DOD

I don't know why I have two blogs. I've posted all of my recent posts (last two years) on the Bee Hive. This blog is dead. Rest in peace.

Restlessing with the will of God

Work has been sooo sloooow lately. My coworkers seem to be keeping busy, but I just don't seem to be getting very many applications. I don't know if they are all just good at appearing busy, or if there's some cosmic event that keeps people with last names beginning with G-L from applying for public assistance. It's given me a lot of free time to websurf (and blog!) and read books. I wonder if this restless feeling in my soul -- to do something radical and different with my life -- is due to not feeling very busy at work or if it is its own completely independent stirring.

Because work isn't that busy and I have a semi-private office and internet access, I've been able to do a lot more reading, listen to NPR podcasts of new music, interviews, and stories, and start to research graduate school. I try to tell myself that this is sweet deal: I get to maintain a warm fuzzy feeling from helping people by providing excellent customer service in a human services field, I'm not completely stressed out by an unmanageable work load, I get recreation time for half the day to read, chat, and listen to the radio, all with a compensation package that meets my needs. How could I possibly be so restless and frustrated?

I need a shift in perspective. This is a sweet gig, I insist to myself, don't take it for granted. Remember the days when you used to come home and sob because the powers that be had totally unreasonable expectations of what you could accomplish each month. Yet, with all this free time to think, how can I help but recognize that I'm meant for more. For something "radical and different," like I told my pastor this past weekend. I don't have the details all worked out, but I have a calling... where it goes from here, God only knows.

The thought that this abundant time for thinking and exploring is a gift from God starts to creep into my rational mind. I've maintained that the ease with which I got this job after a heart-breaking struggle to find anything besides my last job was partly because God called me to this place. That's one of the ways I convinced myself that moving to Forgotonia was the thing to do right now. For now, I abate the restlessness with researching grad school and reading dog-help books.

Heart of the Matter

Another response to my pastor about a sermon on Palm Sunday.

Your sermon yesterday got me thinking. It's easy for people to say that Christ died for our sins. But what does that mean? The phrase has never really had that much meaning for me. I think sometimes Christians have the perspective that Jesus was sacrificed in the same way that a lamb was sacrificed in the Old Testament...that we have to suffer and give up things we love because that is somehow pleasing to God...that Christ died so that we can live on in heaven. This attempt at logic and faith just doesn't cut it for me. I'm left asking, "why?" I'm not saying that's what I got from your Palm Sunday message. I'm just saying these ideas seem to be prevalent in Christian culture in general and your sermon got me thinking about it.

The thing that resonated with me about your message was the part about forgiveness...

Jesus didn't just die. He was murdered. And we did it. It wasn't the Jews, the heathens, the unsaved, "those people" who didn't know what they were doing that killed him. We did it. We killed him and we continue to kill him. I'm finding that one thing we need to learn from the Crucifixion is that we are every bit capable of doing it again. We need to explore the part of ourselves that has that capability, seek to understand it, so that maybe someday we can control it. Maybe someday we can stand up for those who are being slowly, systematically, distantly, painfully crucified every day by starvation, by violence, by disease. God's children, the hands and feet of Jesus, are still suffering with us today.

The thing I remember the most about Palm Sunday in the Catholic church (at least the one I went to) was that the whole congregation was involved. We were the crowd waving palms. But then... we were the crowd proclaiming "Crucify him!" The liturgy involved reenacting the last supper with communion, but also going through the Crucifixion. And I remember asking my step-mom when I was about 7 years old why we were saying crucify him, when Jesus was good. She tried to explain that it was so that we could remember that even Jesus' friends turned on him and so that we remember that we might have done the same thing...that just everyday people went along with it even though it was wrong.

And God let it happen, willed it to happen, made it happen? How confusing. But the thing that clicked with me yesterday is that this allows us to see the abundant grace of God. The fact that we tortured God's only son and killed him and then we are forgiven? Forgiven! Would we ever forgive someone that did that to one of our children? Jesus died and yet God forgives us for the sin and to, in a sense, prove that we will always be forgiven and to leave us with the task of trying to understand a love so great that allows that to happen. Knowing that I am forgiven allows me to forgive. That may be the greatest love that we will ever know.

Today your fortune will not come true because you are chicken

There's a man who works in one of the offices above mine. He wears a suit and tie and a tan trench-type coat every day; he's one of the very few people that enter our building dressed so formally. He's middle-aged with greying hair, but not bald. He reminds me of my Japanese teacher, but taller. I saw him a few weeks ago in the little natural food store a couple blocks from the office, shopping on his lunch break like me. I saw him walking back from somewhere downtown as I drove to the other side of town to buy a garbage can. This is striking because few people walk anywhere anymore and few people do anything downtown these days.

