"To live with desires is to choose vulnerability over self-protection; to admit our desire and seek help beyond ourselves is even more vulnerable It is an act of trust. in other words, those who know their desire and refuse to kill it or refuse to act like they don't need help; they are the ones who live by faith. Those who do not ask do not trust God enough to Desire."
-- John Eldrige, "Desire"

I ordered the transcript for my last class to be sent to CSU today. I updated my mailing address. I verified that no requirements are outstanding for my degree. Instructions on how to apply for my teaching license are pinned to the bulletin board next to my desk. My diploma is set to arrive in approximately six weeks.

I am standing at this open door. A door I've been working towards, climbing hills towards, for perhaps a total of eighteen years. I am among millions who have reached this crossroads with an empathetic understanding of the apprehension that accompanies.

Christmas has passed with all of its fury and wonder and joy and now I sit here in the kitchen, typing on a blog that has been abandoned since Halloween. My mom always tells me that transitions aren't my best time and so here I am in the midst of one and again trying to pretend that indeed I am not. On the way home from turning in my final portfolio 16 days ago, I could hardly keep up with myself thinking of all the things I was going to do for my long-neglected self. As soon as I got home around 9:30 that night, I cleaned out all of the old papers and books and school-related items that had been cluttering my bedroom since moving in last august. I wanted to paint my nails and make myself breakfast, I started planning all the things I would sew for my house, all the things I would draw, all the books I would read.

Each day that passes I remember more things I've been dying to do since August. I've resumed reading blogs that were for a while too depressing in their inducement of creative ideas I had not time to carry out between lesson plans and data analysis. I am reveling in a string of four entire days spent without an hour drive or $10 worth of gas used. And I am wondering what how I am going to proceed on this path with this degree in my backpack. I am also wondering what I am going to do with all of this other baggage that I've picked up along the way.

I sat down a few days ago at Bookends with the trusty journal and quill pen and realized that somewhere along the way, my heart melted away into the depths. I see the face of a certain university entity and cringe. I can't help but revisit contexts that still make me feel small, inadequate, and lacking personality. I am searching for a self that used to drive a passion I seem to have misplaced.

In attempt to regain some sense of self and in pursuit of much needed wisdom, I picked up a copy of John Eldrige's "Desire," and have been chewing on much of his insight for the past few days. This semester has certainly been one in which my desires and beliefs related thereto have been challenged. As I've run out of money and faced the high price of living in a Boulder apartment, my beliefs about who God is and his generosity have certainly wavered. As I've been humbled to rely on the grace of others time an again, I've wondered if it was fair for those around me to live in a place that feels more like home than any other place I've lived before. I began to wonder if this was, in fact, too wonderful and the Lord was shaking his head at my immaturity. I wondered if in fact I had proven myself quite lavish and selfish in pursuit of my desires.

Yet, almost a month ago, I began to consider the Lord's promise to clothe us beyond the splendor of the lillies. I could not help but think of the number of times he has promised to lavish his undying love apon us or the words of Jesus reminding us that God is infinitely more loving than a sincere father. And I began to wonder at the idea that perhaps the Lord delights in those who trust in his extravagant love enough to see how far it will go-- how much do I trust his love to stretch? Is it possible that he dreams even larger dreams that I am capable of and he is simply asking me to admit mine first so he can one-up me?

Now that I sit here on the banks of this Jordan, it is beginning to make more sense to me why so many people finish college and fall into lives they live for sometime that are far from their true desires. It feels so easy to say to myself, "You are broke and living on the grace of others. You need to get out there and take what you can get." But, as I learn more and more about life in this backwards kingdom, I see that this life of obligatory , fear-driven settling isn't the type of life Jesus had in mind when sacrificed everyrthing that we might be free. He said, "I came to give you life," and, as Eldridge points out, goes around continuallly asking people, "What do you want?"

I am struck by Jesus' statement to the woman at the well written in John 4:10 when he tells her this: "If you knew the generosity of God and who I am, you would be asking me for a drink and I would give you fresh, living water." This offer brings Jesus' presence into focus as he is essentially saying, "Don't you know me at all? I am not the Son of a hard-hearted God. If you truly knew me, if you entered the intimate friendship I offer, you would know my delight in giving you all that your heart desires. If you knew the heart of God, you would not be afraid to ask." If we know him at all...

I feel as though my heart has been in the freezer for a while and day by day a few peices chip off, but the attempt to look inside is still leaving me cross-eyed. I am struggling to shed the layers of a life enclosed by a single-minded identity as a student. I still feel the sting of micro-management and the sense of belittlement endowed by an over-zealous thoroughness, and an inherent sense of precariousness that comes with being new at something in someone elses' territory.

To be honest, I think that the passion and desire that once led me on this journey towards taching is buried somewhere deep in this ice-heart that seems to have replaced my old one and it may take some time to reaquaint myself with it. I am still trying to figure out what I want to do next or how I am going to pay my bills, but I do pray that as the Lord softens this heart of mine, he will in time be generous to those desires that will emerge along the way.

"If you knew the generosity of God and who I am, you would be asking me for a drink and I would give you fresh, living water." John 4:10

Two posts in one week... I must be either depressed, lonely, or bed-ridden. Luckily for you, we've nearly got all three. Seriously, this is my third day laying in bed, fighting off what appears to be a nasty flu. Within the last week and a half, I finished my high school placement close to my new home and started my new placement at the elementary level closer to an old home and-- as a somewhat direct result-- landed myself in bed for an extended weekend of sore throat coughing fever and Lord knows what comes next.

I haven't been sick enough to really take an extended time away from school since probably high school or before that I can remember, and for those of you who know me well, staying in one spot for more than a day or so doesn't suit me well, especially when new and extreme demands are at hand.

Me, being the extreme analyst that I am, can't help but lay here and re-hash all of the same thoughts I've been having throughout the course of this difficult season. I just finished watching a movie that brought up a lot of ideas that I've been especially contemplating this morning.

The movie is called, "Broken English," starring Parker Posey, one of my favorite people. It was a refreshing movie because it represented a realistic picture of what so many people feel. The heroine of the film is a neurotic hotel customer service manager who feels stuck in her own anxiety-ridden life of failed relationships and unfulfilling choices. As the story unfolds, Nora begains to make more and more of her own choices, saying no to the things that have left her empty in the past. Eventually, she even quits her job to go after the thing that scares her the most.

As I was watching this, I couldn't help but think about something my counselor said to me while I was in Idaho. I will always remember sitting accross from him outside the Library, ready to leave and come back to CO in mid-May.

"Why don't you just go then?" he asked, matter of factly.
"What do you mean, why don't I just go?"
"The thing I am trying to get you to understand is that your choices in life are always yours."

You choose. So much of my frustration this semester has seemed to hinge on this idea taht someone else is taking away my choices. As I've made my way through college, the things (or people) that have left me feeling most frustrated and angry are the ones that I sense are attempting to take away my personal choices of how I spend my time, where I put my energies. I often feel that in student teaching, you are simply asked to choose not to sleep, not to cultivate relationships, not to enjoy life outside of your role as becomming a teacher. Many people have said, "Teaching is a full time job inside and outside of the classroom. It is an all-consuming profession." And apparently student teaching is designed to foster this sense of impossibility.

But I think that there must still be room to choose. There has to be a place where I as a teacher get to choose how much of my day will be devoted to giving to schools, to children, to education, and where I need to be filled. If there is no room for this in teaching, I suppose I may choose something else in life.

It has been difficult for me this semester to keep from treading the path of anger. In this time that I need more help than ever, I feel more alone, more pitted against the people who are set up to help me than ever before. I feel advisarial and in retrospect, I realize that I've been working against "the system" more than I'd like to admit.

My eyes are no longer on the prize-- teaching. My focus has somehow shifted from wanting to be the best teacher I can be to spiting this entity that I feel is only there to remind me how I am falling behind. Somehow I stopped choosing to follow my joy.

Perhaps it is a matter of senioritis. Maybe it is my decision to move to a place and at a time that now feels like a pre-mature shift in life. I left my student-self somewhere and am now trying to fit into other shoes that aren't mine.

I used to be a person who wanted to do well in all things. And I've somewhere become a person who is apathetic and angry. People keep saying, "just jump through the hoops," and "just get through it," and somehow I interpreted that as "stick it to the man." No wonder I've been frustrated.

