All Your Life

It's October 6th and only my 2nd day to write in the 31 days.  Awesome.  However, considering my last blog post had been a year ago, I'm counting it as success.

I am a tad obsessed with God loving us from the moment we exist.  I always have been.  As a researcher, I see this truth in research on adverse childhood experiences and in-the-womb studies.  Science is telling us the story of how our experience of creation matters from the start.  How the experiences of our pregnant moms and our first few years develop a neurological and hormonal path for our future.  I love watching a baby that knows it is safe and loved.  It glows out of them.

I know it is not a mistake that I was born with this fascination because it has kept me going in my life.  It's as though I've always known I'd be sunk without it.  My life would tell a different story had there not been a constant of the deep-calling-deep whisper of love to my spirit. 

Last weekend, I attended reCreate, my church's annual women's conference.  The worship leader was Meredith Andrews.  I wasn't sure who she was or what she sang, but y'all - that was my loss.  She's good.  One of her songs is a beautiful and bold telling of the fact that God has loved us all of our lives.  We can go searching, but He made us, He's seen everything, He's protected us in ways we can't see even during the terrible.  He is the one that has loved you all your life.  What better love story is there than that?

You can listen to You're Not Alone here.

Holly Wagner spoke after Meredith sang this song.  She didn't know she was coordinating this theme in my mind when she told of how kings tried to kill Moses and Jesus both as babies, not because of the babies they were but because of the men they would be.  Some of us need to hear that in the center of ourselves.
I needed to hear it because my mom did not have an easy go of her pregnancy with me.  Life was chaotic.  One doctor couldn't find my heartbeat and swore I died.  One said I might have a cognitive disability.  One said I might be deaf.  Then I hung out in there for 10 months because I was cozy.  Yet, here I am.  I can't claim to be normal but I didn't have any baby problems that some sunlight and prescription shoes couldn't fix. I've never shaken that deep eternal echo that I am loved and my life is worth fighting for, no matter the rejection, shame, and untruth that has come my way (even when I've been the source). 

If you don't know this to be true in the core of your being, then I pray Ephesians 3:18 that you "may have power, together with all the Lord's holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ" for you.

31 Days of Writing, A Day Late

Ok, there’s that whole life-long struggle with writing and not writing I have.  So, I’m taking part in the Nester’s 31 days project.  I was at a bit of a loss for a topic.  However, after some recent events and stirrings during the reCreate women’s conference, I feel like I’m supposed to write my love story.  I realize that sounds cheesy.  I realize that sounds self-obsessed.  But I also realize the disproportionate focus our culture places on eros love over agape love.  I’ve lived a lot of being told there isn’t love in my life because of the absence of romantic love.  I’m not devaluing the role of romance, marriage, etc and admit I have a lot to learn there. I am tired of that being the way we most often discuss and frame love or using that as the qualifier for love’s presence.

This is rooted back into that Song of Songs revelation (2:4) that his banner over me is love.  God’s covering over my life is love.  When he looks down from above and sees the top of my head he sees a stamp that says love.  And his love is lavish.  It has saved my life again and again.  My love cup runs over to the point of almost ridiculousness (Thanks by the way!  See above saved my life part).  

The thing is, I’m not alone.  This is His truth for His children.  Do you look at your life and see a love story?  If we’re the Bride of Christ, what does that look like in a life?  (And the Bride of Christ includes men, right?  Whoa – can somebody preach on that? I’m thinking some men might need to be thrown in the love tank too.)

So, this is what I’m writing about for 31 days.  Good or bad.  Edited or not.  Freaked to put it on the internets or not.  Completely coherent or not.  We’ll see.

I also have no clue if I know how to permalink.  

My Beautiful Friends

I haven't posted anything here in AGES.  But there is something that has been rolling around in my head that completely relates to something I just read, and it's my lunch hour - so here ya go :).

I turned 35 in August.  I've spent a lot of time thinking about being a woman in her 30s (You might have noticed).  I've come to understand that whole "youth is wasted on the young" thing and wondered why I couldn't have the brain, heart, and boldness I've got now in a 20 year old body. And I've wondered why God makes us stronger and makes us feel more beautiful right after culture has told us we've peaked.  Right when all of your skin starts shifting.

I have a lot of friends who are moms to newborns and young children.  I love to watch them being moms.  This observation has answered some of my questions.  I think God makes women in their 30s and 40s a special kind of bold beautiful because that is when children are most watching them and learning about what it means to be a woman.  Because that lets us grow up with memories and images of beautiful women in our lives and what they looked like at our birthday parties and at the beach and when leading Sunday School.  Women in their 30s and 40s aren't lovely so much for the empty enticements of the world but for the hopes and dreams of the world.

