Everything glorious.

This afternoon I've been revelling in my first free day in a long time. When my evening plans fell through, I moved to the piano to play around, something that happens only occasionally these days. A rare afternoon off, a rare chance to play the piano just for the joy of it, and the rare opportunity to pull out a book of songs I probably haven't touched for two years. It felt like no accident then that today, Valentine's Day, I flipped the music book open to Everything Glorious, a song by David Crowder.

'The day is brighter here with you,' the lyrics begin, 'The night is lighter than its hue would lead me to believe, which leads me to believe that you make everything glorious.'

As a single thirty-something whose experience falls somewhere and everywhere between slightly crazy Austenesque old maid and the werkin'-it-Beyonce-style single lady, being a party of one in a world of pairs often feels less than glorious. When I started writing this post, I kind of got lost recounting the ungloriousness of extended singleness. It's a list that runs the gamut from petty, first-world annoyances -- never getting to take a plus one to a party, for example, or having to deal with car stuff on your own, or wishing food processors weren't only gifts for brides -- to the loneliness of being in a situation that 95% of your peers have not experienced, and then to the very real grief that comes when you realise the narrative you've always imagined for your future -- maybe one including children -- needs to be completely rewritten.

But none of us needs another list of why extended singleness can sometimes stink. We can come up with our own lists at the drop of a hat, and recounting these griefs leads nowhere (except, possibly, to the freezer for a tub of icecream).

What we do need are songs that remind us that glory is coming -- and not the beautiful but limited vision of glory that is romance and a white gown and to have and to hold. I mean a glory that takes a broken narrative and turns it into something wonderful, a message that now is not all there is, a promise that takes our ashes and gives us beauty.

Weeping may endure for a night, but the night is lighter than its hue would lead us to believe, and joy comes in the morning. Because someone is at work making everything glorious.

The opposite of dying.

Recently I read Marina Keegan’s now-famous essay for the Yale Daily News, “The Opposite of Loneliness.”

It is famous because it’s a lovely piece. Written in 2012 in the week of Keegan's graduation from college, it embodies the tension, uncertainty, and lip-biting optimism of this season. It suggests a woman moving forward from the collegiate cocoon into the realities of the adult world. It is honest, idealistic, joyful, frightened, hopeful.

It is also famous because Marina Keegan died in a car accident just days after her graduation.

As I read it, I – like everyone else who reads the essay knowing the story – couldn’t help but delight at the beauty of her hope, and grieve at the poignancy of it. Here is a young woman who stands looking out at what she sees as the beginning of her adult life. She marvels at it. She shrinks away from the unknowns. Then she runs boldly towards them all. She says, “We’re so young. We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time.”

Only – she didn’t.

And that is one scary thing about death. We like to think of it as something having a proper time and a place. The time is far into the future, and the place is at the end of a full life: a gentle, welcome conclusion to a life well-lived. But death is not so tidy. It likes to sneak up on us at odd moments, and that is scary.

Another scary thing about death is that it closes the book. And wherever we were up to in our writing – even there at the half-finished sentence, the misspelt word, the angry exclamation – is where the book is done. Or undone, as the case may be.

That’s why, in Marina Keegan’s story, although there is a sense of deep sorrow at a bright young life being seemingly cut short, there is also a sense of triumph: the story ends on a rich, meaningful note, one that will have echoes far into the future. It’s not a happy ending, but it’s a great ending. Marina Keegan left her mark on the world, and it is a good mark.

Sometimes, when I’ve had a particularly lame day, overthought everything, talked too much, accidentally been a jerk to the people I love the most, and wrestled with creative paralysis, I worry that I might die in the night and the only legacy I’ll have left behind is a bad taste in people’s mouths.

I don’t think I’m alone in that. Even for those of us who believe there is life after life, we are not so much scared of death (although it can be frightening, because it is strange to us); we are scared of having not really lived. We are scared that we will not do what we were meant to do with this “one wild and precious life.” And all the unfinished projects, the untouched possibilities, the wide open relationships, the people we love the most that we haven’t loved the most – all of them are a hundred tiny swords of Damocles, suspended over our lives and ready to come crashing down at our failures.

People like Marina Keegan empower us, and they terrify us. We hope we will end well, but we can’t be sure we will. One of the gentlest men I have known once told me, “I worry that my time will be up just as I’m snapping angrily at my wife.” Even he was not immune. It seems that none of us want to be caught in the messiness of a first draft.

That’s why it’s freeing – achingly, beautifully freeing – to consider that our legacy, whether it’s a whisper or a shout, is not only about how well we lived. It’s also about how well we were loved. A life well-loved is a life well-lived. That is a rich life, and a full life. If there is one person who loves you, then you exist, you are valued, your very being is important.

Within the Christian worldview, this understanding goes even deeper. To be loved in many cases means to be lovely. To have friends requires us to be friendly. And there are days when we are not lovely. There are days where we are not friendly. There are days when we are abandoned and alone. This is, after all, the essence of the fear.

What then? What of those times? The Christian message, the message of the gospel, is for those very times. At the bleakest, at the blackest, at the most unlovely: still loved, still beloved.

The horse hairs snap, the tiny swords fall, and He is there catching them all in his bare hands, heedless of the pain and of the blood that flows from the wounds.

This is not permission for any of us to embrace the jerkdom that either hibernates within us or openly roams free. It is not permission to waste our lives; love compels us to live better lives. But it is permission to look ahead with hope and to silence the voice that tells us we must do something important in order to be important.

You may have sixty years left or you may have six. In every one of them: be loved, because you are beloved. That is the opposite of dying.

A half-circle of light.

Last night was black and stormy. I was driving home from my friends' house, a route that cuts a winding path through a swathe of unlit bush. As I rounded a bend, a tiny car up ahead of me swung out round a further bend. It was one of those moments where, for just a second, the mask of humdrum falls away and you get to see life for the poetry that it really is.

The car was just a gleam in the dark, a flash of glossy black with an arc of yellow light from the headlights, filling out a semicircle in front of it. It looked like a tiny beetle with a torch strapped to its head. It was brave. There was something fierce in the way it cut a path through the darkness before it, seeing only a few metres ahead at a time.

I'm not a fan of that way of doing things. I don't want to see only a few metres ahead. I'd like to live with the high beam switched on. Better yet, I want to drive in full sun, where I can see the path stretched before me, where I can look ahead to the horizon. I like to estimate the bumps in the road before I reach them. I want to plot a course so I can stay on track. I'd like to avoid potholes instead of coming across them in the dark and being forced to swerve. I want to be ready in case a kangaroo leaps from a shrubby block of shadows. I want to be in control.

There's nothing brave, though, about being in control. It requires no courage. A life lived in full sun is a charmed life; the real world has some dark patches. And though my anxious heart wants to see what's waiting around the corner, I'm glad for the tiny half-circle of light stretched out before me. It's just enough brightness to keep me chugging on.

The temporal death that is loneliness:

As a child, I equated loneliness with being alone. It wasn't so much that if you were alone, you were lonely but, rather, that you could only be lonely when you were alone. People are the cure for the disease that is loneliness. This is what I thought.

But as an adult, I now recognise that loneliness is no respecter of persons or relationships. Most of those times that loneliness has weighed heaviest on me are moments when I am quite literally surrounded by people. Because there is not just one type of loneliness. There are dozens, perhaps even hundreds of lonelinesses.

There is the loneliness of being in the middle of a crowd that is engaged in watching or singing or being, and you are somehow disconnected from it all. There is the loneliness of being at a gathering where everyone is sharing and talking and laughing, but you can't speak because tears are close to the surface and to speak would make them spill over. Then there is its counterpart, that other, seemingly irrational loneliness that hopes someone will intuitively know what's up, seek you out, help -- care.

There is the loneliness of evolving friendships, of someone who was once very dear in your life slowly moving out of it. There is the loneliness of not having someone's hand to hold as the clock ticks over midnight and the fireworks blaze up into technicolour life. There is the loneliness of heading north while everyone else is headed south. There is the loneliness of someone saying "I wish I could help you," and then the deeper loneliness of someone saying, "I don't want to help you."

