Pain Hurts Me

I experience emotional pain very physically.  Maybe that's normal, I don't know.  I've never been in anyone else's skin to understand how they feel their lives as they happen but I know that the word 'hurt' is so accurate. Pain really hurts me.  When I see starving children on my television, when I learn of the death of a friend, my heart literally hurts.  Like a little bomb has just exploded in there, leaving bits of me scattered all around, bleeding.  I often say, "Ouch, my heart".  I know that sounds childish maybe, but its the only word I have.  Ouch.  That hurts.  When I found out that my mom has cancer I spent nearly a week feeling physically ill.  It was so real that I even jotted it just so that I would remember it later.  "My skin hurts, like the sun is burning me".  Hurting skin.  Like I my body was trying to escape the covering that traps it in the here and now.  Sometimes we long to escape it, to run away.  And I've recently been feeling a new pain, more of an heaviness really.  Occasionally, out shopping or on the street, at the most unpredictable and inconvenient times, I'll see a beautiful baby, new, tiny, and just the size that you know, if you were to hold her, she would nestle into your chest and feel like she's an extension of you...and my arms will ache.  Literally.  They physically ache.  Ache to hold a little beauty and know that she is mine.
Someone asked me the question recently, "When have you felt most alive, most human?".  And, for me, times of pain are often times of feeling most human.  Being human hurts.  To be human is to be small, to be damaged by sin we do and sin done against us, to be sick and broken...to depend wholly on God.  The smaller I feel in my circumstances, the bigger He is in the reality of my day to day.  The more I surrender.  The more I hope.  The more I beg forgiveness.  The more I believe.  And the more human I become.  More fully how He designed me to be.  Fully dependent on Him.  I hate the pain.  But I love how He speaks to me through it.

Trying to get back into it. Post 1 - Pink Lipstick

My mom gave me a new scarf a while back.  It's one of those cancer awareness campaign type things - a beautiful pashmina that is a lovely pinky coral colour.  Gotta love scarves recently as we were making the news in our minus double digits temperatures.  So we were at my parents' place and "baby" brother, now an 18 year old basketball star, had a home tournament.  Remember, home for me is a town of 500 where, to quote a currently popular country song, people know you by your first name, what kind of car you drive, and what you did last night.  Everybody knows everyone and their business, or thinks they does, or just goes ahead and invents things if they don't know anything interesting and would like to spice things up .  When  I was away at college my best friend informed me that there was a rumor going around that I was dating a neighbor guy and it was getting serious and then she would periodically get updates about how we were on the rocks, and then we were back together.  I can understand an initial rumor but for there to be installments of the drama in a relationship that didn't exist made me laugh and cringe at the same time.  It's a strange dynamic of a small town that anyone who has lived in one can relate to and those who haven't don't really get.  Back to the scarf.  You know how you feel before you go to a high school reunion and you want everyone to think you look good and are successful and really much cooler than they gave you credit for at the time?  That's how I feel pretty much every time I'm back in my hometown.  I was terribly uncool when I attended school there and some certain people had no qualms about reminding me of that fact every day.  So, when I walk back into my high school gym, I still feel like everyone is looking at me and talking about me and judging me...oh wait, maybe they are...like I said, this is the nature of small towns.  I wanted to look good for this game.  The best revenge is living well, and all that.  I wore my new scarf and was happy to discover that a pink lipstick I had bought a while back was a perfect colour match.  I don't usually wear heavy lipstick but I put it on a bit thicker this time..."Lookin' good" I told myself.  Get in the car with Dear Husband and we're off.  There must have been something about the way the light hit my face when we turned off the gravel road and onto the highway because he suddenly looked and me and said "Whoa!  That's some lipstick!"  (Glare, then roll my eyes and find something very interesting to look at out my window).  It's not the first time he's made what I am totally convinced is the innocent observation of a curious mind....I'm willing to let it go.  He's back peddling now...I can almost see his mind whirring, trying to figure out how to recover.  "What?  It looks good, I've just never seen it before.  (brace yourself)  Is it your mother's?"  My face freezes like the icicles on my window.  "My mother's?!!!"  Now, I love my mother and I think she has good style, but she's well old enough to be a grandma and, honestly, what thirty-something wife wants their husband to think she looks like his mother-in-law.  "So you're telling me I look like a grandma, is that it?"  He's totally baffled.  Which totally baffles me.  "Really, is that what you heard?"  Yep, sure is.  My poor DH.  You'd think after 9 years of marriage he would have learned to just tell me I look hot but, for some reason, (my dad does this too so it must be common among the species), he feels the need to ask lots of questions.  Where'd you get that?  (Why does it matter where?  Does it look good or not?)  Whoa, that's  different.  Are you really gonna try that on?  (Why, do you think it's hideous and I shouldn't?)  What is that?  Oh, it's a zit.  (as if I'm not already intimately aware of every mark that shows up on my face)  And you'd think after 9 years of marriage, that I would learn to not be offended and insecure because I know he really does love me and think I'm hot and, well, I married a detail oriented, curious man.  You get the good with the bad.

