Thursday, June 18, 2009

A magnificent storm passed over Wilmore today, and I watched out the window as it thundered and lightninged and poured down torrents of rain. Sometimes the thunder sets off nearby car alarms which, though a little irritating, amuses me. The storm was dark and I’m always impressed with how different my room looks when it’s sunny outside from when it’s stormy. In the sun, turning on my lights makes no difference because the light streaming through my windows is brighter than the dingy bulbs in my room, but in the storms, though I can still see outside, the lack of sunlight is so thick that my room is as dark as if the sun had just sunk below the horizon in its final curtain call of the night. I can hardly see where I’m walking.

I love the storms that come through here. Sometimes they miss us and go around, but when they hit Wilmore, I’m as captivated as a child’s first time in a candy store. No matter what I’m doing, I stop everything and simply stand by the window and watch. I am not supposed to do that, I recently learned. Apparently, I’m supposed to steer clear of windows when there’s lightning, but I just can’t help myself. I’m mesmerized.

Aside from the storm, today lacked anything in the way of eventfulness. I got up today with the plan to read some of Jeremiah, and in the afternoon to work on church history, my online class. The storm threw my schedule off, though, and I didn’t try particularly hard to get it back on track. I baked cookies instead. I did, however, get to read some of Jeremiah, and I hope to do the same tomorrow.

It is earlier than usual as I write this and a number of thoughts are mingling in my brain and I could pick anyone of them at random and write. A lifelong friend of my chaplain died today, and so she and her husband are on their way to Canada for the funeral. I am thinking about my friendships, and I’m wondering who will still be in my life when I am fifty-three and what my history will look like. And then, with this on my mind, an old friend from Alaska called me. We don’t talk often, but it’s always fantastic when one of us calls and the other actually answers. It’s a four hour time difference and her life is in a flux of transition as her family is unexpectedly expanding. She recently married and a baby is coming in September. I first met this friend through the common connection of being Quaker. I was an upper classman in college and she was preparing to transfer in from a state university and we were both participating in young adult events in the yearly meeting. Friendships are strange. Some take a long time to build and connect and yet others come together like Lego pieces, with just a click. This is like my friendship with Rachel, and I look back at when our friendship began and think that never in a million years would either of us expect to have the lives we have right now. What will this look like in another seven years and what will it look like in another twenty-five?

I have learned a lot about friendship in Kentucky. I have learned the power of what it means for friendships to have history, to have years of a story attached to it, to have memories and emotions and a sense of knowing. To be known, really known, is something I don’t have here in Kentucky, and it is often painful to be here because of that. I am left longing for the day when my friendships here have history too, and it is not because I shouldn’t be here or I am unwelcome, but simply because that is what new places are.

I’m thinking about my friends lately and in these last two days I’ve had much needed conversation with two of those old friends who knew me before the thought of seminary even crossed my mind.

New friendships are forming here in Kentucky and I am very grateful for them. I look forward to the day when we can laugh and remember that long ago time when we were at Asbury together. And it was crazy.

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

These days I am feeling restless. But differently from the past, it is not the kind of restless where I feel that if I do not quench it and do something that relieves the restlessness that I’ll explode. Instead, it feels as if, if I don’t find something to do about this restlessness, I will simply fade away and disappear. That is a very odd feeling and one that feeds my uncomfortable sense of uselessness like little other. I feel as if I am lost in a world that does not belong to me and that does not wish for me to stay in it as I am, and so it is trying to change me and form me into something I do not have the capability to be, and in so doing, instead of becoming something false to myself, I will become nothing at all. And I feel as if I’m fighting it but with no weapons, and so my battle against this army of seminary academia is one in which everyone knows I will lose, because how could I not. But then I remember David struck the great warrior with only a slingshot and stone and a heart full of faith and the Philistine fell to his death.