There is loneliness in unfulfilled expectations. There is loneliness in having to keep quiet when you want to speak. There is loneliness in fighting a battle that no one else around you is fighting. There is loneliness in the dying off of traditions. There is loneliness in frailty and loneliness in weakness. There is the loneliness of someone laughing at your dream, and the loneliness of endless rain.

There are perhaps as many different lonelinesses as there are happinesses, and each one of them feels like a small death -- a death of belonging, a death of hope, a death of security. But perhaps that is the very thing that is redemptive about loneliness, too: that just as it can come out of nowhere and make your throat tighten with unfelt feelings and uncried tears, so too can happiness. Just as unexpected, just as powerful.

In the loneliness, though, joy feels far away. Joy feels impossible. In those moments, I have to talk to my soul, to remind it that tomorrow, or next week, or next month, the sun will come out. I remind my soul that loneliness is a side effect of being human. I'm lonely because I'm alive -- which is, after all, the complete opposite of death.

[this post was inspired by the Life Captured Project]

The warrior virtue.

I got home from work today and just wanted to cry. It was nothing particularly to do with work and nothing particularly to do with home. I just felt tired from the inside out, and it suddenly caught up with me. Everything I had to do felt too difficult and too awful, and the few things I’m looking forward to over the next little while all seemed so wrapped up in other things that terrify me that it felt/feels impossible to separate the yay from the unyay in order to really enjoy them.

While the physical reality of this hit with a fresh intensity, the vibe wasn’t exactly new. I’ll admit it: a certain sense of cynicism has crept into my soul lately. I didn’t notice it happening. I didn’t intentionally stamp out the flames of optimism. Suddenly I just realised: I’m not such a hopeful person anymore. I’m more skeptical. I’m more doubtful. I have less of a sense of anticipation about the future. And every time I watch the news, I regret it.

 I used to be Pollyanna, but these days I feel more like Daria. Without the funny bits.

 As it turned out, my teaching appointment was cancelled for the afternoon, and I was able to collapse onto my couch instead, shutting my mind to the million other things I’m supposed to be doing this week. I put my iPod on shuffle, and Mumford & Sons’ Thistle and Weeds came on. It’s not my favourite of their songs, so I hadn’t given it as much attention as some of the others that caught at me from the very first listen. Today, though, the words made me stop:

Plant your hope with good seeds / Don't cover yourself with thistle and weeds

I was arrested by this image of hope as a garden, a garden that requires cultivation, energy, pruning, and watering. I thought of how cynicism and snark can spring up like thistles and weeds, and how once the weeds take over a patch, it’s so much harder for the good seeds to grow there.

Then came the chorus:

But I will hold on / I will hold on hope.

Hope is such a small word. A slight word. A simple word. I equated it with Pollyanna before, and sometimes I suspect that is how we think of it: as the sunshiny stuff of children’s stories from last century. But there’s a reason the image of the anchor has come to represent hope: hope is the weight that can keep the soul from being dragged away by the rips and currents that yank it off course. Hope strains under its own strength. Hope pulls, hope catches, hope preserves, and hope keeps alive.

Hope saves us from shipwreck. Hope is fierce. It has guts, and it has muscles. Hope is the stuff of warriors.

Last week, I got a text from a friend I rarely see or talk to, but who is one of those steadfast, true, and excellent people in my life. She reminded me that the last time we’d caught up was for New Year’s Eve. We danced and sweated our way into 2014 in my tiny Housie living room, and we talked about Woody Guthrie’s New Year’s resolutions from 1943. The one that stood out to her was the call to action, Wake Up And Fight. The one that leapt up and smacked me on the nose was this: Keep the Hoping Machine Running.

I loved it so much that I painted it on the front of my moleskine planner. That way, I’d see it daily all through 2014. But after my friend’s text, I saw those words anew, with a jolt. My hope machine hasn’t been running at full horsepower. In fact, I think I’ve let the fuel tank run low. My little hope machine has been coughing by on mere fumes. Time for some jumper cables, I think.

Considering hope as this thing that can be fed or starved, fuelled or run dry, may seem oddly contradictory. After all, we can’t just magic our way into joy or click our red-shoed heels and find ourselves there. So is hope fake?

I can’t believe that it is. Jesus notched its importance up there right alongside faith and love. And through humanity’s long history of messes and flaws, it has been the thing telling people to walk on. So it makes sense that sometimes we have to tell our hope itself to hope on, too. The Psalmist literally told his soul to keep hoping. And Dory did the same thing when she sang that magical phrase, “Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming.”

If hope is a garden, we must weed it. If hope is an anchor, we must cling to it. If hope is a machine, we must keep it running. Just keep swimming.

System reboot.

Last week I was able to take leave from both my jobs. With uni being done and no work at all for seven days solid, I was on the most holidayish holiday I’ve had in ages -- certainly, in 2014 so far. I was ridiculously excited by this prospect. My week was going to be awesome! Illuminating! Life-altering!

I had grand visions of doing all these amazing things: completely reorganising my walk-in closet, working out for hours every day, reading stacks of books, making art, writing stories, replying to the five hundred letters I owe people, hanging out with my little brother and being the world’s best sister, doing up a new menu plan and shopping for lots of fresh food. I was also going to be charming, snappily-dressed, witty, entertaining, and super-holy. You know, it’s never too late to try and be your best self all in one week, right?

But then… I didn’t really do much. Of anything. For starters, most of the time I felt like I was dying, which is my body’s really kind way of processing stress and anxiety. I struggle to catch the thoughts in order to stop them from taking root because my anxiety seems to bypass my conscious brain and instead just keeps my body constantly on the edge of fight-or-flight mode. So that was exhausting. I barely read a word. I did take six bags of books to the op shop, but that wasn’t so much satisfying as it was a slap in the face to my own humanness and a sudden existential tailspin into questions about mortality and the unenduring nature of pretty much everything ever. (I had visions of myself surrounded by a crumbling tower of old books, so make of that what you will). I watched a lot of German television and developed an unhealthy obsession with the all-too-cute cast, lurking their work anywhere it was to be found online. I wrote in my journal, but mostly it felt like me self-indulgently regurgitating all the messy thoughts I hadn’t had time to process towards the end of the semester. I thought too much about how to change things that can never change. I attempted to address all the questions of the universe, as well as some of the seemingly unfair issues of human existence. (Like, why do some people get to be pretty and others don’t? Why do some people get to be pretty and good at sports and musically-talented and with a winning personality? [See aforementioned German actors] How come it’s impossible to connect with certain people no matter how much time you invest in them?) The end result is that I felt just as confused after all my writing and processing as I did before it, and the whole week had this unsettled, dissatisfying hue over it.

This is the part where you should be laughing. I sure would be if it weren’t all so pathetic.

What you know -- and what I should’ve considered -- is that you can’t rewrite a life in a week. You can’t do everything you’ve put off for five years in five days. You can’t reboot just like that. I wailed at my BFF about this via text, slamming her with all my failed aspirations and intentions and confessing to her the extent of my ineffectiveness: “Why can’t I get obsessed with actual important things?” She is wise and sensible, and replied by saying, “You don’t have to turn on the Christianity when all of life is grounded in it.”

Her words -- always good -- reminded me that, when you live a life devoted to something (or Someone), there doesn’t get to be any distinction between secular and sacred. If you’re married everything you do is as a husband or wife, not just the husbandly/wifely things. You don’t turn it on or off. All things are permitted, but not all things are beneficial. It’s okay sometimes to rest, to think, to wait hopefully and expectantly for the sun to rise and burn away the last remnants of fog.

We live in a world that values achievement over just about everything else. There is no glory in quietly being. But sometimes that’s exactly what we need to do.

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Conversations:

• Asea -- everything you said about HTTYD2: YES. A thousand times. And I'm sorry you had such a rough day the day you posted. Here's an across-the-sea hug from me.
• Jasmine Ruigrok -- David Crowder is great; you really need to give him a listen! I loved your rundown of your day. It made me miss getting to sing with my siblings.
• Joy -- feel free to email me anytime! And your blog party sounds like a lot of fun. I'm going to pop by for a visit!

