Rattly People

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In a class this week about femininity and how we are composed of many layers (the object lesson was my matriska doll named Natalie) we talked about how our layers sort of blur into each other, and it’s hard or impossible to separate them.

I suspect that we have at least 100 layers, which explains why we’re so complex. But to be efficient, and to avoid 100 unwieldy terms, we usually use “spirit, soul, and body” to talk about the layers that we’re made of. What we do physically affects us spiritually and emotionally. Our emotions play out physically, viscerally, tangibly. The physical shell of the person is the first thing we notice, but it isn’t who they really are, and yet the way they carry themselves, the things they laugh at, the way they cast their glances around–all of this reveals the intangible parts of them.

So the Samaritan woman came to the well in the middle of the day, not in the morning or evening when the other women did, because of the shame she lived with. Lilly wanted to keep living with August because she needed a mom. Sarah moved across the US, as far away as possible, to remove herself from her cancer treatment and broken engagement. It’s easy to connect the dots with people in a book.

It’s a little more mysterious or insidious to see the pattern in ourselves or the people who we only see as bodies and not having 100 layers, but it’s still true. The loud laughter is an unspoken fear that he doesn’t matter. The trendy clothes reveal internal priorities.  The insistence for control or comfort shows itself in the second helping of Oreo ice cream–or refusal of any of it.

Natalie (she is rattly) demonstrates that each layer is important and valuable. But maybe the most valuable part is the inside that’s most hidden and takes the most time to discover. When I take the doll apart in class, there’s always a collective gasp when they see the smallest doll appear because she is so cute and sweet and unexpected. Sort of like what happens when we see what’s inside the person who we only saw before as a body.

This is a most fascinating life, teaching. I am opening to my brain to the realization that teachers must work harder than their students in the constant process of receiving, processing, and transmitting information, and then re-thinking and re-assessing what was transmitted.

The downside to that is that I end up over-thinking things and living inside my head. Which is why it’s really necessary to spend some time plunking stones into a creek with a child, or laughing at a lame pun. Or kayaking on a slow river with friends, racing for the darkest tan. All of which I did this week, and–at every level of myself– am better for it.

My Diet

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I came to the US with plenty of extra space in my suitcase. On my return flight, that space will be taken up completely with books. This is the promised land of books, and they’re arriving by post these days, which is so, so exciting. The stacks are growing! Between classes and chapel and walks and socializing I’m gorging on books.

I overheard a conversation lately where one person was saying they don’t read, and if they do, it’s a discipline as in, “This month I will read one book.”

That’s ok for them, and they are very useful in God’s Kingdom, but not reading is the discipline for me.

I’m reading Oceans Bright With Stars, the second in a series by Rachel Devenish Ford, which is a compilation of her blogging while her family moved from California to Goa in West India. My life is nothing like hers, because she writes of she and her husband travelling with three children while she’s pregnant with her fourth, and she talks about how exhausting and bewildering and exhilarating her family and surroundings are.

The book keeps me up reading way too late because she’s so honest and refreshing like cool breezes. In a most inexplicable  way, even if our lives have little in common, I feel like she understands me. Her writing isn’t comedy, but it makes me laugh aloud because I get her humor and crazy metaphors and because I see so much of myself in her, especially in the way she mixes up her words like I do.

Then I just finished The Tiger Rising by Kate DiCamillo, a beautiful little gem that made me smile and cry. It’s reminiscent of Bridge to Terebithia.  I love the writing that sparkles off the page and the way the story blends Blake’s Tiger poem in with it.

If you never read it, just try to be the kind of person that when someone tells you they saw a tiger in the woods, you don’t say they’re crazy, but ask “Where?”

It’s All Good News

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The lecture comes first and then the fun part:

I was with my family visiting another family whom we didn’t know well. When us girls were getting acquainted, one young lady’s first question to me was “So, do you have a boyfriend?”

I said no. I was so stunned by her question that I still, eighteen years later, remember reeling from the realization that having a boyfriend was the way she valued/ranked her life and her friends’ lives.  While I wanted a boyfriend, I still felt deeply that not having one wouldn’t keep me from living well. Some years later, this girl was so crushed when her sisters married, that she couldn’t function well, and was so desperate that she made tragically unwise, harmful decisions to take whatever man would take her.