So here I am, laying in bed with what is probably H1N1, wishing I could just be out there, getting it done. I do have a choice for so many things in my life. And although at this point, I don't have a lot of choices about what I do, how I spend all of my time, I do still have a choice in my own posture. I have choices about my attitude and my focus-- I can turn my eyes upon my future as a great teacher or I can allow my own choice of anger and bitterness wear me out until I give up on my dream.

It is still my choice.

I live in a beautiful place. On the days I wake up after the sun comes out, I can't help but marvel at the beauty of this place that I live. I am sitting in my favorite chair in the living room, looking out at snow falling through branches. I look up and there is a mountain close enough to touch. Pines all the way up. On Saturdays, I often wish I was a runner and join all those people with the spandex pants and bright green fleece jackets because they look so happy in the sun.

I wondered when I first moved here, changed my entire life around, said goodbye to close friends in familiar places, agreed to take a risk on rent and people I hardly knew, if this was the biggest mistake I'd ever made. I wonder still, sometimes, if I am making a mistake, taking all of these risks, wondering what will happen when I need people to bail me out. But most of the time, it just feels like home. Lucky, yes. Home, nonetheless.

Sometimes I forget. I forget about the notoriety, the reputation that this place carries with it. People ask, "now where do you live?" And I answer truthfully, coming from a variety of feelings, ideas, doubts, about it. Some say, "wow, that is far way to drive for your placement." Some say, "wow, that is a political statement," some say "wow, that is expensive," some say, "wow, you live in the 'cool' place." And a lot of people simply say, "why?" And there are a lot of days that I say all of those same things and most days I too am asking "why?"

Nevertheless, I am happy here. Yes, there are days that I long for how things were before. I miss our wonderful little house and, more than anything, I miss the garage and the freedom of a yard and the freedom of a house. I miss how life was then, but in all the times I've been back to Fort Collins, I cannot truly identify a time that I entertained the desire to be back there now.

Starting over. A few weeks ago, or maybe it was just last weekend, I found myself praying for a cease in change. The part of me that strives to be realistic keeps sending little memos about the fact that tomorrow could hold any number of things. My realistic self keeps telling my tired-of-change-self, that this still could only be temporary. My realistic self keeps trying to keep the rest of myself from getting its hopes up. Money might run out soon. The matter of employment is quickly approaching. And all of me simply wants to sleep.

As most likely evidenced by the activity in this writing space in the last few months, student teaching has a tendency to help student teachers forget that there are other areas to their lives. When you find yourself taking on a title that involves two full-time jobs upon which the rest of your life appears to rest, it is difficult to find yourself in the mess. Who is this person that is buried under all of this mess of change anyway? Some other weekend in the not-so-distant past also found me with this realization: there really is more to me than just the "student teacher."

This semester has been a struggle, to say the least. A good friend who has walked this road before told me that her student teaching experience was the most insecure time of her life. I think about that revelation daily, I think, and it brings me a lot of assurance. I like to have explanations and reasons for things. I like to get a prognosis on why things are going to poorly, why things don't feel right-- I like to get a handle on things through definitions and names. And my friend's small bit of experiential insight has helped me a lot to remember that this lack of self isn't a condition to be blamed or remedied, but simply an realistic expectation.

I've been through a lot of emotions. A lot of anger and frustration, mostly. There are a lot of days that I feel I've lost my ability to be a humble and gracious student and I've become haughty and prideful in my anger and frustration. I am distrustful of the system these days, do not see the benefit my "supervisors" state that they are present to provide. I fear I will never find a way out and the only answer available to me at the end of this long road will be that I am simply not cut out for this work. There is something that I've missed and I might as well stop here.

Now perhaps such a fear is over-fraught with emotion, that I am speaking out of exhaustion, I am speaking from the middle of the road when all I need is perspective. in fact, I think I believe these things more than anything else. But gazing down the road at the end has become difficult. I am starting over again at my elementary plaement, and, truth be told, I find myself quite apathetic. I am ready to be finished and eight weeks feels awfully long to go through motions. Eight weeks feels like a long time to turn in obligatory paperwork of incredible length. Eight weeks feels like a long time to sit through evaluations nodding and smiling at an evaluator who doesn't seem to hear a word I say. And, simultaneously, eight weeks feels like a short time to figure out what I am going to do next when laying in bed for a month doesn't seem like a feasable option.

tomorrow I am starting my elementary placement and, truth be told, I feel awful. I don't feel in myself the strength, the stamina, or even really, the desire to pick up and start again.

I feel as though there is still too much that I lack. I'm too small. I can't do this. I feel like there is so much demanded from me. The watching eyes. The checklists. Expectations. And it feels as though I will never get there. And yet there is this watchful eye, this checksheet, these lists, these forms, these people, waiting for me to reach "proficiency" within a certain timeframe. A small timeframe.

I have this sense of impatience. This pressure that won't wait for me to grow up. I cannot dicern if it is my own voice, my own inner dialogue shouting "hurry up" or if it is the pink, the yellow, the white. The numbers, the rubrics. I can't just be this thing-- I must also do so much. I walked through the parking lot lit only dimly by streetlights and realized that I've stopped seeing myself as more than a teacher. This is my life. this is my identity. My personal life, my personal character, my personal time is about developing who I am as a teacher. And I'm terrified.

I am tired of the lists. Tired of the pile of expectations that I do not fully understand. Tired of the evaluations that only confuse me more. Do everything and do it all well. I don't want to do it anymore. I don't want to be a student. I'm tired of people telling me what I should do with my life, where I should go, what I should work on, what to do next. And yet I just wish someone would tell me exactly what it is that they want from me.

I wonder if I've simply become too emotional. But I feel stranded, alone, confused, broken, and small. I can't do this. I can't do this. I don't know how I'll ever finish this race.

humility

how much lifestyle change is going to be required of me? I tearfully put myself to bed last night crying out-- can I do this? Have I made the greatest mistake of my life? Is this what I want? What do I even want? I find myself in a place in life that I don't think I even had time to imagine for myself. What is tomorrow and the everydays after that going to look like?

I live 0.6 miles from Pearl Street. I share an apartment with three people that I hardly know and we are all struggling against the confines of the walls that seem to be closer together than we allowed imagination. I find myself wondering if I am sacrificing all rights to my own domestic whims, putting the placemats and hand towels back in boxes and wondering where I can leave them until I decide what I want out of life-- where I want to settle. Thrift store placemats and and hand-me-down handtowels that once seemed barely enough now feel like luxuries not to be afforded. Compromises for the sake of hurt feelings and a love of natural wood table tops. I find the way of life that has proceeded this to be too large for this small living space. And I wonder what sort of refining process is ahead, wanting not to move again, but unable to pare down everything to one small carload.

I've had a lot of seasons in my short life. the last few years have felt like a large collection of small places, transitions, big movements, big questions. There have been a lot of forced opportunities for starting over. This do-over, however, feels quite different. I find myself in a vast stretch of opportunity for growth and change unlike any other. The distance is larger, the risk is greater, and the payments are higher. I find myself on the brink and yet find myself feeling quite young. Inexperienced. I am daily reminded of my inability to go it alone and each moment find myself whipering prayers for the grace badly needed but out of my own ability to pay back.

Last night, as I navigated the maze of boxes and homeless furniture, I wondered if there can be a limit to the grace of the Father. This week, I've thought often about the quote printed at the top of this very page: "If we are to keep growing, we must risk failure throughout our lives." I've been confronted with the question of whether or not there is any risk we can take that results in a failure too great for the love and redeeming hand of the father. Does he make a way for difficult relationships, for cooperation between selfish people, for rent that is higher than I ever thought I would ever pay, does he make a way to move more often than any person should try to do when they are painters and teachers and find comfort in the stuff that fills thier ever-changing homes? Does he make a way for the things left undone in the midst of my overwhelm over work and time and the damn heat of the summer. Does his forgiveness make a way for him to bail me out when I repeatedly bite off more than he created me to chew? Is there a place when he simply steps back and says, "sorry, this is the sixth time you've had a chance to learn your lesson and I think it's time you suffered a bit more for succumbing to the ways of your over-product-zealous society. I warned you."