The last five years:

I never went on to tertiary study when I finished high school. In fact, I hardly even 'finished' at all. School just kind of faded out and work faded in, and suddenly I was doing a whole bunch of projects I really cared about, burning the candle at both ends, and loving every minute of it (I needed less sleep back then). A degree was the last thing on my mind. But five years ago, it all kind of fell together for me to begin a bachelor of arts, majoring in creative writing, minoring in history, maxing out in books and words and thoughts.

On Friday, I handed in my final paper of my Master's degree. Mum called later that day to share the excitement. "I just realised," she said, "that you've finished your degree just as everything is winding down." She was right. In those five years, my second sister got married. My brother re-met and got engaged to his high school crush. Two nephews and a niece joined the family. My parents lived in Tasmania, Western Australia, and New Zealand. A lot went on in that time and my personal world spun pretty fast.

But now: my dad has finished his recent work contract and moved back to Queensland. My parents are going into business together. My life has an established pattern in a place I feel at home in, even though I'd never have guessed I could feel at home in Queensland. But this is my place now. I feel like a local, I'm full of patriotic pride in this little region and all of its loveliness. I have two part-time jobs that I care about, I belong to a church. The people at my library know me by name. I have conversations with checkout people and sometimes I even see them at my church. The guy at Blockbuster asks after my life. The owner of the best local fish and chips place passed away recently and I'm sad because I feel like I knew him. I meet with a cool little gang on Thursday nights and we talk about life and CS Lewis. I meet with another friend on Monday night and we pray and read the bible. I have a buddy who lives on the north side but still makes time out of her busy life to hang out, see movies, and talk books. I kind of even know my way around without a map.

None of this was really going on five years ago. None of it. I felt like a newcomer to every part of what my life was then, and my roots weren't down deep. "Your degree gave you stability when there was none," my mother said on the phone. "Now you're finished and life has settled down." I hadn't thought of it that way, but it was true. And I've lived long enough to know that nothing ever settles down, really. But it does feel like we've come out onto a plateau and the view from here is a good one.

Considering this, I'm thankful. But I'm also wary that this may sound like everything's coming up Danielle. My life is no more perfect than it was five years ago. I think I'm definitely more neurotic than I was before. I wrestle more with anxiety. And the single life at times feels more like a cage than a pair of unfettered wings. But my life feels steady in a way I haven't often experienced in this wandering life, and that's new and good.

I've spent so many paragraphs talking about anything but what I actually studied and why it was relevant. It was ridiculously important to me, and I'm definitely going to expound on that, but for the moment I want to appreciate this unexpected revelation: that studying gave me some bones to hang my life on in a time when everything was shifting and uncertain me around me. I'm pretty thankful for that. And I'm thankful for the one who orchestrates time and circumstance so that the pieces fit together well, even if it only makes sense in retrospect.

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Conversations:

• Brenda Wilkerson -- thank you :)
• Lauren -- and thank you.
• Melody -- thank you for reading along! x
• Bush Maid -- I love that you can relate.
• Asea -- gosh, yes. I hadn't thought of the relationship to intuition. You're so right. (I've never heard of Predator Cities but it sounds amazing!).
• Meaghan -- oh you.
• Mothercare -- hearts. xx
• Joy -- thank you! Isn't it amazing how many kindred feelings and experiences we all share and yet struggle to find words for?
• The Elf -- I'm honoured by your nomination. Thank you!
• Brooke -- thank you for reminding me about your blog! I lost all my old feeds when my computer died, so now I can keep reading!

A sudden flash of Sehnsucht:

When I was a child, moments of wonder, moments when I truly felt down to my deepest self that life was a grand fairytale and I was living in its pages, were not uncommon.

I remember clearly one day when such a moment occurred. It was the middle of winter, and even the air felt grey. My sisters and brother and I had gathered at the edge of our lot for some kind of crazy game, and as we stood looking out across the paddock, the winter breeze came up and swept across the field. The vast crop of tall lucerne was transformed into a wild, rippling sea of vivid green. The shimmering sea swiffled and quivered and rose and fell with each gust of wind and our response was to rush into it, as though we could ride the waves. Even then, as a much younger person, I felt that here was something wonderful, something beyond the realm of the every day. There was an ache in the back of my throat, and a sudden urgency to experience the moment entirely, fully, with my whole self. Then came the startling question: how much more of myself can I give if I am here, living the moment already?

I think children are better at finding those moments than the rest of us. I’m not sure whether it’s a gifted ability that we lose with age, or simply that the crushing weight of the momentary so bears us down in adulthood that there is little time to consider anything else. I only know that when those moments come to me now, they are startling and unexpectedly lovely. They hurt, and they heal.

I will be reading something wonderful and living and true, and the beautiful sentences will take hold of me so that for a second it is hard to breathe from the wonder and the goodness. Or my tiny niece will bury her perfect round head right in the baby-sized hollow where my neck and shoulder meet, and nestle there. Another time, such a moment will arrive through a piece of music. A composer somewhere in the ages of human history, a person I have never met, will have taken notes and movement and dynamics to transform a shapeless cloud of feeling or memory into a note- picture that is visible and recognisable to me. Or I will be sitting on a faded rug under the crisp light of an autumnal Queensland sun, and the people I love most are gathered around me, and for the merest instant I see my life as if from a distance. I see it for the movie that I get to watch as I live it. I am struck with a thunderclap of sudden, complete knowledge of how good things are even in the brief upsets, how golden the hills are between the valleys of challenge and confusion and small heartbreaks.

I suspect that, as children, we often keep these instances of everyday illumination tight within ourselves. I know that if I thought about them at all then, it was with the vanity of childhood, the sort of conceit which believes that no one else could possibly have felt like this, ever. We don’t consider these things to be universal. We think they are ours alone, and sometimes that realisation is like a hug or a glad secret, but at other times it makes us lonely. What a happy wonder, then, to discover that others have felt these things, too – that, even more than this, people have recorded them, spoken of them, and thrown their experience into the vast pool of relating that reminds us that we are humans together in our human-ness.

L.M. Montgomery called such moments ”the flash”, and she put the flash into words in the experiences of her semi-autobiographical heroine, Emily of New Moon.

It had always seemed to Emily, ever since she could remember, that she was very, very near to a world of wonderful beauty. Between it and herself hung only a thin curtain; she could never draw the curtain aside – but sometimes, just for a moment, a wind fluttered it and then it was as if she caught a glimpse of the enchanting realm beyond – only a glimpse – and heard a note of unearthly music. This moment came rarely – went swiftly, leaving her breathless with the inexpressible delight of it. She could never recall it – never summon it – never pretend it; but the wonder of it stayed with her for days. 

C.S. Lewis spoke of a similar experience – or, rather, a similar feeling – but a feeling for which he felt there was no true English word. Instead he settled upon the German word, Sehnsucht, which can be translated as a yearning, a craving, or a sense of missing something incredibly deeply. Lewis called this Sehnsucht an “inconsolable longing” for a thing we cannot identify. For him, too, it visited through unexpected clashes of beauty, calling it:

…that unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World's End, the opening lines of Kubla Khan, the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves.

I fumble for my own right word to describe this sensation. The search is fruitless, but I find something akin to it: inspiration. And inspiration is not the right word or even almost the right word, but it is a cousin feeling. For inspiration is a gift and a beauty in and of itself, but it is not satisfied to simply be. It wants to move, and it will not be content until it goes somewhere, until it works itself out in some kind of art or response or worship. Sehnsucht afflicts us with the same irreconcilable tension. We experience these brief moments when suddenly the ridiculous constraints of time and gravity and history open up for the merest slit and we get to see past it all into something beyond, something that – even though it is unfamiliar – we recognise, and we long for. And there is a collision of satisfaction and longing. As with inspiration, my heart is full, yet it is hungry.

