Lit With Hope

It's simple today.

In a big, gigantic hurting world like this one, there is sometimes nothing more comforting than coming home to your very own place.  I walked out of my school tonight with a pile of papers, through the flurries, through the traffic, and straight home to peace.  Pajamas, a candle, my fireplace, the tree.  I am delighting in Advent at home.

I have a lot of papers to grade tonight, but I took a minute to just enjoy that I am safe and warm and that even when I have that one last push of work, that one last stack of papers to grade, I can still settle in to the mystery that is Christ.  Emmanuel, God with us.  He even sits with me while I grade.  

We need Him so deeply, and today I feel it.  Distinctly, a heart ache and a hope, and a light in the darkness.

A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices. 

Cadence

I don't intend for life to be heavy on this blog.  Sometimes when I begin it feels this way, but maybe that just being honest.  Or maybe it's the poetry stuck in my throat, dislodged by the clickety clack of typing. 

Or maybe heavy is sometimes really goodness considered from all sides.

Mercy Love of Old

It's hard for me to write to anything lately, at least anything meaningful.  I am full to the brim with unpolished thoughts.  Today I'd just like to share this song, and it's a good one.  And lyrics are poetry and music, and that really helps.  Ellie Holcomb's 'Place My Hope' is beautiful and comforting and some of the realest stuff of my life.  Enjoy.

White Winter, Rich and Full

Snow and winter and winter and snow.  
I like today. 
It is blissfully quietly introverted time. 
Just flannel. 
Just the quintessential 'Winter Song'. 
Just a little white cup of coffee, and on it the letter 'j'. 
Just one white candle which somehow blends the scents of mint and winter.  (MAGICAL THING.) 
Ticking clock. 
Cozy home. 
Day full of challenges suited to my calling. 
Challenging, for sure, but interesting and purposed nonetheless.

Changing Winds

November has arrived, and I welcome it. 
(See related post in previous Novembers.   This is an unapologetic trend.)

Every year I feel a relief in this month, because the world quiets down.  I find my cadence as a teacher, and the days move seamlessly.  I can take a breath.  I remember my place.  

Sometimes at school it's astonishing to me that it takes so long for everyone to find this rhythm to life.  Other times it's astonishing that it all comes together so fast.  It's only been a few weeks (of reckoning moments, awkward moments, brilliant hopeful moments, tiring moments, confusing moments....etc....) with kids, and now they are my people.  I know what need.  They know what I mean.  Relief.  

Joy, Small and Holy

Let me tell you a story about something small and refreshing in this world.

Last week I was visiting my sister and brother-in-law in Texas, and I was inspired at Chipotle.  We had the best time. (I mean, in general on that trip...outside of Chipotle too.)  On the Chipotle bag, there are now Cultivating Thoughts.  It's some good, thought provoking ideas getting magnified in concise and interesting ways. 

My Twin

So. Wow.  This week I discovered a blog called 'Love, Teach'.  I'm inspired.  There is someone out there who is creepy similar to me in all things teacher. 

Reasons why....

Quiet, Slow, and Thrilling

Today is a day for big thoughts.

Last year my sister met and began to love Levi, and today I finally board a plane to see them.  We've been waiting for this.  And guess what?  Sometimes life really is like a movie.  Call me sentimental, but I say that 'slow motion happy' is very real.  Tonight the comfort of my homey childhood will fill me up, just standing there with Levi and Jenna for two seconds at the airport.  And tomorrow morning I'll be having coffee with my sister in Texas.  This is quietly thrilling. 

Sometimes life is big in the minutes you wait through too.  Each minute this week is 'stolid, all things a century' to me because I'm waiting for news of a friend and her baby.  

New Page

I am doing that thing again where I stop and start, stop and start again with writing. (New page, new thoughts.) I think you call this writer's block.  Or 'scattered teacher with a complex that writing isn't as valuable as everything else you love'. 

Of course that's not true.  And that's what I must first declare in order to writ anything else past this one singular sentence.  A pause, a breath, an anchored thought is very worth the time.  What follows this of course is further stillness in chaotic, frenetic places. 

You level out and become more yourself and live in the world more freely when you give voice and credit to the thing you really love.   When you inhabit what you are passionate about, it stills things that needed to be stilled and enhances the rest of the story you're supposed to live. 