In our sub-culture that is pro-family–and rightly so–the girl who has no boyfriend or husband feels a lot of pressure and silent questions. She might be 20 or 29, and very satisfied and fulfilled.  OR she might be 19 or 23 and feel cheated and left behind and missing out. People wonder if she chose to be single. She wonders if she’ll ever get to choose a baby name. People unhelpfully recommend a good man to her, but what can she do about him?

I wrote a book called Life is For Living–Not for Waiting Around for the girl who is forlorn and desperate, because I know that God had infinitely more in mind for her when He first dreamed her up. The book doesn’t answer the unanswerable questions, nor resolve all the hang-ups we get stuck on. One of my friends said that when she reads it, she feels like I understand her and am walking with her in this solo walk. It was high praise, and fulfilled part of what I dreamed the book would be.

Because a big fear of women is that we’re on our own. I think we can do anything if we know we’re not alone. My book is a kind of companion that says “I get it. I know, me too.”

Wives and mothers tell  me they like the book as well, because everyone needs a voice beside them that urges them to search out abundance and fullness in Jesus. Romance and children are beautiful and rich  gifts, and not everyone is given them. Is that fair? Hardly. But the good news is that life and fulfillment for every lady is found in one person, and his name is Jesus.

The fun part is this: we’re doing a close-out special, a 60% discount, on my book until March 31.  Which means it’s $4.40 now instead of 10.99.  Order here from Christian Learning Resource. Wholesalers, contact the office and  get 75% off. 

This would be a good chance to buy copies for a study group. Contact me and I’ll be glad to send you a study guide–free!–for your group.

Spread the word–let your friends know, forward this post, share it on your networking places–and I would be so grateful!

The Work of His Fingers

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This week one day our ladies’ class had a lesson on beauty and how we become beautiful. Doesn’t every girl want to know the answer to that? One pointer was “do something with your hands” and I heard myself talking about it with a passion that surprised even me. It seemed to stun my students a little bit.

I think that when we do something with our hands, we enter a little bit into God’s character as a creator. It’s almost sacramental. It IS sacramental if we’re being mindful of what we’re doing and bringing into our world something that has never existed before. Even dicing an onion for soup.

I’m serious.

I used to think that artists were from another planet and breathed different air from me. But in my baby steps toward wholeness, I’m discovering that working with my hands is part of being a whole person. Creativity doesn’t only mean canvases and paints and clay. It isn’t only galleries and exhibitions and coffee table books. It means things as diverse as every person who breathes and connects their brains to their hands.

That diversity is what excites me, and makes me want to grab everyone in sight and start making and doing stuff. Then I watched this TED talk and I cried when I saw the beautiful child-friendly MRI machine because I’ve been in them, and know how terrifying it must be for a child.

One man took what he knew just a step further to better the world. Seems like that’s what artists should do, and aren’t we all artists?

Transplants and Love Does

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1. Today I was one of three girls walking across campus, and on the other side of the drive was another group of three girls walking together. What we two trios had in common was that each group has lived outside the US. They, in Kenya, we, in Europe. Now we’re in the US for various lengths of time, enjoying the benefits and ease and junk food of it, but our hearts are always feeling stretched across time zones and cultures, and we wonder if we will ever feel at home anywhere. Or know where we’re from. Or if we’ll ever fit in anywhere. I’m thankful beyond words for the high privilege of living outside my birth country for nearly half my life, but it comes at considerable cost. This isn’t the time to talk about that cost, but for now the understanding and kinship of others who share my experience is something I treasure deeply.

2. If you’re hungry for an easy-read, this is a must-buy: Love Does, by Bob Goff. From the website: “A book and a movement about love in action.” I heard Bob Goff speak last week, and it was phenomenal, the way he lives large, and loves big. I will never be the same again, watching how he loved on his audience and told us stories of teaching witch doctors in Uganda how to read and write. “Walk in grace, live in love” was the theme of his talk, and he urged us to make it our mantra when we walk: walk in grace, live in love, walk in grace, live in love.  People won’t know we love them if it just stays inside our heads. We have to DO love. A key word in the book is “whimsy.”  This is the man who wakes up his Sweet Maria every morning with a cut rose from their garden (this is possible in San Diego) and jumped off the dock with his children to wave goodbye to Don Miller, their guest leaving by boat. My favorite story in the book is when he got his children, in response to Nine-Eleven,  to write letters to hundreds of world leaders in order to dialogue with them and send them house keys to invite them to come stay with them. Walk in grace. Live in love. This is the mantra that will change the world.

