  • How can we come to understand more deeply the profound impact of words, and how they give life or death? How do words exercise man’s dominion over the created world, which includes the spirit world?

But none of that translates into stories. Hence the silence here.

But something funny did happen to me this weekend, and it makes a story to laugh about, and it was a little adventure.

The conference I went to asked me to speak in one session, and reserved a room at a nice hotel–one much nicer than the kind I reserve when I’m paying. The girl at the desk gave me the key and instructions, I found the room, swiped the key, and stepped in.

I saw lights turned on and clothes  and an open suitcase and I knew there would be a body on the bed. In the half second it took to assess the situation, I backed straight out, walked downstairs, and told the check in girl. She had no idea what was going on, and looked terrified and bewildered. She said someone had checked out of that room earlier in the day, didn’t know why someone was in there, and had no extra room to give me because they were booked full that night. I knew (but didn’t say) that we had an Agatha Christy plot on our hands. She gave me the employee’s restroom and I changed and left for the evening session. I couldn’t quite relax all evening. I knew a reputable business would take care of me, but still.

When I returned  hours later, the same girl was still there, falling over herself with apologies. The conference organizers had made two room reservations for two of us speakers. The check-in girl had given the other speaker the room with my name. That girl had already left when I came, so there would have been no body on the bed, but oddly enough, she said it went through her mind that she’s always a neat freak, but this time someone will come in and see the mess she left.

To compensate for the mix-up, the hotel gave me a $25 gift card for a local business I’ll probably never patronize, but it was awfully kind of them. Human error can happen anywhere, and happily we could laugh about it.

What a Woman Needs

Posted in community, life, singleness, women's stuff by

Last year in psychology class, our teacher spoke briefly one day of gender differences. We girls all looked knowingly at each other when we listed the stereotypical things about us: emotional, verbal, soft-hearted, quick to cry.

Then the teacher shared a vignette of a marriage counselling session. He was encouraging a couple to understand their differences and be aware of what the other needs. (Live with your wife in an understanding way, the Bible puts it.) The husband could love her best if she could talk and feel heard. He doesn’t have to explain it away or find solutions for her, just hear her out.

In typical human fashion, I only heard what I wanted to hear from the teacher’s lecture. (I didn’t hear what the wife should do!) I heard an acknowledgment that women function best when they can talk. I did two things with that: 1) winced because I don’t have a husband to talk to and 2) took it as permission to knock on someone’s door to talk when I need it.

Those of us with opinions and fears and ideas and wishes and falterings need a place to get outside our own heads, have someone else look at what is jiggeting around in there, and sift through the stuff. Untangle the spaghetti. Bring to mind what’s been forgotten.

So this morning I was troubled about something I heard yesterday. I was out of my depth and didn’t know how to think about it. I needed perspective and it suited my mentor to meet over lunch. We met, I talked, and she talked. She gave balance and wise perspective and encouragement, and when my scalloped potatoes and salad was finished, I was good to go. I thanked her soundly, and hardly thought about the troubling issue again.

I’m saying this for any woman out there with spaghetti muddling her tired, clever brain: you need to talk with someone.

I don’t mean that you tell someone EVERY time you’re bothered, because that could be every five minutes or every five hours. Life gives bumps and questions and riddles. That’s normal, and we have to roll with the punches. But when there’s a niggling that won’t go away, a worry that festers, an unrest that simmers, find someone who can hear you talk about it, and then you can go on.

No one can do life on her own. Not even the independent ones who know their own minds. (And most of them are independent only because they have to be. But I digress.) We function best in teams, families, communities, small groups. The sum of the whole is worth more than the individual parts, and each gives to and benefits from the others, and we lose more than we realize when we isolate ourselves and try to push through on our own.

Bouncing ideas off someone or sifting through the things that simmer inside is a big part of staying emotionally whole and healthy. It isn’t a right to demand or be selfish about, but something to be honest enough and weak enough to admit need. I think there are a lot of women walking around who are slowly withering inside because they haven’t found a safe confidante or mentor or counselor. And that saddens me because bottling things up is not how we were designed to live, and there are options and better ways of living.

Some options:

  • journal
  • go on a brisk walk around the block
  • email someone if you can’t talk
  • curl into a ball and cry and talk to God for a long time
  • text or call someone to ask if they have time to meet

Burrowing into a book or scrolling through Facebook are not good options for a bothered brain, usually.

I’m unutterably grateful to be writing from a place of wealth, not want. I know loneliness. I know the ache of friends far away and confidantes too busy. I also know the little bit of courage that it takes to ask to talk gives huge payback in equilibrium and peace.

