When the Theme of the Season is Trust

L and I arrived home from Michigan a little over a week ago, and although it’s remained silent here on the blog, I promise you, you have not been far from the front of my mind. It’s just – there’s so much I want to tell you, I’ve felt sort of paralyzed. Where to begin?

I need to tell you why I’ve stopped posting my Weekly Dinner Menu. I realize this happened without warning or communication – because it wasn’t intentional. Michigan was busy, and it was so easy to just let it go. I confess, I felt burned out. It was becoming more of a chore than a joy, and I honestly wasn’t sure it was benefiting any of you. If you feel differently, by all means, leave a comment or send me a message on Facebook. Your enthusiasm may help revive mine. If not, I will just wave a fond farewell from a distance.

I want to tell you about the things that have been rocking my world lately. In the world of books, it’s Jen Hatmaker’s Interrupted and 7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess, as well as Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s Half the Sky. They have changed the way I think about church and the gospel and how we spend our time and money and what we do with all our stuff. And then there are the organizations and ministries that have been tugging at my heart, and which E’s new job has enabled us to support: Mercy House, Compassion (we’re so excited to have L sponsoring a girl close to her age in Kenya), The Seed Company’s Esther Initiative, Help One Now‘s orphan prevention initiative in Ethiopia, Mobile Loaves and Fishes’ Community First Village in Austin, Texas, a revolutionary approach to loving the homeless. Just being able to give a little to support things that stir my soul is helping me breathe deeper. I keep seeing a mental image of an oyster being cracked open with a chisel, and can’t help wondering if that oyster is my heart, my hands, being chiseled open for Christ. And I want to be cracked wide open.

But as much as I am feeling inspired and impassioned about God and the lives of others, I am also fighting feelings of lethargy and exhaustion about my own life.

In Michigan, I had dinner with a former colleague who is now an agent, and she gave me tons of priceless feedback on my novel. I took pages and pages of notes, and now I have to do the work of implementing them. I knew – I’m no dummy – that my first draft was exactly that – a first draft – and that I would have lot to do to move it forward. But still, no matter how well a writer understands that constructive criticism is necessary and beneficial and that every writer’s first draft is a first draft, criticism still has a sting. And so I’m slowly, painstakingly ingesting that sting, giving it the time it needs to fade, to lose its edge, before I begin the next stage of work on my manuscript. I don’t know how long it will take before I’m ready, but I suspect that what I’m going to tell you next will help stretch out the time until I get back to a regular writing and editing schedule.

Mainly, I think my lethargy and exhaustion are because of The Great Unknown, which is still hanging out around here. Some days, I am perfectly able to deal with The GU, like in my earlier blog post, but lately I haven’t had as much pep when it comes to living in the fog. Yes, E has a job (and we are deeply, deeply thankful for this, do not mistake me here), but we still don’t know where it is or what life will look like for our family three months from now – initially, we thought we were going to Tennessee, but now we’re not so certain. We’ve heard it said that getting a government job assignment in the initial days is “like trying to aim at a drunken monkey with a dartboard,” and that things could change at any point. On top of that, E leaves this coming Sunday for ten weeks of training, and so I’m essentially facing the fall as a single parent. I have empty boxes sitting around our cramped apartment, and I find myself looking at them helplessly, wondering if I ought to start packing them or not. As a Type-A personality, this is hard for me. I want to know. But instead, I have to trust. As always, gratitude and joy can be speckled with a dose of  The GU. I guess it’s what people call “living in the tension.”

I do realize my “problems” are not real problems, and even if they were, they would be First World problems. Because I have electricity and clean running water and health care and we eat well. And I am not wallowing. I refuse to wallow or whine. I am just trying to sit with the tension and the lethargy and the fogginess, to confront it, to deal with it, so I can get on with the business of joyful living.

I confess, the Virginia humidity doesn’t help.

More to come, on all of this and many other things as well.

Grace and mercy to you all, every day ~

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