eye on the sparrow

I have not written since Spring Break, and I think it's been because of my subconscious need to savor and use every single moment of these final weeks of school. Most of my fellow seniors are thrilled to graduate, and I've had multiple younger students tell me they're incredibly jealous. I have to admit it: it's hard for me to understand how they feel. I have been incredibly blessed in my college years. I have met the dearest, most incredible friends a person could ever have. I have found a uniquely amazing, beautiful church body that really feels like home. I am fortunate to be studying two of my greatest passions in life, literature and dance, so even most of my academics are enjoyable. I get to volunteer with an organization that does really meaningful, valuable work to help the needy in my city. I have gotten to travel to some of the most breathtaking places on earth. And let's face it...college students may complain about their schedule, but in my opinion, classes and homework allow way more freedom and flexibility than a 9 to 5 job. But my university life is coming to an end, and it scares me to think that all my rhythms of life and all the familiar people and places may soon be gone. I start to feel desperate to cling on to everything that is safe and comfortable. It scares me to have a blank future after graduation day....as of now, I have no job, no plans, and no idea where I'll be living.

Here's the thing, though....God is good, and my future is not blank to Him. A lot of my recent days have been consumed by trying to figure out the right balance/tension between being proactive and being patient about my life. On one of the recent sunny days, as I was feeling anxious about figuring things out, I sat outside in the grass and watched a sparrow fluttering around me for a long time. I was reminded of when Jesus says that not a single sparrow falls to the ground apart from the Father's will. This sounds silly, but I suddenly realized that the little sparrow I was watching could DO absolutely nothing to be "useful" in the sense I often try to be....she could not get a meaningful job, she could not be an amazing friend, she could not communicate the gospel to anyone, she could not help the poor and the needy....yet God watches over her and knows her every wing flutter.

I can't do anything to make Him love me more or care more about me than He already does. I can't save the world; in fact, I have realized over the past week that I can't save even one person, no matter how much I want to do it on my own. And I certainly can't save myself. I can't justify my existence through a good job or good works or a good marriage. All I have to do is rest, trust, and live my life one day at a time, as the sparrow lives hers. That's grace, in all its mysterious and difficult-to-accept beauty. Grace to live and to move and to just simply be.

love your neighbor as yourself

I'm taking a Literary Study of the Bible class this semester, and the past couple of weeks we've been studying the Mosaic Law of the Torah. Rabbis have identified 613 mitzvot (commandments) in those first five books of the Bible. 613!! The sheer burden of it all is staggering, as are the epic failures to obey it by the "heroes" of the faith such as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Solomon, Moses, and David. I think we often gloss over their faults, but in re-reading all their stories again, I have been struck by the fact that I probably wouldn't even want to be friends with these individuals if they were in my neighborhood. They had some serious, destructive character flaws: pologamy, adultery, murder, favoritism, passivity, arrogance, and cowardice, to name a few.

Then Jesus steps on the scene, and provides the most stark contrast in all of literature. If you read the Bible like a literary text, all of these Old Testament characters have been foils to the protagonist... after this crew of lying, sexually promiscuous, cowardly men, Jesus is incredibly refreshing and shockingly different. He sums up all those 613 mitzvot in just two commandments, "And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

613 down to 2 seems like a seriously lightened load. But I've been thinking a lot recently about love and how intensely difficult it is. The love between two friends, the love for a stranger, love for your neighbor, love for your family, love for the suffering....the kind of love I want to have for other people. This past Sunday, my pastor talked about the absolutely urgent necessity of true, authentic, deep community in the Christian life, about how we were made to love and be loved. If we were created in the image of a triune (not isolated or singular) God, then we were formed to both be loved and to pour out other-centered love. Tim Keller describes the relationship within the Trinity, "Each voluntarily circles the other two, pouring love, delight, and adoration into them. Each person of the Trinity adores, defers to, and rejoices in the others. This creates a dynamic, pulsating dance of joy and love." Because God is triune in nature, love is not an additional quality, but a necessary, innate quality of who He is....as John says simply, "God is love."

Sometimes I am afraid that I rarely...if ever....truly love anyone more than myself. Other-centered love is difficult, and sometimes feels impossible. I am so quick to meet my own needs for approval, acceptance, affirmation, and my desire to be right often trumps my desire to affirm and encourage other people.

Funnily enough, watching the Olympics over the past couple of weeks made me one of the ways I wish I could show love. When I watched those athletes, I feel incredibly joyful and excited on their behalf. I don't feel competitive, I don't feel bitter, I don't wish that was me out on the ice and snow....I just felt thrilled and proud to see someone reach that level of excellence. I want to feel that way when my friends are successful, when they reach a milestone I have not reached, when they look beautiful, when they win an argument, when they are smarter or more witty than I could be, when they get a new job, when they get married, when they show a greater strength of character, when they are right and I am wrong....I want to rejoice in those things for them and find joy in their joy. In essence, I want (against everything that comes naturally to me) to be humble as Christ was humble.

