One of the best things about (good) stories is that they tell you things without telling you.

Last night I was reading to my friend from To Kill a Mockingbird. She knows the story well enough to finish most of the sentences for me, but reading aloud or being read to is a perfect way to unwind at the end of a long day.

In the story last night, Calpurnia had taken Jem and Scout to her church and were debriefing:

That Calpurnia led a modest double life never dawned on me. The idea that she had a separate existence outside our household was a novel one, to say nothing of her having command of two languages.

“Cal,” I asked, “why do you talk nigger-talk to the –to your folks when you know it’s not right?”

“Well, in the first place, I’m black–”

“That doesn’t mean you hafta talk that way when you know better,” said Jem.

Calpurnia tilted her hat and scratched her head, then pressed her hat down carefully over her ears. “It’s right hard to say,” she said. “Suppose you and Scout talked colored-folks’ talk at home it’d be out of place, wouldn’t it? Now what if I talked white-folks’ talk at church, and with my neighbors? They’d think I was puttin’ on airs to beat Moses.”

“But Cal, you know better,” I said.

“It’s not necessary to tell all you know. It’s not ladylike–in the second place, folks don’t like to have somebody around knowin’ more than they do. It aggravates ’em. You’re not going to change any of them by talkin’ right, they’ve got to want to learn themselves, and when they don’t want to learn there’s nothing you can do but keep your mouth shut or talk their language.”

Learning to live and speak in a new country is both exhilarating and terrifying. Sometimes scary, but mostly exciting. Which is why Anne Voskamp’s blog post was especially meaningful to me last week.

Here are some gems:

Sometimes we shroud who we are becoming, to keep all the tender, stretching places, safe. Sometimes we fear the words that might abort dreams, the future that might miscarry, the humility that might hurt.

“I know not….know not of so much. Of everything. But I am venturing out into the questions in search of the answers.”

Little did I know how the venturing out would terrify and that it would never stop terrifying and that fear never stops the faithful, full of Him, from leaping anyway.

(my italics)

Ann frequently addresses fear in her posts, looks at it squarely, and leaps. I think it’s because she has a lot of love to give. Love casts out fear, John said.

I can’t wait for Ann’s new book coming out in Jan. ’11.
One broken woman,
One wild quest for joy,
One Thousand of His Gifts
Sounds like my kind of book! I will find a way to get it from the USA to Poland without paying exorbitant shipping. It will be a must-have.

I am proud that I know a small part of what is in the book. Ann gave me permission to share three blog posts with the writing class at CBS last winter. She said the posts would soon not be available on the blog, because of being integrated into the book and becoming Zondervan’s property. The students were moved with her writing. We called it “emotive.”

What has happened to Ann is every blogger’s dream: a publisher found her blog and asked her for a book. She is most deserving, and I’m so glad she didn’t let fear stop her first tentative fingers on the keys of cyberspace. Ann has guided thousands to give thanks, find joy in the mundane,
see the sacred in the chaos,
the Cross in the clothespin,
the flame in the bush.

I’ve written about Don Miller before, as in here and here. I follow his blog, on which he posts sporadically.

A couple days ago, I found the post especially profound. There was a paragraph that pierced me. I think it’s truth, though I’m still mulling over it, and there are ways in which I want to disagree because I wish that beauty didn’t have anything to do with pain. I guess that’s what we were made for, but on this side of Eden, the two will be inextricably linked.

…beautiful things are frightening. When something beautiful happens it’s sometimes like an amputation, like your heart is being cut out with a knife. You don’t ever think when you are in extreme pain that you are being saved, chosen, picked for relationship, set aside to be loved. You can never really believe pain. It’s almost always something beautiful transitioning to something better, the whole time masquerading as a tragedy.