QUITE a bit after midnight, and Wednesday morning creeps across the pages of my textbooks and ink-drenched scrawlings and dares me to still see the words… I tried to crash out, but I miss you, and needed to unwind briefly.. and also needed to try to connect with you for a moment, faraway people that comfort my heart.
BIG, difficult tests start tomorrow (today?)... There's so much I want to tell you (and almost all of it is the emotional and spiritual side of what currently only looks like an academic statement)...Little universes, small vortexes have shifted in these days and I am w e a r y but have had such a joyful heart today... The last few hours contained infinite amounts of information-scrunching into my brain tonight though, as we studied and studied for Part 1 of our two-day Syntax and Morphology final exam.. I leave in a week and a few hours from now! And before that comes three quizzes, five tests and two projects. Please pray!
I will work out the "so much to tell you" next time, but know that I LOVE you, sister and brother, cousins and parents and friends of my heart. Wish that typing that didn't feel so inadequate, and praying that each you know that I mean it.
With love and hopes for rest,
moni
Posted on 29 July 2009 at 1:50 AM Comments (0)
Showing posts with label missing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label missing. Show all posts
07 May, 2010
October 6, 2008 - Compost piles, goose flesh, and wanting
Putzing about and listening to William Fitzsimmons…somber, almost painfully candid singer/songwriter, and there is a lingering feeling of something that I can’t put my finger on..
And that seems to happen a lot lately… I find that I undulate between 1) grappling with not being conscious enough of what I feel and 2) feeling everything, but differently than I used to. I find that lately little things wreck me,.. that I can be sitting in a coffee shop catching up on my friend’s blog, and tears just drip out for things I’m reading, I brush past cloth that was given to me in a country I love deeply or I drive and listen to something that simply raises bumps all over the surface of my skin…makes them ripple out of nothing—ex-ni-he-lo—like they were always there… I’m not used to responses being so visceral, so wordless, unnamable…
I’ve been moving, and something about packing one place to turn it into another… undoing, deconstructing one era to build a new one; and maybe that’s a dramatic way of putting it, but somehow this time I don’t think it is. I was pulling apart a lovely apartment, a hobbit-home abode, ridiculous arched walls, where the bedroom was the living room was the foyer, and where the kitchen was the closet was the bathroom :), and everything I’d bought was designed to contain something else. Years of me bloomed there and some of me retracted there, and then there was the knowing that it was time to go. And now as I have been unpacking, I find I’m pulling out remnants and pieces of everything, and I am filled with nostalgia for things that are larger than me and that I may not have experienced yet.
One of my new roommates and I were talking this afternoon, and she mentioned the Creation… how first, for several days of the-seven-day-beginning-of-everything, God separated things: earth from water, darkness from light, one kind of expanse from another—stretching long and ruddy—bursting out blackness that couldn’t know itself yet. And then he filled it. Birds, trees, men, LIFE for the pulled matter-from-matter. But after. After separation, after movement. Then filling with all the things that are supposed to be there, in that place, then.
May it be so.
Posted on 6 October 2008 at 12:05 AM Comments (0)
July 31, 2008 -- A [long overdue] monica update
31 July 2008
A [long overdue] monica update
Dearhearts, friends and family~
So… I know I’m off the appropriate time for “Christmas and what-I’m-doing-now letters” by about 7 months (or I’m 4 months early! Depending on how you look at it :), but this summer I found myself at my first huge pause in a very long time, and waves of love and missing people hit me as I finished something that felt difficult to me, and I found the largest emotion in me was an ache to reach out and say hello, and ask for prayer, and re-open my side of all these relationships that I haven’t poured into as I’d like to by default… Please know that I am sorry for my lack of communication, and that you have been thought of much in this lapsed time~ I began trying to write all of you in a little house on the Carolina shore… Erik and Mom and Dad were all able to take off work, and we escaped for a whole week, which has never happened, as far back as I can remember. It was beautiful to watch everyone decompress; some of the complexity of the last few years for my family sloughing off, puddling somewhere gracious. I cannot describe how great and poignant it was to have “guitar under the stars time” with my brother, and to have the time to read books just for me, while bathed in sunlight! Right before we left (vacation was in June), I received word that I am now, after two years of teaching High School, finally a “real” teacher :). The last time I wrote to some of you was after Berry and right before Ghana (oh, heart!)… So much has happened since, but I returned to Georgia after Africa and took an office job in the name of getting rid of my school debt so that returning to the mission field could come sooner. God’s plans for the time being were different for me though, and a challenge to my heart. Instead, through some bizarre orchestrations, I fell head-first into teaching English/Literature, mostly in the Special Ed. environment, at my old high school (!) and taking evening classes to get my teaching and Special Ed. certificates. The program allowed me to work in the capacity of a true teacher for two years with the understanding that I would complete all the classes and state tests by the end, and turn in a culminating “digital portfolio” with all kinds of proof that at the end of that, they could trust that I knew what I was doing. Oh the stories I could tell you! The education system here has been such an odd training ground, and these two years have run the gamut from kamikaze days of driving after 7-hours of teaching to my 5-hour certification class (3 days a week!), to teaching a literacy class for a group