after the storm, i look up

Tonight was one of those pre-graduation scares. The kind that make you wonder if you will actually get to graduate.

After sitting in the animation lab for four hours to edit the interview footage for my senior project, I went to render and do a final save on the work in progress. Somehow it did not save properly and all those hours of work became obsolete. Fun times. (Did i mention that I hate editing?)

As I put my head on the table in misery, my friend austin went to the white board and started to write out two columns. One said hate. The other love. And he started making a list. Then he handed me the marker. It was my turn.

Somehow my world got a lot bigger in that moment. The project still mattered, but my life didn't feel like it depended on it anymore. And I started to connect with my heart. Finally. It's amazing how a break from technology can help you feel a little more deeply and honestly.

So here I continue. The things I love, hate, regret, wish.


Hate...
editing
injustice
emotional constipation
manipulation
striving
deceit
fame used poorly
when I don't take the time to really see someone
masks (mine especially)
my selfish ambitions
fear
when hearts are broken and never learn to dream again
when people feel worthless
when people feel left out
when I miss the point

love...
adventures
my friends
my family
the grace of God
being a daughter
trains
water
innocence
sincerity
fire
passion
getting to watch people do the things they love
purity
honor

regret...
not learning to play an instrument
quitting volleyball
giving up on my dream of med school
underestimating the person God's made me to be
the times i've been so consumed with myself that I haven't noticed others


wish...
to love deeply (even when it hurts)
to fall in love and stay that way forever
to see people like Jesus does--to see Him in them
to write a book
to take risks
to learn how to sail
to backpack europe
to live out what matters
to be a friend who loves at all times
to hike a huge mountain
to sleep under the stars
to trust fully in my Papa
to listen better
to notice hidden beauty
to create a culture of honor
to meet people who destroy my boxes and preconceived notions




i have class early in the morning, but i felt the need to start writing these lists. guess i'm willing to lose sleep for words.

thank you, Sir Austin. You are gold, my friend.

(as are you--jordan, morgan, nathan--who know me better than i thought...)

"He is unique not only in the absence of sin, but in the perfection of moral virtues which meet in Him - every virtue balanced by its opposite virtue; His passivity balanced by His militancy; His world-renouncing with His world-participating; his self-denial with His self-assertion; His love of God with His love of man; His moral grandeur with His humility; His mastery with His servant-of-all attitude; His purity with His approachable-ness; His mysticism with His practical service; His terribleness with His tenderness; His law with His grace..." - E. Stanley Jones

headed to nyc

I'll travel 'till my country home is found
So I will travel
I will travel
I will travel till my country home is found
Yeah, I will travel
I will travel
I will travel 'till my country home is found
-avett brothers

I have no idea what is around the corner.

What I do know is that God is good.

wanting God more than the promises

a text conversation i had with my little sister the other night...

Me:
"Do you think God asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac because he needed to want God more than the promise?"

Bri:
"Yeah I do."

april is approaching...

“yes is a pleasant country:
if’s wintry
(my lovely)
let’s open the year

both is the very weather
(not either)
my treasure,
when violets appear

love is a deeper season
than reason;
my sweet one
(and april’s where we’re)”
-e.e. cummings

"there is no victory

without hearts of purity."

honor

this word holds a lot of weight in my assortment of connotations. when i think of this word, i usually see a picture of a person. usually it's a person who has been dishonored--left alone in a gutter cause they "messed up" and everything in me wants to know how that honor that was lost can be restored. how life can re-enter. how to change the way those who have been dishonored see.

let's dream

like we are kids and have no idea that some things shouldn't be possible

listening to Graham Cooke...some notes

"Joy is the atmosphere of heaven. It is the place of absolute love...of deepest, deepest affection."


"when the Father sees you, He doesn't see anything wrong with you."


"This is the Good News. Your old nature is dead. You are learning to have a new nature established."

"Your life is about discovering who you are. And the brilliant thing is, God is not trying to fix you. He is trying to resource you. he wants you to have everything that belongs to Jesus. And the Holy spirit's job as your helper is to disclose to you everything you need to know about Jesus and experience so that you can have a brilliant life...and He is here to teach you to stay...in this place between the Father and the Son, where first love is always going to be your truest experience of life."

