Sunday, May 31, 2015
birthday cheer #1
trying to FaceTime with you in the Arboretum this morning...
all of us on the Sunday run wishing you a very HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!!!
(By the way, I still wonder what I am doing in this group- ha!)
(Angela (far left) is probably the only gal you don't know- I met her at a race in January, and then there is Tina, Susan, Sally, Sarah, Jess, Robin and Emily)
about to head to small group and will take lots of pictures with the birthday cake to send your way later this afternoon.
XOXO
Saturday, May 30, 2015
balloons, cake and presents
for ELIZABETH....
Sending these this afternoon knowing you will wake up to these in your inbox. :)
at my sewing machine yesterday
I ordered some fabric that had art from Julie Cairnes on it to make you some pillows for your birthday and had such fun being a little seamstress thinking of you and making these for your homecoming...
running by the roses at UW this morning and thinking of you too!
making your bday cake for small group tomorrow :)
cake for 41!!!
and of course a trip to the bridge today to decorate....
Jodi's daughter Kate was with us and we all had such fun decorating the bridge today....
4.1 x 10 = 41 = eh
41 balloons!!!
and a song for you too as we were standing in the poppies!
Friday, May 29, 2015
seeds
This year, there have been several times of prayer when I have had pictures of bulbs and seeds growing underground.... Something is happening that we cannot see and I trust that God is at work. My friend Katherine and I talked about this at Christmas and she shared with me some reflections looking back over the last decade as she has gone through so much loss (her brother was killed in a car accident, her father died, her step father died). She talked about how at first she thought that God must be teaching her a lesson and that she must have had something big she needed to learn. But over the years, she sees how that was not really the case. It was not about this, but much more of a process that through all these things that God was cultivating trust in her heart. Isn't that what life is all about in many ways?
Anyway, this poem is another one about seeds and growth and trust... I love the imagery here and thought you'd relate to it too... XOXO
Seeds under the ground on a mid-winter’s night
sleep with their dreams of Spring.
They are dancing, tunneling, settling in,
finding just the right place to begin
their sprouting. But first, they must rest,
gather to themselves the vision
of what they will be.
Is it faith—this survival spirit, this
willingness to abide, to seek darkness,
even revel in it, to be willingly
unnoticed for long months of the year?
I want to believe in my own renewing,
let body and spirit rest, refuse to exhaust myself
in someone else’s expectations, grow old
before my time, cast off, disposed of.
I want to be recycled endlessly, and flower again
and yet again unexpectedly, bloom into
a surprising color for an old woman, ripe
with wrinkled youth and vigorous beauty,
with twinkling eyes in deep sockets,
making them wonder
just how I do it.
-Victoria Miller
Thursday, May 28, 2015
p.s. HAPPY 28th!
and..... happy 28th to Micah!!!!!!!
the sun is sparkling here today and I pinched myself this morning realizing that next month around June 28th that Micah and I could get together and bake up something together... (and of course taste the batter of whatever we are making to make sure it is not poisonous.)
on love and suffering...
Below is a talk a professor at SPU forwarded to the faculty that was given by David Brooks at an annual conference called "The Gathering"... As you say goodbye to your mom tomorrow and as you begin to wrap things up there with responsibilities and relationships, I can imagine that these words below on love and suffering will resonate with you. Holding you all up to the light as you walk through these days...
"......When people fall in love, something opens up in them. A great passage I read about failing in love was written by a guy named Douglas Hofstadter, who is a mathematician at Indiana University. He was on sabbatical many years ago now with his wife, Carol, and their two kids who were then 5 and 3. And all at once Carol suffered a brain aneurysm and died. He kept her picture on the bureau of his room and he must have looked at it every day, but one day he looked at it with special attention and here’s what he wrote about seeing her face:
"I looked at her face, and I looked so deeply I felt I was behind her eyes. And all at once I found myself saying as tears flowed, that’s me, that’s me. And those simple words brought back many thoughts that I had had before about the fusion of our souls into one higher-level entity. About the fact that at the core of both our souls lay our identical hopes and dreams for our children. About the notion that those hopes are not separate or distinct hopes, but were just one hope. One clear thing that defined us both. That welded us into a unit. The kind of unit I would dimly imagine before being married and having children. I realized that though Carol had died, that core piece of her had not died at all. But that it had lived on very determinedly in my brain."
So the first thing love does is it humbles us. It reminds us we are not even in control of ourselves. It’s like an invading army that reorganizes your sleep patterns, your thoughts, your emotions, and is the kind of invading army you welcome and you want to be invaded by.
The second thing it does is it decenters the self. The Adam One world your centered on yourself. But a person in love finds the center of his or her life is not inside oneself. It is outside in the soul of the beloved. The ultimate riches are outside and not inside.
Many writers have noted that love illuminates the distinction between giving and receiving. Montaigne had a passage which I think C.S. Lewis sort of stole…where he said, “The person who allows a friend to give a favor is doing the most favor. By giving the friend the pleasure of being able to give that favor.”
