Monster-mountains

(With thanks to The Avett Brothers and Welcome to Night Vale, who really have been the shield that my friends have held up for me recently.)

I-40 West has two peak driving seasons each year- late September/October and spring days like today that lull you into a false sense of summer, days when you can roll down the windows and smell the dying vivacity or purposeful renewing of the world. Driving down the road on days like today, with the windows down, the sun browning my arm, and the Avett Brothers blaring, I feel like the world is back in love with me, filling in the seams and cracks of my imperfection with warm light and fresh air. In the winter, it's so easy to forget our place in the world, to forget what our lives are all about.

Which is what, exactly?

This has been a long winter. April, I was not ready for you, but I am comfortable with blaming that on March, February, January, December, November, and September, so maybe you should have a chat with your friends, there, April. (Except you, February. Nobody cares what you think.) And in the same way that someone running away from a velociraptor doesn't particularly focus on their place and use in the world as they run, I've lost sight of whatever it is I'm supposed to be during these past few months. But I'm ready to change that. As one of my friends said, "I'm just ready to know what my purpose is."

And I think, in some ways, not knowing our purpose makes our lives harder. Not that those of us without a firm purpose are lost children wandering in the woods or anything like that, but to have a goal, to know that you're a functioning member of society, to know that your life is going to have an impact on some level, that confidence in our purpose can guide us and push us forward. If your purpose is to have a family and raise kids that then go on to have families that spread the love throughout a community, then your job takes its proper place in that vision. If your purpose is to invent and innovate and make and design and bring new ideas and thoughts into the world, then setting time aside for that creative process seems less selfish to me. If your purpose is to care for others, in body, mind, or soul, then spending time on yourself so that you can be better able to pour yourself into others makes more sense. And not that you shouldn't always have a good work-life balance, and take time to make things, and take time for yourself, and not that you can't have a combination of all of these lives and needs, but having a reason to remind you that these things are okay is helpful.

Outside of that guidance, knowing what you're supposed to be doing helps pull you out of the doldrums. I think a part of adulthood is knowing that there are going to be times of routine that can lead to stagnation. Sometimes our path takes us to stretches of sea where the winds are absent and the currents lazy. We're not wrong to be there, but we aren't meant to live there. Knowing that you have a goal and reorganizing your life around that goal is like having a steam engine on your ship. It might take more energy out of your reserves, but it will keep you going. Without that engine, you're left pacing the decks of an increasingly smaller boat, praying for a tailwind.

I love going to church council meetings, which, I think, may be the strongest sign of my call I've ever come across. But I love watching the church alive, the church thinking about its priorities, the church designing the gears that allow it to function. And I love dealing with rational functions in algebra. The problems that you get are these messy polynomials and it's your job to simplify them and reduce until they're something manageable and functional, and then you can graph the functions and use them to model real-world scenarios (kinda). But there is a joy for me in observing, quantifying, analyzing, and restructuring so that progress can be made, and putting this specific joy in a church brings verve to it. Being a member of a church reminds me that I'm a part of a bigger story and gives me instantaneous access to a community of people and a living, breathing organization that's remembering its place in the world. It wraps me in a community that, if all things were equal, would rekindle the fire in my engine to push me out of the winter's doldrums.

But, as we know, all things aren't equal. We all have our demons to face. I'm so scared of the twin monsters of Pride and Poverty, with their familiar accents, that I've sat down at the crossroads and alternated between staring them down to see who blinks first and burying my head in my arms with the hope that they'll go away when I'm not looking. I feel like one or the other monster stalks any path I want to take. Or maybe they're mountains instead of monsters, and I have to conquer them to be able to see my purpose on the other side of the road. Monster-mountains that hurl stones of indecision and listlessness at me with impeccable aim and every stone bruises. Some break.

I want to end this on a high note. I want some turnabout, some recourse, where I say, "But oh, I've had this shield [of undetermined metaphorical significance] the whole time and it's high time I started using it" or "I'm strong enough to get through this and take my place in the song/dance of life" or "I've realized that I'm reading too much into this and the best we can do is to live our lives with the love we have available to us because the idea of purpose puts on undue burden on our thoughts and existence", but none of that rings true to me.

I think things are fluid. I think I haven't seen enough of life yet to figure it out. I think that no matter how much it sucks, there are times that we have to move forward in our lives without the map that purpose can be, and know that ships can go in many directions, including backwards. I think we have to fight our demons, because they're not going to move and they're not going leave and they're not going to stop, but I don't think we have to do that alone. I think we can share our bruises. I think we can ask to be handled with care until the battle's won, no matter how many weeks or months or years we have to fight. I think we have to use the full arsenal of existence, from carefully considering our motivations to pushing forward with determination to retreating for the chance to regroup to depending on the wisdom and strength and encouragement of others to standing strong, to make our lives what they need to be so that the world benefits from the air we use.

And I think this is hard.

But I don't think that it is too hard for us.

Shoulda Coulda Woulda

I'm one of those people who wants to know what they should do so they can go do it. These people are the natural teacher's pets and overachievers because someone somewhere along the way figured out how to manipulate us by making us think that we should do everything we can to help out everyone we can in every organization that we can find. What blows my mind is that this is not what I have to do, it's not something like eating or breathing or singing, but rather it's something that I'm supposed to do, that I should do to be successful in life or fulfilled or something. Nobody made me be in the band, nobody made me be in SAI, no one forced me to play handbells, no one pressured me into joining a committee, no one pushed me into one organization over another. No one's making me consider my future and plan it out. It's just what I should do.

It's an interesting line between should and must. There are quite a few things that I must do now because I'm so invested in them, I don't know that I have a choice in the matter. I mean, a while ago, say three years or something like that, I'm sure I had a choice but now I'm so caught up in the workings of the organizations that if I left it'd feel like a cog was missing from the clockwork and I'd be so jealous I couldn't stand it. I'm trying to remember that I'm replaceable, because everyone is, but I love this feeling of necessity and importance. I'm in charge of things. I get to decide things and do things. I get to guide and lead and help shape and form and I love that. I'm terribly afraid that if you take away the frilly words, I just like being bossy. And I like it so much that taking away all these things that I should do would be pulling the crutch out from underneath my recently restored happiness. Admittedly, it hasn't been all that recent and the injury wasn't that bad and so the crutch should not be as necessary as it is but there you are. [Blogger's note: I promise I'll deal with things more directly in the future. I'm even getting a little confused with the extensive imagery.]

