24-year-old single female seeks the voice of experience.

I need some perspective.

Most of the people I know and know of seem to think a stable home is vitally important for a family. When I use the word stable in this context, I mean it in a physical sense. We could discuss emotional stability, mental stability, spiritual stability, etc., but my thoughts are currently turned to a more tangible sphere.

Back to the point, a lot of people seem to place high value on physical stability, particularly when talking about families, and my present question is "Why?." I don't disagree with them, but I also can't say that I agree completely.

Maybe my childhood is to blame for my wondering. It certainly is for my wandering. The longest I've lived anywhere is approximately 3.5 years, and that seemed like an eternity to me. My average is markedly shorter. Not only that, I've traveled most of my life almost like it was my job. It's not been quite that extreme, and some seasons are more full than others, but for someone who doesn't get paid to bop around the landscape, I've done it remarkably a lot.

As the person I am now typing this, I don't regret my life at all. I do wonder from time to time what staying in one place would be like, but never do I regret or feel mistreated. When I was younger, the nigh constant flux was a lot for me to handle; so much that it caused a lot of tears. Perhaps that's why people bestow such importance on staying in one place: to save their children from distress. I understand that. Well, I understand that as best as I can from my non-parent perspective. And if I may be so bold as to also speak this from that perspective, as much sympathy as I have for that position, I suspect too many parents are overprotective.

"No!" I hear you say. "That can't be! Don't insult my quality as a parent!" you admonish. "It sounds like your parents weren't protective enough." Maybe. I won't say there's no room for you to be right. But, although I can't claim to know all of their thoughts, I'm willing to bet I know my parents better than you do, and I wouldn't call them neglectful at all. I know the moving our family has done for the past quarter-century was not at the core of what they believed was important for us, especially not in my mom's heart. My dad didn't specifically want it anymore than she did, but he handled it better. Both of them wanted their own home where they could be together, build their life, raise their kids, and give each of us a platform from which to launch out to develop our own lives. That sounds nice, doesn't it? But life...God...dictated differently, and they were willing...forced...to go along and try to make the best of it. I think they've done an admirable job. Had they organized their and our lives as they wanted, we wouldn't have left the region where I was born. Even though it was difficult for me initially, speaking now as a 24-year-old product of physical instability, I'm grateful they didn't insist on having...weren't allowed to have...their way.

Is this an odd perspective to have? Or more accurately, is this appropriate? Acceptable? I guess the more pressing question (to my mind) is are we...am I...just an anomaly? I think I've fared rather well with a transient life, and I presume others would do the same given the opportunity, but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe most people would curl into a ball, either physical or metaphorical, and become bitter and mad at the world. I don't know.

What makes me wonder about this are speculations on my future, which now seems so near and simultaneously so far, and time spent with people at stations of life I have yet to reach. When I hear them speak I wonder if they know something I don't. In fact, I assume they know something I don't. I want to believe there are things I don't understand and can't until I reach the same side of the bridge. I can't help but think, though, and want to give my experience as much credit as I possibly can.

When I combine the full credit of that experience with the voices of my inward leanings, I get a message that says, "Looks like settling down's not for you." Maybe partially settling down would be okay, but planting my feet as two deep-reaching roots would be a stretch. My wondering then becomes, what does that do for my chances of having a family, or more specifically a healthy family?

Thus we are back to where I began. I seek to understand why so I can make better decisions. Or at least informed decisions. I can see myself living in the same place, maybe actually more the same general area, for a long period of years, but not spending all day, every day there for large chunks of time, and certainly not owning the space in which I live. I know. I'm weird. Who doesn't want their own house? Particularly what woman doesn't want her own house? Me, apparently. What I want to know is can I be this brand of weird and not destroy my family? And can I drag my kids out all over creation as I'm out doing whatever it is I'm doing while not at home without devastating them? Or will I have to leave them frequently for short periods of time and will that frequent absence be more harm than it's worth? Will meeting a man be the beginning of my staying in one place? Will my inevitable choice be transience or family?

And then there's the question that could trump them all: as my life progresses, will I change so much that all these wonderings won't matter anymore, won't even be relevant anymore?

The many things I say when I don't know what to say.

A brief note that I tell myself is for others out there in cyber world, but is in reality probably just for myself as there aren't nearly as many people out there in cyber world who care about this as I tend to think:

More frequently than I would have liked had I a choice, there have been many occasions in recent years where I have been unplugged for a prolonged period of time. Unplugged from the Internet, that is.