Invited Back

“I have also long held the belief that one's tears are a guide, that when something makes you cry, it means something. If we pay attention to our tears, they'll show us something about ourselves.” 

― Shauna Niequist, Bread & Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table, with Recipes

Morning Manifesto

Sometimes in this world there are songs that go right to your heart. 

Straight to you, past everything....all sounds and voices and distractions, and right to the place you needed to be tended.  I think that God does that to remind you of Himself and that you are, as a beloved person that He has made, being seen and talked to in your day.

Year 8 Begins

 

It's the first day of school. 

(!!!!!)

I am 8 years into the life of this profession, and I am happy to say that while I still picked out very carefully what I will wear, there is no longer a pit inside my stomach on these days.  I feel happy to be Miss Christians again.  I feel excited to meet 186 people again and welcome them to my class.  

Juxtaposed

This is what God feels like today.

Last night I received the terrible news that someone I knew and loved had died.  For the sake of grief and time and a thousand private thoughts, I'm refraining from sharing overly much here.  But I will say that it is loss of family in the 'walking-around life' of a close friend. I am feeling this from all sides. 

More Themselves Than Ever

"When He [God] talks of their losing their selves, He means only abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever.”

- C.S. Lewis

Messy

Summer for this teacher was wonderful. 
Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. 

I found the magical things that refreshed me, and bound up the ways I had been unraveled in the spring.  And then, after all of the big and small things in that season, I found myself back at school. 

Life this week is everything I used to do in the spring, but it's fresh again.  Without fail this week is fresh bulletin boards and long meetings and pencils and copies and protocol.  And don't forget the crazy nightmares about losing control entirely.  (I hear you always have those, no matter how old you get.)  But in one said meeting today, our speaker said this.

'Teaching is messy.'

Breezy Trees, Summer Sky, and Jesus

There’s a certain amount of pressure for all of us, I think, to be endlessly productive, to create content around the clock, to say big things every day.....

Let’s resist that. It’s not how nature works. It’s not how seasons work. There’s planting and reaping and harvesting, and there’s the practice of letting a field lay fallow for a while, allowing it to prepare again to produce. For the first time in a long time, I’m practicing silence, laying fallow, trusting that the world will keep spinning quite happily without quite so many words from me.

I’m going to listen more than I speak, rest more than I produce, read more than I write, say“no, thank you” more than I say “yes, please, and quick, and more!”

I didn't write this.  Shauna Niequist did.   But I started there because until today, it's how I felt exactly.  

Switching

I'm done. 

With the D.C. trip.

With my long, winding habit of grading papers in the 13-14 school year. 

With doing things as I can in the moment, knowing I'll have to circle back later and actually do it well.

With crazy, cluttered thinking. 

Hiding Within The Vine

Sometimes when life is loud you move through it differently than you would in the deep silence of another season, one less full.  I like reading things from a bunch of people out there in the world who maintain a site called 'The Art of Simple', and of course it's because they're interested in simplicity.  Like me.  We live in a really complicated world, and the older I get, the more I see with real depth and clarity, that I like things simple.

Prosaic Mosaic

Spring is the time of year when I am humbled as a teacher.  Also just as a person, but it goes to teaching first.  I feel it keenly every year, and now I just expect it.  I am tired.   I am being simplistic.  I am streamlining things.  I am thinking about priorities, and not trying to control too much.  But there is still a lot to do.

There are a lot of things I could write right about now which would, what, somehow prove that I'm busy and really feeling it...?  But I don't want to.  Half of me says I chose teaching, so own it.  Another half says that you don't do this to people unless they're your people.  (And they've already been hearing from me this week.)   Meanwhile, I am doing my best. 

Every year though I discover again in this feeling of ratty humanity that God is artful in how He designed us.  We're wretched and vile and don't have very many manners and sometimes we're just tired.  A few weeks ago I heard the term 'human sandpaper' and it rang in my ears.  It has not left.  Even the students, when they hear a loud noise now, comment on it.   People have short fuses.  In this, I realized that it makes us still, thank you God, long for and hope for something beyond ourselves.  How relieving that it is not just about us.  

Short Speak

Today is....


