A story exchange

A scene often repeated in my mind is a conversation between child-Rachel and grown-up-Rachel. They sit across from each other at outside a fast food restaurant holding dripping ice cream cones while child-Rachel wonders, "What changed?"
Grown-up-Rachel realizes where this is going, but takes the bait: "What do you mean?"
"I just thought I would grow up to be more, you know... cool."
The dialogue goes on as the grown-up me reasons that things just are not as "simple" as they seem in childhood. College costs money. Traveling costs money. Becoming a better author, learning photography, musical instruments, and going on adrenaline-rush excursions to sky-dive and surfing all cost... money. They all cost time, too -- something that hit me as I crossed my twentieth birthday. Life also has surprises. Child-Rachel still does not know that her Nana is about to die from cancer and it will change her world forever. She does not know that while she will always have a soft-spot for the stage, writing is where she will feel most safe, most free, and even most vulnerable. Finally grown-up-Rachel offers, "Challenges and the unknown are coming. The plan will change, but it will become a story. And you, I promise, will not only get through it, but begin to grow into someone that you trust more than your ideals. Our story doesn't stop growing."

If all the world's a stage, then every day I am living my scenes. Great amounts of these have gone by with the mundane and necessary pushing them along. But there is a desire, a deep one, that is growing. There are dreams yet to be realized, people yet to be touched, and a great story in the making. One of the most sacred hopes I have held is the desire to go to attend either Oxford or Cambridge. Originally it was Oxford all the way... but I have found that the decision is not so easy nor is the task itself, so I shall chase my opportunities. The original plan took a detour from its crisp neatness when I opted for a year of ministry school before beginning college. It went even further off-track from "Rachel's Plan A" when I met the most wonderful man in the world while at school and spent the next year, dating, engaged, and getting married. Plan A was discarded and something more tangible, more real, more worthwhile, and requiring more reconciliation with child-Rachel developed. My husband and I are both pursuing double-majors and we just made a move from Texas to the west coast to live in the town and state in which we met and have missed. Community college is the stepping stone we are on now, which will lead to university, which will hopefully aid us in careers along our story-paths. There are travels to be had, books to be written, and eventually living abroad (hopefully where I will pursue my university aspirations) as a counseling team, writing, loving, teaching, and healing.

One of the reasons I very much want to attend the Living a Better Story conference is that I seek refreshment of every day story, every day choices, and every day scenes that go on as sub-plots to our lives. My heart needs inspiration to keep moving, to not see the grand goals of studying abroad, writing books that touch lives, and raising a family that has their own hopes and dreams as intangible possibilities, but inevitable results of choices well made and a life richly lived. Much of what stands in the way of these ideas is finances: money to go to school, money to live, money to travel, money to move. But Father God is the author and perfecter of our faith... and if he perfects something so simultaneously complex and simple, so meaningful as our faith, I know Father will produce this life He leads and make it a story worth sharing.

This post was inspired by a contest to win a trip to Don Miller's Living A Better Story seminar (link) in Portland. He is an author that has inspired some life-changing questions and conversations with my Producer and "A Million Miles in a Thousand Years" embodied sentiments I have been struggling to express. I have made more decisions than I can count in pursuit of my great story and some of them have been wrong in more ways than one. In the interest, though, of pursuing a story all the same and learning along the way what it is to live a meaningful adventure with the time I have on earth, I would very much like to attend the seminar as a point of inspiration and refreshment.

If you would like to find out more about this conference, check out the following video:

Living a Better Story Seminar from All Things Converge Podcast on Vimeo.

I, Author

Every person has a story. To some extent, we are the director, the writer, and the actors to our lives. Our choices indicate what scenes will arrive and in what order. We script our own dialogue and often coach it out of others. The private moments, the deep meaningful ones, are completely at our dispense. As we live it out, we follow Shakespeare's "As You Like It":

All the world's a stage,
and all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
and one man in his time plays many parts.

Like an author about her characters, I have to wonder about myself: Where am I going? What am I doing? Who is a part of it? And so very intrinsically: Why? These are the questions I have been pondering in my heart as long as I can remember. Even as a child I knew that I wanted my life to be an adventure. Children are meant to be dreamers. There is an imagination level they have and because it tends to be curbed by time and experience, adults forget how to understand and value this gift. Childhood is the beginning, as every story must have. It is the the sweeping concepts, grand ideas, high hopes, and imagined impossibilities of the story of our life. Maturity constructs a storyboard from this and accepts that a story cannot be all highs in order to have depth. Maturity embraces adversity, frustration, growth, mistakes, and tragedy not as the end, but as the means for enriching character.

