Well, Christmas. Much more real than Thanksgiving, but still nice. Good to know that real life in regard to my family can be manageable and can be good. Something to be thankful for. I don't think I'll write a very Christmas-y post, or a happy birthday Jesus post, but there's this: if he came to save me, if he forgave me, then I must be nothing but thankful and repentant and myself forgiving. If he can forgive me, then I should ask for forgiveness, both from my God and my family, the people it's hardest with. I should be quick to turn back, even if it feels too late--"maybe forgiveness is right where you fell." And those are hard things coming, I'll tell you, but I don't think I feel the desperate need for Christ so strongly in anything else. I am rebellious and independent by nature, and arrogant, oh man, but I need my God and he's good at showing me that and then being right there for me. If it's ever going to work, my family loving one another, then God's got to be the absolute nexus of it, he's got to be the one doing it through us, we've got to learn to let his hand be the one reaching out to each other. There's something good in this, and it's God. It's hearing my mom talk about praying for people, having a half hour discussion over the phone with her about different things in the Bible, about God. It's little places like that with Josh. All three of us believe in God, but there's a small feeling of the beginnings of it being less individual, more familial--the three of us seeking God together, calling each other to that. That would be wonderful. There's hope in that.
The drive home was strange in a very detached sort of way. Sometimes I get the feeling that I'm just watching things, that I'm separate from the things going on. It's usually only for a little bit, and then I lurch back in all of a sudden--anyway, I felt like I was driving through a movie on the way home, something American Beauty-esque. I had the soundtrack to Garden State playing (and I have a whole blog planned about that planned, so if I ever get to it...), if you haven't heard it, think acoustic folk, really chill. And then I saw a pair of pants on the side of the road. Love it, hilarious. But then, two or three minutes later, I started seeing all these clothes scattered across the highway, tossing all limp in the blow-rush of cars passing by. I can't think of the right verb to describe this--imagine a puppet, its movements, careless. The plastic bag from American Beauty, the way the wind floats it, except clothes, red and blue and this purple long sleeve thing that ripped in the slipstream past my windshield, sleeves thrashing and waving.
I wanted to catch them, but I was watching the colors toss through the air around me, some dream of childhood, laundry hung out on the line meshed with the improbability of driving this machine rocketing down a stretch of asphalt. Imagine kites, between cars, and rushing road sound. Flying home.
1. Yesterday came with two bits of news, one I'd been waiting for and the other, if not completely unexpected, then at least unhoped for. The bad news? I don't get to see my brother this Christmas. I found out last night after waking up from a four hour after-work 'nap' and in all the haze of being half awake, it took a few minutes to register. I'm reminding myself of the wonderful time we had over Thanksgiving, and, as they say, to take them as they come. I got him a Bible about a week ago, and actually it's really cool. If it weren't for teen boys, I'd get one like it. I'm holding out that I can still give it to him.
The other bit is good news, exciting news. Got an email back after lunch from a lady from Link staff. Completely honest? I was terrified the last two weeks that they were going to tell me no. Terrified is the wrong word--more like back-of-my-mind anxious, steeling myself for whatever their response would be. So I've gone on past the preliminary application, and waiting for me in my inbox is an incredible amount of paperwork and thirty essay questions. One part at a time, I tell myself. No freaking out about fundraising yet. There are things about the potentiality of moving overseas somewhat longterm to do this that I have no reservations at all about, and there are other things, through IFES, that make me hesitate, linger over uncertainties. But after some prayer and a night to sleep on it: I'm trusting God will use all this for his glory, to bless me and bring me closer to himself. And stepping outside to go to work this morning, bright and cold, I caught myself wondering about what a life over there would look like, what a morning would feel like, and there it was, peace about the whole thing. "For I know the plans I have for you..." and all that.
2. I have a mullet. It is unfortunate.
Not intentionally, of course. I don't remember if I wrote about this or not, but sometime around late September I got a bad bad bad bad haircut. And it did look a bit like a mullet. And then I had my friend fix it for me, and it looked good until the next morning, and then it looked like a shaggy mullet (no offense to my friend, and I still appreciate the fix and I did really like it at first). So since then, the best thing I've been able to do is to pin up the front shorter part and then it looks okay except somehow pinned up combined with the angle of the cut and the shape of my face it's managed to make my cheekbones look bulbous. I can wear it down now, which I'm glad, but it's just choppy and uneven and starting to be noticeably longer in the back.
Solution? Well, haircut, hello. Reshape it, somehow. Except I'll have to either go back to the hair cutting place or have someone I know do it, and I'm so paranoid at this point that I don't trust anyone within ten feet of my hair. I've resolved, over the course of the last few days, and risk Great Clips once more. Even though they hacked up my hair last time, I've had really good haircuts from them before. And I'm super cheap, I can't bring myself to pay more than the $12 it costs to cut my hair there, without the wash and styling. Which I never get just because I hardly ever do more than comb it when I get out of the shower anyway. Sounds like I don't care how my hair looks, except I'm worried an awful lot about how the haircut makes it look. So crossing my fingers, I'm going under the scissor blades tonight.
