I told you I'd be back today.

Today has been a fantabulous day, I tell you.  After getting the book from my friend, I decided to have a quiet day of cleaning and reading.  It was great.  I've read both the new book and the vampyre book, and I packed a few boxes, cleaned the kitchen & bathroom AND mopped.  AND went running with a friend AND made dinner- including a side salad.  Look at me go! 

This book, bittersweet, is really good.  It's very small chapters describing tiny pieces of her year/year and a half of brokenness.  She sees the times when she focused on the wrong thing and, like Lewis's house of cards, she realizes that her faith was never really there.  All she ever wanted was to get what she wanted, not to be molded by God. 

As I go through this tumultuous time in my life, I'm pleased to see that I'm not quite in the same place she was.  I do trust God and want to float on his waves more than I want to fight them.  This book is speaking to my heart, but it's also helping me to stand up and claim that vibrant faith I've been praying about.  I know that everything in my life right now is very good, so I need to stop moping. 

One of the most powerful chapters so far is one in which she addresses the poisonous command she once gave herself:  DO EVERYTHING BETTER.  She took each word apart and realized how she was (and many of us do) beating herself down with them.  I was happy when I realized that this was my own book and I could write in it.  I starred this section:

There is work that is only mine to do:  a child that is ours to raise, stories that are mine to tell, friends that are mine to walk with.  The grandest seduction of all is the myth that DOING EVERYTHING BETTER gets us where we want to be.  It gets us somewhere, certainly, but not anywhere worth being.

 I really love what she says are her jobs.  I love it.  I love the idea of fully inhabiting your life and seeing all parts of it as a unique vocation- not comparing yourself to others because they cannot do what you are supposed to do.  

Gah! I got nuthin'!

I almost forgot to blog, but here I am, and boy-o, are you glad!

Let me think if I read anything today other than twitter & facebook....hmmm...well...no...mmm...OOOH!  I did!  I actually read a little devotional book.  I was feeling down & like I needed some good, old-fashioned, health & wealth kind of faith talk, so read my devotional book by Kenneth & Gloria Copeland.  It's in Spanish, so I also get to work my skills while spending time with God.  Double-duty.

Anyway, it was really good!  It was about the parable of the sower, specifically the soil that is fertile but the rocks & weeds & the cares of this world come up and choke out the word.  This immediately gave me a new energy and a better attitude. 
a) I need to read my Bible or have intentional time with God much more often than I have been.  It's just ridiculous.
b) I need to figure out if the weeds & rocks are just my thoughts and I need to remember the word, or if I have too much stuff crowding in on me, which makes it hard to remember the word. 

It reminded me of the idea of having defensible space around your house if you live in a fire-prone area.  I need a defensible space around my life, my health, and my relationship with God. 

I may have just made a decision.

Ooh! Famous Bloodlines!

I'm addicted to ancestry.com and I'm having a great time trying to go back as far as I can to see where my family came from.  Along the way, I've had a few surprises. 

I've found out that I'm not as Irish as I thought, which bums me out.  My grandma always thought that my grandpa was 100% Irish, but he was only 1/2 or 1/3.  I'm just as French and English as I am Irish. 

Also, going into this, I thought that I'd certainly get a couple hundred years back, being that we have names, papers, and dates.  The ways I've always defined myself: German, Irish, and Finnish?  They've left me out in the dark.  The English and the French, though?  I'm all the way back to the 10th century, and it's a lot of fun.

Of course, I now need to go through and double-check those family members, because as I get my bearings on the site, I'm starting to learn the lame tricks or lazy things that people do to keep their trees going.  What is the #1 favorite thing for people to do?  Insert a famous person! 

Believe me, I want to be related to Queen Elizabeth I so bad I can taste it, and I do get geeked when I see a famous name pop up on a tree, but I also have a healthy skepticism and the internet, so I do a search when, oh William Wallace pops up in my direct line, y'know, just to check things out.  Oh, lookee there!  It turns out that it's really easy to check on the actual family relations of historical figures and especially royalty!  So, no, so far I'm not related to any rebel leaders, high kings, Lady Godiva (seriously), or Elizabeth Tudor.  I'm not even related to the guy who saved the life of Henry VIII (her dad!) once & got a title for it.  I checked.

Additionally, I'm pretty sure that most women didn't have their first kids when they were 5, or their last one when they were 80.  Now, I was dubious about the late-30's and 40's for mothers, but I poked around and found out that women had children quite late back in the day.  They pretty much started at puberty and didn't stop until a) menopause or b) death, whichever came first.