Living the adventure meant something a little different, although not wholly irrelevant, as a child. Unlimited by trivial details like finances and fears, I expected to have traveled half of the globe by this age of twenty, as well as conquering many skills such as writing, surfing, photography, bungee jumping, painting, skydiving, singing, scuba diving, sailing, para-sailing, guitar playing, piano playing, and playing with dolphins. Somewhere in that not-too-busy life, I was supposed to have already earned my bachelor's degree and be gliding my way toward a master's and doctorate in English, emphasis in creative writing, maybe double major in British literature. No sweat.

While I am still ambitious to accomplish many of these dreams (albeit somewhat modified and in a more reasonably time and manner), there are more pieces to this story than I had anticipated.

You might notice that I did not mention the producer in my introduction of roles. That is because it is arguably the most crucial role in all of this and I have chosen to relinquish that to the one who has my deepest affections. He has more experience and wisdom in managing life than I could ever hope and he has proven himself time and again as someone capable of handling my heart in a thoughtful way. Now and again we delegate roles in our story to others, allowing them to call the shots, either out of deference, humility, or fear. Eventually, we have to take those back on at some point, but with this one I do not intend to do so. It is my deepest desire (one so deep that I am often terribly afraid of it) to write, direct, and act out my life story in such a way, that it has substance enough to be produced. The one who loves and knows me better than I know myself gets the final word on my decisions and I want him to be happy with the final cut... that is exactly why I go to him in high hopes or tears: "So does this girl move to California or stay with her family in Texas? Where is the story going?"

This Time Around

Yesterday I spent some time contemplating what it would have been like to stay in Texas. Joshua and I both really miss my family a lot and eventually had to just stop talking about it yesterday in order to enjoy the trip. We are having a fantastic time now, but the feeling lingers that different paths are always available to us. We can make bad choices, good choices, great choices. And sometimes, it really is just a choice. What will you do with your life? Where will you go? What are your goals? Someone said something the night before we left that made me feel guilty about leaving and I had to wonder if the whole thing was a giant gesture of selfishness. Confessing this to my brother, I almost needed a release. He very calmly observed, “You’ve done this before. It’s where you’re supposed to go and you know that.” The heavy implication was the reality I have known in my heart since I was a child: I don’t belong in Texas. I just don’t. As big and wide as that sky is, it is somehow not big enough. And that’s okay. Choosing to move 1,800 miles away (and maybe eventually across an ocean) is not the choice to abandon relationships there. It is simply a selection of paths and this one carries me further away. It rips my heart out because I absolutely need those souls in my life and the more frequently, the better. But I also do not want to limit myself to a radius. The idea that the average person lives within a fifty mile radius where they are born is completely disconcerting and suffocating to me. Sometimes better opportunities lie outside of our radius but we feel safer within that space. (I acknowledge that sometimes the opportunities are not better or that the decision to stay is not always personal security, but those are two things that I am not willing to risk). So here I am. On this path. And today the music and lyrics of IO sang over me a proclamation…

This time around... You can be anyone...

Residing in the Comma

Seven days remaining.

Thursday through Sunday were spent sorting, packing, and cleaning our entire apartment. Thanks to some last minute help we were actually out by 10:30 (of course not to bed until midnight). I am still sore from all that work, but I am glad it is done. While we did actually get out, we are not finished with our list. Lately, I've been feeling pretty out of it and it is definitely due to lack of sleep. I am torn between rest and my to-do list, knowing neither can be satisfied with this week's schedule of working, trying to schedule time with friends, hanging out with my family, plus all of the other things bound to arise like laundry, repacking, planning, etc.

The busy-ness (busyness, business, bizness) has continued to be my shelter from that feeling of leaving... again. It is an emotionally tense place to live, but I have not found another solution. I just need time to slow down (or maybe speed up?). I want it to be over, I want it to never come. I want to drive away, I want to stay forever. I have so much to do, I just want to relax. I reside in that comma.

New discoveries:

• I find that I have to psyche myself up for infinite moments. Like, driving down the road is just a commute unless you turn on your favorite music, light up, and roll down the windows even though it is raining. Suddenly something routine becomes rejuvenating.
• Ben and Jerry's "Everything But The..." is my new favorite comfort food.
• I am finding that I like to be "necessary". Self-esteem issue? Maybe. I'm working on it.
• Sometimes friendship grow with change and sometimes they fade. Mostly though, relationship change with change. The dynamic that worked in the past may not continue, but it can still be beautiful.

The Hardest Thing About Leaving

We are moving forward. Days are dragging on, but somehow weeks are flying by. We are down to eighteen days remaining. Eighteen. I just cannot believe how close it is.

It has been an overwhelming few months, but I am starting to see the finish lines to what has been eating my time, energy, and attention. Knowing that there are reasonable chunks of tasks that can be completed and will be coming to a close brings a lot of peace of mind. Monday signals the end of my school year. The following Sunday is the Official Move Out Day. The weekend after that is my last day of work at GBBC and Hunter's graduation. And two days later, we're leaving.

