A few little thoughts around midterms

There is a Jiminy Cricket that works in the Homework Department of my psyche that is maybe not so pleased with me right now, but I have not taken a moment to come and breathe here in just over FIVE weeks, so he will have to whimper on tonight… 

Dearones, I’m so sorry! Weeks have tugged at small fibers so that every mental and emotional facet I have are all focused on school; but you all, your faces and your voices and your support tug back without you even knowing you’re doing it. I MISS YOU, am bolstered by you, and am lonely for how well I’m known by you, but it's a delight to be here, and I'm learning so much!

These last few weeks have been a roller coaster—I’ve been trying to juggle the course load here (Phonological Analysis, Sociolinguistic Survey, and Language and Society) with Skype-interviews and meetings with my Wycliffe Personnel Administrator; and then stuffed somewhere in between those major players have been gorgeous little bursts of either time outside to process my whirwind-head, or time with my uncle or other students… 

Last week was a crux of extremes: it began with the most exquisite beauty (our group went for a day of hiking and night of camping a few hours north to the most beautiful spot!), but then we all returned to midterm exams, awaiting projects, 12-page papers, and all the while the need to think and pray through the large decisions that are on the horizon. I found myself bucking at feeling inadequate—my brain wriggling in the one class that stretches it against its regular constructs of thinking (to the point of embarrassing tears in front of my professor!)—and I observed my initial frustration (two weeks ago?) when my history with health issues was discussed as a factor for Wycliffe in where I will be assigned… I am reminded that no matter how many seasons my faithful Christ walks me through that pull back my expectations and identity to a gloriously content and worshiping place, I am still not comfortable being a vessel filled with the right kind of emptiness sometimes.

If I’m completely honest, I gravitate back to wanting to be defined by some sort of skill or ability or unique characteristic—to have “something to offer”—but always I’m returned to the place where weaknesses or past bouts of sickness are a defining factor, or my mind’s struggle with the data/structure side of this task before me overwhelms me and I feel defined by lack. But THIS is where He begins to move again, this is where he uses my disillusionment with myself to open my eyes again, to fill them with light, to show me that those specific weaknesses that He has allowed in me are exactly as they should be and that He has always woven good stories around weakness whose only acclaiming attribute is a steady, resounding “yes, Lord”.

Once again He has to whisper, hold loosely, with your hands wide open… don’t choke it; your clasped, tiny fingers are ineffectual anyway, but you’re going to want Me to be free to move these things over and around you, across your flattened, receptive palms, little one, so trust Me and stride forward, delighted.

Arrival in Vancouver!

Light spills out of the top of a paper lantern before me, and the sun has just fully left the sky dark, although it’s nearly 10pm.. This summer British Columbia sky has caught me off guard every night this week, but I’m enjoying its temperamental rain-cloud tantrums and layered-cloud blue bliss!

How strange to begin the week on one coast and end it on another! The last few weeks have gone so quickly, let alone the last few days! Packing and precious people filled them—last-grabbed hugs, words, clutched-at hands and moments. Small bits of weighty prayers I tucked away from off your lips. Laughter that I've bottled to smile about for the next three months until I see your faces again. 

I flew here on Tuesday… Atlanta to Phoenix was a sleepy blur—eight a.m. across time backwards, arriving in Phoenix only minutes after I’d left, though I’d flown for hours. Phoenix to Vancouver arched and skimmed over carved, crooked grins of pink and brown, jaggy curves of canyon-teases kissed with blue haze. And so here I am!

It's been a lovely few days with my uncle, who lives about 30 minutes north of CanIL, the school I will be attending. His kindness has made me at home, and his company has made me thankful. It's been a joy to cook with him and run errands—to learn each other as adults and to revel in story-telling! Early this morning I drove him to the airport, as he’s a tour guide and will be in and out of this area all summer…

I took today to skype with GA-family :), and to anchor my head and heart a bit.
I got to jog a long, incredible stretch of New West Minster, too, down the Fraser River, and the sky burst down a chilly downpour as I pounded out glad-feet in a new town..

For now sleep~ And tomorrow I will drive down and continue this week of transitions, as I move into the dorms on campus for the summer!

Repairing the ruin in the year of favor

I finally know “what this year is to be called”…
A beautiful friend of mine has been whispering for months, “ask God what this year is about for you… He will give you a word to focus it in, a name to call it. He wants to narrow in and teach you, show you something specific.”

Already, just the 2^nd month in, and this has been an incredible year of blessing, of vision being sharpened and light spilling all over it. I feel God undergirding it—undergirding me—with Isaiah 61, which my ESV titles “The Year of the Lord’s Favor”… and so it is.

