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Monday, March 21, 2005

Our neighbors

I've mentioned our neighbors in my photo blog (they're the ones with the gorgeous tulips). They're these little old Christian ladies who have lived together their entire adult lives, who ran a Christian camp for kids until just a few years ago. They used to shuttle my dad (and T's dad too) back and forth to Sunday school when they were kids, this is how long these ladies have been loving the Lord and spreading Him around as much as they can. Anyway. One of the ladies has become quite infirm, and needs live-in care. This past weekend the live-in carer apparently went on a drug binge (!!!) and failed to show up from Friday through this morning, when she showed up long enough to quit and grab her stuff, not even willing to help her former patient out of bed. So this weekend T and I have been filling in for the absent nurse in the morning and evening, getting Miss Ruth up from her chair, into the wheelchair, onto the commode, up from the commode, and into her bed in the evenings, and reversing the procedure in the mornings. We do the heavy work while Miss Jan, who is about the size and weight of LT, helps Miss Ruth with the more intimate aspects of her care. It has been quite an experience. (This morning I did the morning procedure without T, since he was at work). We walk away each time with our muscles aching, stretching our backs, so unspeakably grateful for the freedom to simply hop out of bed and go about our day without giving a thought to how we'll do it, pondering the kind of friendship that says: I will offer you my emotional support and friendly affection as long as you need it. I will trust you with my physical and financial well-being. And when we get old, and you can't take care of yourself, I will stand beside you and take care of you and stand up for you and help you in what should be very private moments, and I will strive to keep your dignity intact, and I will do this as long as it takes.

That is agape if I ever saw it. May God grant me the grace to love -- my friends, my family, my husband, my children -- like that.

Tuesday, March 01, 2005

The kind of morning moms dream of

Well, some kind of moms, anyway.

The community chorus* had a rehearsal with the high school choruses this morning, since we are performing with them for a couple of songs at their concert this Thursday. I took the kids with me (obviously), and sat them in a couple of auditorium chairs with their schoolwork while I stood with a bunch of girls who were BABIES when I was their age and practiced singing. And here's the good part: those two angels (they're angels this morning, anyway ;) sat there quietly for the entire hour and did their work without giving me even a single smidge of regret for having had to bring them.

I'm writing this down so that the next time I feel like I am useless as a parent and my kids will have me in the asylum within fifteen minutes, I can read it, and hope. ;-)

*I don't get out much. The community chorus and church and Awana and Bible study, that's pretty much it. The chorus is the only one of those things that I do on my own, without the rest of the family, so it is pretty much the extent of my adult social exposure. So you'll probably hear about it a lot. Maybe I should put a picture of it in the sidebar.

By the way, I've been doing my reading every day. (pats self on back). I am using a modified version of a through-the-Bible-in-a-year plan that divides the days up into The Law, History, Prophecy, etc. Instead of going from one section to the other on successive days, though, I'm reading a book from one section, and then going on to a book from another, so as to have more context. It will still work out to take a year. That's if I don't slack. Which I may well do.

I'm also planning to put up a post about chapter summaries soon, probably when I actually start working on mine for the next study.

Friday, February 25, 2005

Resolution

I did this before, when my children were much smaller, and while I stuck to it my spiritual life was the better for it. So I'm going to resolve again that each day, I will not do any fiction reading OR turn on the computer until I have read my daily three chapters of the Bible, as well as reading through the chapter I'll be summarizing at Bible study the following Wednesday. (ask me sometime about chapter summaries and how fantastic that method of study is.)

This means that if you see a post from me, or a comment, or if you otherwise discern I'm online, you can feel free to hold me accountable by starting a discussion with me about my Bible reading for that morning (if anyone wants to check up on me via instant messaging I'll gladly email you my Yahoo ID). ;-)
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Questions from Kristen

1) What book (in the last year) has most impacted your relationship with God (excluding the Bible)?

Well. Most of the actual book-reading I do is novels, some of which affect me positively spiritually (like Jane Eyre, or the Mitford books, and I'm reading Les Misérables right now, for example), some of which are neutral (Austen and many others) and some of which I frankly maybe shouldn't be exposing myself to. Every bit of garbage I put in my head stays there, whether I'm "reading with discernment" or not. Something to think about. ANYWAY. As far as what I've read that's most affected my relationship with God, well, Kristen, your journal would be high on the list. ;-)

2) If you could choose a country to live in other than your current home country, which would it be, and why?