C.S. Lewis' words keep coming back to me as a resounding reminder and challenge this week: "Christian humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less." What would it look like to think of yourself less?

The Joy of Cooking

Mmm, just look at these scrumptious Coffee Cake Muffins. I made these tonight in a recent kick to do more cooking from scratch-- thus far its been quite successful and satisfying. I also cooked a delicious Eggplant Parmesan for lunch today, which was going remarkably well until I smelled burnt paper and realized the corner of my cookbook was stuck and burning under a molten-hot frying pan. I guess all novice cooks are required to have some major kitchen disasters on the path to culinary mastery!

Another great joy of my week involved cooking.....cooking an amazing dinner with a dear girl friend who I haven't spent time with in over a year and a half. The best sort of friends are those which can jump back in right where they left off after months or even years apart, despite all the changes and growth and experience the two of you might have been through since you last met. I am so thankful that God is so gracious and good to grow those roots of friendship deep- across time, distance, huge life changes....and that He is constantly making all things new.
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p.s. my roommate just alerted me to my new favorite food blog: http://smittenkitchen.com/
Beautiful and mouthwatering, check it out.


sew it begins...


I am proud at announce a new skill: I have been taking sewing lessons the past few weeks, and they have been so much fun! I can now operate a sewing machine (quite a feat, let me tell ya) and make all kinds of crazy stitches. This little heart pillow (seen here with my roommate's cat Babar, who was more than happy to model) was my first project. I hope to go on to making bigger things someday, but it's a start :)

Football and Funny Face


A quick note on the Superbowl: anyone who knows me knows that I don't know the first thing about sports, nor do I really care to most of the time (sorry, sports lovers, I have tried). Yet for some reason I almost always can't resist watching the Superbowl. Regardless of who you were pulling for (sorry, Peyton fans), you have to admit that watching the Saints win was amazing. I felt so inspired and overjoyed for the battered city of New Orleans. I don't know what it is about sports, but they just rally people together like few things can --take for example the recent movie Invictus, about how Nelson Mandela unified the South African people after apartheid through the sport of rugby. And watching Saints QB Drew Brees cry as he held and kissed his little son after winning was enough to make me want to cry myself.

It was also pretty neat to see via Facebook that some Scottish pals were watching the game as well (which is a lot of dedication to American football, since it ended about 3:30 AM their time). One comment concerning my church family in Scotland that made me particularly happy: "Rest assured there were brothers watching in St V's tonight...feeling the American love, stunning show tonight! " You gotta love transatlantic sports comraderie.

On an entirely different note, I'm watching the classic Audrey Hepburn movie Funny Face right now, and a great deal of the movie is set in Paris. I love spotting all these places I've actually been, then pinching myself to remember it was real. The Louvre, the Champs Elysees, the Seine, the Opera, the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame, Sacre Couer.....it all seems like a dream now, but the movie brings all of the thrill right back to me. Plus, Audrey Hepburn is probably the most lovely, charming woman to ever grace the screen--watching her is always a delight :)

A great musical number just for you: Audrey and Fred Astaire singing (and dancing) "Bonjour, Paris!"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zuhl8gO7Igo

letting the thrill go

One of my biggest problems is a constant excess of nostalgia (you might notice it if you have read this blog for any length of time). I tend to constantly look backward and grasp for past joys rather than savoring the present moment, and I've been doing that a lot the past couple of weeks. A few days ago, I was talking about this feeling of loss to an old friend, who reminded me of this wonderful passage from C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity (which begins as he is talking about marriage).....oh, actually, I just realized that I already posted this one this blog about a year ago, but it still incredibly relevant and I love it, so here you go:

"People get from books the idea that if you have married the right person you may expect to go on ‘being in love’ for ever. As a result, when they find they are not, they think this proves they have made a mistake and are entitled to a change — not realising that, when they have changed, the glamour will presently go out of the new love just as it went out of the old one. In this department of life, as in every other, thrills come at the beginning and do not last. The sort of thrill a boy has at the first idea of flying will not go on when he has joined the R.A.F. and is really learning to fly. The thrill you feel on first seeing some delightful place dies away when you really go to live there. Does this mean it would be better not to learn to fly and not to live in the beautiful place? By no means. In both cases, if you go through with it, the dying away of the first thrill will be compensated for by a quieter and more lasting kind of interest. What is more (and I can hardly find words to tell you how important I think this), it is just the people who are ready to submit to the loss of the thrill and settle down to the sober interest, who are then most likely to meet new thrills in some quite different direction. The man who has learned to fly and become a good pilot will suddenly discover music; the man who has settled down to live in the beauty spot will discover gardening.