But then I suppose he gave the Isrealites 40 years. He knew it would take them this long to shed the slavery within thier hearts. And although it felt like a punishment to these wayward people, it was simply his way of preparing them for the promise of freedom. It takes time. He seems to be eternally patient with our failings. And I suppose the greater the risk that we allow, the greater our understanding of just how big God is. As we grow, we choose ever higher steps to jump from, testing the true strength of his outstretched arms.

Yesterday I drove down through the country to my new school. I am overwhelmed. I was so confident until I actually tried writing down some thoughts about what I was actually going to do. And I sat there across from my mentor teacher feeling very small, very young. I humbly sat across the table feeling somewhat like one of her high school students as she patiently walked me through what I needed to do. And I humbly sat there thinking about how she had introduced me to other teachers on a first-name basis, realizing that these people were now my peers and collegues.

In many ways, I feel myself stradling two worlds, two selves. I am teacher and I am student. I feel prepared, my arm is heavy from a full toolbox of resources, but I am overwhelmed by it. How do I sort it all out in such a way that I know how to speak to students in a way that communicates how important they are while also creating the structure that my authoriative role requires. How do I maintain an honesty with myself about what I really am capable of doing while finding the humility to simply cry out for help. It is, I think, one of life's greatest challenges to find the ability to simply be broken without allowing the possibility of another person's distain to infringe upon the truth of my own worth. And yet, this brokenness is just the honesty that we need for essential growth.

So here I am. Sitting in what I think is going to be one of my favorite spots for thinking, lesson planning, and drinking coffee and struggling against the thought that somehow I am unworthy of this thing I've chosen. I'm fighting the voice that is constantly telling me that it is all too difficult, the voice saying that grace is going to run out too quickly, the voice telling me that my mistakes are too great for the lovend forgiveness of my eternal Father. I'm fighting the voice saying that I ought to be ashamed of my accumulation of earthly possessions, fighting the voice tempting me to despair about the things that are much too unkown. And I'm straining to hear the voice of Truth reminding that he meets us where we are.


HE MEETS US WHERE WE ARE. So here I am. Small and humbled, waiting to see the growth that awaits in this mess of life.

I am on the verge of being stretched. A lot. Last night, I found myself sleeping on the wood floor of my then-empty bedroom. I woke up and found an exciting world. And tonight, I am sitting on the long-missed familiarity of my comfy bed, wondering what I've gotten myself into.

My life is changing. A lot. I am no longer preparing for a schedule of classes within biking distance from home. I am no longer figuring out how I am going to get around campus or what classes I need to be dressed a certain way for.

I am living in a new city, with people that I am just getting to know. I am preparing to spend more time in my car than I have for a while and I am preparing to do something I have been preparing for and dreaming about for a long time, but still have no idea what it will actually look like.

Part of me is exhilarated and part of me is terrified.

And more than anything, I am hoping that all will be well in the morning.

The rain washes
Away all the extra

The stuff that bogs
Rushes
down gutters
sliding off rooftops
We are clean.

All the failures
and the things that
Will Wait
for another tomorrow

Stop the worry
And fear not
I will make space
When time is right

I will make space.
I will make space.
I will make space.

And you will rest.
then you will rest

saying goodbye

 

 

The tables and walls and bookshelves in the house are starting to look empty and the boxes are getting to looking quite full.  We are getting ready to move yet again and we are saying goodbye to our wonderful little house with cheap rent and great location.  I am slowing packing up the things in my room, the carefully placed picture frames and organized art supplies.  I have always been quite convinced that space is so important to our souls-- that creating a peaceful, or welcoming, or friendly space is good for our spirits.  And so moving is always bitter-sweet.  It is sad to say goodbye to a space that I've crafted and arranged and loved and molded to the curves of my hands.  but it is also happy and exciting to dream about new life in a new space-- the blank canvas of a new space.  It is exciting to think about the ways that this new space will form me and how I will choose to make it my own as well.

A good laugh to relieve the stresses of moving...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-94JhLEiN0

you've probably wondered if I've died. Or maybe you've thought "she probably forgot how to write." and maybe I've just changed. the need has shifted. My stamina waned. perhaps perhaps perhaps.

today I went to Wal-Mart. I seem to only do this when I'm moving and the pile of priorities has shifted. I went to Wal-Mart, but I only bought what I went in for.

This afternoon I talked on speaker phone while adding some more paint, although still frustrated with the amount of mud my colors seem to be making. I sat on the floor of the garage and organized paints into categories of "craft," "acrylic," and "toxic." Toxic, I must say, is still my favorite. I placed the tubes and old, worn out brushes in the plastic squares I entered Wal-Mart to purchase. Pink, Orange, and white lids seal them in before they are stacked and ready to become a part of the new adventure.

This morning, I nervously sat at a familiar too-high table in an old favorite place with red walls and lime green trim. I came back tonight to write this. But this morning-- back to this morning. I sat nervously, not even sure if I would know them when they came. I took a check in my hands and set the painting on the table. We sat. We drank the ice cold coffee. I put milk and sugar in mine-- they drank the ice black. (they call it"black," but the color of the ice was a distinctive "brown"). We talked. We exchanged tidbits of information about our backgrounds-- mine small and short, only a few details as of yet, theirs long and detailed, patterned with age-- we exchanged tidbits between akward silences, our tall mugs of iced coffee and the painting surrounded by thick molding sitting, obvious, between us on the small round table.

They drank thier coffee fast. I sipped mine slow. On with the Saturday's schedule, they stood, I said good to meet you and thank you for the eighth or ninth time. Then he picked it up, admiring it like a new child, and I watched, holding the check, holding my breath, feeling like something was expanding, growing. He carried me off into this new unknown, unimagined, unrequested world.

I packed a few boxes today after driving around sweating. Rushing downtown, to the gas station, down a well-worn road to see an old friend of sorts-- my hairdresser-- I contemplated how to spend my time, if I should give any money to the corporate giant, if I should treat myself a $14 peice of silver that I've been covetting, the silver that adorns the fingers that type this very thing, contemplated if I should come home and make myself write the lesson plans that I've been putting off week after week. I decided on another tomorrow that I will most likely regret tomorrow when I want to drive up the canyon to dip my toes in the water.

Do you ever feel like your life is on the verge of taking off soon soon soon. You've crossed your fingers for a few hours and you just dream dream dream. Dream about that new environment. Wonder what your new bedroom will be like, hoping that everything will fit as nicely as it does now. Wondering if your old pillows will match the couch and the wall color.

Bittersweet. I packed up my paints tonight and began to think about how I'm only 22 and yet it feels like an era of my life is changing in huge ways. looking at the snow shovel and garden rake in the garage that i bought with a roommate for our house and wondering if I'll need it now and what we'll do with it. Suddenly I feel glad that we only spent a dollar for them at that garage sale. We joke about how we'll split things up in the "divorce,"-- but honestly realize that it might just be that hard.

I'm caught between excited and sad sad sad. Change change change. Coming to that place again when the old must die for the new to begin. And I have no idea what lies ahead for me. but the wind feels quite new and oh-so-different. Fresh and frightening.

I haven't written for a while. I don't know why. Maybe because things have felt too complicated to articulate. There haven't been many grand revelations and the day to day is full of shift and change. I keep getting cards in the mail reminding me that the next stage of my life may be the most difficult of all. words like "long road" and "challenges ahead" seem to ring out and each reminder brings me back to the question of whether or not I'm just walking around with my head in the clouds. I know the winds are changing and transition is the name of the game, but I'm not all that worried. Maybe because the future is so unknown that worry over its contents totally evades my understanding. Maybe because tomorrow is so up in the air, that next week or next month, or six weeks from now seem quite impossible to even wrap one baby finger around.

I am going to be a teacher soon, I think. But it is summer and I enjoying tank tops and flip flops. I am learning a lot about myself and about teaching and management with the impossible little trouble-makers at work, but I feel as though the life that awaits me in a short number of weeks is far off, floating somewhere near mars. Maybe orbiting. And I wonder how long until I really do have my own classroom, wondering how long before it really hits the fan when i am just out there on my own. In charge. yikes. And realizing that maybe no amount of practice will prepare me for that day because the dynamics are so very different. The difference between guest and hostess. The shoes fit so differently.