And I suppose that such moments shouldn’t surprise me. If, as C.S. Lewis says, we are souls who have bodies rather than bodies who have souls, then my soul is the realest reality, the most real part of my self. Should I wonder, then, that sometimes the lacy veil of the temporal lifts and, just for a second, I get a glimpse of the eternal? I should not.

Neither should I be troubled by the irreconcilability of it. We are hemmed in on all sides by finiteness, but these bodies we wear, like the clothes of our souls, will one day be outgrown. And once we’re free from their constraints, once we’re out in the broad infinity, everything will be turned loose to find its reconciliation. The flash, Sehnsucht, inspiration – these will all make sense in the Someday.

For now, though, I watch. And if I am set on fire just for a moment by a thrilling and unexpected glimpse of what Annie Dillard calls ‘the corner where eternity clips time’, then so much the better. It helps me to remember that this life is not all there is. I thank the God of infinity for that.

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Conversations:

• I am loving all your comments and reblogs and c. on the giveaway! You've still got ten days to enter so be sure to at least get up in there. I mean, BOOKS, you know?
• Asea -- I approve of your methodology in singlehandedly disproving my remarks about commenting etc. Nice work! Oh and I worked out why I'm ahead in Hawkeye -- I've been buying the individual issues (digitally) rather than the collections. So individual issues are up to #18, but the compilations haven't got that far yet. I'm beyond keen for #19. Where is #19? I need #19!
• Katie -- isn't it crazy that LiveJournal and commenting and even long emails feel like part of the old media? It takes serious, disciplined intent to continue to cultivation real engagement in others' worlds and even in social media. It's something I want to commit to doing more because I think it's important and it would be a shame to lose the wonderful community generated by the early days of blogging and LiveJournalling.
• Mama Essy -- and well glad I am that Jess was here.
• Meaghan -- aw get out with you.
• Milliebotreads -- thanks for your awesome comment! I agree with you; I think so much of the makeup of social media lately is about the cursory glance or the brief engagement. There is not as much time inherently built into the task of perusal and reply. As we keep finding shorter and shorter ways of granting our approval or disapproval, it's inevitable that we will cling to those shortcuts instead of going about things in a more time-sucking manner.  

(If this post seems familiar, it's because I shared a snippet from it in 2012.)

The good, the bad, and the ugly-turned-beautiful:

The Gospel is bad news before it is good news. It is the news that man is a sinner, to use the old word, that he is evil in the imagination of his heart, that when he looks in the mirror all in a lather what he sees is at least eight parts chicken, phony, slob. That is the tragedy. But it is also the news that he is loved anyway, cherished, forgiven, bleeding to be sure, but also bled for. That is the comedy. And yet, so what? So what if even in his sin the slob is loved and forgiven when the very mark and substance of his sin and of his slobbery is that he keeps turning down the love and forgiveness because he either doesn't believe them or doesn't want them or just doesn't give a damn? In answer, the news of the Gospel is that extraordinary things happen to him just as in fairy tales extraordinary things happen.

 -- Frederick Buechner,  

Telling the Truth: the Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairytale

Happy Easter, all.

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Conversations:

• Andrea -- I see what you did there! Thanks for the censorship ;)
• Asea -- now I'm going to have to work on a nickname for you! ;) But oh YES to the whole avoiding-confrontation thing. This is my life exactly.
• BushMaid -- I totally agree with everything you said, and I have particularly felt that sentiment: "It can be a curse to care too much." Our weaknesses, however, are often also the same things that provide our strengths. There's a plus and a minus to just about every quirk, it seems. I take hope from that!
• Joy -- a beautiful comment, Joy! Thank you for reading. I did my undergraduate degree through Tabor College and my postgrad through the University of New England. Both schools have qualities that I really love. Feel free to email or hit me up on facebook if you have any questions about either uni.

Little ways to feel human (i):

I am most happy when my life is segmented into regularly-proportioned, disparate activities. It overwhelms me (and, yes, terrifies me) when any one things looms too large in the scope of my future vision. 2014 has begun with all large things. Everything that is happening personally, socially, academically, financially, and relationally feels huge -- at least to my often-warped perspective.

When my perspective gets warped, it's the little things that remind me how to be human, how to feel like my life is not One Big Thing and that This Too Shall Pass. It's things like getting to have a sleepover weekend and attending a scriptwriting workshop with Laura; like making a mixtape with songs for my mama; like breakfast dates and coffee dates to grow new friendships; like the happy-toe-twiddling thought of two weeks off from one of my teaching jobs (I'm gonna sleep in tomorrow. Just you watch me!); like taking time out to write a blog post about... taking time out to write a blog post.

Here are some of the current little things helping me to feel human. My list got long so I'll save some for next time:

Burn by Julianna Baggott. Oh wow. Wow oh wow. I wonder if I can explain this trilogy to you in words that won't send you running for the hills? Basically it's an apocalyptic story that has left the world broken and wretched in the years after a sort of nuclear holocaust. Many of those those who were unprotected by a cult-like paradise (known as the Dome died), but some survived, fused to the very things they were holding or that were near to them when the detonations occurred. Julianna Baggott has done the seemingly impossible: to take imagery that could be grotesque and terrifying (and often is) and yet reveal its beauty. Her characterisation is impeccable, and her writing so rich. What's more, this story has not suffered from the dreaded Second Book Syndrome. In fact, I think it's improved as the series (Pure, Fuse, and Burn) has gone on. Ugh. I'm basically in raptures.

The Ear Biscuits podcast by Rhett and Link. Rhett and Link may be accurately described as "my favourite bromance that is not Hamish & Andy." Their weekly podcast, a relatively new endeavour, has them sitting down for a casual yet sincerely earnest chat with somebody who is YouTube-famous. YouTube is a creative avenue that I'm not actively involved in; the most I do is watch videos. However, the discussions that Rhett & Link open up could apply to many creative endeavours, and their conversations are with creative people living creatively. The podcasts are generally with people who have "made it" in traditional generic understandings of success (fame and fortune), but there's an honesty about the chats that make them creatively energising even for someone less enamoured with standardised conceptions of success.

The Desiring God devotional app. This app has been a part of my life on a daily basis since someone (was it you, Lauren?) put me onto it last year. I can't tell you how many times the daily reading has been so perfectly-timed to speak straight to my heart, to encourage me, or to give me a well-deserved kick in the pants. I like John Piper's no-nonsense approach that somehow manages to be incisive yet warm and sincere.

The Walk fitness game. From the makers of Zombies, Run! (which you've all heard me flail about) comes this new(ish) game, created in conjunction with the National Health Service as part of an initiative to get more people moving. Coming at The Walk from my zealous love of Zombies, Run!, I was at first a little disappointed with the change in format. But now I'm used to how the game works, I'm really really loving it. Essentially, The Walk is an unfolding mystery story (which has been compared to The 39 Steps) which takes place in Scotland (both cities and wilderness!) and is delivered through sound bites which are unlocked as you progress through the story.The game is episodic, and when the app is opened, it works as a pedometer, which means you can work your way through the story if you're jogging, walking, biking, or even just doing your grocery shop. The characters in the story are warm and funny, and I love the gentle air of introgue that's building through the story. It's a great way to make movement more fun.

So. There are a few of my favourites lately. What would be on your list of little ways to feel human?

All things new.

For the last few years, I haven’t made New Year’s resolutions in the typical sense. I used to do that whole thing of portioning out goals for each aspect of my life, and I’m not against that, it just doesn’t happen organically for me anymore. Rather, the last few years for me have seen one key idea come to light, one concept that I’m able to hold in the forefront of my mind and consider for the length of a year. Usually it’s vague on specifics but generous with an ideal. One year it was “just say yes,” which was an experiment in me saying yes to things I’d normally want to say no to. Another year it was “holy confidence / bold love,” and that one became so important that I recycled it and reused it for the next year. I still catch myself pondering and praying about this idea now.

