Move On

Here's to all those times I said I liked being busy: this month has really made me eat my words. I think I've reached uncharted territory in terms of being overcommitted. If you don't know, having a busy job/work life, moving, planning a wedding, and occasionally trying to fit in an errand or a meal or a workout or some sleep, is a lot of work. But it's the last day of May, and I'm still alive, so I'm counting that as victory!

Y'all, moving is possibly one of the worst experiences a person can have. Somehow, when you start packing, you think to yourself, "I don't have that much stuff after all - this will be easy!" And then, before you know it, it's 10 am on moving day and everyone is here to take your stuff and it just keeps popping out from nowhere and you're running out of boxes and people are trying to take your trash pile down to the moving truck, because that's what the rest of your stuff looks like too, and then once you somehow get everything loaded, moved, and unloaded, you find yourself surrounded by boxes in an unfamiliar apartment, and your cat's freaking out because he doesn't know what stairs are. Or maybe that's just what happens to me.

Kitty in a box.

The worst part has been that it just won't end. I feel like I've been moving for six days. There are still boxes everywhere (although the place looks slightly more like a home and slightly less like the set of a disaster movie), I only just finished getting everything out of the old place and still haven't "checked out" of there, and I just found out that all my hard work putting the kitchen and bathroom stuff in cabinets was wasted, because there's an exterminator coming on Wednesday who demands that I remove all of it from said cabinets for spraying purposes. Also, this place is far away from where I used to live, and every morning I'm late to work because I forget how much further I have to drive. I'm obviously not quite as familiar with the neighborhood as I'd like to think - this morning I went running, and I got confused, and my 3 mile day turned into a 5.5 mile day. In a thunderstorm. At 6 am. Whoops!

And yet, I think this place has potential. If I ever get my stuff unpacked, I can tell this place can be a home, not just the place I sleep and keep my groceries and my cat. It's an older building, and I think that gives it more character than my previous apartment had. It's less college, and more real adult life, and it feels like the beginning of something, even while gazing helplessly at an endless pile of cardboard boxes, coffee cup clenched in one hand like it's going to help me fix the problem. This is the place where I will be a wife for the first time, where we will make memories and laugh and cry and hang up pictures and buy new furniture. I'll cook meals on that stove, bake cookies in that oven, make the house smell like coffee every morning. I'll leave my shoes by the door and throw my clothes on the floor instead of hanging them up like I'm supposed to. The boy will probably leave dishes in the sink and will provide the addition of several (lovely, I'm sure) pieces of artwork prominently featuring golf, which I'll have to hang somewhere (second bedroom? just kidding).

That's what's lovely about moving, despite how unpleasant it can be. You're moving on, you're packing up your life, you're letting go of the times you spent in the place you used to live, but you're headed towards something. It's new, it's an adventure, and it may be full of boxes now, but in a few months, it will be full of friends and memories and laughter and tears and life. That's the hope that keeps me going, and I find it to be worth celebrating.

The Waiting Game

For those of you who don't know, I have a cat. His name is Dragon, and he is an adorable, annoying, cuddly, friendly little turd with an amazing amount of hair, which he routinely leaves all over every surface of my apartment. He wakes me up at 5 am by scratching on anything that makes a lot of noise, and he never wants to play except when I'm busy doing something else. He doesn't know it yet, but he is preparing to return to his natural habitat - the Great Outdoors - so my new place will not suffer the same terrible fate of Kitty Claws (I hope and pray).

Dragon, the fierce hunter and hair factory.

One thing that fascinates me about cats is their ability to sit and wait for things to happen. Dragon will watch his laser pointer (his favorite toy) for twenty minutes, just analyzing the situation and deciding how to best attack. In fact, he's so patient that it usually doesn't even pay off, because I get bored before he does and end the game. When he hunts outside, he stalks a bird/squirrel/whatever incessantly. He doesn't get annoyed when his prey doesn't do anything. He doesn't try to force it to let him chase it. He just waits for the right time, no matter how long it takes, and then he pounces.

I am so not like that. Patience is a lovely and wonderful thing, and it is not a natural gift of mine. I can't seem to sit and wait for things to come. I just want them to happen immediately so I don't have to dwell in the unpleasant place of waiting and hoping and being terrified something will go wrong. And yet... somehow things never come when I wish they would. For example, I'm ready to get married. I'm sick of waiting, although I'm the one who picked the wedding date. I just want it to be here - I want to have the wedding and the party and the honeymoon and the gifts and everything, but more importantly, I want to be married. The boy and I have been together for so long that we're just ready to seal the deal! And in this season of life, it seems like it's suddenly become very popular to have a relatively brief engagement - which means that we have to endure dozens of other couples beating us to the punch. I hear that the waiting sweetens the moment when it arrives, but right now, as I prepare to live in a half-furnished townhome for 4 months waiting for the moment when the other half of the furniture moves with the boy, and we can purchase new things together, as I dig through plans and vendors and deal with a dozen mini-crises at any moment, I'd sacrifice the building anticipation for the fulfillment.

