Idle and Blessed

I like to be prepared for things. I like to know I'll be good at them before I try. When I was little my sport was soccer (well, first it was tee ball, but I'm not sure that's a sport in itself). I remember doing drills in my front yard over and over with Dad, making sure I'd be able to stop that ball when it came at me from the feet of another team. The games mattered so much. The technique mattered so much. But it was the practice that mattered the most. When I learned Russian I didn't speak much until I knew complete sentences. At the end of my first 3 month trip, Slavik said, "How did you go from knowing 3 words to saying everything? I've never seen anything like it." I like to know I'll be good at things before I try. It doesn't mean I don't love a good challenge. A marathon in the driving rain, 50k of Appalachian terrain, getting a Masters degree, living in Russia…I thrive on challenges, but these are my cha...

There's always a foreground and a background in life, and most of the time we pull only the biggest events to the front, like on our Instagram feeds. The noise and the laughter and the glitter jump forward, and we ignore the rest. Do you remember the 20 minutes you spent in the car going home last night? Of course not. We forget the spaces in our days, if we ever noticed them at all. Yoga teaches that we should pay attention. That we should pull the spaces to the foreground and let some of the busy things fade. There are downward dogs and warrior 2's but there are also the transitions between them, and they're harder. It also teaches us to notice the spaces between the breaths we take. We know there's an inhale. We know there's an exhale. But there are also spaces in between, where we're all empty or all full, and maybe we don't ever notice that, but we should. Because in our frantic hurry, our raging consumerism, our constant need for stimulation, we a...

What if the best things in life are quiet? There's a current running through life that pulls us when we let it. It doesn't talk about goodness, it just goes there. I think a lot of our angst would cease if we let our feet lose ground and go with it. There are times for revolution. There are revolutionary times. There are times when the protesters must march and the preaching must start and the mourners must grow loud, but there is a time to be moved by the current. We are pulled along. The birds and the dirt, the faithful growing of the trees, the mountains' celebratory stance say "from Eden to Eden" and go. They know the earth's cycles. They know their purpose is small. They know the simple goodness of being what you are, and they go with it. They're quiet. My generation has a lot to say. We don't know how much there is to hear, when we stop our chatter. The first question is, "what do you know for sure?" and I say, "the incar...

I think partly I’m homesick. I miss my town. My places and my people, the hills and valleys and the landscape of Familiar. Really familiar. Like, simplistically meaningful. Unassuming and raw and quiet the way Tennessee is. I want that surrounding me again. And Jenny, who turns 24 tomorrow in Thailand, who won’t be home for years. The girl who has seen my soul unedited and loves me still. I’m homesick for her and the other people who grew me. Partly it’s this time of year. November. Two Novembers ago my heart was broken enough to re-chart my course and change my life. The way it gets dark early, the sun fleeing fast each day, like it’s not quite brave enough to stick around; the way the leaves all change colors and die so fast; the way my breath makes clouds when I run long miles…it all brings me back to a profound memory of trying to get out of bed every day, trying to ask God questions with no answers. It could also be the halfway point of my Master...

There are some things about this career path that are impossibly hard. How do I stand in front of 24 state prisoners and teach them medical ethics? They're the ones who really know about abortion, about a stage 4 cancer diagnosis, about losing their parents and kids. And how do I take this Bible I wrestle with and make sense of it? For my theology and my ethic and my world? How do I tell someone where my hope comes from, why I can say "death is not the enemy anymore?" How do I choose to uproot my life every 3 or 4 years and start a new degree? How about choose to really know people in those places I won't stay, those places I know I'll leave behind? I can put up walls and be safer but the heart of God is about risk and costly love and I promised to follow. How do I watch my professor battle disgrace for the sake of the gospel, and still choose to follow in his path? How do I continue to stand in the gap between what I used to believe and what has been re...

"I just wanna make a difference," she said. "I been in here a long time, you know, but I'm about to get out soon. There's a lot of things I want to do." She's tall and authoritative, even sitting down, and her brown eyes are serious. The others always listen when she talks, like she's a wise old woman, but she's probably only 30. She has a lot of opinions, is skeptical of most things, and she talks about suffering more than the others do. When we discussed abortion, she was the first to say a severely disabled child should be "aborted so it wouldn't have to suffer." When we talked about suicide, she didn't raise her hand before giving her opinion. "I just feel like if life is total suffering to someone, they should be allowed to stop it." Why wouldn't we stop suffering? She doesn't talk much about her own life but I see her old suffering, below the surface of her eyes. She takes care of the other women ...

