Linkydinks

I don’t usually do this, but there are several things on the web that have my attention today.

This article almost made me cry. Imagine that, a gymnast who performs better because she has permission to make mistakes, and whose coach is not only proud of her gymnastics, but of who she is as “a real person.”

Here’s the game that I can’t stop playing. Seriously, I don’t close my browser so it doesn’t lose it. If you get addicted, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

And this is the funniest thing the web has given me in the last several weeks. I think it sums up, just about perfectly, how I feel about politics right now. And, while I’ll most likely vote for the man, the image of Obama riding a sparkly-rainbow pooping unicorn while singing about change? Priceless.

Vacation, Take II

So, there were definitely hard parts about my vacation. There was the letting go that comes with letting down and tears that come with unwrapping white-knuckled fingers from what they’ve been clutching. And then, there was joy.

There were the fireworks:

Followed closely by the fire:

And the firetrucks (for which we were all very thankful):

There were flowers:

(wild columbines...you NEVER see these!)

(I have a thing for flowers.)

There were rocks:

And mountains:

I don't care who you are, that's high!

A lake:

Some streams and rivers:

And the clouds. Oh, Lordy, the clouds…

This last one is how I remember the sky looking every afternoon of the summer. You can see it get dark blue in the distance and watch it come toward you over the plains.

There were furry critters:

They're marmots!

And not-so-furry ones:

Mom and Dad

The one you haven't seen before is my Grandma Jane

When stalking the Dave in his natural habitat, it is wise to begin your approach from behind.

As you swing around to a side view, make sure he's distracted.

And then there were the things you can’t photograph: the hiking at least 7 miles, all of them above 8500 feet, all in one day; the conversations and the stories; the getting to spend time sitting next to Dave just watching the river flow; the good beer and the better wine; the jumping into the rapids only to get sucked in and spit out downriver; the sterile, simple beauty of the tundra; the joy of not having anything you have to do.

I SO needed this vacation.

Vacation, Take I

Gosh, I haven’t been around here in quite a while. Things are crazy, and I’m using lots of my writing time to finish the second first draft of the novel and, yeah, it’s been a little nuts. But I DID want to say a few things about that vacation I came back from a couple of weeks ago. This might have to come off in multiple parts.

Last semester sucked. I don’t think I can say it any more clearly than that. It was one of the most awful experiences of my life and I’m not exaggerating (there have been other awful experiences, but this one’s definitely on the list). Don’t get me wrong–I love the people that I work with, and I think the program I’m helping to run is one that God loves and that is important in his kingdom. But it was handed to me in a shambles, along with a lot of expectations because (and here’s the catch) it didn’t LOOK like things were in a shambles until you gave it a significant examination beyond the surface. It’s always difficult to rearrange expectations, and that was definitely the case here. So I spent a semester trying to meet these high expectations while I had very little to work with. On top of that, my supervisor was on sabbatical and I found out that my very presence in the position I’m in is threatening to at least one person. Yeah, it sucked.

The thing is, it took a vacation for me to realize just how deeply the semester had cut me. I don’t know if I couldn’t see the forest for the trees, or if I just couldn’t bear the full weight of the hurt while I was still having to deal with it (though I suspect a combination of both), but stepping outside helped me feel. So I woke up at 6AM the second morning of my vacation crying. I’d dreamt about work and it wasn’t anything good. It took me a lot of tears to realize I was grieving, not so much because I’d lost things but because I’d hurt so much and carried so much so far and it was hard. Actually, the word that keeps coming to mind is “trauma.” I hesitate to use it because it seems so strong, but maybe it’s right. Last semester did trauma to my soul. I’ll recover, with some rest and some weeks that don’t involve crises, but it’s traumatic, I suppose in a way akin to the trauma done to a body if, out of the blue, it’s given a heavy load and told to walk up a steep hill for four months.

So a big part of my vacation was grief. I asked God so many times why he left me here, why he dumped me into this place and then didn’t change anything so that it didn’t hurt me. I asked him if this job was all I meant to him, if walking in this small place was all I’d ever get to do for him. I asked him if it bothered him that it had hurt me, that his people had hurt me, and no one did anything about it. I asked, and he answered. God said, “You think I left you there? You think I abandoned you someplace small and unimportant? I PUT you there. I CHOSE YOU to walk into that very place.”

I admit my first response came out somewhere along the lines of, “Gee, thanks, God, but if that’s what a gift looks like, could you refrain in the future?” but then, in a still, small moment, I could see. The place I work means a lot to God. And my particular program is close to his heart, too. He wanted the program to live, to survive the disintegrating structure, and so he brought me and the people I worked with last semester so it would. I also saw how heavily a program like ours could come under spiritual attack. We’re caring for the hearts of people who will go on to do ministry, and teaching them to watch and care for their own hearts. How important it must be to Satan to keep that from happening, and how much more attack that must bring on us!

When I saw all of this, I started to realize how so many of the things that went wrong last semester hit me right where I’m weakest. The DID do trauma, because they tore at old wounds, at questions I’d put away because I never found any answers, at deep, dark doubts I’ve carried around for years. And I truly believe that they were DESIGNED that way. It wasn’t just a hard semester. It wasn’t just a program that hadn’t been run well, and it wasn’t just a person before me who struggled with his job. It was a slow, steady peeling away at a program that has the potential to wreak some serious havoc in Satan’s future plans.