When things take their time in coming, I have to resist the temptation to agonize over every moment. Every e-mail that doesn't come, every hour my phone log has no missed calls, every day that I make do without something I'm waiting on, I expect the worst. Why didn't he/she e-mail me yet? They must think I'm asking for too much. Why haven't my friends texted me back? Maybe they're mad at me because I've been so busy. What if I don't have what I need to make a decision today? Is my life going to be ruined?

The reality is, the Lord tells us to not let our hearts be troubled. This means, not only are we supposed to have faith that God loves us and works for the good of all of us, but also that we have a choice in the matter. Sadly, I don't get to write off my neurotic fears and impatience as a personality flaw. It's my responsibility to cultivate patience, to wait and to rest in the security that God is not secretly trying to screw me over. And when I say I put my trust in Christ, I'm supposed to, like, actually do that. I have a tendency to say, "Oh, yeah, I trust you, Lord. I know you're good and you love me and all things work to the good of those who love you etc," and then proceed to continue worrying and agonizing over every minute the thing I'm waiting for has not arrived. I try to fix it, to make whatever it is come faster. Of course, I can't. So instead I drive myself crazy and don't concentrate on work and I spend entirely too much time reading blogs on the subject of my impatience. And none of it helps, because I can't make time go faster, and I can't see what's happening in places where I'm not, and I can't predict the future, no matter how hard I try. And so finally, I do what I should have done and let my crazy mind have some genuine rest by throwing in the towel, giving up the ghost, what have you, and letting the Lord do whatever he's doing, and praying that I understand. I'm not in control, even when I think I am. What else can I do but take my cat as an example, and wait for God to bring me what I need?

Quotes

This isn't going to be a long and pensive blog post, don't worry. I just realized recently that I used to be pretty into quotes - inspirational quotes, movie lines, funny quotes - and now I just don't do that so much. I want to get back into quotes. Question for everyone: Do you like quotes, and, if so, where do you find them? How do you store them?

Last Saturday's brunch - veggie omelet and fresh muffins. Exciting!

To start this project, I am going to share a quote that I recently found that kind of kicked off the resolution to get back into quotes. It more or less sums up my entire life, and I can only hang my head in shame that I was unaware of it previously. I may get it on a canvas and hang it up in my kitchen. Also, based on my knowledge of the people who read this blog, it may sum up your life too! Maybe we can buy matching canvases.

“When you wake up in the morning, Pooh," said Piglet at last, 
"what's the first thing you say to yourself?"
"What's for breakfast?" said Pooh. "What do you say, Piglet?"
"I say, I wonder what's going to happen exciting today?" said Piglet.
Pooh nodded thoughtfully. "It's the same thing," he said.”
― A.A. Milne


Have a super fantastic weekend, everyone!

Broken

Photo by africa

I've been thinking a lot lately about brokenness. It's not a particularly upbeat topic, I guess, but that's where my mind has been, on tears and burnout and breaking points. This season of my life has been filled with many wonderful and amazing things, but it's also been marked with a lot of stress and hardship and wanting to rip my hair out on a fairly regular basis. I'm not sure, but I think it may be linked to planning a wedding, moving, working in an high-stress environment on a daily basis, running a half marathon and getting oral surgery in a very condensed time frame. It's just a guess. But I'm starting to learn that, unfortunately, life doesn't slow down very often, and never for very long. There's always something wrong with your car or a stressful work meeting or something you committed to knowing you didn't really have time or your cat gets sick for two solid months and you spend the equivalent of a pair of Louboutins at the vet's office (this is drawn from a personal experience, but it could happen to you!). It just never slows down, and it's always too much, so I'm starting to feel like brokenness is going to to a permanent fixture in my life, and I better start thinking about it.


The summer following my high school graduation, I participated in a discipleship program for incoming college freshman at the summer camp where I used to attend every year and where I later worked on staff. The program is competitive to get into, but it's entirely possible that if they advertised the activities more openly, it wouldn't be quite as popular. They keep it secretive on purpose, because a key component is learning obedience and service, even when the requests aren't fun. I cleaned out the inside of a dumpster, as in, I stood inside it and scrubbed. There was a lot of cleaning by hand that could have been done faster by other mechanisms, a lot of picking up trash, a lot of doing the jobs nobody else wanted to do, and then there was some running (this was before I enjoyed running), mostly in the dark. There was not sympathy, or much assistance from the staff (who were told not to be friends with us), or respite from long hours and hard work. There was drama, as there will be when you stick seven random girls together for 24 hours a day and tell them to get along. There was envy, since we were the second half group and the staff was frequently heard lamenting the loss of the first half girls. There was a lot of thinking, because we were responsible for two intensive bible studies per week and nobody wanted to risk looking like an idiot for not doing their homework.

