My work is teaching pre-schoolers to memorize Mary Oliver poems.

"My work is loving the world.

Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird-

equal seekers of sweetness.

Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.

Here the clams deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?

Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me

keep my mind on what matters,

which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be

astonished.

The phoebe, the delphinium.

The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.

Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart

and these body-clothes,

a mouth with which to give shouts of joy

to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,

telling them all, over and over, how it is

that we live forever."

A Tuesday afternoon during advent.

I'm doing dishes in soft pajama pants and a tank top, thankful to be home with only reading to do the rest of the day. The phone is pressed to my ear. My bread machine mixes yeast into flour behind me.

Her familiar voice from two time zones away, driving home to her husband after a day of teaching.

"I've been reading a lot of psalms on waiting."

I switch ears. Rinse the soap off a bowl, set it aside to dry.

"Oh yeah?"

"That one... oh, I can't remember the reference. It says 'I believe that I will see the goodness of the Lord. In the land of the living.'"

"Ohhh yeah... I love that one."

We sit quietly on the phone together for a few beats. I think about waiting. The waiting they've been doing, waiting I feel. I think about what a promise to see goodness in the land of the living might and might not mean.

She drives. I scrub the sponge across a cookie sheet. She completed paperwork for an IEP for one of her students this week and the special ed department was crazy helpful. I had my semester evaluation with my supervisor yesterday, it was unexpectedly encouraging. They're going out to dinner with friends from small group tonight. I bought quilt fabric today, gorgeous batiks in browns and greens.

"I've been hanging out in this passage in Isaiah..." I tell her.

Enlarge the place of your tent, and let your habitations be stretched out; do not hold back; lengthen your cords and strengthen your stakes.

"Ohhhh."

We talk about it being hard to continue to make room- to keep stretching out, enlarging... in hope. Hard to continue to wait to see the goodness of the Lord in certain fallow places; to believe that we will see it here, "in the land of the living". Easier to put up walls, move on, stop hoping for certain things, stop allowing any empty space at all. Enlarge. Stretch. Lengthen. Strengthen. Do not hold back. Room-making words. Waiting words.

My full heart, as I connect with this beloved friend, baking bread in my little kitchen in the community I love. Her full heart, driving home to his arms, pouring herself out every day for the kids she believes in. Her waiting heart, her frustration and confusion, her cries to Him. My waiting heart, my fear and longings, my cries to Him.

Her dance performance this weekend was so much fun. She was supposed to babysit some friends' kids but they cancelled. My morning client didn't show so I got to start my day with a half hour reading over coffee. I have my tree up and friends have filled it with ornaments. So I'm considerinnngg this thing that probably doesn't make sense... well, sometimes God calls us to hard things, I'll be praying. Thanks, babe.

She's home, time to get ready to go out.

Love you. Love you. Talk to you this weekend. Sounds good.

My dishes are done. The dough is risen and ready to be put in the oven.

It's advent. We're full. We love. We're thankful and happy. And we wait.

"The celebration of Advent is possible only to those who are troubled in soul,

who know themselves to be poor and imperfect,

who look forward to something greater to come.

The Holy One Himself comes down to us,

God in the child in the manger.

God comes.

The Lord Jesus comes.

Christmas comes.

Christians rejoice!

We are no longer alone. God is with us."

-bonhoeffer

.learning.

emily, it's not coming out right.

let me see. here, let's try it thiiisss way.

ohhhhh. (groan) now it's ruined.

nope, it's not. besides. what's the rule at my house?

uuhhh... put glitter on as soon as we get inside?

the other one.

oh. mistakes are good.

yup. why?

(sigh) because they help us learn.

you got it. and who loves us even when we make mistakes?

God?

yup.

*******

it's far easier to speak it to a ten-year-old learning to sew

than it is to speak it to my own heart much of the time.

in psychology. in relationships. in adulthood. in faith.

*******

her pillow turned out absolutely beautifully.

and watching her carefully choose and pin and fuss over the fabric

and grin when she showed it to her mom afterwards

was all joy.

.we never know.