I want to come in the next few days and fill you in on a whole bunch of monumental boulder-movings that have occurred in the last few weeks for me, but in case you read this blog and you aren’t at my church where this was already circulated, I wanted to post this initial update and then go from there:


Notes from a Glad Ledge

I can almost feel my toes curling tight over the edge of the precipice; a jumpy anticipation poised in my spirit’s heels, it’s tummy full of butterflies, and elation burst-fisting its way out of the fortress of waiting I’ve lived in for years… 

I wish I could show you the million little moments that have led to this cliff, but this is the story of some of them, so that you will understand the beauty behind it when you see me hurtle off its height—

Ten years ago I “accidentally” took a Linguistics class.
God had begun nipping and tugging at small fibers of my heart, telling me I wasn’t for this place and that he was fashioning my compassion and preparing it to pour out into other cultures all the days of the rest of my life. As I went through college I felt the conflict of “wisdom” to choose studies that would lead to a job, and a job that would be a livelihood, but as I kept trying to choose ways to do this, God would wreck my heart with images of orphans, cultures I’d learn of that were flanked by oppression, and blatant demonstrations of the fact that He’d wired me to find no joy in things but to hunger to reach into people’s stories and do life with them.

At the same time that He slowly revealed this burning call to missions, I stumbled into this most-odd class that had its students playing scrabble with the International Phonetic Alphabet and learning concepts about how languages all over the world work. Almost every student with me found it to be the most boring, absurd class they’d ever taken, but I was lit up and intrigued! Over the course of the next year, I began looking into ways to combine these passions, which eventually led me to Bible Translation… As I started to research how God could use something like linguistics on the mission field, I found out that there are still about 340 million people that have no portion of the Bible accessible to them in their mother tongue—that’s more than 2,000 possible languages left.

I found this utterly overwhelming.

I have since witnessed deep caverns of darkness in people’s lives, footholds, sorrows, staggering lack where God’s heart longs to fill in and heal—but to imagine these millions of people with no Living Word, with no access to the Words, Spirit, and Breath that swoop in to redeem all brokenness—this felt like too much. I knew that whatever manner of loneliness I have ever felt in this life, I have always had a book of shelter—Words that save me, have loved me, have torn me out of sorrow and into a Kingdom that seeks to rescue. But so many don’t have it. This knowledge licked at all the tugged fibers like whipping flames, and I felt God’s purpose in me solidify: you are to fight for Me this way.

So I set to it—I took a trip to Ghana in ’04 with Wycliffe Bible Translators, and spent a summer exploring how one approaches the idea of translating God’s Word and how many different roles there are in that process. I met the most incredible missionaries, witnessed moonlight literacy meetings in the mountain village of Gekrong, and watched God expand my heart and shatter my worldview. In the weeks that I spent observing the work and seeking God’s voice on these new hopes, Christ spoke such confirmation and assurance into my being that I came home fiercely excited. I thought that I would just quickly work off my undergrad school loans and then launch into the 1-2 years of Linguistic training I would need to be ready to head to the mission field—

Eight fascinating years have plodded past instead, though.
I look back on that time and the care God put into planting certainty into my heart and can’t help but laugh at how much He knew I’d need that! I tumbled into working several jobs, took certification classes and became a teacher, walked with my family through some heartbreaking crises, and wrestled through a long, sharp season of sickness. Journal after journal from the last few years were slowly filled with passionate out-cries, scribbled reminders of what God told me ‘on the mountain top’, and jotted down prophecies and prayers that I received from the Body and the people in my homegroups.

Each year I would ask and pray “is this the one?”, and always He would whisper that the Kingdom is here, and the Kingdom is coming—now/not yet, my love—You are already on the mission field, and every bit of now is the training. I, Myself, am cultivating in you what you will need for this task.

 As the years wore on, and especially inside the one of sickness, people began to suggest other goals, saying that I would need to stay where doctor’s were easily accessible, and that surely I would be happier accepting that circumstances were different now and that maybe I’d misunderstood God’s will. Medical bills were added onto the stack, and although the determined fire for what God had written on me wouldn’t wane, I shoved up my sleeves, understanding that it would be years more than the eight that have already passed before I would work the last of the debt down now.
Carefully, painstakingly, God ushered dependence into me, humility that has bent wide His vision for the impossible to be completed. Slowly I submitted my expectations and timeline and begged that God teach me to be where He has me well, and to trust that He would make it bullhorn-clear when it was time to move forward.

This past year, in August, the “Deeper into Community” series broke my heart again, and I found God stirring my waiting up with the “Your Calling Takes Us Deeper” sermon. In September, I sat in the sanctuary afterwards and shivered as I felt God whisper “it’s coming”, and then grabbed at my journal so I would keep that moment, writing it down as the physical goose-bumps dissolved back into normal skin.  In October God asked me to give up the sickened sorrow that I was carrying from my hope deferred, and November poked at my held-breath when we tumbled into speaking of Rescue each week and mingled our post-it notes together on the curved sanctuary wall—all our dreams stated beside one another, interconnected.

By the end of the year, I sent a long email to the Wycliffe recruiter that I’ve spoken with for years. I updated her on the debt again and explained that I was in another one of those weeks where my soul tingled and God was keeping me up at night with dreams—She sent a note back with a prayer and signed off with “LORD MOVE THE BLOCKADE”. Three days later I got a phone call.

One of my dearest friends was on the other end of the line saying, “Monica, are you sitting? We have something to tell you.”