It didn't take long for us to break under all that. I remember sobbing while cleaning out the coffeemaker. When we started the program they told us, "We want to push you to your breaking point. Because when you're broken, that's where you learn." But hearing about brokenness and experiencing it are two different things. I feel that a lot more closely now when I pray for brokenness and the ability to see my need for Jesus, and when I actually live out brokenness, exhausted and beaten down and completely, totally empty of all my own strength. But it's true, this is where the learning happens. When I'm blinded by my pride and my sense that I can do everything by myself, God doesn't have room to work. When I'm just done on every level, I finally have to admit that I'm an empty vessel, a cracked pot that can't hold water, and I've always needed help. And there is a great deal of sweetness and freedom in knowing that I need help, that I don't have to fight the world all by myself, that God calls me to rest in him. And when you come through a season of brokenness, you can see that it was worth it. The five weeks I spent cleaning, crying, studying, aching were some of the sweetest of my life, now that I look back on it. I hope that when this season is done, I will look back to find the memories are even richer and sweeter still.

Insanity

I've never considered myself to be super athletic. I played YMCA soccer when I was in first grade, and I was the kid who won awards like "Best Effort" because I just wasn't that good. Same story with basketball (I think I scored one basket in two years of play) and softball. Hand-eye coordination? Not so much. In fourth grade, I did ice skating, which I was decent at, although I was certainly never going to be an Olympian. I rode horses for a while, but that was expensive and inconvenient. I ran cross country in a seriously misguided decision in the 7th grade, and I was truly awful. So by the time I got to high school, I was pretty much over athletics in the classic sense. I just chalked it up to being "not a sports person".

I don't really know when the shift happened. I worked out hardly at all my freshman year of college, although admittedly a daily 40 minute walk across campus could be considered a workout. I think I tried to go running once. When I transferred to OU in my sophomore year, I had easier access to a workout facility, and I started going every now and then. But it wasn't a priority. And then I moved to Italy.

This is a weird and unconventional way to get into exercise, since the Italians look down on wearing "pantalones du jogging" in public. I have never met a more frustrating people group. I never saw them working out, or a single gym, but they're all so skinny. And all they eat is carbs. How do they do it??? The world will never know... but I digress. The point is, I don't know if it was the influence of my lovely roommates, who convinced me to become a vegetarian and downloaded hilarious workout videos from itunes and used water bottles as weights, or just that I wanted to get out and see the city, or if after two months of carbs and rain I felt a little like a blob. It may have had something to do with the impending arrival of my new boyfriend to Florence and my pressing need to look good after 4 months of long distance Skyping. But I started to run. At first I could only run a little way before getting breathless. This was my problem in cross country back in the day - although the fact that it wasn't 108 degrees outside helped. But after a while, I figured out how to breathe correctly and discovered that I have a gift for making myself do things that don't necessarily feel good. And I learned how to ignore the creepy men staring at me as I jogged down the street.

After finishing my first half marathon in the rain.

Somewhere in there, running out of obligation turned into running for enjoyment. I thought maybe I would stop, but when I moved home, I kept going (even though it was summer and despicably hot). When I moved back to Norman for my senior year, I kept going. I bought a pair of Nike+ shoes so I could track my distance. I remember the first time I ran eight miles. It was like something snapped inside me and I was free to run as far and as fast as I wanted to. That's called a "runner's high", if you were curious. I've never been actually high, but I think the term is probably accurate. And then I just couldn't stop. I get cranky if I go more than a few days without running. I've run in thunderstorms, I've run in blazing heat, I get up at 5 am at least twice a week to run before work. Last December, I ran the White Rock Half Marathon in pouring rain while it was 40 degrees outside. It was the best experience of my life. I run in India when I'm there for work, and all the hotel people look at me like I'm insane, but I just need to do it. Somewhere along the way, I changed from "nonathlete" to "runner" - that's worth every mile I've pounded the pavement, every early morning, every bit of pain and agony to me. I earned that title, and I'm proud of it.

