Pep Talk To Myself

Yesterday I made a consultation appointment with an orthopedic surgeon.  Jessica is going to have scoliosis surgery to have rods put in her back.  This consultation is to interview her and ask her questions.  If that goes well and we are comfortable with the answers she provides, then we will likely set the date for the operation. 

I opened the blog to talk about it, but now that I have, I feel pretty numb and the words aren't there.  I can't even explain why this has been so hard for me, and it's not even me who will have the surgery!  I've been so set on doing everything I could to keep her from having to have surgery, a last resort sort of thing, and then now here it is ...and it's scary.

To top it off, I feel selfish - wrong -  that I am the one wigging out.  *sigh*

So, I will give myself permission to wig for now.  I have a few more days to pull it together.  Then I have to be able to put the emotions aside, the ones that paralyze me and keep me from thinking.  Jess is going to take her cues from us.  She needs us to be strong and confident.  I don't think I can fake it though.  I don't think I can be terrified on the inside and pretend on the outside. 

So.   Yeah.

I'll wig out on the inside for a little while, and then?  Then I'll lean really heavy on the Lord.  I'll trust Him to have control of all the things that I don't.  I won't let myself obsess over the complications that can happen.  I won't let those fears stop me from doing the right thing for her.

Okay, talking about it helps.  It helps for the feeling part.  Putting words to it, is sort of like poking a hole in the balloon of it. 

The thing is, even if I feel... wiggy, trust is more about what I do and not about how I feel.  The feelings are good for identifying what's going on inside me, but I can't let them define my actions.  So the pep talk you just heard me give myself has a purpose in reminding me that my faith, my trust in God, is not based in my feelings. This gives me hope in place of the feelings.  Hope that's not dependant on my ability to sustain it, because that hope is in God, not my own strength.

Apparently, I needed the reminder. 

Anyway, pray for us? 

He Does What He Pleases

Our church is corporately going through the bible in a year using this bible reading plan. To enrich the experience, we are opening up the conversation to any who want to join in via the Internet.   This week we've been discussing the life of Job.

Here is a link to my contribution, He Does What He Pleases, at the Scio Journal. 

Month of Letters Challenge

A friend of mine, Mary Robinette Kowal has issued a challenge for all who would like to participate called The Month of Letters Challenge.  The idea?  Send 24 letters in the month of February.  Write everyone back who writes to you.  Anything you send through the mail that isn't business or bill related counts.  You can even send post cards.  Here is a link to her blog post that explains it better.

Does this sound fun to you?  Do you want to get something in the mail besides bills?  Christmas is fun because of the cards you get, but lets be honest, precious few of them are really intended with just you in mind. 

If you would like to participate in the February challenge pass Mary's link on to a friend.  If you would like to participate with me personally, reply as a comment to this post.

Walls



My family is going through a hard time.  Financial stress, scary scoliosis surgeries, business, the daily choice-making that comes with being a grown up.

It's easy to be philosophical about the hardships in life when you aren't going through them.  Or when people are distant enough from you that they can't peek into your life to identify them, then you can go on pretending that you have it all together.

It's easy to give platitudes about how God builds patience in us by letting us go through trials, but when you are the one who is going through the trial it's cold comfort.

When you hit that wall where your philosophy and your intellectual agreements run out of words and you're at the end of your own resources... what do you do?

Most of us really just want to be comfortable again.  We want the hard time to stop, the pain to go away, the tax refund to come, healing from sickness.  We want deliverance from death, deliverance from pain, deliverance from all our discomforts.

It's humanly very hard to reconcile a God who cares about me intimately, loves me passionately and sacrificially with the one who really is seemingly more interested in the state of my spirit than he is with my body or my circumstances.  We fall into the "if He loves me he'll take care of me" mode of thinking that equates good things with His favor.

I want to look at that a moment, I'll get back to my original train of thought, but follow me down this bunny trail a while.  When we want to train a dog we do it with reward and punishment.  When we want to train our children we do the same thing.  It's how we were raised and it's how the world works. 