So I do all of these things and I fill up my calendar and I feel quite accomplished because I should be doing all of this. I should be living my life to the fullest because I will never have another opportunity like this again. I should be enjoying every last toll of the bell tower because it will only be around in my life for another school year. I should have meetings and plans and things because that's how I'm going to leave a mark on this wonderful place that's left such a mark on me. I should be doing all of this and I am and at the end of a busy day, I'm smiling because this is what I'm best at. I'm accomplishing things. I should be doing this.

But there are also these other things that I should be doing that I am not and the little guilt monster that lies hidden in my stomach jumps when I think about these things. I should be looking at applications. I should be writing essays. I should be asking for letters of recommendation. I should have this all figured out with a plan, because that's what you do when you're a senior, is you have a plan and you follow it through and you have a backup plan and you follow that through if you need it and at the end of the day, you're really just planning what stuff you can take with you out of your parents house because you are actually moving out because suddenly it's May and you're on the field in Kenan at graduation and the real world is actually at your door step because you cannot hide in college any longer and what are you going to do since everything you know and know well has now become obsolete knowledge because there's no more time for you here and there's going to be another freshman turned senior in your place in four years and where will you be in four years aaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh breatheinbreatheoutbreatheinbreatheout. Sigh. And I know that other seniors don't have it figured out either, but you're supposed to, you know, successful people have a plan and I am a successful person and I have a plan.

I do have a plan. In my other window of Firefox there are several tabs concerning certain theological schools and I have a couple of dates boxed in on my calendar for visits to schools. I'm also finishing all those exciting education classes and student teaching in the spring, so the backup plan is in full swing as well (though I feel like you shouldn't teach in a school unless you have a passion for teaching in a school and I can't say that I've grown that yet so I shouldn't teach, right? Right). I like to daydream about staying right close to Chapel Hill because I am in no way ready to leave this place yet. I love North Carolina. I love our green state and our mountains and our beaches. I love walking in the quad listening to the music of southern accents as they float along in the general symphony of speeches that only campus affords. I'm not sure if I could be happy anywhere else. It's funny, four years ago I was looking at out-of-state colleges because I had no desire to be stuck here forever. Some things change. And even if that daydream bursts at the seams, I still have plans for other places and it'll be good to go somewhere different and experience a different life and all that jazz. The problem is, I'm happy here. I don't want anything else. I'm one of those seniors who is stolidly ignoring graduation day because I think my heart might actually break. I should move on to other things and I do have a plan for that. But this might be the first time in my life when what I should do is different from what I want to do a large, painful way.

I start to think about this post-college life thing and I want to do something impulsive like move to a large city and become a bartender and spend my days reading and writing and sneaking peeks at astrophysical journals. Sometimes you want to go where no one knows your name. I want to be an effing mystery for ten seconds, some enigma that no one can figure out, from the name that I use to the place I say I'm from. I want to run away and find myself and see if there's anything to me beyond the choices that I make and the plans that I lay down.

Then again, I have never been a nomad- where I'm from is who I am. I have the feeling that I'd scream North Carolina even if I went to live in Illinois or California or Alaska. There are chunks of me that are unexpected, like chocolate chips in pancakes, but all in all, you'd look at me and say, Yup, that's a pancake. Most of me is happy with that- what would I be if I wasn't this? But I have this little restless part of me that thinks that adventures are still to be had, that thinks you should run out your door without your handkerchief or walking stick because life only happens to those people who live and I want to live. But I look at me and I see a pancake. Pancakes don't have adventures. Well, Pancakes might have adventures, but he's led a much more exciting life than me. But the point is that I'm not sure that I'm suited for the outside world. I'm a church mouse. Some people are just like that.


But.


I'm not sure that I should be.

Shoes (Or, Sometimes I Think God Cheats)

So Saturday morning me and two of my awesome friends decided to watch the sunrise in the mountains and spend the rest of the day in silent meditation. Yup, that's what I said. Silent meditation. Well, we got to watch the sunrise  (great story- pictures soon?) and we did have a good morning of silence, which deserves its own blog post. After one friend almost rolled down the mountain and suffered a severe flesh wound or two, we called off the silence, ate lunch and shopped before returning home. I came back to homework and another long, long story and didn't sleep until late, which was not cool because, as you all know, the sun rises rather early and Blowing Rock isn't particularly close to Hickory and friends make four hours of sleep dwindle down to three at best. Totally worth the lack of sleep, but I paid for it last night going into this morning.

I had to work at Cold Stone today (note the video of the Cinnamon Challenge on BookFace- it might really be the best thing I've done while working at that store; that and the fact that I caught and ice cream and threw and ice cream and didn't fail [!] today) so I was driving myself to church, which means not waking up at 7:30 to leave at 8... 15 to go with my mother but rather that I could leave whenever I wanted to. I could leave at 9:45, like I intended, to be at church in time for Sunday School, or I could leave at 10:15, like my second plan was, to be able to be down at church in time to learn the anthem to sing in the choir, or I could leave, last ditch effort, at 10:45 and be at church in time for the 11 o'clock service. Sleep is powerful. I left around 10:52, wearing my new purchase and a pair of brown flip flops that I picked out specifically to wear to church.

