worthwhile reads to start your week

Holy moly. 700 page views last weekend, for my post on graduation, community, and what the pictures don’t show you. If you’re a new reader, welcome! Here are a few worthwhile reads to start off your week, and I’ll see you back with a new post tomorrow. As the legendary Veronica Corningstone says, “Thanks for stopping by.”

It’s been about 73 and sunny here in Durham. Rolling down the windows and blasting the radio weather. Jogging on the nature trail weather (still gearing up for my first 5K in a couple weeks). Tending the baby lettuce, spinach, and arugula weather. (And by “tending,” I mean “doing absolutely nothing except looking at the lettuce and taking pictures of it.”) Going to see The Avengers weather…can’t spend all my time outdoors, after all.

If you’re stuck inside, though, might as well have some good reading. Here’s some writing that caught my attention this week.

learning to shut my mouth

It’s time for some true confessions, folks.

Fact: Sometimes, in my mad rush to get out the door, I forget to put on deodorant in the morning.

Fact: This happens more often than I’d like to admit.

Fact: I bought a mini-deodorant to put in my purse for these very occasions.

Fact: Sometimes I forget and leave my purse in the car.

Fact: If heated and cooled, deodorant will, in fact, melt and break apart into little deodorant crumbles that will then stick themselves to my wallet, my keys, my day planner, my iPod, and my Kindle case.

I am nothing if not a classy lady.

It was about the time I got to the food court next door at the hospital that I noticed that everything in my purse smelled like Secret, and I realized what had happened. I took out my purse to pay for my food, and there it was, my deodorant-caked wallet. Everyone in the hospital, probably everyone in the zip code, could smell the unmistakable aroma of Secret Powder Fresh.

I desperately wanted to turn around to the people behind me. Make a joke. Explain it. Defend myself. “I’m not that kind of person,” I wanted to tell them.

what the pictures don’t tell you

I go on Facebook, and all I can see are pictures of new graduates, their faces beaming with joy.

A year ago, it was me, posing with six of my best friends from seminary. Gowned and smiling, our red and white hoods hanging down our backs. We pose seriously in one picture. We pretend to do a kickline in another one. We do the infamous jumping shots–a group tradition–in another.

They are viewbook type pictures. I saw these kinds of pictures when I signed up for divinity school. Smiling friends at basketball games or graduations, arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders. “Be part of Christian community,” the viewbooks and websites said.

I know something now I didn’t know then: Community is not instant. Those pictures, beaming with joy, are not pictures of the awkward beginnings or tedious middles. Those pictures are the end of a story. Behind those pictures are a thousand words that have been said, a thousand moments that have been lived.

worth reading for the weekend

Here’s a few links worth reading this weekend. I’ve worked some overtime, had lunch with an old friend, chauffeured some friends’ families to their graduation ceremony, felt the warm spring sun on my face, and sat around a campfire eating s’mores and laughing. Hope your weekend is full of laughter, good work, good rest, and those you love.

Betting on a Dream, Living a Good Story | Reflections on Jennifer Lawrence’s pursuit of an acting career (from someone who knows her family!)

Back in 2009, Jen spoke with our hometown paper about her passion for acting: “Once I got the tiniest taste for this, I could never look back and I could never do anything else,” she said. “Thank God I have parents who could see that. They knew what was happening was real.”

In which I’m no angry feminist | Thank you, Sarah Bessey, for saying what I’ve been trying to say for years.

I’m no angry feminist. Oh, no, I’m a Jesus-following, joy-filled feminist.

How an ENFP reads “The Hunger Games” and What ENFPs think about all day | Don’t read these unless you are prepared to spit water out of your nose because you are laughing so hard. Yes, I am an ENFP.

1. Let’s drop everything and have fun RIGHT NOW!
2. How can I make this relationship deeper, richer and more fulfilling?
3. Oh, I have so many things I want to say!
4. Everybody is SO interesting!

sometimes it just won’t die

The rain fell long and hard the other night.

I had given up on my poor wilted, dying basil plant. “I can’t grow anything!” I said to my husband. “I am never going to be able to have children if I can’t even keep a plant alive! I’ll probably be one of those mothers who leaves their kids in the car just for a second and gets caught up in a discussion about Friday Night Lights for two hours and forgets they’re out there!”

