chapel songs.

I wish I could say that every Sunday I spend in church is a rich, overflowing time for my spirit.  That the songs we sing permeate my frustrations and that the sermon pierces right through all of my preconceptions and my judgments and that I walk out of the middle school where we meet totally upheaved and re-written.

This is not the case.  Due to my utter humanness I often find that I sort of grovel through the service hoping to pick up nuggets, grabbing them and shoving them into my pocket like a beggar on the streets of Boston.  I leave the service in a wrestling match between what I am and what I want to be.  My feet are in my sneakers and eternity is in my heart.  So for now, I try and I wait.

After our pastor gives the sermon on Sunday morning, the music team piles back up on stage to play another set of songs.  They kind of scurry up there like mice while he prays, asking the LORD to please sow the seeds of the Word in our hearts and I, in my own little lap, beg for it.   Sometimes my first reaction is to be irritated by that song that I don't feel like singing, but I am learning, have patience with me, that it isn't really about what I like or don't like. It's about singing songs that will take to the skies all the way up to heaven.  So this week when I was singing the songs I closed my eyes and imagined what it must be like for God to hear a whole church sing a song to him, about him.

We sang Be Thou My Vision, a hymn that I have sung so many, so many times.  I love this hymn.  The words are like a blazing fire that emits such a force of heat that you can feel it all around and inside you.  And do you know how a fire, all of its smells and glorious popping light, is somehow comforting in its grandeur?  This is the way that this hymn, with its music and its words, is to me.  And, like a fire, it has the capacity to make me feel so incredibly tiny and powerless.  

Our church is what people today would call "Contemporary," meaning that the music is more up-beat than many churches.  They add some spunk to this particular hymn but on Sunday, around the fourth verse, all of the instruments deadened except for the drum, played by this total rocker college kid.  The auditorium filled with the voices of the congregation and this tremendous Celtic drum beat.  The sound was audacious and, at last, I could imagine God really listening to our singing that colossal anthem.

Riches I heed not, nor man's empty praise.

Thou mine Inheritance, now and always:

Heart of my own heart, whatever befall,

Still be my Vision, O Ruler of all.

meals in minutes.

Stuart bought a cookbook recently, "Meals in Minutes," in a new concerted effort to learn to cook.  The selling point of this book is that you can throw together a delicious well-balanced meal quickly.  The intro reads: "Sharing homemade meals is a fading ritual, too often replaced by television or a slice of pizza ... However, you hold in your hands the book that shows you how to create wonderful dishes without a lot of fuss and bother."

On Wednesday night he was going to make some curried chicken with rotini dish.  At two-thirty he was pulling the meat out of the freezer and asked if Mark and I wanted to join the family for dinner. Of course! Well would you mind picking up three more cans of this... he looks at the can... reduced fat Cream of Chicken soup?  I'm on it, I said.

When I brought the soup home the chicken was no longer on the counter-top.  I guess the dinner process was already underway. I put the soup on the counter and left, yelling up the stairs that I would be home by 6:45.  Dinner would be served, I was informed, at 7:15.  Wake Forest would be playing Duke in basketball so we would eat in front of the TV. Please refer back to the Cookbook's tag line.

The smell of something hit me when I walked in the basement door from outside. My apartment has its own entrance and I was surprised to smell dinner all the way downstairs.  Mark arrived and we discussed the wedding over a glass of wine while waiting for dinner.  

Around 7:20 Kim marched down the stairs in her flannel pajama pants and red fleece, classic post-work-I-don't-care-I'm-not-leaving-the-house garb.  

"Time for dinner?" I asked, getting up.

"No." She rolled her eyes with a laughing in them.  "We're having frozen Costco pizza."  Please refer back to Cookbook tag line again.

"What??  What happened to Chicken Curry Cream Pasta thing?  He's been working on it all day!"

"Well, yeah, you know you'd think that you couldn't botch a meal in minutes, wouldn't ya.  Well apparently Stuart added two entire--" making a little hand motion to indicate the two-inch-tall plastic container, searching for the right word "--things of curry powder!  And then, you know, it tastes awful so he keeps adding more milk! I mean he's got about three huge cookers full of this curried milk sauce.  You have to get the milk up to temperature but he got impatient so he turned the heat up under the pot and scalded the milk! So two gallons of milk, all this chicken, curry powder, vegetables... we're throwing it out.  It stinks up there, like something rotting. It's foul."  