And this brings me back to that cliff that I mentioned—

Through the obedience and sheer generosity of other believers, God is moving the blockade. With a single swipe—out of my hands, more than I could ask for, more than I can swallow without fits of joyful laughter—God has suddenly led a couple to completely wipe out the last of my school debt!
In quick gusts of the last month, so many miracle-nudges have been set in motion, and now it looks like I may be moving this summer to one of the three training-program locations to get equipped for this mission.

So I dance on this brink with you, beside you, sweetly terrified, our whole souls thrumming to the shift God’s calling our Body of believers to—church planting, adoption, foster care, feeding the poor—His fingers, His ears, His arms brought to His waiting people, and also His mouth in their language to feed their hearts. And as we all hurtle off these peaks, I hear Him comforting me… every one of these cliffs is in the vast Land called Married (Isaiah 62); none of you are hurtling alone, and whatever distance is coming, for a long or short time, you belong to one another—I am making you into each others’ netting.

Advent

.

A year has clambered past
wrestle-trickling across the barren waiting floor.
I shift like time sand swiftly to and through
a decade of astonishing pause
Held-breath and suffering,
Dry eyes and puddle heart,
wracked flesh, soul on an alter
And we have sacrificed.
But small stubborn seeds pop heavy in time
Ripe with wild, precarious hope
hemmed in safely
Nestled where they grow,
Urging to not just wait well
but to want with conviction.
You uncurl my grip-white fists
so the delicate fingertips will feel
every   last   drop
the rush of everything as it spills over
Ample measures, long awaited, too much to hold.
Whirling dervishes of color
that pour down the aisles
rushing to light the candle—
in memory of a people longing for your arrival
in reverence for all current languishing
and your faithful cracking open of the darkness each time.
So you gently unearth them
small vials of light
Little moments—liquid, brilliant—moments of Emmanuel
that light the path for when we can’t see the star

.

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~

Mmm,.. So this song and video are beautiful and I wanted to share it, whether this is ever seen by anyone or not.

...And then, of course, there is the hot-coals part of my heart that is simmering and wants to update here so badly... to be able to write about this last year and where I am right now, but knows that this is a loaded, large task... So pray that I can, and know that I will try in the next bit of time to fill in some of the loveliness and turbulence of these anchored, frenzied, quiet months.

Until then, may this tidbit remind you that I love you, family and friends that still peek here~
with all my heart,
mon

Lord Knows

My thoughts hold their breath... they sit paralyzed by the change of season, like small objects caught in a tide change; spun on themselves, attempting valiant bravery but incapable of advancing until something calms down..

I came across this today though... Lord knows I have scribbled words, such words of hope to a husband I have not met yet, and oh how He knows the shattering ache some hopes feel after deferment. And it is not just this one hope on deferment, but 3 major ones that I've mentioned before... but this is the one nearest to my heart tonight, pressing in with the insistency of a vast bruise.

Her thoughts, almost all of them, are voice to mine tonight. And this heart sighs a sigh of deep relief that someone has said it for me at this moment... Oh please exist. Please..

Not this mind and not this heart..

After The Storm : by Mumford & Sons

And after the storm,
I run and run as the rains come
And I look up,
I look up, on my knees and out of luck,
I look up.

Night has always pushed up day
You must know life to see decay
But I won't rot, I won't rot
Not this mind and not this heart,
I won't rot.

And I took you by the hand
And we stood tall,
And remembered our own land,
What we lived for.

And there will come a time, you'll see, with no more tears.
And love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears.
Get over your hill and see what you find there,
With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair.

And now I cling to what I knew
I saw exactly what was true
But oh no more.
That's why I hold,
That's why I hold with all I have.
That's why I hold.

I will die alone and be left there.
Well I guess I'll just go home,
Oh God knows where.
Because death is just so full and man so small.
Well I'm scared of what's behind and what's before.

And there will come a time, you'll see, with no more tears.
And love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears.
Get over your hill and see what you find there,
With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair.

And there will come a time, you'll see, with no more tears.
And love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears.
Get over your hill and see what you find there,
With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair.

Monday morning haiku silliness

Staring at coffee
Thoughts of you and dark ripples
Waking from this dream
-------------------------------------------------

Two weeks and two days...
Change flies on wings and brings rest
What will I be next?
-------------------------------------------------

"Now I'm warm" she said
Buttoned up in my big coat,
Will she remember?
-------------------------------------------------

I'm sorry I failed
At teaching you third grade math
But I've loved you well

Updated funny things my students have said this year!

So here's to the things my 8-year-old students (and a few of the fifth graders too!) have said in the last few months that i HAVE remembered to write down.. Some of these made me halt class (in funny, disguised ways) just so I could walk to my desk for a post-it note and capture the words that made the day a little bit easier (aka, made me chortle :)). Enjoy!..