Ann Kiemel and Don Miller

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1. Ann Kiemel Anderson died a couple days ago, and her funeral is Saturday. Dying in the Lord is not a tragedy, but it’s an enormous loss to her family and larger world. Ann is the girl who sang songs to her taxi driver and loved her neighborhood by baking cookies and buying ice cream cones. She inspired many people in several generations to say YES to God, and run to change the world. I heard a wise man say “The most gifted ones struggle the hardest,” and I think that was true for Ann. She fought a lot of personal demons, got addicted to fame and drugs and running, and hated herself for it, and failed often, but kept stumbling back to God for help. I think she fought well, cancer was her last enemy, and now she can rest well.

Related post: Yes, Lord 

2. I’m coming off such a good weekend that it deserves a whole big post all to itself but it would sound like I’m gushing. My good friend Janelle flew with me to San Diego for  the ’14 Storyline Conference. I knew it would be good, but it was way better than I was expecting. We were 1,700 people in the Point Loma Nazarene University chapel, focusing on how to live a good story. Donald Miller was the main speaker then there were many others, writers and visionaries, who told us their stories and life missions. It was authentic and honest, not glitzy or emotionally manipulative which is why I could respect it and take in what they were saying. Three recurring  points:

  • Life is going to be hard, very hard, either because of our own mistakes or just because life is unfair.
  • God is fathering us, and He’s a good father.
  • Every bad part of our story can be redeemed.

I heard and saw so much grace, love, and hope poured out, and it fed something deep inside me that had felt parched. I will never be the same for having witnessed people loving their world and equipping others to live well, stop being a victim, make wise choices, and stumble to Jesus for forgiveness and freedom.  For anyone wanting to refocus and be refreshed, I recommend this conference. And if they have it in San Diego again, you will love Point Loma.  How can you beat bird-of-paradise and roses blooming in February?

 

History and Today

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1. If you could change one thing in history, what would it be, and why? In English class, this would be a question to practice conditionals. But this week it was the impromptu question put to me in front of a group of strangers as a way of introducing myself. After a couple seconds, I said that since I live in a country where we feel the repercussions of WWII, I would change Adolf Hitler’s choices. Later, I thought I could have mentioned Eve’s choice to eat that fruit, but I know my potential to do the same thing she did, so the Fall would have come at some point anyhow.

Back to Hitler: this idea  is not original with me, but what would have happened if someone would have loved young Adolph when he was three or four or five? Or mentored him when he was eleven and twelve, wanting to be an artist? Somewhere he made terrifyingly wrong choices, but before that, it seems somewhere he fell through the cracks. Who let him go? Who is sliding into cracks around me now?

2.  I think heaven is going to be something like living on a Bible school campus. These days, I study and teach, read and eat good food, take walks and sing in choir. And best of all, every day friends knock on my door just to visit or see if I want to go on a walk with them, or at supper they refill my bowl with Oreo ice cream. It’s not heaven, because there were plenty of un-pinnable moments where the tissues were close to hand, and the enemy’s accusations rang louder than they should. This is a special time of intense focus on God and what’s most important, and I love it.

Good News

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1. For a long time, I’ve resented how newspapers and the news media in general are fueled by the thirst for negative, sensational stories.  There are so many good stories out there, but somehow that’s not exciting enough to sell, so we get fed negative stories. Why would one PAY to read bad news? This is a perpetual mystery to me. Of course there are terrible, twisted, heartbreaking things that happen, but that’s not the only reality.

That’s why I love Humans of New York.  Brandon Stanton lost his job, hit the streets with his camera and took hundreds of photos of people, asked them simple questions, and posted their photos and short dialogues on his blog. Last Christmas, the book came out: HONY, and overnight it became a New York Times best-seller. Someday I want a copy too.