So it is summer. my income and lifestyle and goals and ideas are changing so swiftly I hardly have time to stop and adjust my glasses. Full time to unemployment in no time to part time to maybe full time to too much and too tired and too confused. and unbalanced. out of whack. out of sync. unclear. change. I'm okay with change as long as things stay the same.

There is a little sign up at the school where I work that says, "raising teenagers is like nailing jello to a wall." And I think that is also true about being a teenager or a young adult or a recent college graduate or a person. Figuring out life feels much like nailing jello to walls. You nail it, turn and watch it slide down the wall, morphing into something you never thought it could be.

It's a weird time of life, this transition. This space. Finding shifting sands as a normality. Finding the thought of a mortgage and matching silverware and furniture that came from somewhere other than the garbage to be quite appealing and yet also quite out of reach. Living a life not quite ready to spend money on anything due to the impermanence of everything. Choosing things to furnish my life based on their moveability-- included carrying cases are still significant factors in the appeal of certain objects.

And I think in some ways this constant state of flex, this preparedness for movement is a good trait, a valuable habit, and yet I find it tiring and long for a place to settle. Wishing for the day when these considerations would leave me alone.

open

"He told them a parable: 'No one tears a patch from a new garment and sews it on an old one. If he does, he will have torn the new garment, and the patch from the new will not match the old. And no one pours new wine in old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins, then wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins. And no one after drinking old wine wants the new, for he says, 'the old is better.' " Luke 5

Back in March, I received student teaching placements outside of what I wanted. I had an image of my life in mind and reality stepped in to change the picture.

I have an image of a dwelling with wheels. My life is still moving, still shifting. I do not know what tomorrow is going to be or what to expect next. Life is proving to be much more complex than I realized. The wind is blowing in directions I do not know.

The last project in my sculpture class revolved around the idea of movement and emotion and I couldn't stop thinking about open. open. open. open. Open and ready for the call to pick up my mat and leave everything. Leave it all to follow me, he says.

Almost five years ago, I started writing in this space I designated as a place to record my "lessons in freefalling." I was reminded this weekend of a prayer I used to pray about being okay with only a rock for a pillow-- being an obedient wanderer and happy to leave it all. I was thinking this weekend that I don't think that this is really what I want afterall. I do want the real pillow. I want a place to come home and night and I want relationships older than just a year. I want to be planted somewhere. My feet are tired from wandering.

And yet I want to be open. I am still praying for a posture that is awake and aware of an imminent call upon my feet. Go here. Do this. This is the purpose I have for you-- walk with me in it.

And I wonder if both are possible. I realized this week as I cleaned out my closet yet again, searching for a few more things that could take a trip to Goodwill rather than to my newest place of residence, that a great deal of my life is postured towards the consideration of how hard things will be to move. Most of my purchases revolve around thier hierarchy of importance within boxes and the weight and space they would take up in the back of a truck. And I find myself spanning the tension between these two-- a desire for some permanence, a hope that someday I will have a place to put down a few roots, but a companion of knowledge that tells me that the best wine comes from skins that are flexible and ready to move. Is there a balance? Is there some balance of grace that I am yet growing into?

So things are changing again. A season of friendhips is shifting again, lifestyle is in flux, and a certain transition in planning has moved closer than I had anticipated.

And yet, somehow I have peace. Again, the reality I know is faithfulness. I have no doubt in the undying love of my Father-- a love that is jealous, is a hurricane, and bends me under the weight of its wind and mercy. No word seemed more real than the "Oh how he loves us," this morning. Oh, how he loves me.

So-- bottom line for me now-- I have no regular employment for this summer. And yet, I feel that God has been preparing me for this reality for quite some time now. he has known all along, he has been cupping his loving hands around my life, forming and comforting me in anticipation for the ready moment for me to be let in on this part of the story. And the softness of his arms have carried me through.

Wait. wait. wait. These words whispered through my heart a lot this week. It is as if the spirit was holding its breath, waiting for the silence of the floor slipping out from under my feet. And now I freefall.

Sometimes things don't go the way you think they are going to.

Hi friends.. It's been a while. My last on-campus semester has officially come to a close, i've had the party, walked across the stage, and now for a few months I continue to wonder just how hard student teaching is going to be. But I've made it. This far, anyway. I'm in the process of selling painting, which is big deal for me, but this last week of school-free living has got me really creatively motivated and I am hoping to put a lot more of my work out there in the near future. It is strange to see myself as an artist who actually is making art and (at least working on) doing something with it.

It has been a really great semester. I realize I've written very little here, for which I feel a bit guilty, but life seems to be taking me in directions less tied to this little webspace into more three-demensional arenas. And I've also been much to tired and busy to write.

I've been wanting to do some reflecting here though, as this seems to be the thing I do here. As I look back on the last five months or so, I can't help but find myself filled with awe at the faithfulness of the father. I started out the semester with the simple goal of getting through it and somehow Abba didn't seem to think it fit to allow me such a shallow and disconnected existence. And so he had mercy on me. I found his face in the eyes of many supportive instructors and in some great experiences. I see an image of myself much grown into myself, an artist developed in her work and a teacher ready to face whatever comes next. Some of you might recall a number of thoughts revolving around the desire to teach more than paint and the end of the semester has brought with it a dueling desire between the two. I want to do both for 100% of my time and self and energy.

And so-- this brings me to this day. Saturday, May 23. yesterday, I recieved a phone call informing me that the full-time job I was intending to rely upon this summer is no longer available to me. My plans have changed. My prediction of the future seems to have met a foggy spot. And so, I see a cloudy abyss of questions about rent on where I am now as well as the prospect of coming up with a pricy deposit for a place in boulder in the fall. how it will all work out, I do not know. And yet, somehow, I feel peace about it today.. I am ready in anticipation to see what the father, who is good, has in mind for me. I am open and waiting to hear his voice and follow his call.

I'm listening to snow melt and drip down rain gutters on this quiet Sunday afternoon. Although I've been counting for most of the semester, I'm coming to the realization that in just 6 or 7 short weeks, these last demands of school will conclude and life will be different. Despite this continual onset of realization concerning the transition that stands before me, I am learning that perhaps I ought not set my heart and mind so firmly upon my own ideas about what life looks like beyond the short threshold.

It feels that these last few weeks have been heavy with change and heavy with the voice of the Spirit within my heart. My student teaching placements are set and the personal decisions accompanying these somewhat definitive arrangement are far from determined. The radius of possibilities is vast and so are the questions about where to plunk down in their midst. Places to live for free and places to live for a small fortune and choices about family and friends and aloneness and relationships that I do not yet have any hint of and yet know I will quickly be in need of. And then there is the whole matter of getting too far ahead of myself.

I've been thinking a lot about this time in my life, being 22, being surrounded by friends (of all sorts of ages) who feel lost in purpose. And although I have a somewhat clear path ahead of me, the generalities are the only real guides in my case. The world is still fairly open and I begin to wonder what sort of life there is to be pursued outside the constructs of university life. The 9-5 life that is kind in its stability but dangerous in its potential for stagnation.

I've been thinking a lot about who I used to be and I've caught myself reflecting on whether or not my value has increased or decreased in the process of the last four years. I've been attempting to write essays about a spiritual and personal life that feels as though it has been ravaged by the daily shift of personality change. I've gone from child to student to artist to painter to this thing they call pre-service teacher, all in the context of this square mile. And I've been shaped and formed by this institution, I've been molded towards this end and then wonder what to do when friends ask me not to be that person in the context of our relationship.

I feel like things were a lot more clear a few years ago. And now they are complicated and I'm different today than I was yesterday and I find myself longing for roots. I'm ready for the day when things become more clear in retrospect. I'm ready for the day when I don't see so much of a stranger when I look in the mirror upon awakening.

Personal change is a funny thing. One moment you feel like your normal self and then the next moment you are wondering where your old self went while admiring aspects of a new face. Some parts of you become unrecognizable, other parts in which you placed so much stock are buried or erased, and you see in yourself a developement of something else that is some sort of synthesis of it all. Or so you hope.

It is difficult not to hang on to who you were and what you had a few days ago. It is difficult when you realize that you don't think in exactly the same ways and sometimes it is sad when you realize that you've left some old part of yourself on the side of the road along the way. It is difficult navigating a new body, a new brain, a new heart, while also navigating realtionships and rush hour traffic.

