Just what I wanted.

It could have been the french fries. But I don’t think so.
I can’t sleep.
I’ve just gotten in from a Remnant (www.theremnantwebsite.com) project, it’s after midnight, I’ve got outside air clinging to my pores, I need to remove my contacts, and instead I’m here on my couch typing in the dark because I’m so jazzed about life.
Yeah, life.
Funny how a four-letter word can pack so many years, emotions, victories, lessons, shame, renewal, rainstorms and traffic jams. I’ve accidentally cut myself too many times to remember. I’ve pumped gas more than I can figure. I’ve hugged more than my share.
And I have no idea how many hours of my life has been spent washing dishes, going through the mail, changing my vacuum bag, folding towels, or brushing my hair.
It’s all just snug between those four letters.
But there’s a few gaps, no matter how tight you squeeze that word. There is open space, unwritten program, untapped eternity between the “l” and “I” the “f” and “e”. And a lot can happen with just a little breathing room.
The Remnant.
Once it was just an idea. Then it was a concept. Eventually it became a gathering. Now it’s where I go home. To me, it means friends.
I drove home, after a hearty meal of Salmon and fried potatoes, thinking about all the people I had seen that evening, all the beautiful faces in my life, and some incredible new ones I just met. I drove home thinking about the laughter still whispering in my ear. I drove home thinking about a chance to do something not about me, all about Him. I drove home thinking about how I was still smiling.
I drove home loving my life. And I told God so.
This isn’t where I imagined being, even months ago. Jobless, alone, 30. Not my description of what I wanted to be when I grew up. In fact, good thing God doesn’t tell us our future. I’ve crossed too many bridges between here and there. I may have jumped off one.
And this isn’t what my family dreamed either. I remember, even at an early age, people telling me I’d marry young. My mother married young. My grandmother married young. I’d find someone. No problem.
It was said so often I actually believed it. Life was predestined to be a repeat of the women before me. And at the time, it’s exactly what I wanted.
Tonight, driving home in my seven-year old Jeep Jillian (whom I love and pray for often, “Lord, don’t let that sound be the suspension”), heading to my quiet little home, tiptoeing inside so I don’t awaken my roommate, kicking off my Wal-Mart shoes and dropping everything in the middle of the floor because I can, energized by spending the evening with great friends, I realized I had exactly what I wanted. I had a GREAT life. It was perfect for me in every way. And God knew that long ago.
So thank you Father. Thank you for a beautiful life, complete and joyful. It’s just what I wanted.