The Head and the Heart and The Killers
grading
a conversation with  my mom
coffee
the smell of spring
classic awkward traffic in Stillwater, Minnesota
(why?...always?....never before have I seen so many angry decision makers on small quiet roads...)
deadlines
more deadlines
intentional smiling, the real kind, when your eyes crinkle

Furiously Loved in A Tangled, Redeemed Place

"Beauty. Redemption. Miracles. Wholeness. Healing. Renewal. Friendship. Conversation. Prayer. Worship. Work. Music. Art. Justice. Jubilee. Mercy. Love. Sex. Aging. All redeemed.

I want to see the light and I want to see the trees. I want to learn to see them both, moving quickly, stirring with the wind of the Spirit.  I think the Kingdom is more poetry to bear and live into throughout our life, than dictionary definitions to memorize or boundaries to place. Go for a drive, go for a walk, look up and fill your eyes with the Kingdom already come."


This comes from Sarah Bessey who is current inspiration in my life.  When I read Sarah Bessey, it feels like the things I think about (and wanted to say) magically floated through space and time and landed somewhere else far away.  I like Sarah Bessey's words because she is refreshing in the age of reason in which we currently find ourselves.  I become reminded to inhabit my life, to breathe the words I speak fully, and to let the Spirit of God inhabit my life too.

Careworn Little Heart

"The Ragamuffin Gospel....is not for the super spiritual....is not for the fearless or the tearless....

The Ragamuffin Gospel was written for the bedraggled, beat up and burnt-out.....it is for the sorely burdened who are still shifting the heavy suitcase from one hand to another....it is for the poor, weak, sinful men and women with hereditary faults and limited talents...."

I took little parts of the forward of Brennan Manning's book, wrote them out, and put them on my desk.  For moments like this.  Right here, right now when the words would feel profound for my careworn little heart.  

Fine Tuned Old Soul Things

Spring always surprises me, probably because I love it so much, and it is so fleeting.  It's short and intense at school, but at home, it is slow and still.  It draws me back to favorite things of life (and ever the introspection) like November does. But I'm busier now, and so today when I woke up, everything was weird, weird weird.  Seasons are changing again, and I'm a fine tuned person.  (If I have learned anything personal in my 20s with more clarity, it is this.)  But maybe spring feels different this year, or still unconnected to me despite the fact that it is April, because I have moved. 

Vaporous

It is the kind of day where I am running on fumes.  My comrade in teaching just let me dig through her drawer for tea or coffee or something, and when I found instant coffee (very bold, definitely old) from Starbucks, I felt like I hit the jackpot.  I poured hot water into this cup and the whole classroom filled up with the promising aroma of coffee. 

I imagined the steam swirling all around (like I'm Pocahontas in a Disney movie) and I could breathe and pray again.  And then I went to the computer and heard the clickety clack of the letters on the keyboard as I typed, and I didn't feel so rattled anymore.   

So now the confessions emerge. 

Holy. Set Apart. Good.

(Put a bird on it!)

Yesterday at school, I started thinking about 'Joy to the World'. 

Uncommon thinking for life so late in March, I know, but there it was. A lingering thought about how much I love the song.  This year at Christmas I loved it especially, and it was because I mostly heard it Sufjan style.  Sufjan Stevens makes me think of my cousins, somehow always cooler, older, more advanced in the world than me.  Somehow always still watching out for me too.  When I was little they would tease.  I fell for everything, every time.  When I got older, they were my friends.  Of all the people in the world, these are some of my favorites. 

Pausing to Look

Inspiration this week?  For me, a list like this....

• Psalm 107 - God is in all places and reaches out to meet the needs of His people
• Starry Night by Van Gogh above my desk at school
• Blue Nalgene bottles and cool water which is helping to fight away the sickness that is creeping into my voice as I teach
• This
• Also this

Plain and Simple

I think that sometimes life is just really simple, and we make it complex.

How's that for a loaded statement?  It's nothing new or original, but I want to write about it today because I tend to need the reminder.  I am guilty of complexity, when all that is necessary is a breath, a prayer, a smile.  I've been trying to step out of this complexity for a while now because so much of the world is the business of busy, looking busy, staying busy.  I feel really tired of that look on people I know and love.  I also don't like it on me. 