So I've been thinking and praying a lot about taking things one day at a time. Stopping and asking the Father for directions for the self that I am today. It takes a lot of grace and trust when you inhabit a changing self. You hope and pray that someone else is in control of this spinning mess.

 
 
 
 

A lesson in accepting people and things just the way God made them (even if it wouldn't be my way of choosing them). Things feel different again. I've been doing a lot of thinking about this blog and the fact that I don't seem to have the stream of thoughts to record here that I used to. I've wondered if I've grown out of the purposes that writing here used to fulfill. I've wondered if the loss of depression has led to the discontinued need to write here. I don't know. Regardless of all of these things, I do find myself with something to write here today.

It has been quite a different school year, but an even different-er semester. I'm to the point of feeling ready to emerge from the cocoon dutifully called "school" into a different life. I've been reminded, however, in the last few weeks of the eminent change and uncertainty that I've been ignoring with a personal sense of control I like to misguidedly apply to all elements of future life. I hear the voice of reality calling me a bit louder each day out of my illusionistic stupor. Change is coming, I hear it whisper, and it is not going to be controlled by you.

Yesterday I met with a teacher in Longmont to speak about a student teaching placement in her classroom. This location, this teacher, this school would not have been something I would have chosen on my own, but seems to be a place that I can grow and learn. Things felt good. I could see myself transferring my settled life to this place, finding an apartment or some space to put a bed and couch and table and making a new life there.

And then I drove home, opened my computer to greet the awaiting email from a possible part-two placement in Loveland, a good 40 minutes away from placement #1 and a good much too close to the place I was hoping not to be that close too. Within an instant of reading the words "Mary Blair," my plans changed. Hope you like commuting and temporary housing that other voice said. Things don't always go the way you think they should.

Change is rolling in like gray thunderheads. I see them coming, but the magnitude of the storm is yet to be determined. Friendships are changing. I'm clenching my stubborn little fists around keeping things the same, keeping people where I want them to be.

I've been thinking a lot this semester about realtionships. Relationships with people who are different from me. Relationships with people that take work and acceptance and understanding. Relationships that require a daily reminder to myself that the acceptance of others does not determine my worth. Daily working through the reality that just because someone thinks slightly differently that I do does not make either of us less important or more right. I've been struggling with the butting heads and clashing opionions. My easy friendships are absent and the difficult ones, although no less beautiful or important, have defined much of this season. I'm realizing my need to accept people as they are, even if I don't get it, and to accept myself, even when it feels like nobody else gets me.

I don't know what this next season will hold. I do not know where I will be, what my environment will be like or if I'll even have a say in the furniture of my life. But I cannot help but listen to the sense that I may be asked to give some things up, to give some things away, to let go of a lot of things. As I put red ink down on creamy paper surrounding these thoughts, I could not think of the Isrealits reminder, "Our fathers were wandering Aramaics." I couldn't help but conjure images of the wilderness along 287 and the small neighborhoods along the way that appear lonely and isoloated now and long drives ahead of me.

I realize that I've been applying my belief in God's provision to my own plans. The last couple of days, however, have opened my eyes to the reality that I am purusing a life in which He is the leader, and my life is found inside of his heart. And perhaps I am being led into the wilderness and He holds his hand open to recieve the sense of security that I can create and maintain so he can give me something better.

Inspired by the "Handmade Spaces" featured on Modish, I thought I would post some pictures of my own "Handmade Space," including the bookshelf I built out of some old shutters and a new project I'm working on.

creatively frustrated

I have a question. I've been asking it for a while now and its voice has been louder recently and its unresolved echo is leaving me quite frustrated and a little depressed. The question is: What makes art matter? A more specific question that chases after is: does my art matter? Am I saying anything worth listening to in my paintings, my scribblings? Am I even saying anything at all?

I've been feeling stopped by these questions. I am fearful of creating things that don't matter. I keep hearing the echo of this voice telling me to stop wasting time on things that dont' matter, but am waiting for the voice that tells me what does matter.

I feel more or less free from criticism this semester, but I still feel the residue, the lostness of words and sentences spoken before. Who sets the rules about what art is and what we are supposed to make?

I've made things before that I thought were good, I started on things from my heart and felt the crush of words with too little qualification. I didn't understand and today I still don't feel like I understand. What is art? What makes it meaningful? Is there art that shouldn't be taken seriously? Does it have to be specific or can it simply be a part of the flow that leaves these hands? Is there something I'm not tapping into? Or am I tapping into the thing that does matter? I feel frustrated. Stopped. Crippled. Lost....

Maybe the Aztecs were on to Something

Yesterday, in my Art of Mexico in the Age of Conquest class, we discussed the Mesoamerican view of deity. As a person looking for a God who is found at the heart of all reality, I am often fascinated by the spiritual views of people uninfluenced by the western, European church. I often wonder what happened to the hearts of the people far from the middle east and unassociated (and unknown by) the people most closely connected with the person of Jesus. I want to know if and how God manifests himself to these people and I want to know what they did with the image of God and the imprint of his breath on thier faces and hearts.

This class I am a part of is an interesting one as it adresses the nature of the culture of Mesoamerica before the visit from the Spanish, the interaction between Mesoamerican and Spanish culture, and finally, the new cultural heritage that resulted from the intersection of these people groups. Much of the information we do have about the Aztec people comes from records actually taken by Spanish missionaries (after the original indiginous records were detroyed), which did set out to accurately portray the lives of these people, but these records do also contain some bias emposed by the Western slant on reality.

Anyway-- the thing I found most compelling in the understanding of the Aztec understanding of "gods" or "deities" is its contrast to the western or Roman idea of gods as separate beings, residing in myth or elsewhere. To the Aztecs, thier "idols" or god-figures were more realted to types of essences found in nature or reality. The sculptures they made of certain "gods" as we would call them were considered to be more embodiments or icons describing the natural elements such as rain, fire, wind, or earth. They believed in a certain sort of life-force filling the manifestations of nature and thier environments. The had no notion of sacred v. secular-- everything was connected for them.

Another interesting idea that set a major backdrop for Aztec life was the absence of opposites or opposing concepts. Much of their imagery depicts a marriage of agriculture and fertility to death and sacrifice. They held this strange idea that life can only come from death. Now, for them, that did often manifest itself in terms of human sacrifice, which I certainly do NOT advocate, but I think that perhaps this idea of connecting these sorts of ideas is very profound. They were not as interseted in defining things and choosing sides as they were interested in wrestling with the tension between these aspects of life that seem both controdictory and inseperable.

Yesterday in class, we were looking at a carving of Caotlicue (pronounced co-at-li-que), or "She of the Serpent Skirt," which was their metephor, or teotl, for the earth and discussing how the Spaniards would have responded to such an image-- due to certain details of myth, the figure is missing her head, which is replaced by two writhing snakes, she sports large claws, wears a skull as a belt, and is adorned with a skirt made up of snakes. Although the Aztecs did take some enjoyment in frightening people, this is not neccessarily the major intent here. I imagine the Spaniards coming from a land of icons of the Virgin and beautifully ordered and contained catherdrals to this sort of undefinable figure of power.

I am struck here by the Aztec ability to embrace the power that comes from creation. Their view of the earth was one of both nurture and sustinence, but, dwelling in a land of desert and volcano, they also knew the earth to be a place of destruction and mysterious power. And they were not afraid to be honest about these facts in thier ideas of spirituality.

Please do not misunderstand me here-- I do not think that the Aztecs got everything right in thier religious ideas, but I think as we come from a "civilized" and Western perspective on the God who created all taht we are, we need to critically consider the truths that might be here. As I consider this interaction between Europe and Mesoamerica, I can't help but note the clash between formula and order, definition, label and box placed on deity and the freedom and openness to a really big idea of the essence of life packed into the environments we call home. I love the wonder and sense of power the Aztecs attributed to their spirituality-- it was not tamed like our western religious views often are. I love this idea that there is life in everytrhing all around, this recognition that all we are and all we have comes from something far more powerful than we are, and this idea that life is never separated from death, that both come as one dichotomous relationship.