Faithful

I know I've been terrible at blogging lately but just have to share this quick thought.

I spent yesterday afternoon with some good friends doing a "craft" but that was mostly just an excuse to hang out together, drink some wine, and share some laughs.

That night as I was laying in bed with hubby, thinking about all the unknowns of our future and all of the deadlines that I'm not sure I'm going to meet, I said, "T, what's going to happen?!"  And my calm and wise hubby said, "I don't know.  But its going to be something good.  Think about everything that's happened in the last two years.  We just spent the afternoon with some good friends, this time two years ago you were working minimum wage at job and hating every minute, we didn't have a church, we didn't have any friends.  Think about all the good things that God has brought us."

Swallow hard.  Message received.  I so quickly forget every gift, every blessing, every provision that came at just the right time.  I so easily get caught up in the now and forget that God has never failed me.  So today, behind on work, no idea about the adoption, mom fighting cancer,...I can still say, yes, You were faithful and I know You will continue to be because you've never failed me yet.

Please God

Drought
I can only see the faces of my friends.  What can I do?

Birthday Gratitude

Today is my birthday.  And I want to be grateful.  Birthdays should be joyful days but they are also days of reflection, of laughter tempered with a reminder that we are all finite.  Some find birthdays depressing.  I choose not to - I want to celebrate, to be thankful, to praise God for the years I've been given to enjoy things here, build relationships, and grow.  I want to make a thankfulness list for today.  Without premeditating this blog at all, here are the first 15 things that come to my mind that I'm thankful for today.
1.  Real brewed coffee with cream
2.  My mother
3.  Soft blankets
4.  Bright sunshine
5.  Robins
6.  The green grass that is finally here after a long winter
7.  Sleeping in
8.  My husband who makes me laugh
9.  Hot water
10.  Jodi
11.  Tracy
12.  Cold medicine (yep, sick on my birthday)
13.  Kleenex (see #12)
14.  Janet
15.  Waterslides

Huh, well that was a bit more random than I thought it would be.  Embrace thankfulness, it does the body good.

Snow Tastes Good

She couldn't see me but I could see her.  From her vantage point on the playground she could see only a wall of bright reflective mirrors.  She didn't know that I was just on the other side of those tinted windows in the staff lunch room, trying to catch my breath between classes.  I watched as she climbed atop a hill of piled snow her two black braids bobbing under her heavy pink toque with a huge pompom on the top.  Reaching the top of her mountain she stood to face her mirrors, caught up for a moment in her reflection.  She smiled, twisted her braids, smirking at herself and then, with a grin, plunged both of her mittened hands deep into the snow, pulled a huge mound of it to her mouth and took a missive bite.  I laughed but she couldn't hear me.  Grinning even more now an her snow covered face she twisted back and forth in front of her mirror as she ate and then she went back in for a second round.  She did this over and over, joyously chomping away and her snowy feast, her dark braids now covered with the white fluff.  She was the essence of childhood at that moment.  I wished I had my camera.  How beautiful.

A Picture A Day

A few years ago my aunt gave me a book called A Year of Mornings.  It is a picture project done  by two friends on opposite coasts of the United States.  For one year they each took a picture before noon and posted it to a shared web album.  They were not allowed to discuss the subject or mood of their photos but it was interesting how their themes and even the colors of their photos were often similar. 
Since we moved back I've been feeling busy and boring.  Like I don't have much to say (as you've probably noticed).  And like I have nothing around me worth photographing.  The year of mornings book is just pictures of ordinary things.  What they had for breakfast.  The family cat.  And they're really pretty.  And so, inspired by their project, I am starting my own Year of Pictures blog where from Dec 31 2010 - Dec 31 2011 I will try to take one picture each day and post it to the blog.  I want to see the beautiful in the mundane and learn to enjoy the everyday.  Here's the blog link if you want to follow along.  Our Year in Pictures
Happy New Year everyone.