not one single thought

The past few days have been a bunch of randomness and I haven't been able to find a single thread to grasp and blog about.

Last night I went to a pub for traditional Irish music. Exposed black beams supported the low ceiling of a dimly lit cozy of a room and we walked on a creaking wooden floor splashed with drink. Was crowded, relaxed, and smelled of smoke and sweat. Quite the scene. I enjoyed the experience but when I took a mental step back realized how crafty Satan is to have interwoven a moral sin (specifically, excessive drinking) into the tapestry of Irish history and culture. Many of their beloved songs and stories - oral traditions passed down through generations - centers on this activity. For Christians or others to condemn the practice of intentional drunkenness means coming up against a deep-rooted national pride hundreds of years in the making. I'm not saying it is the solitary fact of Irish history, just that it is so interwoven that it is now hard to separate the sin from national identity. Not sure where I'm going with this. But even after being here for a week I forget to allow my heart to break about it because the prevailing attitude is that it's harmless fun. Drinking looks so much different here than at home. So many people on all nights of the week intentionally drinking to a state of illness.

I leave for Taize on Tuesday but haven't had much time to think about it. I can see that God is preparing my heart for the experience but still really don't know what to expect.

A quiet Sunday afternoon. I went to church this morning with Jenni. A beautiful service but my mind and heart are currently so distant from the book of Ezekiel that it was hard to connect with the sermon. Hoping to take a long walk with God this afternoon, gaze at old stone houses and delight in each step taken on pavement so far from home, remembering whenever I feel lonely that my friends and family love me from across the world. Only this, and remembering that Jesus is present, gets me through the empty moments.

Tomorrow I'm catching up with two friends from my last visit - one, an older woman who has sacrificially given up almost everything to serve full time at a ministry called The Way In. The second is a woman a few years older than me who has a cute apartment, went to university in Scotland with Prince William, and teaches ESL with a Belfast accent to a whole host of foreigners in the area. Will undoubtedly be great conversations.

A thought from my journal yesterday:

Feist is an excellent band to listen to in Europe. Grey half-light of a rainy midmorning in Belfast brightens the room but does not invite me out of a warm bed. Deep under covers, arms tucked in to keep away the chill. Blogging, quick emails, reading Jane Eyre. So nice to be here.

emerging artist

You know those really relaxing days where everything seems a bit quieter and laying on your bed all day seems like the most reasonable response to the soft light coming in through your window? As it looks, today is making out to be one of those peaceful, modest days. Unfortunately I'm at a place where I want to be jumping off of something, screaming till my lungs pop, running until I fall down, all culminating in me laying in a pool of my own sweat, a near-lifeless heap strewn about on the grass... restless I think best sums it up.

-Anonymous

some Germany photos

Me, Katharina, Thomas and Regina hiked to this view of the Rhein













Beaming after my first experience climbing




















Some nice candles in a massive cathedral

for the love of the Irish

I told my friends here that I am dedicating this blog to them. They are quite excited and now I feel great pressure to perform. Here goes...

Not much has changed since I lived in Belfast in 2006. The new Starbucks at the end of the road and two beautiful new roommates add excitement but don't alter the essence of this city that now lives simultaneously in my memory and in reality. Many strange and stimulating moments as we record new memories over old ones in familiar places. I love the narrow streets and never remember when I walk to Nicola's parked car that the misplaced steering wheel is located on the right, not the left.

I am a roommate again. I have been welcomed back with warm embraces, giggly smiles and hearty Northern Irish cooking. Love seeps through the walls of this hundred-year-old house. Excited squeals about Nicola's new boy, collective moans about Jenni's decision to cater a 1200-person meal, and me repeating every other word they say in order to acquire their queer Irish accent. My favorites: pain (pronounced peein'), power (pronounced paahr) and various nicknames already thrown at me...wee pet, dote, plonker, numpty. I'm starting to develop a strange kind of complex.

I've already drank more tea and eaten more small pastries than my body knows what to do with. Remembered that the last time I was here I ate so many of these desserts... they call them tray bakes... that I actually threw up, and have been trying to refrain a bit. Praying for God's help.

I visited Belfast Bible College today and in the evening went to an evangelistic kids' club where I reunited with some kids from East Belfast, most of whom need Jesus and a warm bath. They pretended to remember me from my last visit (so sweet) and I teared up as they walked out the door. God's love for them overwhelmed me. Now I sit closer than a sister to these girls on the couch, them "revising" (studying) for a medical exam on Friday and me indulging in Jane Eyre and wishing I had some chocolate cake.

Missing you all quite a lot. Loving you from afar.

life in a list

I am sorry this will be a lame and short post but I just have a few moments and wanted to share some of the past few days...

God gave me another piano, this time in my friend Katharina's room, and sunlight streamed onto the keys as my soul played this morning. Just what I needed.

Good and deep conversations throughout the past few days. Learned this universal truth about women: we don't have the solution but we admire the problem. Hours of talking lead us to restate our initial hypothesis as a conclusion - wow, life is complicated. I usually do not tolerate generalizations like that but all of our analyzation proves nothing more or less than this one declaration.

Visited Beethoven's house. Felt more talented after just moments standing on his winding staircase and scuffing my feet along black and white tiles in the entryway.

College students look the same everywhere and the university district is inherently cool. 

Proud to be an American. German friends were aghast to learn about drive-through Starbucks and outdoor library drop boxes that exist to save us the hassle of actually leaving our cars. You think their efficiency-oriented minds would react with jealousy instead of shock. What is it about traveling that makes me immediately more cynical?

