A thirty-day "diet" of passion~

Passion and Calling are interesting, hungry beasts, and nothing wakes them like this particular day, each year. Where December 31st comes gliding into our psyches on the beautiful and holy winter exhale of Christmas, New Year's Day shoves at our hearts with purpose, rousing it with a newfound umph!

We long to start well, and January reminds us that the slate is clean, that Jesus has bannered us with a firm it is finished, and we get to wear His name instead of our own murky deeds, identity, and effort. And I think the Lord loves this time of year too… The heft of symbols, and all that advent means burns my heart up each year--learning to wait on and with my Abba--and then to have it followed by the freshness of a new chance to learn to follow Him well.

One of the small ways I want to do that this year is to intentionally feed on what excites the Lord. I find those things in His word, in His creation (us, and nature) and the images of His creativity that come out through us (music, art, poetry..). But I also find it in the passions He's placed inside of me and others---all images of the passions contained in His own heart, the one pure heart. This month, I feel Him calling me to celebrate that, and to nestle into Him by learning more about what brings Him joy, what He's up to around the world and specifically in Bible translation, and what He longs for us to do about it!

So for 30 days, I will process and post what I find here, and I hope you'll join me in my pursuit and celebration!

2012 - In Memoriam

Just a handful, not even a full-fingered hand, of posts punctuated 2012, and yet it has been one of the most remarkable of my life... The last few hours of 2012 tip-toed out last night, but I was left with gratitude as I listened to the patter. I stand baffled at the sheer speed of this last year, but more by the things I don't know how to explain about it.

A year ago in December, God set a tumble of miraculous movement in motion (explained HERE, if you missed it), and in that post I mentioned the impression I had that 2012's name for me was The Year of the Lord's Favor. This might have sounded pretentious in so many ways, but my goodness this past year spilled over with kindness and generosity that I have earned in no way. Over and over and over again, there has been a constant stream of things my soul couldn't have thought to ask for, and a joy-rush towards the work God formed me for. Where pain and waiting were my strong, patient teachers for the last few, warmth and unmerited awesomeness have guided this year. And so, though it is less conventional than listing things at Thanksgiving time, here is my heart's attempt—a typed register of a few things that should not stay unsaid, an account of goodness that must be spoken.

I am thankful:

• For my parents and siblings!—My parents and my sister and brother-in-law have a Masters in sacrifice with a Concentration in making you feel loved instead of needy. They have all made room in their homes for me, as we're all adjusting to the nearness of my move to Papua New Guinea (12 months!), and it has had such an impact on me.  Beyond this, I am so very blessed by the friendship of my siblings... how all three of them are truthful mirrors, verbal, kind, honest, and playful. They chip the edges off my too-serious, and comfort me in my too-sensitive. I am surrounded by love, and have never felt the weight of it as keenly as I do now that there is a timeline until I'm on the other side of the world for a few years.
• For getting to use my passport this year! I was blessed to spend time globe-trotting with Krissy and Chris, to hop into Canadian life for three months, and to take a train down the West Coast when I left Canada to spend time with dearones in San Francisco! 

• For a church family I am always blessed to be near, where there are artists that give of themselves, where worship is born of what God is doing among these people, where community is valued above 'having everything figured out', and where I'm challenged 

• For the many new babies in my life this year, and friends that welcome me into Auntishness with their children!!!
• For getting to go to Wycliffe's headquarters last February, and again in October for training. Both of these trips shifted and impacted huge decisions, and were such a submersion tank of prayer, preparation, and counsel

  

• For time this summer (while I was at school in Vancouver) with my uncle that lives there. We got to know each other as adults now, and I am moved by his tender heart and funny stories
• For all the students, friends, and soon-to-be-colleagues that I spent the whole summer with at CanIL! It was an incredible experience, to be surrounded by people that are passionate about Linguistics, Christ, and the need for Bible Translation, (not to mention the part where British Columbia took my breath away!) Lord willing, I will see them again in 2013 for one more class~

• For Allison and the Thursday Girls—You are friends of the highest caliber, and I will always, always, always be grateful for these years in Alli's dining room, one night a week, unmasking the world, laughing, baring our hearts, and eating delectables. 
• For a job that has been more than a job and people that have been more than co-workers

• For the interest, care and concern that I have been shown as I step into this role of missionary.. for the encouragement and prayer warriors in my life, and the prayer and financial team that is beginning to form.
• For good health(!!)--I have been in a pretty steady remission from Ulcerative Colitis for more than 2 years, and despite symptoms being a little rockier during grad. school this summer, I have been allowed to begin lowering doses of maintenance meds. This was something I dreamed of getting to do before heading to PNG next year!
  
  And most impactful to me,

• the overwhelming grace that I have been treated with this year. In so many ways, I have had nothing to offer. In the past, desert places were utilized to plant me firmly in the understanding that all I have sometimes is the will to choose obedience——when sickness comes, when hardship shakes what our culture tells us we're entitled to, all we have are the ways we respond, and this can bring God glory even when we have or are nothing else. But being stripped down in this way (in strength, health, time, finances), and needing to depend on others, has also at times left me feeling utterly indebted to kindnesses I can never repay (or has made me respond as an awkward recipient). But God is turning this on its head for me—reminding me that it's all His, and that He will do what He wants with it, that He delights to surprise us, and that His methods of getting us to where He wants us (and ultimately, of redeeming  e v e r y t h i n g) are unpredictable, joyous, and almost always communal and relational. He has been revealing pride for what it really is in me, and showing me that this will need to go; that His plan has always been about interdependence and goodness that we can't earn.
  This grace and generosity took many forms this year, (a spontaneously provided airplane ticket to visit my potential school last January, a vacation with 2 of my siblings gifted to me with a loving desire to spend time together in the face of us finding out I have 1 year left before moving to Papua New Guinea, an extension on a paper that came with so much more encouragement and edification than I could have guessed, dear friends providing the funds for Wycliffe's Equip Training and others paying the full conclusion of school loans that were keeping me from the mission field).. and this has sprung fertile humility. I have been shown so much faith by others in what God has been working out in me, and that faith and the active support of it moves my heart beyond words that I will ever have access to.