Mark and I were laughing at this point. 

"But thanks to Costco we have pizza.  Y'all want some pizza?"

We nodded, my eyebrows raised.

"So what is Stuart doing right now?" I asked.

"Well the Wake Forest game is on now, so he's lost any concern about dinner.  He's up there with a glass of wine and his buddy's here..."

She laughed and tossed her hair back as she turned toward the garage door to get the pizza.  "I swear..."  

Lesson: the only simple thing is spaghetti and meals in minutes don't exist, at least not around these parts.

it's cold here.

It is cold here. Last week the temperatures were down in the "teens" and my car hesitated to start when I tried it for work.  We had two days in the fifties but the cold still felt thick--like maybe it's so far inside of me by this point that the actual temperature doesn't factor in. My bones are in frozen hibernation and the only respite is Florida.

My apartment is a basement and the door to the outside doesn't quite close all the way.  I have a long skinny pillow with a design of row houses painted on it that is meant to be stuffed down at the bottom of the door to prevent the air from wafting in down low to the ground.  This is fairly effective, however there is also a gap between the door and the rest of the door frame. I can look through and see a little line of light.  The little pillow doesn't frame the whole door, dang it.  The thermostat is upstairs so there isn't much I can do about this except to turn on the gas fire place when I'm home for long enough.  Then I wrap myself up in a fleece blanket and sit on the brick fire place to warm up.  I've also resorted to running my hands and feet under scalding water in the sink, wearing five layers, doing the dishes more often by hand and making sure to fold the laundry when it is just out of the dryer.

The low body degree issue is compounded by a few things.  For instance I am addicted to ice water. My cells are probably on the verge of explosion because I drink so much water.  There are these insulated no-sweat plastic cups called Tervis Tumblers and they have straws.  These things go everywhere with me full of ice and water.  I probably drink over 150 ounces of water a day, no joke, and my sister commented on how even when she was 8 months pregnant I peed more than she did. It might be a problem.  So it's freezing cold and then I guzzle cold liquids.  No wonder my guts are frozen.  

I am also an outdoors person.  We're not talking camping, I don't have any great desire to be rugged. However I have a real need to be outside and in natural light.  In fact I can hardly stand to be inside during the daylight hours.  Windows help, but since I live in the basement the best option for me is to, obviously, go outside.  So I do.  Sometimes I go for a walk around the neighborhood and call my mom to catch up.  Holding the cell phone turns my hands into ice.  Sometimes, though, I just sit outside on the deck and read.  It's thirty-five degrees and my body is shivering with cold, but I have to be outside.  So I sit there as long as I can possibly stand it and read.  Just finished Kite Runner. Had to read the last few chapters inside.  It helped that it was gray out.

Winter is good for Christmas and snow, but I'll be glad to dismiss it come... March?? Please say yes.

january snow.

I recently read an excerpt from a book that said this: "to pray means to wait for the God who comes."  It is in God's identity--One who comes.

Ever since I read that it has remained in my mind, dusting my thoughts like powdery white snow that swirls around on the pavement and only accepts the faintest footprints.  So I guess it was something I had needed to hear.

It seems like this road has been so daggum windy.  I can only see two feet ahead and then the pavement makes another jarred curve and I drive in blind with only minute confidence that there will not be a car, or a herd of grazing water buffalo, in my lane on the other side.  I feel tired because I wait and yet have no idea what is coming.  UNCG would do me a huge service to tell me if they'll take me for their Writing Master's program because the not-knowing is turning me into something of a plastic wind-up duck.  

We've got these married friends who went out on a limb to move down here to North Carolina. They live in an apartment complex.  It's nice, but they decided it was time to move on.  They found a house and jumped through about seventy-five loops, all hung up high in the air, some of them on fire, to buy this house.  And they love it--it's got a big lawn with a slight hill in the back.  There are a few other houses around but everyone is neighborly.  They have two big dogs, a lab and a golden retriever, and my friends just want so badly to live in a place where the dogs can run around and play.  

