Idle and Blessed

I had a dream a couple nights ago that I went back to Russia. I wasn't ready for it for some reason; I was already there before I decided if I even wanted to go. I remember thinking it was too expensive, but I was having a hard time stopping the whole thing. Traveling was normal and quick, since that particular itinerary is somewhat normal to me now, but I began to realize it was TOO normal. I was going to Russia, but I wasn't leaving home. When I got there, Russia was in my living room, in my house in Spring Hill. Tanya was there. I saw Tima. I held Karina's hand. But the person I was really looking for was Nadya. I walked down the stairs into the bottom level of our house and found her, and we were so happy to see each other we could hardly talk. I asked her where my baby girl was, and she brought her to me so I could hold her - baby Tanya, wrapped in a wad of pink blankets. She wasn't a newborn anymore, and that made me sad, because I realized I won't ever get to...

"I've been thinking about grace a lot. And writing about that. I guess because imperfection bothers me, and I'm realizing just how short we come of measuring up. All of us, even in normal, everyday interactions." Dr. Curtis just nods his head, in that way of his, with his eyes closed and his small frame sinking into the couch cushions. If the vagueness of my ramblings ever occurs to him, he doesn't acknowledge it. I don't really think acknowledging vagueness is possible for him. He just nods, like everything makes sense, everything is worth feeling, everything resonates with him. I'm aware of how blessed I am to have professors like Ben Curtis. Professors who see me as a person and not a number, who know me well enough to have me in their office for conversations like this. Who remember what graduate schools I'm looking at and what my major is. Who offer their advice when I ask and suggest books I need to read. People say there are two sides to every s...

The past few days I have been sending and receiving emails from Russia like nobody's business. I've been obsessed with certain pictures of a certain baby girl: Her name is Tantiana and I love her. She doesn't know it yet, but I do. Her parents, Sasha and Nadya, and Slavik and Tanya have been having a really hard time lately, so I'll extend the request they gave me: МОЛИСЬ ЗА НАС ПОЖАЛУСТА (please pray for us). My "Russia" life and my "Belmont" life have been very, very polarized lately, even with the emails and the difficult Russian class I'm taking. It probably is because I've been so preoccupied with school and the tough lessons God is teaching me here that I can't really remember what it was like to be there, pouring out instead of God pouring into me. I mean, he is always pouring into me, but you know. Somehow I feel like right now, in Nashville, as a junior at Belmont, things are all about my formation and shaping and learning and ex...

My entire being is a jumbled mess of everything. In yoga classes, when you’re supposed to close your eyes and look into your own soul from the outside, I usually just pray instead because I don’t know what “looking at your soul from the outside” really means. But right now I do. And it’s that scene on the news, the helicopter cam looking down on the land where a tornado was. It’s those paintings in the children’s section of the Frist where all the colors are muddled together into brown because kids can’t really use paintbrushes. It’s that sentence you can’t get out so you keep stuttering and mixing words together because you’re nervous. It’s how you would imagine drowning being like if you can see the glimmer of daylight through the water but can’t tell which way is up. That’s my soul. That’s what it looks like from the outside. I’ve been going through the days by swinging in the middle of calmness and frenzy. Silence and screaming. Fake and real. Up and down. I keep thinking either th...

There are some times in life when all of the sudden something explodes and you become a different person. These are the times in my life I have come to fear, expect, love, hate, stand in awe of; in some ways I invite them in, wish for them, pray for them, and in some ways I expend lots of energy trying to avoid them. I think a lot of people refer to these times as crises. Crisis. That’s got to be one of my favorite words, because (side note) I use it all the time about everything, especially when I want to exaggerate, which is every minute. But still, crises shape us in a very strange and unpredictable way, and I feel like if we all just sat down with our neighbors and recalled the crises in our lives we would all get to know each other better, and we would get to know something really important about humanity and about life. Again with the side notes. Last night I met some friends my roommate had over, and we stood in the kitchen for a while and talked about moments of panic ...

Do you ever get frustrated with how hard it is to connect with people? To dance the dance of cultural norms and social graces, work through the limited medium of language, and get over the inner life of our minds to enter into the life of the Other while making ourselves known. Enter dishonesty, pride, fear, apathy, and selfishness, and there's not much hope left for authentic communication. I mean, that's not true. Because somehow we humans still manage to communicate with each other semi-effectively most of the time. My point is just that it can be really difficult. I've been in a phase lately of wishing I could just shed my skin and leave behind the clutter and brokenness of this life. Of myself. I have little patience for imperfection right now. Admittedly that is a problematic place, one that I hope to grow away from soon. But for now, I'm here. I'm reading a book called Soul Making for class, about one man's journey of discovering desert spiritua...

Sometimes it’s the goodbyes that I remember the clearest. I’ve been six times, and the years blend together like the long summer days of a Tennessee August. Hard to sort out in your mind where one ended and the other began. But when I think back on those six goodbyes, I can see snapshots of them all pretty clearly if I try. The first year I remember shaking hands with Slavik and saying “baka.” I remember that because I later wondered if it was improper to say “baka” instead of the more formal “das vidanya,” and it ate me up all year until I realized it wasn’t that big of a deal, and people like Slavik don’t hold it against me even if it was. The second year was the year I cried because Katya left without saying goodbye to me. So Anya called her and let me talk to her on the phone, and I just remember standing there in Anya’s room crying like a fool because I already missed Katya and it was occurring to me I wouldn’t see her again for a year. Years three and four are less de...