I don’t necessarily mean I wish to strike down the “beast” of seminary. But then again, maybe I do—not out of heroic effort or a belief that it should not be, but maybe because seminary, as I’m experiencing it here in Kentucky, may be full of a lot more Philistines than Israelites. These words are harsh, I realize, but as I search my inventory of language, this seems the only accurate way for me to state it.

I have had a lot of people ask me why I stay in seminary if I find it gives me such a bad taste in my mouth. And I can only say that I stay because this is where God has called me right now, and this confuses people, because they don’t want to believe God may call someone to something they do not enjoy. This response, though, is not a Christian response. It is entirely American, so let’s go back to the beginning.

Noah was called by God to build an ark where God would house him and others while the rest of the world died after their spirit finally gave way and instead of oxygen, they began to breathe water into their lungs. Noah was stuck on a big boat with his family and a bunch of wild animals for forty days. Wild seas probably left a number of them sea sick. Dead bodies of both people and animals likely bumped up against the side of the boat. Seven pairs of all the clean animals and birds and one pair each of unclean animals undoubtedly caused a ruckus of both sound and stench. And after forty days, even if it were the size of Bill Gates’ largest yaught, the space of the ark probably felt pretty confining. I would imagine the time on the ark for Noah and his family was not exactly like a cruise through the Caribbean.

David was called to be Israel’s greatest king and yet for what scholars suggest may have been a good fifteen or twenty years, he lived in the wilderness, fighting the enemies of Israel and running from a crazed King whose family he was eventually to dethrone. We can see through numerous psalms that this was a time and place where David felt lost and confused.

Jeremiah was called by God in his very making—“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” Something about Jeremiah just gives me chills, I must admit. He’s not exactly a rock star to me, but he’s definitely one of my favorites in the Bible. And yet the calling of being a prophet utterly destroyed Jeremiah’s life. He was threatened, fought against, jailed, and despised by is very own people. In one place Jeremiah declares it is impossible for him to not mention or call upon the name of the Lord, that it would be like a burning fire shut up in his bones, and then only a few verses later we find him cursing the very day he was born.

Mary was called to carry, birth, and raise the very son of God. In that call, she watched her son be rejected by his people. I wonder sometimes if he baffled her at times as much as he baffled others. And then she had to experience what no parent would wish even on their worst enemy. She had to see her son die, and she watched him die a bitterly cruel death.

And then there’s Jesus Christ himself. He came to Earth to show us what it meant to live a God filled life, but in that calling he was expected to die a painful and humiliating death.

Now, I do not think I am Jeremiah or Mary or Jesus Christ. I believe that God will eventually give me a job I love, but I do not believe I am destined to live a life of comfort and peace. I will always have a heart that aches and breaks for the world, which will leave me living in a tension that will keep me in a place of constant movement, and I will always have a distaste for the places in the church that don’t have that heart, or worse, the places that pretend to but really don’t.

Late tonight, in the middle of writing this, I got to have a phone conversation with my good friend and old college roommate Heidi from back home. I have not spoken to Heidi since before I moved to Kentucky and it turns out this phone call was one we both needed. Heidi and I undoubtedly hold very different political views and likely interpret the places where politics and the Bible meet quite differently, but Heidi has a desire for God that I marvel at. She has a purity in the way she speaks about God that I love and it is always a joy to hear what she has to say, because even in her searching and questioning, she speaks with such a longing for God. Heidi’s life is full of new things just as mine is and with that has come some of the same struggles in each of our relationships with God. It was so good to share with someone who knew my heart because hers was right there with it.

Amongst all this restlessness, of my search for my identity in a place I can not understand, God gave me a jewel from home, and I’m reminded that in the middle of the wilderness, David still had friends, and in the midst of persecution and rejection, Jeremiah still had God who declared that though people would fight against Jeremiah, they would never prevail, because God was with him and would deliver him.

I don’t really expect this restlessness to go away. Writing these things down will not ease the discomfort this causes. But in a way I have not desired for a long time, I hope to delve into the word of God with a long forgotten passion. I do not want to study the Bible. I do not want to analyze it or read commentaries and write papers about it. I want to read the story of the Bible, the story of God’s people. I want to know who God was with David and Jeremiah, because I now that that is still who God is.

