Sharing of friendship and overflow of garden abundance.

"Oh, these late, strange riches of the summer,

these slab-sided pumpkins and preposterous zucchinis."

-from Gilead

I copied that into my journal when I read it a couple days ago, loving her use of language and imagery and knowing rural Oregon would provide me plenty of opportunities to use the quote. Then Jay walked in last night with a full backpack, chivalrously declaring that we shouldn't feel pressure to take more than we would use...

The little girls have been eagerly "adopting zucchini babies": the neighbors save them big ones and they dress them up in doll clothes.

How this girl spent her weekend.

 

Camped out getting to know my new sewing machine, and couldn't be happier about it.

I love to sew. (I am so my mother's child!)

There are several precious and very prayed-for babies being born this month...

I am so happy every time I think about them I almost don't know what to do.

My ADD self always prays easiest with my hands busy.

(It's why I love walking the labyrinth in the valley,

and knitting, and chopping vegetables.)

 
I had sweet time this weekend,

as I tried to weave fabric and thread into something useful and beautiful for these new babies and their parents,

sitting with God and holding them before Him.

With Him.

I am also trying really hard this year

to turn time alone into

not time which is lacking: people or plans,

but into solitude:

its own space,

its own goals,

time with a different and intimate way of hearing Him.

Sewing, making and creating, is one way I am loving that.

(...Although I also love it when friends stop by and sit in my big soft chair drinking tea and talking to me while I sew. Which happened several times this week as well.)

I experimented today with this fun project for one of my favorite buddies, who is turning FOUR tomorrow!

The pictures aren't great because I snapped them as I was running out the door to his party,

but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

Colored thread on the hems and glitter glue for the letters!

(It was frankly inspired by the beautiful prayer flag Sarah sewed me when I left for HNGR,

which has hung above my bed now in five different houses on two continents.)

One year ago.

Written this same week, last year. A week after landing in this pine-tree filled state, after Mary hugged me goodbye and got on a plane to go back to Maryland and I took a deep breath and started this new northwest life of mine.

Second Oregon run, and first one alone. I had just an hour before sundown tonight and I laced up the shoes I bought over a year ago, that ran me through cancer and my girls and long dark dryness. I headed out, and up a hill...  this fall, they will run me through new everything and stretching into adulthood and flashes of vocation. I ran, up, and up... Oregon is not flat like Illinois, that is for sure.

It's the same me in the same shoes, same body feeling the same heartbeat thudding, same rhythm of steps grounding me here, in this place, as it always does no matter where "this place" may be. But I ran on larger, darker coarsely packed stones and asphalt, not a sidewalk or the packed-dirt prairie path. I ran next to vineyards (vineyards!) lying at the feet of mountains covered in pine trees, past fenced-in fields of long wheat pointing to the sky, as their farms blinked at me in the distance.

I know how I feel when I run and so running lets me know differences. Tonight as my body fell into its familiar rhythm, I could see what has changed. Hills not path. Vineyards not trees, pines not Pleasantville houses. I ran alone... no Meghan, no Chet.

Other differences, too, I hadn't known yet. I ran and was surprised at a peace: certain anxieties I ran with in Wheaton the last months don't seem as at home in this new setting. And I ran and found the heaviness settled around my heart: loneliness.  I ran up a hill I've never run before, alone, and remembered: I love it here, but I don't have years of history, I don't have my community.

I ran and cursed Christy Schweigert's voice in my head, our last HNGR small group night, when we gave each other challenges for the next year: "Press into Jesus when you are lonely. Turn the alone time you're going to have to have there, into solitude with Him". I did HNGR!! Half of my best friends moved away last year!! I did that already!! I know about finding Jesus in solitude, okay, I already learned that lesson!! Because I have it so down at 23...

I turned a corner and ran past another field, another farm. I stopped and stared at the huge Oregon sky, gray clouds turned golden and the sun setting behind evergreens, turning their tips into dark, towering, beautiful silhouettes.

I ran and breathed and was thankful for my body, for these hills, these vineyards, adulthood, vocation, community to long for in grateful love, community to anticipate and reach out to. Thankful for Christy's words, for my God who will meet me this season in ways I can't yet see. 

Strong and lovely.

"I remember my father said when the two of them first came home,

they found the roof of the church in such disrepair

that there were buckets and pans set in the aisle and on the benches.

He said the women had planted climbing roses against the building and along the fence,

so it looked prettier than it had ever looked before.

Prairie had come into the fields and the orchards again,

and there were sunflowers growing in the roads between the ruts.

The women had their prayer meetings and their Bible studies

even though the church was falling into ruin around them.

