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...