5-14-10
Fifth Grader’s written response—
Q: "What is the definition of 'reluctantly'?"
A: "Something that’s shaped like a reluctant"

Student: Ms. W, if I go to jail when I’m older will you help me get out?
Ms. W: Why would you go to jail?
Student: I don’t know but if Billy ends up going, I’ll probably end up there too.
Ms. W: Why would Billy go?
Student: For stealing fried chicken, of course! Duh :) You know that crazy-Billy loves fried chicken!
5-13-10
“Your sister has a ducky husband and he smells like chicken. And I know this because I’m awesome!”

“My pencil is a warrior. That’s why it has a hat”

“I’m going to make a lot of airplanes and sell them at recess to kids that don’t have a life”

“Aw… I farted in the hallway again- my bad bugs are acting up! Seriously”

3-24-10
[One of my little girls crawled under the table, sat Indian-style, and dropped her head to her hands]
Me [semi-under the table too]: "what are you doing?"
Little one: "I don’t know"
Me: "are you hiding?"
Little one: "yes, from the monster"
Me: [smiling] "am I the monster?" [nods her head and begins to smile]
Me: "what kind of monster?"
Little one: "the Math Monster"
Me: "what can I do to make it better?"
Little one: "I don’t know yet" [said in a deeeeply whimpery voice]
Me: "but you’ll come out soon and tell me..?"
Little one: [nods her head]
Me: "I love you. Take your time."
Little one: "ok,. I’m ready."

“No, smoking doesn’t make you ugly—that’s only with drugs. Drugs make you look gross and disgusting.. Like Michael Jackson. Drugs made Michael Jackson a girl!”

“Miss W, I think you should have a boyfriend, but I don’t think boys like teachers”

Student #1: “Oooh there’s a duck in this picture”
Ms. W: Is that the picture with a girl holding a duck?”
Student #1: yes!
Ms. W: Oh that’s my sister. She’s a duck.
Student #2: Did you say your sister’s a duck?
Ms. W: yes :)
Student #2: Your sister is a duck! That’s crazy :)

“Are you writing an email to a platypus that saw you in your underwear?!”

“This morning for breakfast, I ate a pooptart. Haha”

”I FORGOT TO TAKE MY PILL TODAY!! THEY SAY I’M HYPERACTIVE! HA HA! NO SERIOUSLY, WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?!”

“I love how my mom forgets stuff! Like she said the other day ‘Im never going to buy you anything else’ or ‘you’re not allowed to watch tv until Friday’ and then she totally forgets and I can’t do it!”

3rd grader #1: “Who’s Jesus. Oh! Jesus. Yeah I just forget who that is sometimes”
#2: “How can you forget Jesus?”
#3: “It happens. I do it too. Like when things are going really good and I’m having a lot of fun I stop thinking about him.”
#2: “yeah I guess sometimes I can even forget I have a family”

“Only my dad can carry a 200 lb. pumpkin, ‘cuz he’s like 73 years old!!”

“I feel so free in these pants!” (as he did a little butt-wiggle)

Fifth grade IEP student transition survey question: "what will you do in your free time after high school?" Student's response: "probably study for college tests and quizzes. that, or spend time making a museum entirely out of legos."

“I feel like I lost two years of my life!” –5th grader after a five-minute tornado drill (HUGE sigh of relief and air escaped the hallway when the announcement came on that it was done)

"monday is my march memesis!"

"I... I must have some bad bugs living in my stomach that are making me do it" -Student's somber explanation for creepy giggling during a test!

3rd Grader #1: "You're not a teacher. You're like a teacher-puppy"
3rd Grader #2: "Heehee...A teacher in a puppy-suit!"
3rd Grader #1: "A puppy in a teacher-suit!"

"Miss WonderTech, aren't you a teeeenager??"

January 11, 2010 - Hope Like Egrets

Now there is only stillness
This very day it is only calm, only gray and waiting.
Blue droplets gathering silver,
Dross transformed, and hoping

Straight lines like clavicles
That start off at the center—bold—
Have tapered off behind narrow sinews
Disappearing into the greater structure
Absolved and absorbed
And it is good.
That clarity waits to shoulder the curves—
The weight of everything not yet made straight:

Hiccupping impasses,
Whorled, woolly declarations,
Cloaked eyes and hurtling hearts—

All will bear down on this road
And not, not, not snap the fiber that came first.
It is in that grace that they exhale.


There was another day with a shallower stillness that came before.
The dam held back the flow of everything behind,
November crisped out of everything that lay ahead—
Like small gasps under small steps,
Fallow things snapped out the rhythm of vacuous deaths beneath my boots and the season

Then one white bird on thin, long legs.
Stark, cut curves poised over foam-scraped sand
Tall and sharp like elegant rejection
Beautiful like grief and steel.

Everything shudders to a halt.
Months of chaos and isolation stare back, drip off a beak; made still in rigid eyes
One white-draped spot in a haze of yellowed green-gray, and the world makes sudden sense as an egg.
Every bit of now is the groaning—
Unhatched but incubating hope, joy just beneath a shell.
Lean-lined life that looks beige, too delicate, until it breaks through and isn’t.
So much life held in with paper-thin birthing barricades
But it will be born. It will all be borne.
It is in that grace that we exhale.