As the end of 2013 approached, I hadn’t really formulated one idea to keep with me throughout 2014. As I mentioned earlier, 2013 – especially the latter half – was rough for so many around me. In my own life, 2013 felt characterised by weakness and what I saw as a failure to be a thriving, productive adult. I was napping more, reading less, and seemingly getting through very little in a day even though I felt ridiculously busy and pulled in several directions at once.

At the same time, though, I was feeling the need to pull back on the things in my life that were leaving me emotionally, mentally, and physically depleted. But the thought of doing that made me feel ashamed and guilty. As a maturing adult, I should be fitting more into my life, not less. I should be doing more, being more, and achieving more, right? Instead, I was embarrassed about the fact that I actually felt like I needed sleep for the first time in my life, as well as for the tears that started to come a lot more readily to my eyes. “What are you crying about?” “Um, just nothing and everything.”

As so often happens (and this is where I believe God speaks to me, in all these little encouragements and markers, even though the idea is controversial), in the last weeks of 2013 and the first weeks of 2014, I kept stumbling across resources that pushed me towards an unexpected sort of goal for the new year. Via John Green’s tumblr, I stumbled across Woody Guthrie’s ‘New Year’s Rulin’s’ from January 1st, 1943 and was particularly struck by two of his incredible resolutions: ‘Keep Hoping Machine Running’ and ‘Wake Up and Fight.’ On the 7th of January, I re-read the age-old comforting words of Jesus: ‘my power is made perfect in weakness.’ I felt condemned – the good sort of condemned, mind you, the sort that makes you take action – when I read Emily Freeman’s chilling admonition in Grace for the Good Girl: ‘You have trained people to think you have no needs, but you are secretly angry with them for believing you.’

At the movies to see Frozen for my little brother’s birthday, the lyrics of ‘Let It Go’ restated this in a whole new way. While the music soars around her, Elsa sings, ‘The wind is howling like this swirling storm inside / Couldn’t keep it in, heaven knows I’ve tried. / Don’t let them in, don’t let them see / Be the good girl you always have to be. / Conceal, don’t feel, don’t let them know./ Well now they know.’ Later, she shouts, ‘Let it go, let it go / And I’ll rise the break of dawn. / Let it go, let it go / That perfect girl is gone.’ I listened to the words, and I thought, yes.

 I have always thought of myself as an advocate for authenticity. Growing up slightly in the public eye as early-generation homeschoolers in New South Wales, there was a lot of emphasis placed on appearance. People would frequently seek out my family to see what the fuss was about: can people homeschool their kids and have them turn out okay? Even more importantly: can we please have a blueprint for feminine Christian perfection? My sisters and parents and I recognised back then that this hope of cookie-cutter perfection was really unhealthy, and we strove in our own personal ways to fight against that. If it meant being honest about our flaws and the choices we made that might not align to other peoples’ ideas, then we tried to do that. People were frequently disillusioned when they met us. ‘Oh you’re normal and you don’t look like you came out of the pages of Perfect Holy Family Today? How disappointing.’ It was uncomfortable but important to us to be real. And I guess I thought that this was enough to make me into an honest person who didn’t overtly strive to present a certain image.

What 2013 has shown me is that while I told myself I was an advocate for authenticity, what I was really doing was being authentic about some of my life. Without even knowing I was doing it, I was giving people a sterilised version of my reality. ‘Yes, I went through this tough patch and here’s what I learnt.’ ‘Oh, it was a real struggle when this happened.’ ‘Yeah, I’ve wrestled with this, too.’ All past tense, all ‘my mess was back then; today I am okay.’ I wasn’t consciously holding back information; I just had subsconsciously decided that some of the nitty gritty of my life was too toxic for other people to handle. Also, I didn’t want people to know I was so pathetic. I mean, there’s weakness and then there’s weakness, right? If you break your arm, you deserve sympathy, but if a link in your brain is broken, you just need to grow up – or at least, this is how I saw it when applied to myself.

I made my own personal weakness a bad thing, and I made it shameful. What’s more, by assuming that my weakness was the dumb weakness and all other weaknesses were fine, I downplayed my family and friends’ love. In other words, I wasn’t trusting them to keep loving me even though I was being pathetic. Ouch. Weak and kind of a jerk.

What that all means for my 2014 is this: I aim to find peace with my weakness. To be truly honest, this feels weird, particularly since there are weak areas of my life that I know I need to be stronger in – and that’s okay. But if God’s strength is made perfect in weakness, then weakness begins to look less like ineffectiveness and more like opportunity.

I want to hold this in balance, however. Woody Guthrie’s ‘keep the hoping machine running’ and ‘wake up and fight’ remind me not to make weakness my identity. After all, this is just as deluded as making strength my identity. I won’t run to weakness, embrace it, gather more around me. But I won’t be ashamed of it, either. I won’t believe the lie that no one can love me if they see my flaws. I will try not to freak out about the fact that I have just paraded my frailty on the internet for all to see. And I will do my best not to berate myself when I need to take a step away and say, ‘Sorry; I’m not quite strong enough to do that.’

Being able doesn’t make me a better person and being unable doesn’t make me a worse person. It just makes me human.

(This post was written in response to Truth Thursday's #21 theme, All Things New.)

Raw/roar.

It’s not difficult for me to say goodbye to 2013. If we graded our years like we grade our movies, 2013 would not get five stars. I’d probably put it at a solid two and a half.

There were great things about 2013. I’m alive, and the people I love are alive. There’s grace, and that makes the living worthwhile. There are babies to squish, and FaceTime to look at their faces when they’re far away. People made my life better: among them, movie dates with Laura, texts and visits with Meaghan, my Thursday night crew who simply cannot stay on track with a Bible study and it is perfect, letters and emails from faraway people who don’t hear from me as much as they deserve. My mother was full of wisdom and grace, my sisters full of friendship and lives lived creatively. I have a job, and an amazing little houselet. I had my best semester of uni and, through one of my classes, was able to work on a project that grew my relationship with my grandmother in precious ways and opened my eyes to the beautiful and heartbreaking story of my great grandmother. I am blessed beyond the basics, and I have everything I need.

But there was a lot that was not great about 2013. And you don’t even necessarily recognise when you’re in it; you just look back and realise, whoa. That was hard. Mostly, it was stuff you can’t even see from the outside looking in, stuff that’s hard to talk about when it’s in media res. People I love went through some really hard and heartbreaking things for purposes that were not always clear. There were so many gaps between what was and what should be. There was a gap between what I imagine church can be and what my reality of it is. There was a gap between what I needed to do for my health and what I actually accomplished. There was a gap between what my faraway friends deserved from me in investment of time and friendship, and what they actually got. A friend who was growing to take a very important place in my life moved away from here. My creativity shrivelled up – or at least appeared to. And one of my jobs left me grinding my teeth and with tension headaches at the end of my workday.

In 2013, even normal daily activities were difficult. I was unwell physically, mentally, and emotionally for about half the year. I have never had so little energy before; it was a whole new experience, and one that left me feeling weak and useless and frightened. I was let down by some friends, let down by my own body, and I felt let down by God. There is, of course, a great difference between feeling let down by God and actually being let down by God, but the former makes the latter seem truer. In reality there was grace everywhere – there always is – but it didn’t necessarily come in the forms I was looking for or thought I needed.

At the end of each year, I tend to look for growth. In 2013, I see very little. But the knowledge that I am here writing about a lack of growth is its own small growth spurt. In a way, the fact that I can write this at all is testament to some level of peace with a lack of answers.

This year, I found myself drawn to a lot of stories in films and books that were content to finish unresolved – without all the loose ends tied up. As a child, I would have been uncomfortable with these unresolved resolutions; after all, if nothing appears to have actually changed, how is it the end? But in the best of these stories – or the ones that I think are the best – while things may look the same on the outside, on the inside there is a spark of something new, a spark of hope that says things may not be different tomorrow or next week, but they are going to change. Things will happen. Aslan is on the move.

