Posts from — December 2008

Unfortunately, we did miss church today.

Fortunately, we had a lot of fun doing it! (Maybe not the walking-a-mile-in-the-snow-with-2-wks-worth-of-groceries part, but otherwise )

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(P.S. Happy birthday, Joelle!!!)

“[The illusion that life is a property to be owned or an object to be grasped, that people can be managed or manipulated] sometimes puts us on the road to frantic search for selfhood and self-fulfillment. We want to be “true to ourselves” — or at least to our self-made image. We become so concerned with our identity that we preoccupy ourselves with our own unique distinctions. We worry about how we are doing in comparison to others. This is the illusion that sets us on the road to competition, rivalry, and even violence. For it makes us conquerors who will fight for our place in the world, even at the cost of others. This illusion leads some to nervous activism, propelled by the belief that anyone is only the results of his or her work. The same illusion leads others to introspection with the assumption that they are their own deepest feelings.

Awareness of how such illusions grip us often comes through a crisis or hardship. In the face of a great pain or inescapable grief, we realize how little we control our lives, how feebly our protests change reality. Something happens to make us realize we can let go of a cherished ambition, bid farewell to a friend, or accept an ailing body. We relinquish the hope of a marriage or career recognition that seems out of reach. We look in the mirror and admit that we are not strickingly handsome, not always the center of conversation at parties, not always brilliant. And we allow ourselves to remember that not only does life include losses, but in the end we will in some sense lose everything because we will, inevitably, die. At the same time, we sense that there may be much more to life than life.

Such discoveries remind us of our humble place in the scheme of things. They keep us from self-aggrandizement. Perhaps our need to hold life loosely is no more evident than in our daily relationships. Loving someone means allowing the other person to respond in ways you have no control over. Every time you engage yourself in an intimate, loving way with someone else you become at least partly subject to the exhilaration of hearing another person’s yes or the disappointment in his or her no. The more people you love, the more pain you may experience. For the great mystery of love is that while it can be recieved, it can also be rejected. Every time you love you enter the risk of love.

…

When we mourn, we die to something that gives us a sense of who we are. In this sense suffering always has much to do with the spiritual life. We surrender our striving denial of our limitations. We release our hold on a piece of our identity as a spouse, a parent, as a member of a church, as a resident of a community or nation… And so we admit, not without many tears, that we sometimes must let go of what we hold very dear.

… Many things in our lives matter intensely to us, of course. We cannot be whole without people to love and people who love us. We need food and places to live; we enjoy the company of a friend and the enjoyment of a book. But holding lightly means remembering that we are not what we acquire and accomplish as much as what we have received. The deepest joys come not from the money we earn, the friends we surround ourselves with, or the results we achieve; we are rather whom God made us to be in His infinite love. We are the gifts we have been given, not just the conquests we wrest. As long as we keep running around, anxiously trying to affirm ourselves or be affirmed by others, we remain blind to One who has loved us first, dwells in our heart, and had formed our truest self.

…Such openhanded posture may mean releasing our hold on certain prejudices. We are asked to surrender to a vision of God and God’s people greater than we now know. We may have to release some boxes that can no longer hold the breadth of God’s truth. We may need to develop another stance toward people we spend time with every day, or pass in our commutes to the office, or see on the news. Prayer, we may find, helps us see others as persons to be received, loved.”

-Turn My Mourning into Dancing, Henri Nouwen

Jealous I didn’t come up with this list

Last week we were able to secure 3 tickets to FL with some finagling and help from family, so we are FINALLY going to visit my well-missed and well-loved family and friends in January. I am so excited I could pee! (…I guess that doesn’t mean much coming from a pregnant woman.)