I always really want to be outside. I have a hard time being still. The worst thing about being in school is sitting down under florescent lights to learn. I don't know how people do it all the time, or why. I guess adults in offices everywhere have grown content with it. Have we forgotten what it feels like to be alive in the dirt and sun, learning from the trees we climb and the streams we jump over? Kids know. We should listen. I at least have the luxury of going to work at a yoga studio every other day, instead of a typical office. But there are still days when the little skylight above me is not enough and I leave for lunch just to smell the air. I think if we remembered how mortal we are, we would stop sitting down in buildings. Our bodies are how we move through the world. Our bodies are how we know the world, how our souls find their place in creation. I remember my place in creation when I'm in the woods. When I see the stars and feel the smooth rocks on the b...

We are all just people moving through the maze of life at different speeds and starting times. Learning lessons as we go, as the world speaks to us and bumps up against us in its strange ways. We're just people getting it at different times, standing next to others as they get it too. There's an episode of Gilmore Girls where Rory gets arrested for stealing a boat. Lorelei picks her up from the police station, and they stop at Luke's. While Rory is in the car, Lorelei rants to Luke about the situation, freaking out because she doesn't have soap to wash the fingerprinting ink off her daughter's fingers, and her car is still at the marina. Luke, in his brilliance, just keeps saying common-sense things like, "I have soap," and gives her a doughnut. When Lorelei gets back to the car, suddenly Rory is hit with the reality of the situation. "I was arrested! I have to go to court! Where is my car? I need soap!" And Lorelei just looks at her with the...

I encourage anyone who wants to practice transcendence to take up ultrarunning. I don't have the right words to explain exactly what happens out there on the trail. First my mind stops its linear thoughts and instead starts to swirl around in circles. Tree. Rock. Jump over. The song stuck in my head. Person ahead of me is slowing down. My knee hurts. The wind. I hear the river. The swirling goes on and time doesn't pass in a normal way. After 4 or 5 hours of running, there are less thoughts and more feelings. More noticing. It is no longer "I need to eat exactly 90 calories of carbohydrates at mile 24," but "I'm hungry." And I start to feel pain all over and somehow am completely happy at the same time. I remember seeing a white fuzzy caterpillar around 6 hours in. He was on a rock I jumped on and I made sure not to hurt him. Caterpillar. I can't remember the last time I noticed a white caterpillar. I don't remember anything else from that fe...

How surely gravity's law, strong as an ocean current, takes hold of even the smallest thing and pulls it toward the heart of the world. Each thing - each stone, blossom, child - is held in place. Only we, in our arrogance, push out beyond what we each belong to for some empty freedom. If we surrendered  to earth's intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees. Instead we entangle ourselves in knots of our own making and struggle, lonely and confused. So, like children, we begin again to learn from the things, because they are in God's heart; they have never left him. This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly. -From Rilke's Book of Hours

Your first word of all was light , and time began. Then for long you were silent. Your second word was man , and fear began, which grips us still. Are you about to speak again? I don't want your third word. Sometimes I pray: Please don't talk. Let all your doing be by gesture only. Go on writing in faces and stone what your silence means. You be our refuge from the wrath that drove us out of Paradise. Be our shepherd, but never call us-- we can't bear to know what's ahead. -From Rilke's Book of Hours

About a year ago, Don Miller wrote a blog about why he doesn't go to church , and it went a little viral. I haven't gone back and read it recently, but I remember him saying some things about the modern church being a business, aimed at getting more people in the door and giving them an experience as efficiently as possible. I very rarely attempt to disagree with Donald Miller on things, considering he's the one with the successful career in ministry/writing/blogging/conference-leading and I'm the one sitting on my couch blogging on my old MacBook, but now that the rest of the world is done blasting him for that article, I have some things to say. I don't usually want to go to church. Let's start here. I grew up going to a wonderful, vibrant, connected, growing, teaching church in Nashville that I still call home. My favorite place to be on Sundays (and any other time they let the youth group in) was church, and even when I struggled through my theology clas...

So welcome to mid-September, when pumpkin drinks make their annual debut and candy corn lines the outer walls of grocery stores. But have you stepped outside in Georgia lately? It's still really summer, guys. I always have this frustration with our refusal to see a season all the way through. There might be some mornings when, if you wake up early enough, the dew on the grass and chill in the air talk to you about autumn. But I say let's be here now, in our summer selves, barefoot and warm in the sunshine. Autumn will come soon enough. School will get busier, fall races will be run, pools will close. But for now we have the magic of trees green and lush, tomatoes fresh from the ground, and a sun that flushes cheeks, and my soul isn't ready to come back inside yet.