That would be really hard. America has its faults but I do love it, and frankly I can't think of another first-world nation whose policies and lifestyle aren't even further from my ideal than the U.S. is, with the possible exception of Israel, and that's no place to move right now, when you have kids. Maybe in Africa or South America, as a missionary?

3) If you were sent to the Isle of Patmos for the rest of your life and could only bring ONE BOOK of the Bible, which would it be? Why?

This is the question I've been thinking about the most since I first read these questions, and I'd have to answer Psalms. For one thing, it's the longest, and I like variety. ;-) For another, there's a little bit of everything in Psalms -- lots of comfort, plenty of conviction, BIG views of God, personal views of God, prophecies about Jesus, it's all there. So if I could only have ONE, that would probably be it.

4) What was your favorite movie, book, or character as a child?

In early childhood, I liked Laura Ingalls Wilder, the Narnia books, and a whole lot of assorted kids' books like Mr. Popper's Penguins, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, The Phantom Tollbooth, and Blue Willow (note: with the possible exception of The Phantom Tollbooth, I am still enormously fond of all of these books today). Later I discovered Anne (of Green Gables, of course), and as a teenager I added Dickens to my list of favorites, on the strength of David Copperfield and Great Expectations. And let's not forget the obligatory worldy-teenager fit of literary angst which included a profound admiration of John Steinbeck and the socialism he stood for. Ouch.

That's what you get for asking me to pick a favorite. :)

5) What's your very 'favoritest' thing to eat?

Oh, no! You did it again! :)

Probably the food that I MOST love to have in my mouth, no matter what my mood is and dietary considerations aside, is REALLY GOOD cookies-and-cream ice cream over a warm walnut brownie with hot fudge and whipped cream on top.

Thanks for the questions (and everything else as well), Kristen! :)
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Why another online journal?

The Lord has been working in me lately. A lot.

I can't really say "it all started with...", because, well, it all started before the foundation of time, when you really get down to it, and God has been working through events my entire life to bring me into first any relationship at all with him, and then to bring me closer and mold me into the woman He wants me to be. I am, like every follower of Jesus (and every other person, really) a work in progress. However. The most recent chain of events which have brought me to this point where I can feel myself being drawn nearer to Him started with, of all things, a really offensive cartoon about homeschooling, and my response to it. Some of the people who commented on my response left links to their journals, and those journals had links to OTHER journals, and just... wow. These are women who are not afraid to put it all out there for Jesus, and who defend the gospel eloquently and with humor, and who also are likeable people in their own right. I think I developed about four friend-crushes in the space of two hours.

Now, I've been a Christian for twelve years this month. I went through the standard phase at the beginning of my Christian walk when I was really passionate and really in love with Jesus and really vocal about it and also really clueless about how to be anything but very heavy-handed with the gospel. I was everything that annoys non-Christians about Christians, really, with very sharp edges and very little understanding of other positions. Fast-forward ten or eleven years and basically I had the opposite set of problems. I had allowed myself to be immersed in the world so much and for so long, and I was out of the Word, and basically my Christian walk was a façade of church and Bible-study attendance and teaching my children about Jesus, over a morass of uncertainty and apathy. I wasn't witnessing, not just because of the standard fear of rejection but because I had honestly fallen into a trap of not really believing that it was important. I was essentially giving lip-service to being a Christian. Well, not exactly, because my life (from a distance, at least, if you didn't look too closely at how I spent my time and what I read and what I watched and the words that would slip out of my mouth) was also "on the straight and narrow". I was never unfaithful to my husband even in thought; I never stopped going to church or doing my weekly Bible study. But I was at first appalled, and then later I shrugged, at how infrequently I opened the Bible when it didn't directly involve one of those two events. I had no private devotions or prayer time. My online journal was full of posts that bordered on disrespect for God and certainly didn't give any solid impression of myself as a woman who was devoted to Him -- because I wasn't.

You know, in reading over that, it sounds a lot harsher than it was. There was nothing harsh about it. It was all very soggy really. Squishy. Undefined. My whole spiritual life was like wet newspaper.

