A lot of growing

This is life. A crazy, wild growing experience.
I am getting married in 12 days. That's right...12.
My mother is fighting breast cancer. She had a mastectomy the end of January.
We are heartbroken. We are happy. We are spending everyday, as a family, crying on each other's shoulders, laughing with each other, and learning to trust God. To have faith to please God, peace to tackle each day, to BELIEVE God. Because God is good. He is ALWAYS good. No matter what is going on.
Mom is amazing. She has her eyes on God and is wanting Him to be glorified through her life. Her surgery went really well and she has what the doctors call "incredible tissue." We are blessed.
I have some of the best friends and bridesmaids in the universe and a family that could not be more supportive. So blessed.
So why, I often ask myself, do I make myself feel so insecure? Why is life so intimidating to me? I have talents and education to handle so much more than I give myself credit for, and yet I feel like I never measure up. I think so many people find themselves in that place. Not really sure how they feel about themselves and their abilities. I have a lot of respect for people who step outside of that insecurity and do something that stretches their character.
Be honest, we all have dreams. Or at least, we all have had dreams at one time or another. When is it okay to give up on them and what does that do to our spirit? I am no psychologist and I have no desire to be. But, maybe we need to put a little more energy into doing and a lot less sitting around looking at everyone else's facebook page thinking we will never be....successful.
Our culture paints itself as an advocate to individuality. "Be YOU. It's all good!" However, I think the media, in particular, does the opposite. While seemingly encouraging individuality, the media depicts a very specific picture of success and beauty and "acceptable" behavior. We allow ourselves to be compared to and also defined by the pictures that the media presents to us.
Why?
Look back through history at the people who made bold steps towards things we don't even understand anymore. Esther rescued an entire race of people from slaughter through her actions. Joseph was able to keep more than a nation of people from starvation and famine. The pilgrims struggled through every kind of hardship to settle on a new land for the promise of religious freedom. These people were not celebrities or fame-seekers. They were a kind of breed that no one even honors anymore: the faithful.
Lady Gaga wore a meat dress to show her support of gay marriage. Wow. What an amazing accomplishment! But, hey, it made the news. This is disturbing to me, especially with my core beliefs being based on the Bible. What are our priorities? It's all about love, right? Do we even know what love is anymore?
We will defend our rights to be actively involved in mass genocide (abortion of unborn human beings) but many people get upset if you say that homosexuality is an abomination. (Leviticus 18:22; Romans 1:24-27) Which is more hateful from your perspective? Killing an innocent life at its beginning or finding the action of homosexuality disgusting? Hmmmm. Is the freedom to be stuck in sin and disease really any kind of freedom at all?
But, God has said this is what the world will come to. And even though it hurts my heart to see it, compassion is the only answer. Because love covers a multitude of wrongs, including my own. Love changes lives. And that has been my dream for as long as I can remember. Changed lives. There's really nothing that is much more beautiful than that. Stand on the truth, but don't forget love.
I have a lot of growing to do.

The bane of my existence

We all have our weaknesses…yes, even I. My particular kryptonite is a seemingly harmless evil called “laundry.” I pretty much loathe doing laundry. For me, it has never been simple and cute like Susie-stinkin-home-maker makes it appear to be. Nooooo…I play the game of grand procrastination when it comes to laundry. I let it get to that shameful point where I am wearing two totally different socks (all day long) because I have seventeen and a half pairs crammed tastlessly into my ridiculously small laundry basket/hamper.

Which, by the way, is a terrible method of improving bad habits…a smaller hamper never seems to encourage me to do laundry oftener. Oh no. My basket is crammed tight and towering up like Mount Vesuvius before I ever get around to doing a load…or three. It’s usually three.

There is no such thing as a “small” load of laundry. Not for me. Why do they even have that option on the machine? Nope, I’m vigorously stuffing random socks and underwear into any possible cranny and then sitting on the lid to keep everything in so the thing will run.

Not to mention the laundry detergent issue. Oh man.

One fine glorious day, my mom and I were chatting and I was sorting laundry. Now, my mother will follow you throughout the house if she is talking to you, cause she has stuff to say and it is worth making a decent long conversation out of. So I’m ignoring the slight ribs and jabs about my laundry habit and trying to get Vesuvius to look a little less ominous. Anyway, she follows me to the washing machine where I proceed to pour in the laundry detergent like I always do. I take the lid off and just give the jug a nice, quick swish around the barrel of the machine. Mom stops mid-sentence and I hear this squeal of horror.