"Your role is to be the beloved."


"it's not about what you deserve. it's about the fact that Jesus paid the price. he deserves you."

"It's not about behavior. It's about blood. You belong because of blood. Blood has been shed. And you don't get to say anything about relationship. God gets to say about relationship, and he says, 'You're mine'"

"you don't want to end up with a brilliant working relationship with God but a lousy friendship."

uncertain

I took a personality test once that told me I have a difficult time with uncertainty. Apparently I don't have a hard time taking risks as long as I am certain about an outcome. And as I write that, i realize that's not much of a risk at all. It's actually quite a safe way to live.

I'll jump out of a plane as long as I know I won't hit the ground at a billion miles per hour and die instantly. I'll fall in love as long as I know my heart won't be broken. I'll go to graduate school as long as I know i won't fail. I'll move to a random place as long as I know I won't end up homeless. I'll let people in to my heart as long as I know they won't walk away. I'll serve God as long as I know He won't disappoint.

I read that and I think "coward". Amazingly I think God calls me by a different name and gives me a different description. He sees someone who is growing in faith--who wants to be brave and not safe--who wants to trust Him with everything. And I think to that He says "beloved" and then proceeds to say, "you don't need to be afraid. I'm here. Forever."

Forever. That's the part that makes me come undone. That's the part that challenges my fear of the uncertain and the unknown.

A lot is uncertain and unknown right now. Where I'll live after graduation. How I'll pay off my loans. How I'll get established in life. If I should really make "getting established" a goal in life. Should I adopt the hippie lifestyle? I mean, I'm down with growing my own food and making my own clothes. Sounds awesome. But how do I know that I'm really following God?

Questions plague me. Different scenarios and outcomes to those scenarios sometimes try to steal my sleep.

But I'm growing. I'm trusting. I'm embracing the fact that this life is full of uncertain elements. And God is there in the midst of it all, teaching me how to fly.

Time Is Closing In

Approaching the 6 weeks left point.

Kinda crazy.

List for after graduation:

Learn to play an instrument
Go backpacking
Move somewhere that creates an epic adventure story
Make new random friends in random places
Pay off student loans


...more to come.

Psalm 18:6

Frederick Buechner

"Grace is something you can never get but only be given. There's no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or earn good looks or bring about your own birth.
A good sleep is grace and so are good dreams. Most tears are grace. The smell of rain is grace. Somebody loving you is grace. Loving somebody is grace. Have you ever tried to love somebody?
A crucial eccentricity of the Christian faith is the assertion that people are saved by grace. There's nothing you have to do. There's nothing you have to do. There's nothing you have to do.
The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you. Here is teh world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It's for you I created the universe. I love you.
There's only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you'll reach out and take it.
Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too."

whether you come or not...

I'm following Him

Shalom

-Peace
-Wholenesss
-Completeness

I want to understand this word.

future:

i wanna be wild eyed and radical.

not safe.

"he who would come after Me, let him take up his cross..."

His Greatness

The other night I took a drive out to the ocean to visit a friend and look at the stars. As she and I stood there just staring up into the huge sky and out at the seemingly unending mass of water, I realized just how small I felt.

It was the best feeling I've had in a long time.

It was not the smallness that comes from someone disgracing and putting you down. It was the smallness that comes when you realize Someone is looking our for you--and that there is a Captain who is greater than every storm that hits our lives.

When I start seeing this world as my home my compass gets messed up. I become disoriented. I get the map flipped upside down and spattered with the tears of regret and heartache. I get confused. This journey that is supposed to be full and brimming over with life and adventure feels less significant and more like survival.

But when I remember again that this place is not home--that I am a pilgrim whose Father is directing my steps--True North becomes my navigation point once again. Things come back into alignment.

I like alignment. I like simply trusting Abba. Cause I have no idea where I"m going, but He knows.