And hope is a swirling thing that grows from one to many—
Letting go is like the steps that came after; braver from seeing the one bird, but prepared for it to be enough—
Despair and Peace will both hear you coming, and sometimes still waters can go either way
That lake met me with undulations—Soul-holes whistling with the static charge of wind where barbs had just been pulled out—my acceptance, my approach set the sky in a flipped-white blaze
Wings everywhere
Fifty birds swirled around us, twisty circles, swift oscillation
Green-gray lines swallowed entirely by ribboned white, now flapping, now dropping
Hope like egrets, folding; feathered origami blossoms in the trees
Small and white like elegant redemption
Beautiful like thorns and tears

It was like the first snow of winter, and it has caused the thaw.


Posted on 11 January 2010 at 11:27 PM Comments (1)

October 19, 2009 - whispers to the weary before rest

I tack these words as a reminder to myself. Not as an architect, laying the timber and boards that will insulate many, but as the pioneer that lays the logs for his own walls so that he will not grow cold and faint.

Tonight I read Chambers’ reminder: “You have no idea of where or how God is going to engineer your future circumstances, and no knowledge of what stress and strain is going to be placed on you either at home or abroad. And if you waste your time in over-activity, instead of being immersed in the great fundamental truths of God’s redemption, then you will snap when the stress and strain do come. But if this time of soaking before God is being spent in getting rooted and grounded in Him, which may appear to be impractical, then you will remain true to Him whatever happens.”

And here is the heart and shiver. Sometimes these circumstances are ones that thread us thin—wriggle under all our mental and spiritual armor to a place beneath it all…flesh and blood; not marring our armor in the least, but attacking the body beneath it, and making the armor seem far away from the now smaller frame.
My Armor, You have not changed—I am just blood and sticks, bones and candlewick—and You will hold it together. I depend on You; please don’t let me splinter. Make our feeble dependence fruitful~

Posted on 19 October 2009 at 11:03 PM Comments (0)

July 29, 2009 - Deep Breaths

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)

June 16, 2009 - Meandering thoughts before rest can come tonight...

Late—and I’m up sitting, thinking about trees… mind unwinding like gnarls rescinding arthritic grasps on green.

I like the ones up here—things blooming that send out wafts of cottony film, pu—lled out long over blades of grass, purple blossoms that sweet-prick noses on the way to class, and North Dakotan firs, stretching long peaks homeward, and I am stretching also; green to the touch, new fibers spindle-tangling upward, flopping forward, kneeling onward, standing still.

Today brought a moment to walk around the Coulee, and shin-grazing fronds led my eyes to a momma duck and her four ducklings escaping the thrum of my voice on the phone with a friend. Cords of fluid gleam dragged thin behind them, and with them, some of the air in my cheeks. It’s these moments that lend the firm, bendy, tree-calm to days wick-whipped from burning candles on both ends. These—and a few others, tethered to ridiculousness with new friends—Provisions for the pressure-cooker—hand-picked for our common propensities towards spontaneously combusting into silly accents and quick-deep conversations.

Gratitude consumes several minutes of every night lately, licking clean the bones of the day, leaving only the strong supports…


Posted on 16 June 2009 at 2:06 AM Comments (0)

June 10, 2009 - North Dakota Arrival and first days!

So it’s Wednesday afternoon, and I am coercing the part of me that longs for a nap just now, to make my finger-tips speak a little instead…it seemed a good compromise between not sleeping now and not doing homework yet :).

I sit on a twin-size bed in a white-washed dorm-room thinking of all of you—
Good days!—long, thick days of push-pulled consciousness and cognition. I am happy, but oh-so-tired, and miss you, but oh-so-fulfilled…

I wanted to come here and recount some of these first days, both for you and for myself… Saturday after I wrote you, I slept maybe an hour!—body would not sift down, like wiggle-nerves before Christmas. We all woke up at 4am and I was driven to the airport early… The flights were uneventful, other than a few air-pocket-hiccups and a quick plane switch in Denver. When I boarded the second plane, I peered down the aisles, reading the seat numbers and letters, and as I made eye-contact with the area and then the people sitting there, I realized that it was an 8 year old boy sitting across from his brothers, who—no joke—checked me out, exchanged glances with his brothers, and then asked one of them for a piece of gum in a loud, braggy voice :)—Really funny and exaggerated from an 8 year old! The whole rest of that ride was spent with him asking me how much time had passed—about every 10 minutes—while he filled me in on what Grand Forks was like, and how there are “really great bike trails at my real dad’s house”~

We touched down in North Dakota early, and I instantly grabbed some food and a coffee, as my cute conversations and incessant “are-we-there-yet?-trills” didn’t allow me to catch up yet on sleep. I waited then for Bethany, another SIL-UND student that would be flying into Fargo, as we were going to rent a car and drive the last hour from Fargo to Grand Forks. She’s wonderful!—and she was so even-keel for just having met me…which came SO in handy when half an hour into our drive, I saw red lights and a cop pull out behind me! Apparently ND is MUCH more stringent on speed limits :) and the 5-mpg’s over-the-limit that GA police have told me is more than acceptable was highly suspect in this new environment!