Once upon a time, there was a young couple living in suburban Maryland. They were happy and kind and pretty tired, in the way young couples with three small children often are. Their afternoons and weekends revolved around changing diapers and T-ball games and Brownie meetings, and their friendships revolved around their neighborhood and church small group.

They had been missionaries in Tanzania for the first five years of their marriage. Sometimes they wondered what they were doing in their house on a cul-de-sac in the suburbs. They had had desires to live radically for Him and they weren't always sure this normal-American-life they were in was how they should be doing that!
They kept praying and kept applying and kept looking into other things; yet doors opened, and opened, and opened right in that community.
So they decided to live faithfully right where they were. They kept their radical hearts and they prayed and invested in small, mundane, normal ways with  the people around them. Fellow PTA moms came over to discuss logistics and sometimes ended up pouring their hearts out about their broken marriages. Coaching the soccer team of seven-year-old boys became an unofficial way to model an involved, affectionate dad to kids who didn't have one. Refugee families who had just been resettled into the community were surprised when the white couple in the school office invited them over- in Swahili!

And every Tuesday night, while that young couple went to Bible study, a fourteen-year-old girl in their neighborhood came over to babysit.

They hadn't known anything about her the first time they called; a-friend-of-a-friend had passed on her number when they mentioned they were looking for a sitter, said she was a friend of their daughter's who had just recently started coming to church. She had babysat for them for a few Saturday date nights and the kids had taken to her right away, so they asked if she would be their weekly sitter.

The girl liked being in their house and liked seeing their family interact. She noticed how affectionate the parents were with each other, and how intentional they were with engaging with their kids on a deep level. She noticed that even when they were a little stressed about being on time, or where their books and jacket and keys and directions were, or why the kids still had not eaten their vegetables even though they'd told them to, they still smiled at her and asked how school was going and listened to the answer.

After the kids were in bed, the fourteen-year-old would curl up in their living room and do her homework and watch One Tree Hill... but sometimes she would also read her Bible or write in her journal.There was just something about the atmosphere of their house that for some reason made her want to do that.

The kind, happy, tired couple didn't think too much about the fourteen-year-old girl besides the fact that they were grateful their kids loved her and that when they came back every week everyone was alive and the house hadn't burned down.

They didn't think about the fact that from the kitchen she could hear on the baby monitor how they prayed earnestly when they put their youngest to bed- (even though she was just a baby and it wasn't like she could even understand all of these words about her growing into faith and joy and strength!).
They didn't know that she saw through the window that they held hands as they walked from the car up to the house.
When they told her she could feel free to borrow whatever books on the bookshelves looked interesting, they didn't realize she was paying attention to how dog-eared and underlined the devotionals and Bible studies were. That she read the thoughtful notes and prayers they'd written in the margins as well as the authors' words.
One day the dad came home exhausted from work, and muttered under his breath, "Work as if working for the Lord and not for men". He never knew the girl took the reference to heart, and started applying it to her own hard days.

The couple didn't know those things... but they knew there was a young girl in their house every week, which was enough for them to know. That was enough for them to ask if she wanted to eat dinner with them as a family before they left. That was enough for them to ask how they could be praying for her when they drove her home at the end of the night every week.

A year or two down the road, they found out the girl's parents were separating. And even though the girl was really convincing about how she was doing totally fine, every once and awhile they'd ask if she wanted to come by just to hang out- even if they weren't going out and didn't need her to babysit. Sometimes when the dad would take the kids in the backyard to play, the mom would encourage the girl to stay inside and drink tea with her, and they would just chat. Sometimes the girl was confused by the decisions her friends were making, or by why she was still not perfect even after being a Christian for three whole years!! Their kitchen became a place she could sort through those things. Even if they were in the midst of folding laundry or stirring spaghetti, they always had time for her questions; and even if they admitted they didn't know any solutions, they always offered to pray.

*******

Once upon a time, a twenty-four-year-old girl speed-dialed a number that's been memorized for a decade, just like she does most Saturday mornings.