I get such joy at seeing my friends' children interact with their moms because it reminds me that they get to remember these women at this stage too - while we're all in awe of them.

Not that beauty caps out at a certain age and not that we ever stop learning from watching women's plot lines as they age, just that this is a special window. 

So, when Shauna Niequist posted on what she has learned from her mom in different stages, I simply had to finally get it out of my brain.  In a nutshell, the advice from her mother is to boldly be who we were created to be even when wearing the different hats of wife, mom, aunt, sister, daughter because children are watching and taking note and children need us to be fully alive.  It's a great read:

http://shaunaniequist.com/mother-taught/

When sausagey crescent rolls become a holy thing...

You know those "I'm trying to make life less crazy and yet it's crazy so I'm going to eat this entire box of Whole Foods organic lemon wafer cookies" days?  Yeah, it was one of those. 

The words "nurture" and "nourishment" have been rolling around in my soul for a while now, but I'm unsure I've officially done anything about them yet.  I've realized it's as though I've totally forgotten how to take care of myself.  This sounds ridiculous, but it's true.  I've tried, but something real needs to change instead of being an illusion of change.

This is why I'm leading the Bread & Wine Supper club.  In hopes it will get me towards getting back to the basics of care.  And food.  Or food that isn't standing in a room shoving cookies in my mouth.

Today was such a reminder of this need.  I was at work, knowing I had a 4 hour video conference to be a part of and knowing I'd need food but not knowing what or how to get it.  I started thinking about what would be quickest, cheapest and "best" and realized what I really wanted was to go home and boil and mash some potatoes.  Or make a giant pot of soup and pour it over some cornbread.  Maybe even, dare I say it, have an entree and two sides and a glass of tea!  I desperately wanted a meal.  So, I decided to cook something for dinner.

Of course, I wound up working late, which wasn't looking good for the meal I planned.  Still, I went to the store for a few things.  Now, y'all, I don't know the last time I ate sausage pinwheels.  They were the signature dish of one of my second mothers growing up and my mom mentioned them the other day.  I had never personally made them.  As an adult, I most often avoid sausage.  But I left Winn Dixie with the ingredients for sausage pinwheels and made them like a starved dog.  I mean, I turned on the stove light and watched them cook and stared down the timer.  Then ate four of them.  Like I was in a race.

I don't want to think about whether they were a healthy choice for my heart and my rear end, but they revealed a need.  If I'm tempted to eat hot, half-baked dough just to have something real and comforting and homemade then there is a problem. 

So, we'll see what happens and how long it will stick this round.  All I know is I actually cooked and did 2 loads of laundry that I folded when I took out of the dryer - so I've won my own personal Super Bowl.  Good night.

My Roomate Was the Homecoming Queen

My town has received a lot of national news coverage this week because of our historically strange ways of going about things.  It's really about the balance of power, who has it, how they use it, and the process of successful change.  If the family is God's laboratory for learning how to love people, Alabama is the nation's laboratory for studying class, racism, and voter fraud.  It's a place where tradition has allowed it to remain easy to categorize all types of people while the outside world is ever changing.  Holding on to something familiar during shifting sands can be a comfort to humans, even when they know its wrong deep down.  We may not necessarily be better or worse people than the rest of the country but we are definitely less subtle (The 50th Anniversary of the 16th Street Church Bombing will remind you of that) (As will the details of picking of candidates for Governor).  It's a population Diffusion of Innovations study waiting to happen.

 All of this talk about who is accepted and who isn't had me thinking about my own college experience, which was vastly different from the students I teach.  It's all a matter of perspective and what you value.  In this town, if I told you I roomed with two different Homecoming Queens (one of which was Panhellenic President or something) and was elected SGA Secretary you'd probably think I owned at least three pairs of Tory Burch flats and had my pick of open doors in life.  In reality, we thought it was absolutely hilarious that we had a Homecoming Queen and we considered it a bit of a funny adventure.  As in,  they let us run a muck on the soccer field and put a crown on my roomie's head and hoop and holler and eat free pizza.  Here, the Homecoming Queen is escorted by the Governor and was the focus of an HBO documentary.  In reality, my roomate leading Panhellenic meant that we had some underclassmen girls over to the Honors House for spaghetti.  Here, it would mean determining the life path for thousands of young women.  In reality, I was SGA Secretary because nobody cared to run and I needed more scholarship money so the Dean of Student Affairs thought it was a nice way to help me out and get the position filled at the same time.  It was an uncontested race that involved zero threat or intimidation to other candidates that might be different from me.  Here, it would be a different story and involve putting my name on lots of Range Rovers with white shoe polish.  The thing that actually made me kinda popular at my undergraduate university was the fact my three best friends were cast members in the annual Fall Follies production and the guy that sat by me in class led the night's house band.  Have I mentioned it was quite a different world?