The Portland homefront is doing well, tight on $, but well. (We decided to go in the backyard this week to chop the top off a small evergreen because we can’t afford a christmas tree this year, which isn’t the worst thing in the world. Scratch that, we realized we have no saw! ) So far, our backyard has supplied the bulk of our holiday decorating, and its actually really fun! A door swag, a centerpiece, and some stairway garland, pretty cool. Even with our “buy less, love more” desire for Christmas, there’s still this part of me that feels guilty if I don’t have SOMETHING under the tree or in Ethan’s stocking. He has a gift from grandma to open, of course (though we realized its a DVD and we don’t currently own a DVD player! Scratch that- an angel brought us a DVD player ) And I will probably get some oranges in my produce bin that week to put in his stocking. I know its all the same to him, it’s just my own feelings about not getting him some super cool fire truck or something, lol. The good news is that our bills will be paid, and we’ll be going to Florida a few weeks later, so it’s all worth it!

It is somewhat surreal for people of my generation to truly grasp the idea of not having a surplus. We do pray together every night for continued provision, so we can live paycheck to paycheck until we’ve paid our dues, so to speak. Last month, we began to to do a lot more random meals at home, like black beans and rice or lentil stew. Last night, the hearty cuisine was straight from the produce bin: sauteed potatoes, kale, and carrots (you won’t believe how good it actually was! When a 3 year old will eat all of his kale and your husband wonders why there are no “seconds”, you know you’ve scored (or they’re in cohorts to make you think you have!).

It is all very good to do, but boy are there times that I feel like there is a wild animal in me wanting to get to any place with a peppermint mocha or similar “treat”. I figure I’m addicted to three things when that happens: caffeine, sugar, and spending. But I try to stay encouraged here and there for the progresses we have made, such as our dependence on a vehicle. It has been ONE YEAR since we have gone completely carless, using mass transportation, bikes, car-sharing programs, and good ol’ fashioned legs to tote our family of 3 (almost 4!) around the city. It has actually been easier than I thought it would be, esp once we learned to rely less on mass transportation (waiting 20 minutes at night for a bus to take us 1 mile was a pain in the rear, but we did it all the time when we first tried this last year. At this point, we expect to do a LOT more walking, and take the bus less than once a week, which is much better.) There are times I can’t STAND it, like the times about once a month that I miss an appointment or event at church because of our lack of vehicle (which usually is really about our lack of planning or money – for the bus or a zipcar). But when I remember that even with our previous car completely paid off, we saved $2,400 this year on the cost of insurance and gasoline! (That’s a hefty amount in our income bracket!) Imagine getting a 2,400 tax break, would you pass it up? (BTW, Obama- you should provide ENORMOUS incentives in tax breaks for those who have gone carless. I mean, come on!)

The best we can hope for is God’s continued provision for our most basic needs, while honing in the spending, the grocery bill, the frequency of counseling, the frequency of preschool, etc. We know it builds character to pay your bills, pay down your debt, one paycheck at a time, if at all possible. When we do the right thing, it always seems to work out (like selling hubby’s xbox for plane tickets, which was our only dvd player, and then last night the 3 of us got to snuggle under a blanket and watch Charlie Brown christmas special on network television -with our antenna, lol). When times are tough, it usually brings the family together to think of more creative and meaningful things to do together, so I really have a lot to be thankful for.

I will be picking up my last small paycheck today until after the New Year, so I only expect it to get even more bleak as the holidays approach, but I trust that it will work out. Can’t you tell I’m being very optimistic?! (All that counseling is paying off, LOL)

Adios for now -

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how cute they are at 1.5 years old

While strolling down memory lane, we’ve been thinking about our golden retriever, Helen, lately – I hope she is doing okay in her new home we found for her before we moved out here. She was SO good with Ethan and we miss her a lot

Here’s some pics from a few days ago, hanging out with Hubby in the Pearl enjoying the day off after the sonogram. My camera kicked the bucket several weeks ago and I just got a new one (THANK YOU EX-REPRESSED LIBRARIAN A.K.A. SUCH A SWEET FRIEND!) so we are a bit click-happy.

You know you love coming to blogs where one day its a forever-long post and the next its just a short slideshow… keeps ya on your toes

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