Ironic, you might say, if you knew me, because then you would know that I don't wear shoes at church. The story behind the lack of shoes in my church life is this: I live in the choir loft. One of the top ten weirdest feelings in my world is when I sit out in the congregation at my home church. I mostly sit back and think, "Oh! So that's what the choir loft looks like from the other side. Huh." So, naturally, I adapted to life in the choir loft. Most of my church shoes in high school were heel-ish things that made little clonking noises when I walked. I spent a lot of time walking from where the brass players sat up two rows to where I stood to sing. It is not, in my opinion, good manners to be clonking all over the place during prayers or when a pastor is talking, so I'd take off my shoes in the choir loft so I could pretend to be a ninja... in a white, flowy yet constricting choir robe... when I walked from place to place. One Christmas-y service, I'm sitting with my french horn in my lap and there's an awkward pause in the service. It's a service of lessons and carols and the awkward pause is not because we're supposed to be singing a carol, because I have a list in front of me and I'm playing on the next one so we are definitely not starting it yet. So Ron looks down and hands me a piece of paper and says, "Will you read this?" and I take it and say sure and he says, "Now?" The reader for the lesson had mixed up the service times and wasn't there to read the lesson. So, in my choir robe and without shoes, I walked up to the pulpit and read the lesson and walked back and played my french horn. Apparently feet are very visible in that space in between the choir loft and the pulpit. And so a legend was born.

I brought my shoes to wear to sit in the congregation this morning because everyone else in the congregation would have them on and I'd be walking in late and blah blah blah. I left them in the car. Explanation? None. I then snuck into the service late and realized it was a communion service, but (tragic organ chord) it was too late. I became engrossed in the hymn and the sermon and then it's too late to retrieve the shoes because it's communion time. It was the offering that did it- they moved the offering up before everything and I got confused and then I was stuck in the service. So I walked up to get communion barefoot, which isn't that bad- people don't point out your feet if you look up and act like you've got shoes on like everyone else- and I make it back to my seat without criticism. I dunno why I'm always nervous about being barefoot in the congregation. I guess I think they know what's up in the world of propriety and that the choir members love me enough to ignore it, but I'm always iffy about the congregation.

I intended to sneak out of the service as well, because, due to my oversleep and then that long story that kept me up later than was necessary, I wasn't in a super talkative mood. We have a new associate pastor and she was at the back shaking hands on the way out. I felt bad, because I got out of wearing a name tag because I was late. Well, no, I didn't feel bad because I got out of wearing a name tag- I hate those. I felt bad because now the new associate pastor won't know my name. But I smile and she shakes my hand and then points to my feet and says, "Barefoot. That's the best way to go to church. I used to go barefoot all the time until my mother yelled at me from the choir to put my shoes on." And I smile and say something like "Sweet!" or "Awesome!" or "Good call!" because those are my approving exclamations and walk away to the nursery to say hey to my mother (who stopped fighting the where-are-your-shoes battle long ago [PS she doesn't wear them either]) and then abscond some animal crackers before speeding away to my current place of employment.

See, but the point is, the new associate pastor will now know me as The Girl Without Shoes. I fully intend to take advantage of this. She doesn't think I'm going to be a teacher, so I'm not going to leave a conversation with her convinced I'm going to be a teacher. She doesn't think I'm going to be a pastor, so I'm less likely than usual to leave a conversation with her thinking I'm going to be a pastor. She doesn't read what I write, so she won't make me feel like I could really do this writing thing. She hasn't known me since high school, so she has no preconceptions about astrophysics (PPS- I bought a particle physics book and am super excited about it! Because me and physics is like that Jackson 5 song- "When I had you to myself, I didn't want you around..."). She doesn't know that I'm going to be a senior in the fall, that I really need to get on this decision-making thing, no matter how much I want to ignore it. She doesn't know that her comment and the sky tonight have swayed me back in one direction. She just knows that I appreciate bare feet on holy ground.

I think she knows the most important thing about me.

I Had the Theme Song for The Office in My Head While I Wrote This (and I can play it on the piano)

So today I went to the church to make copies of the lyrics for the songs for Crossflame tour (expect daily updates over tour- I'm going to hang out with the cool kids who stay up late and do bed checks at 12 [also, apparently I'm lame because I never left my room after the chaperons had gone to bed when I was on tour back in the day...] so I'm going to need something to keep me conscious after a full day of high school drama [so. bad. How did I stand myself when I was a high schooler? How does anyone stand kids who are in high school? Ugh] and other exciting times and I figure keeping up with my weblog is a choice way of doing that) which really entails at least an hour of standing at the copier in the church office and stapling.

My mom is the Childcare Coordinator at my church, so I know pretty much everyone in the office. They're some of my favorite people. I routinely lost everything from shoes to glasses when I was a kid, so I know exactly where the lost and found is and still check it every time I walk into the office. I know where the first aid kit is and I know where the janitor's closet is. In every building. I don't spend a lot of time in the Family Life Center where the kitchen and Fellowship hall are, or the youth building anymore. Really, I spend most of my time at church between the choir room, the sanctuary and the children's building and I normally just run in and out of the office. It was a little weird to just be chilling in there.

I printed up the 14 pages of lyrics and started copying them back to front. I was on page two, I think, when this guy came up with a paper in his hand and just kinda stood in front of the front desk. I smiled and went back to my copier (it was still on copy 27 of 50) and then walked over to the table where I was sorting the copies and picked up one of the books that was there waiting to be picked up for a bible study group. 23 copies later I picked up my original and asked if he needed the copier, since he was looking super expectant and rather impatient, and he said no, thanks. It was superbly civil. A page and a half later, he walked into the secretary's office and dropped off his resume for some position at the church. Darn copier lid. The only thing I heard was, "Are you still taking applications for [slam]?" Not helpful. And I probably could have just asked the secretary since she's probably the most awesome person ever, but I think I'll just do some detective work later.

Next exciting happenstance: One of the ladies in the church came up with the idea of sending handmade dolls to kids in Haiti after the earthquake. They just finished another batch and they're going down with a missionary group tomorrow, I think, so we had a blessing for them today. I was on page six when I got invited to go to the blessing which was being held in the sanctuary. So four of us and one of the pastors walk over to the sanctuary and there are the dolls, lined up on the steps to the chancel, right in front of the altar. They're mostly brown and black, but there's a red one, a yellow one, and, my personal favorite, a purple one with blonde hair. Best. Doll. Ever. There were also a couple with rainbow colored hair and a pair of twins, made by the pastor's wife, right on the front row. Our church likes giving away stuffed things for kids to play with- our youth director makes Build-A-Bears to give to kids in hospitals that we're taking on tour with us this next week. Spreading joy one snuggly face at a time. Or 79 at time. Whichever. So we blessed the dolls and prayed them a safe journey and I walked back over to the office.