The thing is, while God uses an element of that, call it a function by design, He then calls us to rise above our worldly training and into something different, something we can't see with our eyes, hold in our hands or prove beyond our own personal experience.  Something that requires a faith in the things that make no worldly sense and force us to rely completely on Him.

And that is the purpose of our trials and discomforts.  To shake us from our worldly training of believing what we see, trusting only in what we can touch or store and having faith in ourselves.  Because we think we can control it that way.

I'm going through the bible in a year.  This week I'm reading about Job.  He didn't earn or deserve the rotten things unleashed on him.  He was the apparent victim of God's approving attention.  God was bragging on him to Satan, and Satan set out to use Job as a failure in order to hurt God.  Job's friends came along and did the very same thing we want for ourselves, someone or something to be responsible for our pain.  Something we can point to in a balance sheet to explain or justify our loss, an explanation to the discomfort.

His friends sat with him for a while saying nothing... just entering into that painful space of empathy, grieving with him.  But they couldn't sustain it.  It had to have gotten them thinking about their own lives, or how they would respond if such devastation had happened to them.  And they each gave advice according to their natures.  

Let's come back to what I was saying before, the trap we all fall into: "If God loves me he will take care of me".  What does it do to our faith, our trust in Him, when the terrible things happen?  What if they continue to happen for a very long time?  What do we do when we come to the end of our own resources and there is nothing left in the bank and we can't keep up with the payments?  When it's time to have that scary surgery? 

Take a break from my words for a moment.  Think on it.  Answer the question for yourself, out loud to God. You have your own situation or circumstance that is represented by your own messy life.  Insert that Tough Thing you can't get over, under around or through.  What then?

The platitudes don't help do they?  They sound distant and make you feel like you are separated from everyone else who is singing the praises of a personal God who cares about them and attributes His love to their well-being as though they are special and God loves them more than he loves you.

That, my friend, is a lonely place to sit.  You wonder what you did wrong, and it erodes the foundation of your faith so that you don't trust your full weight to the God who might let you fall.  After all, He let Jesus be crucified, Paul be stoned, and Job lost everything but his life so that he could be around to endure the agony of it.  We give his wife a hard time for telling him to curse God and die, but she loved Job more than any other and endured the losses along side him.  The Psalms are full of verses lamenting the messiness of life and not wanting to live through the agony of it.  (My personal favorite is Psalm 13.)  She, like us, just wanted the agony to stop.  Where do you think her faith was?  Not so far distant from where mine is most days. 

Is that where you are today?  Have you come to the end of your own resources?  Do you long for the agony to stop?  Do you wonder how long you will have to endure it? 

The platitudes seem so distant, they can't reach inside the pain to where the hurt is.  The anger that we hold, the belief that someone is responsible for what we are going through or worse, the belief that God COULD have saved us from this - and just chose not to, makes us hard inside.  Firms our resolve not to trust anyone else, especially a God who doesn't come through for us.

Did you catch that?  Did you see past the feelings of disappointment and hurt in that statement to the revelation on where trust is seated?  Has He not come through for you?  Do you pray to God to fulfill your own agenda, your will? 

Which one of us is God?

This is why we are not exempt from hard times as a Christian.  Because those hard times reveal where our foundations are, what we really want and what we are really trusting in. 

It's a mistake to think that once we are saved our world view changes over night.  It doesn't.  It's revealed in these hard, and lonely places of our lives where we get stuck.  The changes in our world view happen when we release our own agendas and desires of our heart, and cling instead to the things we can't see or touch.  Read the sermon on the mount in Matthew 5-7 to understand the differences between the way God sees things working and the way the world does.

Today, I am looking at my own life.  The hard places I sit at, wishing it were different.  Can I endure?  Will I let these hard times, these hard places reveal the fractures in my thinking, the head games I've played with myself to justify my own desires and agendas?

I'm not good at it.  I fail all the time.  I sit long at those walls, crying because I am once again focused on blame, fault, worry and the oft repeated question... "Why?"

