Giving Up

It has been a long week. In one class this week we were called into a different way of disagreeing, into a different way of listening, and into silence. It was the most disrupting peace I have experienced in a long time.

I left with this overwhelming desire to just give up...in a good way. I battle so much within myself, and sitting in silence made me desire real rest. Since that moment of release, this has been my theme song...Slow Motion by David Gray.

While I was watching, you did a slow dissolve

While I was watching, you did a slow dissolve

While I was watching, you did a slow dissolve

Did I imagine, or do the walls have eyes

Did I imagine they held us hypnotized

Did I imagine, or do the walls have eyes

Life in slow motion, somehow it don't feel real

Life in slow motion, somehow it don't feel real

Life in slow motion, somehow it don't feel real

Snowflakes are falling, I'll catch them in my hands

Snowflakes are falling, I'll catch them in my hands

Snowflakes are falling, now your my longlost friend

Getting Messy

It occurred to me this weekend that I treat this blog like I do a friend or conversation in general. I feel like I have to have everything together in order to be presentable and acceptable. Granted, I owe no loyalties to this blog, but it is much safer to analyze a relationship to an inanimate object than to an actual human being. It is less messy.

My life feels so messy right now. My living spaces are a literal mess - piles of clothes and paperwork everywhere. My finances are a total disaster - rent past due and what I could pay was short with no money coming in for a few more days. My emotions are always on edge as I feel I am being called to live in the messy places of my story...all the time. I question everything about myself as I exist in this hyper-sensitive state of understanding my story, my transference, my countertransference, and my response-ability to it all. It is hard not to feel constantly analyzed by new friends that are in this program, and it is hard not to "practice" on them what I am learning - thankfully we are all aware that we are doing this to each other to some degree.

Being in this messy place is incredibly uncomfortable to me. I think people have always viewed me as a very mature person, which is probably true on many levels, but this weekend I found myself searching Amazon for books on parenting, reparenting and inner child work. I may be mature on the outside, but I feel so immature when it comes to seemingly simple adult competencies - like cleaning my room, managing my money, and being able to express basic needs.

When I moved to Seattle my landlord told me that it would start raining in November. November 2nd it started raining and I think we have seen sunshine twice since then. So, when my mom and brother called me last week to ask if my house was flooded, and I started getting little notes in emails about staying dry and not forgetting my umbrella, I just thought they were commenting on the fact that it rains a lot in Seattle. But no, come to find out it is flooding all over western Washington, and the amount of rain we have had is very abnormal. This feels like a metaphor....

I feel like there is this way that I am. I can't describe it because it has always just been that way. I have assumed it was good and right because it was affirmed and praised throughout my life. And now I am getting little messages inferring that something is wrong, something is abnormal. And come to find out, I am a mess, I am flooding and I didn't even know it. Typing that sounds arrogant...I don't mean that I thought I was perfect, but I guess I thought I was okay, but I just needed some emotional healing from past wounds. But now it is being revealed that that healing will never come unless I allow myself to be not okay, I have to allow myself to get messy.

This is the part where I always have to ask..."why in the world did I sign up for this!?!"

Advent of Restoration

Sometimes I surprise myself as to how passionate I get about the issue of women's leadership and equality within our culture. I don't have a dramatic story of being burned by male leadership, I thankfully have never been abused by a man, I don't have some qualifier to provide a reasonable explanation for my passion about this issue. But even as I write those words I think how sad it is that I feel I must have a qualifing story in order to substantiate my sense of being "less than" as a woman.

Anyway, this was stirred up within me as I was doing some research for a paper. I came across this quote that I found affirming and lovely and sad all in one. There is still so much about male-female relationships that is yet to be restored:

"Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man - there never has been such another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronised: who never made arch jokes about them...; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unself-conscious. There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity; nobody could possibly guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything "funny" about woman's nature." (Dorothy Sayers, as quoted in the book "Freeing Theology")


Reading this quote makes me realize all the little qualifiers I do have in my life, but more importantly it turns my focus to who Jesus is. I had a professor declare to me last week (in question format) that I must not like Jesus a whole lot. I didn't really like that statement, but in the context of our conversation it made sense. But reading this passage today made me really love Jesus. It made me so excited for the season of Advent that is upon us...I just can't wait to celebrate God's entry into this world that is the answer to all the restoration we need.