The tissues and tea help too.

Image result for willow tree heart and soul My Willow Tree figurine: “Heart and Soul”

 

 

A Special Kind of Recycling

Posted in life, Poland, teaching English, words by

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There should be a word for déja vu reversed. Maybe ‘tables turned’ is the idiom I want. Or “what goes around comes around.”

It happened after work when I was hurriedly eating my solitary supper before rushing off for my voice lesson at the local college. I was keeping an eye on the clock when this warm wave of memory washed over me.

I remembered how my English students would rush in after their work day, fling a coat off, and sink into a chair. I made it a point to have a warm, cheerful classroom, and a bright, positive attitude. During our lessons, I cheered and cajoled and guided and believed in them when they couldn’t. My students, individually or as a group, would relax, smile, and even laugh. Actually, we laughed a lot. Often. Head down on the table laughing. Leaning out of the chair laughing.  Then they said things like “Coming here is like therapy” or “I had to stay for this late meeting at work, but I didn’t want to miss this lesson” or “The train was late, and I was so angry, because I didn’t want to cancel with you.”

Eating my supper in a rush, I suddenly understood them. Now it was me whose head was tired of thinking, whose creativity was wrung out by 5:00, and who couldn’t wait to walk into a doorway of light to a welcoming, confident person who knows what she’s doing.

My teacher teaches voice like I taught English, and I am like my students were. I was coming off of 6 weeks of no lessons due to a bad cold, and this was like starting from zero, like all the time she’d put into me was nothing. The first few scales were really, really horrible, even I could hear it, but she never flinched. She knew what I needed, knew the incremental baby steps to take, and got me do things I didn’t think I could do. And we talked about other stuff as fast as we could between warm ups and French pronunciation.

Just like it was with me and my students.

This kind of pay back is beyond-words-delicious.

Now I need an English teacher to help me with my metaphors.

Who Am I?

Posted in Family, life, travel by

Last Sunday we were given a chance to talk to each other about our memories of our grandparents. Two of our girls had just lost their grandfather who was a pillar and a patriarch, and they told us some of the things they’ll miss about  him.

These times can never be comprehensive and say everything there is to say, but the opportunity brings to the surface some of the cream, the richest and most enduring aspects of the people we love.

I heard myself talking about my grandpa. Totally ad lib, some words and memories came tripping out.

I didn’t know my grandpa as soon as most children do, because he lived with his family in El Salvador when I was very little. They came up on furlough when I was three, and my first memory of him is when this tall black-bearded man crouched down with his arms open, expecting me to run to him. I was afraid of this stranger and refused to go to him.

They lived in Central America for more than five years and he would happily have spent the rest of his life in El Salvador. He learned to preach in Spanish. Locals there called him Papi Juan.

Recently a friend used her wise counselor voice on me: “I wonder if your itchy feet and love for the open horizon is part of your pathology.”

Hmmm. It was a new idea. It’s possible that it’s part of my brokenness. I don’t want to be trapped. I like plenty of space and freedom. It might not always be a good thing. I remember how Bilbo said, “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

But I also wonder: this man who tromped easily around foreign countries and opened his heart and arms to people, I carry some of his genes. It is ironic to me that I was tramping around Rome the day I got the call he was dying. Maybe his endearing himself to his big world is part of the reason my heart feels stretched tightly across continents. Living that way is part of my normal. It’s how my family and extended family have lived. (There’s a cost to that, maybe some pathology, but this post is not about that.)

This is the tribute I wrote on the flight from Europe to Chicago, and had the honor of reading at his funeral. Today I’m asking God what it is that would give Him the most glory–where should I live, what should I throw my energy into, who does He want me to embrace and care for? Following my Grandpa’s footsteps means “home” is not necessarily a static address. It could be that, but it’s not a given.

It took someone else’s grandpa’s death to remind me of how I’m shaped, how I make my own choices but they’re not made in a vacuum. And I have more than one grandpa, and not two, not three, but four grandmas. Family lore, genes, traditions, even broken places, help to shape the pieces of me.

None of us are self-made people. This is cause for deep humility and gratitude.

Anita’s Life Hacks

Posted in Family, food, life, recommendations by

If you read other life hacks, you know that some are genius, and some fall flat. Well, these are my latest ones, and they work for me.

Kefir with orange concentrate

A couple years ago, I was attracting every bug in town, even with eating garlic sandwiches and Polish pickles at a tremendous rate. Jewel and I had an English student who is a metabolic dietitian (isn’t that a cool title?!) and she said I need probiotics.  So I got attached to kefir, and now I don’t like to do without it for more than a couple days. The healthiest option is to use fresh or frozen fruit to make smoothies with it. Last year when I lived in a dorm, that wasn’t easy to carry off, so I improvised by just adding lemonade mix, and it was lovely.

