I guess it all comes down to them, cause they're up in the air.

How strange. I'm leaving home today and flying out tomorrow morning. Actually we're leaving in 3 hours from here. I'd intended, one of the nights this week, to write a post that adequately worded my jumbled up thoughts about this upcoming month, but I didn't have a chance to. There's so much to do and to think about, and the more I do, and the more I think about, the more I realize how utterly unprepared I am. And I don't mean this in a carefree, who-knows-what'll-happen-so-let's-enjoy-the-adventure way. I mean that I am literally and completely unprepared for this trip. I've been feeling very unworthy of all of this. And I know that's a lame, downer sort of attitude to have when one is setting out on an adventure... but honestly, I'm scared. In one sense, I don't know what's coming, because that's just how life is. But on the other hand, I know that there are certain situations that WILL come up, and I don't know if I'm ready for them. And that's scary.

Part of me thinks that this is a fitting way to start an adventure, though. Maybe not a good way, but a fitting one. Tough, but maybe more beneficial, if I can pull it off. Of course, it won't be ME pulling it off, I know that. In fact that's what I'm counting on. I'm so small and unprepared and can't possibly hope to do anything on my own. I guess all that I can do is hope to be a good tool for God to do whatever He wants with. There's no easy, if-I-do-this-then-the-trip-will-be-fine fix... but if I can be open to letting God use me and try my best, I guess that's the best that anyone can do.

So yeah. I'd really appreciate prayer for that. Pray for a silly girl to grow up and grow closer to Jesus. I've been realizing how pathetically in need of all of that I am.

I'll see if I can write updates every now and then. It's going to be strange, being away from all the connections around here. But you know what, it's good. Every once in a while we need to get away and turn the volume on life down. It's like being in the mountains at night for the first time when you've grown up in the city, and looking up to see the stars clearly. I remember that feeling so well from last year - so many revelations and things that I'd never thought of or felt before. I only hope I can see that clearly this year.

One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eyes.

I'll be back in 3 weeks. :)

Longer than the road that stretches out ahead.

My earliest memory of life on this earth is of my family sitting at the dining room table, and I'm feeling a bit panicked. After sitting in uncomfortable silence for a while, I say, "I think I have a problem here", and point to a piece of corn that I stuck up my nostril.

I also remember waiting to leave for the park on my sixth birthday. We lived on a cul-de-sac and I discovered that it echoed quite nicely on that street. "Ladybug!" I shouted, over and over. And over and over, my echo would come back: "Ladybug!" I was wearing a blue and white checkered shirt with daisies on it.

I remember being picked up and skated off of the rink by Sonny the ref. on skate night, after a teenage boy had knocked me over. Sonny asked me which man was my father and I pointed him out with my unbroken arm. I remember being in the ER after that, but I can't remember leaving the building or getting my skates taken off.

Mom used to put a tupperware cup on our cheeks to collect our tears when we would cry. When we finished, she would hand the cup to us and tell us to drink it. She called it Alligator Soup.

The last time I wrote a bike, I was eight. I was trying to get over my 'childhood' fear of them - actually, Dad was trying to get me over my fear of them. I didn't mind a distance between us. But Dad made me ride up and down the street until I could do it without complaining. I never rode a bike after that day, though, because even if I stopped complaining to HIM... I never got over the insecurity of being on two wheels.

I think that of all my memories, the one that makes me the saddest is the day that Mom took me to LA to see Grandad in the hospital. It was the last time that any of us ever saw him and I don't know why she took only me. I don't remember much of that visit at all, but I do remember that Mom read to him out of the Bible. She sat on a chair near the bed, and I sat in a chair near the window, watching with polite curiosity. He'd been sick for a long time, and had lost a lot of weight and grown a shaggy beard. I remember thinking to myself that he looked something like what Noah must have. (I don't know why I picked Noah... maybe we'd just read about the flood in Sunday school or something.) Hazy as all that is, the memory of walking down the hall and back to our car is incredibly distinct. I was aware of the fact that Mom was crying, and I remember looking up at her and whispering (so that I might not offend anyone else), "Who was that man?"

One day during lunch hour, Dad picked me up from school and took me to the optometrist to pick up my first pair of glasses. I walked back onto campus with him and looked up at the big trees that stood over the lunch-yard. I was astounded that the green blob was actually made up of individual leaves.

Around Christmas one year, it rained steadily for almost a week. Kate and I went to the park to collect pine cones and leaves for a wreath that we were making, and it was - of course - raining like crazy. Instead of collecting things like we'd intended to, we laid on top of picnic tables in the middle of the park and talked for an hour.

Last summer in Prague, we took a stroll on Charles Bridge in the middle of the night. I can still see the moon above St. Vitus Cathedral, and how the statues of the saints looked, silhouetted against the sky. But I especially remember two swans that swam below the bridge, slowly and consistently together. And I thought, This must be love. Love of a city, love of a person, love of the world, love of life. How lucky am I to have seen it?

Sadness of a Closed Door.

I get such headaches lately. Only they're not really headaches... it's sort of this pounding, nauseous feeling, like how your head feels when you get motion-sickness. But I'm not sick from motion, because I'm not moving. Maybe it's stable-sickness, or whatever the opposite of motion is. Immobility-sickness. There you go. I'm sick from not going anywhere, and of not having anywhere to go. I lock myself up here in my room in the hopes that it'll make me study or work or do any of the things I should be doing to improve myself or help myself or help other people. But I end up on facebook, or playing music, or reading sad books, or writing sad stories. I realized last night that all I seem to be able to write are sad stories. Odd, because I'm not really a sad person. Well, sometimes. Actually, I don't even know if "sometimes" covers it - but I also don't know that you can say you're one type of person or another for sure, all the time. I don't think that anybody would fit any kind of category 100% of the time. I do know that it's bad for me to be in my head this much, though. The worst part is that I've gotten comfortable here, and the thought of getting out of my head is overwhelming. I've started wearing my old glasses again, in the hopes that they will help me. I don't think that they do, but they give me some kind of action to take, and that helps. I'm so tired. I sit here with my head aching, telling myself that if I go somewhere, the sickness will go away. Tomorrow, I tell myself. I'll go tomorrow.

