Sarah Grace on vacation

No, this doesn’t mean my mind has left the building (though that’s probably debatable). What it DOES mean is that, starting early tomorrow morning, Dave and I are off to Colorful Colorads (seriously, it’s one of the state mottos). We’ll get to see my parents, his best friend, and the best that Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National have to offer.

I haven’t decided yet about my cyber presence while I’m gone. I guess I’ll just see what I want, what I need, and how it all works out. But if I disappear, don’t get too worried

Watch this video

Ok, this is my last post this week, I PROMISE. Unless something deliciously bloggable comes along, of course.

Maybe most of evangelical humanity has seen this before I did last Sunday, but it moved me so deeply. Watching it, I realized that I don’t need any better proof for the fact that part of what I’m made to do is hear people’s faith stories than the tears that came to my eyes when I saw this.

(Note: This youtube version is all that will post on WordPress, but there’s a better version here, if you can’t read the words that come up below.”

When I watched this, I felt like someone ripped my heart out of my chest, mushed it around for a while, and handed it back to me, but all in a good way. And then, our pastor had each of us do the same thing and share it with the rest of the church (there’s 20-30 people at my church most Sundays). Wow. I don’t know everyone’s story, but what I saw, both in the words written on the cardboard and the looks on their faces, my heart overflowed.

Our faith stories are so important. They’re so key to understanding ourselves and the people around us, and they perpetuate the faith. When I hear how God has helped you, I’m changed. When you hear how he provided for me, you’re encouraged to expect his provision for yourself. We need these stories. They’re part of how we stay alive in the faith.

P.S. Sabrina bloggeth.

Choosing Light, Part II

I’ve been mulling on the things I said and the things some of you said in response to my post that asked, “How do we choose light?” You guys offered me so much there that I think it’s still settling into my soul. That’s how I think about these things…it’s like the new ideas need a chance to bonk around in my soul to see if they find a place, or disrupt things that are already there, or add clarity, or something totally different. For those who’ve watched The Price is Right enough times, it’s like Soul Plinko.

One of the conclusions I’ve come to (at least for now) is the idea that God’s calling is probably something different than I’ve ever thought before. I don’t just mean that his calling on my life is different, but that calling itself is a different sort of thing.

I’ve always waited for the herald, or the voice from the sky, or the flippity-flup of my heart that would indicate that I’ve found IT, the thing that God is sitting up there waiting for me to figure out that I’m supposed to do (or, more realistically, one of the things). I’ve wanted something outside myself to let me know that I’m in the right place, whether that’s another person, God himself, or my own body that makes the confirmation (note: the relationship this indicates I’ve had/I have with my body could be a whole ‘nother post).

So here’s the idea I’ve been looking at in wonderment and awe: What if God built his calling for me into…well…ME? What if it’s…not quite hard-wired, but something like that…into the structure of my personality and my heart and even my body?

I think this is what some of you were getting at before, but I’ve had to find words and ideas for it that I could understand and that assuage my fears of “going off the deep end.”

I like this idea for several reasons:

1) It preserves God’s role. If any of what I do is ever only about me, I think I’m lost. If it’s about being me for the sake of being me, I see myself wandering forever in the oblivion of my soul. It’s not a pretty picture.

2) It preserves God’s image in me. The imago dei is there, it comes out in particular ways through me, and it doesn’t come out in those ways in everyone.

3) It allows for the influences of sin. I know that God’s image in me is battered and twisted and oozing in places. I know that it doesn’t get reflected the way he intended because I’ve sinned and been sinned against. I know that the pain is as real as the joy. If God built his calling for me in to me, as parts of his image that I’m to show the world, then some of those parts are injured and influenced by sin. It doesn’t mean I shouldn’t go forward in them, but that I should look for healing along the way.

4) It deals well with my experience. I’ve experienced the desire to write like a calling from within, like there’s a voice ahead of me, just over the next mountain, down in the green valley by the river, calling to me to write and I keep chasing after it but I don’t ever catch up.

5) It allows for multiple callings. It makes sense that God would call me (and each of us) to be or do to more than one thing, to be about more than one thing. I’ve always felt like there are so many directions that I feel called to, and the push to choose one has been painful.

6) It allows for both human choice and the influence of circumstance. There are SO MANY things I’d love to learn to do, to pursue and follow after. I can’t do all of them, but I think they would all reveal more about God. So I choose to do the ones that come before in particular ways and that are achievalbe given my lifestyle, free time, and financial means. In another life, I might have been a cellist or a sailboat-racer, but I haven’t made the choice or had the opportunity to learn those things and so I don’t reflect God in those ways.