The cop was kind, if a little suspicious, since our rental happened to have Wyoming tags, a South Dakota registration, and a Minnesota insurance card(!), but once we explained where we were going and where were from, we all loosened up—
Besides this, the drive was lovely!—wide open sky—almost making the land look convex in its extreme flatness, bending wide its surface to bear the weight of the clouds~ It made our hearts feel yellow!

Campus brought us to a small city—there seem to be a hundred buildings to UND’s campus, but they’ve managed serenity in the midst of this. There is a small winding creek—which I’ve been informed is a cooley instead…a slightly swampy, reed-surrounded stream that is almost still (“it will stink later, just wait,” I was told)… But it is beautiful when it reflects the Dakota sky. There have been SO many people to meet, and every conversation exists inside this pressure cooker of depth!—in my 1 hour drive with Bethany, I believe we know more about what matters to one another than it usually takes people a month to know—and it has been the same with most of the people I’ve met, probably because there is the pre-existing conditions that everyone has traveled here for the same reasons, and time has warped to fit the urgent, quick-pace of the program.

We live, eat, and learn in the same living space as our professors, and the environment is like none other that I have experienced. These beginning days keep waffling between elation and exhaustion, and I’m definitely re-acclimating to being a student! It’s been so long since I’ve pushed my mind so hard, and I find at times that it’s pushing its hands up against the walls of my skull in protest :). Monday, we had orientation and we bought our textbooks, and received our pre-first-class homework… For Phonetics alone, I worked my way through the first two chapters, fumble-finding the vocabulary and preparing for the first class the next day. By this first class, these chapters were reviewed and the third one assigned! Second Language Acquisition placed each student into a group, and for the summer I will be learning Sindhi (a language from Sindh, Pakistan) to assess my aptitude and to teach us the foundations of language-learning using a method where we cannot speak a word of it for several weeks!—SUCH a challenge for my tongue that longs to contort :). For now, we use T.P.R. (total physical response) to teach our minds the language using different lobes of the brain, and skipping the usual route of translating a new language to ourselves using the one we already know. Syntax & Morphology is fantastic, and this professor makes me laugh-out-loud daily~ The fourth class I’ve only had once so far, but it’s Sociolinguistics, and I’m thoroughly enthralled.
Though I’ve scrupulously been struggling with moments of frustration at my own intake pace, heart has been whispering its own contentment.

I think for now, this is enough :). I love you, miss you, and am thankful for anyone keeping up with this or finding any interest in it! Thank you, THANK YOU, to those who have written me.. PLEASE know that it has meant more to me than I can express, and that I will truly try to respond soon! With fervor, moni

Posted on 10 June 2009 at 6:12 PM Comments (0)

June 6, 2009 - News~ [North Dakota!]

Precious, precious family and friends~

Please forgive any presumptuousness of a mass-email, but time has slipped by me again, and as I find myself on the brink of something I’m really excited about, the loudest emotion cutting its way through my busyness keeps being a throbbing sense of wanting to tell you all about it—So, if you’re reading this, please know you’re special to me; that you’re either a part of my family by blood and beautiful inheritance, or part of my Body at Vineyard, or one of the dear friends I’ve made as a student or as a teacher or as a traveler—all journeys anyway—and it is for all of these reasons that you’re on this list. Also, I am so sorry I didn’t get this out sooner, and if you’ve already been told some or all of this by me, be patient with my impulsive enthusiasm :)~

Two major events are beginning/changing for me, and I have longed to have you “in on it” for the few weeks that I’ve known:

Five years ago I spent a summer in Ghana, West Africa with Wycliffe Bible Translators, praying and testing out a burning heart. It was a sweet time of confirmations, joy-heat and heart-spurs, and all the time since then has been a meandering journey of soul sifting, patience, and preparation. In these years, God has had to realign my compassion to first identify with Him before any personal will to help another, and has deepened the ardor I’d grown for the concept of bringing His words to cultures of people that have no access to it in the language they most understand [in 2008, there were still 2,393 languages without any part of the Bible]. For many of these cultures, their language is still only oral, and there is a thirst for the development of an alphabet in their tongue and literacy in their village. This vision tugs my compassion, my knowledge (of the darkness I experience without Christ’s words as my haven and tower), and my hope (in God’s use of our silly gifts and hobbies to further His Kingdom).

What I mean to share though is that I get to begin training this summer!~ Where there were only 3 schools I could find that offer both the Linguistics and Biblical Exegesis parts together, each of these schools’ schedules require me to quit my job and to move across country—both things that are not yet financially wise for me, if I am to take responsibility for my school debt and to pay everything off before my leaving and needing support ever enter this missions-equation. In fear and twisty hope, I started applying to programs for this fall anyway, and asked God to reveal how I could make this work—ha!—my foolish forcing~ Instead, spring break brought me time to speak to people from Wycliffe and the schools, and opened a new door to begin my first semester of courses now, in an intensive 2-month semester at a school in North Dakota…then return in the fall to teach another year. As everything has fallen in place swiftly, my parents, too, have been the most gracious encouragers, and came alongside me to pray and figure out the practical side—Four weeks ago, I moved back in to their home, and with this gift, I can be done with all college and car debt within a little over a year and truly free to finish training and be assigned to a language project (!!).