I think about that, and it is strong and lovely in my mind.

I truly believe it is waste and ingratitude not to honor such things as visions,

whether you yourself happen to have seen them or not."

-from Gilead

My Christine.

"Hi, love. I was just calling because I need you to affirm me. Well, actually... I mean, I need your affirmation, but really, I want your honest opinion, ok? Please be totally honest with me about what you really think. Ugh, except actually, I think the decision is already made, so, maybe it would just be better if you just tell me to do what I already decided to do. Ohhh... I don't know."

I just love her so much.

 

 

A warmed home.

I am planning my reflection on how much I've appreciated and grown in my year in Newberg, but in the meantime, a story and pictures to illustrate...

Today three women from church threw me a housewarming/birthday party.

As I write curled up in my favorite chair with candlelight flickering on every surface,

my little house is overflowing with bouquets of flowers, beautiful and delicious things for my kitchen, and cards with words that made me cry...

and my heart is overflowing with gratitude and contentment.

 

 

A reflection on 2010-2011.

In two days I will have lived in Oregon for exactly one year.

I've been pondering how to explain what these last twelve months have been for me.

As I collect my thoughts and heart on the past year, it is good to reflect also where I was roughly this same time the last two years...

This was written in May 2011, as I finished my job as a caseworker/home visitor for immigrant families with 0-3 year olds, wrapped up my year of living with Ryan and Kendra a mile from my college campus, and said goodbye to my church, friends, and five years of history in Wheaton.

The tree outside my window at work has full, green leaves on it.
A few weeks ago, I saw it budding.
The last time it looked like that... I saw it, too. Looking out of the same window.

I have now spent twelve full months in one place. For the last... ok, not 365 days technically, but over 350, which I say counts- days, I have slept in the same bed. I get up every morning and drive to the same job. And there every day I blessedly, wonderfully, do... the same thing I have done for the last. twelve. months.

The trees were just budding when I started there. As they were wide and green all spring and summer long, I drove down Roosevelt into West Chicago and did my paperwork and got to know my families. Through the humid summer, I ran on this prairie path, got frappuccinos at this Starbucks, finger-painted with my kids outside on the grass. This whole fall, I was here, carving pumpkins (three times, in fact, because I didn't have a fall my HNGR year and I was absolutely maximizing this one!!), going apple picking (twice- see what I mean?), taking long walks alone among the leaves. They changed and fell and it snowed and I walked in that too, and then I got sick of walking in it and watched it from inside, and drank hot chocolate with my roommates and decorated our Christmas tree. It kept snowing. I held a Valentine's craft party and walked on a frozen lake with my small group, my kids made cotton ball snowmen and we sang about spring coming. I dared to slowwllyy shed first the down jacket, then the jacket, and now, finally, the sweaters. I am in short sleeves and flip flops and swingy skirts and I meet friends by the lake behind Rez multiple times a week to sprawl on the grass as we chat in the sunshine. This week my babies and moms and I took walks and pointed out the colors of the flowers.

I have had a year of serving Eucharist at church on Sunday mornings. I've had a year of doing life with my small group every Sunday night. I've had a year of journaling in the same coffee shops I journaled in in college. I've had 52 weeks of coffee heart-to-hearts with Tamara, of family dinners with Ryan and Kendra, of running with Meghan and pre-work breakfasts with Chet. 52 weeks of Christine and Steve and Elise, of Rez and Iglesia and my ten beautiful families.

Jana asked me on a Saga date mid-last semester, "What are your non-negotiables?". We were all weighing so many things as we tried to figure out where we'd be post-graduation- job opportunities, relationships, adventure, finances... What were going to be my deciding factors?

I needed to be in one place. I needed to have four full seasons in one place- in a familiar place. I didn't know why. I just knew I did.

Seeing that tree, I realized I saw it go through its entire life cycle this year. It grew its leaves and lost them and stood bare and grew them again and now here they are. Again. I saw all of it. I saw Wheaton, I saw my families, I saw the same friends, through twelve whole months. Through one entire rotation of the earth around the sun, I was here, doing a few tasks and loving the same people.

Written down this sounds really obvious and not that exciting. And I know that after college, this becomes the norm- most likely in the not-distant future, I'll spend two, five, ten or twenty!, full years in the same place with the same people.

But this first year of it since high school, and especially the year after HNGR and cancer, I'm so grateful. This world turned all by itself as I walked the same streets and loved the same people and focused on my simple work. The seasons changed as I healed and, somehow, that let me just be.

And I am so grateful for that.