7) It shows God as a lavish, loving Father. We each have so many things we could pursue. We’re more drawn to some than to others, but there’s still more to pursue than we possibly could. And from these things that we know we could love, God lets us choose. I think there are particular things he puts on particular hearts where it would be wrong to choose something else, but this doesn’t seem to happen very often. There are so many good gifts that we have to choose among them for the ones we love the most.

It accounts for people who never get a chance to pursue anything. Getting to pursue our hearts and our gifts is something that, at least in part, comes out of luxury. I don’t have to work 12-hour days to put food on the table, so I have time to write and paint and hear peoples’ God-stories. If I did have to work 12-hour days, I would come in at night, grab a bite to eat, kiss Dave, and go to bed. That wouldn’t mean that the things I love weren’t in my heart, but that sin kept them from flourishing. I still would have the image of God in me, with all those callings, but I wouldn’t get to pursue them the same way I can now. I would pursue them in smaller ways. That’s a hard life, but it comforts me to think that the inside is still the same even though it looks different on the outside.

9) It allows me to pursue myself and makes that into a way to pursue God. As long as I pursue me and the things in my own heart with God and his glory in mind, self-pursuit is a good thing. As I pursue me, I pursue God. As I get to know myself, I get to know him.

Functionally, I’m not sure how much this idea really helps me. I still have to choose what I want to do and when and how and where I want to do it. But I feel a lot more free emotionally and spiritually to shake out the box of my soul and see what’s inside that I don’t even know about yet.

Note: You know, I read this back through and it sounds so…academic, or theological. And I don’t write it that way. Truly, these things are on my heart and in my soul.

My little gallery

I don’t share my artwork very often. I’m not entirely sure why. Mostly, it’s because I do it for me, because I like making the world a more beautiful place and because I feel like my most peaceful and happy self when I make art. It’s a lot like writing that way, except that making the art feels extraneous, somehow, but in a good way.

Maybe it’s like Heather’s piece on being a creator vs. being an artist. Writing is at least part of what I’m called to do, and as such it’s great fun but it’s also deadly serious. The art I make seems above and beyond, like it both comes from and creates so much extra joy and I get afraid that I’ll break the joy if I share it.

Also, it feels particularly self-indulgent…as if blogging weren’t bad enough

Nonetheless, I finally got my new camera a couple of weeks ago, and it’s wonderful. I don’t think I wrote here about the trials and tribulations it took to get it (at one point, I owned a new memory card and card reader, a camera case, and an extra battery, but NO CAMERA!!!), but it was so worth it. So this is my new baby:

It’s super-duper, with a great macro feature, 10x optical zoom, and 9.1 megapixels. Once of the things I’ve discovered that it does really, really well is take pictures of my artwork. Whoo-hoo! And there’s something so exuberent about the piece I worked on this morning that won’t let me get away with not sharing it. So here goes…

I’m not such a good GimpShop user, so the crop isn’t great and I’m not sure how true the colors are (those are both things I’ve heard you’re supposet to change in editing when you take pics of art), but it makes me happy share it. I’m not sure it’s finished–it needs something, maybe. It will sit in our extra room/office/studio for a while and I’ll look at it every time I see it and eventually whatever it needs will come to me. That’s how it usually happens, anyway. I painted those purple flowers on it this morning and thought I’d ruined it, but then I outlined them and they were perfect.

It’s crazy to me that there’s part of me that works like that, that knows, intuitively, that I should paint purple-and-red flowers on the sparse tree that’s on the happiest background I’ve ever made, even though it doesn’t make sense to me. It’s always like that, and then it turns out in the end and I wonder why I bother THINKING about it when my intuition knows what it’s doing. It’s like the shelf in my kitchen that holds saucers, cups, mugs and Voltron. Don’t ask me how I thought of it, but it works and makes Dave and I both happy.

And now, because I’m in a particularly, um…vociferous, maybe…mood, here are some more. The first two are closeups of the flowers from above.

I love how the purple changes based on whether it’s on top of green, turquoise, blue, or yellow.

Next is the very first Gocco print I ever made (and if you don’t know what Gocco is, it’s a Japanese printing press…google it for more info ’cause I can’t really explain it).