"There were several mothers shopping up and down the aisles with young children in tow-- many of them snarling and snapping at the over-lively, curiosity-filled, wildly energetic kids. I wanted to grab the mothers, embrace them, tell them, 'Do you realize what you have done? You have given birth to a child, a child-- this miracle, this wonder, this glory. You're a Madonna! Why aren't you in awe and on your knees with the magi, with the shepherds?' Luckily, I restrained myself. 'Madonna' probably would not have had the same meaning for them as it had for me."

--Eugene Peterson, "Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places," p 58

Last week, I attended a house concert given by The Blackthorn Project, a fabulously inspiring couple from Woodland Park that travels around the country and the world playing beautiful music, which, they explain, serves as journal entry and remembrances to life as they continue to work it out. Laurie, the fiddle player, had been speaking for much of the day (they also graciously led our worship at Timberline Oldtown that morning) about her recent deep realization of the expanse of God's love and related a story about the manifestation of this love in this life of her nineteen-month-old daugter. When her child was born, she said, she remebered holding this tiny peice of creation in her hands and thanking the Father for such a gift and expressingher love for the baby, only for her prayer to be returned with the words, "I love her even more than you do," spoken clearly from the Spirit of God.

Although I am not a mother and do not plan on having children of my own for quite some time, this idea really resonated with me. Often, when I hear stories about mothers and children and the raising of these small lives, my mind goes directly to the kids I work with every day, the students I interact with through my involvement with the School of Education, and the students that will be under my care when they enter my classroom in just a little while. I can't help but think of these small people as my own children, lives that my career path is leading me to be a significant part of. As Laurie talked about this message from Abba about his love for the child that has been given to her for this short time on earth, I instantly wanted to hang onto that truth for my own student. As much as I love the children I find attached to my legs and arms at work and as much as I am looking forward to helping children realize thier own creativity in an art classroom, it opens my world wider to realize that God loves these children immensely more than I could ever imagine loving them myself.

There is something about this admission from God that makes me realize that I am only a small part of all that he does in our lives and in this world. I am reminded that I am only his hands and I am only invited through his grace into this work of life that he is continually recreating.

In his chapter on creation, Peterson talks at length about the wonder that comes from an awareness of the life infused into our beings as humans. In the passage quoted above, I am inspired again to be the sort of teacher that cultivates the image of God in my students. The more I work with young people, especially kids in the early elementary grades, the more I am in awe of their creativity, thier energy, the life that is yet to be subdued and diminished by "maturity." The more I work with these little people, the more I am challenged to harness all of this life towards good, to grow it, to stregthen it so as to aid its survival through the harsh world. It is as if the small bodies of children are just bursting with the Spirit of God.

Each day, I get a few steps closer to this profession, this way of life that I think far exceeds many paths in life. Just the thought of being in a classroom, cultivating young minds and influencing the future of our world for good makes me feel right at home. It is my hope and prayer that I would be continually reminded of my place in the larger scheme of things-- situated within the house of God's love that is beyond all I could ever dream or imagine.

Two weeks are behind us already. fourteen weeks to go. Just kidding. This semester has been markedly less chaotic and full than other semesters have been in the past-- which has been a great relief. Sometimes, I catch myself feeling a bit like I'm still in "break mode," and wonder who this relaxed person who is who has time to clean the kitchen occasionally. It seems strange to think that after tomorrow and the next day, it will be February and my 22nd year will be finished in just 14 more days.

I've been thinking some about the minute threads of existence that make up the entirety of our lives. I've been thinking about painting the pattern of life and history on canvas. I've started reading Eugene Peterson's "Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places," (thanks Robin!) with a friend and it's gotten us to thinking about all the little stuff that God is in and how important those little rituals are to our lives. I don't know if it would be honest to say that I've been enjoying those little things more these days, but I've been thinking about ways of capturing them, that's for sure.

I am in the last stretch of my education Practicum and I've been spending a lot of time about 20 minutes from home in a very large High School and I'm getting excited about building relationships and collaborating and dressing professionally again. I was late for painting today after forgetting my house keys and taking a 30 minute walk home from campus and I felt free from that nagging sense of failure that often accompanies this sort of irresponsibility-- lateness and all. I simply walked in, set up my paints and got to work. I don't feel the same pressure and am really enjoying the freedom to be creative and free and loose with myself and my art-- I feel like this sense of "enough-ness" is the thing that is going to keep be creating after I get out of school--- not the terror that be used to be the motivation.

"The Lord heard my cry for help and had mercy on me."

"Blessed is she who has believed that what the Lord has said to her will be accomplished."

It feels like a new day today. Although it is mid-January, the sun is shining and I took off my shoes. It feels like summer is on its way, despite the reality of Colorado's tendency for weather trickery.

This morning, the head of the School of Education greeted every senior teacher candidate with these tidings: "Welcome to the first day of your career." There have been times over the last month that I wished I could just skip over this term, hoping that I could wake up and find myself finished. But today, things felt new. I find a new hope under the soles of my shoes.

Today I joined my education collegues, fellow students, and faculty in the RamSkeller to take part in a ritual taking place in Washington D.C. Marking an event overwhelmingly significant to many. Since the election, I've been at peace with the contol I believe our Father holds over our lives and life of our country, but today, sitting in that room, surrounded by people that have become my home, I felt the weight of the day for me personally and for the world. Things are exciting. Dreams are happening and the world is changing.

I was reflecting back four years ago when I first walked this now-familiar campus, wondering if it would ever feel like my own. Today, the first day of my last semester here, I felt the joy fill my heart of knowing that indeed today this place is home, it is a place of hope, and will always be an important place of remembrance for this journey.

I'm not sure if I really have anything really profound to say about all of this, but it feels like a day a stone needs to mark. I've been thinking a lot about ritual and about traditions. I've been looking for those important momvents, those rituals used to mark the important, spiritual things in our lives. Ceremony. Taking more than a coffee break to acknowledge the life that is taking shape around our souls.

So today, new things are happening. It is the first day of my career-- a career that this person also said should never feel like work. I am rejoicing today in a God who has mercy on me. Saying a little prayer of thanks for a painting instructor that defined her role as "cheerleader"-- a sort of person I desperately need in my life these days.

"Our capacity to take risks and learn from then depends heavily on whether we understand action as instrumental or expressive. The instrumental image, which dominates Western culture, portrays action as a means to predetermined ends, as an instrument or tool of our intentions. The only possible measure of such action is whether it achieves the ends at which it is aimed. Instrumental action is governed by the logic of success and failure; it discourages us from risk-taking because it values success over learning, and it abhors failure whether we learn from it or not.

Instrumental action always wants to win,but win or lose, it inhibits our learning. If we win we think we know it all and have nothing more to learn. If we lose we feel so defeated that learning is a hollow consolation. Instrumenal action traps us in a system or praise or blame, credit or shame, a system that gives primacy to goals and external evaluations, devalues the gift of self-knowledge and diminishes our capacity to take the risks that may yeild growth.

I find it facinating that the most 'successful' of all modern activites-- science-- is one that rejects success and failure as the primary norms for its acts. For the pure scientist, a failed experiement is no failure at all, but a vital step towared learning the truth. Such 'failure' narroes the range or relevant hypotheses to be tested and may contriubut some posiive findings as well. Science, seen by many as our most powerful instrumentality, has achieved its eminence in part by freeing itself from the stangelhold of instrumentalism.

Of course, scientific knowledge is often used by technology in action of the most instrumental sorts. Such action, action that links means to ends, will always be a part of our lives, will always play a central role in a world with finite resources and infinte needs. Aslong as we live embodied lives, the demands of instrumental action will always be with us.

But when the standards of instrumentalism dominate, our action is impoverished and our lives are dminished. Only when we act expressively do we move toward full aliveness and authentic power. An expressive act is one that I take not to acheive a goal outside myself but to express a conviction, a leading, a truth that is within me. An expressie act is one taken because if I did not take it I would be denying my own insight, gift, nature. By taking an expressive act, and act not obsessed with outcomes, I become closer to making the contribution that is mine to make in the scheme of things.

