There are bucket lists floating all over the daggon internets. Today I even saw one on a friend's facebook that was a to-do list by the time you turn thirty. That means I only have a few short years to complete a list of someone else's priorities and ideas of "fulfilled life." Yikes, I'd better get on that!
Ok clearly you hear the sarcasm in my voice. As a midwest minister's wife, who works with kids, loves to bake, has 2.5 dogs and hopes to be at least a half-time stay at home mom, I'm the quintessential traditional female role. Not because I felt pressure, but because it's what I really truly wanted.
That being said, I'm constantly fighting to find contentment. Everything American says to long for more, aim for bigger, higher. When I'm indulging in girliness (read: at a bar or perusing Pinterest), there are women and websites giving all the new lists on how to be more fit, what to do by the time you're 20, 25, 27, 30. When I'm indulging my home-making side, I'm barraged by the newest products, the running to-do list of projects and diy that my home should be in seemingly everyone's eyes. At work everything is about the newest method, the latest training, and how many letters you can rack up to follow your name.
The problem is, the calling of the kingdom is to contentment. It is to sacrificial love, to making future plans only based on your current calling, to prioritizing others over what you would like to do, and others' needs and desires over your own.
But that doesn't make it less exciting or less fulfilling. It only makes it more so.
So then, I'm going to keep a new kind of bucket list. A list of all the wonderful and ridiculous things the Good Lord has allowed me to experience before I kick the bucket. A list of what He has brought me to, not a list of where I will go. Because where I will go is unknown and that is exciting and wonderful, because the One who holds my future is perfect and exciting and magnificent, and so my life with Him will be those things also if I am obedient to His calling.
So here it is so far....
My Bucket List:
Fall madly in love.
Completely relocate to a new place almost completely on my own.
Completely relocate to a new place to follow my husband's calling.
Change my Friday-night plans to eat dinner and drink coffee with a (probably schizophrenic) homeless women who was moments before cursing at me and the rest of traffic and the world at the top of her lungs.
Work in a scary at-risk area.
Let a homeless stranger move in with me.
Make friends with random neighbors, and piss random neighbors off by being trashy.
Learn to use gum paste.
Learn to make an icing rose.
Visit another country (3)
Visit another continent (1)
Go to a ballet
Go to an opera
Get a real black eye.
Ride a rollercoaster.
Adopt a dog (2)
Go on a mission trip (4)
Learn another language (Spanish)
Go to extensive lengths to rescue a stray (3 flea baths, 2 car rides, and bug bombing my car for one: currently on month 2 of housing another)
Commit to something totally out of my comfort zone and follow-through. (VOD choir, Zumba)
Pick up and move to another state for a strange job I have only been promised/told of.
Be a camp counselor.
Be a manager.
Learn to make espresso.
Learn to cook. Like, foreal cook.
Learn to ballroom dance.
Stay in a hospital.
Preach a full sermon.
Move in with strangers. (housemates!)
Pay someone's rent.
Get in a car wreck.
Go snorkeling in the ocean.
Hike a pyramid.
Get cussed out by a friend in a public place.
Gain weight. Lose weight.
Pray with a dying man.
Pray over a man while he died.
Seen someone healed of cancer.
Gone foreal camping. (boundary waters)
Give a recital.
Graduate college.
Heard a child's first words.
Give a testimony.
Been a waitress.
Been a nanny.
Have an P.O.Box
Helped with disaster relief.
Ride a bicycle built for two.
Balance my checkbook.
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Monday, March 26, 2012
Why I Stink At Blogging And That's OK
I was really excited about blogging, but it turns out I'm really bad at it. I mean, you're supposed to put up pretty pictures of your life in easy how-to directions on a regular schedule, like "Tasty Tuesdays" and "Wordless Wednesdays." And those things totally fit some people's lives, and they are not a bad thing. But they are a bad thing for me.
I mean, take out the fact that I don't own a camera that's not on my phone. And take out the fact that I somehow thought that I - the embodiment of an adult with ADD - would somehow transform into a schedule-keeping, regulated blogger.