I love how the imperfect texturing makes it look antiqued. I would love to do a series of these with different words and hang them in my child’s room someday.

And here’s another Gocco’d print:

This one’s more serious, somehow. I did it last fall, when the forest fires were burning down people’s homes and there wasn’t anything anyone (even the firefighters, for a time) could do. (The wild pattern behind it is one of the many international pieces of cloth I’ve collected…if the pic was straight or I knew how to straighten it, I’d cut it out…I think it’s distracting.)

Here’s the tree alone, which I also like, though it needs something…

That one looks a little more like winter, with a path that something or someone left through the snow. More than the others, it makes me ask, “What’s it all about?”

If I share many more of these, I’ll have to buy more storage space from WordPress Actually, those are all I have pics of, at least on this computer. I hope you enjoyed this little gallery tour.

(And if you didn’t, well, it was either this or a rant to the producers of Battlestar Galactica, who have postponed the second half of season four (the last season!) until FEBRUARY 2009 (!!!). I’m not usually this attached to a TV show, but Galactica is one of the best I’ve ever seen. Anyway, this post seemed more positive, somehow, than that one would have been, so thank your lucky stars I thought of the idea )

How DO we choose light?

So, I’ve been pondering something lately and I want to share it with you all. These thoughts aren’t fully-formed yet, and I’m not sure how clear they’ll be, but I sense that some of you might have a lot to say on some of these topics and I’d love your input.

I feel caught between following my dreams and being a Christian.

It’s not that I want something that’s even vaguely immoral or anything akin to that; more like, I’m afraid to believe in myself and my dreams because I know that sin gets in the way.

I love reading about women (and men, though I mostly hear about women) who believe in themselves, who’ve learned to say, “Fuck ‘em!” to their detractors, who find deeply good things at the center of themselves and others. I love the lives these women live, with their art and creativity and ability to invest in themselves and their talents. I love knowing that at least a few people have children who will grow up knowing they’re loved and held, no matter what they choose to do or who they choose to be.

At the same time, I feel like I can’t quite enter in, like God says I have to stand in the doorway that leads to all of this beauty and say, “No, the center of us is bad. There is sin and emptiness in our middles, not goodness and light. I can’t trust what comes from there, because who knows what is influencing it.”

And there’s truth in that. Not everything that burbles up from the middle of me is good. Much of it is dark, confused, wrong, manipulative, tired, sad, angry, hurtful, resentful, frustrated, etc. I don’t want to live the rest of my life investing deeply in something that’s based on any of these things. I don’t want to be so dazzled by a beglittered facade that I miss the terrible shadow forming behind it. I don’t want to invest exclusively in myself and miss God.

In the end, I really think that the Bible says that every good thing comes from God: power, creativity, meaning, glory, beauty, etc. If I was just left as me, well, there wouldn’t be a whole lot of that.  But how do I know what I’ve been given? How do I know that these things I want are really from Him and not something I’m trying to take on because I’m deceived into thinking that it’s good?

I’m afraid that pursuing what I want would be self-focused and arrogant, because I would be doing what I wanted to do regardless of the money it brought in or Dave’s and my practical needs. I feel like pursuing these things would be giving in to a life of self-focused falsehoods. The word “debauchery” comes to mind here, like giving up what is safe and what makes sense financially and educationally and on every practical level imaginable would be indulging myself to the point of my soul’s destruction. I feel like I don’t have the right to ask Dave to let me pursue something that very well might not work out, might leave us poor and stretched and stressed. Our lives are tied together now, and ruin for me means ruin for him, too. I feel like I don’t have the right to be wild, heedless, or to take big risks. I need to be steady, focused, patient, practical and solid. I need to hold on to the status quo until it makes sense to follow my dreams. I need to follow the path I’m on, not see what’s beyond the glade.

And I feel like all of this comes from God. The God I know wants me to take care of practical matters first. He puts duty over desire, every single time. Practical responsibility trumps responsibility to myself in almost every circumstance. He is skeptical of my heart’s motives, wanting me to examine them over and over and over again before I do anything, so that I know whether or not they’re pure. The God I know didn’t make me particularly special; sure, I’m unique, but I’m not going to change the world. I’m not special enough to get to do anything out of the ordinary, like for a job or something. My God wants me to always put others first, to do what feels like betraying my own soul, if I have to, so that they can get what’s good for them (is this the “dying to self” that Christ practiced? I don’t know.) He tells me that it’s selfish to ask for resources for training, or to risk resources on something that might pan out. I think he wants me to not need to pursue the things I want to be happy. I should be detached and content, not chomping at the bit to get the hell out of Dodge.