The doing of pure science is an expressive act, an act that simply manifests the scientis's own desire to know the truth. Paradoxically, as science demonstrates, and expressie act is more likely to achieve real ends than is an instrumental act calculated to reach such ends but not rooted in the actor's own reality. When an act is true to one's nature it is more likely to have outcomes that are true to the field of action. I do not mean that we will always find the outcomes of expressive action to be acceptable, pleasing, or 'good.' I mean simply that whatever the outcomes may be, they will be convergent with a larger sustaining truth. They will not be temporary illusions imposed on reality by our false and frail images of how things ought to be."

-- Parker Palmer, "The Active Life," 23-24

After these three days end, school will once again consume my entire person-hood for one more term. As those of you who actually still read this no doubt have observed, I haven't been writing as much lately. I myself have wondered why this is, whether it be the lack of adequate things to say, a loss of my reflective self, an increased loss of literate appetite thanks to the overtake of college senior status and an ever-growing desire to sleep more than anything else. I've also wondered if maybe I'm growing out of this blog. Over the last semester, I've experienced, thanks to the wonder of pharmaceutical technology, a freedom from the depression that drove me to write here in hope of refuge from the storm. I've wondered if the thing I set out to do by writing this blog has been accomplished and I've reached many of the ends each of these posts was a prayer for.

It has been four and one-half years since I started covering this black space with these white words. A journey through the conclusion of high school through what is now the conclusion of my undergraduate life. This has been round four as far as the winter break cycle is concerned, and I am tempted to speculate that this has been the most-anticipated one so far, but I'm not sure if that is true. Regardless of its status among previous breaks, I will say it has been one of a great deal of recombination and reflection-- I've felt the importance of taking some extended time to step back and look at my spiritual life and prepare my heart for the year that lies ahead.

For the last few terms, I've had the painful sense of a spiritual shift in my life-- in terms of how my personal growth has been assessed in my younger days, these more recent seasons of this transition they call "college age" are marked with less measurable focus on who I am becoming and more adherence to an increasing need to "get by." The time I used to spend filling journals and reading is now spent writing lesson plans and painting to a deadline. My prayer life occurs occasionally in the shower or on my bike between classes and lunch and usually consists of the words, "help me make it through another day." God isn't the same God I thought he was when I was eighteen and I am not the same person either. Earlier this fall, I wondered if I was still the deep, wise person people told me I was back then when I was a person beyond most my age. I wondered if my life had become shallow and small.

Over the break, the completion of an application for a summer camp counseling job forced me into some serious reflection on the state of my spirit and the disciplines that keep me growing. A few months back, the presentation of the question: "How is your spiritual life," sent me into a panic as I realized that for the sake of appearances, my spiritual life was found at the altar of school-- the all-consuming fire in my life felt like the need to meet deadlines and expectations. But as I sat down to work through the question presented on the application, "What is your relationship with Christ?" I began to realize that it isn't that my soul has shrunken to meeting the expectations of my superiors, but my way of approaching the Spirit of God and his work in my life had simply changed to something less measurable, but far more authentic.

As I wrote my response, I came to the realization that in the last four years, my spiritual growth has shifted from isolated disciplines of solitude and reflection to a communal way of life. As I've prayed for a freedom from guilt and a sense of obligation for the aquisition of acceptance and validation, I've found a life in the arms of a loving and faithful God who is not limited to ink on paper. Not that solitude and the disciplines are not essential means of connecting with the Father, but when we leave behind the need to do these things for our own spiritual satisfaction and seek God where he wants to be found, we crack open a world far beyond our own imaginations.

Sitting down and thinking through the true state of my relationship with the Trininity leaves me only with the pervading reality that God is faithful, that his promise never to foresake perseveres in the midst of the violent shifts that modern life inevitably presents. I began to write the section of my application on "disciplines that keep you growting" with some trepidation-- no longer do I have time for regular journaling, it has been months since I read a good book on theology or "inspiration" on my own, and truth be told-- my bible rarely sees the light of day outside of Sunday. As I mentioned before, my serious times of solitude are the 8-10 minutes in the shower on days I get ahold of my worries for the day or am awake enough to think beyond the selection of clean clothes in my closet. But as I stopped thinking in terms of how I would have proudly presented my spiritual stature in previous years, I realized that osmething far more prevading and powerful now marks my spiritual growth-- community.

It was just a short time before I began writing here that for the first time in my life I heard the message from Genesis 1-- "It is not good for man to be alone." Four and a half-years ago, I entered into this mind-blowing reality that this longing I have to be connected to other human beings is not a right denied to certain people like myself-- we are made for it. And it has been since then that I've been on this quest towards seeing that play out in my life.

Over the past month, I've been keenly aware of how close my life is to becomming one of a full-time teacher. As I go to work every day and see the faces of so many kids that need to be lovingly cared for and brought up in truth, my role of such a mentor in the classroom draws closer and closer in my awareness. Underneath, I've been aware of my calling to teach for my entire life. I have distinct memories of sitting at the small desk in my dad's office, surrounded by rows of music tapes and my aunt's artwork, sticking barbie stickers on green paper thinking to myself, "I will sit at a desk like this as a teacher some day." As a sophomore in high school, at a youth retreat on legacy, I prayed that God would speak to me about the path he would call me to through college. Almost instantly, everything burrying this life-old voice moved to the side and I knew teaching art was the place created for me. It was as though all I had to do was remember.

And so I followed the voice, despite the trepidation at the thought of connecting with children and my overall fear of relationship. I don't know how to do relationship, I wispered to God often. How will this ever work? How can I ever teach if I don't know how to connect to people? But then there was this whole group of people repeating this word over and over again-- community. Community. It was an alluring word, a concept full of mystery and romance. Something I wondered about for myself.

My first year of college, I felt like I messed up a lot of relationships. This community I was looking for in the Body seemed impossible and I was still hard, full of walls to be surmounted. My dreams weren't coming true and I wondered how I could be so full of the quest for community and yet be falling so hard. And then I recieved an invitation. "Come do life with us for a while." Community.

For a long time, I saw the embodiment of community as a group of friends that did things together on Friday night and never left each other out of things and gave each other rides and ate dinner together a lot. A life-long circle of friends that never wavered or shifted. Undying loyalty. So I went, thinking I would find such a circle of friends. And I found myself alone a lot. I did make new friends and we did things together and I spent a lot of days in a row with people. We ate dinner together. But I also got hurt and it was usually messy. And then certain words woke me up to a new reality of what community meant.

My definition of community changed. I realized community isn't a formula fond in certain ancient accounts. It doesn't look like a high school clique and it doesn't solve all of your problems in an instant. And maybe the most important lesson of all is the reality that community is never static and it isn't an unchanging wall of security. Community, I am learning, is an ever-shifting openness to change. Community is bravery and community is the realization that everybody matters. When I make an image out of community, I end up putting walls around things and miss out on the wind that blows through life.

Perhaps one of the greatest lessons I've learned over the past four years is the inevitable tendency for people to walk in and out of your life and the unquestionable need to hold people with an open hand. Best friends forever isn't actually the way community breathes. I like that image-- community is breath. When I read that humanity is created in the image of God and my exeperience tells me no two people are the same, I have to conclude that as a Body, every person moving in and out of the mouth of God as his breath is some manifestation of the life God gives. So, allowing the natural rythm of relational tide to wash over my life is recieving the sustenence God himself gives. We all know that people move in and out of our lives at certain times for perticular reasons.

Along the course of this journey towards life found in community, I've wondered at the paradox between the idea that God is enough and this life supposedly made for community. Growing up as a lonely child, petrified of the damage relationships with other broken shards of people can bring, I maintained a self-sufficient life, relying on my own ability to perform and learn without actual human interaction. I was taught "God is enough," and that my daily routine of discipline must exhibit a spiritual fortitude of epic porportions to by loved by God and accepted in relgious communities. God is enough meant never trust other people to provide for your needs. I lived a black and white life of isolated theology.

However, this idea of God being found in the ebb and flow of faces around me, reconciles this idea afterall. God is enough as he shows himself in the community he has built into our hearts. Our horizontal and vertical lives are not separated. Maybe the verticle isn't quite as high as we thought. My definition of the life God made for our spirits has changed.