Last weekend, I ran the Hills and Heels half marathon in Irving, TX, in heat and humidity and a week after I got my wisdom teeth removed. It was hard, and my legs ached, and I wanted to quit at mile 11. But I didn't. Because the feeling of crossing that finish line is so, so good. I look like crap - I happen to turn really red when I get hot - and I smell like crap, and I want to fall over and die, but I know that in every cheesy finisher photo I take I have the biggest dang smile on my face because this is a moment of deep satisfaction and joy for me. Sometimes people ask me how to stop hating running, and I don't really know. I remember that I used to hate running, and I know now that I love running, and I think maybe it's just because I forced myself to do it until I didn't need to force myself anymore. Somewhere in there, it became a source of joy and a release from the stress of my life, where I can stop worrying and just go. I wish more of life was that simple, but I'm grateful for the minutes I spend sweating, aching, killing myself to get faster and stronger. And when life gets hard, I know that I can suck it up and tell myself, "You can do this. Just one more mile. And then you can lie down." I know you think I'm insane, but running is my sanity. It keeps me going.

Glory

Well, I'm about 95% recovered from getting my wisdom teeth removed last week. After 4 days basically spent on the couch eating ice cream and/or getting sick from pain medication, I'm happy to be back in the world! I just wish my mouth didn't still hurt when I eat anything more difficult to chew than a banana. This week we are sooo-o-o-o close to nailing down a place to live (finally), but I'm not going to say anything about anything until anything is finalized. because I don't want to jinx it! My nerves just can't take it.

Life update completed, I've been reminiscing lately about my favorite vacations as a child. My family used to spend summers at a dude ranch in middle of the Rocky Mountains, about 90 minutes west of Colorado Springs, called Lost Valley, and when I think about those days there is a lingering sweetness and sense of adventure and wholeness that accompanies my memories.

We used to haul out there in our SUV, taking turns riding in the middle seat, smushed together with baggage and a giant cooler full of food so we wouldn't have to stop so often. We stayed the night in Raton, NM, a source for some hilarious memories and terrible food in the sketchiest town I've ever visited. On the second day, we would begin the journey through the foothills of the Rockies, up into Colorado. I remember watching lightning play across the sky through the car window, feeling as though we were on an epic adventure. And then the last nine miles of the journey - off the paved road and around the mountain, driving slowly because there was literally nothing substantial to stop the car from going off the road. And then, around a final bend, the ranch property would be revealed, a hidden paradise nestled amongst the peaks.

source: The Dude Rancher's Association

Every day of the week, although scheduled from dawn to dusk, felt slow and relaxing and right. I still remember the taste of the indulgent food they cooked and served each morning, luscious buttery eggs hot from the pan, thick Belgian waffles with real maple syrup, and of course, Lucky Charms, the forbidden fruit of my youth which I only ever got to eat on vacation. We ate in the dining hall, a rustic wooden palace covered in homemade brands (there's a tradition that every family that visits creates a brand and picks a spot for it on the wall, and then you put a tick mark next to it every year your come back), with a wide porch overlooking a meadow and festooned with hummingbird feeders. Days at Lost Valley brought plenty of horseback riding, loping through the meadows, up and down mountain trails, before tying off the horses at a destination (most likely a ridge somewhere) and eating lunch, sandwiches and chips and a cookie. Food always tastes better when it's eaten outside. It was in that setting that I learned to love the smell of horses, sweat and leather and hay and sunshine. It's the scent of being alive. We told tall tales and legends about the ranch, the stories different every time (I remember one involving a dinosaur attack), we skipped rocks by the creek and ate ice cream with marshmellow topping from the snack store. Once we played the best game of capture the flag I've ever experienced, involving raw eggs as weapons. In the evenings there were cookouts and campfires and music and fireflies. There was a square dance one night, and a ridiculously acted melodrama on another.

My family liked to go during cattle week, the first week of the summer, when the working ranch brought in the cows to be branded and turned out in the fields for the summer. The yearlings would keep you up all night mooing for the mothers they had been separated from, unless you were staying in Huff and Puff, the cabins at the very top of the hill. I watched my dad brand a calf, and my parents sometimes chose to go on the All-Day Ride, which involved the actual herding of cows from what I was told (I was never old enough to go). At the end of the week they had a rodeo, during which my sister once got thrown from her horse and needed stitches in her chin - but still won the barrel racing event.

I believe there are places on this earth, like Lost Valley, that are just a little closer to heaven, where you can feel God surrounding you at every moment and the earth is trembling with the tension between the earthly and the divine, as though it could shatter and let the raw glory of it burst free. I want to love a God who can make a place like this and instill every molecule within it with his glory. Maybe someday I'll go back there, and ride the trails again and watch the hummingbirds and feel the freezing trickle of the creek water. It probably wouldn't be the same. But regardless, my heart still lives there, in a little valley in the middle of nowhere, with the scent of pine on the breeze and the sound of birds singing in the air.