One of the real chaperones for tour came in to get a form notarized and I failingly pitched my idea of getting reusable water bottles for the kids in choir so we could save the environment from the tons of plastic water bottles that we're going to drink over the next week (most of which aren't even going to be empty by the time they're thrown away... Chapel Hill has given me a recycling eye twitch). Hydration is important. So is having a planet for my epic and awesome grandkids. (I know they're going to be awesome. Hello. They're my grandkids) Anyway. I got all the pages copied and was working on stapling them together (maybe about 20 out of the 50) when Sunshine came in.

Thursday, and I always forget this, is Christian Aid day at the church. People bring in whatever they need help with and we see what we can do. I hate being the object of someone's generosity, but one day I'm going to grow a soul and I'm going to treat everyone like a normal person and not look at my feet when I walk down the hall past people who have the sense to ask for help when they need it. Anyway, Sunshine, who is a recently-hired waitress at IHOP (and now I can never tell my IHOP joke again... darn) is having some medical problems so she asked us to pray for her. One of our pastors was on his way out (annual conference is this weekend- party at Lake Junaluska! Goodness, I love my conference) but he stopped and pulled everyone in the office together in a circle to pray for Sunshine. She stayed and talked a little more with us after the prayer and said that her goal was to put some more positive back in the world, since there's so much negative out there. That is one of my problems. I can totally see the negative, but I never put any positive back in. So I'll be praying for Sunshine.

And Pastor Bill walked in to pick up something he had printed out earlier and his wife talked to the lady at the front desk while other conversations went on and I hummed the tunes to the lyrics I was looking at over and over again. It was a chill, sociable moment where I rehearsed again the back from college speech: "Oh, school's great, it's out for the semester!"; or "Yeah, it's nice to be home and take a break from classes. I'm a physics major, you know." "Oh, really? Wow." and small talk about physics; or "Yeah, I'm at Carolina. Oh, your son/daughter went there? Small world! I love it!" Those are the main variations. I avoid the "what are you going to do with that?" question like the plague. Free advice from one pastor: Go work for a while. Get out in the real world, see some things, do some things. You'll be better off for it. The plot thickens. And then people left to head out to the conference and I stopped humming because there wasn't anybody to cover up my voice.

I finished the copies and decided that the nicer thing to do would be to put them in the choir room because 1) we wouldn't leave them if I put them in an already packed crate and 2) I don't think they'd actually fit in the choir director's box in the office. So I borrowed keys (one of the goals of my life is make it so that the doors of a church don't have to be locked. Really? It's a church. Are you trying to keep Jesus out or in? I'm thinking locked cabinets for sound/ AV equipment and a locked closet for musical things that don't need to be stolen. Like pastor's offices and the sacristy, OK, sure, lock that mess up when no one's around, but I think we'd be OK if someone stole a pew bible. Geeze. *looks guilty but feels much better*) and I walked over to the choir room. Two cool points for Ron- he already has the sheet music packed up. So I put the lyrics in the sheet music crate and decided to cut back through the sanctuary to return the keys and get back to my bag.

Now, the sanctuary we have now is not the old sanctuary, it's the new sanctuary. The old sanctuary had the ugliest green carpet you've seen in your life, no middle aisle and these awesome stained glass windows. I loved it. I'm getting to love the new one, but I honestly probably liked it better when it was under construction and me and my little brother could go play around in it when we were supposed to be in big church... oops. Anyway, the new sanctuary is super super tall, with this ginormous cross up behind the choir back behind the chancel and this large dove stained glass window up above the balcony that only the choir and the pastors get to see on a Sunday morning. Why do you think I'm in the choir? Lord knows I can't sing and they don't need a flute/french horn player every Sunday.

I walked around the chancel and came to the first pew and leaned up against the little wall we have between the congregation and the rest of the church and looked up at the ginormous cross. Now, some people see God in nature, some in the stars, some in the faces of other people. I see God in buildings. Corners of buildings, actually. High corners of buildings, so I love me some cathedrals. I can't explain it, I don't know why, so don't ask me. It's not like God isn't in the other things, it's just that if you asked me what God looked like, I wouldn't say a sunset, I would say the ceiling of the cathedral in Dunblane. Anyway, me and God haven't been particularly tight because all I can ever think to pray about is what I'm going to do with my life and that's a touchy subject, so I really just end up walking away angrily. So I'm looking up at the cross and I notice that there's this little gap of white wall between where the brown behind the cross starts and the ceiling. I guess all that houses the pipes of the organ because the bigger, more impressive pipes are up by the cross and you can kinda see through it. They won't let me up there. Anyway, I found God and started talking about my future, but it quickly transitioned to Crossflame. I was pleasantly surprised.

And then it kinda hit me that the reason that I couldn't pray about anything other than my future is because I hadn't been caring enough about anything else to pray for it. Since November. It's amazing how God's got your back even when you're one of the bigger jerks in recent history. Sometimes, I don't think you need to pray for God's blessings, because He's already given it. Then sometimes I think that you should probably ask anyway.

And it's kinda crazy how the things that are driving you insane are the things that stop you from being insane. It's going to be a great tour.

My Brain is the Tree

I have troubling giving up on things.

I mean, obviously, since ballet probably wasn't going to work out for the fat kid with bad ankles and incurable clumsiness, but I kept at it for 13 years. And swim team. You can only be the slowest kid for so long... apparently every summer until I got a job and all through high school. And the fact that I can't sing hasn't make me quit being in a choir... or the fact that I graduated three summers ago. I only kept going in band because I couldn't quit, though that was a good life choice, I think. And even now, I'm happy with this odd half summer sharing between Chapel Hill and home because it enables me to, in effect, not quit either place.