Do you ever stuggle through a certain season in life only to step back after the smoke clears and feel the suffen gravity of a shift? In expounding on my practices of personal growth on this application, it occured to me that through the refining fire of time management and submission to the demands of Colorado State University, I've been freed from my isolated sense of religious accomplishment as a mark of spiritual worth into the realization of God in the faces that meet my gaze every day. I don't have time to sit down and read for hours and the pages upon pages I write these days often entail lesson objectives and assessment strategies, but the spiritual encounters that permeate my life are the women I life with, my classmates, and the kids I build relationships with at work. I learn about the person God is making me into as I struggle through how to love my parents, and I do the dishes for the sake of a roommate who enjoys a far-neater house that I am compelled to maintain. My exeperiences of God are no longer limited to the weekly hour I spend with my nose in a book, but permiate moments of despiration when I wonder if I'll ever find the strenght to paint another 15 minutes.

As I near the end of this journey and perpare to enter a new season in life, I can't help but marvel at God's faithfulness. As I look back at the times I grieved my own percieved lack of spiritual accomplishment, I see only an image of the Father holding me close. I've been thikning a lot about Rob Bell's Nooma video entitled "Rain," in which he tells the story of a time he took his son for a walk in the forest when it began to pour a torrential rain. Near the conclusion of the video, Bell contemplates what it would be like for his son to later ask him how he could put him through such abuse. As a father, he says, such a question would be pure heartbreak as this experience was one of the closest moments with his son in his lifetime. "I got to hold you close," Bell says.

Throughout the Christmas season, the concept of story has been on my mind. I've been thinking about the story God had prepared for John the Baptist and the journey many prophesied about Jesus' life. I often think about a talk Francis Chan gave at Mar's Hill sometime ago about this idea of the story God is inviting us into; the portion of his talk that continually comes back to me is his retelling of his own life from God's perspective. I'm going to have this child born to a family who doesn't want him. I'm going to have this child be adopted, only to witness the death of his mother at age 12. And then... I often think about this manner of narrative in light of my own life and imagine God telling my story in much the same way-- he knows it all, and he knows the pain, but it is a beautiful novel in his library of lives.

I began to think back on the last four years and how I find myself in a community now that I felt I've been searching for since the start of my college life, a community I was so close to being a part of but somehow ended up taking a detour to find. A detour that led me to perhaps the greatest pain of my life. The first realization of this thought instatntly brought me to ask why. Why, Abba, would you take me through that road that you knew would end in an experience of such greif? But as I thought about the path my life took there, no cell in my body asks to go back or avoid it. It is a part of me. A gift.

So here I am. In three short days, I will venture once again to rooms full of chairs and tables, I will embark on journeys through books and do a lot of typing on this same keyboard. I will be covered in paint and I will dress professionally. I will be making last preparations before stepping into a classroom all my own, on my own.

But I will go with an awareness of a God who is faithful and a God who only longs to hold me close. I will go armed with the pages of a story that tell of a Father who answered prayer, who healed this broken heart and taught me how to love people, a God who soothed my fears and taught me how to love children. A God who gives me dreams at night about building relationships with children I've yet to meet. A God who has already made this child into someone she only dreamed to ask for. So off I go!

Brian Kershinisnik

I opened my iGoogle page this morning and was greeted with this painting in the "Art of the Day" spot and was instantly in love with it. You should check out this artist and fall in love with it too. Because it is fabulous.

Stories

"Blessed is she who has believed what the Lord has said will be done to her." --Luke 1

Since a few weeks before Christmas came, we've been meditating on the first few chapters of Luke on Sunday mornings. For the last three or four Christmases, I've been spending the time leading up to the holidays asking God what he would have to say to me about the coming of his son, to give me some sort of new word about what this ritual means to the connection of my spirit and his. This year, however, having virtually given up on any intentional spiritual effort, I forgot about this tradition. I suppose it may have entered my mind a time or two, but I never took the time to really sit down and seek it out.

In God's infinite grace and merciful remembrance of me, it seems that he has brought a word to me, regardless of my contributed effort. The idea that is continually running through my mind is the concept of story. Since we began thinking through Advent and these early words of Luke, I can't get that word, story, out of my mind. There seems to be little accompanying the word by way of interpretation or specifics, but I get this sense that God is speaking to me about the story he is writing on my life, the story he had in mind for his son on this earth, and how those two things are intersecting.

I am in the closing chapters of my "College Story." This fact I know all too well. I'm sure you all are tired of hearing about it, but somehow this idea of story that keeps repeating itself seems connected to the twilight of this small part of my story. It is significant, yes, but it is part. Although I have a shady outlined idea of what even the entire next year might look like, I know little details of the coming story. I find myself wondering what this message about "story" means because I feel like I have less questions about "what comes next" than most college graduates. I am not seeking a gigantic revelation about what to seek next-- I'm lucky (or maybe unlucky, depending) to be studying something in school that pretty clearly defines my career path: teaching and art.

Our study of Luke seems to continually weave threads of consecration and dedication through each of the characters. Beginning with the birth of John the Baptist, God calls the child out for his purposes before his parents are even able to hold him with their own hands. This child is mine. Throughout these passages, angels and prophets keep saying things about John and Jesus like, "You have no idea what story will be written for these children."

We watch as each person dedicates their lives to the Lord, things change. Simeon gives Mary the good news that her child will "pierce her heart like a sword," and John will never be able to bury his own father. Often we remind each other on Sundays that following Christ will cost us everything, but it will be worth it.

This morning, in continued attempt to decipher this idea of story in my life and the sense of calling that surrounds my spirit these days, I wonder if these words have something to do with all the culminations I find myself in the midst of these days. I feel like I'm so close to teaching-- I can almost taste it in the air, like the salt of the ocean. This is something that I feel has been written on my heart for my entire life. For as long as I can remember, I've been waiting for the chance to have a classroom all my won. I'm on the cusp of diving in, full-bodied. The thing that my story has been about for approximately 17 years is about to be real. The thing I've been preparing for, anticipating is within reach.

I am often hesitant to speak with such certainty. I do not like nailing lists of things on doors and, as Rob Bell has suggested, I do not live with brick walls. And I think for this reason it seems strang for me to want to say that this is the thing I was made to do, that this-- teaching-- is the thing-- yet, I can't help but repeat it like a poem. And maybe there will come a day when I am led somewhere else, when the winds change and I move to a new current. But these days, the thing I think about is teaching. This is the story that's being written for me for now and I can't wait to step into it fully.

It is the third day of 2009 and people are talking about goals and resolutions and retrospectives and newness and change and hope. I've been away from school for nearly three weeks now and most of my days have consisted of sleeping, eating, biking, net surfing, an occasional read, some celebrating, some gift giving, too much TV watching. I've been thinking it is about time I sat down and wrote something here about how 2008 went by and goals I have for the coming year. I keep thinking I should sit down and write something along the lines of: Who I Want to be Before 2010 Rolls Around.

I've been thinking about it and I think every answer to that sort of inquiry can be summed up in the title College Graduate. I contemplated just working through what I am about to write here in the privacy of my journal out of embarrassment for my lack of aspiration and self-motivation, but something talked me out of it. Truth be told, after I think through it all, my goal for the coming semester (the first half of the year or so) is to get through it. I used to be so eager to learn all my instructors had to pour into my head, but as I look forward to this semester, I see myself going through the motions, but I don't see myself putting in the 132% that I'm used to putting in. And, undoubtedly, I'll learn loads of great stuff in the next term, but i don't see myself putting any sort of goals down on yellow paper stating that I will be striving towards any self-inflicted learning.

As I look towards the coming year, I feel like it is broken up fairly simply: one more semester of familiar classes, a summer (hopefully) spent on staff at a camp somewhere, fall student teaching. I feel as though I'm being quite the cynic, but the truth is, I feel much too tired to be making goals. I'm one semester away from the conclusion of my undergraduate life as I know it, a summer and one more semester away from a new lifestyle, a new set of choices.

My public conscience tells me I ought to be thinking more inspirationally about learning new hobbies or learning how to be a nicer person or eat more spinach or something, but the truth is, those aren't things I'm interested in adding to my repertoire in 2009. Maybe my goal should be an improvement in attitude or the completion of CSU's list of 100 things to do before you graduate. Maybe I should pray that God would make me be more in the moment, that he would make me present to all that he has to do in my last semester of school. But the thought of any of those things imposes a bit more pressure than I'd like to afford. So, I suppose obtaining a BFA in painting and K-12 Teaching license will be enough to attribute to the year.