So they had it all lined up and then they hit a snag.  His company won't write a letter declaring he's got a consistent full-time job, even though he does and has worked there for three months, because they're "working on their budget."  Now they can't close on the house.  They are living out of boxes, borrowing spare bed rooms and using other folks' washers and dryers.  My friend, the girl, who is the most delightful soul, her eyes are turning red with stress and the other night, when I saw her laugh at someone's joke, I realized it was the first time I'd seen a real smile out of her in a good while.   This week all I can say to her is that she has to wait for the God who comes.

That's the catch about God coming-- you have to wait.

On Monday night my almost-husband left late after a movie.  He wasn't gone ten seconds before he busted back through the door, picked me up in my plaid cotton pants and sweatshirt, ran outside and spun me around under the radiant moon.  I laughed and shrieked and gasped... it was snowing.

On Tuesday morning I awoke and when the sun finally rose I, in some bizarre ritual, stepped outside in a tank top.  The street was silent and it the earth was white.  I expected the quiet to linger, as it does on snow mornings, but then I heard the most peculiar sound.  I walked out further and heard my neighbors--a five-year-old and two-year-old toe head--shrieking and calling out, "Dad! See this?!"  It was so early, but the kids ran and laughed and dragged their dad by his gloved hands down into the snow.  

I don't know what it is, between the waiting for this One who does come, the small measure of faith that we cling to, and that sweet soft snow and they way it seemed to cover over a multitude of troubles.  But I think I believe it deep down, that God will come.  

"God is thrust onward by his love, not attracted by our beauty.  He comes even in moments when we have done everything wrong..."

papa introduces Jonathan to Seinfeld.

one night last fall.

It was in the fall, probably November.  He called me to come over--it was 10:00 on Sunday night.  I was tired and already in sweat pants and a rugby shirt I'd inherited from my brother.  But of course I'd go.

When I pulled up he came out, saying, "let's go for a drive."  I almost whined, "but I have to get up early..."  but in some attempt to embrace impulse, didn't.  I held my tongue and decided ah hell, one late night won't kill me.

We got in his car and he looked at me and said, "where should we go?"  I shrugged, a bit confused. "Business 40?" I suggested, "Through downtown?"  There is something about city lights at night--any city.  But the center of Winston-Salem at night is majestic in its isolated height and uncanny quiet.  It is heavenly, and the city charm can make anybody feel dazzling.  It's inviting and warm and sparkling with contrast.  Janitors and night watchmen have keys and they turn on the night lights in the city.

We drove down the expressway and got off on Cherry Street.  Weaving around down in toward Fourth and Trade, we got mixed up and turned around on one-way streets and turn-abouts.  Fall had come that day, a swift overhaul of any residual summer warmth.  It was eerie the way all the lights were on. Everyone, like aggravated turtles, was tucked up at home to avoid the cold wind.

With wide open parking, Mark pulled up by an apartment complex.  He looked at me and turned off the engine, smirking.  

"But I'm in sweatpants!"  

He just smiled and got out of the car.  

I opened the door and shuddered when the wind diced right through my cotton coverings.  He grabbed a long sleeve shirt from his golf bag in the trunk and threw it to me.  We ventured into a parking deck and came out to the landing which afforded a view of the skyline.  I'm sure I gaped and he, less concerned with city lights, wrapped his arms around me and lifted me up, stretching his neck to place a kiss my jaw bone as I looked at the light pouring out of the tall domed building that you can see from a thousand points around town.

I smiled, a gesture for the stars, as he spun me around.  And then, setting my feet back on the asphalt, he put his hands on my frozen face and I kissed him.

We walked up the street and turned right on Fifth, toward First Baptist, whose stained glass window glowed with colors.  

"We look like we're homeless," I said, flopping the unfilled sleeves of his large men's shirt that draped off the ends of my hands in his face.  

We stopped in front of a mural wall, holding hands, and craned our necks to see the picture.  It was too close so we crossed the ghost street to get a better scope.  

"Weird," he said of the ambiguous figures.  We both laughed.  "I mean really, what is that supposed to be?" 

The traffic lights switched dutifully from green to yellow to red to green again, though in the whole universe there wasn't a car on the road.

almost three years old.

