Weather!

I wish I could better describe it.

Everything that was white--that is, almost everything, from the snow-covered ground to the snow-smothered trees to our snow-coated coats to the snow-filled air--surreally suspended in purple lightning-light, just before a chest-hollowing thunderclap sounded overhead.

Thunderstorms and snowstorms.  A beautiful combination I had not before experienced.

We currently have several inches of snow and more falling...

Bread

Thanks to my Oregon-siblings gifting me with a bread-making book for Christmas, I have been baking bread like a crazy person.  I actually don't eat sandwhich-type bread too much, so in bread books I go straight for the fun and unusual ones.  Braided breads are a particular favorite, just because they're so darn pretty.

My favorite of the moment, though?  Chopped apple bread.  You make this lovely yeast dough, roll it out, fold apples and raisins and walnuts and brown sugar into it, then hack the whole thing into random little pieces and scoop the fragments into a bread pan.  The resulting bread is fluffy and apple-y and delicious.  And the hacking-to-bits part is wickedly satisfying.

I have been making it far too often.  Good thing I'm finding people to foist my baking upon.

Learning to Pray

"To learn to pray" sounds contradictory to us. Either the heart is so overflowing that it begins to pray by itself, we say, or it will never learn to pray.  But this is a dangerous error, which is certainly very widespread among Christians today, to imagine that it is natural for the heart to pray.  We then confuse wishing, hoping, sighing, lamenting, rejoicing--all of which the the heart can certainly do on its own--with praying.  But in doing so we confuse earth and heaven, human beings and God.  Praying certainly does not mean simply pouring out one's heart.  It means, rather, finding the way to and speaking with God, whether the heart is full or empty.  No one can do that on one's own.  For that one needs Jesus Christ.

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Prayerbook of the Bible

"Whether the heart is full or empty."  Sometimes I think we forget that prayer--being a privilege, a mystery, and an altogether crazy concept--is also a discipline.  It's something we have to practice, and to learn.  And that those times we sit down to pray and feel devoid of words or prayers to offer, we should pray anyway.  And can pray anyway, because, really, prayer isn't about us.  And it certainly doesn't originate in us.  It's a picture of grace that we get to pray at all.

I'm glad we get to pour out our hearts, too, though, when they're sighing and rejoicing and all that.  ...And that we have a really patient teacher.

Monk by the Sea

I found this painting, Monk by the Sea (Caspar David Friedrich, 1809), this week:

It's now my computer's wallpaper.

If any of you are into randomly looking at beautiful works of art, I highly recommend The Web Gallery of Art, which has high resolution images of thousands of pre-20th century pieces (with background/explanations).

When I find myself wanting to flee technology and find refuge in the unspoiled (well, relatively unspoiled) natural world of the pre-industrial age, I console myself with such things: the access we have to the world's artistic contributions--visual, literary, and musical; across time and geography--is astounding.  I suppose there are in fact privileges that come with 21st century life.  (Okay, hygienic, medical, and educational practices are a bit better, too...  And maybe a few other things.  But think of the night skies you would have been able to see.)

One year later...

One year ago today, I arrived in Baltimore.


No fixed plans.  No set timeframe.  Open to whatever God wanted. 

Ready for anything.

Now, I knew that this “anything” might be difficult.  Part of me was even eager for the challenge; anxious to be tested, to be grown, to be taught.

I thought maybe the hard part would be a new job, just outside my comfort zone.  Or rewarding but emotionally draining humanitarian work.  Or adjustment to the academic rigors of grad school.  Or moving again, near or far, to a new, challenging calling.  Culture shock.  Compassion fatigue.  Language barriers.  Even plain old fear.

I prepared myself, as best I could.

When the difficulty came, though, it caught me off my guard.  It wasn’t on the list.

It was, in fact, the absence of the list.

Stillness.

…Stillness, I have learned, is difficult.

Stillness is even more difficult when surrounded by ridiculously brilliant and talented people who are launching careers and moving overseas and getting married and being promoted and having babies and graduating with fancy-sounding degrees; when the lives of people everywhere seem not just to be moving, but hurtling, forward.  Past you.

In fact, in some ways, it was—is—more difficult than everything on my list put together.

And I think that is the point.

In this stillness, I can't keep feeling important because of how good my school marks are or how intrinsically rewarding my career is or how clever I feel or how necessary I am to some cause.

All those things are being stripped away, and all my weaknesses and inadequacies laid bare.

And—like when Eustace had his dragon skin torn off of him*—it is terrible, and painful, and beautiful, and good.

Perhaps (I'm beginning to see) this stripping down—this frustrating inability to be important in the world—is the only way I'll be able to see my actual significance, and how unrelated it is to what I'm able to do.

Perhaps, for now, it is only by not going and facing great trials and doing great deeds that I am brought to the end of my strength and forced to rely on God for my every breath—my very self—in ways I couldn't have imagined.

Perhaps it is only in this still and small-seeming life that I can learn that “identity in Christ” is not a fluffy phrase to throw around, but a stunning, vital, from-your-soul-to-your-guts-to-your-fingertips reality that makes the questions of job-title and education-level and humanitarian-ness as fleeting and irrelevant as dust specks.

Stillness is not empty.  It is not insignificant.  

This year was not wasted, nor merely a time of waiting for the “real” things to begin.  It was a time of actively, energetically—albeit sometimes grudgingly—being still.  And God tested me, and grew me, and taught me.  He did stuff.  Good stuff.

It was a very good year.  Difficult, as I expected.  Just not difficult how I expected.  And I 
think that made it even better.

So, now.


One year later.


I find myself still here.  Still in Baltimore.


Still no fixed plans.  Still no set timeframe.  Still (some days more than others) open to whatever God wants.

Ready for anything.

Even for more stillness, I think.

...I wonder, then, which unexpected thing I should prepare not to be prepared for this year...
------------------------------------------
* In C.S. Lewis' Voyage of the Dawn Treader