of 15-19 year olds that were identified as unable to read or write above a 3rd grade level… It was more than I could have been prepared for, but also more than I expected. And now I find the beginning of my third year is just about to begin. It’s funny how much excitement and how much reticence can exist together! In all this time I still find how true it is that a “hope deferred makes the heart grow sick” (“…but when the desire comes, it is a tree of life” Proverbs 13:12)! and though it has been an accomplishment, my longings are as they were, and I feel as convinced of my call to full-time missions as I was before. I do not know how God’s going to use what I’ve learned this way, but I find that in the “extra time” that I have this school year (since I won’t be taking classes for myself), I want to commit to plead for His vision and for guidance for all the parts of my heart finding their way out of ‘sickness’. Please, as part of myself, pray for clarity as I embark on this next year of teaching: that God would direct my use of time, my desire to proactively get out of debt, and my continued questions about and longings for training in Linguistics and Bible Exegesis… And now you have reached the end of my run-on sentences, as this may be the best I can do to summarize where I’ve been all this time. Know that I love you, and again, that I’m sorry for my tendency to get splotchy about staying in touch. There’s so much more I could say; so many more important chapters have been folded inside these few years for me, and so much I have learned about love and heartache, but I know this is long enough. I would love to hear from each of you, and to know what’s been going on in your lives. Truly. With all my heart, Monica
Posted on 31 July 2008 at 2:21 AM Comments (0)
A [long overdue] monica update
Dearhearts, friends and family~
So… I know I’m off the appropriate time for “Christmas and what-I’m-doing-now letters” by about 7 months (or I’m 4 months early! Depending on how you look at it :), but this summer I found myself at my first huge pause in a very long time, and waves of love and missing people hit me as I finished something that felt difficult to me, and I found the largest emotion in me was an ache to reach out and say hello, and ask for prayer, and re-open my side of all these relationships that I haven’t poured into as I’d like to by default… Please know that I am sorry for my lack of communication, and that you have been thought of much in this lapsed time~ I began trying to write all of you in a little house on the Carolina shore… Erik and Mom and Dad were all able to take off work, and we escaped for a whole week, which has never happened, as far back as I can remember. It was beautiful to watch everyone decompress; some of the complexity of the last few years for my family sloughing off, puddling somewhere gracious. I cannot describe how great and poignant it was to have “guitar under the stars time” with my brother, and to have the time to read books just for me, while bathed in sunlight! Right before we left (vacation was in June), I received word that I am now, after two years of teaching High School, finally a “real” teacher :). The last time I wrote to some of you was after Berry and right before Ghana (oh, heart!)… So much has happened since, but I returned to Georgia after Africa and took an office job in the name of getting rid of my school debt so that returning to the mission field could come sooner. God’s plans for the time being were different for me though, and a challenge to my heart. Instead, through some bizarre orchestrations, I fell head-first into teaching English/Literature, mostly in the Special Ed. environment, at my old high school (!) and taking evening classes to get my teaching and Special Ed. certificates. The program allowed me to work in the capacity of a true teacher for two years with the understanding that I would complete all the classes and state tests by the end, and turn in a culminating “digital portfolio” with all kinds of proof that at the end of that, they could trust that I knew what I was doing. Oh the stories I could tell you! The education system here has been such an odd training ground, and these two years have run the gamut from kamikaze days of driving after 7-hours of teaching to my 5-hour certification class (3 days a week!), to teaching a literacy class for a group of 15-19 year olds that were identified as unable to read or write above a 3rd grade level… It was more than I could have been prepared for, but also more than I expected. And now I find the beginning of my third year is just about to begin. It’s funny how much excitement and how much reticence can exist together! In all this time I still find how true it is that a “hope deferred makes the heart grow sick” (“…but when the desire comes, it is a tree of life” Proverbs 13:12)! and though it has been an accomplishment, my longings are as they were, and I feel as convinced of my call to full-time missions as I was before. I do not know how God’s going to use what I’ve learned this way, but I find that in the “extra time” that I have this school year (since I won’t be taking classes for myself), I want to commit to plead for His vision and for guidance for all the parts of my heart finding their way out of ‘sickness’. Please, as part of myself, pray for clarity as I embark on this next year of teaching: that God would direct my use of time, my desire to proactively get out of debt, and my continued questions about and longings for training in Linguistics and Bible Exegesis… And now you have reached the end of my run-on sentences, as this may be the best I can do to summarize where I’ve been all this time. Know that I love you, and again, that I’m sorry for my tendency to get splotchy about staying in touch. There’s so much more I could say; so many more important chapters have been folded inside these few years for me, and so much I have learned about love and heartache, but I know this is long enough. I would love to hear from each of you, and to know what’s been going on in your lives. Truly. With all my heart, Monica
Posted on 31 July 2008 at 2:21 AM Comments (0)
Labels:
Berry College,
debt,
exegesis,
family,
Ghana,
heart,
hope,
missing,
movement,
Proverbs 13:12,
sickness,
teaching,
tree,
water
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