My niece to be, Hannah, took me to the park for an outing this afternoon.  We didn't get out the door until about 4:45 so the sun was already set and it was getting cold.  

Hannah will be three in February but she talks as if she is a twelve-year-old college student.  She is more articulate than most of my peers.  She walked me down the street, instructing me to "hold hands" and "jump on the grass" when cars drove by.  I am baffled by nice family neighborhoods without sidewalks, as is the condition of our neighborhood.  She stopped and sniffed at every little thing that was out of the ordinary for the side of the street.

"This is somebody's pay," she said, pointing to a renegade grocery receipt that was stuck in the mud.

"Do you see this?" she asked me, pointing her toe into a pile of mud.

"Yes," I replied.

"It's dirt. Don't step there, your shoes will track it in the house."

Ten four.

She told me to watch when she ran and to look at her when she jumped up high.  There are days when this sort of dilly-dallying makes me irritated, but today I enjoyed it.  It's really entirely stupid to let myself become annoyed since the purpose of our time together is for her enjoyment and if all it takes is marveling at a lost receipt, then I should really be counting my blessings.  

When we got to the park, we played house for a while and then hit the swings. She had me put her in the swing that has four leg holes and then gave me instructions.

"Aunt Ginny, I want to go super high."

So I pushed her high.  Usually I'd pretend to give a big push but take it easy so that the kid didn't fly out of the swing and hit the wood chips.  But I didn't do that, I really pushed her as hard as I could, and she just soared. For a hot second I thought, "Too hard?"  But she came down laughing and  sputtering like a little monkey.  Precious, so sweet it made me laugh out loud.  And then she just laughed harder, and I pushed her again.  

"The moon is out already," I said.

"Where?" she asked, craning her head on the down swing to find the elusive moon behind her right shoulder.

"Up there," I pointed and she turned and spotted it.  "Where do you suppose the sun went?"

After a brief pause, she said, "He's up there behind the sun."

 

She asked me to stop her so she could look and really see.  I grabbed her little feet and she came to a halt.  With both hands she wiped her blonde hair, all sticky with static, from her face and stared at the moon.

"There's a man on the moon," I said. "Sometimes you can see his face, when it's totally round." 

She looked at me skeptically.

"He makes sure you're okay when you sleep."

She smiled at the thought and then told me that the sun probably sits up with the moon too.  I laughed, and that made her laugh.

 

high school band at pier 39.

A group of kids played sweet Christmas melodies down by the wharf in San Francisco.  One little boy--the smallest one--played his pipe organ with a hammer and held his floppy booklet of songs with his left hand.  He was the only one in a Santa hat and he hammered his pipes with perfect precision.  Precious Christmas boy!

to applaud december.

A few days ago I overheard a lady say, "the month of December is awful because I want to be able to slow down to take in the meaning of the season, but it's so packed and busy that it always flies by too fast."  And while I can understand her sentiment, I think I'm going to disagree. 

My mother would say I am a glutton for over-commitment and December is most definitely the month of commitments. From Christmas parties to end-of-the-whatever parties, Christmas shopping to making sure you fit in every last tradition (cookie making, "White Christmas" viewing, stringing lights, sending cards, going to various performances, etc.)... there are definitely more than twenty-five things to do.  This means that on top of normal life responsibilities which, in every other month of the year take up every bit of your time each day, you are expected to fit in this whole laundry list of "Christmas things"--and more than one per day! It is indeed a jingle bell marathon.

I've been thinking this week, just about what that lady said.  And that's on top of how often I hear that we've "lost the spirit of Christmas" or that it's "gone commercial."   December-bashing is almost as common as political banter it seems.

But isn't it glorious the way that magic sort of sprinkles down over this month? Isn't there something beautifully comforting about the rich green garlands and ruby red Christmas bows that decorate Nordstrom starting days before Thanksgiving?  I have found myself recently wandering to places like Starbucks and walking around neighborhoods where folks string up gaudy lights and erect blow-up snow men because of what a joy the traditions are for me.

This weekend I ran in a race called the "Mistletoe"--Winston-Salem's half marathon of the last 25 years. I ran beside an older gentleman for a while who informed me that he had run this race every year since it had begun.  he was wearing green tights, stocking shorts and a red t-shirt. He had bells stuffed into his socks that jingled with each step and a ridiculous elf hat.  What fun! And today I bundled up to go to a free performance of Handel's Messiah put on by the local community purely in the spirit of celebration after attending a Young Life Christmas party where there were no less than twenty-seven different casseroles.