The only thing to fear

She wore bright green pants. And a matching shirt. I couldn't have pulled it off. She did. I glanced at her sitting on my left and then back out the window again.
I had other things to worry about than fashion, like where this train was taking me, what this train ride would be like, and if I could make it. 14,000-plus feet isn't normal stomping grounds for me, but once on-board my fate was sealed. We wouldn't stop until we reached it.
The engine roared, the train station began moving past my window, and we started up the mountain. Kristin and I were going to Pike's Peak. We had a bottle of water each, two purses, a camera bag, and the expectation of colder temperatures and less oxygen. We were both thrilled. And admittedly, I was somewhat fearful. Okay, I was pretty scared.
Soon the conductor was yapping away in the speaker telling us history. It was comforting, in a background noise sort of way. The train was full with everyone from the kid in the back saying, "choo, choo" every 15 seconds, to the old man from Arkansas traveling alone, to the group of Swedish teenagers speaking their native tongue. And then there was my green pants girl. I have no idea why I was drawn to her, perhaps it was the brightness of the pants. But I watched her from time to time, nonetheless.
As the train continued at a steady incline upward, I could feel panic setting in. My hands were tingling. My chest was warm. I felt a bit dizzy. And that overly crooked light pole out the window, the conductor explained, was actually straight. We were the crooked ones.
On and on we went. The 8,000 mark. The 10,000 mark. The 12,000 mark. I sipped on my water to swallow my panic. I'd exchange a glance with Kristin ever so often. She was quiet, sometimes a little pale. Neither of us felt like running a marathon. We were just sitting there, letting this beast take us toward the destination, what promised to be breathtaking.
At the timberline I began some deep breathing exercises and sipped more water. The trees were gone. Nothing but rocks and cold and dizziness everywhere. I had to get control of this. Just 2,000 more feet. This was doable. My green pants girl looked fine. She was fine, relaxed even, smiling and taking pictures with her friend. I could do this.
An hour and 40 minutes later, we arrived. I got out, feeling my eyes cross, and beelined it to the souvenir shop and some awaiting Aquafina. Soon, the sickness passed (what I learned later, and would have liked to have known earlier, was a case of rapid dehydration). Kristin and I went outside into the bitter cold. It was at least 30 degrees colder on Pikes Peak than on the ground, below freezing, and a cloudy day meant bitter winds. We stood in the wake of God's masterpiece seeing a world that made me feel small and God so much bigger.
Green pants girl and her friend exchanged cameras with us and we all took pictures for each other. Then we boarded the train for the decent down. She walked in, breathing heavily through her mouth, panting, yet calmly sitting down and rummaging through her purse. I watched the heavy breathing, the struggle, the constriction I could almost feel in my own chest and she inhaled again.
She pulled out an inhaler and pumped it a few times into her mouth, stopping to smile and wave at her friend still taking pictures. I changed seats and scooted a little closer.
"Can I fan you or anything?"
She nodded at me. "No, I'll be fine as soon as the medicine kicks in." A few more seconds, her panting calmed and she continued talking. "I have a breathing disorder. The doctors say it's dangerous for me to go above 5,000 feet."
I sat there staring at her. We were at over 14,000 feet. Nearly three times more than their recommendation.
"But I just had to come. I just love this. So beautiful." Then she went back to her world of watching out the window, and I went back to mine impressed by her, irritated at myself.
Later that evening, Ingrid - our gracious Colorado host - took us to see The Seven Falls at night. Another wonder of the world that left my mouth hanging open.
When we arrived, I took out my camera, snapping pictures of the nearly straight upward climb of the stairs along the cliff, seeing the light, the flow, the rhythm of the shot. A woman I hadn't even noticed sitting on a nearby bench caught my attention.
"Be careful going up. It's very steep stairs. But it's incredible. And going down is much easier."
"Oh. Okay. Appreciate it," I responded.
"I'm just sitting here catching my breath a minute. I went to the top. It's a good hike. And I'm petrified of heights. But I just had to go. I can't let fear rule me."
I could barely muster a smile. There it was again. Another woman facing her fear because she simply had to. I nodded and went on my way.
Fear. I know that name. Sometimes I feel it tattooed on my skin, the ink burning into my bloodstream. It rarely leaves me for other travels. If I looked hard enough, I could make out its footprint next to mine in the dirt. And I despise it like no other creature I know.
Being afraid makes me feel weak, sad, disturbed. It makes me question myself, my future, even my faith in God. It taints every bite of food for my soul. It just plain sucks.
The truth is, I'm not alone. It sags off the shoulders of many of us. We slosh about life burdened down with soggy trepidation and squishy shoes. We tell opportunity "no" when all a "yes" requires is courage.
But then there are others, those living their lives regardless of their fear, sampling extraordinary experiences because they faced their tormentor.
I don't have the strength to quell all the fear I have. I don't have the bravery or the gusto. But I do have a protector. And all He wants is trust.
Then, maybe for once, I'll take a journey into the high points of life simply because I had to.