Even though I wouldn't have chosen it, however, as it's happening, it hasn't been so bad. In case you didn't know that life can still continue without the Internet, I am here to testify that it can. I do miss things, but as the Beatles say, life does indeed go on. I move on. And it really is okay.

The biggest trouble I have with unplugging is plugging back in. It's like I have to start over every time I go through this cycle. My email gets piled to the sky. All the blogs I follow collect stacks of unread posts - posts I want to read, but which take up a big chunk of time as most everyone I subscribe to seems to be as verbose as I am. And then I want to jump back in and blog again, but I don't know where to start. When I know I'm unplugged, I lose the blogging frame of mind, and the regaining of it does not happen in the snap of a finger.

Those are just a few examples. I could give more, but I won't, lest my many words lose their value. My point has been made, and I am currently facing that point and trying to get plugged back in now that my grandma is well enough to not need a live-in caretaker.

So my stack of email is dwindling. I'm starting to check up on some of my Facebook friends again. But I feel half-hearted in all of it. I want to do it. But it's so much trouble. And if the pattern continues, it won't be long before I'm unplugged again and all of my efforts will seem just about pointless.

Why is that relevant enough for me to be talking about in this context? I want to get back to posting substance on this site more regularly, but then again I don't. Or, more accurately, I haven't convinced myself yet that it's worth the trouble in light of everything else that I'm trying to catch up on. I think I'll get there, but it's going to take a while. But then when I consider that it'll take a while, then I also consider that by the time the while passes, I may be knocked back down to the starting point again, facing another while before I get on my feet.

That, my friends, is what is on my mind. I intended about two paragraphs when I started. I guess that's what happens when I forget my propensity for verbosity.

Meeting myself.

I was just perusing my Pinterest boards outside myself. My thoughts:

- This chick's kinda all over the place. She seems like a mom one second and then the next I'd swear she's not old enough to even understand HOW to have kids. Babies having babies so to speak.

- There are also hints that she's formally educated, and then I see Atari coasters....

- And does she really want to live in a house that looks like one Mr. Magorium built?

- She must live in her head most of the time, this one.

- I'd hate to see her dropped in the middle of a fashion show.

- She seems to have lead a really interesting life thus far. I mean, how else could she be this weird? It's kind of impressive.

- We should be friends.

Lacking substance.

I've had many blog ideas hopping around in my head.

I really want to blog.

But I can't.

Well, obviously I can. I'm doing this now.

What I mean is that I can't blog anything that takes longer than a few minutes to write.

You see, here at my grandma's house, I'm having to use my little brother's quite old laptop. The battery on it lasts about an hour. When it's plugged in, it has to be sitting on a flat, stable surface.

While running on battery power, I can get in a cozy spot, curl my legs underneath me, and get in my favorite blogging posture. While it's plugged in, I have to sit at the kitchen table, in a straight chair, feeling completely uninspired.

Also, I can't sit at the kitchen table in the middle of the night, which happens to be my blogging hour of choice.

So until I can learn to write something of substance in under an hour, as long as I'm here hanging out with my recuperating grandmother, I don't see myself blogging anything but this.

Sad days are upon us. Us meaning me.

The fervent prayer of a righteous woman.

Once upon a Sunday morning, one not so long ago, I was sitting in a church service, soaking in truth with a smile on my face, feeling uplifted to such a height I could have sworn there were clouds within my reach.

Then a memory like a pin came in and jabbed a small hole in my balloon. I slowly lost altitude.

For much of the past eight months, I have felt like I've been living in a moment that is perpetually seriously wrong.

"God, why? This is driving me crazy. This is ridiculous. Do you not see how ridiculous this is? I am an untapped well whose resources are not being taken advantage of. What is there to be gained from me being completely helpless? Did I just take five years to get through college and gain a degree so that I could move on to keeping my house clean, hanging drywall with my dad, and serving as a non-paid taxi driver? What's going on? I don't get it."

That's just a small snapshot of my end of the dialogue I was having with God. There were moments that were less bewildered and self-imposing and more encouraging, but in general I spent most of my time feeling defensive, believing, subconsciously I think, that to stop fighting would mean admitting defeat, which was unacceptable.

