(Sort of) About a Dress

Tonight after the women's Bible study I asked for prayer that somehow, somewhere I would find someone to hem my bridesmaid dress for less than $40, and in less than two weeks. 

No big deal, right? Just a little extra pressure?

Except that tonight it turned out I was hiding an awful lot of other things behind the fact of my three-inches-too-long bridesmaid dress, and suddenly as I was making the request I was crying harder than I ever remember crying in public anywhere other than a funeral.

Pathetic and funny at the same time, what with me gulping back tears that must have seemed ridiculous considering my stated request was something like "I need my dress hemmed," and a dozen suddenly solicitous women offering suggestions and assistance. (I do have an alteration appointment now.)

"I'm not trying to be manipulative," I kept saying, especially to the woman who had previously refused my request on the (truthful) grounds that she is so busy just now. 

And maybe partly I meant "I'm not trying to be vulnerable."

Trying or not trying, I suppose I never have been and never will be really able to change that.

Waiting for an open door

This morning I took my car in for repairs and was driven to work by someone who works for the dealership. He opened the door for me when I was getting into the car, and when we arrived at my office he asked me to stay seated until he could get around and open the car door for me. This is what made me sure that I had been driven by this particular man before. I vaguely remember the conversation from the first time he drove me to work—not the exact words, but something along the lines of him asking me to do him the honor of letting him open the door for me.

You would think it would be easy, sitting there while he went around to open the door, but it wasn't. It never is, for me. Because it's not just about how the door gets opened, it's about a whole whirlwind of swirling thoughts in my head. As this gentleman looks more than old enough to be my father and speaks of his wife often, I had no complicating "is he hitting on me" mental chatter. (Funny how I tend to assume that people are nice because of what they think they'll get out of it. Or not so funny.)

This morning I experienced on a heightened level the sort of back-and-forth I have over anybody trying to help me with anything:

• I can do it myself
• But I don't have to
• But I can
• But he wants to help
• I don't need help
• Can you let somebody help anyway
• I don't like people helping me
• Yes you do
• I don't know when I cross the line to manipulating someone
• He offered 

Kindness—especially of the sort that seems to ask nothing in return—throws me off, breaks me out of my "self-sufficiency" a bit, makes me remember God.

God helped before I asked, and He asks me to wait while He opens all of the doors for me, asks me not to open them with my strength and in my impatience. Which is difficult when part of me is screaming to fling open every door on my own.

So thank you, Bob from the shuttle service. I need waiting practice.

Hey, now....

"[My brother] was definitely into comic books, so I was exposed to it, although, you know, I'm a girl, let's face it, so...." -- Gwyneth Paltrow

Things To Do

Maybe non-list people don't understand this, but writing a list can be, on some level, dangerous.

Best example: I have a giant list in my head of things I want to do with my life, but I've been too afraid to write this list down anywhere. To write it on a list is to admit that I need it, or want it, which is to admit that I am not okay as I am, which is...what? Expected?

If I write it down, it means I want to try. 

If I try, I risk failure. Or success. Which could lead to a whole new list.

Then I remember that I told God that this year, this year in particular, I was going to make a sacrifice to God of my fear, to do things that I had always wanted to do, to attempt what I've been putting off, to try without worrying so much about whether or not the trying would work out as I imagined it would.

The list is rising to the surface of my mind. Sooner or later, it will either have to be written or smothered back down.

I want to write it.

Post-study thoughts on 1 Peter 3:1-6

The Christian wife is to be submissive and glad of it, glad to bend her will to her husband's for the sake of Christ. Again I vow I will not bow to anyone who doesn't look like Him.

Submission is a sacred thing. It is holy. It is a spiritual act of worship.

It is hard for me remember that when guys make jokes about how it means I have to do what they say because I'm a woman. Even if I know the guys don't mean it. (Shouldn't we mean what we say?)

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"Isn't it comforting," I say, "that true beauty isn't primarily external? Otherwise it would peak and then be gone."

"When you find a man who thinks that way," says Jennifer, "marry him."

Holly says not many guys do think like that. She says she sees lots of women with gentle and quiet spirits, but that there aren't many men around who are interested.

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Eventually, as in all church people conversations about modesty in dress, somebody brings up the inevitable hackneyed phrase: "Men are visual." It is said as though there is nothing to do about it, as though that is how it is and we can't expect any more than that.

I wonder how easy it is for most women to develop a gentle and quiet spirit. I know it isn't easy for me. It isn't easy to live like Christ, or even (some days) to want to live like Christ. But I'm pressing on.

Are we, women of the faith, pressing on alone?

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This is what I despise about talk of "hotness": that fire consumes with nothing left. A few years, and it is gone. Small comfort being "hot" would be, knowing that it always, always cools. Small respect for guys who emphasize spark over substance...my spark is sputtery and my substance is more me and my skin is thin.

I am in the refiner's fire, which will burn for my whole life and render me more and more beautiful in the eyes of God with each passing year, through wrinkles and creaky joints and greying hair and all. I am a woman blazing and have no time to waste on mere heat.

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The conference leader all those months ago made a list of qualities women looked for in their "fantasy men," and then a corresponding list of things men looked for in their "fantasy women," and the lists showed totally opposite ideals. How is it even possible to bridge such a gap?

We need Someone who has experience with bridges.

Sometimes I miss physical contact....

I come from what my great-aunt Irene has called "the huggingest family." When I was growing up, I could count on (and take for granted) having a plethora of hugs a day. And I know what it means to have a plethora. College, not so many hugs. But I'm a female, so we do a lot of the casual hand-on-arm stuff in conversations. And I was a theatre major, which ramps up physical contact by a factor of eleventy (that's an approximation).

