BCP's Collect 24, "For Vocation in Daily Work".

"Almighty God, our heavenly Father, you declare your glory
and show forth your handiwork in the heavens and in the earth:

Deliver us in our various occupations from the service of self alone,

that we may do the work You give us to do
in truth and beauty and for the common good;

for the sake of Him who came among us as one who serves,
your Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you
and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen."

buried in paperwork and frustrated at the system and not sure how
to carry hopeless cases and dumbstruck at my own capacity for laziness.

deliver me from the service of self alone,
(here the traditional collect adds, "we beseech Thee". amen.),
may i do the work You give me to do.

in truth.
and beauty.
amen.

for those of you who press mute instinctively when you arrive at my blog...

(as I've recently been informed some people and their apartment-mates do!)...

un-mute it, because Gotta Have You and the rest have been temporarily replaced with a rockin' shuffling Christmas mix.

The Weepies shall return Dec 26, have no fear.

Enjoy!

the streets you're walking on, a thousand houses long.

My dear friend Matt works full-time in a home for homeless people who are dying of AIDS and other terminal illnesses in Washington, D.C.

He absolutely loves it. And it is, as you can imagine, tremendously difficult.

The past few weeks he has been spending a lot of time with the 8-year-old son of one of their residents. Here's an excerpt from a recent email (name changed, emphasis' mine).

"...This is one of those relationships that has been teaching me about love.

It has also been a reminder that I cannot fix everything that I want to.

John's wife and son need money and I don't have that to give to them.

His son is going to grow up without his dad and I can't do anything about that.

But, as Dr. Litfin always says, we aren't to respond to need, we are to respond to calling.

The needs are overwhelming and we can easily get bogged down in a futile attempt to meet all of them. God is reminding me that even though I can't make everything better, we are doing important things. We are providing a place for John to die, which is huge, and, in reality, all that Joseph's House is designed to be.

And even though I can't be there for his son in a year or five years or ten years, I can hang out with him now.

I can run around playing games with him and love him in the present.

So not enough,

but all that I have to give right now,

and so from my perspective,

it is enough."

So much to be said on those themes, but I will leave good words alone for now.

(I will say this: for all of the many areas at which I am so sub-par... I am so good at somehow finding the best people in the world to be my friends. I am, all of the time, in grateful disbelief over the people I know.)

joy- the person (who brings me joy the thing).

You should go read my friend Joy's blog.
She is a missionary in Argentina,
and I am insanely proud of her.

In Protest of Fragmentation.

I spent a good amount of afternoons this fall walking through the leaves.










And enjoying every minute of it.

"...If you want to live life free,
take your time, go slowly.
Do few things, but do them well,
simple joys are holy."

Claire; or, I so know right.

An email from my beautiful BFF-since-9th-grade Claire included this conversation she's been having with herself. I connected deeply.

"...me: hm, i miss maryland and want to go back. maybe i could even go to school again sometime soon.

me: well that's fine claire, but you know it's going to be different and not like college time. also, you dont know what you're going to go to school for.

me: oh yeah thats a good point.

me: how about you go somewhere crazy then!?

me: okay! buuut...maybe i don't want to.

me: fine let's just worry about this later, shall we?

me: wahoo!"

Affirm. Oh post-college life.

(I freakin' love that girl...)

Pics courtesy of a day trip Chris, Claire, and I took during our wonderful 08 summer of love. PS, can you believe how blue her eyes are?? (She's gonna be so mad at me when she reads this. ;-))

.uselessness.

i've been touched by this this week.

"...His life taken from Him in the ugliest of executions-
what a waste it looked!
His life was poured out in intentional uselessness,
like the expensive ointment the woman poured out on His head.

Some of us are indignant at the waste, like Judas was.

Some of us are envious of her- at least she had the ointment.

We would like to have something to give, to pour out for love of Him, but we don't have even that. It seems we don't have anything.

Nothing to offer except our uselessness, and our choice to be with Him:
and that is a choice that no one but Him is likely to put any value on."

-from Celtic Daily Prayer's Aidan readings

and oh, how He puts value on it.

love, great dinners out with friends, and the difference between guys and girls.

I went out to dinner last night with my awesome friends Steve and Tamara. Steve and Tamara are DATING. Steve and Tamara are I-N L-O-V-E. Like for real for real, and it's been incredibly beautiful and wonderful to watch it unfold over the last year.

So last night we're out to dinner and every so often they will reference something about their future together. Like holidays will come up and they're trying to figure out where they will be, weddings will come up, and the phrase "Ours should be like..." will be said, or infertility will come up and "Well we'd probably adopt..." gets said (I'm not sure how all those topics came up over a chill dinner at a Mongolian grill, but they did).

It inspires in me a healthy dose of making fun of them combined with some OMIGOSHMYBEAUTIFULFRIENDISINLOVEFORREALWITHTHISAWESOMEGUYANDTHEY'REGOINGTOGETMARRIEDDDD!!!! giddy disbelief and joy as I watch Tam's face radiate when she looks at Steve... not even to mention the way he looks at her.

Yeah, I'm a sap.

So moving on. We're eating our spicy bowls of awesomeness and we are, in fact, discussing infertility which leads to adoption which leads to foster care. So Tamara and I get into this like, legit discussion about foster care. How important it is for Christians to be involved in, how Focus on the Family's new adoption incentives have reduced the number of kids waiting for families in Colorado in half, how we really want to make it a priority in our adult lives but also omigosh is it ever a big deal...

Anyway, Steve is kind of half in the conversation and doodling on his napkin. We're like, Steve, so what do you think.

He looks up. "Huh? Oh... sorry, I wasn't paying attention." We look at his napkin and he looks sheepish.

"Yeah, well... I was just thinking... you know how sometimes when people get married, they get stuff with their initials on them? Like, the last initial in the middle, and then the husband and wife's initials on either side? I was just figuring out how ours would look..."

AWWWWW, Tamara and I make isn't-he-cute faces at each other...

"And look," he continues, and shows us what he's drawn...

S H T

"...If you add just one letter to ours, it would spell-"

And, that is the difference between guys and girls.

We ran the half-marathon and it was freaking awesome.

Christine, Luke, Christine's fam, Meghan and I dressed up in costume to run the Chicago Monster Half-Marathon on Halloween morning. 13.1 miles baby!!! It was so much fun. Five days later and my knees are still enjoying shouting their existence to me all the day long... but it was so worth it. :-)

Go Luke and Christine go!

And I'm off...

The proud husband after the race! These are my dear friends Meghan and Josh. Meghan can run 13 miles and still look this gorgeous. It's kind of unfair. (And then she graciously hosted 10 of us that night in her apartment for small group!!! I love that girl.)

The costumes were fun, but the weeks of training, the day itself and the people were definitely the most "Incredible" part (hahaha... our costumes... get it?).

I love my girls! Here we are, excited and ready to run at 6:30 in the morning.

i love this work.

"sit with me and tell me once again...
why our thinking and creating
and our efforts at narrating
about the beauty, of the beauty
why it matters...

...with its beauty,

how it matters.
how it matters."

-sara groves, "why it matters"