life in the backwoods

I moved home to the mountains two days ago. Since returning home, I have:

*tried (and failed) to ride a motorbike
*pulled a few weeds in the garden
*sat around a bonfire cooking hotdogs and smores with my family
*biked the Virginia Creeper Trail (17 miles of pure awesomeness)
*shot a handgun
*ate the very best homemade barbeque in the world

Gotta love country livin'!

"take this sinking boat and point it home"

I went to a Swell Season concert this weekend, and it was hands down the best concert I've ever been to. I've never seen an entire audience so emotionally moved and throughly enraptured as they were on that lovely summer night. If you've never heard the lush, gorgeous, intense melodies of Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, you should go treat yourself to that right now. Or if you have not seen the movie Once, go do that too.

In addition to enjoying their incredible vocal harmonies and musical talents, the concert gave me such a beautiful rush of memories. I love how music has the power to instantly take you back to a moment in time. I remembered how I was first introduced to the Swell Season during my summer in Prague. The girls I lived with would play "Falling Slowly" almost every morning as we got ready to begin a new day. Hearing it played live filled my heart with joy and longing.

The concert reminded me why art is important: sometimes we need moments of intense beauty or poignant sadness to break us out of our everyday, commonplace routines and remind us that there is so much more. More richness in our memories, more depth behind our day-to-day lives, more hope and awe yet to come.

the post-grad doldrums

Being a college graduate feels strangely unproductive and sort of boring. I know that's a temporary feeling that I'll probably look back on wistfully someday, but for now it's unnerving. I keep picking up my laptop and checking my email over and over again.....and nothing. I keep thinking I must be forgetting some undone homework, but then I remember it's all done....permanently. Today I started pouring over grad school admissions handbooks at Barnes and Noble because I just can't stand having nothing to do or plan.

Oh goodness. What is wrong with me?

Addiction

I have been sitting in a coffee shop this afternoon, doing my last big study/cram session before the final exam of my undergrad life. I was feeling stressed, about studying and about life, and then I overheard the woman sitting beside me. She was a lovely woman in her mid-thirties, who was making phone calls to various women's shelters to see if they would take her in for a few weeks. Her husband had left her, and she had just completed a rehab program for alcoholism. As she explained her situation to various shelters, she sounded so sweet and so genuine. Some time later, a friend came into join her, and they both began to talk about their experiences with alcoholism and recovery. All of my petty anxieties seemed so small in the light of these women's lives, and I wished so much that I could just jump into their conversation and ask to hear their stories.

My essay exam tomorrow is for my Literary Study of the Bible class, and it's on the subject of surprise endings. Over the past few days, I've been thinking about surprises in the Bible, and my mind has been overwhelmed with the fact that the entire book seems like a continual series of surprises, twists, and subverted expectations. As I was overhearing the conversation between these two women, I was writing this paragraph as a rough draft of what I want to write tomorrow on my exam:

"The great surprise of the Bible is that God always uses the unusable, changes the unchangeable, and loves the unloveable. He chooses a murderous coward to lead his people out of Egypt, a young shepherd boy to become the king of Israel, an unknown teenage peasant as the mother of Christ, a group of dirty shepherds as the bearers of angelic tidings, a woman formerly possessed by demons as the first witness of the resurrected Jesus, and a vicious persecutor of the early church as a zealous apostle of the faith. In both the Old and New Testament, God's actions continually defy human expectations of behaviorally based favor and love."

The women beside me began to talk about their faith as I wrote this and I was overwhelmed with this real life picture of what I was writing. I bet their experience of Jesus' love and mercy is so much richer and deeper than I can even imagine. I think there is something beautiful in the utter darkness and horror of an addiction: it makes that false infinite, that sweet poison, that substitute god so clear and tangible in its destructiveness. An addict knows their utter vulnerability, brokenness, and weakness in a way that very few of us are willing or able to admit.

I think we're all addicted to something. One of my (many) addictions happens to be approval, which is particularly destructive when it leads me to believe that I can earn the love and approval of God. The realization that I cannot lose God's love is a daily one, always pushing against the voice inside that tells me I am a failure, or against the pride that tells me I deserve every possible happiness the world has to offer. Freedom lies somewhere in the balance, in knowing that I am desperately broken and yet freely, lavishly loved and delighted in. I think that balance is resting in grace......grace upon grace upon grace that I cannot understand or deserve or lose.

A few good reasons to babysit

1. Playing in the park on a sunny day is the best fun you can have. Especially wading in a creek with a 3 year old who loves to throw rocks.

2. Dress up! Who couldn't love dress up? The boys put on their fireman and Power Ranger costumes (cutest things I've ever seen) and told me they had to protect me (I was the Princess, naturally) with their fire-fighting and karate skills. They also made me a gun out of Legos and told me that would protect me if they couldn't be around.

3. Making funny faces in the mirror to get distracted little boys to brush their teeth.

4. Reading bedtime stories and saying bedtime prayers.

5. Building Legos, making LiteBrite patterns, shooting laser guns, lightsaber battles, playing soccer....need I say more?

6. When I asked the 5 year old what he would be when he grew up, he replied, "A dolphin trainer." After a thoughtful pause, his little brother cheerfully answered, "I will be a crab someday." I wanted to explain that changing species probably wouldn't happen, but I decided to let him dream.