But you can't serve two masters. Either you'll love the first and hate the second or be devoted to the second and despise the first. You can't serve God... and money. (Oh, money! End extended Godspell paraphrase) This extends to other things, but not, I think, to serving God and serving people. I think that serving people is probably the closest you can get to serving God while living. I dunno, why don't people help each other out more? Why do churches need to organize days of service or reach-out days to get their members involved in the community? They're great events and I'm extraordinarily happy that we do them, but when you join the Methodist church, you promise to be involved in the church using your prayers, your presence, your gifts and your service (and your witness, but we don't have any new hymnals at my church, so no one says that part). And Jesus said, famously, to love one another and they'll know you by your love and what is love but service, but helping people? If we were meant to live in isolation, there'd be a lot more caves. And we'd all have epic night vision like I do from working at the planetarium because we all would have stayed hidden for far too long. Though it would be helpful, if you needed to get across a dark room with tons of seats. Anyway.

My point is, I think you're most faithful when you're serving. If that's donating food to a food bank, if that's going on a mission trip, if that's helping fund a mission trip, if it's helping someone clean up their yard, if it's helping a child learn, if it's being encouraging to others, if it's cooking a meal, if it's just holding the door for someone, you're best when you're helping. You're next best when you're thinking of ways to help, though I'm sure right now, BP would be most happy if someone thought up a way to help and did it for them. If we built a large wooden badger...

So I find it hard to reconcile going to school for another three years after next year when I can be out helping people. I know I can do good while I'm at seminary, wherever I'm at, but I don't know if I can make myself. Honestly, I live a very self-centered student life. Don't have a life crisis before an exam of mine, I'm probably going to choose the exam. Don't expect me to be cheerful or helpful after I've gotten a bad exam or a bad paper back either, that's my life that's just been screwed up, thanks very much. I know you need money, but I need this for coffee, it's very important that I be alert when I'm studying. Oh, I would be sorry for that mean look I just shot you across the bus, it's just that I'm trying to study right now, you know, since I'm a student, and I really can't take your loud conversation or your child's noise or the disturbance you just caused by taking too much time getting all your things on the bus by yourself. And clearly, since I'm a poor college student, I'm much more worthy of people's sympathy and lack of expectations. It's a nice life. Not in the real world, but not with your parents and nobody expects anything from you, yet.

So, someone tell me that grad school isn't like that, that you get a job to help pay for it and you're working for something and, even though most grad students I meet are pretentious and self-absorbed, they're not really because they're just trying to be the best they can be so they can get their next degree so they can start contributing more productively to society. Because I'm kinda tired of being one of the privileged few. It's wonderful to be blessed, but don't blessings come with the fine print that you should share them? You know, going to Carolina just happened for me. Everything worked out and everything that has been best for me has just fallen into place. I haven't ever gotten anything on my own that turned out to be just the right thing for me. It makes me hesitant to go looking for something that I want to do with the rest of my life.

Like go to seminary and get a position at a church. I think I'd love that. There are tons of resources in a United Methodist church- we've got different committees for missionary work, for relief efforts wherever they're needed, for people who are here and people who are far, and if the church doesn't have it, I bet we don't have to look super far to try to find someone who can help whatever situation we're looking at. And a church has a congregation full of people. I have this delusion that if people just hear about a wrong or an injustice, that they'd just jump on getting that fixed. I mean, you wouldn't let the air conditioning in the sanctuary go out for a service on a Sunday morning in the summer. Why on earth would you let a child go hungry? So, being able to lead a group of people to do good things in the world, all the while having the opportunity to help them learn about God and develop a faith that will be fulfilling and give them access to music and literature that'll be inspiring and encouraging, and enabling fellowship that'll help us all get along, I can't think of many better things. You can support things globally, you can speak out against injustice everywhere, you can work out ways to help fix the world, and you can fix the community you're in. It's this great mix of near and far, of caring for all. I'd love to be a pastor. Plus, after a while, you get to make people listen to you for at least twelve minutes on a Sunday before they all start looking at their watches. That was meant to be a joke. See, lame jokes! I'm already set!

Listen, please don't respond to me by telling me that it's all going to be roses and happiness. I know that it's tough. I know that I'm going to have to work on taking criticism... because it really seems like 78% of a pastor's life is taking criticism from a never-happy congregation. And I know (sigh of angst) that people aren't going to want to save the world today. They're going to want to save their souls, give their kids a couple of good extracurriculars, eat decent food and listen to at least an OK choir or praise band. They're not really even that intense about the choir. And I shouldn't knock church people like that- some of them, maybe most of them, have a heart for making the world a better place because God put it in them. We just forget, you know? There are so many things here to deaden the sounds that are coming down from heaven, sounds that give us hope and love and tell us that we can't possibly keep the goodness to ourselves. So we take our goodness, because we want to hear that bit, and we keep it. And I can't depend on the judgment of an admissions board on whether I can trust myself enough to give my goodness away.

Plus, I have this teaching thing, which comes back to the beginning of this post. I have trouble giving up on things and one of the best academic mentors I've had has been Dr. Churukian, who's in charge of the physics part of the UNC-BEST program. I'm going to have taken these education classes and I'm student teaching in the spring. I'll be certified to be a physics (and hopefully math) teacher. Dr. Churukian thinks that I'd be a great physics teacher. And you get to care about people when you're a teacher- it's your job to care about the students. And teach them physics. With a lot of astronomy snuck in. (Also, fun factoid, sneaked is the past tense of sneak, not snuck, though that is not going to deter me from using it- let's change the dictionary, people!) And Teach For America is a viable option, if I got in- they send you for two years (see, two years and I'm out in the real world and doing things and the United Methodist church isn't going to come crashing to the ground in two years... I hope...) to schools that could use teachers willing to fight the education gap. It would be out of my comfort zone and I'd be helping and living and making the world a better place and using my college degree. And not disappointing anyone. It's a great compromise, right? Right?

So here comes the begging for advice section of my blog/Facebook notes. What should I do? Because I want more- I want more out of life than what I have out of it so far (maybe that'll fill the big aching gap that this idiotic loneliness causes [oops, ending awkward personal confessional moment now]) and I want to be more. I can help. We can help. It just depends on where I should go to help. So, would you go along with your calling, because it seems like everything you want, or should you try to strike a new trail for a bit, knowing (read hoping) that you'll go back to the call before the end of it all? I can't lock myself away in a tower for three years.