Then last fall I was "roped into" going to a ladies' retreat. My mom paid for me to go; I assumed she was going as well, and then found out that indeed I was going to go off on my own with some near-strangers from our church to spend three days with a lot of TOTAL strangers, worshiping Jesus and learning about him. Now remember, I had my façade in place, although I think those closest to me knew something of the wet-newspaper-consistency mess that was underneath it, so this wasn't something along the lines of Let's Send Rachel Off To Get Right With God. I think my mom saw it as a way for me to get closer to God, because as I said I think she figured that I was not at the top of my game spiritually speaking, but I don't think she knew how riddled with doubt I was, or how very squishy my Christian walk had become. She just figured that if I were there alone (and if you know me at all you know that I do not mix well. I don't mind being ALONE alone, in fact I like it from time to time, what mother doesn't? but one of the worst places for me to be, comfort-wise, is in a large group of people where I am not friends with anybody, but everyone else there is friends with someone else. THAT is the worst possible kind of alone there is, to someone who had the experiences in elementary school and junior high that I did) it would throw me into God's arms pretty hard.

And it did. When I first got there I was nearly despondent; it was exactly as I had pictured it would be. Three hundred well-kept, stylishly-dressed, put-together women, calling out HELLO!! and It's so great to SEE you!! to each other, and then (homely, unattractive, awkward -- these words come FLOODING to mind when I am in this kind of situation) me, wandering around alone, making occasional snippets of meaningless conversation with the handful of women with whom I was acquainted, when I happened to encounter a chattering group of them. My paper journal from those first few hours is filled with words like "exile" and "reject". Then we went to the first evening's worship/teaching session -- and God reached down his arms and hugged me to him in a way that still brings tears to my eyes when I think of it. The rest of the weekend was amazing. I was no less alone physically -- I didn't miraculously turn around and make a dozen new best pinky-swear friends with whom I meet regularly for tea, or anything like that. But I spent the next forty hours or so in a kind of communion with God that I hadn't experienced in years. I couldn't go twenty minutes without crying. God revealed Himself to me in ways that brought me back trembling to worship at His feet and thank Him for my salvation and His love for me. I spent my alone time reading the Bible (and Persuasion too, OK, I was nearing the end of my annual Jane Austen re-read, but a LOT of the time it was the Bible), and praying. I won't lie to you and say that I never felt lonely again that weekend. I did. But God used that loneliness in a mighty way.

The problem was that the retreat ended. I couldn't spend the rest of my life in that painful kind of situation that sent me running to God until I was so happily out of breath -- nor would I want to. But coming back home took a bit of the glory out of the experience. I was back to the same life, the same situations, and it became easier and easier as the days went by to slough off the defined edges I'd regained at the retreat, and slide back toward sogginess. The doubts didn't return, I'll say that much, but over the course of months from then till now, I found it easier and easier to slip into old habits rather than stand out for Jesus. I'll be honest and say that much of it is simple fear -- that people won't like me, mostly. I want my online friends (some of whom are people I have known at one point or another in real life, while others aren't) to think I'm funny and clever, not to see me as one of those boring judgmental "born-agains". If I'd been confronted by it, I wouldn't have put it in those words exactly; I'd have sugar-coated it with things like "not wanting to alienate people with whom I might be able to share the gospel" -- until the last couple of days, reading these other journals by these Christian women, when I have been having a different sort of spiritual renewal -- one where I honestly assess my situation and find it lacking indeed. No fireworks, just a flashlight that shines into the corners and shows up all my spiderwebs.

So, in answer to the question that is the title of this post, this journal is going to be a chronicle of my movement back toward a walk that is truly "in newness of life". By the grace of God, I know I can do it. "Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come." (2 Corinthians 5:17)

Sunday, December 19, 2004

A Very Special Episode, Based On An Inspiring True Story

This weekend we were expecting some friends to come up for a visit; they were supposed to show up late last night and sleep in our "guest apartment" (aka schoolroom, storage area, and 'that extraneous area over the garage which is the REAL reason we rent that space'), and depart late this evening after driving around looking at property in the afternoon, because they are planning to move near here in the very near future. They did not show up, so when the phone rang this morning while we were getting ready to leave for church, we knew it would be them with an explanation. Said explanation totally floored us.

They didn't come because the wife is in labor. Now, that's not the surprising part, unless you're familiar with the situation, which, come on, you can't be, I'm just telling you about it now, aren't I. We hadn't been told she was pregnant. That's not the surprising part either; T and C have been friends for about twenty-five years and they are the sort of friends who may not see each other often in person, but they ALWAYS have a running gag or a joke to play on each other, so that (the "surprise! My wife is out to here!" moment), in addition to the fact that there have been many, many pregnancy disappointments up till this point for this couple, is an understandable reason why we'd not have found this out yet in all the conversations T and C have had in the past months. Which is tied into what IS the surprising part. (you knew I'd get here if you just hung in long enough, didn't you.)