"Neither fondness for my son nor reverence for my aged sire nor the due love which ought to have gladdened Penelope could conquer in me the ardour which I had to become experienced in the world and in human vice and worth. I put out into the deep open sea with but one ship and with that small company which had not deserted me.... I and my companions were old and tardy when we came to that narrow pass where Hercules assigned his landmarks. 'O brothers,' I said, 'who through a hundred thousand dangers have reached the West deny not to this the brief vigil of your senses that remain, experience of the unpeopled world beyond the sun. Consider your origin, ye were not formed to live like Brutes but to follow virtue and knowledge.... Night already saw the other pole with all its stars and ours so low that it rose not from the ocean floor'"

('Inferno', xxvi., 94-126).

Inspired by a friend to try to be like Brian Andreas. haha.

"One day that little switch in her mind that heard what everyone else thought about her turned off. From that point on she did a lot of amazing things without even knowing anyone was watching."

Why is everyone hungry for more? "More, more," they say."More, more." I have God's more-than-enough, More joy in one ordinary day Than they get in all their shopping sprees. At day's end I'm ready for sound sleep, For you, God, have put my life back together.

Psalm 4:6-8 The Message

Amen.

Thomas Merton

"We drove into town with Senator Dawson, a neighbor of the monastery, and all the while I wondered how I would react at meeting once again face to face, the wicked world. I met the world and I found it no longer so wicked after all. Perhaps the things I had resented about the world when I left it were defects of my own that I had projected upon it. Now, on the contrary, I found that everything stirred me with a deep and mute sense of compassion. Perhaps some of the people we saw going about the streets were hard and tough...but I did not stop to observe it because I seemed to have lost an eye for the merely exterior detail and to have discovered, instead, a deep sense of respect and love and pity for the souls that such details never fully reveal. I went through the city, realizing for the first time in my life how good are all the people in the world an dhow much value they have in sight of God." [from The Sign of Jonas]

"He goes because he must, as galahad went towards the grail: knowing that for those who can live it, this alone is life."
-Evelyn Underhill

Maybe I Love Her Cause She's Irish...

THE BLACK LACE FAN MY MOTHER GAVE ME

It was the first gift he ever gave her,
buying it for five five francs in the Galeries
in pre-war Paris. It was stifling.
A starless drought made the nights stormy.

They stayed in the city for the summer.
The met in cafes. She was always early.
He was late. That evening he was later.
They wrapped the fan. He looked at his watch.

She looked down the Boulevard des Capucines.
She ordered more coffee. She stood up.
The streets were emptying. The heat was killing.
She thought the distance smelled of rain and lightning.

These are wild roses, appliqued on silk by hand,
darkly picked, stitched boldly, quickly.
The rest is tortoiseshell and has the reticent
clear patience of its element. It is

a worn-out, underwater bullion and it keeps,
even now, an inference of its violation.
The lace is overcast as if the weather
it opened for and offset had entered it.

The past is an empty cafe terrace.
An airless dusk before thunder. A man running.
And no way to know what happened then—
none at all—unless ,of course, you improvise:

The blackbird on this first sultry morning,
in summer, finding buds, worms, fruit,
feels the heat. Suddenly she puts out her wing—
the whole, full, flirtatious span of it.

-Eavan Boland

One of the Most Profound Things I've Read in a Long Time

Elisabeth Langgässer:

Fruhling 1946

So you return
My sweet Anemone –
All brilliant stamen, calyx, crown –
Making it worth the devastation,
Like Nausicaa?

Windblown and bowing –
Wave and spray and light –
What whirling joy at last
Has lifted up this weight
From shoulders bent with dust?

Now I arise
Out of the toad’s domain –
Pluto’s reddish glare still under my eyelids –
And the hideous pipe of the guide to the dead
Still in my ears.

I have seen the iron gleam
In the Gorgon’s eye.
I have heard the hiss, the whisper,
The rumor that she would kill me:
It was a lie.

Anemone, my daughter,
Let me kiss your face: it is
Unmirrored by the waters
Of Lethe or the Styx.
And innocent of no or not.

And see, you are alive
And here – there’s no deception –
And quiet in the way you touch my heart
Yet do not rake its fires –
My child, my Nausicaa!


(On reunion with the author’s daughter,
released from a concentration camp)