Heyday

It's time for this body to catch up to my soul.

I've started making actions out of faith for faith. It's a little like conducting an experiment, and it's working.

This morning I danced in the kitchen at 6:40 as my oatmeal cooked in the microwave. The radio was blasting. Grandma gets up at 5:30, but doesn't put her hearing aids in until about 7:30, so when she turns the radio on, boy does she turn it on. Lord love 'er.

The radio is always on. It fills this muffled house. I like the noise, and I'll dance to it, even if it's always tuned to our local Christian station. Grew up listening to that station, even gave money to it when I was a pipsqueak. I think their mission is critical, but I also think it is profane. Most churches, most Christian-anything seems profane when compared to the sacredness, the high-holiness, of God.

But if I keep scratching Christian-anythings off the list, soon I'll be left with nothing but lead. Soon I'll be alone. If I turn the radio off because it's not good enough, instead of appreciating its potential and recognizing that "hey, they are preaching the gospel," I accomplish nothing except to fulfill my desire to enforce limits. All I am doing is limiting the capabilities of hard-working people, limiting God by saying He can't use something so...umm...lame, and— Limiting myself.

I limit myself—and God's proffered gift to work in and through me—when I dwell on the past; when I let other people offend me, make me anxious, or make me cry; when I am particular about the location I live in; when I blame things on my personality; when I let one uninspired and emotional, grammatically-incorrect-to-boot worship song ruin the entire service for me; when I let struggling Christians influence my belief about Jesus' power to change; when I turn my back on the church; when I let my mind run on autopilot at all hours and drag me into darkness; when I let my life in America negate everything I ever learned and believed about myself and God and others and beauty and the church and history and brotherhood and reconciliation while I was in Italy.

Pathetically, that's what it all comes down to: Italy. Six months out of 22 years, but I keep coming back to it. I have an effervescent faith over there. A deep calm in my soul when I am over there. A purpose. Every time I come home, I lose it. 

That is not right. The Italian version of myself is not a fake version. It's the more real, more eternal version of myself. My body unites with my soul when I am there.

Living in America shouldn't hydrolyze me. It shouldn't make me compartmentalize. No matter how much people don't get along, no matter death, no matter minimum wage, no matter the doctor saying "there's really nothing we can do, but you'll be fine, just live with it," no matter the absence of Alps—

I don't want to limit myself anymore.

This is not Italy, and I've never been more home than I am now. But I am not limited.

I'm not letting it happen anymore. My soul is hollering and won't shut up and my mind is giving in to its blessed cacophony.

And somethings happening. I'm scared to use the word "transformed." I dared to admit to my Mom when I last saw her that I've been in a better frame of mind as of late.

That is what it is, though: seeing everything in new frames. Frames that were built strong and tight out of the best lumber because—dang what grace!—I was raised Christian and my parents, church, friends, and school taught me a thing or two. And those frames are pretty because I've lived in beautiful places my whole life. And they will endure forever because of God. He provided all the materials, built them so they would fit my unique line of sight. But He gave me freedom, said I don't have to use them if I don't want, and either way, mourning and doubting or joyfully submitted He will save me because He's merciful.

But my day to day existence would be better—indeed, could be one hell of a celebration—if I used His frames.

Day to day, minute by minute companionship with someone is what I've needed. A stable source of goodness that promises to be present in every single day of my life, so that no matter what happens with my body, family, church, career, or country I can have hope.

What do you know, I found that companionship with my triune God and everything is changing.

...Just like every Christian radio, book, preacher, friend, etc, said it would. I want to lay some blame and say they didn't emphasize how hard it would be to get here, or how worth it it was once you got there. But I guess they did. I'm not making excuses. I'm done analyzing this whole process. All this time alone, I'm tired of myself. 

So I dance alone before breakfast in the greenish, pre-thunderstorm light, and study at night, alone, as Grandma dozes. I run alone, sleep alone, and it's still lonely and a little sad and some things wrack my nerves, but it doesn't crush me. The routine of the days is still busy-monotonous, but there's an undercurrent of energy, this feeling that anything could happen. And even if it doesn't, even if the day passes as another boring day, the theme du jour was still good. Because I experienced intimacy with God. 

I'm scared to publish this because when I do then people will know I'm in a better frame of mind and they might make me stay this way.