I've got a problem with the word 'busy' and try not to use it, but two weeks ago before Spring Break, I saw a look in my eyes, and it belied the conversation.  

So enters the discussion called 'What I Am Learning in This Season of My Life'.   

Roads and Trips

I'm going on a road trip soon, and I'm so ready for it. Do you know road trips are one of my favorite things?  I feel like the Midwestern variety of people in this country are really good at these things, because they're necessary in order to go anywhere cool. 


One time, a (nameless) family member told me they hated road trips.  ('What do you do anyway?  Just sit there?')  It felt fundamentally wrong to hear this, and I have never forgotten it.  No, you don't just sit there.  You gaze at the horizon and see everything all at once.  

Me? Human? Yes.

Do you know this movie?  Don't mind the (appropriately labeled) calendar.  This moment in the movie was life today for me.

One thing that is interesting (read: annoying) to me about my life is that, sometimes, when things aren't ok, I'm the last one to admit it.  It's been a few days now, and I am trying to remind myself again and again that, like everyone else on the planet, sometimes I am just that human.  My spirit will become low, my health will fail me, my mind will become scattered and cloudy.  

That.  I am feeling that.   And I hear the arrogance behind it.
 
Moi?  Sick?  (Sure, sometimes.) 
Scattered?  In need of sleep?  In need of a good cry?  (Probably.) 
Needing a break?  (Yes, definitely.) 

What The Author Wrote For My Day

Today.
Some silence.
Drive time.
Cityscape gazing.
Hip hop.
Worship. 
Thoughts of lost sheep and Zephaniah 3:17.
My pastor doesn't avoid the beautiful reckoning moments of the Gospel.  He reminds me each week of God's character. 'Praise be to God, this is what he is like'  = a balm to my very soul.
Friendship.
Thoughts of Home.
Sunday dinner with kindred spirits and cousins.
Peace and sunny windows. 
Tea...green, cream with honey.

Retrospect

Yesterday I got to school and took down the snowflakes.  It was just the right time.  

We hang snowflakes every year, a hundred of them at least, from the ceiling and some in the windows too.  It is a tradition, something I fell into in Year 1.  Ah, Year 1 of the teaching life.  Snowflake Day 2008 emerged from a desperate attempt to fill time before Christmas Break.  Now, it's a 'thing'. 

I get nostalgic and sentimental about Snowflake Day because this is when all of my students, not just the loud ones, show me in class who they really are.  I'm up on the ladder and there's Christmas music blaring and it's loud and crazy and wonderful.  It's ordered chaos.  I love that time, I'm waiting for it, because they live so tightly in the fall at school.  At least some do.  They're worried about getting to class at the right second and where they will sit for lunch (legitimate) and what I will think of them.  It's nestled into the year at the point when we're happy to have snow, late  in slate gray November, 4 weeks before Christmas.  

Then, in the season we're in now, they come down, and I see again just how much real, authentic growth happens in these people every year. And in me. In the dead of winter, under the snowflakes. 

Counting Down

The story of today is that everyone I teach is taking a test.  Or a quiz.  Some are nervous, others going with the flow, hoping down the hours to Spring Break, which starts at the end of tomorrow.  In between us are the bells and the busses and the locker clean out (someone spilled juice, and the hall has begun to smell), and finishing those last tests and doing those concerts and then....a break.  We are all ready. 


Yesterday I went to a restaurant and everything I ordered was out of order.  I didn't even notice, but everyone else at the table did.  Basic conversation was difficult?  Yes.  My mind is slipshod, scattered, all over.  That's because all of the week before a test is review review review, and who is prompting them with a thousand questions?  Me.  Every hour, so many people, so much history.  So many thousands of conversations about history.  

Stories of Stories

Something is happening lately in my life that is making stories all around me seem bigger than ever.  'I have always felt that life is a story...'....yes, I love that line.  But now, it's more.  More about God and His work, more about the world seen from many angles.  Less about my own part of it. 

This story is worth telling.  

Tiny Sentence, Fierce and Loving

This comes from a brilliant little moment in a C.S. Lewis book.  (Do you know it?)  I've got this tiny sentence on my desk at school this year, and I need it so badly because it encourages the life I want to live.  I like it because it's simple. 