German breakfasts and dinners centered around bread. It's a beautiful thing.  

wish to see your face

I would be lying to say that my weary body wasn't crying for lack of sleep and my heart for the absence of home today. I enjoyed a beautiful first day in Europe with the family of my dad's wife just outside of Frankfurt, Germany. Brilliant sun stole the shock and sting of Germany's cold winter air. I learned vocabulary from small children and was comforted to play quiet notes on a keyboard in the living room. But my thoughts and heart were torn.

I struggle tonight to know with how much finality to shelve my longings for the person and people and things of home, and conversely with how much loving acceptance to acknowledge my heartache and allow it to linger. There is risk either way, but my conclusion during this jet-lagged, wide-awake hour of 1 a.m. is that the greater danger lies in silencing the sighs of my soul, one of God's main method of communication with me. I dare not deny the presence of my deep longings and instead must enter fully into the missing and the pain, that I might discover what God has to teach me there.

You are each one dear and precious to me. It remains to be seen whether my irrational, culture-shocked frustration at there not being English writing on my package of cheese, for example, will linger and lead me home, or if by acknowledgment of my feelings, understanding and okay-ness will grow and God will give me peace.

It goes without saying that this has nothing at all to do with cheese.


(disclaimer: for new readers of my blog, please realize that in my writing I tend to emphasize small details of my daily life that sometimes make my experience and interpretation of events seem melodramatic or tragic, when really I am doing just fine. this is art...please don't worry.=)

transcending the cow

Fire warms my cheeks to pink in this beloved world: a sink-into-able leather sofa and within my reach African red tea steaming silently from a wide-mouthed porcelain mug. Strangers become friends by shared experience. Absorbed by George Muller's biography, his story comforting and challenging, while a hundred years later coffeehouse satellite radio makes me trendy just by the listening.

The sky darkens outside and intimacy glows brighter as I await the arrival of a close friend. Frequent glances toward the door. My thoughtful meditations on the words of an inspiring man slip to darker corners of my consciousness and solitary moments stretch with anticipation. I am eager for shared time and quiet conversation.

All this for a dollar and some change. I moan about the extortionary price of tea but money can't buy the beauty of this moment.

he tells me - "bury your head"

...or something along those lines.

My latest briefing with God yielded this directive: I must close my eyes in battle and choose blindness. My critical task is to shut out the artificial light of my own wisdom and scheming and stalwartly refuse to predict a million different dangers, mapping the location of potential land mines and carefully calculating avoidance of each one. This burdensome and futile task of concerned analysis falls perilously beyond my duty and call.

The Commander demands retreat and regression - "become like a child." Intentional vulnerability is my weapon. Closed earthly eyes will allow for the strengthening of spirit-vision that sees only God, and Christ in God.

His words to me tonight:
stop.
stop.
stop.

I know not the way God leads me, but well do I know my Guide.
-Martin Luther

what I need is the one who made the need

Our scramble to fill voids in our lives created by loss cause us to miss the point.

I lost my wallet on Wednesday and count this event a highlight of the week. The stress came first, followed closely by frustrated regret. But if I hadn't misplaced it, God couldn’t have brought it back. And the excited shrieks that ensued after He returned it to my care created an intimate moment between me and my Maker that wouldn’t have existed but for the loss.

“Look!” God proudly declares. “I have given you the seed-bearing plants throughout the earth and all the fruit trees for your food. And I have given all the grasses and other green plants to the animals and birds for their food.”

God could have designed humans and animals to survive without needing food or shelter, or a valid driver's license and Safeway Club Card. But these physical, (somewhat) universal realities allow the divine to penetrate the dirt. What at first seem to us irritations and limitations, as our God-eyes adjust to the light of His presence on earth, we begin to view as shadows that prompt us to turn lightward and ask, believe, receive. Whether simple or wise, let us recognize our dependency and be quick to seek the single Source that both created and joyfully satisfies our longings.

(my life) work in progress

I used to love life when I could imagine it as the handiwork of a painter devoted to realism. Accurate, precise, clean. But I have grown to love messy.

After I graduated from high school, my exact lines and perfect proportions faded and I was devastated. Life stopped working like it was supposed to – my Brady bunch family dissolved, I bent beneath the weight of clinical depression, and my liberal college education smeared rigid black and white convictions into a smudged gray sketch rendered by a blunt No. 2.

Since then, color has slowly bled back into my palette. I emerged from university into a relaxed watercolor painting in which I allowed myself to live instead of think. I stepped out of heavy intellectual debates and wrestled as little as possible with grand theories. I could breathe.

The forms are beginning to emerge again and definition grows. But the shapes and faces that materialize aren’t the harsh “realities” of my high school paradigm, unquestioning and unquestioned. They are dynamic, fleshed-out, shifting. They are imperfect and underground and full of humanity.

I want to grasp God’s hand and charge into the sea of an impressionist’s billion spots and LIVE and when I die to resurface, lifted out of the madness, and smile as He reveals His masterpiece.

As long as I’m made of dirt I want to see His brush strokes with my earthly eyes – imperfections pointing to a perfect Painter.

while

I’m standing on the shore and I study the far-off line: sky kisses water; I see the future. And the wind tempts and screams and my feet grow wet and cold from lapping waves. Garbage scars the sand.

And I just smile toward the line and the wide-open sea: the fullness of love that carries me to promised joy.