Apparently that was not the “most economic” way to be doing laundry.

She claims that is not the way she taught me to do laundry, which I gladly agree with. That was my own brilliant innovation. It started about the time I began cooking without using tablespoons. But that’s another day’s story.

When is a hoodie technically "dirty" anyway? Is it wearable for one day...? Three....days....? A week? (Can you hear the hopefulness in my voice?) It really is an intolerable situation. They don't make a code for doing laundry. People, like myself, have no choice but to try to train themselves to make laundry a bi-weekly habit! All for the sake of cleanliness. I'm all about good hygiene, don't get me wrong, but this is just a bit extreme...this laundry business. 

We all have our weaknesses.

Anti-climactic toads

Write, just write.
I tell myself this all the time. But do I? Not really.
It's tragic. I have what I believe is a gift and I don't truly use it. Not like I could.
This is one of those awful days where I sit staring at my laptop screen, wishing I was Charles Dickens and had something fascinating, in-depth, marvelous to share with you.
I saw a toad today. He (...or she--not an expert on frog anatomy here) was frozen to death.
That's all I got. I know, pathetic. You were probably hoping to read about me finding a lost diary of someone who did something interesting way back when. Not today! No, today I saw a dead toad. How anti-climactic of me.
Now that I have failed you most cruelly, my dear reader, perhaps you'd like to find something more interesting to occupy your time. Like FB or Pinterest or something with pictures. And how can I blame you? If only I could compete! I wish I lived back in the 1800s when a simple, comical illustration every 500 pages or so was sufficient to please a reader. Not so today! Ha! Oh, Dickens...how wonderful your world was!
Hold on, my fiance is explaining to me the details of under-gravel aquarium filters.
At least he is still a hands-on explorer in this modern day. It makes me smile. Besides that, I love to learn new things.
I can't wait till we get some fish in that tank. Ahem. "Aquarium." I almost feel sorry for wanting to put a living creature in a completely see-through environment where I control its existence. What a life for the poor fish! But at the same time, I find it fascinating! Except when the fish die. The other fish start eating them and it's just gross.
I think I'm simply addicted to characters. I like the names, the personalities, their plots and plans and stories. The details. Probably why I love the classics so much, too. All the greats wrote magnificent characters! Jane Austen with her bored and mischievous Emma; Anne Bronte's gallant Gilbert; L. M. Montgomery's dreamy, imaginative Anne; Du Maurier's sweet and naive female protagonist without a name; Dickens and his tragic hero Sydney Carton, comical Mr. Pickwick, hypocritical Seth Pecksniff, noble John Harmon and mysterious Lady Dedlock...I could go on and on.
I just hope someday soon my characters will become that legendary. These days characters are less and less interesting. The readers either don't care or can't find anything else to read so they don't demand better writers. It's so frustrating to hear about "literature" that is only widely read because there is an accompanying movie to make it worth reading. *cough Stephanie Meyer cough*
Books should be deep. Characters should be complex. Readers should demand more from their authors. It's about impact. Not making a dollar.
Just the opinion of one very dedicated classic lit nerd. Think what you will.
So even though nothing more dramatic happened today than the death of a toad, I wrote. :)

Don't stop being you

Yesterday, an acquaintance of mine came up to me and asked if he could tell me something.
I stopped and said "sure." He looked at me and said, very sincerely, "in getting married, just make sure you don't stop being who you are."
I smiled because it's something that I hadn't really thought much about in the whole wedding-planning processes. Everyone has their own very unique personality, with intricacies and oddities that are completely exclusive to that particular individual.
But, however unique and diverse a person may be, humanity has it's ways of pasting on a fantastic facade. For various reasons, we often believe we are not "good enough" in our own skin. We essentially want to be amazing and are too afraid to be confident in the fact that we already are. Instead, we take a tip from the ever-present media and borrow a popular image to mock.
If you really think about it, that isn't being very fair to ourselves. And, overall, it just ends up making us miserable. Be you.
Start by making a list. (I love lists!) Write down 10-20 things about yourself that you think are quirky, unique, strange, fantastic or just plain interesting. Get comfortable in your skin. So when someone comes up to you and tells you to never stop being yourself you will know who that is.