Lord please give me the courage to endure.   Help me to cling to you, who you really are and not what I think you will do for me.  Thank you, Lord, for not leaving me there at the wall.

 

Soul Mining

I spent some quality time in the car with my daughter, Jessica, yesterday.  We were talking about poetry, how for both of us we use it to articulate things we feel, not really conforming it to rhyme or structure, but to wrap our heads around a thing that we want to say out loud.  I call that process Soul Mining.

I journal.  It's a prose version of what I use poetry for.  I need to process things that happen, things I think, and sometimes the things I want to say, sort of as a dry run.  I've been journaling since I was 13 years old.  I still have all the old spiral notebooks and once upon a time I would have rushed in after them in a fire.  They contained the record of me, of my journey.

I even tried to convert them into a digital version by retyping them into a log of sorts.  (This way in case of a fire it would all be backed up!)  I got a few journals into this project and stopped.  Why?  Because I wanted to reach back in time and shake myself!  It had the same sort of feeling you might have when you are watching a horror movie, tossing popcorn at the screen telling the girl not to go looking in the dark basement in her skimpy PJ's! 

Yeah... so why would I want to save them from a fire if they were full of all my stupid mistakes?  Because this is where I learned from those mistakes.  It's the before and after snapshot of all the things I learned. 

That's what journals are good for. 

Everyone has their own way of doing it.  For me, it goes like this: the first several pages are full of high emotion.  I'll describe the situation I'm going through, how I feel about it, what other people have said, what I fear, what I hope, my hurts and disappointments... all of it.  Most often it's done with tear stains, scribbled out parts, underlining, doodles while I collect my thoughts, whatever is inside my head gets dumped onto the page.  Sometimes I'll take a break there, give myself time to shake off the last of the strong emotion and I'll grab my bible. 

When I come back to it, I'll reread what I've written.  If I'm lucky I'll recognize where I am just being over the top with the feelings, because I've given myself permission to blow.  Some of them aren't based in fact, but previous things that make me feel now like I did then.  When I pick up the threads of those feelings and trace them back I can see if they really belong to me or not.  (Raise your hand if you've ever carried around guilt for someone else's actions or inaction.)  If not, then I ask the Lord to help me unknot them and let them go, they belong to someone else.  Sometimes those feelings I've traced back from the past are because of harm I've done while hurt or angry, and I need to ask those I've wronged for forgiveness so that I can untie the knots and let them go too.

Sometimes those threads I've identified are tied to current issues, relationships and sins that need to be dealt with now.  The process is the same for now as it is for stuff from the past:  Submitting it to the Lord.

If I can trace those issues to actionable items, I build a plan for dealing with it.  Most often it means I am asking for or granting forgiveness.  Sometimes it means that I am giving other people grace for not living up to my expectations.  But in both cases, it involves the work of the Holy Spirit.  My journal is also a record of prayer, asking God to change me, to help me see the world through His eyes. 

Because I screw it up so bad when left to myself. 

Without His grace and mercy, I get caught up in getting justice and my perceived understanding of fairness.  Without the Holy Spirit's intervention into my journal/prayer-life, my entries look like laundry lists of anger and a record-keeping of wrongs and offenses done to me so that I can justify my own bad behavior.

With the work of the Holy Spirit, then I see those wrongs from a totally different perspective than my own.  When I can let go of the feelings that tie me to the moment, I can look at the big picture or behind the actions to the why of a thing. 

It doesn't always change the circumstances, but it changes me.  Those focused prayers, when I am submitted to the Holy Spirit, enable me to see the truth in a situation and react off of that instead of the feeling that rode me when I entered into the journal/prayer time.

Feelings are good for getting a temperature of what's going on in your heart, but feelings aren't always true.  Journaling is good for examining those emotions.  Journaling helps clear the truth from the feeling.  But the most important thing journaling does for me is that it allows me to talk to God.  He gives me room to pour out the stuff that's circling in my head, and because he's a real person to me I feel heard.  He cares about me and my day.  He wants me to lay down the heavy stuff beside Him so that he can replace it with joy, assurance, compassion, patience... whatever it is that I need.