Like usual, it’s long past time for me to be in bed. It’s 2am now and will probably be closer to 2:30 or 2:45 before I finally shut off the lights, but I hope that I go to bed and get good sleep and tomorrow give time to God that I have not done for a really long time. I hope tomorrow that I do not have a devotional, a time to hear what God may be speaking to me for that day, but that instead I get to hear the story of God, and that through the story of his people of Israel, I begin to hear more of the story of myself. Christianity and the Bible, I am remembering, is not a lesson to be learned, a moral to be gained, or a set of rules to be followed. Ultimately, it’s a story. It’s a story of sacrificial love, of grace, of heartbreak and retribution, of good choices and bad choices, and of unfailing redemption. It is our story, and it is my story. Tonight, I will read a little of the book of Jeremiah before I turn off the lights to fall asleep. Not much, but enough to get me started. And tomorrow, well, tomorrow is a new day, and for the first time this summer, I am going to treat it as such.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Written the following day.

Do you ever feel as if your heart is on fire? I don’t mean a physical ailment. I mean with a passion for something that may just well consume you if you allow it. That fire that takes over and may render you incapable of breathing if you don’t harness it and learn what it is to temper it for a useful purpose. A few years back Sara Groves wrote a song about the prophet Jeremiah wherein she implores, “Jeremiah, tell me about the fire that burns up in your bones,” a reference to Jeremiah 20:9 where Jeremiah claims if he refuses to mention God or call upon him “then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.”

Most of the time, I find that fire in my heart for the things I’m passionate about is manageable. It moves me, motivates me, pushes me to do more, to be better, to think more often about the questions that are hard to answer, to remember those who are poor and have nothing—to never forget them, to never forget that the same God who made me made them with the same hands, and to never allow myself to believe that I don’t have the power to change things, that to remember who I am is to remember I serve a God who is above all and over all and who is not limited by human ambition which means neither am I.

But sometimes it’s too much and sometimes that fire is all consuming and makes me feel as if my heart just may explode from the intensity of it. This was my Tuesday, a day full of a burning passion that rendered me rather useless. But, yet, this is what pulls me back into who I am and what I’m called to. These are the days that remind me of the authenticity of my relationship with God and what that means for me as God’s child, as her daughter. In this setting I live in where a Godly relationship is defined by how many minutes one spends with God each day and the swear words we make sure not to speak, how I am with God feels so foreign to how I watch others relate to God, or at least pretend to. So it is days like this, when that all-consuming fire envelops me, where God says to me, “Remember you are mine and no one else’s, and I have created you for a specific purpose that is unique to you.”

These days pop up now and then, but it is not unusual for them to happen near the beginning of every summer for me. It is that time in my life when the craziness of the things I don’t care much for settles down and room is opened for the space to remember what my true passion is and what my heart is calling to me, what God is speaking into my very being.

I never really know what this means for me. Someday it will mean something far bigger than it means now, but I do know I am being given the space to learn again. Not to learn theology or philosophy or the chiasm in a given segment survey in the book of Mark, but to learn the things that throw fuel into the fire, to learn the things that feed it oxygen and make it burn like the beacon it sometimes is for me. It’s time to remember where my heart really is, to remember what and who it is I really love. I’m not really sure where to begin again this summer, and yet it seems as if I already have. How this will manifest itself is a little unclear. I wonder if perhaps, first, I should reread the book of Jeremiah. It’s never a bad place to start.