There are times when distance running is so monotonous that trying to drink from a glass bottle without stopping becomes something joyously interesting to do.

What is it that makes us run from our pain? Turn our backs, avert our eyes. We are shy of ourselves. We hear the rumblings of the deep and sense the darkness that lies beneath our surface, a darkness that quickens the heart and the feet to run. Why? The murky blackness of our souls is something we are prone to sleep through, like the blackness of the night. There is mystery and terror there. There is the fear that if we face our pain it will rise up and flood our whole self, like an ocean the shore can't stop. I have felt this fear. I see it everywhere. And we turn off our awareness of the dark, we turn on every light in the house, anything to keep away the black corners and keep the monsters under the bed. "Go back to sleep," we tell ourselves, and during the day, "Don't slow down." Run and run and run. Sadness and slowness and darkness and fear are ushered out to the prisons and hospitals, and when our own evil breaks out in the streets, like in Fe...

In the certain corner of Christian life I encountered in Tennessee, the sweet and good and true corner I call home even while trudging out beyond it, I learned the way to true compassion for the Other is to be in relationship with them. At my home church, we did missions that way and I was raised on it. Those summers in Russia, as my dearest and oldest blog readers know, were the days I learned that lesson best. I learned that Christian love and ministry is nothing but solidarity with the hurting, although solidarity can have a thousand faces. Our small and me-centered perspectives are always insufficient and the only cure is to go live from someone else's side for a while. I learned what Russian culture is, how the politics play out in people's lives, and what the prevailing opinion on America is from Eurasia, but what really shapes the person I am today are my friendships with them. They are my family. I miss them like I miss my own parents. And never in a million years wou...

It has either been a million years or 44 days since I last posted. The blog says the latter. Not sure I trust it. It's been one heck of a long, full summer. Actually the whole year has been long and full, and I can't help but look back wide-eyed at how far I have traveled literally and metaphorically. I never thought I had it in me to be a pilates instructor or an ultramarathoner. I didn't know I could actually pursue a PhD or teach a bioethics class in a state prison. I didn't know I was capable of managing a thriving studio or living in a city like this, and yet here I am. It all makes me feel so young sometimes. Like I only barely know what I'm doing in any given area. The best part about being 23 is having the freedom and energy to do all the scattered things you enjoy doing while having full creative license to dream about the future. I dream about a career in ethics, living in places like Colorado and Chicago and Vancouver, hiking the Appalachian Trail and...

As a young female runner, I've been programmed to be afraid of certain types of people. There's a level of profiling that happens when I'm alone on the city streets. Even in daylight there are places I won't go and people I will avoid by crossing the road. Car honks and cat calls, among worse things, reinforce my suspicion that I am never truly safe. And then every so often in Atlanta, Georgia, one of those fear-inducing people will start cheering me on from the bus stop, and it really gets to the heart of what heaven will be like. Sometimes I can't believe it's coming, but I still look for the day when I will not be afraid, when I will not stereotype my brothers and sisters, and when we will all surprise each other with hope.

I'm not one for over-analyzing everyday happenings. Ok, that's a total lie. But I've gotten pretty good at letting things simmer for a while before extracting the meaning from them. Most of the time life is more like a crockpot than a microwave, and contrary to my Gen Y instant-gratification tendencies, there are certain things I put in the back seat until time gives me the perspective to resolve them. Church is one thing I am parking right now. That car is parked. I'll figure out my ecclesiology someday, but that day is not Friday, June 20, 2014. Stem cell research is also parked. I could go on. But there are some things that are in high gear right now for me, I'm telling you - try being a 22 year old woman in Div school studying social ethics and you'll see what I mean. The Bible, women's roles, healthcare access, immigration, incarceration, and all the bioethics you can imagine are moving along in my brain. Full steam ahead. Things are a'c...

Loneliness is nearly always a stranger. When it comes knocking I start to ask questions. It’s just that I’m used to having so much going on externally that I need to shelter my inner world. Protect my energy, ration it. There’s only so much I can store up for a day. I use it up on the people I really care about, the ones I am invested in. The members of my “home team” usually, or the important things like school and work. The problem with this phenomenon called introversion is that it can look like being antisocial or boring or whatever, but I really think that says more about the dysfunction of an extraverted culture than anything else. Boundaries between the self and the other are a natural part of human dignity. It’s a healthy thing to be able to protect the life force inside of you, to be able to say, “here is the line where my energy is at its limit today.” When I get lonely it can mean I have energy to spare, but not usually. Usually it means I’ve been ...