Just a bit more red.

How strange... I just walked into my room and expected to see the strand of colored Christmas lights and holly leaves around my window. I don't know why, but I was completely caught off guard when I didn't see it there. My mind is either six months ahead or six months behind... or maybe several years ahead, or, more likely, several years behind. I've been thinking about old things a lot lately. I've been thinking about the things in my room, because my room is the one thing that I can control, and how I'm bored with it and would like to re-decorate. Or at least move some furniture around - you know, maybe throw some of it out and get new and interesting stuff. Today I came up and looked around, telling myself that I would find one thing to throw away. A big thing, too, not just a pile of junk. I started with a little table by my rocking chair, then my rocking chair, then my nightstand. I don't play the keyboard much anymore, unless it's to tune my guitar by. I use my desk often, but could live without it. My bed would be missed, but eh. If I had to leave it, I would. Then I realized that the only things in my room that I would keep would be my bookshelf and a large black and white photograph of Paris in the 1930's that hangs above my desk. At first this realization made me feel excited - I can throw it all away! Then I realized that I would have an empty room if I did that, and that would look even worse. So now I'm stuck with all of this useless junk that I don't love or need. Funny: basic furniture now equals useless junk. This is me acting out against all of the clutter that has taken over our house.

I'm reading Everything is Illuminated, and though a large majority of it makes me laugh out loud, the rest of it breaks my heart. The chapters where he's talking about his great-great-etc.-grandmother, Brod, especially. I read this passage just now and it made me want to run out and find someone to read it to. But I couldn't think of anyone to go to. How sad is that?

Brod discovered 613 sadnesses, each perfectly unique, each a singular emotion, no more similar to any other sadness than anger, ecstasy, guilt, or frustration. Mirror Sadness. Sadness of Domesticated Birds. Sadness of Being Sad in Front of One's Parent. Humor Sadness. Sadness of Love Without Release.
She was like a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life. She learned impossibly difficult songs on her violin, songs outside of what she thought she could know, and would each time come crying to Yankel, I have learned to play this one too! It's so terrible! I must write something that not even I can play! She spent evenings with the art books Yankel had bought for her in Lutsk, and each morning sulked over breakfast, They were good and fine, but not beautiful. No, not if I'm being honest with myself. They are only the best of what exists. She spent an afternoon staring at their front door.
Waiting for someone? Yankel asked.
What color is this?
He stood very close to the door, letting the end of his nose touch the peephole. He licked the wood and joked, It certainly tastes like red.
Yes, it is red, isn't it?
Seems so.
She buried her head in her hands. But couldn't it be just a bit more red?
Brod's life was a slow realization that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest at the same time. She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release. Table, ivory elephant charm, rainbow, onion, hairdo, mollusk, violence, cuticle, melodrama, ditch, honey, doily... None of it moved her. She addressed her world honestly, searching for something deserving of the volumes of love she knew that she had within her, but to each she would have to say, I don't love you. Bark-brown fence post: I don't love you. Poem too long: I don't love you. Lunch in a bowl: I don't love you. Physics, the ideas of you, the laws of you: I don't love you. Nothing felt like anything more than what it actually was. Everything was just a thing, mired completely in its thingness.

Strange how things that I read seem to relate to what I've been thinking about in the past few days. Or maybe I project my thoughts onto what I read. Maybe both. Strange how that happens, isn't it? Really good books, I think, can be taken to mean completely different things - not just from person to person, but from day to day and mood to mood. You find and identify the things that you've been thinking about. Realizations like this make me want to read every good book at least five times. One good book, read five times, could be like reading five completely different books. It's all limitless. Sometimes it blows my mind.

Nothing is as it has been, and I miss your face like hell.

Jon, Megan, Kate and I have been working on various recordings of this for our dear Katrina for the past few days. However, harmony-mishaps or else faulty equipment got in the way of a perfect recording.... until today.

http://youtu.be/pFBXy8kXhuA


ps. I wrote a sad story today. Not sure where the idea came from, but it's been rolling around in my brain for a while now and today I wrote it. I think I like it. I'm not sure. It's on my site, if you care to take a gander.

Let the weakling say "I am strong."

While I was researching churches in Ireland, I found this really cool-looking congregation whose church is in the heart of Dublin. (Points.) I listened to the recording of the pastor's sermon this past Sunday (they are more technologically advanced than we. But that's not really hard to do.), and I was really impressed. Not only was his sermon really solid, but the Irish accent is pretty fantastic, too. :) There was one thing especially, toward the end of the sermon, that I was struck by, so I figured I'd share it here. His sermon was about God being our refuge, essentially. He read from Joel and Revelation about the wrath of God and how inescapable it is. Then he said, "But in a bush-fire, where is the safest place to be? The safest place to be is where the fire has already been."

The analogy is simple, but it blew my mind. I guess I'd just never thought of it in those terms before. We're familiar with the fact that Jesus took on God's wrath for us, but think about it - fire doesn't double back over its tracks. It can't touch what it's already burned. God's wrath and judgement is very real, but to those who know and have a relationship with Jesus, it isn't a threat. Once Grace steps in, wrath can't double back.