Sometimes, I get spanked.  Sometimes He reveals to me that I am operating from the sinful side of my nature and if I want the good stuff He has for me, I have to be willing to let go of my righteous anger.  I have to get over myself and give Him time to confront and deal with those other people in His timing and not what suits me.  I have to give them room and time to mature at their own pace and not put up stumbling blocks that make it harder for them to come to God on their own.  It means, I have to pray for them, love them and actively look for ways to do good for them.  Because that's what He's done for me when I didn't deserve it.

Grace and mercy.  It keeps coming back to that doesn't it? 

Soul mining, the act of digging up the dirt, rocks and metals in our life - if we do it right, creates a well for the Holy Spirit to seep into your life.  It's the Living Water that Jesus was talking about to the Samaritan woman in the gospels.  The better you get at digging up the self-protecting and self-serving part of your nature, the deeper your well and the sweeter the water of the Holy Spirit.

It's hard work though.  Especially if you like to be right.  If you like to have it all under control and someone has to take the blame or responsibility for how you feel.  It's humiliating to keep digging up the same stupid rocks over and over again.  After a while you just feel covered in mud and the temptation is to sling it at anyone else.  That's human, sinful nature that is common to us all.

Aren't you glad that He doesn't leave us there?  My daughter Megan has been using the phrase (is it a popular one these days?) to "go die in a hole".  I always cringe at it, but in my mind it makes me think of the scripture in Jeremiah 4:13 where it says

"My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water."

Trust me, we all have a back yards full of broken cisterns.  They come in all shapes and sizes, from our for emergency candy stashes for those stress full days to the savings or retirement account, you hear what I'm saying?  Any time we rely on other things instead of God, we fill cisterns with our own resources, and store them for rainy days.  Hoping for the rainy days actually, because that's they only way those cisterns fill, they don't go deep and and when it's gone it's gone.  It makes us careful in who we share those resources with, doesn't it? 

Also, it has a by-product of deceiving us in to thinking that those rainy days of abundance are signs of God's favor, when it may not be true.  Good and bad fall on all of us.  That kind of water shouldn't be confused with the Living Water God talks about in scripture.  It's one of the reasons it's so hard for the rich to enter heaven (no need for God's abundance when they have such deep personal resources) and why money is the root of all kinds of evil.  Not that planning ahead or having resources to draw from are bad, only when you do that INSTEAD of digging the well.  But I digress...

If you have dug deep, and the resources are endless, it makes you want to pitch a tent for shade and invite the neighbors over, doesn't it?

The point is that we all do the digging, it's life.  We are all in the mud and we all have to deal with the sin that so easily ensnares.  The real question is where do you dig, and what are you digging for?

Journaling is my shovel.  What's yours?

What's In a Name?

Once a week I guest write for Scio Journal, this is the community blog we use to discuss this bible reading plan corporately.  I'm posting it here too, but I invite you to join the conversation there. 

Prayer Focus: Africa 

Bible Reading: Genesis 30-33

Scripture

Then the man said, "Let me go, for it is daybreak."
But Jacob replied, "I will not let you go unless you bless me."

The man asked him, "What is your name?"
"Jacob," he answered.

Then the man said, "Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome."

Jacob said, "Please tell me your name."
But he replied, "Why do you ask my name?" Then he blessed him there.

So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, "It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared."(Genesis 32:27-30)

Observation

Periodically, God steps into history  and has encounters that change the flow of events through single individuals.  Jacob had inherited the intense scrutiny of a God who had plans for redeeming humanity through his family line.  God held his promise to Abraham in a faithfulness that endured in spite of the workings of generational sin.  Of all the ways he could have revealed himself to Jacob, he chose to come in the form of a man he could speak to and wrestle with; a man who then blessed him, and gave him a new name.   

Application

I am grateful that God invites us to wrestle things out with Him.  There is so much there in those few verses that I wish scripture had unpacked for us better.  We will never know their conversation through the evening of grappling.  Did he shift blame to everyone who’d swindled him, and use their actions to justify his own?  Had God confronted him with his own sin?  The bible doesn’t say.  It only says that they wrestled through the night and that he overcame both God and humans. 