A newly-deep voice answered. When he heard who it was he immediately launched right into telling all about his soccer game and the youth group event the night before. And even though he's a head taller than both of his parents and applying for colleges, he still was the first to say "Love you" before he handed off the phone.

Then the dad got on- he put down what he was doing so he could talk the girl through an adult-life-worldview-formation question (just like he did a couple weeks ago).

The twenty-four-year-old girl has an inbox of loving, Scripture-filled replies to spiritual-freak-out emails sent to that couple across the country, because she knows they will read and pray and encourage over every doubt and failure and question.

She has a cell phone filled with text messages from a beautiful girl who once was a kindergartner with impossibly cute chubby cheeks, and now is an inspiration with her passion for God and her desire to show His love to every single person in her tenth-grade classes.

The smiling mom who once wrote her a check every week while balancing a baby on her hip is now one of the girl's very best friends in the whole world.

Because of that young, happy, kind, a little tired couple, that girl loves Jesus and others more. She had a place of stability and an example of life lived in faith and love that made more of a difference in her life than probably even she knows.

*******

Sometimes that girl wonders if what she's doing is really very important either.
It's so easy to look at the blogs and the conferences and the passionate declarations of justice and think that that's where the real work is happening.
Walking and hugging and studying and praying and sending a text message or sharing a meal all seem so... small. So unimportant and unexciting.
So non-radical. So non-impactful.

And then she needs to talk or pray through those questions, and she realizes who she can call...
and knows she's just answered her own question.

*******

Moral of the story?
Be really nice to your kid's baby-sitter.

*******

 

Verónica's mom.

"That's Verónica's mom," they murmur to me, as we pull up to a small, garbage-filled park by a traffic circle. They nod at a tiny woman sitting on a bench with a group of men. She is dirty, tired-looking. I know her to be in her early thirties, but her size suggests she could be one of our girls; yet her drug-aged face suggests she has lived through decades more.

Verónica's mom?? Stories flood back to me...

***********

"Why is Verónica here? She's younger than the other girls we normally have."

"She doesn't have anywhere else to go." Gladys explained to me about Verónica's mom: a street girl herself, Verónica born when she was just fourteen. Verónica, as a baby and toddler, sleeping on the sidewalk on the street corners, as traffic screeched by and drunk men called out terrifying things, laughing.

"Verónica was referred to us at ten, and we keep her longer than most... she just doesn't have anywhere else to go."

"Do they have contact?"

"Yes. Sometimes. She's visited."

"Does she love her?"

Gladys paused. Her composure fell a bit.

"Yes. Yes, she loves her." She nodded. "She loves her... but... she doesn't know how to be a mom."

***********

"Hermano, why aren't the girls allowed to get phone calls at the house anymore?"

"We can't screen them all, to make sure they're good for them. Verónica, for instance. Her mom calls, sometimes. We used to let Verónica talk to her. But her mom would be drunk, or on drugs... or, often, she'd have just been beaten up by a boyfriend. And Verónica would cry and cry and want to go to her. She'd say she needed to go take care of her." 

It's our job to protect you, hija. We can't let you go to her. We know you love her, we know you want her to be okay. But it's not your job to protect her. It's our job to protect you. It's our job to keep you safe. Because we love you. We're sorry, hija. We can't let you go to her right now. We're so sorry.

***********

"Verónica, it's your turn to go on a date with me. Just you and me! We can go anywhere in the city you want. Where do you want to go?"

The other girls, on their turns, wanted ice cream, or the park nearby with swings and slides. They were giggly and chatty, excited to be out alone with a worker, excited for attention and a treat.

Verónica was quiet. We got in a taxi and she explained to the driver exactly where to go, in fast Spanish I couldn't follow. We got out in la Cancha, the open air market. Without hesitation, she led me through the stalls, past the stores, to a dark, less populated section I'd never been to before. She pointed to a small, faded sign advertising fried chicken, and we entered the restaurant. "My mom used to take me here when I was little."

It was dim and dank inside. The food was cheap, just pennies for our meal, really, and when it came it was stale and the worker didn't smile, just tossed it on the soiled table and walked away.