___________________________________________________________


Pollyanna Whittier: [after Jimmy Bean jumps out of the tree and scares her] Why don't you come out of the front door like normal people?
Jimmy Bean: They won't let us. I can come out anytime I want with my tree.
Pollyanna Whittier: You could also fall and hurt yourself badly. You shouldn't play in trees.
Jimmy Bean: That's stupid. Don't you believe in God?
Pollyanna Whittier: [offended] Of course I do! But what's that got to do with it?
Jimmy Bean: He grew it there, didn't He? So I can climb it anytime I want.
Pollyanna Whittier: You're much too young to go around discussing things you don't know anything about.
[coolly walks away]
Jimmy Bean: [chasing after her] He did too! Why else would it be there?
Pollyanna Whittier: Shows you're very juvenile.
Jimmy Bean: You aren't so much, you girl! 'Sides, I'm something you can't be. I'm an orphan.
Pollyanna Whittier: [exaggerated patience] Go away from me, please, little boy.
Jimmy Bean: [mimicking her] Go away from please, little boy!
Pollyanna Whittier: [finally losing her cool] What is it you want?
Jimmy Bean: [suddenly all smiles] I wanna go fishin'! You wanna come along?

Rock

Happy almost Easter.

Sorry about the lack of enthusiasm there. In addition to trying to remove the exclamation point from my life (because I am developing a sincere dislike for people, especially former speakers, who use exclamation points in a book) I'm just not excited. You see, for me, Easter last year was a big deal. Big. Huge. It was the end of a terrible season in my life. I want to say that Easter Sunday that Sunday was an epic experience, where light flooded back into my life and all the past wrongs that had ever happened were set right. That'd be a lie, so I'll try to avoid it.

But the point was that I could talk to God again. I could pray, and not in the angry, despairing, fearful, useless words that had defined my life before. I always get a little creeped out by mystics- I'm not really sure what to do with people who love God that much and in that way- but the easiest analogy is like getting back together with someone after you've had a fight. You know, you can talk again and each person forgives and forgets enough to function together. You put away the things that you argued about in the first place and focus on the reasons why you like being around the person. It's not a lie, per se, you're just willing to love the other person while they work on fixing the things that made you angry.

Well, God's not going to change, so guess who needs to fix themselves in this argument?

The really frustrating thing is that a year later, I'm still the same. Well, I'm a little different. The outside pain that I wouldn't let myself feel is creeping in. And I can't sit down in front of God and say that I've failed to hear the cry of the needy, because I have. I think I've been under the impression that hearing is enough. Goodness knows it's not. Imagine if God had only heard the cry of the Israelites in Egypt.

But doing is difficult. It's this rock in between me and God right now, because I'm not willing to do. But what do you do about the things that stab your heart? How do I do anything to help the more than 4. million. Palestinian refugees? Crying over their stories is not enough, but inviting them to live in my dorm room that has seceded from the residence hall isn't particularly reasonable. What do you do about abusive parents? Abusive boyfriends? You can't catch them all. How do you get a world that can feed every one of its citizens to wake up and realize that global hunger needs to be something in our shameful past? My heart breaks over the big things, the things that I have minimal control over. What are you going to do? You gonna beat up everybody?

But there must be something I can do, something beyond the small things I do.

And I'm really afraid there is.

You see, I don't want to go to the cross. I don't want to follow Christ to the cross on Friday, because I know that I've got my own cross that I have to pick up, my own mission for the redemption of humanity that no one else is going to do. And I don't know what it is yet, but the potential scale of it scares me to death. I can see the cross. And I don't want it.

See, I'm one of those people who said a long time ago that I'd follow You, Lord, wherever you lead. And I'm one of those people that says now, not there. I'll follow you anywhere but there. And there. OK, and maybe there too. Oh, and there's definitely out. Here, I've got this sharpie, how about I just mark off sections of the world that we won't go to, people we won't talk to, things we won't do, because I don't want to go there, no matter who's leading me there. And I know that I'm doing this. And I don't want to fix it.

Give me a church. Stick me in tower for another three years of education. Keep me in middle class America. Surely there's enough of a field there for me. And there is, I don't mean to knock anyone's calling, but there's also many other places that I am unwilling to go. I can't resolve this with God. One of us has to change. I'm pretty sure I know which one of us it'll be too. So I'm waiting on something to break, because I know it's coming. I'm sure it'll come at probably the most inopportune moment, but how do I fix this? How do you break your own arm? Because that's what bending on this is like for me. It's a beat down of a vital part of my pride, my fear and my humanity.

It's hard to see how far you've grown when you've shrunk.

Promise

A man had a fig tree, planted in his vineyard, and he went to look for fruit on it, but did not find any. So he said to the man who took care of the vineyard, 'For three years now I've been coming to look for fruit on this fig tree and haven't found any. Cut it down! Why should it use up the soil?'

'Sir,' the man replied, 'leave it alone for one more year, and I'll dig around it and fertilize it. If it bears fruit next year, fine! If not, then cut it down.'

(Luke 13:6-9)

Fitting

This has been the year of fitting into black dresses that weren't bought for me.

I first encountered this problem earlier this semester, right around my awesome and wonderful birthday, when Christine, Pam and I went to the opera. Having never been to an opera that wasn't put on by the opera class at UNC, I had nothing, I felt, that was appropriate to wear. Christine had been Target shopping online but one of the dresses she had bought didn't suit her the way she wanted. I tried it on and through much effort and lack of breath, I got into it and looked pretty good in it. I wore it to the opera and it sits in my closet as my current little black dress.


I had to once again go dress hunting this week because I needed a formal dress for the Jupiter Ball at the Planetarium. Miranda and I wandered down to Time After Time, the thrift shop down Franklin. I had gotten my Halloween costume for last year from there and that had been a nice dress, so I figured I'd try my luck. Fifty bright pink, purple, green and yellow dresses and about three million and two sequins later, I found a formal length black dress. It looked like it might could fit, so I walked back into the dressing room and proceeded to try it on. That was an adventure in itself and there were many moments were I was sure that I was going to get stuck like that forever and have to ask someone to come in and cut me out of the dress, but I got it on. And I looked pretty good in it. I wore it for six hours last night and it's hanging up in my closet as my back-up formal dress.