Though it’s not in today’s reading, I mention it here in the application portion because this whole business about name changing is for you and me too: “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To the one who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, with a new name written on the stone that no one knows except the one who receives it.” Revelation 2:17

Prayer

Lord, help me have the courage to bring my sinfulness to you, to wrestle it out into the open where you can shape me, change me and mark me.  I desire to overcome the world, to know my new name, to meet you face to face.  Thank you for not giving up on us a human race, or on me. 

Re Purposing

Sunday I had a family from church over for lunch. It was a first time visit, and was full of the first impression jitters you get when someone new is in your house. You worry that they will notice all the stains in your carpet, for instance.  And you look at your house like you would if you were seeing it for the first time.  You notice all sorts of things you hadn't before - because you'd gotten used to it. (Yeah, I seriously need to take down my curtains and wash them...)

In conversation with Tammy, (the mom in the family I just mentioned) I discovered someone I could relate to. She's a writer, she's a mom and she home scooled. (Okay, I ran a day care and only home schooled one of my kids for a semester, but we travelled much of the same road.) Like me, she's looking at the day when her kids are all grown and don't need her the same way any more. She called it "re purposing her life". She's still figuring out what that means, what it will look like on her, and I guess I am too.

I took my daughter to her college class yesterday and she was thrilled to see a lady she knew when she was in grade school, it was her favorite para pro (teacher's helper assigned to some specific kids in a class room). My daughter is going to school to be a teacher, because her life has been significantly touched by a few ladies who made working with kids more than just their job, of which Mrs. Wing is one of them. Because we were there early, I was able to hear some of Mrs. Wing's reasons for taking classes at the community college. She's going to become a social worker, specifically helping out kids in the foster care program. Working with kids is her calling, and she's squeezing in classes so that when her kids are all in college, she will be ready to move on to the next thing. It made sense that she worked with the schools while her kids were in the public school system so that her schedule could be the same. Now that they are moving on... she is too.

And so, I reflect on my life. What's next for me? I've sent out a few applications for jobs that were hinted at, but not offered in the end. I do so much of the "mom's taxi" stuff right now that getting a job would put more on my husband's plate than it would take off. But I seriously only have a few years of this left before they are going to be driving themselves, and one by one moving out.

I like the word that Tammy used, re purposing. I'm struggling. Partly I struggle with redefining myself, making the decision on what I want to be when I grow up. Much the same as my girls are struggling now with deciding what courses and which college they should go to.

But I need a purpose. I need to know that what I am pouring my life into matters.

I've spent a lifetime pouring into children, my own and others. I was in the child care industry (babysitting, nanny, daycare center and then running my own for a while) and then with my own kids. But that's awfully hard to write on a resume. I've always been a mom, ever since they put my infant brother in my arms at three years old. What will I be in 4 years when my own baby is in college?

I thought for a while I would be a web designer, took a class that I aced, but realized that what I liked was the creativity.  The web was a fun medium, but the coding - and the reality of what that kind of job is, wasn't what I was looking for. So I retain most of that knowledge, but mainstream has caught up to the stuff that I'd taught myself.  Most people are tech savvy and understand the basics of HTML.

I taught myself how to write, and I've gotten some success at writing short stories, I'm even halfway into my second novel. But I don't hold any hopes of becoming a writer that can support her family with it. I don't think I have the competitive spirit that you need to put yourself out there and sell yourself to agents, convincing them that they can make money off of you. Plus, the industry is really changing out there. Anyone can publish, thanks to e-books and e-publishers but not everyone has marketing.

I've been taking pictures. We invested in a good camera and I'm building equipment to make a portable studio. I'm going to explore that next. Can I make this something that I can pour myself into? Will it have purpose, and can I enrich both my life and the life of someone else while I do it? Can I spend the money it will cost to take photography classes, or will that be stealing resources from the girls?