C and S have been married for maybe thirteen years. For about eight of those years they tried very hard to have a baby, but S kept miscarrying. As in, ten or twelve times, ranging anywhere from just after she found out she was pregnant up to one stillbirth at five months' gestation; her doctor finally told her that she has a malformed uterus (my own personal theory is that she is a DES daughter, but that's beside the point) and that she was probably never going to carry a baby to term. So they stopped trying. Fast forward five years or so to this past summer: S was feeling sick and tired all the time. S was gaining weight no matter how much she watched what she ate and worked out. S went to the doctor to find out that she was three months pregnant. Her OB told her after a sonogram not to expect anything good; her uterus hadn't changed at all and she would probably lose this baby.

So C and S went to their church and told them about the situation. The people laid hands on S, prayed for her, anointed her, and (forgive me for sounding crass about this, but I am inexperienced) did whatever else it is that charismatic congregations do in this sort of situation. We are talking some serious praying going on. S went back to the doctor and the doctor said that her uterus was completely normal and called it a miracle.

Which we call it too. And anytime they want to skip out on a weekend date with us because they're having a healthy full-term miracle, they're welcome to do so. Even though I spent most of the day yesterday getting that guest apartment ready.

Tuesday, December 14, 2004

late-night ramble, ack

"Are you ready for Christmas?"

You can't get away from that question in the month of December. It's a conversation starter -- it takes the place of talk about the weather, and just as any pregnant woman is seen as fair game for such questions as "when are you due?" and "Do you know if it's a boy or a girl?", it's simply a given that any time you encounter anyone during the first three and a half weeks of December, from the post office clerk up to your close friends, the conversation is likely to open with "Are you ready for Christmas?" And, God help me, I answer it every time with, "Yes, almost done with the shopping." It just comes flying out of my mouth. I should come up with something witty, or just smile, or maybe I should be super-spiritual and expound on how we're preparing spiritually for this celebration of the incarnation of Christ. But I don't, I take the easy way out and give the expected response about (gack) shopping. I was never brave about it when I was pregnant, either. I always wanted to come up with smartass comments: "[sigh] No, I'm not pregnant. I guess I really need to lose this weight." Or "The next person who asks me that will feel the significant force of my wrath. Beware." I never even made the t-shirt I always joked about, with all the pertinent information, so as to avoid having to answer the same-three-questions over and over and over. It's easy to shrug philosophically now, and figure that people don't mean to be annoying; they just like to know what to SAY to a person, and dang, an obvious pregnancy makes it really simple. It was not so easy then, as any woman in late pregnancy will attest. It's the same trap with the Christmas shopping line, except that I do feel a faint sense of spiritual betrayal when I cave in, because after all, aren't I contributing to the crass commercialization of this holiday when I take the easy way out? Ah well.

As an aside, we are doing something nice this year, and we did it last year too. We made up a set of ornaments last year, each with a date (1 through 25) and a Bible verse reference having to do with the birth of Jesus or the reason for it, written on it in gold paint pen. Each night LT looks up the verse and reads it, and the kids take turns hanging the ornaments on the tree. It does help to focus us, at least once a day, on what this is all about. It's not just shopping, or cooking, or even family and togetherness and generosity. And it's certainly not just about Mommy spending three hours on the roof, risking life and limb and getting sore muscles on Sunday afternoon putting up Christmas lights which now look really cool, although she's mighty proud of that (go girl power!).

******Possibly Boring/Mildly Bragging Homeschooling Blurb Follows********

Speaking of LT and "proud of that" -- he surprised the living daylights out of us the other day. He was quizzing C on math problems, asking her things like 5+3 and 4+4, things that she has the barest grasp on (because, hey, she's not even halfway through kindergarten!). So I thought I'd teach LT a little bit of humility and even the scales a bit, and I presented him with a scrap of paper with "3x=6" on it, and asked him, "What's x?" I thought he'd be stumped. He didn't even THINK about it, just said, "Two." So I gave him some harder ones, and he got them all. This is, you have to understand, an eight-year-old boy who "hates math", who adds with his fingers, who probably wouldn't know how to calculate "fifteen divided by three" if you just presented it to him in those terms. So his father and I are giving really basic algebra problems, like 5x+4=44 or 8x-6=50, and he's nailing them all. This is both a homeschooler's dream, and a homeschooler's nightmare (well, nightmare is too strong a word. It gives me a thrilling, excited, challenged feeling like a roller coaster, not a horrified, ominous feeling like a bad dream), because hello, now the rubber actually meets the road and I have to do what I've always said is so great about homeschooling: work up a customized solution. For a person whose grasp of concepts is advanced, but whose practical working-out of grade-level things is average. Fun and rewarding, and definitely possible, but challenging too. He's shown signs of being able to grasp concepts that he couldn't explain since he was a very little boy -- things like knowing how many animals would be in each group of you divided 25 into 5 pens when he was in kindergarten. But it took much time and effort to get the multiplication tables into his head, and he still doesn't have them "memorized to automaticity" -- heck, he doesn't even have addition facts to that point yet. I am thinking he's strong on concepts and not so strong on memorization -- which, hey, if he has to be weak in one area and strong in the other, that's the way I'd want it to go. I asked him today how his brain solved those problems so fast -- what did he think about to get the answer? It took him a while to be able to slow it down enough to tell me, and he says that he knows that the 5x has to be 40, so the x has to be 8. He says that he does not think about subtracting the 4 from both sides, which is of course the "proper" way to solve the problem, and the way he'll have to learn when he's older in order to be able to move on to more complicated equations.