I’m reminded of a conversation I had with my uncle and aunty when they visited later in the year. We were talking about the conceit of believing that Christianity means that everything will be fine. “Everything won’t be happy,” my uncle said. “But everything will have meaning, right?” I asked, maybe a little tentatively. And you know how sometimes, even as you voice something you already believe, it becomes a little truer for you than it did before, a little bit more fully embedded in your soul? That happened then.

2013 was not great. It ended, unresolved, leaving as many unanswered questions as it did answered ones. But if there was not a great deal of investment in happiness in 2013, there was certainly an investment in meaning, and faith, and significance. What’s more, that little spark of something is burning bright within, and it looks a lot like the hope that comes with the new year. Here’s to you, 2014.

And here is where the words roll up the screen, Star Trek style:

I saw in the baby new year -- the 9pm version -- with my parents and my brother, my sister and her wee family, and my cute goddaughters and their parents. There were fireworks*, people jammed all over the paths lining the oversized pond (the one at the bottom of our hill, that likes to think it's a lake) and then there were queues for ice cream and finally peanut butter Cold Rock with nutella mixed in, dripping all down my fingers because I couldn't eat it quicker than December was melting it.

At about ten, I got in the car and drove to a friend's place about half an hour away. His new house is still in christening mode and a bunch of people were gathered for games and conversation (yeah, we party hard). Midnight snuck up on us and we fumbled through a really rushed countdown before the happynewyears began. About ten minutes later, Tim remarked on our somewhat pathetic countdown efforts and suggested a do-over. I was so on that. So four of us (the four most mature?) raced outside and did a proper countdown with shouts and cheers, and that felt like the right way to see in a new year.

"So is anyone making any resolutions?" asked Emma, whom I'd just met for the first time. She looked right at me and I was startled into saying the thing that was at the forefront of my mind.

"Just a word, really, one word to sort of... guide my approach to the year" -- or something like that. And though thoughout the week before I'd had three words jostling for the supremacy, three words which would all make sense, all be worthwhile ways to sally forth into a new year, when she asked what the word was, it just popped out, and my resolution was fully birthed.

"Boldness."

"Boldness?" asked another friend, Cath.

"Yep," I said. "Basically I'm a wimp."

Cath raised her eyebrows. "No."

"Yes." And when she looked skeptical, I had to confess: "I'm pretty good at faking brave."

So.  

Bold. That is my word for the year, and if it sounds similar to things I've said in previous years, then that makes sense, because it's the same thing God's been drumming into my brain for a while now. 'Because I'm scared' doesn't cut it as an excuse any more, even just in my own head, and though I've been getting better at not using 'it freaks me out' as an escape hatch, I definitely still have a way to go.

It took a small dose of bold even just to write about it here, because part of being a wimp is being scared of failure, and part of being scared of failure is being intimidated by the judgement of others. Hi, others. Now I've told you about my plans, you are perfectly able to watch me fail. Nevertheless, I couldn't help but notice the smack-in-the-face-with-a-wet-fish obviousness of last night's devotional reading, though. Philippians 1:6. It's a good promise for a new year.

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*A kid about eight years old was roaring NO GET IT AWAAAAAY MAKE THEM STOOOOP and a tiny baby was cooing and kicking her legs and grinning.

Breathing to death:

It seems like a cruel irony that the times when we most desperately need to step outside the circle of clamour in order to pause and examine are the very times when it feels most impossible to do so. Things can be so pressing -- one Thing, then another Thing, and another and another and another -- that it becomes easy to forget an even bigger Thing: that this is life, and we each get only one of them. Maybe it's hard because it's important. The most important stuff doesn't usually come easily.

There's a line in a song by Lecrae which says, 'I ain't living; I'm just breathing to death.' It gives me a little shiver, a shudder of kind of unfamiliar recognition -- like I'm on the verge of finally understanding something I should have known all along.

It's terrifying, this thought that it's possible to go through life without actually living. And I don't mean living in the floaty sense of I'm-just-going-to-spend-my-time-and-money-doing-whatever-I-can-that'll-make-me-feel-happy. I mean, sucking the marrow out of life while looking outward, facing out to the people we love and up to the Creator who made us. We owe it to him and we owe it to them to live fully and live well.

Just gotta work out how to turn down the noise occaisonally and actually do that. How do you strive to be more present -- more alive?

What comes next:

My imagination has decided that the end of one thing definitely means the beginning of several others. Quite suddenly I am buzzing with project ideas. I want to spring clean. I want to clear out my walk-in-wardrobe and convert part of it into a linen shelf so that my little pantry cupboard can actually house food rather than towels and tablecloths. I want to set up a shop on ebay and sell the clothes I love but haven't worn in a while. I want to pack up bundles of my favourite books and leave them hidden in public places with a note telling some stranger to enjoy the stories. I want to finish all the half-read books on my bookshelf. I want to get back into art lessons with my little brother. I want to get the Pentax fixed and go on a film-shooting spree. I want to start new journals and new writing projects. I want to open a cafe that's open till late at night and people can bring their homework or their girlfriends or their grandpa or their guitars and sit, surrounded by books and freshly-baked muffins. I'd like to do all of the above -- tomorrow, if possible.

Most of this list -- leaving aside the glorious book cafe -- might actually happen someday, but none of those things are likely to happen tomorrow. Because life quickly establishes its own full-to-the-brim rhythm. Before a gap opens up, something else comes to fill the not-yet-empty place. I often bemoan this fact, the sense that there is never time to stop and breathe after one thing before the next race begins. Really though, I'm thankful for it. It's healthy and life-giving to have a sense of purpose, even a small purpose that's only a part of the jigsaw puzzle that is the greater, overarching purpose.

I floundered for a while wondering what would happen post-degree. What about continuing study? What about money? I think I gave myself extra grey hairs overthinking everything. And then of course, things happened in such a landslide that I was left looking sheepish over my own doubt. Within the space of two weeks, I got accepted into the Master's program I'd been hoping to study, I was offered a challenging but right-down-my-alley part time job, and I sold a story! I could almost see God with hands on hips (suddenly it seems irreverent to imagine God standing there hands on hips; does He even have hips?), saying, "Seriously, you assumed I'd forgotten about you?"

So that's what comes next for me. I've got two weeks of work -- teaching English and history privately to two teens and two pre-teens -- under my belt, and I'm one week into an MA in writing. I'm enrolled in some great classes and I have masses of amazing related reading to dive into. In other words I'm blessed, even though I'm a wimp and oh so good at freaking out.

What comes next for you?

* * * * *

The lovely folk at PocketChange included the old blog in their Best of the Web roundup, which is pretty sweet of them! Be sure to check it out; I've been lurking the Best of the Web posts and found some lovely new blogs to explore and enjoy.

* * * * *

Conversations:

Rebecca Simon -- thanks, sweet lady!

Caitlin - Crafty Crackpot -- thank you, Caitlin! And I totally agree: my family is definitely so cool. And please don't consider yourself slack in the letter-writing department. Your supposed slackness doesn't even appear on the graph when contrasted with my intense slackness!

Katie -- those little white paws are surprisingly good at shoulder massages. :D

Andrea -- I still wish you could've been there, too :). [And glad you like the slightly tweaked layout]

Domesticwarriorgoddess -- thank you, lovely Charis.

Cara -- I think unpacking is sometimes more overwhelming than packing! Good luck with it. I look forward to hearing more when you have a chance... and I need to update you with lots of things!

Rach -- thanks for the tag! <3

Amanda -- yes indeed you MUST have a little party.

Meaghan -- love you. xx

HarrietCoombe -- thank you, lovely. I love you. x

Inhale, exhale.

I used to think I was made for intense seasons. For the five years my family ran a quilt store and cafe, I revelled in a packed schedule. Even when it freaked me out, I kind of relished the challenge of adding 'just one more thing' when it seemed there wasn't room for even half of one more thing. That was me, back then. So the question I'm asking now is: where on earth did that person go?

