In Dreams

Do you have a cough due to cold? Yes Forest. I called in sick today and slept until 1:30pm. I'm feeling better now.

Last night, Kevin called me and my squeegee into the Timothy House for an emergency. The creepy, dungeon-like basement was flooding. Part of the old part of the basement wall was leaky and the sump pump in that room, as I discovered upon arrival, was not working properly. It just churned and churned the well of murky black water, but didn't suck anything up. Hmmm...must be clogged, I thought. So, I crouched down and dug into the water past my elbow and this is what I pulled out:

2 disposable pudding serving cups
2 rotted rolls of electrical tape
1 rotted roll of duct tape
3 shards of plastic
1 straw
1 spray bottle cap

Did you know that electrical tape rots? me neither. While the excavation was satisfying, it didn't unclog the sump pump, which overflowed numerous times today while I was out sick. It had to be replaced.

While I was sleeping, I had two opposing dreams. In the first dream, I discovered that my gerbils (named Bea Arthur and Gena Davis in real life) were not both female, and had reproduced the most adorable, tiny baby gerbils. I was so happy and played with them for hours.

Then, the gerbil dream ended abruptly, and I found myself in a nightmare in which I had been abducted by a serial killer. I was being held hostage, tied up to a chair in his creepy apartment. In my dream, the apartment was Lindsey McDonald's house, but not really (not relevant if you don't know Lindsey). Anyway, the killer went to find a scalpel to torture me, but I managed to get out of the ropes that were tying me down. I silently crept over to a book shelf and found a big, heavy Greek Lexicon and hid behind a doorway waiting for him. When he came around the corner, I jacked him in the face with it and then beat him unconscious and escaped.

Yeah, I have really vivid, intense dreams. Always in color. Always weird.

Don't worry.

Sorry if I alarmed anyone with my exhaust leak. Ben is super duper responsible, and we got the leak fixed the day after I posted about it. My throbbing headaches cleared up immediately.

Last weekend, my "girls from college" weekend was great. We got things off our chests during this awesome, spontaneous time of confession and prayer. I realize that's not everyone's idea of a good time--screw it. It's healthy and therapeutic and pleasing to God and we loved it. Living with those girls was one of best times of my life, and it is excellent to be reminded why. Part of our time involved a State of the Union style report. I was glad to be able to say that I've been happier this year than I think I've ever been. My marriage is out of the honey moon phase, work has been intense, and everything costs more money than we usually have, but I feel good. I feel good about life with Ben. I feel good about painting. I feel good about work. There have been things to grieve over in past year, but I think I've been able to do that and experience closure and move on. Yes. Life is good.

Major Events

2 of the events I look forward to most all year are going down tomorrow. The Walk for the Homeless is in the morning and my awesome girls-i-went-to-college with reunion tour is happening in Indiana. I could hardly sleep last night, I'm so excited.

I hate being awake early, but tomorrow, I'll jump out of bed at 6am to make it to work in plenty of time to get ready for the "Kid's Walk" that's going straight through the Timothy House. I love the Walk. I love it because it's such and encouraging show of solidarity. It makes me want to become a Steinbeck style union organizer, or some kind of powerful writer. We don't get a whole lot of "thank yous" at the Timothy House, and I feel like this is our community saying "thanks."

Then, immediately after the Walk, I'm driving up to Indy to hang out with these terrific friends from college. They are all teachers or in ministry, too, and I feel at home there. We'll catch up and eat each other's great cooking, they will inevitably drag me shopping, and I will attempt to put the kibosh on their plans for a "makeover night," and we'll encourage each other and pray. I can't wait.

Fumes & Propaganda

My dad & husband installed a tub surround in our downstairs shower on Saturday morning. This shower had previously just had drywall and wall paper in the shower--a bad idea, I know. So, as you can immagine, there were some issues witht the drywall, namely that the joint compound all the way around where the tub joins the wall was cracked and falling off. So, my husband the science teacher and my father the mechanic decided to replace the cracked plaster with quick drying BONDO. Bondo, if you're not familiar, is the stronger than steel, toxic putty type substance that is used to patch the body of cars. At any rate, the bondo filled the whole house with raucous fumes. Although we opened all of the windows for hours in the cold that afternoon, some of the fumes are still lingering and ruining my lung capacity. I feel sluggish and not so bright. Oh, and did I mention that we've been driving around in a car with an exhaust leak? Apparently, in my toxic haze I left Jenny a rambling, nonsensical voicemail telling her the fumes were cleared out and it was OK to come home. I think maybe I was wrong, as the message made perfect sense to me as I was leaving it.

While dad & Ben were Bondo-ing the shower, I was in the Kroger mezanine (read cart coral) with an intern, Hank, promoting the Walk for the Homeless. Hank and I both enjoy talking, so I would say this went well. I am that person you know to whom complete strangers feel compelled to share their entire life story, and some of krogering townspeople who stopped to talk did so. I continue to be entertained by this phenomenon. I'm also going to KCU on Tuesday and Wednesday to represent Good Works and recruit interns at the missions fair. I hope this goes well. If you have youth group kids or know people who go to KCU, please tell them to come by and see me...I think I know one student who's still there.

Thinking

I've been staying up kind of late recently, thinking about a lot of things. This pastel is about a friend of mine and the things that hold him down. These things are primarily addiction and location. When I say addiction, I mean he's hooked on a little bit too much of everything. When I say location, I mean he was born here and he's too poor and ignorant to move away, or to ever desire to do so. Plus, this is home. The pastel isn't quite done yet, but it illustrates what I'm thinking about better than my words likely can.