"...Summer and winter and springtime and harvest

Sun, moon, and stars in their courses above

Join with all nature in manifold witness

To Thy great faithfulness, mercy, and love."

The tree outside my office, mid-October 2010.

A reflection on 2009-2010.

In three days I will have lived in Oregon for exactly one year.

I've been pondering how to explain what these last twelve months have been for me.

I realized that without planning to, the last two summers I've done a write-up reflecting on the year before.

As I collect my thoughts and heart on the past year, it is good to reflect also where I was roughly this same time as I finished, first college, and then my first year out of college.

This was written in July 2010, seven months after returning from a six-month, completely life, faith, and self-changing internship in Bolivia, and five months after my mom was diagnosed with advanced and aggressive cancer.

Prayer this semester didn't look anything like what I have known it to look like before. I couldn't journal. I couldn't sit in a coffee shop and follow any train of thought long enough to feel like I was praying. The cheerfully-voiced and neatly patterned prayers I said with friends in the cafeteria before meals bore little to no resemblance to the way God and I were actually talking.

Me and Jesus, the me and Jesus we have been since I was 12, wasn't happening. I didn't know how to talk to Jesus in a world that lets little girls get raped and beaten and abandoned. Not in a fake, "Well, I just don't know how to talk to you if you're going to be like that" haughty way. I mean I literally did not know how to talk to Him in this new world in which I found myself. Sometimes I feel like my entire foundation that I stood on has been taken apart and put back together and I'm standing on something I don't even recognize. Now that I can breathe a little bit more I'm realizing that what I'm standing on is still pretty good. Sometimes I get these tiny glimpses that it might even be better. Stronger. But I had to learn how to do all these things on it that I knew how to do before, but the ways I knew how to do them don't work here. And the main thing that didn't work, was praying.

Praying with the expectation life is going to work out just beautifully didn't work. That sucked, but it was good. That was a wrong foundation I'd had. That's not how God works, and it's not how He's ever said He was going to work. I'm not sure why I thought otherwise, and it's been- it is- painful rearranging that. But it's good.

And, praying with the knowledge that God is good, didn't work. Because I wasn't so sure about that all the time anymore.
That sucked, and it wasn't good.

I didn't know how to pray without knowing that God is good, which means I didn't even know how to pray about the fact that I didn't know God was good. And so praying (and pretty much everything else, actually) felt terrifying.

So prayer this semester felt like it almost never happened. Because it didn't happen in any ways I had known to recognize.

Prayer this semester, instead of feeling like I was "keeping company with God", instead of quiet times in Starbucks or Caribou or long letters to God in my journal, was a lot of long walks, in the snow, by myself, with my iPod. Sometimes if it was cold or too late at night instead of walking it was driving, through my neighborhood, through the campus, going the speed limit and using turn signals, going slowly and mindlessly over the same route again and again as I tried to line my heart back up, in the quiet, for just a minute with the God I was missing.

Prayer was chopping vegetables. Really. So much so that I once heard a housemate confess to her boyfriend that she "kind of love[d] it when Emily gets depressed because we get a good soup". Prayer was hymns playing in the background as I focused on the purpose of peeling and chopping and stirring and found peace in the rhythm and the use of my hands.

Prayer was reading Rilke out loud before bed with my roommate and being able to, yes, line my heart up to these words. It was lighting a candle for five minutes at night as I asked God to bless the girls at Mosoj Yan- candle-lighting is something we did on the HNGR retreat which I found helpful.

Prayer was interceding for others, which I didn't do enough out of sheer laziness, but which by some beautiful miracle did not hold the difficulty that attempts at casual conversation with God did.

Prayer was and is, in an incredible gift of grace, the liturgy. It is going to church and saying and singing the same words every week, and in recent months being blessedly able to affirm them more and more. It is the gratitude that rises up in me that, in my inability to tell God these truths about Himself out of any spontaneity or warmth or even sense of friendship, I can sing them and raise my hands for an hour on Sunday mornings and get to tell Him them in that way. That I can find myself more and more knowing that I do believe these things, and that this liturgy, this church, is providing a way for me to affirm them before my own emotions or abilities are going to let me do so on my own. Oh, how grateful I am to get to praise God through words others have written and songs others are singing when my own heart is so confused and cold.

Prayer has been, greatly, others praying for me. That is something I think I underestimated the power of in these past seven months. People have prayed for me and that has been important.

Mostly as I have looked at myself and my interactions with God in the past seven months I have felt ashamed. Who am I to not pray? To not know how? To be so faithless? Clearly, to feel so far from prayer must mean I am far indeed. And how does this show gratitude to Mosoj Yan and the work they do?