I am nothing if not even-keeled. So much for permission to fail.

“Plants don’t cry if you don’t feed them,” Josh said evenly. Point taken.

The rain kept falling outside, a spring thunderstorm in Durham. The next morning, as I walked to the car, I looked at the plant. It was healthy again, the leaves strong and firm. All it needed was a good soaking.

“I had been watering it,” I said. “I just heard that you can kill a plant by overwatering it, so I was being careful.”

Josh smiled sweetly. “Overwatering hasn’t really been the problem in the past.” Point taken again.

Sometimes you give up, decide it’s over, throw in the towel, say, “permission to fail,” and let it die.

And sometimes, despite your finest efforts at defeat, God just sabotages them with victory.

on (not) living the dream

The other day, the phone rang every thirty seconds with someone else’s phone calls. When it wasn’t ringing, I was opening, stamping, delivering someone’s mail.

Sometimes I would catch a glance of the mug that sports my seminary’s logo. Right by the telephone in the office where I work as a temp secretary and have for nearly a year.

It was one of those days where all I could think was this: This is not where I was supposed to be.I should be past this by now. One of those days where I talk to myself and ask, “Is this what you took out these student loans for? That you got that Duke education for? That you studied and wrote papers and learned Greek and Hebrew for? To answer somebody else’s calls?”

walking on water

I was eighteen.

I had just graduated from high school with dreams of being a writer. I had always loved words, ever since reading A Little House in the Big Woods and the Narnia books. My best friends early in life had been Laura and Mary Ingalls, the March girls and the Pevensie kids, some babysitters named Kristy and Claudia and Stacey and a Receiver named Jonas. I loved good stories, stories that often seemed to be more true than the reality around me.

I loved story, but it was hard for me to think that it was a “good use of my time.” A good use of my “potential.” I had certain ideas of what a “Christian writer” was supposed to be. The books that I picked up at the Bible bookstore sometimes seemed more concerned with making sure ends were tied up, characters “converted.” They prided themselves on being “clean”–no swearing, no sex. They were beginning to seem farther and farther away from the world I lived in. And I wondered if that was what I wanted to write.

I was beginning to doubt that life was like these tidy, clean stories.

permission to fail

My basil plant is slowly wilting, dying outside.

I looked at it this morning, last night, yesterday morning. I’ve been careful to water but not overwater. I planted it in another pot with organic potting soil and sat it in the full sun. But the leaves continue to droop.

Beside the basil, there are two pots of lettuce sprouts grown from seed and one pot of spinach that has just started to sprout. They’re growing so thick that they will probably need to be thinned into other pots soon. But I can’t think about them.

I can only think about the basil. I stare back at it, a small failure. I wish I hadn’t planted it at all.

red toes and the risen Lord

Early in the morning, on the first day of the week, on the day of the Resurrection, I paint my toenails red.

I haven’t painted my toenails in a solid year. It seems frivolous, too silly to spend my time on. But it’s been a long time since I’ve done anything much for my body.

My mother-in-law brings me back a fancy bottle of Dead Sea foot cream from Israel. I’ll use it later, I think, when… But I don’t know the end of the sentence. When I feel like I’m worth it?

practice resurrection

I am never sure what to do with Easter.

Lent, I have no problem with. I am fairly good at lamenting my sins and remembering my mortality. I shed a habit yearly. I often put a new habit on, too, for forty days, until it comes to fit me as well as the old pair of blue jeans, contoured to my body after years of use. I am good at Lent. I wear ashes on my forehead and hear the words: “Dust you are, and to dust you shall return.” I confess, put away my alleluias. I wash feet or take bread and wine on Maundy Thursday. I sing and pray and watch the candles extinguished on Good Friday.

I always do celebrate Easter, for a day. Sing “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today,” feast with friends, dress up nice. And then it is over. I go back to Facebook or shopping or eating meat or whatever.

I have been thinking recently about the Great Fifty Days, what the early Christians called the season of Easter. Fifty days because the feasting of the Resurrection should trump the fasting of Lent. And yet after a good meal and a good day of church, it seems like Easter is over for me. What does it mean to live into Easter like I live into Lent?