While I'm on the subject of school, I should put in that C is also doing really well. She finished her kindergarten math book a couple of weeks ago, so I'm having her go through the homework workbook that goes along with it, as a review, and then I'll move her on to the next grade's book. She is the opposite of her brother in learning styles -- she has a very good visual memory, and when she's read something, it stays in her head if she wants it to. She is also at the age where she is always coming up with little sayings that sound very funny to her parents, but which bore the pants off people not related to her, so I won't torture you with expectant punch lines here.

OK, OK, one story, I can't resist. But only one, I promise. We were watching footage online of elk damaging vehicles and chasing after people in Yellowstone National Park. The elk in one video would make his high-pitched yelling sound just before charging at cars driven by people who had stopped to look at him. C's cheerful, matter-of-fact comment about elk was: "Well, they make cute sounds. Buuuut, they're evil." I cannot possibly duplicate her expressiveness in type. See, I told you. I don't expect you to gush so don't feel guilty if you don't.

Good Lord I should never update this thing after midnight. I get so stupid. I'll probably delete this in the morning.

Wednesday, October 27, 2004

answers to questions

yay, questions! (see the previous entry to know what the heck is going on).

First, from Trinity Sixty-Three:


What frustrates you most in life?
Wow. I actually thought about this for quite a while, and I couldn't think of any one overarching frustration as an answer... except maybe some political ones, and those are frustrating in a different way from the day-in-day-out tension-headache frustrations. They're bigger in scale, but less of an actual factor in my daily life. Here's a list of frustrations, though. :-)

• Finding clean laundry in the dirty clothes
  
• Spending hours cleaning the kids' rooms, or coercing them into doing it, and then the next day the messiness starts creeping back in, and a week later you'd never know we'd done it.
  
• My own idiocy and laziness about household stuff. If I would just keep up, my life would be so much nicer. But I seem incapable of remembering that when it's a choice between doing a little bit of laundry and a few dishes and running around with the broom, or sitting at the computer. Until it's a TON of laundry and a HEAP of dishes and a lot of tidying-up that needs done.
  
• Working hard cooking a meal and not hearing "thank you" for it once. Bonus frustration points if the kids complain about it (which is rare, but happens occasionally).
  
• The days when my daughter seems to fall down more than she stands up. And then I feel guilty because hello, it's not like she does it on purpose.
  
• When the car won't start.
  
• When unpleasant things take way, way longer than I thought they would.
  
• My *&^%$#! insurance and its *&^%$#! high copayments for every little step along the way -- $20 to see the doctor, $30 for labs, $30 for x-rays, etc etc. I miss the HMO we had before. boo hoo. Although I imagine the doctors don't...
  
• Repeating myself. It's stupid, but it's one of the things that shortens my fuse really fast.
  
• The way kids "forget" or "didn't hear you" when you've given them a job to do.
  
• When DVDs get left lying around instead of put away.
  
• A messy house in general. Just having the house messy (which it is a lot, and it's my own fault) brings me probably halfway up to what I call my "yell threshold", before anyone does anything.
  

And then from Beth:

Okay, What are your kids going to be for Halloween, what are you going to be for Halloween, and about the home schooling thing: do you have more patience than the average mom? What's your secret?
Well, the first two are easy; we don't celebrate Halloween, for religious reasons. I keep wanting to have a New Year's party with costumes and candy, because I LOVE COSTUMES AND CANDY. But it never happens. Someday. (My kids love to dress up and they have huge tubs of costumes and accessories and lengths of fabric and helmets and belts and who knows what. Making costumes for themselves is pretty much a daily occurrence).