Just like that. Leaving.

My emotions are all over the place but my busyness has helped me stay distracted from that topsy-turvy nervousness and the sadness at leaving my family behind again. Family is the hardest group of people to stay with and the hardest people to leave. My sight is becoming blurry with stinging, salty tears as I type this, particularly thinking of leaving my siblings behind because as we grow up, we change so much and so quickly. The year I was gone it seemed that all of them became different people. I just do not know how to miss those moments in their lives and be okay with it.

I'm talking about the moments that make you who you are: when you tell a bad decision no, or say yes to a mistake and grow from it, or have the best night laughing with friends (the kind you remember for always), or any number of those times when you feel "infinite" and it becomes what molds your memories. So many people do not get to love their siblings the way I love mine. When I say I would die for them, there is no hesitation in my heart that I would give every last thing I have to save them, help them, grow them. Each is such a unique person with incredible talent, beauty, and destiny. And if you've met them even once, even briefly, you know that too. How do I just get in a car and drive away? How do I move forward with my life, knowing that they are moving forward with theirs and it might not be in a parallel direction anymore?

As long as I have known these four incredible people, we have all been moving in the same direction: up. We were growing up, from one grade to the next, from single digits to double digits, middle school to high school, up clothes sizes... just up. But I hit it first: that place where things are not moving "up" so much as across. Getting older is leveling out just a bit and I am making choices for my life that move me out and forward. Hunter is beginning to do the same and now every other year, so will each of the others. So as we move out and forward, can we still be together? Can we still be connected? Can we avoid the awkward quiet and fumbling for conversation that comes between normal friends after extended time apart? Can we still be involved and interact without having that deathly distance kill the intimate camaraderie that is so unexplainable and so rare? I hope so. God, with all my heart, I hope so. Because these are the people I love the most and I know my life would fade so quickly and lose so much color if something were to tear us apart.

There it is. That's the hardest thing about leaving. I feel like I am abandoning them and it's hard not to hate myself for it. It's not comforting to be told that it will "all be okay", that I have to go my own direction because it's "natural" and "healthy," that our relationships will be fine, etcetera etcetera. I'm supposed to be here. I'm their older sister who has done her very best to love them, protect them, and encourage them amidst her own chaotic learning. I have made mistakes, but I do not love them any less or want to be away from them anymore.

I will be okay. I know I will because I have been before. But today it just hit me and my independence tastes more bitter than sweet through these thoughts.

{So if any of you darlings read this, I love you. I love you so very much, with all my heart, and I always will. I'm here for you no matter what, no matter when. Forever. -Your Sister}

I, who am weary and burdened

Riches I heed not nor man's empty praise
Thou mine inheritance now and always
Thou and thou only first in my heart
High King of Heaven, my treasure Thou art

This week has been a blur of sleepy-hungry-overwhelmed. While I enjoyed some of the most beautiful moments with precious friends this week (the kind of necessary moments that remind you that you're alive and happy to be so), the pressures of school, work, and moving are starting to close in. I really have tried recently to be more focused on school so that I finish stronger than I started. One of my grades is not doing so well and I am giving it this last push to try and bring it up (i.e. immediately working on my in-progress project when I got home after six last night and not finishing until midnight). When I get overwhelmed, if I can just sit back for one minute I hear the Lord telling me, "Not much longer. You can do this." It's the sentiment my husband echoes in such gentle, understanding tones as I struggle to balance the demands on my time, attention, and emotions.

This morning was an early one as usual since Joshua and I are sharing the Jeep until further notice. The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was the moon still round and yellow, hanging around to say that the night went by too quickly. My mind is somewhere back in that moment, I think, because it has not yet caught up to me. Work is quiet and empty today so I am doing boring old bookkeeping, which practically drives me insane. And as I think about how I feel so ragged, so worn, so used up, it hits me: there is a difference between taking a break and genuine rest.

"Taking a break" brings to mind half-time in a sweaty, athletic match or the deep breath you take between one task and another. It's the pauses we take to survive. But when I think of "rest", I think of soft moments relaxing in the park, drives with the sunroof back, and reading with my feet kicking the air behind me. Even the memories I have over past months are not "rest." They are like sleep: necessary for existence, but not always rejuvenating. I need rest: continuous moments where my mind and heart are at peace and unity with my Father, just absolute bliss in knowing I am loved, approved of, cared for. There is something in a daughter's heart that needs to be spoken to saying that she is secure and okay and that all the messes, mistakes, confusion, and victories are accounted for and accepted. I crave it so deeply that I was in tears on my drive home yesterday, wordless, just lonely for that communion. I truly cannot live without it. Survive, yes-- but live, thrive, rest? No.

"Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."

Every day strengthens my resolution that I don't want to be

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