The last month has been a steady trickle of just-one-more things. Uni things. Finance things. Health things. Brain things. Heart things. Daily life things. Future things. Wondering things. And I've turned into one big Anxious Thing. I should probably mention here that before I was the girl who revelled in the packed schedule, I was the girl who lived in the terror zone. I guess you could call it my special gift -- an unwanted gift, but one in which I particularly excelled. My special skill peaked in my teen years, during which time I really hit the fear zone. It was a time I don't look back on with fondness -- it was pretty crippling, actually -- but it taught me some good things, mostly about how it's not who I am, but who I am in Christ that matters. And that sounds like a pat phrase, but it's really not.

I thought all that stuff was in my backstory, though. Then KABOOM, it suddenly catapulted itself into my present. Whew. Just as ugly and paralysing as it was back when I was seventeen only, like, now. Yuck. Yuck and yuck. And it seems petty and weak because there are people with infinitely huger things going on in their worlds, as well as some very good things going on in my own world (and I promise to tell you about those things), but of course none of that makes sense to a brain when it's on the fritz. Logic puts on its cloak of invisibility.

In the middle of it all, though, and just like back in my teens, this season has sent me running back to the shelter that is true. The truth doesn't take away pain, but it reminds me that it's bearable, that it's for some good reason, and that there is Someone who has promised to keep me within His love. Man, I can't express enough how good that is.


Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits, who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy. Psalm 103:2-4

Sehnsucht:

It can come from anywhere -- out of the blue -- though I suspect it appears more when you're actively looking for it. Today, it was in the words of Annie Dillard, whose lovely sentences made my stomach muscles hurt from the not-breathing. Other times it will be something else -- a picture of one niece's impossibly-long eyelashes resting on the curve of her cheek, or the moment when my other niece buries her tiny round head right in the baby-sized hollow where my neck and shoulder meet. Or hearing a piece of music that takes an emotion I have felt, or that I have known others to have felt, and pulls a tune from that emotion, taking a shapeless cloud of feeling and forming it into a note-picture that is visible, recognisable. Or I will be sitting in the sun with people I love and for the merest instant I see my life from a distance. I see it for the story that it is, for the movie that I get to watch as I live it, and I realise how good things are even in the brief upsets, how golden the moments are between the challenges and the small heartbreaks.

LM Montgomery's Emily (of New Moon) talked of this thing she called The Flash. CS Lewis borrowed a word from the Germans, Sehnsucht. And I wonder if they were both speaking of the same experience. When I think of Emily's "flash", I think of how, occasionally, we have these brief moments when suddenly the ridiculous constraints of time and gravity and history open up for the merest slit and we get to see past it all into something beyond, something that -- even though it's unfamiliar -- we seem to recognise. And Sehnsucht, well it can be translated as a yearning or a craving, even an intense missing -- whether or not we know what it is that we miss. For me, it's a great and irreconcilable clash of satisfaction and longing. In one moment it heals and hurts. My heart is full, yet hungry.

In a way, it reminds me of inspiration. Inspiration is a gift and a beauty in and of itself, but it is not satisfied to simply be. It wants to move, and it will not be happy until it goes somewhere, until it works itself out in some kind of art. And when I say that Sehnsucht -- that longing for a far-off country we know but can't quite pinpoint -- is irreconcilable, I only mean that in the sense that we are hemmed in on all sides by finiteness. Once we're freed from those constraints, once we're out in the broad infinity, everything is turned loose to find its reconciliation. It will all make sense in the Someday. 

For now, though, we watch. And if we are startled by a thrilling and unexpected glimpse of what Annie Dillard calls 'the corner where eternity clips time', so much the better -- because then we remember. This life is not all there is. To steal the words of another: we were meant to live for so much more.

* * * * * 

Conversations:

Carla and Alastair -- YAY first and beloved commenter! I love you, and I love that you love me in spite of my overthinkyness. And no, while I might feel shy leading up to a visit if it's ages since I've seen you, I could never be shy with you in real life. You are almost family!

Meaghan -- random fact #14: I learnt any awesomeness from you.

Charis -- thank you for persisting with commenting even though the internet is convinced you are a cyborg. Please don't terminate me. Is it weird that I am sort of happy that there is another person out there like me whose special talent is nervousness? I feel your pain and yet I love that I've got a buddy in this odd affliction! Ooh, I love quippy and fast humour, too (THE WEST WING!) and I hate watching others' awkwardness in real life. I can only handle it if I know it's made up. 

Andrea -- you should know by now I like quirky, conventionally daggy things, right? :D

Sarah -- aw, it's tough when you have big assignments all due at once! I hope you come through it unscathed! And I still haven't posted your questions and my answers, but it's on my bloggy to-do list :)

livingintheshadowlands -- if Atticus Finch was a living, breathing, non-fictional man, I might even propose to him.

Laura Elizabeth -- YAY you actually get this! Somehow, talking about what you'll be given after a grandparent passes away seems so morbid and -- yes -- mercenary, but in actuality it turns out to be quite natural and even funny :D. PS. I loved seeing Avengers with you yesterday. It feels like ages ago already, though, because it's been a really busy 24 hours. Boo to time passing too fast!

Jess Axelby -- so if we ever get a little hangout together again, Office marathon y/y?

Elizabeth in Alaska -- thank you, dear friend! x

The trouble with dreams:

As I near the end of my undergrad degree, I’m getting more questions about what I’m going to do ‘afterwards’. Aside from the basic and straightforward response – pursue an MA – it’s a hard question to answer because it suggests that it’s only now I’ve (almost) completed a degree that I’m actually able to pursue my goal of writing. Really, though, I’ve been working towards this in one way or another since I was seven years old.

But the degree adds a kind of subtle pressure. In a sense, it legitimises a long-held dream, but in another way, it reduces the dream to a mere to-do list. I suppose that’s the problem with dreams. They are intangible fantasies which only come true when they reach a tangible conclusion.

The way I’m using the word ‘dream’ and making it interchangeable with ‘fantasy’ probably sounds like I’m not a fan. Perish the thought! I’m a big fan of dreams. I think imagination is important. And I strongly suspect that many of our dreams are God-made ones, originating in the Creator’s heart and transplanted into our own.

But lately I’m realising that the tangible conclusions we dream about and work towards are always strictly measurable ones. We dream of adopting a child, or building a house, or being married, or rescuing women out of slavery, or painting a prize-winning portrait, or travelling in space, or writing a novel. We think that when we achieve those things, our dreams will have come true. We’ll be successful!

We don’t dream about the little things along that pathway, though. We never dream about filling out psychiatric evaluations, or taking an architecture class, or building ourselves into the sort of person who would make a good partner. We don’t dream of squirreling away a little bit of money here and there to send to a mercy mission, or cleaning our paintbrushes, or reading dense physics texts, or putting 500 words down on paper every day, good or bad. To us, those things aren’t success. They are the things we do while we’re waiting to be successful.

The other day, I had a nasty thought: if I die and I’ve never had a book published, will I count myself a failure? To give you an even greater insight into the lame depths of my own heart, my next thought was: will people think I’m a joke because I never achieved my dream?

Bleh. My, it’s great to be reminded how pathetically human I am. And I mean that sincerely. It was eye-opening to discover what a place of honour my self-made idea of success had been given in my heart. And not merely success for my own satisfaction – after all, small things make me pretty content. But there’s this idea that I need to be successful to prove I haven’t wasted my life, to ensure that I meet with others’ approval, and to be absolutely certain I don’t mess up what might be one of the main things I was meant to do with this four score years and ten (plus a few, I hope).

How backwards all of that is. How backwards my dreams can be! Wherever did we get the idea that One Great Dream defines who we are – defines our success?

God says that it’s the one who is faithful in little things who’ll be given opportunity to be faithful in big ones. When we pray over adoption websites, rescale blueprints, learn to cook healthy food, attend a seminar, make preliminary sketches, watch a documentary on space exploration, take a red pen to a first draft – then, we are living our dreams. The dream isn’t made real when we hold the baby in our arms, hammer the last nail, open the safe house, stand at the altar, accept the blue ribbon, get outside earth’s atmosphere for the first time, or finally see that paperback with your name on the spine. In fact, those things might never come to pass. But we can be parents, builders, advocates, faithful friends, artists, astronauts, or writers as we faithfully pursue the work that we care about, looking ahead to the final goal but never letting it be the one definition of who we are.