3. URBANA09, baby. Leaving sometime Saturday afternoon, and looking forward like you wouldn't believe to seventeen or however many hours in the car. And the amazingness of URBANA, worshiping in other languages--heck, just worshiping with that many people, period--and learning more about Jesus, his heart for the world. I need to be doing more to prepare for all this. I'm excited though. I've debated about bringing my laptop--I want to be able to post when I'm there, but I've decided I'm going to leave it here. I can always write, which I do hope to do anyway, and I figure the distraction is better not to have.
4. Saved the best for last. My coworker got me a Christmas present today and it's about the most amazing thing ever. She got me this bright bright pink Snuggie I'm wearing right this very moment. Actually, it is not a Snuggie, it's a Hugglie, which makes it even better. And it's perfect because I am always freezing at work. Whiiiiich--I need to go back to doing now, all bundled up in my Hugglie.
We drove back from 'Nam last night so I could work tomorrow morning, and somewhere in the back-road stretch between there and home, sometime around three in the morning, I was looking out the window and surprise. Sky full of stars. I forget sometimes about how when you're in the country you see so many more stars. In high school I always told myself I'd move back to the country when I grew up, somewhere really out in the middle of nowhere and sleep out in the middle of a field if I wanted where the sky looked like a city lit up at night. I feel kind of silly writing about stars. I just forget about that kind of thing living in the city.
I want to live somewhere one day where I don't have to have a car. I want to spend time in the mountains in the summer, climbing things and seeing the stars where there aren't any lights around. And live near a port, near the ocean. What I'm really saying is a mix of the places I've lived and spent time in which makes total sense, sort of like saying I'd live in the country when I always had. Well, I can't really fit all the places I want to live in one place, but, well--yes, I'd like not to have to own a car. To get around the city on public transit and walking, and to be able to visit the country sometimes. Anything more specific, well I don't know, but I like the movement. And I want to always be caught by surprise when I look at the sky at night.
I'm sitting here watching Julie & Julia with my roommate, every so often parroting the things the French women are saying in English, so that what you see is me with all bundled up and beanied, laptop balanced on top of two blankets, me saying there! (theh-ul) sure! (shu-ul) with! (wheesze) but I am helping! (el-peeng) I love this.
It's just cold enough that I'm almost too warm underneath all the bundling and my fingertips and nose are cold and I'm thinking that hanging out here writing is a nice way to spend a Sunday night.
There two things about snow, for me: first, I've seen it. Not a lot, but I've seen it. Second, I have no idea at all how to dress properly for it and while I can't go outside more a minute while it's snowing without my whole body shaking, it is pretty. I like the ice, most. It's only raining here but if you go outside it still smells like snow, like something--maybe the ice?--sharp, defined lines, something cold and precise. I like the way, after snow or ice when the sun comes, everything is so clear, crystalline. Same as after hurricanes, except then it's warm and muggy, but clear, nothing left at all but swept-away sky.
I'm hoping for a little snow while we're in St. Louis, but there's a bit of apprehension mingled in there as well, as checking weather.com tells me the first day we're there it'll be twenty-eight degrees. The high, that is, meaning it'll probably be below twenty at night and I'm afraid I am a southern, warm-weather creature and when the air isn't thick I feel like I'm moving through things too quickly. And that's on top of being cold, of course.
Funny thing is that we don't use our heat. It's sixty-one in here now, but I've mastered the art of several blankets, sweats and the heater couch. Were I outside in sixty-one degree weather--well, maybe high fifties--and were there the slightest bit of wind I guarantee you I'd be cold. I swear it's a mental thing--in my own house (not at work, mind you) I can deal with extreme-ish temperatures (once more, all this being relative and fairly American, all this in reference to the use of central air and heat). In the coldest part of our admittedly mild winter, if it's thirty-five outside it'll get down to about fifty in the house, maybe a bit below during the night, but that's not till late January, early February. When we were kids it would get colder living in a trailer that wasn't insulated and gas way too expensive, and I remember getting dressed in the morning and being able to see my breath. My point is that, despite complaining, I can deal with the cold inside without a problem, but outside, I'm telling you. Drops below sixty and I'm shivering.
Part of me likes it all, though. I remember spending Christmas Eve my freshman year outside on my god-sister's porch listening to music and writing and my fingertips were so red and cold I could barely move them, but Christmas lights look different when it's that cold. They're pretty from the car, but feel warmer, more Christmas-y when the parts not bundled up are cold. Cold nose, cold fingertips, snow on your cheeks when you look up if you're really lucky.