My brothers and sister and I! - Christmas 2012

The glistening new one

There was a day last year (early 2009) when I drove myself up to Berry for a visit. It was a glorious, sunny afternoon of traipsing all over campus… I chased deer, I careened down Stretch Road with abandon and elation in the crisp newly-spring weather, I stomped leaf-piles and inhaled Ford air, pool reflections, and picture-taking…
As the day wore on though, the clouds dripped down like watercolor gray running oddly over everything bright, and the sky began to tilt its melancholy chin. I was visiting with the new spring colts by this time, and suddenly heard sirens in the distance calling all of the wide expanse to attention. Ducks from around the pond had been scattering for a while, and I noticed that the last few photos I’d taken at the small waterfall had bleeding-droplet designs and an odd whirling effect to them..

By the time I’d run down the hill and back to my car, wild raindrops were the urgent metronome (metroGnome? :)), and I jumped into my front seat, retracing the miles of Stretch to their drumming.

I just made it off campus when the hail started.

First it was minute: small pin-pricks at the windshield as I giggled. Slowly it picked up speed and force: pebble-like wads flung like a bridge-troll’s trick.
I didn’t make it a whole two miles before the golf-ball sized ones came crashing down, and the giggles were completely gone by the time the pieces were as large as a small fist..
I remember finding a small Rome gas station, the only covering for miles, as the tears started down my cheeks. It was one of those small-town now-closed stations, so the old tanks stretched up into poles that only had a “roof” of about 4 feet across.. When I pulled in, I could see I was the third car trying to find succor in the thin covering.

I edged as close to the other cars as all of us could bear, and turned the Sentra off as it rocked under the weight of the blows. I had never sat with fear in the midst of nature, other than the time my college home was hit with lightning (this is a tale for another time though), but I couldn’t seem to help scrunching my eyes up each time that metallic crash would ripple through the frame of the car. I found myself balled up in the center of the car, envisioning the glass splaying sideways in jagged lines, and when I opened my eyes I saw a little girl in the car next to me, sitting in the very same position.. little arms wrapped around her knees that were pulled up to her chest, peering through her squinty eyes and jerking in little jumps each time the huge ice balls hit.

In a less dramatic way, this is what 2010 was like.

Like a sentence about sickness, punctuated with hopes holding their breath—cheeks full of air and lungs wondering when they’ll get some, dizzied by the lack.
Being sick again started in the fall of 2009… I got back from that most incredible semester of Linguistics classes and rolled right into my new assignment of teaching elementary school. But as a high school lit. teacher for going-on-four years, I s t r u g g l e d to figure out how to teach an all-in-one-classroom group of third, fourth, and fifth graders that desperately needed a literacy specialist. I was handed three stacks of books and told “you’ll do fine, they’re behind anyway”. And I tried, with every fiber in me, I stayed up nights and “did my homework”. I learned all the new terminology for third-grade math and studied-up on literacy strategies. I re-taught myself 5th grade social studies and lesson-planned for 7-preps daily, but within three weeks of the new school year I was very sick with an Ulcerative Colitis flare-up for the first time in years. Severe sickness, bleeding and weight-dropping, lasted the entire year, and for only the second or third time in my life I tasted the sad flavor of relinquishing something that feels like a failure even when you’ve given it your all.

Family was the best part of this year, and I was blessed with wave after crashing wave of support from my parents, sister, and brothers. They cut through the isolating nature of the ache of chronic illness, and loved on me.
But the year saw difficulties for them too, as my mother’s father became very ill and she left for Brazil (getting held there for a while because of issues with her papers!), and we had a few scares with her health too in these last few months.
I realized a few weeks ago that my emotions were brimming over with the most recent event: our church dealt with the weight of a young friend’s death. She was 28. We all gathered, some that we hadn’t seen in so long, to celebrate a life difficultly lived, boisterously hopeful and sorrowful at the same time, and it was utterly overwhelming.

Fist-like ice-balls on a windshield, ice in our stomachs and hope firmly in our cheeks, though our lungs felt deprived.

This long, meandery post is not about the details of sickness or sorrow however; nor the deeply beautiful lessons learned inside of God’s mercy-plan of suffering. It is instead about the second part of one of my favorite verses.
Proverbs 13:12 says, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.”
And so hope is a heavy seed. Whatever aches and hiccups-of-path, whatever struggle and revelation, whatever necessary dependence, whatever loneliness and waiting, whatever fog-filled hunger for what you feel is coming but is not yet, it is all just inside the comma in that verse. The tree afterwards is already growing.

I bid 2010 Adieu with a strange mixture of feelings tonight, because so much has occurred—so much that hasn’t even been broached in these paragraphs. So much has been fashioned in me that I don’t even know how to explain yet, and so much rambunctious, stubborn good and needling bad has passed this way. But TRUST, the likes of which I hadn’t known before has lit up, and now comes a new year…

With love, fiery hope, pungent prayer, and a glad heart, I usher this one in quietly with you. And grin at the glistening new one~