I am, however related to Gov. John Winthrop, 1st gov. of Mass., and a founder.  My family has been in the New World for hundreds of years, both in Canada and in the Colonies.  My family has been a part of Michigan and Detroit for hundreds of years- when Detroit was still a French territory.  And George Washington is a distant cousin, as I'm sure he is for a bajillion people. 

Overall, I'm having a lot of fun, though I do get frustrated every day with the stupidity of some people and what they'll blindly put on their trees and then allow to proliferate.  Now, if you'll excuse me, instead of going to bed, I have to go double check and see if I really am 1,456,894th in line for the throne of Belgium.

Long time, no see

Hello, bloggity-blog and the readers out there. Of course, the majority of you that come here are looking for a poster of "A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste." Of course, you fine folks won't even see this post, because you'll be taken to an older one where I had a link to said poster. Others of you are looking for Bible verses about sleep. Hopefully, you were taken directly to that post, too. If not, hi! Welcome.

I don't have lots of terribly deep things to say, but it's a downright crime that I haven't written in so long. So, as I sit here, avoiding reading for class and suffering the effects of eating ENTIRELY too many apple chips, I shall recap a bit of life.

As you my know, my sister and brother-in-law lost their daughter in January. That really sucked. I have realized that I haven't really gone through the mourning process before, because this hit me differently than I expected. I suppose that when my grandma died, she had been sick, and she was old-ish, so it wasn't as horrible. I was mighty sad, but there wasn't a lot of confusion or back and forth about it. Just the knowledge that death sucks.

But with Adi's death, it was different. It has hit me in ways that I still don't even realize-just this past Sunday, I was telling someone about what happened and I cried again. I'm sad that this little girl died and that she was sick, but I'm mostly sad for my sister & bro-i-l. I hate the pain that my sister went through, the fear that my bro-i-l had to face, the sadness that they feel in their souls and bodies.

I want it all to make sense. To work out. To be clear. I wanted to find the magic bullet answer in the Bible so I could tell her that THIS, James 17:8 (no such verse) or the theological construct of God's providence and blah-blah is what will make it align, make life (and God) look fair, and will make the sun shine. I actually was pretty desperate for that for a while. I read, I asked pastors and friends, and I prayed and cried. And this was all more than a month after she died.

I knew that grief was a roller-coaster, but I didn't think I was going to be on it. But mine is definitely a kiddie ride compared to my sister's. I've had to learn to step back and let them ride theirs, and that I can't control it. Every up or down isn't their final landing place. They'll get wherever "there" is, and God is with them, whether or not they always see him or hear him.

But we're all doing better now. Well, most of us. They're going to be okay. I'm not worried, at least not today. Pharmaceuticals and C.S. Lewis have helped a lot.

This is from A Grief Observed, and it blew me away:

God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn’t. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. He only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down.

So, I guess I got deep after all. I'll write about Twilight next time.

What I've Learned Lately

1) I'm happier being outside than being inside. I was going to say, "I like being outside better," but that's not completely true. The lazy flesh wants to stay inside, vegetate, be fat and unhappy. Without fail, though, as soon as I step outside, I'm happier and feel better. I've known for a while that I need the sun, but I'm pleased to see that it's just the outdoors in general.
It hit me more clearly a couple weeks ago when I got up, was exhausted and foggy, and I needed a Coke, but there was none in the house. I got in the car to drive to Jack in the Box for a Coke, but I really didn't need it by the time I got there. Once I left my house, I was feeling more awake and chipper.
I've always wanted to be Outdoor Girl, and I believe that I finally am her!

2) Perception is NOT reality. I've said the opposite in the past, and I think that the opposite is true as far as our actions and psychology go, but we really need to get back to focusing on the actual reality of the situations. Where did I have this revelation? At the Exploratorium.
We were going through all the visual experiments, and I learned about the nerves on the backs of our eyes. They are ALWAYS in our field of vision, but our brains block them out. Now, I've heard things like this before, and I know that our brains fill in our blind spots with what they're pretty sure is there. I also know concretely from Carson and other places that we have messed up perceptions of our bodies. It's just that it finally hit me in a real way as a scientific fact, not just psychological mumbo jumbo. The way I think of and see my body isn't necessarily real. It's not what's actually there.
That can go either way in my case, because I often think I'm totally adorable, and then I see a picture and change my mind. So which is real? The cute or the hateful captured in the picture? And other days I feel super ugly in person, or I can get a picture that I love.
But I had to sit there and gather myself and try to not cry in the children's museum because it finally hit me that our eyes and minds lie to us. I kind of think it's great.