Business as usual

Routines are easy to get into – unlike those jeans from high school, that relationship from last year, and that dream from endless hope. Routines zip up with ease.
It’s been three nights. Kristin and I arrived in Colorado Springs on Saturday, by Monday night the three of us dwelling in Ingrid’s one-bedroom apartment had a rhythm. I noticed it as I dragged the air mattress from off the balcony, Ingrid brushed her teeth in the bathroom, and Kristin began plugging in all her many electronics for the night. We had a pattern, a routine.
It isn’t that far off from life, in the broader since. I was stuck in a routine for three years, a job with a 30-day rotation from conception to deadline and back again. We played that song until I wanted to bash in the surround sound.
And in a moment, the routine shattered. I was unemployed. No more rhythm, off beat or otherwise. It’s been 11-weeks of what I’d call “massive upheaval.” Who knows what I’ll be doing from one day to the next, what job will come my way, what money will exchange hands and land into mine, and what odd task I’ll do to get it.
On and on, from gardener to construction worker, from telemarketing calls to photo assistant, to cleaning a house to pacing my own, I’ve done just about everything you can imagine, except squash grapes. But my clean feet don’t get me far in the professional world.
Instead, I’ve gone from temporary job to temporary job, losing pieces of my identity at every doorstep.
For a person who bemoans routine like I grumble over undercooked artichoke hearts (stringy vegetables are just icky), I’ve felt a bit lost lately. I’ve had no routine. Despite all my complaints to get out, suddenly I found myself wanting in. Where was my security? Where was my foundation? When would I get a solid job, a steady income, and finally get a good night’s sleep?
If you can define torment, do it now. I’ve seen it’s gnarly face and crooked teeth too many times over the last 11-weeks, more frequently as the clock spins past. I’d like to smack it heartily and give it a toothbrush. But it’s ugliness, for me, is unmanageable.
Truthfully, I’ve been overwhelmed.
Oh I’ve had moments of profound revelation. Times of bold faith. Spasms of brazen and busty declarations that this, this trifle loss of a job, this plummeting foothold, was just all in a day’s work. God could and would handle it all.
And I’ve even believed it a time or two. More often than not. But the not is there. And once planted, spreads like milkweeds in moist climate.
So that’s been me. For weeks, that’s been the portrait of me. And perhaps, more than a vacation, I came to Colorado to escape. Pretending is so much easier when you change the scenery. Here I could push reality aside.
Here’s the guts of it: God had a better script.
I don’t have a job, a title, a cluster of words to define my economic status, professional goals, or philosophy. I have me. And in me lives a Savior.
Yesterday I went to two church services in two churches in two towns. And I asked God in each for one thing: comfort. Please just give me peace. My supply dried up and evaporated weeks ago. And the drought was affecting more than my view on a future career, it was spurring on a deep-seeded, overwhelming, all-encompassing, gargantuan node of hot, steamy fear.
I needed peace like I needed air, and both have been too heavy to take in.
Did I find it? Yes, in moments. It didn’t come raining down. There has been just a drop here and there over the last couple of days. But I felt it just the same.
During the final moments of last night’s worship service, the contemporary if not downright edgy band played an old hymn, “How Great Thou Art.”
Oh Lord my God. When I in awesome wonder consider all the worlds thy hands have made. I see the stars. I hear the rolling thunder. Thy power throughout the universe displayed.
We don’t always get a bolt of lightning to severe the here from the now, to part the tempest from the calm and sit us on dry soil. Sometimes it’s just a mountain on the horizon to remind us how small we are, how big He is. Sometimes it’s meeting new people and finding a common Love for an uncommon God. Sometimes it’s finding that routines can be replaced, within a heartbeat, within a matter of moments, within an unsteady time when nothing is routine. That’s when I knew He was there, just like before, just like every day of my existence and every day forward, just like He said He’d do, like He’s proved to me He’d do, like He promised and has never broken. He’s been there arranging the future while I’ve been busy counting toothbrush strokes.
He’s been simply going about His routine.