Now, with summer being over and frozen fruit being at a premium again, I found another solution: orange juice concentrate. I drop a dollop of it into my pint jar, add a bit of sugar, and  oh, it’s so good that I moan every time at the first sip. I associate cold, juicy oranges with this time of year anyhow, and this just fits. Add a smidgen of vanilla and call it an orange julius for breakfast. Yum.

Happy bubbles 

You know how some little people need time to warm up to you, and sometimes you don’t have that kind of time? Or they’re grumpy and won’t be charmed? I found a trick. It’s called bubbles.

It started when I just happened to slip a little tube into my purse after a wedding, and happened to remember it was there when I was trying to befriend a fairy child. The minute I started blowing the bubbles, she started giggling and chasing them and suddenly she liked me after all. Well, she liked the bubbles, but that was ok. Her rollicking laughter was the best thing that happened to me that day, and her gorgeous, chocolate truffle eyes are still with me. I gave her the tube to keep and she couldn’t get done talking about her “happy bubbles.”

So now I have a supply of mini bubble tubes in a closet (JoAnn Fabric’s bridal supply) and keep one in my purse to give to the next child. It’s a sure way to make sweet little friends in an instant. (The photo is at my sister’s wedding reception when my nephew forgot about being grumpy and hungry.)12698453_805008379644694_4219333476885333484_o

Newest News

Posted in books, life, My Book, singleness, women's stuff by

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In the spirit of things today, Cyber Monday, my book is available in e-format!

While I will always love the tactile experience of paper and ink, there is much to love about this e-book.

  • It’s cheaper than the printed version. (1/3 of the price)
  • You get it instantly.
  • You get a preview of it while you decide you want it.
  • It adds no bulk or weight to your purse or book bag.
  • You can buy a copy for your friend and have it emailed to her. (Think easy, thoughtful, inexpensive Christmas gift.)

I wrote the book for single women, but am often surprised and overwhelmed at how warmly other women–mothers and pastor’s wives– speak of it. The book focuses on living well in Plan B. That’s not only for singles. Turns out most of us everyone is in some form of Plan B and we all need input, encouragement, companionship in that situation.

Today, that voice just got more accessible!

How Beauty Rests

Posted in life by

It was the worst, hardest week of 2016. I was blindsided with issues and dynamics and baggage that I didn’t want to think about but couldn’t get away from. I felt as limp and anemic as an over-cooked strand of linguine, and tears would drip without warning. But I lived in an institution and had to be presentable most of the time, so I breathed deep and kept my head down.

And it “just happened” that at the end of that horrible, terrible week, I went with friends to Cleveland hear the American Boy Choir. On 2-hour the drive up, my friends sang choir songs with their beautiful voices, and I listened and soaked it up and wondered at how voices can be so beautiful and so harmonious and accurate. The boys’ concert, in a gorgeous stone church, was these exquisite waves of sound soaring up and wrapping around and giving delight. Outside, the tulips were blooming bright and the sky was clear and the breeze fresh with spring. On the way back, we took turns reading to each other from Peralandra. My friends had no idea of my turmoil (unless they noticed the tears that leaked out when I closed my eyes to rest.) The time filled with easy conversation and comaradarie and simple enjoyment.

That evening, I felt washed and clean, because beauty had soothed and rested and refreshed me enough to start the hard work of addressing the things that were tormenting me. I learned that day how important beauty is in giving wholeness and balance to a soul that is fragmented and given to extremes.

Beauty comes in many forms.

  • musical harmony
  • color, shade, shadow
  • order, simplicity
  • surprise, serendipity
  • smiles, tears
  • laughter, giggles
  • shared jokes
  • texture
  • rest, quiet
  • water, sunshine
  • fragrance
  • courage

We are a very practical people, and if something isn’t useful in some way, we tend to discount its value. If this is always our modus operandi, I think we miss out on the beauty that’s bursting all around us, and our souls suffer for not feasting on it. We shrivel and wither and are less than the people God wanted us to be when He dreamed us up.

Or maybe it’s just me whose soul needs beauty like lungs need air? Or like leaves need rain?

I only know that when I heard a friend tell her incredible love story, I felt washed and refreshed because it was so beyond-words-beautiful. Or when I painted something, I felt like a new person. Or when I walked around the block and saw the brilliant sunset colors that filled me with gasps, I felt washed clean. Or when an instructor came to me that terrible week to say “I noticed you looked troubled yesterday in class. Were you in distress or did you have allergies? [I’d been crying my eyes out just before walking into class.] Are you ok?” The beauty of concern gave an increment of healing that will always stay with me.