Thursday, June 11 through Monday, June 15, 2009

It occurred to me today that the chasm between the third world and the first world is, in fact, a fabricated one. There is no such thing as one or the other. The first worlds, and especially America, have simply become the best at hiding our poverty. Or perhaps it is not that neither are true, but that we’ve defined them incorrectly. We want to believe that in the first world poverty doesn’t exist, at least not bad poverty, not like in the “third world,” but the truth is that it is simply a difference in percentages. It does, however, exist. Children starve in America. People are killed in the streets over drugs and territory. Women and children are trafficked. Yes, even in the land of the free and home of the brave. I sometimes wonder if I’ve ever passed one of these invisible women or children on the street. Portland, you know, is a prime location for sex trafficking—a coastal city somewhere on the route between Seattle and San Francisco. And it has the highest number of strip clubs per capita of any city in the nation. The sex industry is booming. Kentucky is a little lower in its sex trafficking numbers, but with all its farmland probably contends pretty well with trafficking for labor.

This world is a hard place to live in. It is hard on those in the slums of the biggest cities in the world, because their subhuman status makes them invisible to protection by their own governments, and it is hard for those of us who are not impoverished, those of us with the power of these choices, because with great power comes great responsibility. Many have chosen to pretend as if they don’t have power, which is a lie to themselves and to those more helpless than them and a great disservice to our God. But there are the rare few (and I don’t mean the Bill Gateses and Angelina Jolees) who have come to understand that it is, in a strange way, better to bear the burden of the poor than to bear the burden of ignorance, to care deeply and in a way that forces us to action about the hungry, diseased, oppressed, enslaved, and marginalized in the world.

Today, I have been listening to Sara Groves as I browse through the 1,200 pictures I took over the last three days and select just a few to edit for Facebook before I edit all the rest of them, and I have been thinking about things, thinking about my life, about Christianity and Christians, and about this world.

Ichthus is finally over. I did not stay till the very end on the last night, because I reached my limit of people time and then overstayed by two hours as it was, but I stayed long enough. I spent likely a total of about thirty-four hours at this music festival, most of which was spent on my feet moving from one stage to another and that left me with a lot of time to take in and process what I was seeing and hearing. Ichthus has attendees of all ages, but it is geared toward high school through college age. Basically, it’s a three-day long youth event with well over a hundred speakers and musicians and thousands of attendees.

If you know me (and you don’t have to know me that well to know this), you know that I just might have some thoughts and opinions about youth events. In fact, I have some thoughts and opinions about the way youth are treated in the American church, and they are generally not good ones. I believe youth (as does everyone) need to be saturated in the message of the gospel, not the convoluted message of right and wrong, dos and don’ts, guilt, behavior modification, to be or not to be, but the real story of the gospel, the story of love, the story of redemption, the story that teaches them, in the words of Philip Yancey, what’s so amazing about grace, and they need it not in a kindergarten way, but in a scripturally soaked way, a way that really teaches them, from the fall of Adam and Eve to the sins of King David to the prophecies of Jeremiah to the cross of Jesus Christ, that if the message and meaning of the story of the Bible could be summed up into one word it would be this: redemption. And it is only out of that foundation, out of that realization, that we can begin to move into a Christianity of action and into a conviction of social justice, which, like redemption—which it is inherently tied to—is saturated in scripture. Over all, I was disappointed with what I saw. I was disappointed because I discovered that very little has changed about youth ministry since I was a youth. I saw what I’d expected, but I’d hoped for something different. And yet, in the midst of it all there was that glimpse of something different. The things I didn’t discover until I was coming out of college are making their way into younger generations even if still only on the margins. In the midst of baby-milk Christianity and guilt trips and individualized spirituality is coming the message of community, of authenticity, of a world view that makes us move from inward to outward and not the other way around.

Of all the musicians that played at Ichthus this year, only one was a name I recognized, and it was the name of someone I list among my three favorites, alongside Bob Dylan and Over the Rhine. Sara Groves has an interesting story about her faith journey. It is a story you can follow through the timeline of her song writing and one that moves from that same inward to outward journey that is beginning to move its way ever so steadily into the youth culture of the church. Today, as I sat at my computer, I listened mostly to her latest two albums, “Add to the Beauty” and “Tell Me What You Know.” “Add to the Beauty” is what I would label as her transition album. It is the album where you can see the first real manifested glimpses of movement, where the restlessness and struggle in her heart for something more than what she was or had became transparent through her songs. “Tell Me What You Know” is easily labeled her social justice album and it is through these songs where her transformation into her call for the hearts of the people of the world whom God has created becomes fully real.