So my next question was, “What do we do now? How do we keep that from happening again? Because, seriously, God, I don’t think I can stand another semester like the last one.” And that was the second part of my vacation. And, wow. You know, don’t ask God any questions that you don’t really, really want answered. Because he has started to answer, and it’s rocking my world.

First of all, he said, “Pray. Pray over everything. Pray over your office and yourself and your co-workers and your events and your faculty, but most of all, pray over your students. Pray over their hearts and minds and spirits. And pray with others, your co-workers in particular. Let them share the burden of covering this project in prayer.”

And then he asked me, “Do I love you? Because if I love you, then it doesn’t matter what the expectations are. It doesn’t matter what people want and what they think. I know what you can do and what you can’t, when something is part of your job and when it isn’t, what you can and cannot handle. If I love you, and you walk and work and speak in that love, can you throw all the rest of that away?” And he asked, “What if my love is different than how you learned it was? What if there aren’t any expectations or any responsibilities, but instead a life lived in love? What if I’m a different God than the one you’ve worshiped all your life?”

I can’t answer those questions yet, not really. I can say words, but I can’t answer them with my life. And yet, things are changing. The expectations I encounter at work feel more like opportunities. They seem more like chances to learn rather than things I’m somehow supposed to already know through absorption. The messages I receive that reek of power-grabbing and control seem almost funny because they’re totally unnecessary. I’m learning how to do mental judo throws and turn their power against itself. And I’m learning great and wonderful things about God.

*********

I feel like I need to offer a couple of caveats here at the end, or else I either see my comments section exploding or people praying, trueheartedly but misguidedly, for the wellbeing of my soul. First of all, I’m not hearing voices. Where I’ve put quotations and noted “God said,” I’m phrasing the things that I heard and thought and read in books. While I believe God guided and directed those times tenderly and lovingly, and while I believe he can speak audibly if he so desires, he did not to me. It’s creative license, and I think it makes God smile.

Secondly, I don’t want to single out my workplace as under more or less spiritual attack than other places, or make it sound more important to God than other ministries. I do think Satan found some footholds here that might not be available other places, and he worked with what he found. Most people should probably be praying over themselves, their co-workers, and their workplace, though we don’t often think about it.

Finally, I’m not worshiping another God. I don’t think there are any others. I do think that I’ve had wrong conceptualizations of God and ideas that have hurt me and my relationship with him, and these are what he’s rooting out. In some ways, he LOOKS totally different than I’ve seen him before, but he’s the same, yesterday, today, forever.

The greatest of these…

(Updates below!)

I had planned for my next post to be about our vacation, but as I’m learning every day now, God changes our plans…sometimes drastically.

For all the years that I’ve known Dave, he’s wondered what he wants to do with his life. It’s not that he doesn’t know what he likes, but that he likes so many different things that there’s not much out there that will really help him feel more whole.

Last fall, he stumbled on an idea. I cried at first, because it scared me, and then I began to incorporate it into my daily existence and found it yummy on so many sides. It had just the right combination of fun and family and scary and money and challenge that we decided to try it out, to see if it could actually become real.

This summer, after our vacation, Dave exchanged some emails with the people who would have to agree to hire him for this to happen. They wanted all sorts of information–height, weight, date of discharge from the military–and we found it and gave it to them. Then we waited.

It only took a couple of days for us to get an answer, but it felt like forever. We talked, dreamed, schemed together. And then it came. He told me and I cried.

The truth is, this door isn’t shut, but they’ve determined that Dave is currently unqualified. It has nothing to do with his mind or his heart or his desire to minister. It has everything to do with some health concerns they have for him based on some current information and some history.

Are these things we can change? Maybe, with a lot of work and even more grace. But we’re a little bewildered, left wondering what God is trying to say to us and how hard we push this before we change our minds and hearts and plans and walk another direction. We had narrowed so much of our lives down to focus on this goal–I work so he can get a discount and go to school to get the degree that would make this job possible, he works so we have enough to live on while he’s going to school to get the degree that would make this job possible, we work out so that he can be in good shape to pass the prerequisite physical, we don’t know how much we should commit to a church because we might be gone in a couple of years–and it hurts to wonder if it was all for nothing.

No.

Nothing is for nothing with our God. None of this last year, none of last sememster which was harder than any one when I was in school, none of it. But we thought we knew what it was about and now we find that maybe we don’t and that’s hard.

I think that’s the summation of this post–it’s hard right now. Not “I’m going out of my mind because it hurts so bad” hard, but “Life doesn’t look quite as bright and tears are often near and I pray that God’s making something beautiful out of all of this because I can’t” hard. If vacation was a mountaintop, this is a valley. And so we walk, hand in hand, through our valley, praying that we have the faith to take each step, the hope to see resolution where we don’t expect it, and the love to draw nearer to each other as we answer these questions.

Update: Dave decided to go for it. That makes it sound more unilateral than it was, but the truth is that it was his decision to make since it’s his body. So pray for us as we investigate some options and try to figure out what will work best for us. There are a lot of changes we need to make if this is all going to work out, so pray for courage and stamina and whatever else God leads to to ask for. Thanks!!

The girl is back in town

I’m back and I’m well…better than I’ve been in ages, in some ways. I am thinking a swirl of thoughts that I’ll share as they come into more words and less goo. Love to each of you and thanks, to those who commented on my last post, for your words and prayers…they touched my time away. I am truly blessed.

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.