Words, stories, color, love–these reflect God whose character is beauty, rest, and delight. For us to witness and enter into beauty is part of knowing God’s character better and becoming more healed, whole, and true to His design for us. It is a travesty for Christians to be shriveled, negative, and whining when they know the most beautiful Person ever and the world is dying for lack of hope and light and joy.

Moses said: And let the beauty [delight, splendor, grace] of the Lord our God be upon us…  (Psalm 90:17)

We can start by opening our eyes and ears and hearts to that splendor and beauty.

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My Stone

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Nie mój cyrk, nie moja malpa. Not my circus, not my monkey. I’ve heard that this is a Polish maxim, but when I was living in Poland, I never heard it that way. I usually just heard nie moja sprawa.

The monkey line was whimsical and made me chuckle, but I could never remember it at the right time.

A couple weeks ago, I was at a women’s retreat and it was a wonderful time of fellowship and refreshment, everything a retreat should be. As a parallel to the décor of ferns, water fountains, moss, and stones, there was a basket of small stones at the registration table. Every one was supposed to choose a stone and was instructed to carry it with them all the time.

Then someone read the story of the man whom God asked to carry some stones to the top of the hill. On the way, other people asked him to take their stone, and in his good nature, the man accepted. The load got so heavy, he started blaming God for asking so much of him. But God reminded him that He never asked him to take on all the extra stones.

In the retreat, some of us were told to plant stones surreptitiously  in people’s bags and laps, to see what the women would do when they discovered more than their own pebble. Unfortunately, I was socializing too much and didn’t drop any stones anywhere. But one busy bee was planting them everywhere. She was sitting beside me in one workshop and afterwards we had this serious conversation, but when I turned my back, there was a hot pebble under my Bible, and the lady was gone. The pebble was warmed all through, holding its heat from being clenched in her hand, waiting for the right moment. The turkey!

She may or may not have had several handfuls of pebbles mysteriously scattered between her pillow case, sheets, and blanket that night. As always, the laughs are the best part of being together.

A couple days after the retreat, I heard bad news from several places, and it all wanted to paralyze me. Then I thought, No, that’s not my stone to carry.

I care deeply, will listen, pray, stay alert, but put it down. It’s not my stone. There was an extra stone in my bag when I came home, and I pitched it. I took the original one I chose from the basket, wrote my assignment on it with white-out pen, and put it on my desk.

This is my stone, the biggest current assignment that God is ever so gently but persistently asking me to carry. I don’t have room right now to carry any others.

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Farther Along

Posted in life, love, Poland by

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It’ll be hard, they said.

Give yourself at least a year to adjust, they said.

So I gave myself a year, and July 1 marked the day, and most days since then, I’m not sure that a year did any good in helping to adjust. I’m still fragile enough that tears are usually simmering just under the surface, and I would happily board a plane tonight to go back to Poland. 

oh.

That strike-through option shows me that a year does something more than I’ve realized. I couldn’t freely board a plane to leave because it would mean tearing up the little burrow I call home and leaving work I’m coming to love and people who have come to mean a great deal to me.

But if I’d have known how harrowing the year was going to be, I’m pretty sure I’d never have had the courage to start.

“There is always something to miss, no matter where you are.” That’s what Sarah, plain and tall, said. Her words have helped keep me from feeling completely insane in this crazy mix of being happy and sad in the same second.

I miss simple, flavorful European food without sauces that disguise whatever it is. I miss living in town and walking wherever I want to go. I resent needing to drive everywhere. I miss taking the train or bus to the next town or across the country. I miss elegance and stately city designs. But I love how easy it is to drive away for the weekend, and how stores are air-conditioned and how customer service agents laugh with me on the phone.

I always hesitate when writing the date–is it month or day first?–and I feel like a deviant either way I write it. I push down the anger when people talk so LOUDLY in public places because it feels terribly invasive and indecent to me. I shudder at the shocking amounts of artificial coloring in food. I’m agog at how effortlessly church fellowship dinners appear and I did nothing to contribute. I still hate answering the glib question about where I’m from. I still feel like a foreigner, an oddity.

But I know my address by heart now, and that feels like a huge accomplishment. I have a PA driver’s license and a local library card. I know my way around town without a GPS. I walk around campus with this incredibly rested, relaxed spirit, singing, instead of feeling the tight, nervous, nameless fear of a year ago. And most delightfully, there are people with whom I share inside jokes and confidences, and I didn’t even know them a year ago.

hmmmm.   Maybe a year makes a bigger difference than I thought.