I tried to make conversation with her, ask her about school and friends, but, uncharacteristically, she was almost silent, giving me one-word answers. Eventually I gave up, and we just sat together. She ate slowly, staring around her at the surroundings. Drinking them in, I realized suddenly. Given anywhere in the city, she wanted to come back here. Where she used to come often, with her mom.

***********

Verónica, squeezing her eyes shut as she earnestly prayed out loud before a meal, thanking Papito Dios for how He provides for us. Verónica, begging to choose music to play as we did chores in the morning, always campaigning for reggaetón; Verónica, exlaiming, "Hermana! I have red hair dye! Can we streak your hair?".

Verónica, the girl who had been there the longest and who, though they'd never admit it, I think the staff think of most as their real daughter. Verónica, in Albergue the whole time I was on HNGR, and still there last summer when I came to visit. Eleven months ago, the day I flew away from Bolivia for the second time, she pressed a note into my hand at the airport. "Thank you Hermana Emily for spending time with us... I love you so much."

Verónica, now out of the house, working, finishing school. Verónica, living on her own in her very own apartment, but she comes back to visit every Sunday afternoon. Verónica, Gonzalo told me on this visit: "She broke the cycle. She used to want to go back to the streets. Now, when she has time to go 'home', she doesn't go to the streets anymore. When she needs something, she wants to come to Albergue."

***********

"That's Verónica's mom," they murmur to me, as we pull up to a small, dirty park by a traffic circle...

Verónica's mom... and though at our last stop on the streets, interacting with people unbathed and visibly drugged, I had felt uncomfortable and out of place, suddenly I am pushing out of the car, walking up to her, needing to see her face, to connect... Verónica's mom, and  I am suddenly reaching for her, introducing myself, looking deep into her eyes, somehow feeling like I owe her something, like I need to apologize. Most of all... I just want to know her. This woman... Verónica's mom.

I reach her, and then I stumble, falter. "Hola... me llamo Emily... yo conozco tu hija." I know your daughter.

She looks at me, nods. A slight, hazy smile, through a face I know to be aged by drugs, by street life, by more pain and less connection than probably I could imagine.

"Mi hija, conoces? Verónica es."

"Sí... Verónica... ella es muy preciosa a mi." Your daughter is precious to me.

I grab Asharae. "Ash. Can you take a photo of us? I want a photo with Verónica's mom."

Why? I don't know. This woman is the mother of someone I love. Someone I have gotten to have a tiny part in getting to care for. This woman standing in front of me, loves this girl we love... she loves her so much more than my twenty-three-year-old, childless heart can fathom. And yet we were the ones who got to raise her. I, a twenty-one-year-old American college student, got to feed her dinner and laugh with her and hear about her school day. I got to watch her pray before meals and see the results of her experiments with hair dye, got to hear her dancing to pop songs with her friends and giggling as she played tricks on Hermano Gonzalo.

I put my arm around Verónica's mom's shoulders. She grins at the camera, a gap-toothed, stoned smile.

"Gracias," I say to her, "Gracias,"... and I think I am thanking her for her daughter.

I'm sorry, I want to say, though I don't know why.

Because Albergue gets her now, and you don't. Not in the same way.
Because your life is this dirty park and these men who hit you;
because of the opportunities I've had, the life I was born into... someday when I have my babies I will get to raise them myself, but you didn't have anyone to teach you how to do that.

"Ella es muy preciosa a mi..." what else can I say to her? Why should she care what some young, American girl has to say about her child? "...I pray for your daughter."

She looks at me. Then looks away. "Sí... sí. Pray she will get off the streets. Not like me."

 ***********

"Does she love her?"

"...Yes. Yes, she loves her."

"Pray she will get off the streets. Not like me."

Amy Grace, friendship, adulthood, and hard things.

A couple of weeks ago, I spent three days in San Diego with Ames. We went for walks and ate out at restaurants and spent too much at upscale California thrift stores. We cuddled her sweet baby nephew who she nannies for and stayed up late in sweatpants watching Friends and How I Met Your Mother.