The other change I will come home to is that my county has had to shift around a lot of their teachers due to budget changes and a hiring freeze, and I am one of the surplussed teachers, so I will be teaching at an elementary school for next year instead of Sprayberry~ This will be a new adventure for me as well, and I figured with all of the paragraphs I was sending your way, I could throw this in as well :). I have no experience with Elementary Special Ed. yet, but have also come to know that I finally trust God, and will not resist this change, but please pray for my capacity to learn to teach and love these new kids well. SO much new learning for me…

I know this is long now; but I think this is the catch-up :). I get on a plane in just a few hours now…

I love you and so deeply appreciate that no matter how verbose and lengthy this is, or even whether we share the beliefs that are catalyst to my going, there was enough confidence in me of your care and place in my life that I knew I could send it… So PLEASE, keep me this summer (by email or facebook, or blog since I don’t know that each of you want blubbering emails from me often :), I won’t inundate you, but rather, will post here) Hope you sleep so well, and that I hear from you soon, truly.
With love, Monica

Posted on 6 June 2009 at 2:14 AM Comments (0)

March 6, 2009 - Another Experiment

So.. it's one in the morning, and I have just finished an "assignment" that is technically an assignment for my students, but as I think I've mentioned on here before, with creative writing that we ask them to read aloud to the class, my co-teacher and I have promised that we will always write on the topic as well, and come prepared to share what we've written, so it is not just them under a spot-light that's ravaging their confidence, but also us in all our nerdy, adult vulnerability..

It is once again during our unit on the novel The House on Mango Street; just a wonderful little book to teach lyrical/poetic prose with, and to give freshmen a heaving dose of literary devices... So we ask them to write a few vignettes in the style of the author (Sandra Cisneros) and this week's needed to be a treatise on or vivid memory of music in their life.

And here is the bleary teacher's-edition of the mimic-assignment:


There is a silken web that winds itself in and around and under me—shot up my veins like an internal tree running roots down my arms through my throat—the glue between a million little polaroids. It is notes, songs, snatches of harmonies that wind gnarly vines around soul and set it free from body. If travel has been the demolisher of my walls, music was what kept me in one piece during the glorious fall-out. It is the haze that my breath blew on the windows of a boxcar as the train whirred onward to somewhere new; dissonant chords rolling off Thom Yorke's tongue, sent to light the fire in my belly—baby’s got the bends—and so did I… pressurized, and about to burst.

It is the hours spent on a piece of carpet, with a long-adored brother, eyes closed, listening while eternity drips slow to the layers in an album—Innocence Mission—and my heart on fire—O happy, O happy, the end, the end, the end—she says. Because music is like water, whirling around in ringlets of change, lilting through and welding together chapters of life to form a whole. Because it is only music, and light, and water and God that transcend the gaps and gutters that the rest of life digs deep.

It is the wild-hearted drum-circle, spontaneously combusting after the Easter service at my church, and docks that shook with the voices of youth camp kids, cluttered together to join and surpass the worshiping toads. It is the funereal dance around the blazing fire, one white-hot whisper, so much life found in that Ghanaian celebration at another man’s death.

And maybe then we are like notes. Each bobbing along, suspended at times, meeting others to form chords—some combinations disastrous, clashing gongs, but unrelentingly powerful—and others the sweet tilt of harmony, trills in form of relationship. Our own music that breaks wide the marching lines of time and leaves something wispy on a page to mark the crescendo.

Posted on 6 March 2009 at 1:06 AM Comments (1)

January 20, 2009 - Mercy

Mercy
Drawn seeds from tree unborn,
gnomey limbs and strong-armed form--flourishing.
Now not yet, my love.
Me, not you, my love.
Responses with my face but not from me
Limb from limb, I draw my strength from thee.


Posted on 20 January 2009 at 1:37 AM

Nov. 21, 2008 - Reflections on an odd day, without reflecting on the day at all, but rather adding some small part of it to this place..

So today was a lot.
In a lot of different ways.
But as I was lying down to close it, I smiled at the way the class-part of my day went.. Fun students, and a room full of people trying to turn their memories into metaphors!~ Maybe only a scene an english-nerd could love.. but it was enjoyable.

Today was "I Am" Poem day;.. something I've done since my second semester of teaching with the first co-teacher I ever really clicked with...It's a very structured poem. Only now we were tying it to The House on Mango Street.. how Esperanze (hope!) is told that she cannot erase her memories... "you are Mango Street".. The concept that you are, in some powerful ways, the sum of all your history; all your vivid memories--good or bad--combining to form someone made of dust and sunny days and kinship and cold.