And after all, why shouldn't I be able to wear those dresses and look good in them? It's what I've been doing my whole life.

I swear, my whole life I've been looking for something to put on that'll make me look nice and fit the world I'm stepping into and my whole life I've found something that was never mine but that I looked pretty good in. I've paid for my black dresses and smiled at the compliments, all the while knowing that I can't really breathe or be functional in them, and those things were made to be looked at in, not to pick up programs around the Star Theater in, tell me you. All my life, I've been looking to see how I fit into the clothes that someone else has worn.

And the annoying thing is, I fit. OK, maybe it's not easy to get into it, but I'm close enough, you know? And the people around me think that I'm great in what I've been in. Imagine, then, what I could look like in a dress that was actually made for me, tailored so well that I'm not sure that I wasn't made for the dress instead of the dress being made for me. Imagine what each of us would look like in clothes like that.

Now you all know that I'm not talking about dresses anymore. Maybe you're one of those people who follows my life with intense anticipation... OK, since those people don't exist, maybe you know that I went to Exploration a week ago yesterday and maybe you've been wondering what I learned, if I decided anything. I hope you haven't been impatiently awaiting a blog post on it(since apparently I can only express myself in writing mass distributed across the internets) because then I would have to use the excuse that I needed time to reflect on it. Really, I don't think I did. I don't think I even needed to go to discern what I was supposed to do. I'm pretty sure I've known for longer than I want to admit that I was going to end up settling on ordination and living my life out in the church (don't judge). But let me 'splain.

See, I'm kinda angry at the church at times, like a lot of my friends are, because it's not living up to what it's supposed to be. OK, my friends are generally angry at her because she's full of hypocrites and judgmental liars and because she has a long history of hate and violence. And in some sense, I am too. But I have no room to talk; to quote one of the speakers at Exploration, "The church is not perfect but I am the church too." Man, I needed to go just to hear that (and to get an exorbitantly large amount of free bags and pens and to have my nice new blanket given to me and taken away from me and you know how attached I get to things I sleep with [yeah, I went there {anyway}]). The speaker before that, and really the speakers the whole weekend, talked about how we can change the church by the way we live our lives and the way we lead, regardless of whether you end up ordained or as a lay leader. I was watching the NOOMA we're going to watch in Double-C tomorrow and Rob Bell says that you have to own up to your name, to your past, good and bad because it's yours. We as the church have to own up to our collective past, good and bad, and work to make our future better, to help heal wounds and loosen the grip that history has on us. We are the church. "Church, choose to do something different."

Which I can do. Listen, kids, we can change the world. Listen, everyone, we can change the world. We can be better. We can help build the church into what she was meant to be, we can help the kingdom come on Earth, we can be a force for good, might for right, as TH White's King Arthur might say. We don't have to sit still and let a load of good organization, good connections and good people go to waste. We have such potential. Don't let anyone tell you different. "When the wind blows, things move." Things are moving, my friends, and I'm excited.

Because I know where it's coming from. It's the same place that hope and wonder and bushes that are not consumed come from. It's where love comes from. It's where this crazy, stupid, heartfelt, wonderful idealism comes from. It's from this deep, deep well of living water and we have to tell some people about it. How bad I am at this! How inadequate! There has to be someone better. You know, there always is.

But I'm thankful. At least I know my dress fits.

A Raft

[Disclaimer for Rachel, should she end up reading this: He's all yours, once I forget that I've read this book. And you're more than welcome to beat me down if I've read a moral into something that had no moral value at all. Just sayin'.]

I am in love with another captain of the guard.

Due to the wonderfulness that is fall break, my homework and required reading has gathered the most minute amount of dust possible as I spent my evenings, or what was left of my evenings after work took its toll, reading a book. Not to plug Terry Pratchett or anything, but I adore the Discworld and its characters, most of all Death, the anthropomorphic personification of, well, death, and Sam Vimes, captain of the Night Watch. I love Death for his weird humanity and I love Vimes just because. Maybe because I'm a sucker for a guy in uniform, maybe because he's a cynic or maybe just because he's adorable to me in a million ways I can't precisely explain. I love to dive into stuff like this, just escape from everything in a way that's more mentally stimulating than TV but a lot less mentally strenuous than the problem sets that I should probably be doing this very instant. And the Disc is quirky and amusing, but it's got a soul, somewhere in there, and morality and odd physics-y magic and superb characters. I listen to Vimes' optimistic cynicism and I smile and know that the lesson is hidden somewhere deep and if it had been said out loud, it would have been mocked. And so I love it.

But it's dangerous at the same time. Reading and made-up worlds are not safe grounds for my brain to live in. I could almost be there, running with the watch to the palace or climbing deeper into the depths of the Library with the Librarian. And it makes me think and that is a dangerous pastime as well. It's much safer to immerse myself in whatever subtlety is involved in whatever weird math I'm supposed to understand to finish my E&M homework than to let my mind swim unsupervised in the ocean that is creative, fantastic thought. I can't muse on the nature of humanity any more safely than I can spend hours imagining a castle far away surrounded by distant blue mountains and a clear river. My heart's much too invested in either topic and the brain goes astray when the heart takes the wheel.

Oh, but should it be that way? Should I have to limit my dreaming because eventually it'll take me places I don't want to go? I know it's like flying-- there's always that risk that you'll come crashing back down to the earth. But I'm not Icarus, I'm not dumb. I know my limits and I know when the wax will start to melt. At the same time, my limits are so low to the ground that I feel like it's not even worth the effort to take off at all. And then the familiar cycle of accusations come around again, mostly directed at the ceiling. Why would I even have the ability to think and to dream like this if I wasn't allowed to use it to its full potential? Why give me a mind that can think like this and visualize and imagine if that's the worst thing I can do? And believe me, it's not a good thing for me to be too romantic. It's much worse than having my head in the clouds. It's more like building ice cream castles in the air and then insisting that I be allowed to live in them. It's not safe. But building the castles is such a gift. Maybe I'm supposed to use it for something else? Oh, what else? What am I supposed to do with my life?