We talked about her dad some, but not a lot. More we talked about her husband of seven months, and what a blessing he is, and how much she loves becoming his wife. About what a gift it is right now to spend her days with her sister and her family and to come home to James at night. We talked about my settling into life in Oregon, how well the rhythm suits me and how in love I am with my studies and community.

It would be easy to try to draw a million poignant points from being with this freshman-roommate of mine, two weeks after her dad died. About walking together in this season, after seasons we shared where our tears were over 18-year-old boys and overwhelming term papers.

Honestly, though? That fact doesn't feel glamorous in any way that made me excited to write a blog post. It just feels sad. I'm so sad her good dad had cancer, and I'm so sad he died, and I am so sad Amy and her mom and her sisters and their husbands and babies have to miss him these years until heaven. I'm proud of them and the faith and praise they choose. I'm grateful for that sassy and beautiful girl and our friendship, and for all she teaches me, and for what I hope I can give to her.

As we walked and laughed and shopped and vegged and were basically just together, I thought a lot about how my understanding of adult life has evolved in the last couple of years. I think I used to think that hard things ended at some point; that we'd "arrive", and at that point pain would be the anomaly, the strange and sucky event to get through before returning to the baseline of Normal: Easy and Great. That seems less and less true. Life is so beautiful and joyful and good, but it is really hard. It doesn't make me love adult life less, but it makes me engage in it differently; it makes me re-think what my hopes and goals are of how to live this life and walk out faith and love well.

I've been re-writing this for a couple of hours now, and I don't really have any great conclusions.

I am grateful for our crazy God, who doesn't take the pain away, for reasons I still don't understand and still rail against... but who in His upside-down-kingdom way, abides with us and never lets us do it alone.

I'm grateful for reminders that this beautiful and good world, still, is not our home. I pray those gaps of felt home-less-ness, will lead us to long for Him and His fullness.

I'm grateful for the friends we're given to walk with.

In San Diego last month. Some hott grown-up girl with a pixie hair cut.

**********************

Fall 2006

Spring 2010

Fall 2011

Officially my favorite picture ever.

We had coffee together every week for five years. 

Including on her wedding day.

I talked to her for an hour and a half last night while sitting in a coffee shop...

she was 2,000 miles away, but it still fed (caffeinated?) my soul.

So grateful for her and our friendship.

(photo credit: Yeesum Photography!!)

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.

.happy emily.

A gift in this year: Serving Eucharist.

"Take this in remembrance that Christ died for you,

and feed on Him in your hearts by faith, with thanksgiving."

"The body of Christ, the bread of heaven."

"Amen."

"The blood of Christ, the cup of salvation."

"Amen."

I pick up my tray, check on the sheet which aisle I am assigned to, walk over and take my place.

There I stand as they file down. Parents with their children, a baby on one hip and a toddler or two in tow. Young adults, and elderly couples who hold each other's shaking hands as they walk down the aisle. Little girls in twirly dresses with matching headbands, skipping more than they walk. Fellow Wheaton grads sitting together in groups. Faces I recognize, faces I don't. They file down. They pause at the deacon, take the bread. They stop and take the wine from the chalice, or they come to me.

"The blood of Christ, the cup of salvation."

"Amen."

I don't always make eye contact- I wait. I remember what Nancy, the Eucharist ministry coordinator and one of my favorite people, says about how she serves it- she takes a step back, leaving them room to meet with God, but she prays for them as they drink. I pray for each one of them- specifics if I know them. I pray "Lord, bless her today", "Bless him", as they tip it, drink and walk on. I affirm His love for them as best I can for that moment they are in front of me, meeting Him.

Meeting Him.

I get to watch them as they meet Him.

"The blood of Christ, the cup of salvation."

"Amen."

"What we... must realize, is that all our intellectual articulations about this sacrament are but feeble human attempts to comprehend the basic mystery of God's unconditional loving acceptance of us, His children."

 The mystery is unfolding in front of me.