Mmm, I'm just thinking. It's winter in, what, three days now? Already? Winter feels to me the same way black and white photographs do, that timeless feel about them. I suppose the connection there is a clear enough one. Everything's frozen. And it's like a picture in winter, still and clear and I can feel every little thing, none of the sluggishness of stewing, east coast heat. I'm thinking words with Latin roots to do with light--lucent, luminous, luz, lumină. Lucid.
I'm sitting here listening to music on shuffle, and just now Chris Tomlin's song God of This City just started to play, and my stomach is somewhere by my feet. I don't think I've heard this song since I used it in a slideshow I made for fundraising for the Romania trip, and while Mighty to Save was the song I first associated with all of that, I don't know. It's the words, it's the sounds of a song I haven't heard since before I went, when that country was to me some pictures I'd found on google and what I imagined cities post-Communism to be like, mostly images from We the Living. I didn't know that country, and still I don't, but what I did know was completely intangible because what's a statistic numbering Evangelical Christians in Romania next to a group of Romanian students singing out to God because they love him, because they only want give glory to him?
This is messy, it's not well-articulated or punctuated, but I'm thinking of how I saw God moving in those students, in a church in Bucharest, and the words are exactly it. "You're the God of this city, you're the King of these people, you're the Lord of this nation." And "for greater things have yet to come, and greater things are still to be done in this city."
"There is no one like our God."
There's a verse I read earlier today and I've been sending it to everyone, and it's amazing how it's exactly this: "Look at the nations and watch--and be utterly amazed. For I am going to do something in your days you would not believe, even if you were told." Hab. 1:5
If there's one thing God continues to do, no matter what my situation is, it's amaze me. Just blow me away. He's always doing it, and sometimes all I can do is sit there and turn my hands out and think, whoa. This is a God who loves his children. Who's promised them hope and a future, who hides them in the shadow of his hand. Really, there is no one like our God.
Well, I am back. And it is about time. For me, I mean. Creature of habit, as always, just got out of the habit of writing in the middle of all the exams and didn't really get back in. But anyway, hop back on, or something like that.
November was a bit of an experiment. The initial idea was to write every day of the month, just to see if I could. And at first it went great--turns out length for me is more an issue of will, up until a certain point, and as always a bit of discipline does wonders. Who knew? But then it got weird and emo, and after the second or third time missing I decided, well I can't go every day now, and let myself not keep up. Here I'm reading way too much into this, but that makes sense considering everything to do with grace as of late, but I am learning, and it is good, and with any luck, that'll come in future posts. I kind of feel weird about following a month of a ton of productivity with a month of a lack of it, but all reading into things aside, how about I just write this post?
The only thing that really comes immediately to mind is that I switched my facebook (which I will be giving up around New Years for a yet to be determined period of time) into Romanian sometime during exams, and I'll tell you what, that has been an adventure. Facebook's buggy, as always, and at first it was this really strange hybrid between Spanish (it's been in Spanish for about a year now) and English and Romanian. Now the Spanish has mostly gone away, but it still alternates between the English and the Romanian--one day one part will be one language, and the next it'll be the other. And then the Romanian keeps changing. For example, the like button--one day it'll say imi place (I like) and the next it'll say iti place (you like) which does make sense, depending on from whose perspective you're saying it (either I'm saying I like it, therefore clicking the button, or they're asking me if I like it, and then I click the button).
I love to do this sort of thing though, with anything at all I do things repetitively on. My old roommate or someone switched my phone into Portuguese and, because at first I couldn't figure out how and later I was too lazy, for three months I would substitute the Portuguese (kind of like the 'I me gusta'ed his status' thing from before) within regular English rules, all American sounding and everything. That said, the temptation to not do away with facebook for a while lies in the exposure to Romanian, and for that reason I still may not do it--I could flip through the New Testament I have, but it's really just not as effective, even if I'm doing it parallel to the English, which--
Cool word thing. So the other night I was hanging out on biblegateway and I looked up Isaiah 43 in Romanian and I know it fairly well in English--not well enough to quote it or anything, but to guess along, follow along, figure it out with some of the Romanian (with my Bible open beside me to for real follow along, of course), and anyway. I came across the word martorii, and I thought, huh, that looks a little like martyr. And I never knew this until I read the beginning of this book by Richard Wurmbrand (who, ironically, was a Romanian Jew), but martyrs, witnesses--well, I'll do a bad job of explaining it but they're pretty synonymous. And so when I saw martorii, between context and what I'm assuming is a common Latin root, I thought it could be witnesses, and sure enough it was. And that's pretty much the coolest word thing I've come across lately.
There's some other stuff too, but I can't think of any of it right now. Looking forward to getting back into the habit of this. Until then--
because look at that face.
(regular posting should resume forthwith)