As an official photographer for Ichthus, I had the pass that could get me anywhere a photographer would want to be which included backstage on the Main Stage, where the biggest known bands and all the speakers were scheduled, and I was wandering around back there, chatting with someone I knew when Sara Groves came up the ramp from her bus to wait for her sound check for the next scheduled show. To see Sara Groves in person was what I’d been waiting for all day, and the only thing I’d really been looking forward to amidst this entire event. She does not seem to make it out to the Northwest ever, so this was the first chance I would have to get to see her in concert.

As with a lot of people I know whose hearts are touched by the plight of the world, Sara Groves has discovered that there is no turning back once your eyes are opened to the true poverty that exists, and so she has named her tour the Art*Music*Justice Tour and travels with other musicians in an effort to not just entertain but so that through the music they can touch the hearts of those watching. Along side video clips of Martin Luther King, Jr,, speaking and Bono’s well known prayer breakfast speech, she talks about her journey through her discoveries of modern day slavery, the unbelievable poverty of so many people in this world, her visit to Rwanda and their genocide memorial sites in hopes of sparking that same fire in the hearts of those who are there to hear them play.

I was down in front with the audience as the videos played at the start of the show, but I spent the majority of the time listening to the show from back stage. In the intensity of this crazy three day long festival, it was like a breath of fresh air to listen to Sara Groves and her fellow musicians share the same concerns that are on my heart, and I have to admit that I’d become so adjusted to not knowing anything I was hearing that when she played the first notes of her well-known song “Add to the Beauty,” it startled me to hear something I recognized, and it surprised me even more to listen to an entire show about the very things that have seized my heart and refused to let go, even though these were things not unexpected to hear from them.

This world, as I noted before, is a hard place to be in. There is so much that needs to be done, so much injustice on this earth to contend with and fight against, so many people who need love, so much struggle in my own heart to make the better choices, even though they may seem self-sacrificing, or maybe because of it. This world is constantly changing, and as a Christian, it’s my responsibility to chose to change it for the better, but it is not my calling to save the world. It is my call to seek out and follow the heart of God. That is the call of every Christian.

Ichthus was full of things I had hoped it would not be, but had also simply expected it would. Just before Sara began her show, I had a short conversation with a young volunteer security guard who argued that to listen to anything but Christian music was to listen to idol words and that when he was first saved he felt God say to him to put down the music that didn’t glorify God, which meant only listen to Christian music. “That was my personal conviction,” he claimed. I simply responded, “Well, it is not mine.” I wish, now, that I could have a longer conversation with him—that I could hear him out and share some of my thoughts, but I was exhausted and hot didn’t have the energy to say to him that my thoughts at the moment were that there are a lot of good things being said outside of Christian music and a lot of crappy stuff said within it. I wish I would have, but perhaps it’s best that I didn’t. I can only hope that what he heard from Sara Groves and those traveling with her challenged how he sees the world and planted a seed of seeking within him.

In the end, I got to meet Sara Groves. It was a brief encounter in which I simply told her I love what she’s doing and that despite my general dislike for Christian music, I love listening to her stuff. She is a delightful and friendly person. And it was the highlight of my summer so far. In fact, it may be the highlight of my entire last year and perhaps has made all the shittiness of transitioning from the Pacific Northwest to Asbury and Kentucky completely worthwhile.