I did eventually begin to get over myself, though. It was a remarkable work of grace. And I began to see how nothing was wrong, how suffering isn't always punishment, but - more often than not, perhaps - an opportunity for better; a grace is its own right. We'll leave that there until another blog on another day, and say nothing more on the subject beyond this frame of mind is the one I had on that high-flying Sunday morning. Another one of the reasons I was feeling so much lighter than air.

We now return to the prickly memory. I don't remember what anyone was saying at the time to trigger my specific remembering. All I recall is that my specific remembering was of a time several years ago. I came to a point in my existence where I was feeling particularly discontented by how content I was to be comfortable. When I get comfortable, I get stagnant. I don't grow. I don't contribute much to the world. I don't do anything to enrich another person's life, because I'm not doing anything to enrich my own. I only drain life, I don't give it.

I was so unsatisfied by settling for comfortable contentment, that I remember writing these words to God: "Lord, don't let me get comfortable." And for a time after that, as I would think-talk to God, I would repeat those words, "Please, don't let me get comfortable." I repeated them often, and fervently.

Vividly flashed the memory. Sharp became the realization: I begged God to disallow my comfort, then what did I do when my comfort was undermined? I felt like a victim. I fought against defeat.

Oh. Yeah. That's right. I did say that, didn't I?

It's a good thing I'm not condemned. My balloon did deflate a little, but I very quickly felt that much more a victim of grace than I had before. God honored my prayer, even when I didn't understand the gravity of what I had prayed or that I had prayed it at all. He's not letting me settle for less than the fullness that is available to me.

Thank you, thank you, Jesus.

On Lent.

I didn't learn much of anything about Lent until I was grown. Before that, I only heard the word a few times and all I knew of it was that it was somehow associated with Easter. I was born into the religious circle of General Baptists. General Baptists don't talk about Lent. General Baptists talk about believing in Jesus and getting your hands dirty; the school of love God and work hard. My heritage is a practical one, and the idea of sacrificing something for 40 days and giving extra care to prayer and penance was too complicated for my doctrinal forefathers. Baptists of all types, whether "General," "Primitive," "Independent," "Southern," "Missionary" or any other name you can imagine, are "the plain people." The only exposure I had as a child to all things liturgical, aside from the days of Christmas and Easter themselves, came through my father's father and the Methodist church. He was a United Methodist minister when I was growing up, and we would occasionally visit whichever United Methodist church he happened to be pastoring at the time. While in that religious sphere, I would sometimes hear words like "Lent" and "Ash Wednesday" and "Advent," but as my stay never lasted long, my understanding of such matters remained shallow.

I still am largely uneducated in Lenten matters (just last year, while I was still a student, I saw a girl walking around campus with a smudge on her forehead. I let my initial confusion pass, but after I saw another girl, I thought, "What is going on?" Only then did I remember it was Ash Wednesday.), but after learning what little I do know, I've found the tradition interesting, and I've thought about participating.

But my want of education, in both senses of the word, is at once my first and second hesitation. My first hesitation is that I feel I lack the knowledge to, in a sense, have the right to participate. I felt the same way about Communion (or the Lord's Supper, Eucharist, whichever is your term of choice) when I was a child. I have known about Jesus my whole life, and I gave that life to him when I was four years old, but I didn't understand the whole thing with the bread and wine (or juice in the cases of every church I've ever attended) at such an early age. I heard "Do this in remembrance of me" over and over again, and watched all kinds of people nibble either bread or crackers and drink tiny shots of grape juice from these nifty fluted cups, and felt like I should do it too, but I didn't get the context surrounding it or understand the depth of its meaning. So one Sunday morning, while walking with my aunt through the procession at the front of my grandpa's church, when my father's sister looked down at my short frame and offered me a piece of bread I shook my head from side to side. I didn't understand it, so I didn't want it. Even though I adore freshly baked bread and grape juice more than most other things on this planet.

My second hesitation is this: clearly, Lent is currently nothing more than an intellectual curiosity for me. The essence of my interest is contained in my desire to know, not in a desire to be affected by it. If all I want to do is pull it apart and examine it so that I can store knowledge and experience in my brain....is that the right posture to have when approaching Lent? I think I too often engage the world solely with my brain and not with my heart, and that detached intellectualism has a way of stripping beauty, truth, good things, of their meaning. In my zeal to learn about the flower, I pluck it from its roots, and pretty soon the life that attracted me to it is gone and I'm cradling a broken, dead, decaying configuration of atoms; not a flower. I don't want to kill Lent.