Because the souls are merged.
The third thing love does, is that it opens up ground. Love is like a plow opening up hard ground and allowing many other loves to grow. Self-control is a muscle. If you use it a lot, you use it up. Love is the reverse. The more you love, the more you are capable of loving. And so many people fall in love and through that love discover other loves.
And finally, love leads to holiness. One of my heroes is a woman named Dorothy Day, who wrote a great book called, “The Long Loneliness,” in which she describes giving birth to her daughter. And one of the things she said in that book after she described childbirth very grossly, but vividly. And she said, “If I had painted the greatest painting, if I had sculpted the greatest sculpture or written the greatest symphony, I could not have felt the more exalted creator than when I did when they placed my child in my arms. And with that came a need to worship and to adore.”
And so it was with the birth of her daughter that her eye turns heavenward. That’s the motion of love. First, decentered. First, humbled. Down to the bottom, you can’t even control yourself. And then upward, heavenly. It’s down and up. And that’s what love does.
It’s also the shape of suffering. The second activity. When people think about their future, they’re often thinking about happiness. What can I do that will make me happy? But when you look in the past, and think about the things that formed you, it’s rarely the happy moments, it’s the moments of suffering. So we shoot for happiness, but we’re formed by suffering.
Now it should be said there’s nothing intrinsically noble about suffering. If it’s not connected to any larger transcendent purpose, it just dehumanizes people and shrinks them. But if it’s connected to some greater design, people are clearly ennobled by it. Think of Franklin Roosevelt when he got polio. A shallow guy who became a much deeper and greater person after the polio.
The big thing suffering does is that it drags you deeper into yourself. Paul Tillich, the great theologian, wrote that people who endure suffering are taken between the routine busyness of life and forced to confront the fact that they are not who they believed themselves to be. The pain of suffering, whether it’s in composing a work or losing a loved one, smashes through the bottom floor of what they thought was their soul, revealing a cavity, and then it smashes through the floor of that, revealing another cavity and down and down and down.
So it digs you out. And opens up space. It shatters the illusions of self-mastery and when you’re suffering, you can’t control your suffering, you can’t even control yourself. And when you heal, that also feels magical. Like nothing that you did.
Suffering teaches gratitude. When you’re on top of the world, you think that people love you, well, you deserve it. But when you are suffering, you realize that love is unearned.
Suffering also, like love, points to holiness. People have suffered often and almost always have this sense of calling. When people lose a child, say, they don’t say, “Well, I had two years where I had low pleasure. I should compensate by going to a lot of parties so I can get high pleasure and balance off my hedonic account.” They do not say that. They want to turn the suffering into holiness, so they create a foundation. Or they transform their lives. People don’t heal from suffering. They come out changed. So it’s the same u-shaped curve. What Soloveitchik called “advance retreating advance.”
The third thing everyone I think in the secular world also experiences is grace. Now in this world, in this room, you may think how can a secular person experience grace? But I am telling you, everyone does. It may have different words, it may have less discreet meaning but everyone has the feeling sometimes that they get better than they deserve. You get a stroke, and people are there to care for you. You get fired and the community rallies around you. You suffer trauma and unexpected strangers are there for you. And you feel – you may not feel if you are secular – salvation sanctity, but you feel accepted.
Tillich again has a great essay on this. “Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when our disgust for our own being. Our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us. It strikes us when year after year the longing for perfection of life does not appear. When old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades. When despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into ur darkness and it is through, it is though a voice were saying, “You are accepted. You are accepted. Accepted by that which is greater than you, and in the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now. Perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now. Perhaps you will do much later. Do not seek for anything. Do not perform for anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted. If that happens to us, we experience grace. After such an experience, we may not be better than before. We may not believe more than before, but everything is transformed. Nothing is demanded of this experience. No religious or moral intellectual presupposition. Nothing but acceptance."
-David Brooks
Wednesday, May 27, 2015
from brokenness to community
[In the community] we talk about how God has brought us together. I love to hear each one talking about where he or she was before coming to our community…and then there is a consciousness that now we are together. A few years ago we were dispersed; we did not know each other. Now we are together; we belong to each other. We realize what an incredible gift God has given us, to bring us together from different lands of pain and loneliness, and to become one people. We become more conscious that we are responsible for each other. -Jean Vanier From Brokenness to Community
Tuesday, May 26, 2015
Monday, May 25, 2015
a year ago today....
As I was running this morning, I had some fond memories
of this race a year ago today on May 25th...
I still crack up that Liam is the one who told me about this race-- he was the first to see advertisements for it and he knew it was right up my alley. He knows me well.
before the race
15 K later after we crossed the finish line
bubbles were compliments of Anna who was blowing them in our direction
with Liz who came to cheer us on in the awards ceremony
costume contest for Dorothy (remember that the guy in drag won!)
tin man (woman) contest
the Glinda contest
treasured prize
such a creative costume!
(the tornado and the house)
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