I am glad that Ichthus is over. I am left with a saddening for our youth, some very sore shoulders, exhaustion, 1,200 pictures to scan through and edit, and in the middle of it all a glimpse of hope that maybe it’s going to be alright. Redemption, as Sara Groves sings, comes in strange places, small spaces, calling out the best of who we are. I have paused her music for the moment as I finish this up and prepare to read back through, but when I’m done, I will turn it back on, and I will be reminded that as difficult as things can be, just as she says, Love is still a worthy cause. And so I will simply close this out with these words of hers that have gotten me through a lot this year, and will likely get me through a whole lot more:

in the midst of passing bravery
in the face of our own injuries
is the constant generosity of grace.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

The next three days just might be total insanity for me. This is a whole new ballgame. Well, sort of. Tomorrow kicks off the beginning of a three-day Christian music ministry festival called Ichthus (Greek for fish in the New Testament, and the symbol [IXOY∑] for Christianity and that silly Jesus fish we see graced on the backs of cars of really bad drivers). Created as a Christian alternative for Woodstock, Ichthus is celebrating its fortieth anniversary this year, and this happens to be the year I join in the party, rather unexpectedly.

Christian music is not exactly my chosen form of entertainment (or worship) on any particularly regular basis. In fact, I’d rather have silence over Christian radio stations. They sort of make me want to vomit, or at the very least, blow my ear drums out. But God, it appears, finds this really funny, and put me in a class last Fall with Ichthus’ ministry coordinator. I wasn’t aware of this until about a month ago when he asked me to be one of the photographers for the event. He first asked if I might want to work in the prayer tents for the alter calls and I hemmed and hawed, because nothing about that sounded enticing for me, and then I was asked the photo question, and I was sucked in to three full days at a Christian music festival. But here’s where God’s humor surpasses it all. I’ve been asked to be a ministry photographer. This means, I must take pictures of worship and…drum roll…the alter calls. For the entire weekend. Don’t laugh. Well…laugh, because it’s really ridiculous and I’m laughing. I may be laughing all weekend, because God is absurd, and she makes me smile. I love you, God. I love how you take me for a ride and remind me I’m not really in control. I’m rolling my eyes at you. But I’m also smiling and giving in.

But before all of that became my main thought process today, I got to have a good phone conversation with my dear friend Sarah from back home. Sarah has made the same move I made only in the opposite direction, from Wilmore to Newberg and it is good to talk to someone who knows the people and places in both my worlds. She doesn’t, of course, know my fellow students, but she knows many of the staff and faculty that I am getting to know, and it has been fun to get to see who knows her. It was wonderful to talk to someone who asks me questions because she’s interested in knowing the answer and who asks questions without judgment but simply because it came to mind. Processing my life is something I find myself doing most of the time, but I have been learning over the school year that some people do not have the capability to appreciate the space and grace processing requires. Talking with Sarah was like getting to breathe clean air in a place that feels often polluted. I get whiffs of that clean air sometimes. I get it when I talk with Peg. I get it sometimes when I talk with Marilyn. And it’s so validating in those moments. My conversation with Sarah was brief, only an hour. That may seem long enough, but I felt as if, despite having talked to her numerous times since coming here, I had an entire year’s worth of stuff to say. I can look back on everything now and not just pieces of it. I’m not far enough away to understand it yet, but I can at least see it all in one direction. As I talked with Sarah, I watched out my window as a storm began to roll in. Just after hanging up, I heard the first roar of thunder, and for the next few hours, storms reeked havoc outside as I sat peacefully inside and reflected on that hour long phone call. It was a delightful conversation. I hope to get to do it again before the summer disappears too quickly.

Back to my previous topic, another Sara is also on my mind. There is, surprisingly, at least one Christian musician I enjoy. She is a true musician and brings a fresh breath of honesty into her music that I don’t often see in the Christian music genre (which I still think is a strange way to classify a genre—by subject matter and not by style). Sara Groves gives me hope that even in the world of Christian music, truly gifted people exist. And Sara Groves will be at Ichthus, performing on Saturday evening. She is the only one I look forward to seeing, the only musician, actually, whose name I even recognize. The best part, though, is that as one of the photographers, the only place I don’t have access to is on the main stage (there are multiple stages). Since I’m uninterested in being seen on stage, I could care less about this. But what this means is that I have the pass that gets me anywhere else, including backstage. I have a job to do, and I can’t stop everything I’m doing during the hours she’s there, but I do hope that by chance I will get to meet her. For this pathetically crappy year I’ve had here in Wilmore, KY, I think that would make it all worthwhile. Every bit of it.