I think it comes down to this: Christmas is the season that we celebrate the good news--Jesus has come to be with us!  The words O come, Thou Day Spring, come and cheer our spirits by thine advent here. Disperse the gloomy clouds of night and death's dark shadows put to flight.  Rejoice! Rejoice! Immanuel shall come to thee, O Israel!  are indeed my portion and perhaps it is the reminder of Christmas--Christ's birth--every December that gives me the strength to make it through one more year.  As Madeleine L'Engle said in her poem Into the Darkest Hour, "the stable is our heart."

Some things are ridiculous, like the inflatable six-foot snow globe with the Nativity scene in the yard on the corner of Lindbergh and Country Club, but it is fun to laugh.  And I am thankful for Bing and Nat and their sweet Advent lullabies, for the peppermint coffee drinks and the Home Alone marathons on cheap TV because at the heart of the joy and merriment is the precious keeping of Jesus born in Bethlehem in a sheep pen.  Sweet sweet December, thank you for hosting my heart in this celebration season.

the corner where they lived.

On the Saturday after Thanksgiving we drove in toward Pittsburgh from Butler--Mark's home town.  We got as far as the city outskirts to a little place called Mount Lebanon.  Pittsburgh is nestled down in a valley where three rivers meet, the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio rivers.  The hills that rise up, including the famed Mount Washington, surround the city as the porcelain walls of a bathtub. They are dotted with simple homes and nondescript structures--old mills and sheds of sorts.  Pittsburgh's history lies in the steel industry and the city people are hard working.  It is an aged and solemn city. 

The street winds around up Mount Lebanon and passes houses that grow by the block.  The oldest houses, found up on top of the hill, are structurally unique, built with mortar and stone and sharp angled roofs.  The yards are small--every house seems like a well postured gentry standing in his square foot guard post.

As we wound through the neighborhoods, I realized we would pass Mark's folks' first house.  They had met working at the city hospital--a nurse and a young doctor--and fallen in love in the courtly city.  Doc had grown up on Mount Lebanon and when he and Joyce were married, they decided to start back at his beginning.  We drove around corners and sucked in our breath as the Honda squeezed between a row of parked cars and a passing Lexus.  The houses were framed with red and white Christmas lights and in the early dark we passed heedless window people cooking dinner and picking toys up off of the ground. 

Doc pulled up in front of a house on a steep hill.  "This is it," he said, crouching down to look up out of the passenger window. "This is the house I grew up in."  We all looked and I was smiling, and nobody had anything to say.   We drove on down the block and made a few turns, pulling up again in front of another house, smaller, with the front door open and the light shining out onto the lawn.  

Joyce put her hand on Doc's shoulder and said,"there's our first house." Turning to her husband she said,"don't you just miss Mount Lebanon?" 

He chuckled and as he pulled away he glanced back out of the window and exclaimed, "those are my steps!"

"Oh yeah!  Mark, your father built those steps down from the porch to the back.  There weren't steps when we moved in."  She looked back at him and said, "That's your carpentry-- holds up a long time."  She sighed and watched out the window as we drove around down the hill.  

We ate dinner in a quaint restaurant in the neighborhood around the corner from where Joyce used to walk the girls when they were babies and she would wait for Doc to get home from work. "One time," she explained, "I had Lisa in the stroller and I tipped it and she fell right into the gutter.  And then Stef started screaming, 'Mommy! The baby!'  I had to tell her to hush because, of course, all of the rich Mount Lebanon mothers are walking through town and here I am, this young mother, throwing my child in a gutter."  She shook her head and laughed at the memory.  It was sweet to watch her delight in memories that poured forth so heedlessly.

Outside it was windy and cold, but inside it was cozy.  The restaurant had once been someone's home; our reserved table was in an upstairs bedroom of sorts, only the walls had been punched out.  We drank wine and laughed about stories that took place long before Mark and I could be found anywhere but God's ledger.  How thankful I was to put a hand on a place which, to me, was merely a place but to them was the backdrop of an era.