My friends and my theology are the topics of my thoughts. I have an awful lot to say on the subject, but I think I'll keep the majority of it for some kind of essay or short book. The short of it is, well...

I used to think that the world is the way it's supposed to be for now, and heaven, or "The Kingdom Of God," (which really means the reign of God--like, his dominion and the working out of his will) would be like taking the earth and turning the whole thing inside out and upside down. And the inside out way would be the way "heaven" was supposed to be. I used to think that there was some kind of eye-for-an-eye justice going down on earth, and that things were, for the most part, quite ordered and proper. I thought bad things that happened were aberrations; small moth holes in a fabric that was otherwise intact. I thought those holes were "evil," or maybe "sin."

During that time, I was sometimes depressed and lonely, I certainly didn't treat people around me very nicely, I was a Young Republican, and I sincerely believed that Jesus was, too. I was in the middle class, and all of my friends were, too.

Jump ahead and I've had a couple of epiphanies. The first was that I wasn't the center of the universe. The second was that God is not cool with me treating people like shit. And the third was that, rather than treating people like shit, it would be way cooler with God to treat them well on purpose, especially people who no one else wanted to treat well.

Move ahead a couple more years, and I'm feeling great about working at a homeless shelter. This is some reaching down to the poor. Like, full time balls to the wall charity-is-my-job kind of reaching out. I was at a staff meeting and my boss suggests to everyone that there's something out there much better than charity. He suggests that we should give our social lives over to God, and that if we did so, God would probably give us poor and lonely people to hang out with. I was not OK with this suggestion and let God know it. I think I told him something like, "I need down time. I need my friends to be like me so I can blow off steam with them. If you want me to spend my free time with poor and crazy people, too, then you're going to have to make me feel differently about it."

God said something back like, "OK." And through events and people he's erased my previous notions of what it meant to be cool and have cool friends. It felt like the day you looked around and realized that neon pink,teal were not it any more, and that they had been replaced with flannel and Kurt Cobain t-shirts.

So my husband and I have been hanging out with people, like my friend with the mullet, who are broken and lonely, and cool as hell. The more I hang out with these guys, the more I realize that world is upside down now. Things aren't at all the way they should be. The whole thing is the mess. The fabric is bad--it's a heavy curtain and it's the moth holes that are good, and let us see through the curtain to God.

Being upside down friends with my broke neighbors opened my eyes to what was actually happening around me. People who aren't poor look at my poor friends like animals at a zoo, or like ET just waddled off the space ship. Almost all of my poor friends have cell phones. I used to think it was because their priorities were messed up, then I realized it was easier to get a cell phone than it was to get necessities like food stamps, or health care, or a steady place to live. Lots of my poor friends have cable. I used to think that was bad prioritizing, too. Then I realized that tensions run so high in relationships between people who are right on the edge that TV is a welcome distraction, but poor substitute for working things out.

Things are upside down. In the kingdom of God, you get what you need, not the shady substitute. With Jesus, you get healing, not the bandaid. You get the new family, not cable. You get food instead of distracting toys. I wish things were that way now. I think that's what it means to pray, "your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven..."

Maybe I'm rambling because rain makes me sad and I feel like I have to get things off my chest. Maybe it's because I watched the movie Sicko last night and was so bummed that I couldn't think straight. I don't know.

Waiting

I got up at the ungodly hour of 7am today so I could shower and be ready to wait for the TV repairman, who was to arrive at our home between the hours of 8am and 5pm. The Sears TV guy, Mark, actually woke me up. "I'm not sure where you live. I have down here Athens, KY." Hmmm...I'm still waiting. I hope he finds out house before I have to leave for work.

In the mean time, the American Electric Power guys are cutting trees down and chipping them into dust in our neighbors' yard. These beautiful, 20 year-old pines provided a lot of blockage between our lot and the road. I miss them already. In my mind, I march over to the AEP guys and have an imaginary argument with them. I ask them who they think they are, and why they can't just trim the trees. I ask them what they're going to do with all the wood, and why they have to cut it up, when they're clearly cutting down lots of pines and poplars the same size to make electric poles. Then, in my head, they look at me with sad, tired eyes and apologize. They tell me the don't hate trees, but they need the money. They tell me they use all the materials for things like mulch, and they apologize more. They tell me this is the best job they could find, and I know it to be true and feel like an ass for being the 50th person to bitch at them this week without even saying hello, and in my head, I feel badly about the interaction. So, I keep it in my head.

Skype

Have you heard of this? Skype? My inlaws got us this magic, Logitech webcam for Christmas. As it turns out, this little ditty is pretty great. We have a subscription to Sype, an online communications tool that allows free phone calls via computer to other people with the service, as well as free VIDEO PHONE conversations. We just got off the phone with Ben's grandparents in Hawaii. This is the technology we were promised as children. Next step? Teleporter.

So, I was working out today with dumbbells and did a lift that I do probably 3 times a week, and my neck and shoulder went crazy. The whole muscle group is tight, but it doesn't hurt so badly that I'm crying anymore. My shoulder problems stem from a youth group water skiing trip. It was, like, 10th grade and I was in an inner tube behind Dr. Allen's boat, The Fellowship Hull 2, when I went over a wake and felt a rather intense snap under my right scapula. I'm pretty sure I broke a rib, and certainly tore up some connective tissue. Any way, I couldn't take a deep breath for over a week, but didn't go see a doctor, either, for fear of my mother. So now, a couple of times a year, I move just so and am in intense, stabbing pain for about a day. I'm treating my injury with red wine, Tension Tamer Tea, and motrin. Oh, and human growth hormone, of course.