Flexibility is important in my life. Messes are important because, as a ministry wife and a full-time non-profit worker, every pile of dishes and dust bunny can be counted as a tally to investing in the real people in front of my face. I know that on the other side of the internet there are real people. You are a real person. But God intentionally put me inside a whole bunch of flesh-and-blood communities.... my job, my town, my neighborhood, my family, my church, my gym....and those people take real face time. And quality time over a cup of coffee, or crying in a pew, or hitting the gym with the Zumba girls? Well it's not a neat, photographic how-to. It's messy, and spontaneous, and sometimes leaves me worn out with a messy house.
And it is not just important,
It Is Imperative
that I, and every woman around me, remember that perfectly repurposed furniture and the perfect crock pot stew and the perfectly decorated home does not make any of us better women, better children of God, better wives, better mothers, and the list goes on and on.
Blogs are for inspiration. Not guilt.
Romans 5:8 but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
If God loved me in the middle of my depraved sinful self, and still loves my in my depraved sinful state which He covers with His grace, He certainly loves me in the middle of my stanky, messy kitchen.
I mean, take out the fact that I don't own a camera that's not on my phone. And take out the fact that I somehow thought that I - the embodiment of an adult with ADD - would somehow transform into a schedule-keeping, regulated blogger.
Flexibility is important in my life. Messes are important because, as a ministry wife and a full-time non-profit worker, every pile of dishes and dust bunny can be counted as a tally to investing in the real people in front of my face. I know that on the other side of the internet there are real people. You are a real person. But God intentionally put me inside a whole bunch of flesh-and-blood communities.... my job, my town, my neighborhood, my family, my church, my gym....and those people take real face time. And quality time over a cup of coffee, or crying in a pew, or hitting the gym with the Zumba girls? Well it's not a neat, photographic how-to. It's messy, and spontaneous, and sometimes leaves me worn out with a messy house.
And it is not just important,
It Is Imperative
that I, and every woman around me, remember that perfectly repurposed furniture and the perfect crock pot stew and the perfectly decorated home does not make any of us better women, better children of God, better wives, better mothers, and the list goes on and on.
Blogs are for inspiration. Not guilt.
Romans 5:8 but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
If God loved me in the middle of my depraved sinful self, and still loves my in my depraved sinful state which He covers with His grace, He certainly loves me in the middle of my stanky, messy kitchen.
Sunday, March 4, 2012
There Are Not Words
Please find a way to help. Donate. Pray.
That truck on it's side was one of the only indications that a home used to be near it's place.
That big object in the tree is a tool shed.
Everywhere there are roads like this one, which no longer lead to a home and instead lead to a pile of rubble where one might find a group of weary, shell-shocked people working hard to salvage what is left of their belongings.
This is where souls groan. This is where people need to see His hands and feet. This is where only a greater one, the Greatest One, can sustain both the grieving and those serving them.
I have often shuddered at blessed are the poor because I am not poor, and at blessed are the weary because I am not weary. But this is where I learn that to be blessed, I must join side-by-side with the poor and weary until I become one with them, until I am truly sharing their burdens. It is here that my soul learns to groan, that my heart learns to trust, and that I learn what it takes to sacrifice until I too will inherit the Kingdom of God.
That truck on it's side was one of the only indications that a home used to be near it's place.
That big object in the tree is a tool shed.
Everywhere there are roads like this one, which no longer lead to a home and instead lead to a pile of rubble where one might find a group of weary, shell-shocked people working hard to salvage what is left of their belongings.
This is where souls groan. This is where people need to see His hands and feet. This is where only a greater one, the Greatest One, can sustain both the grieving and those serving them.
I have often shuddered at blessed are the poor because I am not poor, and at blessed are the weary because I am not weary. But this is where I learn that to be blessed, I must join side-by-side with the poor and weary until I become one with them, until I am truly sharing their burdens. It is here that my soul learns to groan, that my heart learns to trust, and that I learn what it takes to sacrifice until I too will inherit the Kingdom of God.
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