Now, living on my own after college, I pretty much depend on church functions and hang-out times with select people for hugs. This is usually enough to keep me from feeling contact-starved.

This past month, though...wow. I haven't felt like I needed this many hugs in a long time. A lot of it is connected to the stress at work, I'm sure.

Anyway, it's nice to have Sundays. Because Sundays are when I get most of my physical contact for the whole week. I can usually count on the following: 

• A hug from Rosemary
• A hug from Lisa or Abby or Trudy or Janessa or all of the above
• Several pokes on the head from Brenna and Braelynn
• A couple of hugs from Braelynn
• The female-conversation-style arm touching thing I mentioned

Also maybe a few high fives in there from some of my guy friends. That sort of thing.

Today I got a chance to hold a baby for a while, and one of the pre-K girls was playing with my hair when I got down to help her with her project, and tonight I get to see my little buddy Lucas, who is always good for a few hugs.

So it'll be a good day for getting hugs. Which is good because I had kind of a rough week. Which was just capped off by a phone call from my dad to tell me that my brother's bird died. 

Now I'm extra glad I got to go to Pennsylvania last weekend, so I could see Claude, too. We liked each other a lot. I'm going to miss him...but not as much as Jeremiah will miss him.

Now I'm sad about Claude and sad for Jeremiah and sad for Dorothy, who also liked Claude a lot....

Yeah. This is definitely the sort of day when I miss being a daily part of the huggingest family.

Setting in

I worked 39.5 hours in four days this week, largely due to the fact that I was on vacation on Monday. I have a few more to go tomorrow, but not nearly as many as I anticipated.

Today was good. It started off with a clearing of the air between a coworker and myself, which was an answer to prayer as well as a positive reinforcement from God on my 1 Peter pop quiz at work yesterday. (The women's Bible study I am part of is currently studying this epistle about Christians living under pressure, and last Wednesday's lesson touched on living under work pressure, especially people who are behaving unreasonably. God has good timing.) 

It wasn't the only answered prayer today. Here are a few others:

• I had a positive outlook on the day
• I was able to delegate jobs
• It wasn't raining when I moved my computer
• We packaged up far more than expected

We still have a lot of stuff over at the old building, but everything we really need in order to work is at the new building, and we have until about June 20 to clear out the old place. That gives us almost two months to make little trips out for a day or an afternoon of cleaning and boxing at a much more leisurely pace than we've had this week.

So it was good.

Now that most of the intense bits are over, it's starting to hit me....

I'm not going to work at the old building anymore. Sure, I'll be over for some of those cleaning and boxing trips, but it won't ever be home base again. And I've worked there since July of 2001. I've spent more days in that building than I spent at college. I've "lived" there about as long as I lived at the home where I spent my high school and college years. And there is a growing list of things I will miss:

• The quiet lunch room in which I ate on just about every work day for the last seven years, and was able to read in peace for most of those days
  
• The one-stall bathroom
• The "nap room" I made in an unoccupied office, which consisted of three chairs set next to each other
• Bantering and exchanging stories with our regular UPS driver
• The "cage bars" on our cubes and the way Amanda would hold onto them sometimes when she was telling me a story through the mesh
• All the surfaces for displaying trinkets; comic strips; pictures of Apollo, other birds, and all the kids I've tutored over the past years (Jephri, Daijah, Marshelle, Hassan); etc.
• The smallness of the place...only the five of us there, and all of us within easy shouting range of each other, not that we ever had to shout that loudly to be heard
  

That place saw the two hardest years of my life and heard the worst phone call I've ever received. It was also the site of hours and hours of laughter, and myriads of scrapes and bruises and muscle strains (many of which sparked some of that laughter). Apollo came and visited several times, when I was going to leave straight from work for some time out of town. My parents have been there, and my brother, and my cousin, and even some people from my church, who came by for a pop can drive.

The new place is...well, new. While I have no real resentment of it, I have no affection for it, either. There are high cubicle walls that make me feel like a rat in a maze, and keep me from easily seeing everyone I can hear. There are dozens of people in one large space broken up only by these cubicles. I share a cubicle quad space with two other coworkers and can see four more from where I sit. There are three stalls in the bathroom. All the product swatching I used to handle is now part of somebody else's space and will soon be somebody else's job. It's all so different....

Now, after years of having it on the horizon, and months of work, and one crazy busy week, it seems the mental dust from all the moving is clearing away enough for me to start mourning the familiar spaces.

This Week in My World

I spent last weekend in Pennsylvania with my parents and my brother. It was good to be able to be there, especially as I had thought we would be moving offices that weekend and that I would be unable to join them.

Instead, we are moving offices this weekend. For real. I've been boxing and trashing and organizing for at least a month now, but this week has been high-gear. I was at work for over 10 hours on Tuesday and Wednesday. My muscles are aching, my left hamstring is mad at me (a slight twinge last Sunday has not been helped by all the rushing around and such I've been doing), my forearms are nicked up, and it still doesn't look like all that much has been accomplished.

Today I woke up at about 3:40 and couldn't really get back to sleep, because I was thinking about move stuff and stuff I should have done already that isn't related to the move.  So I'm heading in even earlier than originally planned. (Maybe I can put 12 hours in and still be home before 7.)

I've been getting some help at work, but as far as my division is concerned I've been doing most of the packing, because most of our stuff is "mine," by which I mean product literature, etc. that I've been responsible for almost since I started working at this place. And I have a hard time delegating because I have difficulty believing that anybody else can do things "right" (meaning just like I do them). So that's been tough, too. I could probably have had more help if I asked for it. Probably still can.

I'm working a long day today, a long day tomorrow, a long day Saturday. I don't think I've ever looked forward to Sunday this much.

Please pray that I do my job well, that I behave as a servant of God, and that I stop feeling so sorry for myself over this. Thanks.