I like HONY because it’s positive and real. There are heartbreaks and loss, but there is unabashed joy and creativity and trembling life and darling children (“today in microfashion.”) Everyone in the world has a story, and every night this blog celebrates some ordinary person’s story. Seems lots of other people like it too. It has created a kind of supporting, cheering community around the globe. It makes me happy that some good, ordinary stories  are making it big because one man notices things that others just walk past.

2.  In 48 hrs, God willing, I plan to be flying across the Atlantic. Yay, yay! It’s been a year since I’ve been there, which isn’t so long, but it will be wonderful. Even the airports in America smell different than in Europe.  Yesterday a friend asked what I’m most looking forward to. The answer is easy: “Spiritual fellowship and speaking English.” And the access to good books. I want to inhale good books, and have visions of coming back with suitcases full of only books.

But I will also miss the snow in Poland, my friends and their hugs, the pickles, and the little old ladies wrapped in fur hats and long fur coats. Sarah, Plain and Tall was right: there is always something to miss, no matter where you are.”

(related post here)

Thinks and Thanks

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1. “So what do you think of God?” I asked her.

“I just don’t think of him,” she answered.

Another day, and another friend: “Is time your enemy like it is mine?” I asked.

“I just don’t think about it,” she said.

There are endless things to think about that are negative energy drains, and best ignored. If we don’t think about something, it doesn’t take up so much uncomfortable space in our soul. There are, however, eminently important things to think about–God and time being some them.

So here’s to being mindful. To being conscious that today is a gift that I will never see again–the strataed  sunset, the window of free time to eat pizza with friends. To being mindful of a benevolent Creator organizing this life, how His fingerprint is on everything that is good, how the Hound of Heaven pursues–even chases us–can one think about this too much?

2. The experience of living in an Eastern European country is something I treasure. There have been hard, hard things, the hardest of which has been the language. Being a communicator and caged with this barrier seems to take a toll on my soul.

Even so, there is communication and fellowship that goes beyond spoken, stumbling words. The bond of Jesus’ family members knows this reality. And there is also beautiful, unpretentious, real friendship that comes as a grace.  Hence, twice today I invited myself to meals where local friends were hosting other visitors. To enjoy that level of freedom and spontaneity and enjoy it hugely with people whose mother tongue is different from mine, this is a stupendous gift.

To My Friend with SAD

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To my friend with SAD, I care so much about how you’re feeling. I know how it is to be wrapped in gray fuzz, to feel that nights are never long enough to get enough sleep, to be afraid that someone will bump you and spill out all the acid inside you. I know irrational tears and impossible fears. This winter, for whatever amazing, incredible reasons, SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder)  hasn’t come to visit me, but I know what you’re feeling. I get it. And I would like to help you, how ever bumbling and unprofessional my care is.

If we lived in the same town, I would want to invite you to my place. If you didn’t want to come, I’d go to your house and make you some coffee or tea and listen to you if you want to talk. If you wanted to be quiet, that would be ok, and I would hand you some tissues, and ask if you want to journal. While you journal, I would journal too, or doodle, or read stories to your children. I’d make you some more coffee, but not more than one more cup, and fix you an egg or yogurt (protein instead of carbs) and then invite you to go on a walk with me.

We would put layers and layers on–leggings, socks, fleece jacket, scarf, hat, coat, boots, and gloves, then go outside. If it’s raining, we’d use umbrellas. We would walk and walk for at least 40 minutes, talking only when you want to.

Back inside, we would talk about what we want to create. A new recipe for supper? Something abstract in acrylics or pastels? Plant bulbs or repot seedlings? A new centerpiece on the table? A collaborative poem about our walk? A photo collage of your last holiday? It has to be something new and something you care about. Something that has never seen the light of day before.

Then I’d hold you and pray over you and go home. I would be confident that God is up to something good in your darkness, and that you won’t always feel this gray.

After a day or two, I’d call you again, and ask how you are, and as tactfully as I could (which is really hard for me because I tend to lecture), ask if you took a walk that day, and what you had for breakfast. I’d ask God to pour His grace into your day, and tell you to call me anytime you need to talk.

This is what I would want to do. Would that help? What is it that you need, and that your friends could do for you? You’re not alone, and maybe this comment section could be a safe place  for you and others with SAD to be heard and cared for?