Needless to say, God and I are on some pretty strange (I almost wrote “strained”) terms right now.

In the end, I think that some of what I come to this dilemma believing is true, while some of it is false. I think that some of the messages I’m hearing from the outside are true, while parts of those messages are also false. I want to sift the truth from the falsehood, pick it up and let the rest fly away. Letting go of lies is harder than that, though, whether they’re long-and-closely held or new-and-alluringly-attractive. It’s a fight inside, and at the moment I don’t feel like I can see anything beyond the dust and confusion of the clash

*****

I just read over this and I’m afraid I’ve revealed too much here. And yet…well, maybe not. Thus, the longing to say these things, to make this heart-struggle real, has a better hand than the one that says people shouldn’t know these things about me, and I post.

Am I dreaming?

It’s official and I can’t quite believe it. In August, I’m flying to Washington to meet up with Christianne and Kirsten. I bought the tickets this morning, but it doesn’t feel real. I’ve been blessed by their words, and now I’ll be blessed by their presence.

By their presence.

In some ways, having blog friends is like knowing God. I don’t see my blog friends, like I don’t see God, and I mostly get to know them through the words they write, like I get to know God through the Bible. At times, I have more intense experiences of these friends, either through a phone conversation or a visit, but mostly I believe that they care because their words prove them the type of people who care and because they sometimes say specifically that they do. I don’t very often get to look into their eyes or see their smiles in real time.

And so I practice the presence of my blog friends, like I do with God. I remember how things are between us. I remember that they care for me and I care for them. And it’s good. Even though I’ve been more absent than present in this online world over recent weeks, it’s good and sweet and…good.

And now this…now plane tickets that whisk me away to experience them in front of me, to smile and watch and learn and love, to experience whatever is there for us to experience. It still feels like a dream…a very, very good dream.

Where I’ve Been

So, I’ve been pretty out of touch for about a month now. The first part of that I still don’t have words for, and then some of you know the second part and some of you don’t. Here’s the quick version: a little over a week before a large event, I discovered that someone had made an error and the 500+ person banquet and ceremony I was in charge of had no venue. We went into overdrive, switched venues, totally changed how we did everything, and had a fairly successful event. The two weeks before were hell, though.

Right now, I feel like I’m warming up after having been out in the cold for several days. I’m starting to feel again. I’m walking around at work remembering what it feels like to have a normal day, to walk across campus and notice the sky and the trees and not just the ground in front of my feet, to respond to people and questions without furiously calculating how long it’s going to take me to help them and whether I need that time for something else.

I’ve survived, but I haven’t yet fully recovered. I slept a lot over the weekend. I started looking at the things I’d been doing before I set them all aside to take care of the crisis. I cried, and felt some of the frustration and anger of the last couple of weeks. I looked up in the middle of my walk yesterday and suddenly felt like writing again. But I’m so tired. I’m tired inside. I need some books and people and slow mornings and time in prayer and completed journal pages and more tears before I’ll be completely myself again.

It’s a bit weird to feel like I’m warming back up to my own life, like I’ve been living as someone else for a couple of weeks and I have to remember what it feels like to be me. And then there are the places that I’m finding slightly different after these two weeks. I’ve found evidence for some things I’ve always doubted, things like, “Sarah is trustworthy.” Is she? Really? Will she be able to do what needs to be done? Will she be able to respond to people and situations in a reasonable and adult manner? Apparently, she will. Apparently, she doesn’t fall apart at the slightest sign of pressure or stress or resistance, but does what she has to do to make it through. Apparently, she can let go of what she needs to let go of and get on with the rest.

Another confirmation? “God is there.” I can’t quite explain the excruciating waters of doubt I’ve been sloshing about in during these last weeks. I don’t know where they came from and I can’t begin to tell you how one part of me can fervently believe in God and His love while another fervently denies, but it happens. And then, in the midst of all that was going on last week, God said, “Dance with me.” He said, “Do your part here, and I’ll be with you and do my own.” And that’s how we did it. I couldn’t take care of the rain, so I didn’t worry about. I couldn’t do anything about the speakers that didn’t work when people said they would, so I let it go. I’ve never really felt like I was working on something with God before, but I did last Thursday night. That doesn’t solve the doubt issues, but it adds another piece to the puzzle.