Every week, as I stand there, it is not just balancing the tray and timing the saying and checking to make sure I have enough cups for the people in line. It is those things, but I am seeing the mystery. I am standing in front of the mystery.

"On the night He was handed over to suffering and death, our Lord Jesus Christ took bread; and when He had given thanks to You, He broke it, and gave it to His disciples, and said, “Take, eat: This is My Body, which is given for you. Do this for the remembrance of Me."

It is acceptance by Him. It is intimacy with Him, unconditional on how we feel or what we say.

It is His body, given to us.

Sometimes they're crying as they take it. Not infrequently. Oh, do I long and pray for the ones who cry; and my heart swells with wanting to offer them comfort- but more it swells with hope that they are receiving it... and with gratitude and awe that the meaning of this cup, can bring them to tears.

I love when they do look into my eyes, and I get to smile into theirs as they drink.

"The blood of Christ, the cup of salvation."

I always try to pick up the tray instead of the chalice because it holds the non-alcoholic wine and I love serving the children. They come, too. The babies, even, and I love watching their parents hold the cup to their lips and minister this living grace to them. I love praying for those babies and their sweet lives the Lord is at work in, as they drink it, too.

I love the toddlers who pick it up all by themselves, so proudly. I squat down to serve it to them, and I say the words to them, too, just the same.

"The blood of Christ, the cup of salvation."

"Say 'Amen', buddy!"

"Aaa-mennnn!"

I'm not sure I'm supposed to, but usually I whisper, "Good job!" as they carefully put the empty cup back.

I love when it's someone I know. We don't act differently, because we are all there as one family. But oh, how special it is to get to participate in that moment, that mystery, with someone I love deeply, whose life I get to share.

"The blood of Christ, the cup of salvation..."- I'm so grateful to get to say it to them.

"Amen."

 "The blood of Christ, the cup of salvation."

"The blood of Christ, the cup of salvation."

"The blood of Christ, the cup of salvation."

Over and over and over I say it, as they file down, as they take it, as they receive and as they meet Him. Over and over I get to see the mystery. Over and over I get to affirm His love and His work in them. Over and over I get to speak words that enter and comfort my heart, that are truth.

I am so grateful God gave me the great gift of serving Eucharist at Rez this year.

"Eternal God, Heavenly Father, You have graciously accepted us as living members of Your Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ;

and You have fed us with spiritual food through the Sacrament of His body and blood."

Thanking God for giving me the chance to serve communion this year.

.13.

Eucharist.

I love taking Communion- at my church we call it the Eucharist- more than virtually anything else. "This is My body. This is My blood." It is intimacy with God. And it is tangible and unconditional to how I feel or what I can say. This hard numb year, that tangible, unconditional, every-week intimacy with God was more important than I could ever express.

A couple of months ago, I started helping to serve the Eucharist at church. For fifteen straight minutes, I get to repeat, "The blood of Christ, the cup of salvation" over and over, as people drink wine and receive it- receive Him. I am strengthened by doing this more than I ever predicted.

At our church even small children can take Communion if they've been baptized. I was curious as to what the rationale behind this was, and so I picked up a little informational booklet on the topic. The explanation given moved me a ton. I may be 22, but I think this applies to adults completely as well.

"Psychologists have helped us to see that there is a level of human understanding... that is non-verbal and non-rational. We now know that this unconscious level responds to reality as it is conveyed by means of symbolic forms and actions...
Children experience much that they cannot verbally articulate. We do not delay the first bath until the child understands hygiene, nor do we require knowledge of nutrition prior to the first meal.
The child experiences many baths and many meals- really experiences them- and at the most basic human level apprehends their meaning through the experience. Children may not understand the Holy Communion, but they certainly understand acceptance and rejection.

What we as adults need to understand is that all our intellectual articulations about this sacrament are but feeble human attempts to comprehend the basic mystery of God's unconditional loving acceptance of us, His children.
Reception of the sacrament by those among us who don't "understand" as we "understand" should serve as a reminder to us that we must always experience grace before we can talk truly about it."

-from "Why Children Receive Communion", Rev. Ronald Fisher

as are all things.