We can work at our dreams and work well – today. Being faithful in the little things is our worship and our success. Which, I guess, is actually the dream come true.

* * * * *

Conversations:

Laura Elizabeth -- thank you for giving me permission to obtain a little teeny piglet. BRB, pig shopping!

Lauren -- What did Arnowld Schwarzenegger say? "Owl be back!" Yes, I did just make that joke up. How can you tell?

Un -- aw, your March thing fizzled out? Start again in May with me!

A Child of Promise -- aw, glad you like them! Haha, trust you to appreciate the "teef" -- and a good reading spot. We are literary-loving kindred spirits :).

Brenda Wilkerson -- isn't it just? I kind of wish it were possible for me to adopt a baby piglet immediately.

Sarah -- the relaxing spot is indeed a great place for studying! Do you have a favourite place to sit down with books and papers for some heavy duty reading?

Ready:

When I was in my early teens, a so much more grown up young woman friend of mine told me how she would meet each new year: at her little writing desk, with candles all around her, scribbling down her reflections on the end of the annum. It sounded amazing, and is probably a large part of the reason I want to get all reflective whenever the year draws to a close.

But new years around here invariably flip over amid a buzz of busyness, leaving little time for journal-scribbling, candlelighting, or serious pondering. It's inconsiderate, really; oughtn't a new year make its entrance at a less busy time than, you know, the end of the year? Nevertheless, even though I sometimes crave a stop-and-pause, I'd rather be living life at the end of the year than just reflecting on it.

Sometimes a new year feels more lonely than anything else. I think I'm an optimist because I seem to expect the best and then get disappointed when my dreams don't come true. And sometimes, the big moments remind me of what's missing from my life, rather than what's already there. This new year, however, there was no room for loneliness or loss. Instead, I was surrounded by my closest people -- my parents, my littlest brother, my sisters, and their adorable precious children.

All of us, the baby families branching off from the parent family, sat around for a big barbecue dinner together. We pulled crackers and read bad jokes and made glo-stick bracelets and haloes, even though the two brothers-in-law swore they wouldn't go out with us if we wore them, even though we swore we wouldn't take them off. The girls won, and the guys accompanied the glowing girls and the children down the hill where we met with hundreds of other locals for fireworks at 9pm. Grammy stayed home to mind the babies, who were sleeping, and Amelia promised she would 'remember all the colours to tell Grammy.'

Home again, the children went to bed and the guys went out for some late-night fishing, leaving my sisters and my parents and me. For just those few hours, and with the exception of my brother Nick in WA, it was like old times again before there were any weddings or babies or people living all over Australia. I wouldn't go back -- I don't think any of us would -- but it was special to be in that place for one evening, and we sat and ate chocolates and watched a movie together and rushed outside when midnight hit, shouting happiness in our own chilled way.

It was a good start to 2012, one that left me more satisfied and less introspective than some new years. I don't have any great conclusions drawn from the months of 2011, only that, as I told friends in my Christmas newsletter, it felt like a settled year, particularly externally. Internally, there is always more to learn. 2011 was the first year I felt genuinely worried about grown up things like financial stability and making preparations for the future. Of course, I've thought about those things a lot, but last year was the first time I really felt them lean toward me in a menacing way. 2011 was also the year I discovered not one but several grey hairs. Do these two events go hand-in-hand? Perhaps.

Life highlights life, it seems, and brings to light everything we are as well as everything we're not. Living with my family once again brought into sharp focus my at times life-sucking sense of insecurity and my failures to truly love as Christ teaches us to love. While I've heard forever that we must find our worth and our identity in Christ, I've never really understood what that meant. "That's just a pretty phrase and no one will explain to me how to do that!!" sums it up, basically. But over the past few months I've been mulling over this whole identity thing, and realising it goes way, way back to creation. Our worth -- my worth, your worth -- cannot stem from what we do or how we act, what we have or what we make, whether we are creative or fabulous or funny or sweet or loving or saintly or brave. Rather, this worth is something quite apart from us, imbued because we are made by a great God who saw what He'd done and called it very good. Nothing we do changes that. It's all about Him.

So this year I haven't made resolutions as such. I'm just praying that I'll understand this more and live it out more. I desire holy confidence and bold love, fuelled by God and in imitation of Christ.

Welcome, 2012. We're ready for you.

* * * * *

Conversations:

Anonymous -- I'm glad it was an encouragement :).

Shaina -- thank you so much for your kind comment! It made my heart leap to get a comment from the lady whose blog inspired this whole Project 52 journey!

Joy -- thank you so much! And all the same back to you :).

Chantel -- yay!! I'm so glad you enjoyed it! And do let me know if you give those cookies a try. xx

Sarah -- happy new year to you, too!

Freedoms, rights, and television shows with naughty words in the title:

Like (I suspect) many Christians, I was annoyed and a bit disgusted when Channel 7 started showing commercials for an upcoming program, Good Christian B*tches. There's not much that isn't offensive about that title or the concept behind the show. However, when I received an email invitation to sign a petition for the program's removal, I declined. My Dad put it most succinctly: "No one has to watch the program. If they find it offensive, they should turn the TV off."

He's right on a number of levels. First, the goal of television networks is not to keep religious groups happy; it is to establish a wide viewership and make money. It shouldn't surprise any of us when networks promote programs they believe will be sensational, juicy, or offensive. What's more, creating hype around a show (whether it's negative or positive) seems only to generate more interest in the program. Think what the disappearance of Charlie Sheen did for the (utterly stupid and degrading) sitcom Two and a Half Men. People who had never watched the show in the past tuned in to see what kind of a job Ashton Kutcher did of replacing the ticking time bomb that is Charlie Sheen.

Secondly, freedom of choice and freedom of speech are key elements of any democratic society. This freedom translates into the freedom to create programs that some may find offensive, as well as the freedom to show these programs. However, it also gives us the freedom not to watch them.

It is when that choice is removed that we should take offense.

Consider the current debates surrounding hot-button topics like abortion and gay marriage. While we may all possess freedom to argue for or fight against constitutional changes, as Christians we should probably stop being shocked when a secular government makes non-Christian choices. The focus of our government at the moment is on individual rights -- like the right of a woman to determine whether she will keep her unborn child or the right of a homosexual couple to marry and receive the same support as a heterosexual couple.

Both of these concepts are areas which Christians have typically taken a stand against, appealing to the government on grounds entrenched firmly in Christian doctrine and ethics. If the government does not subscribe to a similar set of doctrine and ethics, these will likely be pleas falling on deaf ears. However, here is my beef: if the government is going to promote freedom of choice and the rights of individuals, how can they fight for the rights of some groups and inhibit the rights of others? I'm referring in particular to the new move to remove family benefits from parents who have not immunised their kids. Regardless of how you feel about the pros and cons of immunisation, this is a serious blow to the rights and freedoms espoused by democracy. While not outwardly depriving parents of their right to choose immunisation or no, it is, nevertheless, a form of bullying. You may choose option A or B, the government is saying, but if you choose B, we are going to make life more difficult for you.

This is not only undemocractic, but it is illogical. A democratic government cannot fight for the rights of some without upholding the rights of all. Where's the consistency?

* * * * *

Conversations:

Laura Elizabeth -- HAVE YOU CUT YOUR HAIR?? Do not leave me hanging on this!

Samantha R -- welcome back to the world! ;) We've missed you!

Cara -- it was fun, not at all serious. I recommend you check out PluggedIn.Com for any potential problems with the movie; they're always my go-to for appropriateness :). Do let's meet halfway in Italy! I really haven't travelled much (I'm certain New Zealand scarcely counts as "outside Australia").

Lauren -- rasesco!! Sounds like reggae music crossed with baroque; that's my interpretation of what rasesco might mean :).

Katie -- the internet is definitely the place to meet excellent friends :).

Bek Axe -- you would have loved tattooed Twilight guy, I'm sure.