A Plea

Oh come, come, Emmanuel.

I think I need you more and more the older I get.

I need you, Jesus, more than hot cocoa, fake snow, real snow, a good show, caroling, stockings on the mantel, and tea lights in the window.

What perverse part of me ever supposed that those things matter, that without them, I am somehow missing out on Christmas?

No, what I need and what I got was dirty hay, a draughty cave, and the Savior of the world.

Come, Emmanuel.

Hijacked from my Journal: November 9, 2010

Bless Mick, driving the bus.

He and his wife are splitting up: irreconcilable differences.

Over the past month, he's grown his hair out

drunk too much

worked too much,

because he's free.

A new man,

without a wife;

torn up and convincing me that he's not

bleeding,

while he tells some college student on the bus about the heart's greatest failure:

a failure to strive.

Hijacked from my Journal: September 10, 2010

On my way to the bus, I saw a man carrying a giant green duffel bag on his back.

(Maybe it mattered solely because I've been reading Kerouac, and maybe it was the disheveled hair and three of four days' growth of beard on his chin that made him look travel-worn.)

He turned the corner of Lemon and College,

several yards in front of me.

A few houses down, he climbed the steps slowly, to the front door of a nicely-kept house.

It was a place where a family, maybe older, certainly rich, would live. But his door was the smaller front door, where he was probably renting from the nice family.

No stir was perceptible as he entered, late morning.

I thought, "he is coming home after a long journey. And I am the only one who knows."

Wine Terminology

I'm learning about wines. I never know how to describe them. Joella's advice? "Just think of a person you know, and describe them."

Me: So, this wine is lanky, freckled, curly...

Joella: Not so much physical characteristics, like, say, "this wine is creative..."

Me: it likes to be around people...

Becky: You're not getting it! Give her another example, Joella.

Joella: This wine is delicate and thin...

Me: ...it gets sick easily, can't stand the sun.

Other descriptors we decided might be useful:

sincere, vibrant, fat, sunsetty

Oh! the Places You'll Miss!

Is it a curse of getting older that you begin to miss people and places no matter where you are and how good a life you have? Does it keep piling up, the people and places you love and therefore miss?

Facebook has not been helpful here, really. I see my friend list, and think about Fairview Avenue Brethren in Christ, the first place where I felt as though God were my Father. I miss my mentors from there: I had six that I can count off, no problem.

And it was at FABIC that I learned the book of Hebrews as few have had the privilege of learning the book of Hebrews: forward and backward and forever.

And it was at FABIC where I made so many friends: irreplaceable, good people, who were too young to pretend to be something they weren't.

Let's face it, geography means an awful lot. You have to make local friends, though you keep less local ones forever.

My conclusion before I started was that missing people and places is not a curse at all, really. But an aching blessing.

Dear Space-Time Continuum

Not that the space-time continuum has paid much attention to this plea in the past, but here goes another rendition:

Dear Space-Time Continuum,

Please, won't you slow down? When I looked at my Facebook profile, I saw my last status update, a book I had just finished. I thought, "man, that was just late last night." NO. It was Monday. Today is Wednesday. I'm dropping days! And suddenly I'm putting on chapstick and wondering, as I walk in cold rain, when it became so gray and wintry and where I put my warm socks. Waking and sleeping are blurs. I slept at my school placement during our planning period. I opened my book and slept like a baby.

I'm not blaming you, Space-Time Continuum. I'm begging you, would you find it somewhere in your stagnant, existential "heart" to either slow down time, or clone me (like in that movie, Multiplicity) so that I have a chance at writing and reading and thinking and maybe, just maybe... sleeping?

Forever Yours (if not by choice, by divine decree),

Carolyn