One of my best friends once wrote this:

"...The last four months were hard. But if a semester is the cross, as are all things, then maybe the last four months saved my life. Maybe all those other things taught me to see my One thing better."


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'll try to tell someone that I feel 'different' since HNGR and I don't know how to explain it. Because we're all different, all the time. We're different every year, sometimes for good and sometimes for bad. But I don't mean like I grew, or even I regressed. 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 see "my One thing". 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.

If a semester is the cross, as are all things.

Tonight as we were leaving All-School, Matt said, "Taking communion is my favorite thing in the world."

I replied casually, "That's good, it's the best thing in the world."

And then I paused.

I use the phrase "best thing in the world" often, about a lot of different things, seriously- but not literally.

It is startling to realize we can actually make a true statement:

...that yes, there is something that is the best thing in the world.

"As they were eating, Jesus took some bread and blessed it. Then He broke it in pieces and gave it to the disciples, saying, 'Take this and eat it, for this is My body.' And He took a cup of wine and gave thanks to God for it. He gave it to them and said, 'Each of you drink from it, for this is My blood, which confirms the covenant between God and His people. It is poured out as a sacrifice to forgive the sins of many.'"

Matthew 26:26-28

Some People Walk In The Rain...

"Some people walk in the rain... others just get wet."

I know a girl who has a magnet on her refrigerator with that phrase on it.

The other day it was raining hard. I love the rain 99% of the time, but as I peeked out of the Beamer Center doors, hoping in vain for break in the clouds, I was not excited. I was in a tank top and a thin cotton skirt and I was going to have to go all the way (a whopping three blocks) back to my apartment in the cold and wet.

Just as I was about to despairingly make a run for it, that magnet popped into my head. Did I want to get wet, or did I want to walk in the rain? It was unavoidable that I was going to get wet anyway, unless I felt like waiting in the student center for the rest of the night, so I might as well have fun with it, right?

I didn't make a run for it. I strolled leisurely back to Terrace, and I laughed out loud at the feel of the drops on my skin. The sidewalks were filled with puddles and I'm not even gonna lie... I totally jumped in all of them. Really hard. My skirt was soaked to mid-thigh just from the splash. Sweet.

I was going to have to get wet, but instead I got to take a walk in the rain, because a phrase from Mary's fridge jumped into my head at just the right time.

That girl's taught me a lot about walking in the rain. About being playful and present in every single day. About standing in awe at the art with which our God has painted the world. About noticing and celebrating the unique plan He has for each person He has put on this planet and in my path.

Throughout high school...

throughout college...

without ever realizing she was doing it, she has taught me (and so many others)...

that we can go to school, or we can form community;

we can meet our classmates, or we can reach out to them with genuine interest;

we can live with their families, or we can work to understand them;

we can experience disappointment and grow bitter, or we can feel our pain, pour it out to God and let Him meet us in it (and become more beautiful for the experience);

we can participate in a small group, or we can add safety and positivity to a room full of very different girls;

we can talk to people, or we can empower every (every, every, EVERY) person with whom we interact with the knowledge that God loves them, has a plan for them, that they are worthy of being loved and have much to offer and are cherished.

Some people smile, and others change the atmosphere of a room.

Our friendship has taught me that we can just have graduation parties, or we can (smirk) invite everyone we've ever known into my kitchen and excitedly introduce them all to each other while the rest of the neighborhood tries in vain to find parking...

Some people visit their best friends at college, while others manage to form ridiculous bonds with their roommates and make their professors laugh and otherwise own the campus of Wheaton College in three days.

We can feel self-conscious, or we can laugh at ourselves (yes, we threw cake all over each other's faces... just like at a wedding).

Some people go on "missions trips", and others find- create- homes across the world by loving the people they meet. Some people teach us to love God by how hard they seek after Him themselves. Some people show us His humor, goodness, and grace by displaying such characteristics themselves.

And now...

some people go away to school.

And others sit by ponds, meet new people, take drawing classes, go sailing, and praise God.

I am so lucky to have you as a true bosom friend, Mary Elise Gottschalk.