Maybe I’ll always feel like an oddity. Maybe it’s deeper than feeling European and a “returned missionary.” Maybe it’s part of the human condition, which is why I talk about it here. I’m not that eager to dump my feelings on the internet, but maybe someone else feels like a forever transplant. Maybe another human out there feels odd and mixed up. I’ve met more of those this year than I ever knew existed. We’re a weird bunch, puzzled and dazed and mystified at how it’s possible to function in this world while feeling very attached to another place.

There may not be compensation for the losses sustained in our fragmented hearts, but I’m slowly, slowly coming to see that what’s behind us gives us more to go forward with. It’s possible there’s a largeness of soul gained from our experiences that gives us something more to offer our world than we could have otherwise.

These ideas are just tentative. Maybe in another year I’ll know more about it.

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Live a Good Story

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(This blog post is the more polished, non-nervous version of the short speech I gave at the singles’ seminar yesterday at Penn Valley, about my story of living with passion.)

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“Beauty will save the world.” This is what Dostoevsky said, and I think I agree.

But I like to tweak the line to say Stories will change the world. And I’m out to live a good story.

I was born and raised in Virginia, and when I was 21, my whole family moved to Ireland and that’s where they still are. I lived there 14 years, and 5 years in Poland. The shape and the energy of my life have to do with words and people. Which is stories. In Poland, I taught English as a second language, and it was wonderful because words were my currency of exchange and all I had to do was sit in front of someone make them talk. In Ireland, I thought about doing what good missionaries do, which is to write  book about being a missionary in a foreign country. That book didn’t get written because I don’t know how to be a good missionary, but something else happened that I never expected.

When I was 29, I was reading a letter from a friend who  mentioned something she was learning in her walk with Jesus as a single. A voice from the ceiling told me, “You need to write a book for girls like this.” I doubted the voice; I thought it was my colorful imagination, so I told God that if it was Him, could He please confirm it? For the next week, nearly every day, He nudged and reminded and confirmed that it had been Him.

My motivation was to encourage and inspire. It’s not a how-to book, with lists of formulas on how to recognize a good man or how to become perfectly content. I saw women who were looking at being 30 without romance, and they became desperate and bitter, and I knew that God intended more than that for His creation. The book is largely about acknowledging that very few of us are living the life we were planning to live, but finding beauty and richness in it regardless of changed plans.

Maybe it’s a woman thing, or maybe it’s just me, but my deepest fear has been that I am or will be completely and utterly alone. That I have no one to walk with, lean on, depend on. I don’t mind solitude, but the fear of being existentially, profoundly on my own with no other resources has terrified me. I don’t say this cockily, because I still have fleeting moments of that fear but the experience of writing my book has taken most of that fear away. Because it was such an incredibly companionable walk with Jesus, a partnership with Him, where every step was in the dark, and I depended on Him to tell me what to do next and how to do it, and I now I know, as I never did before that I am never, ever alone.

I didn’t know how to write a book. There are things you should do and shouldn’t do, and I didn’t know what they were. But at every step, God put the right people in my path to help or give advice–some people with whom I haven’t had contact since, but they were there when I needed their expertise.

One day at work between customers, I made a list of the words about topics I wanted to cover. That list became my working outline. I’d write a chapter about each topic, and two years later when I got to the end of the list, I stopped, and that was the book. The outline morphed into sections of living with purpose (what is settled in the past, behind us), passion (what we do with today) and promise (what to look forward to.) I’m not much for cutesy alliteration, but that just happened. I should maybe mention that several readers have said my India story makes them wonder if I’m married. I’m not married. The story is completely fiction, even while it is scarily what I could do.

I have a new job now, working on a dynamic team that’s developing a history curriculum for elementary students. I’ve never taught history, and never taught these grades, so my current learning curve is huge. But I feel that everything behind me has prepared me for this moment. Among other good things, it combines words and people (stories) so it’s something I can put my whole heart into.

Stories will change the world. Not everyone needs to write a book, but everyone can live a good story. Donald Miller says a story is when a main character wants something and goes through conflict to find it. You have desires and dreams. Keep them! The minute you cut off your dreams and decide they’re too messy or ridiculous, your story stops. When you have conflict, don’t try to avoid it. Conflict is what makes your story. Think Joseph. Without the conflict with his brothers, he wouldn’t have had a story; he’d have just been Joseph in the field. Living a good story is not about muscling through and making things work, but it’s about keeping in step with Jesus and entering into His life and love.

Because life is such an incredible, beautiful gift and we should make the most of it.