It’s 12:30am now and I actually have to get up at a designated time in the morning, so I will end on this wishful note. I have no idea if I’ll be able to write posts for the next few days, but expect a few pictures when the three days are over. And hopefully, I’ll have exciting news to report.

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Heat in Kentucky is not like heat in Oregon. There’s no warm up and no cool down. If it’s going to be a hot day, it’s simply going to start off and end up that way. Today was hot. Not the hottest it’s going to get, but it was unpleasant, and so I stayed inside unless I had to be outside. And I did have to be outside today. I had to be outside, because I went frantically around trying to find a way for the school to provide a document stating I am, indeed, an American citizen. In the end, I did not get to go make an attempt to get my social security card as I’d been planning, and I learned the school doesn’t actually check to see if you’re an American citizen like you say. Apparently, they just believe you. Needless to say, I’m still peeved that I’ve misplaced that card and the passport and birth certificate along with it.

And so, after that fiasco, I stayed inside until evening came and the warmth was not cooling down like Oregon but was at least pleasant. For a short while, I sat outside on one of our benches and read as little children played around the grounds in front of the dorms—little Korean kids, because the International folks don’t often go home for breaks. A bit expensive, and a lot of paperwork, I imagine. And so the children ran around and road bikes and scooters and had a grand time, and it was delightful to see. It was the only relatively productive part of my afternoon, because aside from that, in an attempt to get my mind off the stress of the late morning, I spent hours eating cupcakes and watching the entire first season of the Showtime series Weeds. If you know anything about movie network TV shows, you should already be aware that no Showtime show would feel like something you’d see on the regular networks or even other cable channels. Weeds, starring Mary Louise Parker, is the story of a Southern Californian suburban housewife, recently widowed, who, in desperation for income, turns to dealing marijuana and becomes unexpectedly successful at it. It’s the strangest premise for a show. No wait, Dead Like Me may have had one of the strangest premises, but the storylines rival each other for originality. Both are Showtime shows (though sadly, Dead Like Me no longer airs), so it’s not a surprise. It has been strangely entertaining to watch. It’s just so odd. I was stoked to realize I could watch them online via Netflix. But in the future, I need to pace myself with the episode watching. Maybe not an entire season in a day, or at least in a row. And maybe not fix or six cupcakes either. In my defense, I didn't eat much in the way of lunch or dinner. But that's a poor defense.

Tomorrow, I’m excited because I get to talk to Sarah on the phone. We have a scheduled date, three hours apart from each other at the exact same time. It is the first time we will have talked since I ended my first year at Asbury and I think it will be a very interesting conversation. Of course, what conversation with Sarah isn’t interesting? And then, in the afternoon, I will be taking Marilyn’s bike out for a test run up to Ichthus for a photographers/videographers meeting at the grounds. It will be hot again tomorrow and possibly a little wet. Like today, I will go outside only when I have to, but while I’m inside, I will be a bit more productive. A lot less movie/TV watching for me tomorrow. Maybe I’ll read a book.

Monday, June 8, 2009

I watched a documentary, today, called Searching for Debra Winger, and I was entranced by it, to say the least. In the western world, there seems to be one place left in society where women still struggle at unprecedented levels for equality: the Church. Included in that is the struggle to have a career and a family, by choice, and not be looked down upon as wrong, a sinner, or one of *those* feminists. Outside the church the struggle for equality exists, but no one questions the right for a woman to be a manager, a professor, a researcher, a CEO, or even president. Some, chauvinistically, may question a woman’s capability to do so, but it is even in the laws that one can not judge her right. I have heard more than one woman who, after coming into the church for the first time in adulthood, was stunned to discover the equality chasm. It had never occurred to them to even think that a woman could not perform the same roles as men. Tradition is hard to break everywhere, but it is hardest to break in the church. And tradition declares that men work and women stay home. When necessity arises, exceptions are made for a woman to work, but for a woman to choose to work and have children is for some, unthinkable.