the Alice complex

Iris Johanson. Well, that was a new writer. Sounded promising. I pulled her book off the shelf, nestled her into the crook of my arm, went back to searching. Carly Phillips. Great. She'll go home with me too. And Joshua Ferris. What a great cover. You can come too.
I carried them around, scanning the library shelves, making sure no one else should be invited to my home for the weekend, and hurried to checkout. I had three books and less than two days, should tide me over.
I went home, sat in my favorite spot, couch cushions arranged perfectly to support all my extremities, creaked open JoHanson, and shut off the world. That was the entire purpose anyway, to shut everything out. I didn't answer my phone, didn't check my email, I just vegged. I sat in a still almost comatose type state, turned everything off including my ability for complex thought, and sucked on my pacifier.
Life, for the moment, had overloaded my circuits. I needed down time. I needed quiet. But mostly, I just needed nothingness. I wanted to escape to another world, to follow the rabbit down the hole, to ignore everything resembling reality.
And books always take me there.
I often wondered what propelled Alice into Wonderland. She was too young to fret, too pretty for masochism, too innocent for brassy life. She couldn't possibly be dealing with failure issues and family trouble. I don't remember any mention of a broken heart or fractured finances. And blonds really do have more fun, so what could have been the issue?
Maybe it was something less pointed, less purposeful, more benign. Maybe she simply needed to stop. She needed to stop trying to figure things out. She needed to stop fretting over life. She needed to stop all the noise, the doubts, the misgivings, the questions, the frustrations, the impatience, the seeking, the striving, the work of basically living. She just needed to stop.
This isn't my first escape from reality. I take them often, actually. I've learned, with me, it's up there in importance, next to eating and applying chapstick. I just have to stop.
I over think things. I over analyze. I try to "figure out" everything. I'd move to the ocean and study the tides if I thought it'd give me anything other than frizzy hair. Basically, I exhaust myself.
And here's the lesson I keep relearning and relearning. And....relearning.
Life doesn't require answers, only acceptance. God didn't tell us we'd always be in the know. In fact, He basically said the opposite. And because of this, He recommended a spicy little ingredient to add those ambiguous times: Faith.
We don't have to create it, buy it, mix it, make it. We just accept it. Just accept.
And the next time we trip into a rabbit hole to Wonderland, maybe we'll enjoy the ride.

The WHO

The scenery blurred by, as scenery often does. It moved with a stubborn destination. Behind, always behind me, pushing everything forward, moving the truck I was in closer and closer to the end. It was inevitable. Unless the earth opened up and swallowed this entire vehicle whole, which I've not often know the earth to do, we'd be in Van Buren, Arkansas in a matter of moments.
I was on my way to what most of us in the working world like to call, "The life-sucking, self-esteem deflating, deadly first day." My first day. There was a job laying rubber base at a construction site in Arkansas and it was mine. For two days, at least. Then, if all went according to plan, the location would change, the job would not.
But there was a minor problem. I didn't know how to do it. I'd had a grand total of one hour's training the day before. My brother - the expert - would be there. But, but, but....no buts. It was a job and after two months of unemployment, I needed whatever I could get.
I wouldn't say it was a terrible experience. But then again, another adjective doesn't come to mind. The site was crawling, dusty inch by dusty inch, with workers. Everyone in a hurry. Everyone a different task. And most everyone not English speaking.
Armed with a razor blade and glue gun, I hit the floor. We only had 1,700 feet to cover, give or take a millimeter. Better get started.
It was a revealing day, as was the day after, as has been the days since as I take to the floor armed with a straight edge and a desire to pay my mortgage.
Here's a few truths I've discovered:
- Pay attention to your surroundings or you're bound to whack yourself in the head, hard, in front of everyone. And embarrassment will linger long after the bruise.
- It really is hard not to flash your underwear when bent over for hours at a time. Let's give plumbers a break.
- If you are a female and seeking male attention, try strapping on knee pads. They get attention. Go figure.
- Being outside our element gives us better directions on getting back in.
I didn't belong there on that site. I knew that. So did most of the men who came up to ask me, "What are you doing here?" I was on the floor, cutting pieces of rolled base, strapped with a glue gun and a dangerous glint of perspiration. If they couldn't figure it out, explaining it wouldn't help.
I've asked God a few trillion times in my life exactly what He wanted me to do. "What God? What IS it? Just say the word. What should I do with my life?" That day, I didn't hear Him say a word. I didn't need to. I knew, without the booming voice and cracking thunder.
The answer was not WHAT but WHO. Who am I? I'm a writer. Actions always follow.
What does God want you to do? Forget the What. Focus on the Who. Answer that. And until you can figure it out, explaining it won't help.

