Cold Day in July

I know a lot of people are sad on days like these, mid-July with very little sunshine, but I am not one of them. 

When it is chilly I can turn off my air conditioning, which not only saves me money but drops the ambient noise level in my apartment by about 50 decibels. I can wear long-sleeved shirts and long pants. Isn't it nice switching back and forth between seasonal wardrobes? ("Oh, turtleneck shirt! I haven't worn you in so long!") And isn't it nice cuddling up in blankets, no matter when it is? 

When it is dreary outside, everything slows down inside, too. It feels okay to be lazy, to leave things for tomorrow. Tiredness doesn't feel as oppressive on a dreary day as it does on a sunny day. The sun likes to guilt you out if you're sleeping in or watching TV instead of going on walks or bike rides, even though the sun knows perfectly well I am afraid of burning and I really really have to motivate myself to leave the apartment solo with no mission.

It feels like such a lovely, stretchy long day. 

Late night/Early morning ramblings

• Technically it is early morning, but in my vocabulary it isn't morning unless I've slept, so it is still late night for me.
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• I got a job as an office manager for a local charter school. For this job, which was really interesting. I start August 17. The next five weeks are vacation now, not unemployment. Nice.
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• What is it about driving my area of I-196 after dark that makes me forget I'm on an expressway? I have often glanced at the speedometer and seen I am waaaayyyy under posted speed limits. And I'm not the only one.
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• Sometimes people leave reviews on my fanfiction like this one--"Interesting. I wondered if Jacob was there. If so, wouldn't that be a twist?! I liked the story, though"--that make me wonder if they understand what the word "though" means. 
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• I think if you like a fanfiction enough to favorite it so you can check it out again later or recommend it to anyone who sees your profile, you like it enough that you can spend half a minute writing a review. Even just to say "This is going in my favorites." Writers like acknowledgment.
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• Went to a concert last night and one of the singers reminded me of Michael Emerson. High forehead, mostly. It suddenly occurred to me that maybe I like high foreheads for physiognomic reasons--they're associated with intelligence. Which is very attractive.
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• Watching so much NCIS lately that tonight I caught myself making a gesture that belongs to one of the characters.
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• I noticed recently that I have a lot of songs on my iPod about men in love with difficult women.
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• I've been with my parents for 20 days out of the last four weeks. I have slept in my own bed 0 days out of that same time...the sofa bed in the room with the air conditioner is getting a lot of use. Speaking of which....
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• Good night.

Imagining and Knowing

Tonight my heart is light and I think it's because yesterday I talked about him and tonight I talked about him and both times I talked not about what I imagined he might be up to or how I see myself in this fraction of time, but about what I knew he had already done, and who he is, past and present and future.

In Sunday School yesterday, someone had a prayer request that mirrored a prayer request I have been keeping to myself, and I comforted her aloud with the truth I know, and in so doing received comfort. (God sends us people broken as we are so we can offer the comfort with which we have been comforted.) 

"Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee," another girl read from Matthew 28:10 during the lesson, and a boy asked in astonishment, "Jesus had brothers?" and it swept over me that yes, Jesus has brothers, and sisters, present and ever after tense, and I am one of them and it is awe-inspiring.

How can I be a sister of Christ? Because he didn't just die on the cross (others had done that), he rose from the grave. He didn't just rise from the grave (others had done that), he rose on his own power. And because only God could do that, then Jesus is who he said he was, and spoke the truth. And because his words can be trusted, we can know that his promises are true, and he promised to reconcile those who believed to God. More than that, he made us fellow children of God, co-heirs of all the blessings and riches of God (Romans 8:15-17). And that, as I told the kids, is why it is important that Jesus rose from the dead.

Tonight I spoke with a friend of deep matters, dark things of the heart, the thoughts and beliefs that entrench themselves. We talked of him then, too, about how he is not the one fighting to increase the hold these things have on me, but the one who fought once for all to release me from the chains I keep helping that other to wrap around my neck again, shadow chains with no power when I walk in the light.

"Do you know why I can't remember very well?" a boy asked me yesterday morning. "Because I forget really easily."

So do I, my young friend. Let's keep reminding each other about the important things.

Whatever He Commands

Maybe I'm the only one who has this problem, but the most draining issues in my life come up with obnoxious regularity. I'll get past something, move on a few years, encounter a similar scenario, try to relate better in it and think of myself less and of God and others more, and eventually crash and burn. Again. I'll see positive changes, but they often seem microscopic, to the point that when I recognize a scenario I practically hear the ticking time-bomb.

What do you want me to learn from this, God? What do I have to change to move past it and deal with something else? Why does it keep happening? Why do my best efforts keep ending in failure even when it seems like I'm trusting in you?