And simple things are favorite things.


I think that whether or not people like to admit it, this courage is what everyone needs.   More often than anything else, the strength that follows 'Courage, dear heart' is the answer to what they are praying for.  It calms what rattles, and it comes from Jesus, who is so good.  I cannot say enough about the goodness of Jesus to me, and how often in the last few weeks and months I have felt that in the core again of who I really am. 

The Quintessential Talk of the Teacher in March

No more talk of winter.  I now turn my heart towards spring. 

I woke up today to a series of e-mails from best kindred hearts, and they all said the same thing.  Take a trip.  Take a breath.  Go away for a while.  I'm taking that advice, and listening to these friends, mostly because I've been living in molasses.  Not a difficult thing considering said previously overly discussed weather and the teaching life in February. 

I've avoided talk of it here, but it will be said once.  February is the lowest of the low in the cycle of teaching.  It doesn't translate to everyone else who has a job in February and feels the same way, but in our world, in this cycle of knowing kids, working with them, encouraging them, and sometimes just surviving amidst them,  this is where it's toughest.

Yesterday at lunch my friends and I talked about waking up again, and how you come alive in a different ways in different seasons.  (Such a needed conversation.)  I got out of Dodge a few years ago in March, and of course it was perfect.  I went to Connecticut, which is where my friends lived with their new baby.  I took a plane ride by myself and got caught up in interesting conversations with strangers.  I drove along roads that ran parallel to the sea.  I ate seafood and thought colonial things.  But mostly, I breathed. 

Ice

Last weekend I was walking down the sidewalk, and a distinct thought came to mind.   'I am now a person who lives my life on the ice.' 

This is Minnesota.  The ice is still with us, a part of a cycle that we all know so well.  School is cancelled.  The salt doesn't work.  The temps are hovering around 0.  You can't see buildings from the road so you have to guess at the right turn when you're looking for some new place.  I am doing my very best to keep a good perspective going here.  Forever is just a feeling.  Soon it will be spring and then summer.    Life sails by, right?  Lots of this feels relative, right?  Right.   

Cathedral Heart

Music has been helping me.   

With winter.
With change.
With feeling life from all sides.

And I will tell you that these days, like never before, I am waking up with a song that stays with me all day long.  I think God is talking to me through sounds and telling me to be quiet and listen.  I don't read too much into it but I used to.  Now I am letting it come exactly as its supposed to. 

This listening, in a fresh way, is brightening my world.  It is making things softer than they were before, and I so welcome this because naturally, I tend to love talk.  Listening to the world, really like you're supposed to, is learned behavior for sure, and an intentional habit that opens me up again to things I love best.  Words and conversation and new stories fill me up and if I'm not careful, there I go.  Away, distinctly, in the direction of a thousand thoughts all my own.  

But lately, reverie and listening and a certain song for a certain day.  

Write to Write

Sometimes, I am learning, you write to write.  That's it.  Because that's all of what you can do.  My life today is not so glamorous.  In fact, I'm kind of broken.  When you feel broken, what do you say?  What do you do?  Sometimes you just breathe and blink and forge on.  People like me think about Psalms and humanity and God who is good throughout all the ages.  But later, when everything isn't public, pen and paper draw me back to another self.  I write sometimes because it's like the heartbeat I have, and because it's the thing that makes the most sense, and because it reminds me of God looking over my shoulder, which is comforting. 

Today God IS looking over my shoulder, whispering things into my ear that are falling onto pages that are in front of me. 

Dot Dot Dot, Deep Down Happy

The happiest place for me in a soul weary state is the bookstore.  Yesterday I felt worn out, stale and burnt out, and I knew I needed permission to go somewhere and get lost.  I wanted book reading and it wanted me.  

Hello, bookstore. 

When I go into a place like HalfPrice Books, I sense the subculture.  I feel it as soon as I open the door.  There's Doctor Who stuff everywhere, and notecards with all kinds of Zen sayings on them.   I am not drawn to those things at all, but it's comforting to know that every time, every time, I go there, someone is asking about these things.  'Where are the Doctor Who magnets?'  (Somehow this is always very pressing.) 

Sometimes I like being among things that really aren't like me.  I think it has the power to level out the thinker's heart.