chunk o'my heart behind...

We dropped Brett off at the Academy last Thursday. Sounds so simple, doesn’t it…

IT WASN’T.

I stayed strong through the whole thing, crying only as little as anyone else---------until we left town. Then I cried and cried and cried, all the way to Wyoming, and even after then, off and on… Kev too. Leaving one of my children behind felt just wrong. We were five, and now we were four… It just didn’t seem right. Part of my heart felt hacked off, and it was weird that a kind of mole suddenly appeared under my left eye… like a piece of shrapnel surfacing from the inside...

We went to McD's today. I told Kev I didn’t want to go to church, that I wouldn't be able to handle the questions about how it went, how it was dropping him off… He woke up with a hideous headache, and we ended up going to McD's, stopping at Safeway for hot dogs, buns, and soda. We went for a ride on their new pontoon boat which came with the new, fantastic house they bought on the river, and it was a lovely, lovely time. I always do love my time with Peggy, one of the most munificent friends I could ever know… Got some pictures, and I’m sincerely grateful for them.

Senior Week

Monday, May 30, 2005, was Memorial Day, so no school. Brett won first in the 800m at districts the week before, passing four runners in the home stretch for a PR and a berth at state (at EWU). I don’t think he’s in the house right now. I think he went for a run...

Tuesday, May 31: SENIOR AWARDS NIGHT. It was weird to see Brett stand up for honor after honor. It culminated in his acceptance of the Academy scholarship, presented by USAF Reserve Major Laine Wyrick. His name had been announced so often that when the presenter stood to present the AF Math/Science award, she said, “All together, now...” and everyone sing-sang in unison, “… Brett Mulligan…” He was a little embarrassed about it, which I found out when I commented on how eagerly he clapped for everyone. He said, “I thought I’d better!”

Running...

The hound of rejection still lurks and occasionally even howls. Not rejection of me, but of someone whose company I seem to really enjoy when I'm with her! I can't figure it out except to assume that the enemy keeps persevering, expecting victory when I grow too weak to fight. If I face it, bark back the truth, and tell it to scram, chances are that'll be effective enough that I'll be able to go ahead and schedule another visit...

Sometimes I think that striking the balance between sanity and social obligation is a winged creature, flitting and silent, but originating from something core inside me so that I am tied to it unrelentingly. Somehow this is a Good thing. Did I mean God thing...? Maybe... He, too, takes on features of wings, silence, and a going in & out of focus, not to mention being ruthlessly tied to my core insides.

I run
and I reason.
In
and out of season.
I blink
and I'm blank.
I strive
and I sink.
I lean
and I rest.
I think
that's the test.
I go
where He's blessed.

Blood Type Diet websites

Note to Self: These are worth checking out for recipes.

http://www.recipenet.org/health/archives/archives_recipes.htm#crackers_yeastbreads

http://www.bobsredmill.com/recipe/search.php?category_ID=14&product_ID=all&keywords=&submit=%3A%3A+search+%3A%3A

ohpleaseno

Sir Render

Surrender = Sir Render

The veil was rent. I will trust Him, and He will rend me. It will be for the highest, noblest, most fantastic cause. The eyes of my heart can’t see it, but something in my head knows it and agrees fully with the veracity of it.

Two friends I have now who are fully surrendered. They are delightful company—eager, joyful, and childlike to almost an annoying degree. The content of their speech now is kind of “out there,” not a place I frequent regularly because it’s a high kind of place, this absolute yieldedness.

Seems like it’s a place of a color just beyond the limited ability of my rods and cones. It seems like a wonderful place, like a Who Wouldn’t Wanna Go There place. I feel like a child stretching on her tippy-tippy toes to see what’s in the glass jar she just discovered is on the counter because her two sisters just got something out of it, but dangit, she’s just too short, and they have neither the permission nor the ability to give her any. I pace and stop, study and think, wondering how or even IF I’m going to get into that jar.

Can’t help thinking that rending must be prerequisite to surrender, and that this could get ugly...

a deposit of words

Is it weird at all to anyone else that I’m here in my little home, and you’re out there in your own little wherever-you-are, and somehow we connect as you take in the words I’ve deposited in cyberspace...? We think it’s such a big world one moment, and the next, our paths cross... and somewhere, that matters.

I love this quote:

What are you afraid of? Let God act. Abandon yourself to Him. You will suffer, but you will suffer with love, peace and consolation. You will fight, but you can carry off the victory, and God Himself, after having fought with you, will crown you with His own hand. You will weep, but your tears will be sweet, and God Himself will come with satisfaction to dry them. You will not be free any longer to give yourself up to your tyrannic passions, but you will sacrifice your liberty freely, and you will enter into a new liberty unknown to the world, in which you will do nothing except for love. ~François Fénelon

It’s that last line that something in my deeps just gloms onto: “you will do nothing except for love.” Oh, that is THE highest form of living!

tiny beauty

I like these words I read in a devotional by Brennan Manning:

"We first experience beauty usually in the things that surround us. Sometimes in sensible things, other times in the transparency of a look or a glance that reveals a soul full of light. Whenever we encounter the beautiful, our hearts awaken, stir, quicken, thrill, because there is an extraordinary, magic power in the least thing: a tiny plant burgeoning in spring, a shade of the sky at a given moment of the day, a calm, cold night brilliant with starshine--all things that ravish the heart. They’re a small taste of Paradise Lost on an earth where so many things are torn and tearing. They are little oases in the vast wasteland of the world."
(Is. 40:26 ref.)

It's the sum total of all the little things that color the lenses of how we see life.

One Humble Soul

Did You tell her to do that? Or is she so in tune with Your Holy Spirit that Your prompt and her desire meet and move as one…?

To the outside eye, she might be a woman to be little noticed. They don’t get out as much as they used to, she doesn’t drive, doesn’t have a job, and reads and writes a lot--quiet pastimes.

Yet the effects of her ministry reach far beyond the walls of her home. The words of life she shares with us, her “girls,” draw us up to met the Lord Jesus, and there is nothing in all the whole wide world like it. That contact and communion then has its influence on our own friends and families. The pebble tossed with divine, purposeful intent into the water, reverberates in ever-widening, concentric circles to resonate the unending Truth of Him whose gracious Hand let fall the tiny stone.

The poetry that is her life evokes a celebration in my soul that must be only an echo of the gala in Heaven, where the great cloud of witnesses, Your servant hosts, and Your own great heart call out not only notice, but honor, great worth, and esteem for one humble soul poised toward You, devoted, and trusting.