I'm reading Job now, which is pretty appropriate in some ways. On the one hand, I haven't had that level of suffering. On the other hand, I have definitely had the "Would somebody please tell me what on earth is going on" feeling. Yesterday I came across this passage: "Also with moisture he loads the thick cloud; he disperses the cloud of his lightning. It changes direction, turning around by his guidance, that it may do whatever he commands it on the face of the inhabited earth. Whether for correction, or for his world, or for lovingkindness, he causes it to happen" (Job 37:12-13).

You know what that passage doesn't say is one of God's goals for doing what he does? "To screw with your mind. To make you feel like a total failure and a waste of space in God's kingdom." (Come to think of it, I know who does have those goals.)

Job was tormented by Satan, and so was Paul. Paul begged three times for that torment to leave (and from my own experience I wonder if it was that whatever it was flared up three different times), and received this for an answer: "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness" (2 Corinthians 12:9a).

God, I am tired of this. I don't know what it is for, or what to do with it. This is what I know: Jesus Christ died and rose from the dead and completed his work, and because of that I will not stand ashamed before you on the last day. Keep me from stumbling today. And tomorrow. And the next time.

Help me to remember that even though it seems that life drones on repetitively, drastic change only needs to happen once.

Casting Director

When I sit in group interviews I find myself more interested in evaluating everyone else than in coming up with my own presentation. I think I would like to be an interviewer, or casting director...I'm not great on the other side of the desk. 

Today after the opening "about me" statements, I kind of wished I had been sent home. One of the three of us had a great background in and love of the sort of work in question. My casting director side said, "They'd be stupid if they didn't pick her." Hearing her and the two women who were interviewing us almost made me cry--I so long to be doing something I feel that strongly about, but have trouble believing that is possible. Or if I should be using the energy to try to believe. And then I feel stupid for being so overwrought and melodramatic. (It's complicated up in my head. Sometimes it feels way too crowded up there.)

I'm heartsick.

"Why don't you just tell me...."

In one of my favorite Seinfeld bits, Kramer has been getting calls for Moviefone and has decided to answer his phone as though he were a recorded message. Unfortunately, as he is not really a Touchtone phone system, he can't tell which three letters the person on the other end of the phone is pressing as they try to select their movie. He offers a few wild guesses and finally blurts out, "Why don't you just tell me the name of the movie you've selected?"

I kind of feel like that lately. You know, on an allegorical level. I don't know what buttons to press, I don't know what movie you want to see, but if you would just tell me what it is I would at least be able to move on from there. 

Extremes

"The Church condemns violence, but it condemns indifference more harshly. Violence can be the expression of love, indifference never. One is an imperfection of charity, the other the perfection of egoism." -- unnamed priest in Graham Greene's The Comedians

I would argue that imperfections of charity and perfections of egoism exist in both extremes, but in general I am far more likely to choose violence over indifference.  "I don't actually get upset," somebody told me once, and between the words I heard, "Deep down, I don't actually care about anything you could possibly say or do." Sometimes when I have made someone angry, there is a part of me that is happy about it because I'd rather they be angry at me than brush me off. And as I was writing that last sentence, I remembered that in a Harry Potter fanfic I once wrote I fed similar words into the mouth of Draco Malfoy. Nice.

Humans are pretty twisted up inside, aren't they?  Which extreme do you fall towards?

Oh, reality...I only ever wanted to visit you....

I just got back from a vacation with my parents and have been thrown back into real life. I am a bit tired of real life. Don't know what to do with it. On the one hand, I need a job to pay my bills. On the other hand, I have been enjoying all this time off--even on days when I've not turned my air conditioning on because I'm trying not to spend money, and I sit here feeling very frugal and rather sticky. And honestly, looking for a job at thirty was not what I thought would happen.

I wish somebody had told me as I was growing up that the odds of me being married straight after graduation or shortly into my time as a working woman were not as high as I thought they were (maybe especially confronting me on my extreme fear of failure and thus of commitment which I have often seen as a precursor to failure).  I wish somebody had urged me not to wait around for some prince to come rescue me from the tower of the corporate world (it wasn't always a conscious thought, but looking back, it was definitely in there). I wish somebody had challenged me to think about what to do with what I'd been given, to move out of my ruts, to fall on my face a few times and get back up.

This is my fear for the young girls in my church who hear a lot about being good wives and mothers and not a lot about what to do if that isn't in the plan: that they'll end up like me, unemployed and searching job boards and wondering why they spent seven years treading water and if they've doomed themselves to that for the rest of their lives.

But then, the first play I ever wrote outside of a class boiled up out of a period of intense discontentment. Maybe I'm scheduled to write a masterpiece.

A girl can still dream.