One evening last month we had a nasty ice storm and everyone was out furiously scraping the ice from their cars in the parking lot. As I was just getting some of the last chunks off of my windshield, I must have had a particularly venomous look on my face as I growled and swore under my breath at stubbing my fingers on the windshield wipers. The man in the tan coat jogged over and asked if I needed any help. Chagrined at how obviously my unmanaged anger was, I said no, I was just about done, but thanks, I appreciate it. I looked over at his car that wasn't quite clear -- he was offering to help me even before he had his own compact, non-sporty, surely, very fuel-efficient car taken care of.

I've been thinking about the man in the tan coat off and on recently. He seems like he must be like me -- socially conscious enough to drive a small car, walks to lunch and to the store, offers to help others, and works in human services. Why am I not friends with him? God knows I could use a friend or two around here. I asked the secretaries at work if they knew who he was. They said he might be a lawyer and not sure what office he works in. I want to introduce myself: "Hey, you drive a compact car and you walk places. That's more in common than I have with anyone else who works in this building. Want to be friends?" But, as I imagine how that conversation would play out in real life, it seems so awkward and forced. What if he isn't the kind of person I've boxed him in to be?

Today I slept through my alarm clock and got up late. I didn't have time to put together a lunch so I walked up to Mr. Moto's for yummy vegetarian food and a latte. Guess who was there... Mr. Tan Coat. He eats food without meat in it! Surely, he's a bleeding heart like me. I tried all lunch hour to get up the nerve to say hello, to introduce myself, to invite a friendship. All the times it might have been natural to say something, he was checking his voice mail, balancing his check book, or lacked an enthusiastic welcoming look in his eyes. Those are the same kind of things I do when I'm dining alone some where and I don't have anything to read. My brain went back and forth: say something and risk looking like a weirdo stalker, or just let it go. At Mr. Moto's every meal ends with a fortune cookie. There it was: You will get to know a coworker better today.

Still, I had no nerve. I lay on the couch near his table reading my book after I had finished my meal. He left and went down the block toward the post office. I headed back to work.

The feeling I have is similar to when I liked a boy. Giddy and nervous and chicken, "notice me!" silently screaming in my brain. Really, this time, I just want to be friends.

Taxes tax me

I have a little beekeeping operation. Nothing fancy, but I want to someday make a profit. I want to claim my start-up costs on my taxes as a loss so that when the day comes that I'm in the black, I'll feel better about paying taxes on it. Not that I'm against taxes, I just think people that actually make money should pay them and the record should show that I have none. Do I need to file a Schedule C for self-employment or F for farm income. Do I need to capitalize the purchases I made this year because they are mostly equipment that will be reused from year to year or do I qualify for the exception that allows me to simply deduct them. What the heck does capitalizing my assets even mean? The small business section of irs.gov is pretty helpful, but geez, can't a girl just have little bee keeping operation without it being so complicated?

MIA

I'm applying to be a Deaconess. On the application they have one of those standard sort of questions about what historical figure I most admire and why. Boring. I think my answer is valid. Hope they like it:

History is not one of my strengths, and I spent some time reading about various historical figures such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Sanger, Frida Kahlo, Mother Theresa and Mahavira, trying to come up with something inspired to say to you. While I enjoyed learning about these historical figures and do admire them, everyone had something that made me a little uncomfortable with writing about them. Roosevelt’s personal life was steeped in heartbreak, Sanger got a little mixed up in eugenics, and Mother Theresa at times argued for the maintenance of poverty as a fulfillment of the scriptures. Although I am an admirer of Kahlo’s work I couldn’t come up with enough to say. And, while I think Jainism is an incredible way of life, I’d be a poser if I tried to identify with it too much.

I imagine you might be tired of hearing about MLK, Jesus, Ghandi, and Suzanna/John Wesley, so I steered clear (though who can deny the abundance of admiration due there?). What I can do is speak to some commonalities that these folks all have that draw me to them.

The theme running through their stories is risking everything in the name of righteousness. They risked, and many experienced, bodily harm, denial of personal freedom and liberty, loss of material comforts and social acceptance in order to do what God (a higher power, their conscience, etc.) was calling them to do. I think fear directs our decision making so much as a culture that many people are paralyzed into inaction. Not to say that it’s not legitimate to be fearful in a world of secret military tribunals and unconstitutional surveillance where citizens can be indefinitely detained in lands far away from home.

The people that I admire the most understood that the results of their inaction were more unacceptable than risking personal harm. There must be some historical figures that were so promptly silenced following a period of righteous rebellion that they never even made it into the history books. Those are the people that I admire above all.