Searching for Debra Winger is a documentary, originally made for Shotime, about the struggle for actresses to have a career and a family and what it is for them to age in Hollywood. Produced by actress Rosanna Arquette, she interviews multiple well-known actresses such as Laura Dern, Holly Hunter, Jane Fonda, and Sharon Stone about their journeys and choices and struggles in the film industry. I was intrigued to watch this movie for no other reason than that I think Debra Winger is amazing, and I think she’s even more beautiful now than she was when she did such movies as An Officer and a Gentleman and Terms of Endearment (a personal favorite). The movie is so titled because Debra Winger made the decision to retire, or at least take a long break for an undeterminable amount of time, from the acting business and pretty much fell off the radar. It is probably a good half way through this documentary before Arquette finally pulls up for a face to face interview with Debra Winger. All the conversations were very interesting to listen to, but it was words from Laura Dern and then later from Whoopi Goldberg that really struck me and stayed with me. As Dern spoke about growing up with a mother in the movie business, she recalled the conversation with her as a child about wishing she’d be around more and feeling somewhat abandoned, and her mother attempted to explain to her that she did not know how to be a mother without also living out her passion. Yes, I could stay home and spend more time with you, she remembered her mother’s reply, but if I did that at the expense of my passion, I would be a really bad mom. And these words really hit me in the heart.

Today, I am young. I am family-less, and I can dream all I want. I can tell people I never want to be a stay-at-home mom, that I want to have children someday, but that I also have the passion to follow my career, and they smile and some probably think, because I can see it in their faces, that really in the end I will want to stay home. But someday, this will not be the future, it will not be a dream. It will be reality, and those looks that tell me now—without ever having to hear the words—that I’m simply silly and young and inexperienced, will instead tell me they disapprove, because I know myself, and I know that I will, in fact, never be a stay-at-home mom, or at least not a happy one. In the world, people may smile and say, to each his (or her) own, but in the church, this is be very different. It is in these words which Laura Dern recounted, where I felt as if God reminded me of who I am, and God taught me a lesson. I felt God say, I made you as you are, not as people want you to be.

I am a passionate person. I have things I’m passionate about and I have a call that may include (I hope include) having children but that is not centered around that. This is not faulty wiring on God’s part, or a defect. It is the way God wired me, with her own hands. As I heard those words, I remembered a conversation with my friend Sarah. It was a conversation wherein multiple women were present, mostly college women, and I asked her about being a working mom, and she said to me, “I have come to realize that I have about five good ‘mom’ hours in me a day. Beyond that, I lose my attention span. I get impatient. That is just something I know about myself,” and these words calmed my spirit and made me realize that my lack of desire (my horror, really) at the idea of being a stay-at-home mom is not because something is wrong with me, but because that is not what I’m called to and not what I’m made for.

Marriage and motherhood is a long way off for me. Probably further away than my career, though I can not see into my future, so I can’t really know. I am very content with my life right now. I have my difficult moments but those are not moments that a husband or child would fix—they are moments that happen at those times, too—but I am happy, over all, with the way things are. I greatly value the freedom I have to live at my leisure, to move without directly affecting another’s life and decisions, to act on a call without having to acutely consider the call of someone else.

These things will come when they come, and with them will come an entirely different way of living and an entirely different set of choices to make. In those moments when people pressure to me to fit into their mold, to be the wife, the mother, the woman I’m expected to be, I hope I remember Sarah’s words; I hope I will recall the conversations and recountings from this film. I hope I remember what God has spoken to me today, what she has spoken to me before, though I seem to often forget it—that I am who God created me to be. I am not anybody else.

So for those of you who love being a career mom, for those of you who can’t understand the idea behind being a career mom, and for those of you not there yet (or are men), I would recommend viewing this film. Some of the language is not PG rated, so be warned, but it is a documentary worth watching.