But maybe that's just how I roll and I need to embrace it. I think most of the time I need to see the flower die before I can appreciate what it means. Then, through the sacrifice of that one flower, I can go on to find other flowers and be fulfilled by only gazing at them and breathing in their scent, not tearing them apart with my fingers. Maybe I could jump into Lent with no more knowledge of it than I now have, and being around it, looking at it, hearing it, smelling it, would allow me to experience how meaningful it is. But more than likely, it wouldn't. More than likely, I'll have to make it die, to pull it apart into myriad facts, ideas, and theologies before I can find its essence, the essence that I have ripped away.

And for all my debating on both sides of the fence, maybe that's actually not such a bad way to operate. I seem to remember some guy saying that it's only in losing my life that I can find it.

As Lent is already upon us in Christendom this year, maybe this season can begin my education. And maybe before the next one rolls around, I will have thoroughly ravaged it enough to put it back together and finally have it mean something to me.

My misfit children.

In an effort to capture as many thoughts as I can, I write down things on a regular basis. If I have a specific plan for them, they could end up any number of purposeful places. My order-loving left brain won a battle with my erratic right brain a while ago, and it's winner's demands were that I categorize the colorful array that dances through my head and designate separate depositories for every category. With a minimum of eight notebooks/journals, it has worked well, and my right brain has complied. But the ease of submission has been helped by the fact that His Orderly Majesty was merciful, and did allow me to have one place that could be a catch-all for everything that refused to fit in a category.

That notebook has become one of my favorites. Its contents are all of the things that I don't know what to do with, but don't want to lose. As a misfit that has found a place with other misfits and has been cherished enough to not be left for lost, that notebook resides in an empathetic place in my heart.

So, like a proud mother, I present to you now a sample of what's in the quirky pages of my beloved. Why? Because that's what mothers do. Much of it is self-explanatory, but if you're reading these thoughts, and they don't make sense, don't panic. I'm aware that the chatter that happens in my head on a regular basis would likely be unintelligible to most if it was audible, and by writing it, I'm essentially making it audible. If anything you read below peaks your interest, and you want to understand more about it, just let me know and I will be happy to let you in on the joke. Or at least try to let you in. As with all jokes, some people just "get it" and others don't. (If you're reading this, that likely means you're my friend, and as my friend, that means you're probably cool (read "nerdy," "dorky," "geeky," or any other delightfully similar adjective) enough to "get it.")



"I appreciate having online conversations with people who don't take me seriously."

"My great aunt and uncle died last year and left us Febreeze."

"My mom and I are both eating close-to-midnight sandwiches. Mother-daughter bonding. But that looks like a weak bond. Maybe I should write it mother=daughter bonding."

"I've taken to sleeping with an array of books again. I'm taking that as evidence that my heart is alive."

"I appreciate living in a place where I can hear trains on a regular basis. There's a loneliness in the whistle that captures my sympathy whenever I hear it. But the train is also a reminder of other life being lived out in the world. Travel. Interaction. Non-loneliness. There's more and I long for more."

"Feminine clocks...clocks with fur coats..."

"It's weird/interesting knowing that I live in a house where druggies have been in before. Makes my life seem more interesting that it actually is."

"I'm grateful for friends who inspire the use of genuine exclamation points."

"I look like I'm wearing someone else's clothes. Someone else's larger clothes. If this shrinking keeps up, I won't be able to wear half the stuff in my closet."

"Fear me and my words of might!"

"1 Chronicles 1:10 reads, 'Cush became the father of Nimrod; he was the first to be a mighty one on the earth.'"

"What other people got from the Grammys: 'So-and-so won this many awards, Yay!'; 'What the heck was that?'; 'Is she for real?'; 'Oh, Whitney. We'll miss you, darling.' What I got from the Grammys: 'Milton Babbit died? Really?'"

"Due to a lack of vengeance, apparently I'm a disappointment."

"Often times, the best moments come unexpectedly. I hope I'm always ready to accept them and make the most of them while they're around."

"Editors are nasty? I suppose. Gentle editor, am I."

I also have a number of lists in the notebook, including but not limited to: "Things I Intend to Do When I Live Alone," "Disney Songs," "Emily's Favorite Things," "Songs for My Blog," "Harry Potter Discussion Topics for a Podcast," and "Skills I Have Which I Don't Want to Turn into a Full-Time Job."



Thank you, reader, for allowing me to be so self-indulgent.