Patience: I don't think I'm any more patient than the average mom, really. There are days when I am frustrated, and at times I even yell at my kids, although that's something I'm working on and I'm way better about it than I used to be. It's just always been my plan to homeschool, since before I had kids. Just like people who get up early and go in to work and face nasty bosses and high stress levels and deadlines and all that -- when it's something that is a necessary part of your life, you just do it; I'm blessed that the thing that is the main focus of my life is also something I almost always enjoy. I do enjoy being around my kids, more than many moms, I think, maybe partly because I have a positive attitude about being around them; I see them as little people whom it is an immense pleasure to get to know, and it's a privilege to be around them as they grow up. And also, it's probably a lot easier because my kids aren't away from the family every day, learning habits and attitudes that cause friction at home. Not that their attitudes or habits never cause friction! (choking with laughter). But I think it's less of a problem than it would be if they were around 300 of their peers for thirty-five hours a week. We fit better together than a lot of families, because we're not becoming strangers as quickly. :)

And then some questions from Jennifer:

Do you find that your faith has led you to discriminate against others?
We all discriminate every day of our lives. "Discriminating" just means choosing, using our values and beliefs to make decisions about what we'll accept, do, etc. We won't all like everyone; we won't all want to be intimate friends with each other. So in that sense, and in the sense of 1 Corinthians 15:33, yes, my faith is one of the factors on which I base my decisions about who I will allow to be an influence in my life. What you mean in asking this question is that you think that Christians look down on others and think we're some kind of super-special people and that everyone else is not "good enough" to be one of us -- which is not the case. Christians know that nobody is "good enough", ourselves included, and that's why Jesus came in the first place. Sinning is equal-opportunity. So is salvation.

Have you ever wondered if perhaps the way you treat people isn't exactly what Jesus wants of you, even though the common practice of your religion calls for it?
Again, you're trying to make a point here, not ask me a question, but I'll pretend that's not the case and answer it anyway. Every Christian wonders about whether our actions in every arena are what Jesus would have us do. We try to follow Him. We're also flawed human beings, and yes, we'll screw up from time to time, and we don't have all the answers so sometimes we're floundering around trying to figure out what to do. Sometimes, just like everyone else, we make the wrong decision, or make the right decision but go about things the wrong way, and hurt people. Sometimes there's no visible way to make the right decision without hurting people. We are all called to be compassionate and kind to one another. That doesn't always happen.

Did you ever find a dress for that scarf I made for you?

No, I have put off major clothing purchases (in other words, anything that isn't either absolutely necessary, or free) until I finish losing weight. Which I sometimes think means I'm just in denial, because I'll be a size twelve until the end of time.

Wednesday, October 13, 2004

the reason for that "ravings" word up there

[ed. note to explain title of this post: my previous journal, from which these posts were imported, was titled "Blissful Contentment: ravings of an unquenchable optimist"]

Sunday during Bible class a friend of ours was closing in prayer and he prayed something that really stuck with me. It sounds very simple; among other things, he just thanked God for the week to come. The reason this has stayed in my mind is because there have been so many times that I was not thankful for the week ahead of me at all -- times when I was mired in a depression that made living through a week seem like a unique and abysmal kind of endurance test, when I wanted to just pull a gray haze around myself and not deal with anything. The best I could do at these times was to thank God that I'd gotten through another day; the idea of being thankful that another day was coming to be faced and dealt with was just ludicrous. I know I'm far from the only person to ever feel this way, and I'm not asking for sympathy; I think everyone goes through times like that. Heck, if I can get depressed, even though I'm usually the most annoying of Pollyannas, anyone can. I'm just expressing the joy I felt on Sunday when I realized that I do look forward to the week ahead, and the year ahead, and the rest of my life, with pleasant anticipation, like each day is waiting there wrapped in shiny paper, waiting for me to open it. And looking back, I can honestly thank God for the times I was depressed in the past (which, when I was in the middle of the depressing times, I never EVER thought I would say), because it is only by contrast that I know what a gift it truly is to feel the way I do now about the future.

Monday, September 20, 2004

soli deo gloria

I just got back from a Christian ladies' retreat at this place. Wow. I am still trying to get my brain and spirit around all the stuff I encountered there. I prayerfully believe that my life is going to be very different from now on. I had an amazing time, even though I enjoyed it in a completely different way from how I thought I might, when I thought I might enjoy it at all, which I didn't think I really would.


Signing off for the immediate future and I don't know exactly when I'll be back.

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