After quite a hiatus, I am ready to write on here again. I've been busy, of course...there's just all of life and summer and people around. And there's the internal, personal nature of things that just hadn't taken form in words on the page yet. There's also the overwhelmed feeling I get when I read what's out on Internetland...a lot of opinions and Lists of Things That Are Going to Change My Life and I'll Never Be the Same (but really most of the time are a waste of time or worse, a gimmick to get me somewhere I don't want to be--you know what I'm talking about?). And yet I continually struggle with where my voice will fall in the great sea of words out on the world wide web. So I create, and re-create, and question my little blog and the temptation to be something I'm not. In the end, I come back to wanting to tell a story...the simple story of what God is doing in our lives, even if it's just the mundane abundance of busy blessings this motherhood/home-making thing is turning out to be. (And by home-making, I don't specifically mean the occupation of "housewife", I mean the making of a home). I want to be purposeful, intentional, honest, and continue posting pictures of the kids for the grandparents. There it is, and it's not likely to be reposted on the Huffington Post.
But there is a worth to the words I write, and I was greatly encouraged by a short talk I heard from a conference about C.S. Lewis (I'll include the video at the bottom of the page). It was an encouragement to WRITE, taken from letters a young Lewis wrote to friends. He said, "Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing. Ink is the great cure of all human ills." Maybe our ink isn't the Great Cure of ALL of the ills...but a Word was...and we are imitators of what we have been shown and responsible to communicate the meaning we see in life to others. Robert Frost said, "A poem begins as a lump in the throat; a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a love-sickness in the midst of this world's mess." And so I continue with These Pilgrim Days...a fullness of life here and all I want it to be and how it really is and the homesickness for somewhere else where all wrongs will eventually be made right.
Now, to bring you up to speed with our family: Jeremy applied for PhD programs (in theology) and was well-received and accepted to a few world-class programs. He applied for scholarships and we held out until the LAST (read: waited and waited and waited) possible scholarship to come from a school in Durham, England. Right at the end of the school year, we heard no. Then, we didn't find a buried treasure, win the lottery, or receive an unexpected inheritance from a mysterious benefactor, so we (sadly) had to put the PhD dream on hold and proceed with the demands and pressures of life. Something that has been in our hearts for some time has been having a hospitality house...a place where people are made to feel welcome and important conversations are had around the dinner table. We longed to host international students...and right at the moment of greatest discouragement, Jeremy disappeared from our poolside conversation (at a friend's house) and came back with a breathlessly narrated cell-phone video: a house that had just been listed for rent right by Cal State University in Fullerton (that he snuck into through a window in typical Jeremy-fashion). I could tell from his voice that it was something special. It would be a risk to commit to it in the hopes that imaginary international students would come to live with us...but it was a great opportunity and close to our hearts. In a whirlwind of craziness, we committed and then were like, "Ah! What have we done?! What if this doesn't work?!" (well, maybe mostly me, in my head).
At the height of the feeling-like-we-jumped-off-a-cliff phase, I went to a garage sale (might I interject that I had a little too much fun scavenging the neighborhoods for free and cheap furniture to fill the place with?) and the people were like "Help us get rid of our stuff because we are moving overseas" and I felt a little pain in my heart that has been so familiar over the past 2 years...that's what we were supposed to be doing.
"Where are you moving?"
"England!" (little knife stabbing in my heart)
"Can I ask where?"
"A city called Durham." (knife twisting)
"What for, if you don't mind me asking?" (heart fluttering)
"My husband is going for a PhD." (out-of-body feeling)
"I'm curious...in what?" (couldn't be...this is too uncanny)
"Theology." (once again, the feeling of running to the end of the dock only to watch the ship sail away without us)
Did we miss something? Were we not faithful enough? It was hard to come home and re-tell the story to Jeremy who had just felt so sad putting all of his books on the shelves of our new place to collect dust for the time being. But, in the retelling, we both realized that we were in a different place than that family. We are rebuilding after being broken down. We are in need of a fresh start. We are obviously in need of A LOT of refinement and humbling :) And so we are satisfied, for now, and hopeful (most days) that God will establish the work of our hands.
In the meantime (which is really the only time), we are having fun in this big crazy house with really wonderful students to learn from and play with and live life with. We LOVE our students...we couldn't have hand-picked them better! We have Mohammed from Iraq, Mohammad from Iran, Adam from Pakistan, and Janyl from Kyrgyzstan. I'm sure they will appear often in this blog and it will be fun to record our memories here this year as we share them together. They are a part of our family now, so keep that in mind in your comments, if applicable.
And lastly, a recap of our lives over the past 6 months (this is the part with the pictures for the grandparents :))...I made a slideshow. It moves fast, so buckle up! (P.S. I had a lot of trouble getting it to come out high quality so just watch it on the small screen here and it looks best)
Here's the link to the 11-minute video about C.S. Lewis and writing:
