true story

So there's this girl. Let's call her Eleanor. (I've been naming a lot of things Eleanor lately. And by "a lot of things," I mean myself when I pretend to be a famous actress being interviewed in my bathroom mirror.) She's a pretty outgoing young woman, and pretty active in the community. She has to be, you see, because she's an only child, and her father is an extremely busy military leader, so she gets lonely. She's an extrovert, you see, and we extroverts need people in our lives, because when we don't have them we resort to pretending to be famous actresses being interviewed in our bathroom mirror.

So Eleanor teaches dance. That's what she does for a living. That and probably she's a baker. Maybe a seamstress, too. She's young, but girls like her know a lot of trades. She's pretty liked in town, because she's honest and genuine, and she has a fun spirit. People like girls with fun spirits. At least that's what my pretend interviewer says when he interviews me about my latest movie, in which I play a girl with a fun spirit. Aw, shucks.

But Eleanor isn't bashful. Nooo, not at all. She's a strong young woman. How has she not been married off yet? She has thick, dark curly hair, and dark skin, and brown eyes the color of molasses. A guy could get lost in those tresses and all-consuming brown eyes. Have you ever tried to escape a pit of molasses? It's impossible. Point proven.

But she wants to be married. Not in a "gimmee gimmee gimmee a man after midnight" kind of way, but it's a resigned desire that she keeps close to her heart while she's teaching couples to dance for their wedding receptions. And she wants it, even more than she loves dancing and baking and sewing, though she's great at all those things. It's her one desire. And she knows it's coming. She just knows that she has to wait, and it'll come.

And it's not like she's completely alone. She and her father are pretty close. For all his military maneuverability, he's a loving, doting father. His name is Jephthah. Whoa, what? Yeah. His mom had just had 4 teeth pulled before Jep was born, so her mouth was still numb and full of cotton balls when the nurse asked her what she wanted to name him. Really she wanted to name him Harry. It got lost in translation.

Jephthah and Eleanor have a pretty strong bond. They get each other. He loves her like no other, because his wife is absent from the picture, and Jep used to take Eleanor on these grand adventures, riding camels and swimming in oases and generally being the apple of his eye. He'd do anything for her, like pay $9000 for a wedding dress because she was a former Miss Delaware. (If the government's looking for some money, they should check Say Yes to the Dress.) He'd had a rough life, too. His mom was a woman of ill repute (and unkempt teeth, apparently) because his father evidently had no self control. And Jep's brothers from another mother were kind of jerks, the hoity toity type, and they chased Jep away saying, "No inheritance for you!"

Well for the past few months Jep has been at war, and this is a big war. If he wins this war, he becomes general of the whole kit and kaboodle. (That's what they call armies where Jep comes from.) And today Eleanor happens to be rehearsing the "I want to be in America, la la la la in America" scene from West Side Story, which the local theater has asked her to choreograph for their spring production of the torrential musical. So to get in the mood before class, she blasts the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack on her stereo and dances around the house.Then she opens her front door, her swooshy skirt piled high on her thigh in Latino flair, and there's her father, Jephthah, walking towards the house, looking bedraggled.

Eleanor's first reaction is to greet her father with an enthusiastic "Daddy!" and throw her arms around him with daughterly affection. But before she can, he falls to his knees, rips open his shirt, scattering buttons everywhere, and throws his hands up in the air in agony, like that scene from Platoon with Willem Defoe.

Eleanor stops dancing and stares at her father. He's in tears, literally weeping into the ground, and Eleanor thinks that the only other time she's seen her father cry was when Goose dies in Top Gun, and that emotion paled in comparison to what she was witnessing now.

"Why'd you have to do it?" He asks.
"Do what?" Eleanor asks, genuinely afraid, curious, and concerned for her father as she would be for a wounded wild animal.
"I made a vow to the Lord that, if He helped me win this war, I would sacrifice the first thing that come out of my house when I came home."

Now, my response to this would be, "You WHAT?! I'M THE ONLY ONE WHO LIVES HERE, who'd you think was going to come out of your house?! DID YOU EVEN THINK THIS THROUGH??" Or maybe I would have been coy and said, "So...how'dya do?" Or maybe I just would've taken off running very, very fast, and never looked back.

But Eleanor and I are very different. She squares her jaw and looks at her father and says, "Do what you promised." Then she walks through the city and says goodbye to all the people who love her, and she comes to terms with the fact that she'll never be a wife, or a mother, or have any of the things she dreamed about having, and she lets her father offer her as a human sacrifice to the Lord.

The end.

Just kidding!

No but seriously, that's where it ends. Read Judges 11 if you don't believe me.

Sometimes I don't understand the Old Testament.

more than auld lang syne

I think I only wrote my grandmother two letters while I was in college, but she loved them. She told people who came to visit her that they were beautiful letters. At my grandfather's funeral, one woman I'd never met told me that my grandma was so proud of me.

I wish I had written her more letters.

I realized in her last couple of years that I had wasted so much time I could've spent with her. And I tried to make up for it in the few visits I had with her, sitting at the feet of her recliner and asking her questions about growing up, meeting Grandpa, and the Great Depression.

I wish I had started a lot sooner.

When my grandmother died in 2009, the part of history that was her life was buried next to my grandfather in a cemetery in Ohio. Nobody felt with her heart or saw with her eyes. Nobody experienced the joy, pain, fear, and triumph she experienced, because nobody lived her life but her.

I wish I had gotten to know her better.