To Grandmother's house we go

It happened every time I stayed over at my grandma's.
Maybe it was because I rarely stayed over. Maybe it was delirium from the perfumed air freshener that smelled like old candles. Maybe it was the spike in my blood sugar from all the homemade cookies. Maybe it was because I slept so deeply, so serenely, so undisturbed.
Every time, without fail, I always woke up from a nap or a full-night's sleep in complete oblivion. I'd never held such confusion until that moment. I awoke to a room, an environment, I couldn't place. I had no memory of it, although I'd been here hundreds of times. This was foreign to me, though I knew it as well as my own room.
And realization didn't come quickly. I'd lay there for awhile, trying to place where I'd seen that dresser against the wall, who was talking outside the door, what that smell was in my room (the old candles again). Slowly, ever so painfully slowly, the dawning happened. I remembered. Grandma's house.
I woke up Sunday morning with that feeling. Or at least a residue of that feeling. I recognized my room. I recognized the smell I know as home (new candles). I even remembered my dresser and the third drawer that always gets stuck. But that's as far as I went. I couldn't recall being here before, not this place, not this life, not this uncertainty.
It was like suffering from selective amnesia, although I had forgotten nothing. My life was unrecognizable.
The message at church was helpful, if not comforting. And I listened as the pastor used clips from the movie, "Pursuit of Happyness" with Will Smith, to show how affliction brings about brokenness, and brokenness unabashed joy. When we come to the end of ourselves, we finally open our eyes to see God. He was there the whole time. We just didn't recognize Him, much like the smell at Grandma's house.
It's then that deliverance can be, without inhibitions, celebrated.
This week has been a tough one, and it's only Wednesday. It always seems as if bad news travels with a few bad news companions. And my family is a bit bone tired. I don't even think Grandma's homemade cookies can right this wrong.
But as I sat across from my parents Monday night at dinner, traveling back to my hometown and a life I use to recognize, I kept seeing that image of Will Smith at the end of the movie. I kept seeing him walk into that crowd outside Dean Witter, seeing the look of complete deliverance on his face, seeing his hands raise in victory, clapping and clasping above his head.
I guessing Chris Gardner, the man Smith played, didn't recognize his life at that moment. I'm willing to wager he had never seen this place before. I bet he didn't even know the smell.
But he embraced it nonetheless. It was his, whether familiar or not. And this was his moment to celebrate his unknown without inhibitions.
Sometimes life just doesn't make sense. It doesn't have to. It never promised me or you or even Will Smith that it would. God never promised either.
But this is what He did say, this is what He did promise:
He's here. In the unfamiliar. In the brokenness. In the unknown.
He's here. No further than a whisper. No further than a thought.
He's here. Making order from chaos. Making deliverance in dismay.
He's simply here.
This is the rest I've been seeking, the joy I'm going to embrace, available even outside of Grandma's house, available even inside the unknown.

this side of delirium

I was going to tell you all about it.
Just finished a 22-hour workday, most of it on a new little job venture. Or maybe just experience is a better word. And I wanted to share, as I've been doing, as I promised I would do.

But I'm not going to do that. Not right now. You see, I'm tired. I'm really, really tired. 26 hours and counting, no sleep. And I've just worked the most physically laborious day in my short-term memory.
The sun is up. But I'm going to bed.

Despite the fact I've spent a large portion of my time thinking of a...oh...possibly amusing (or maybe I was just bored and it amused me) blog to write, at this moment I can't think of one bloody thing at is funny. Not one. Geez. Give me a minute here....hmmmm...nope. I can't even remember a knock-knock joke.

So instead, I'm going to get some sleep, if I remember how. And tell you all about it later.

Wait...I just remembered this one.
Knock knock...