But recently I have been realizing a bit more that it was a good thing for me to learn that prayer that does not look like journaling in a coffee shop and leaving with the feeling of peace, can still be prayer. That crying myself to sleep, God still heard me. That prayers lifted by others on my behalf and the behalf of my girls, do something powerful. And that if walking in the snow and chopping vegetables until my fridge was too full enabled me to be in front of God, then He was happy to meet me there.

I'm not very proud of how I lived the last seven months, but good things came out of them.

Mostly this year I felt like I couldn't pray. But maybe in His great and crazy mercy, He let me go for long walks and chop vegetables and rely on others' prayers, to teach me something about walking on without clarity or feelings of peace or any pride. Maybe He let me rely on the prayers of the church to teach me about the power of community worship, of the history of the big-C Church, of the importance of repetition for our souls, of the power that is in praising Him by choice and even by rote when we feel cold and dry.

I hope and pray that maybe in the long-term, these will be things that will let me see Him more.

Kitchen window.

  

 

Gilead.

"Old Boughton is so eager to see Jack. Perhaps anxious as well as eager.

He has some fine children, yet it always seemed this was the one on whom he truly set his heart.
The lost sheep, the lost coin. The prodigal son, not to put too fine a point on it.

I have said at least once a week my whole adult life that there is an absolute disjunction

between our Father's love and our deserving.

Still, when I see this same disjunction

between human parents and children, it always irritates me a little.

(I know you will be and I hope you are an excellent man,

and I will love you absolutely if you are not.)"

Twenty-four.

"...And I give

thanks but it does not seem like adequate thanks,

it doesn't seem

festive enough or constant enough, nor does the

name of the Lord or the words of thanksgiving come

into it often enough. Everywhere I go I am

treated like royalty, which I am not. I thirst and

am given water. My eyes thirst and I am given

the white lilies on the black water. My heart

sings but the apparatus of singing doesn't convey

half of what it feels and means...

there is everywhere the luminous sprawl of gifts,

the hospitality of the Lord and my

inadequate answers as I row my beautiful, temporary body

through this water-lily world."

-mary oliver

Whidbey.

Some great friends invited me to stay with them for a few days in a beautiful home on Whidbey Island.

Hot dogs and smores over a fire pit, great coffee and the sunrise every morning, sailing, cuddling, reading out loud (the girls and I read all of Ella Enchanted to each other!), beach adventures (I found so crazy-many sand dollars), good talks, lots of laughter.

So wonderful.

These guys are maybe a little bit cute. Just a little.

"Ladybug", going into high school. My buddy.

They have 11 children and still invite more friends to come with.

Thank you so much for having me, Qualls family!!

.Joy.

If you know of something cuter than a bunch of nine-year-olds baking in my kitchen in Bolivian aprons, let me know.

 

Have I ever mentioned how blessed I am by my church community?

Some of this week's abundance.

 Baked these super yummy blackberry-zucchini muffins today with local berries (and a favorite professor's lovely wife's recipe).

I walked to the small grocery store and the produce stand for all the ingredients.

(Twice. I forgot the vanilla the first time. But I still walked back for it!)

 

And I'm right back in my coffee-shop-mornings routine. Thank goodness.

 LOVING this space. Loving trying to create a cozy, peaceful home. So grateful for this apartment.

More pics to follow once my camera makes its way here from Maryland.

Some words.

"I think it's good that you're experiencing the country and the girls in a different way.

You're getting to see every angle of this situation.

It seems holistic... in a really healthy way

to be approaching something like research from a place of love."

-Kendra

"...The combination of compassion with research

is much like the integration of head and heart we all try to balance.

Guess God is in both spheres.

He made both I believe."

-Paul
(small group host and one of my "Oregon dads")

"It is so good to see you

right where you're supposed to be-

being used by God how God wants to use you right now.

I'm encouraged and happy and excited to see it."

-Slagg

Lots of thoughts and prayers simmering for me,

as I spent time in Bolivia and now return to my Oregon life.

These words in recent emails from people I love and who know me

have clarified and encouraged my heart the last couple of weeks.

Bolds mine.

 Pic taken last month in yard of above-mentioned small group host,

as I picked cherries with his daughters and wife.
We then baked two pies.

Home.

Greeted with hugs, squeals, a month's worth of stories, a moving crew, dinner, and a bouquet of freshly-gathered lavender...

An empty, perfect apartment, down the street from friends, sunshine in every room;

walked to get my groceries this morning, picked wildflowers on the way, met my aunt for lunch.

 Full life. Thankful heart. So good to be home.