Beginnings

I'm engaged.
Can you believe it? I think I'm still in shock, so don't feel bad if you are amazed too. It's a huge, wonderful, scary step. A new beginning for me. What will the future hold? I have no idea, but it sounds like fun to me!
Lately my fiance and I have been working on his house. It was once a disaster, but he bought it knowing what he could do with it. Now, it's gorgeous. The kitchen is nothing short of spectacular and we cut and stained our own wood trim.
So now I have been blind-sided by a marriage proposal from my best friend and am very suddenly immersed in wedding plans. We are shooting for a March wedding, so the mothers are pushing ahead full-force. Thankfully! I feel like a bug running around in a box with all these plans. Useless and goofy looking. So very glad to have these two wonderful women in my life.
And my bridesmaids! It was so much fun asking each one of them to do me the honor of standing up with me at my wedding. Their individual responses were priceless. My friend Kaitlyn gave a similar reaction to the one I'm sure I had when Jake asked me to marry him. Haha! It was awesome. I seriously cannot wait to have a blast with those girls. They are each a treasure to me and I'm so grateful for them.
Mom keeps telling me not to stress, things will all work out. Does anyone else think that a bride not stressing out seems impossible? But I see it as a glorious challenge! I will be that bride. Ha!
But in all honesty, I'm just better at things like collecting and naming various random bugs, like Stan the YellowJacket and Carl the StinkBug. Sid the Slug was a glorious find...till Jake stepped on him. (I'm still curious whether that was truly an "accident").
Anyway, getting shoved and squeezed into lacy, complicated contraptions like wedding dresses are miserable experiences in my opinion. The gown associate seemed personally offended that I didn't want to buy the entire store. But I'm not into the million dollar wedding stuff these women think is necessary. No thanks. I'll stick with my jeans, hoodie and books.
I don't even like flowers. They are pretty, but smell heinous. Besides being obnoxiously expensive, they are only decorative for a day then they die. Ok, I'll admit it...the reason I am so frugal is because I just see spending money on a truck as more practical. And a glorious library, but that's neither here nor there.

All in all, things are going well so far and I'm glad Jake loves me despite my weirdness. I can't wait to be married!

To be transparent

Transparency. Webster's classifies this as one being without pretense or deceit. I want to be transparent.
Today's culture makes it so easy to have a secret life, to live as a double-minded man. What have we lost in our pursuit for a specific and admired identity? Our desire for self image has strong-armed our authenticity until we are no longer sure who or what exactly we have become. All we know for sure is that it is ugly. Ugly on the inside.
It breaks my heart. We were born to be so much more than that. Instead of living for eternal things we are absorbed by petty concerns that matter so little in the scheme of things. We have undone and deceived ourselves.
God is not far from those who call upon His name. There is yet hope for living transparent. It's only through Him.

Dreams, stars and AIRPLANES

Do you ever wish you were a world traveler?
I do sometimes.
There's so much that you can learn just by reading and listening to other people tell their experiences; their stories. But inside there always seems to remain a piece of me that just longs to see the sights with more than just my imagination. I want to go to England and see first-hand the places that Dickens wrote about in Our Mutual Friend and David Copperfield and Martin Chuzzlewit. I want to meet Augustus Snodgrass and Eugene Wrayburn and adopt some of their idiosyncrasies.
I'd also love to go to P.E. Island and see the "Lake of Shining Waters," that Anne Shirley was so fond of.
Or Egypt. Blow some dust off a wall of hieroglyphs in an ancient pyramid...and just grin. I think that would be so cool.
If I had an extraordinary amount of money I'd go buy a castle in Ireland or somewhere...find a nice big one that had history and integrity to be protected. Archaic buildings are always more fun. I'd even sacrifice my burning desire for a moat full of crocodiles and just be content with some bushes and a few great danes. Think of all the fun you could have playing hide-n-seek in a castle!
The Netherlands is another place I have always wanted to visit. My family is from the Netherlands and there's just mass amounts of family history there waiting for me to go experience it! I'd visit Maasland and take a thousand pictures of windmills.
There are too many places to visit! Italy, Africa, Australia...it just drives me crazy when I think too much about it. I keep telling myself to simply focus on the experiences and adventures that I do have...right here and right now.
Here's one:
Once, when my family and a few of our friends were out camping we all laid out on our backs on an amphitheatre and watched a meteor shower. It was amazing. Shining fire beams shooting across a pitch-black sky, I love it. There's something about the stars...they are so glorious! And they are everywhere! So, no matter where you travel, you will always be able to see them. It's like one experience God wanted everyone everywhere to have. So amazing.
The one experience that I've always longed to have is FLYING. I just think it's extraordinary. I've been told that flying is dangerous, or it's mundane, or even nauseating. I don't know what it feels like, but I just wish I could experience it and see for myself. Something I can't name tells me I'll love it.
I want to fly. :-)