I’m sure there’s more here…things like, “double check other people’s work, and let them double check your own,” and, “it doesn’t have to be perfect, even if a few people are upset in the end,” but I’m not there yet. I’m still tired. I still want to cry when I think about how I was feeling, all the stress I was under and what I had to carry and how that doesn’t seem entirely right or fair, and how all of this kept me from enjoying some other things that happened during the last two weeks that I would have loved to be more present for. I guess I’m grieving the fact that this happened and that it happened to me, while trying to move forward on other things. I don’t feel ready, yet, to leave this place. Whatever it was, it’s not finished in me yet, or I’m not finished with it. When I’m finished, well, I guess I’ll be recovered then.

6 Random Things

I’ll write more about where I’ve been and why I’ve been so absent later. Right now, I’ve been tagged for a meme that I haven’t done. Thanks, I think, to Christianne for passing this along.

1. I’ve slept roughly 12.5 of the last 24 hours. That almost never happens. I feel like I could sleep another 4 or 5 right now.

2. I never liked dark chocolate until I ate it in Switzerland. Now, the darker the better. The stuff I keep on hand is 85% cacao, for those of you to whom that means something. I eat it almost every day.

3. I was once almost bilingual, with Spanish as the second language. At that point, I was fresh off 4 years of study, a month in Spain, and another in Mexico. I still speak and understand some, but not as much as I’d like. I’m trying to refresh it, but that’s hard when it’s all self-motivated. I love languages, though, and may study Hebrew with Dave next fall.

4. My eyes are green. That’s right, I’m a blonde with green eyes. Yes, I promise they’re not blue. Everyone seems to think they should be, but they’re not. I promise. They’re not even hazel; they’re true green.

5. I don’t always wear my engagement/wedding rings. It’s not that I don’t like them, but I don’t always like having “stuff” on my hands. Dave doesn’t always wear his either. This seems to bother other people more than it bothers us.

6. I have a cracked vertebrae. Almost 10 years ago now, I went rollerblading and tried to stop. The brake broke off the skate while I had all my weight on it and I fell on my back. It hurt BAD, but I figured it would just go away. I didn’t find out that I’d broken something until 2 or 3 years ago when someone who knows about such things finally looked at my x-rays.

Enjoy! Oh, and I tag JJ, Heather, Xapis, and Emily. Or anyone else who wants to do it

Strange but cool

Wow…it’s been what? Almost three weeks since I blogged here? Crazy.

I wish I could tell you all what’s been happening. I don’t feel free to, though. Some of it is very private and I’m not at all sure that this is the venue for sharing it. Some of it involves others that I love dearly and don’t want to hurt. Some of it involves my job.

It seems sufficient, right now, to say that God is at work. Oh boy, is he at work! This has been a crazy, insane day, and it follows on a whole slew of them in a row.

I’m really tired…sustained, but tired. Exhausted, in fact, at least on some level. And yet I keep going. Right now I choose to because there are things that are mine to do. Pretty soon, though, I think I might just choose to stop. Fffftt…there’s the end of me. It’s really strange when you meet your end and find God there. Strange, but cool. And that’s about where I am…”strange but cool.”

Speak boldly

I think I’m beginning a new part of my journey.

In some ways, I suppose this is never true. All of our lives are one journey, culminating when we die and stand before Jesus. We may not understand all the different bits, how they fit together and interlock, but they’re all leaves on the same tree and that tree is our life.

On the other hand, a tree has many branches and part of the journey is to explore each one.

I’m a little lost on this new branch right now. I’m finding new parts of myself, parts that I haven’t known for a long time, parts that don’t speak but instead look at me with tear-filled puppy dog eyes that beg me to just, please, help. I reach out and they shrink away, and I’m not sure they want to know me at all. I’m not sure how to make friends. Sometimes, I’m not sure I want to.

They sense, of course, that I’m at least as unsure about them as they are about me, and shrink away. I’m not trustworthy. I’m not dependable for much more than keeping out the rain. I threw them aside once; who’s to say I won’t do it again.

I wish I had hours each day to spend with these new parts, so I can watch and understand them, but also so I can befriend them. They haven’t spoken to anyone in so long that I see them with dry throats, like people stuck in a desert. I want to give them a voice or, better yet, be with them until they start to speak again.

The more I watch and wait, the more I hope a day comes where they can speak boldly knowing I, at least, will listen.