This is, I think, one little part of what Christ meant by saying that a thing will not really live unless it first dies. It is simply no good trying to keep any thrill: that is the very worst thing you can do. Let the thrill go — let it die away — go on through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow — and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time. But if you decide to make thrills your regular diet and try to prolong them artificially, they will all get weaker and weaker, and fewer and fewer, and you will be a bored, disillusioned old man for the rest of your life. It is because so few people understand this that you find many middle-aged men and women maundering about their lost youth, at the very age when new horizons ought to be appearing and new doors opening all round them. It is much better fun to learn to swim than to go on endlessly (and hopelessly) trying to get back the feeling you had when you first went paddling as a small boy."

Snow Day Reflections

Sometimes I forget how busy life at school can be. After lounging around my house in the mountains for a few weeks after returning to the States, it felt strange to suddenly jump back into classes, commitments, work, church, social life, etc.....hence the not blogging for a little while.
But today is a welcome and exciting pause because of SNOW, snow, snow! A couple of friends and I decided it wou
ld be more fun to get snowed in together for the weekend, so that's what we did as soon as the flakes started falling on Friday. We bundled up that evening and carried steaming mugs of coffee and warm chocolate chip cookies out into the snowy night. We went on a long walk around the neighborhood and
down the nearby highway, receiving some car honks from the few brave drivers who ventured out on the roads (I suppose three girls in pajamas walking in the dark through the pouring snow along the side of the road is a something you don't see everyday)! We slept in quite late the next day and then trekked back through the snow to a nearby grocery store for a late breakfast of homemade biscuits and sausage gravy. Nothin' warms you up faster!

Anyway, it's been an interesting first few weeks of school. It's really strange to be a senior. It didn't really hit me at all in Scotland, but being back here and knowing it's my final semester feels very odd. It was strange to have a last first-day of school, and to know that these classes would be my last for at least a while. I feel weirdly separated from the freshmen and sophomores I meet, knowing that this college experience stretches out ahead of them, but that it's over for me. The nice thing about college is that you always have a template for your life, a pattern and a structure for your days, months, and years. To some extent, you always know what's coming next. Now it feels like a long blank canvas is stretched in front of me with absolutely nothing on it.

I am blessed with some really interesting classes this semester. One of my favorites is "Literary Study of the Bible," because it means I always have some Bible reading to do as homework. Right now we're working our way through the Psalms and I feel continually amazed by their beauty, passion, masterful literary craft, and most of all how human and raw some of them all. There is no neat, happy, bow-on-top conclusion to something as intensely pain-stricken and vengeful as Psalm 137. My professor talked about how all human beings have a limit to the human suffering, complaining, and grief we can handle.....yet God seems to invite endless amounts of it on Himself. One of the strangest things about this semester is that most of my friends have graduated and moved away, so I come home many days after classes to evenings spent alone, which is really new for me. It is so comforting to remember that God can handle my loneliness and my most petty, selfish complaints without growing weary of me.

Another favorite new class is "Global Problems in Health." I'm taking this one just because the subject matter fascinates me. I often walk away from it with an incredibly heavy heart. This weekend as I read over my homework, this sentence hit me like a bullet: "Despite reductions in infant and child mortality, 30,000 children under five die each day from preventable causes." That figure is so staggering and makes me so angry. And all the issues below the health problems run so much deeper: poverty, poor infrastructure, low literacy rates, civil wars and unrest, widespread homelessness, corrupt leaders, and unstable governments. The immense lack of justice in the world is enough to make anyone want to weep. Issues of justice aren't just found in some remote third-world countries, either. In terms of socioeconomic status, the United States is the most unequal among developed societies. We have such extreme wealth and such abject poverty among us.

I've seen some of that poverty over the past couple of weeks as I've gone back to work with refugees. I went to pick up one man for an appointment at Social Services (a building which I am convinced is something akin to hell on earth), and when he opened the door to his small, dimly lit apartment, his family was sitting huddled under piles of blankets because it was so cold. I spent that morning wrangling with multiple Social Services workers on behalf of these two men who barely spoke English, wondering how people could ever do something like this on their own. How do people who cannot speak English ever navigate an insane bureaucratic system which sets up so many barriers to them getting much-needed help, when I could barely deal with it all as a college-educated native speaker? I went straight from doing that to sitting in a lecture on Contemporary Poetry that afternoon, and somehow it made my life seem very disconnected. I know higher education, literature, art, and beauty are all incredibly important, but sometimes they seem so disparate from this world of tangible, crucial problems. Why am I sitting and talking about why a poet chose a particular word in line 5 when I just left a family sitting in a cold, dark apartment on the other side of town?

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