For all that goes on behind closed doors in this town, I will say that it is good that students care.  They care to be a part of leadership, they care to vote, and the students speaking out care to make things better.  My undergraduate experience was much better suited to me, but it wasn't perfect.  I remember when one of our international students wrote a letter to the school paper on how appalled he was by our apathy regarding student leadership.  He was one of the older students that would stand on the walkway above the student center and smoke cigarettes (how scandalous!).  He was from a nation with a dictator and wrote that students in his country were killed for trying to have a voice and we didn't care about student government enough to vote (which was ridiculously easy to do while waiting in line for the cafeteria) and we should all be ashamed of ourselves.

I don't know if he made any of us actually care about the SGA, but his letter all those years ago regularly makes me think of democracy, freedom, and privilege.  Much like the words that have stuck with me from one of my fellow graduate students when I was the lone white girl in the department.  I admit I naively acted like I had shared life experience more often than I should yet my fellow women were so kind in their correction of me.  One told me to never forget I was priveleged and to always use my influence for those that would not be granted the same opportunities.  I hope I've done my best on all accounts.

Mmm...football

I'm starting to get excited about football season.  If you're reading this you're probably going "well, duh, yeah" or "hello - it started last week and if you were a real Bama fan you would have been counting down the days since February like everybody else."

Here's the thing - I'm a lifelong real Alabama football fan, but I've been strangely disillusioned with athletics since the winter.  There, I admit it, I said it out loud.  No, I did not fall and hit my head.  People in other regions of the world might even find this disillusionment healthy.  I didn't order tickets (meaning I don't currently have tickets to a game for the first time in my life - literally - though attendance was spotty during the Virginia years).  I haven't even given an athletically directed Roll Tide in months (though of course I've said it - I mean, I still speak and get excited about things).  Yes, of course, I watched the first game but I admit my heart wasn't in it even if I'm a long standing disliker of VA Tech.

Chalk it up to all the game day recipes on the internets and the exhaustive coverage of punky Johnny Manziel because I am now ready for some football.  I'm also ready to eat baked goods and really cheesy dips with meat in them.

I think I'll start here, with Chewy Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Coconut Cookies from the Tasty Kitchen site.

Egg Love

I don't really like eating eggs.  Or should I say, I don't like eating most eggs.  It's a very strict egg approval system I have.  They can't be plain, they have to have stuff in them.  But no omelets please - because those are way too egg like.  Basically, they have to be scrambled with cheese, but in a skillet and not on a griddle.  Quiche totally gets a free pass because of the level of cheese and other yummy stuff and because it looks like pie and makes me feel fancy.  Stratta too - again, because it's fancy.  And the new McDonalds' egg white mcmuffin - totally my dream come true because trying to cut the yellow out of my previous mcmuffins was a very tricky process that I never fully mastered.

I have a reason for rambling on this, I promise.  Because while I am often suspicious of eggs, they are also a favorite symbol of love in my life.  My dad has the very best cheese eggs in the whole wide world.  They are his signature and nothing else quite matches them.  He takes the ordinary and elevates it with an iron skillet, milk, at least 2 cheeses when possible, a lot of patience, and knowing exactly when to turn off the stove.        
There is something extra special about your father cooking for you.  My mom can out cook most of the world, so I have lots of food favorites from her.  But I have a steady image of my dad, all 6 feet and 6 inches of him standing patiently at a stove because his family loves his cheese eggs and because he loves to make us smile.  His hands are rough and crooked from years of football, meat cutting, and farming but he carefully uses them to scrape the sides of the skillet just right to make sure the eggs keep the best texture.  It's a bit like the giant at the top of the beanstalk stopping to paint a tea pot.

The art of cooking scrambled eggs has eluded me, along with pancakes and the perfect grilled cheese.  I came close to getting scrambled eggs right last week.  I followed a tutorial and everything but they didn't hold a match to my daddy's.

This morning, someone asked me to use this week to think about what kind of legacy I wanted to leave.  To write it out.  I hope I leave people with something that is the best of version of a basic truth. Something simple that becomes beautiful in its truth and consistency.  Like love or mercy.  Or cheese eggs.