Maybe I should wait for my blog's 10th anniversary. Its only 3 weeks away. I could back out, write something existentially reflective, recap the past 10 years.

...10 years...

What's 3 weeks in 10 years?

10 years in eternity?
 

There is so much incomprehensible math and beauty and truth, why waste my time letting evil tip the scales? It's having its heyday alright. But what's a heyday in eternity? Any time I've been given, I want to redeem.

Revolt of the Christmas Carols

Last year I was at the Markell's for home church the Sunday before Christmas, and I remember Ben, John, Jesse, and a couple other guys saying how tired they were of Christmas music. They said that it would make them perfectly happy if it was banned from playing in stores, on the radio, etc. At the time, I wanted to slap them and say, "Sacrilege!" However, this year I have come to the startling conclusion that I just might agree with them. Not that it drives me crazy, like they were all implying, but I do think the Christmas music market suffers from a lack of ingenuity, and that someone should do something about it. After all, we have less than 10 popular Christmas songs that get played all the time. On the Christian music scene, you have just as many hymns that get played over and over. I'm not sure what we could do about the former, since there are only so many ways to sing about mistletoe, and snow, and people kissing in front of fireplaces. However, concerning the latter, I think it would do us all some good if we would branch out a little. There are a lot of rather obscure hymns out there (like the 'Wexford Carol' or 'O Come Angel Band') that are beautiful and profound. But we don't sing them.

So, I've staged my own little revolt and am trying to look up one Christmas hymn every day that I haven't heard all over the radio. Admittedly, I've only been doing this since Saturday so it's not much of a war as of yet. :) Saturday was also the day we got our tree. We were set to get it in the morning, so accordingly three people took turns waking me up (I think they were a little excited). First there was Misha, whose wake-up calls involve creeping into my room on tip-toe, breathing lightly. She thinks I don't know she's there. Then she stands right next to my bed for a full minute before whispering, "Mattae-tae. Time to wake uuUUUuupp." I say, "Uh-huh. I'm awake," and roll over. Personally, I'll take a Misha-wake-up-call any day. The others involve shouting, singing, djembes, cockadodils, and maybe even a gunshot. The funny thing though is that I'm usually already awake whenever anyone comes to get me. I just like practicing the art of undercover-life-contemplation, so when I do sleep in, it's more of a think in.

Anyhow, I did "finally" get out of bed (it was 8:25 lol), and I even had time to do the breakfast dishes before heading out the door. At the tree farm, mom gave us her usual 5 minute warning (the amount of time it takes for her fingers to get cold and she goes to stand by the fire inside, leaving us to make the decision alone). Well, we came to the conclusion that we wanted mom with us the whole time, so in 3 minutes flat we ran around the fir section of the farm, sniffing (to make sure it didn't smell like cat pee, like they do sometimes), measuring (it has to be taller than Andrew), and circling (even branch placement, please). Soon we found the perfect tree. Actually, it's rather short and funny looking but it smells heavenly, like oranges (shout out to mom and Isaac who will suffer with allergies for the remainder of December. I salute you). Isaac cut it down with his man skills, and we strapped it to the roof of the car (dad had even brought a red strap! So randomly thoughtful and festive).

When we got home we realized we didn't have lights. So it wasn't until after supper that we had our decorating/dance party.

And I just realized that my blog is celebrating it's 6th birthday (or should it be anniversary? I can never decide) this week. So happy birthiversary blog! Actually, I'm feeling slightly freaked out. Six years is a long time to have a blog; that is, after all, 1/3 of my life. I go between thinking I am extremely narcissistic for having written so much about my life, to thinking how fun it has been, to thinking how much it has improved my writing skills, to thinking about how much information I have revealed to the world, to thinking about how it has been a great tool for letting me stay in touch with friends...on and on and on. I suppose there are many reasons I have this blog (some of them more honorable than others) and I'm not about to stop blogging now.

The most exciting thing that happened today is that one of the courses I registered for next semester, "Intro to Missions," just had a name change, so it is now called, "Intro to Global Studies." Which. Sounds. So. Much. Cooler! I'm a sucker for packaging, and this includes the names of college courses. This is almost as good as the day they changed the name of my major from "General Studies" to "Interdisciplinary Studies."