Man, two years ago I had it figured out. Four years of undergrad (and I could totally take this physics major on) and then a couple of years of grad school and doctorate work and then I'd have a PhD in astrophysics and I'd be doing research and life would be grand. It'd be hard, sure, but everything in life is hard, you just have to try harder and you'll win. Follow your dreams, people. You just have to be determined.

Can I just say that those are all lies? I mean, not the 'everything in life is hard' bit, I'm sure that's good across the board, but you can't do whatever you want. Or maybe you can do what you want, but you definitely can't do what you thought you wanted. And so here I sit, a couple of classes away from a degree that I honestly have no intention of using but was so sure was right for me and I have no clue what I'm going to do with my life. I've had this awkward and uncomfortable conversation with a lot of people recently because I keep on meeting new people and everyone wants to know what your major is and the most natural response to physics, after a sympathetic groan, is 'What are you going to do with that?' Me, I'm going to frame it up as exhibit A for proof of the stubbornness of my pride and then move on. But to what? There's so much you can do through the church. It's not all being a pastor or a chaplain, there's tons of options out there. See, when God calls you, He doesn't send down a nice little post-it with a profession and a list of goals and He doesn't defend Himself or try to convince you to come, He just says Follow Me. I mean, what are you supposed to say to that? 'No, I can't speak well.' 'But I am just a child.' 'You can't mean me, Lord.' 'But how do I know it's really You? How do I know that this isn't some cosmic joke or twist of fate or weird chemical imbalance that causes me to think that there's really a higher power out there that gives an expletive about what I'm doing? How do I know?'

I mean, it's almost painful, talking about this call stuff. I guess I invite it, because I tell people I'm going to Dallas, but I don't explain why and of course they ask and then I have to explain that it's a conference for young people interested in ministry in the United Methodist church and that's met with a much different response than physics is. There's the 'Oh, that's wonderful!' or the judging silence where people reevaluate me and decide if they really want to be around me anymore or the surprise. That's my favorite, the surprise. I guess I look and sound like a God-hater because I'm a thinker. And it legitimately breaks my heart when I have to tell a little kid who came to a planetarium show and asks me how the planets were created that they were formed out of a protoplanetary disk when the Sun was very young because it can rock your little world when you find out that the universe didn't pop into existence fully formed, but I can't lie. You can't sit back and say we don't know when we do and say it's God when we can see a cause. I don't like the god of the gaps. That's not who I plan on serving. Now, I know that in the Planck time at the beginning of the universe, the laws of physics that we have right now can't explain what's going on, but I'm not going to say that that's God because one day people might get it, God might let us in on a couple of things and we'd understand how awesome He is by what He's made, but that doesn't mean that God is the answer to the question today. And He's bigger than our science, you know? Happy International Year of Astronomy- it's the 400th anniversary of the first time that Galileo turned his telescope to the sky and started to see things that caused a verifiable uproar. But the thing is, he needn't have. Caused an uproar, I mean. If God's existence is called into question by a couple of rocks orbiting a bunch of gas super far away, maybe He's too small. And maybe we'll forever have to be rethinking Him because I don't think we can understand Him. I mean, He's not a superhuman, He's not some mirror for us to reflect the best parts of us onto. He's God. He's holy. He's set apart. He is apart. I know that, for a fact. But if He's loving and He made us all to be loving, where did we go so very wrong?

But that wasn't the original point. The original point was Sam Vimes. Sam Vimes, who claims the city for his own and attempts to impose some order on the chaos and tries wonderfully hard at being a hero despite his insistence that he's not hero material. And maybe he's not, you know, maybe he's just a literary vessel for the idea that whenever the common good man tries to save the day chance and a little messed up dragon must come and save it for him. But he has such faith in good, such idealism that is protected by the cynicism, that you can't help but hope that he's right at the end of the day, that the good in people and in the world will really float on the sea of evil and not be consumed.

And I like that.

Yellow Light Epiphany

Dear Boy,

Thanks for this summer. You probably don't know and won't know how much you changed my plans. You don't know how many hours I spent letting my heart ache pointlessly over you or how many people I asked for advice on what to do about you or how long it took me to realize that you are not what I really want in my life today, but I know. I wasted those hours, I started those conversations and I waited my two years- let me go check my email to find the exact date- to figure out what I figured out today.

You know, I may have loved you. There are times that I've been afraid that I did and there was a whole week of happiness induced by that thought. I knew all along that you never loved me, though. You take the taste out of peanut butter, as Charlie Brown might see it. Maybe I preferred it that way. You were safe and you were unknown to most of the people around me. You could be my mysterious excuse to not talk to someone else. You were safe. You left my heart in a confused mess, but you were safe.

I probably should apologize- I'm sure this is making you uncomfortable. My pen sees it as revenge for having to smile when you mentioned past girlfriends when I've never even been on a date or for the times when I was sure you were saying things to make me size up your opinion of me, knowing that I would fall short. I'm not the girl you want and you probably never thought of me outside of the times that you saw me. I had one painful evening when I could imagine us seeing more of each other. Maybe that's the night that I began to realize that you must become part of my past as much as I am only a part of yours.

Ever since high school, I hit the ceiling when I go under a yellow light- you get a wish when you do. I often waste mine- a wish for a car, for a boyfriend, for a perfect day. Not that these things are inaccessible, just that they don't come by wishing. I realized today, after musing under a yellow light, that neither would you and, upon further examination, I realized that I wouldn't want you to.

Would you believe in a love at first sight? I'm certain that it happens all the time. But it doesn't mean a relationship, as it's just a glance. Destiny is worked out by us and love remains unrequited when left idle. So here's to you- you cured me of my ridiculous obsession with love and helped me grow up, all the while being true to yourself, which Shakespeare tells us is the most important thing.

Still, if you want to spend a couple of hours talking about my favorite books (a question of yours which I never answered satisfactorily), listening to Beatles' songs (just to see where I'm coming from), looking at the stars again (before the constellations I know set), or talking about our awesomely blessed yet superbly separate lives, I'm not at all opposed to putting off packing every little thing until one in the morning. Just in case you happen to be a Hawk Nelson fan, too.

With best regards,
Your Ordinary Girl