I don't know what good writing about history will do. I don't know how it'll help further the kingdom of God, or how it will bring people to Jesus. I struggle with the intense desire I have to write the stories of those in the past - in an attempt to hear a heartbeat that ended before we had the chance to know its rhythm - and the intense desire I have to follow Jesus into the present world of hurting people who need His light and truth.

What do you do with two so completely different desires?

How do you tell people that, while you got your degree in Creative Writing & History, you'd rather go to seminary than write a novel?

And how do you tell yourself the same thing, when suddenly you realize you want both?

So I begin my 23rd new year just as confused as ever about what I'm supposed to do with my life. Though these things I cling to for stability, that the Lord will fulfill His purpose for me (Psalm138:8), and that tomorrow there will be football.

what's in an adventure?

A trip by any other name might sound as sweet....but won't be.

I was thinking about adventures this morning as I sat with God at my college roommates' kitchen table. (I can say things like this now, because we have graduated from college, and they're no longer my roommates. Don't I sound adult?) I had just eaten a peanut butter granola bar for breakfast (thanks, former college roomies) and was waiting for God to say something. He sat there, verbally silent, but looking at me with that look on His face like, "You already know what I'm going to say, so I'm just going to raise one eyebrow at you and wait until you sigh resignedly and write it in your journal." You can tell God and I have this "conversation" a lot.

I've been on a few adventures. Enough, anyway, that I've begun to realize what classifies an experience as an adventure. Is it the circumstances? The destination? The people?

I think the only thing that determines what is an adventure and what isn't, is the attitude of the adventurer. Some qualities of an adventurous attitude:

willingness
flexibility
determination
whatever characteristic ducks have when water rolls of their backs
laid-backedness
joy
optimism
chocolate covered raisins

An experience without those things is just something to trudge through, withstand, or tolerate. Experiences with those things are pots of gold at the end of the rainbow. You come out of adventures with nuggets - and scars - that you'll take with you for the rest of your life, changing you and shaping you.

I can't say, like Johnny Cash, that I've been everywhere, man. But where I go doesn't determine my adventure. My cousin Christine, married and with two kids, told me yesterday that she envied my situation. I can go wherever and do whatever, for however long, with whomever. It makes me want to pack all my stuff and move to Wyoming or Maine or Canada, since they have free health care.

But this is where God's knowing expression comes in. And I sigh and write in my journal, because I realize why I'm depressed as I think about the un-stability of my life instead of being excited about its adventure. I answer people's questions with, "I have no idea what I'm doing with my life." And therein lies the splinter in my finger, the gaping gorge I'm balancing precariously on the side of and ready to plunge into at the slightest tremor:

It isn't my life.

I realized that for the past 6 months I've been trying to find a vocation that I'd enjoy but would still be serving God. I'm good at that, AND God's involved! I can go there, AND be with my friends AND serve God! But I have it backwards. If my hands are too full of my life, I can't hold onto His robe. If my ears are too full of my own plans, I can't hear His voice calling to me. I need to surrender my plans, my desires, my will, and then the REAL adventure can begin.

He called Andrew to leave his nets.

He called Peter to walk on water.

Talk about adventure!

Bilbo said it best when he said in The Hobbit that adventures are not all pony-rides in May sunshine. And, as my 12-year-old camper from Africa sang in the sweetest voice I've ever heard, it's not going to be easy to leave. But I feel like Moses in Exodus 33, when he tells the Lord, "If your Presence does not go with us, do not send us from here." I'm banking on the Lord's answer here being His same promise to me:

"My Presence will go with you, and I will give you rest."

story

I spent my early teen years consuming Robin Jones Gunn novels, in which events would happen not to make the novel realistic, but keep the reader's attention. I used to pine for occurrences like the ones in RJG books to happen in my own life. Rereading them as an adult, I would find one of my eyes squinting beneath furrowed eyebrows as I tell the pages, "That would never happen."

This year has proved that opinion very wrong. So many things that have happened in the last 12 months might be considered unbelievable and unrealistic, but I look over my shoulder at them and know that they happened. I have their lessons tucked in my pockets or sprinkled across my heart, some like scars and some merely freckles or pleasantly-colored berry stains. And I know it isn't over. If my story were to end right now, it would look something like this:

"And she graduated single, grateful for all that had come to pass, sad to leave the Kentucky grass she'd walked barefoot in for four years with those she most loved, but hopeful that the Lord would provide for her the way He had so faithfully through the past."

But it doesn't end here. I don't have to end hopeful. Like Abraham who "did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised" (Romans 4:20-21). I know He will provide for me. I know He will give me what I need, even when I don't know I need it. He's done it over the past 12 months. He will continue to do it. Hope does not disappoint (Romans 5:5), because the Lord will fulfill His purpose for me! (Proverbs 13:12)

I think He waits in expectation for certain parts of His plot to be revealed on my journey, like when the author watches a reader get to a certain part in the novel to see his reaction. I know it has not been all sunbeams and yellow butterflies, and will not always be, but I have received so much unexpected goodness out of the unexpected badness that started as unexpected goodness. I'm grateful for the unexpected! I'm grateful for what has been given me that I never could have planned for myself. And it makes me wonder, what if what is unbelievably improbable is the kind of normalcy God wants us to live in? What if "coincidences" are more reality than when life is predictable or even just...believable?

The God I serve is more creative than a cheesy Christian fiction writer. Why shouldn't real life be unrealistic?