So from a list of topics, each student had to take notes on the most vivid memory they had for each of the categories we gave them. These range from "a pet memory" to "a time you were scared" and "your first crush".. Then we read our examples--To give them an idea of how to re-present their memories as quick images, small sentences, packed polaroids, so much memory pushed into a corner with the hope that there the squeaze-out may be something interesting.. So as an offering to the pillow before me, here's mine (written back the first time we taught the assignment though):


I AM
I am the growing shout of “go-----oal!” husking from my father’s otherwise gentle voice
I am letters written to the love I haven’t met yet I am shove, tear, fight through feeling rawness and weariness, to resplendent joy
I am the single thunder lamp lighting literacy lessons for the Ghanaian village
I am the silly first story written without any expectations
I am glinting Christmas lights squinted at from the base of 20 feet of green
I am the cracking concussion of a head on a swing as I slump to the grass after the fall
I am the apple orchard, bending wide my arms to gather in cousins, juice-pith, and seeds
I am a red-haired chow-chow, dashing at the first glimpse of an accidentally-open door
I am drenched boots and dramatic conclusions cracking through the ice on lake Jenushka
I am whispers to my sister between the bunk bed and wall until stars are yawning, gape-mouthed
I am the summer of 2002, ill, feeling like death and puddles
I am the daughter of Brazilian rhythm laced between the oompa-pa’s
I am the lead foot on the accelerator, trembling for 1,000 miles to see the scars on his wrists
I am red sleds pitched around snowy gutters, playing house with my kindred sis
I am struggling eye sight, blinking, staring, longing for what’s next

Posted on 21 November 2008 at 12:26 AM Comments (0)

November 3, 2008 - Thoughts on "lack" and a mall mishap :)

Tonight I walked into my house and felt overwhelmed. I had been shuffling in the mall, whose hallways and speakers have ALREADY been adorned with “Christmas”… the outward colors of it without any inward depth. I had to squinch my ears to tell if I really was hearing the instrumental song that I thought I was… but it became undeniably clear the moment I saw the most unhappy Santa I have ever seen. There was a photographer; enormous, red, shiny Christmas ornaments; rolls of carpet moving in various directions for lines that would wrap around and around.
But there were no lines; only a Santa who was more than likely musing about skeletons and pumpkins, and a Persian man that said I am going-k to change your li-fe today…this cream! We vill get all the pimps off your face, it will change your life. All the pimps. Yes, that’s what he said.

I returned home to my beautiful girls, but conversation quickly turned to the one that is part of my daily life right now: I seem to have been having long weeks of the same conversation, dropped by one person, continued with another in my life, taken on by several others, dwindled and taken up again by someone that has noticed the same thing my heart has. It began over dinner with my pastor’s family. We somehow got to speaking about men in their 20’s and 30’s, in and out of our church, and Pastor Tommy said we should pray. There is this struggle, this fight, this dropping away of the men I knew that were committed to Christ, and a dearth of ones that are freshly arriving to Him, heart in hands. So we spoke more of praying for the men that let commitment and the forward-fight dribble between their fingers’ grasp; for the boys that have no idea what being a man should look like, and for the women that haven’t seen an example of anything but settling for this.

Then Rachel un-paused a video-teaching they were about to watch and the first words out of the speaker’s mouth were about The Beginning, and he began by breaking down the name Elohim. Break to the only response to emotionally-charged-stimuli that I seem to currently have on tap—a spasmodic visceral reaction: I fled the room.

It felt involuntary, an instant response— I couldn’t stay. The man said Elohim, and jumped into parts of the word, the root, the meaning. And it hurt. Ache. Want. The feeling that my heart would gut itself if I listened just now, tied, I guess, to the study of words, and God, and Hebrew, and Greek. Then instant repulsion at the dramatic nature of those emotions (oy-ve!!), annoyance that the ache makes me hostile, anger that I don’t know what to do with my heart.

I think I’m just tired, but it ends up coming out as a garbled, toe-crunching “rawr”. I would so much rather embrace what I long for—or the waiting for it—and not rush out of the room because of something stinging and poignant. I just felt a little sad. And hated that it comes on the heels of others’ joy. It’s all the change again: my wonderful childhood best friend gets married in 6 days, and in moments of weakness it feeds into the questions of what I’ve screwed up that keeps me from having what God has given to others. What have I done or been that is so irreversible? I feel like I’ve been longing and seeking, and allowing necessary separation… and still ache, distance, faint mimicries of emptiness.
And none of this is fair questioning, and I know this. I hate feeling consumed with lack; lack that my spirit, without false filters and worldly schematics laid over it, knows is not there, or knows that the vessel part, the decaying, unlasting part of me insists on identifying…conjuring.

Bleh. There it is. But out where its sting, or shame at such emotions, can dissipate, and out where the seeming-truth of some of those statements can be illuminated, shown for the shadows they are.

And then replaced. Replaced by the truth of blessing. Blessing in the form of roommates that have been abundant sources of “laughter like breaking dishes”, wisdom, and commiseration. Blessing in the form of joy in welling-up moments spent in my car. Blessing in the view down the hill in the morning mist.
There are some beautiful events in the last few weeks that I need to come back and mention; sights and company that have made my heart burst!—only tonight the other feelings usurped my attention first, so here they sit. My apologies~ :)

Posted on 3 November 2008 at 10:53 PM Comments (1)