I don't mean to sound like I'm whining. And if you know me personally, you've heard this diatribe before. I'm re purposing myself. I'm doing internal house cleaning and it takes time. And I'm not done yet.

Being a full-time mom, pouring my life into my kids and being intentional with how I parent, what things I teach them (90% of that through example, not words) is a hard act to follow. Is there anything else that full filling out there to do? It might not have been brain surgery, but it was life-building. And it's all I've ever been exceptional at. Without the kids for me to point to, how do I define myself? They are my life's work and my great opus.

I won't tie them to me through enabling, or hobble them through manipulation to continue to meet my needs for identification. I've raised them to be adults, not children. And, I hope that when God looks at the role I've played in preparing them for His service, that He'll be proud of me.

And now it's my turn to be shaped and molded... I am being re purposed.

Taking pictures for families, senior photos or whatever, doesn't seem on the outside to have much of a "pouring-my-life" factor to it, but it will get me out of the house. It will put me in contact with other people. It will give me a place to be and a thing to do. (some pocket money) And if my heart is fully trusting in the Lord, He can work with anything I'm doing.

Writing, web-work, and photography seem to fit together well. Who knows what may come of it. While I might not specialize in any single of those things, some doors open nicely when you put them in concert. And from a distance I can see a kind of plan or structure in learning them one at a time.

Will you pray for me? Pray for wisdom and guidance. Some of you have been praying for some time, I've sort of been complaining about if for a while now as I do self-inventory and try to see around the corners of my future.

For others this is the first time you've heard me say this and it's scary, being vulnerable in a public setting. I also know, that there are other women like me who are going through the same thing, the same internal housekeeping, and maybe if that person is you, you won't feel left out there by yourself.

My deep, deep thanks to ladies like Tammy and Mrs. Wing, who reminded me this week ...that I'm not alone.

Spinning Plates

Stress.  Worry.  Fatigue.  There's a bit of that going around my house these days.  So I struggle with trying to keep it all into prospective.

Sometimes it's simply a confluence of events that merge and overlap, stretching us thinner than we'd like.  Sometimes it's because we can't say no and agree to be responsible for too much.  The trick is knowing where your boundaries are, knowing your limits and not letting the expectations of everyone else, push you into putting their priorities ahead of your own... or Gods. 

It's hard when everyone else is screaming for you to do their thing, and the Lord speaks in a still small voice.  A voice that's only heard when we close everything else out and ask Him to say it again.  It's also hard when we carry our own agendas, agendas that require us to stay focused, on task and keep our eyes on a goal.   Our hands become so full of what we carry, or busy spinning plates, that we aren't able to receive what God would give us.  If you are like some in my family, you are very hard on yourself, with high standards and so very good at keeping all the plates spinning.

I won't go into the details of the particular stresses our family is under.  Some of it isn't my story to tell, and I didn't really bring it up here in this place to vent over the frustrations of the issues.  I bring it up, because how we handle stress is vitally important to God.  How we process it, how we treat the people around us, and how we come to terms with the responsibilities we are entrusted to, are where the rubber meets the road in how we live out our salvation.

The bible says that this process is a refiners fire, that the everyday messiness of our lives causes enough heat and pressure to separate the dross.  It creates a sludge of nastiness that has to be skimmed off the top in order for the metal to be pure.   

But the problem is that the process is uncomfortable.  It hurts.  It makes you want to lash out at people around you.  It makes you want to find someone else to blame.  That is human nature. 

The floating debris of sinful, human behavior when you are under stress is the very thing that God wants you to hand over to him.  Maturing doesn't happen in an instant.  Salvation does, but the rest is the ongoing refining process that gets decided in the little moments of your every day.  In the spaces between falling under stress and what you do with it. 

He knows that life is tough, that we have our priorities wrong and we take so much on that we are afraid to slow down.  Salvation doesn't mean that we suddenly are perfect!  All it means is that we have access to someone who is.  Someone who waits for you to ask for his help in dealing with the dross that's floating around in your vision.

He says, in Matthew 11:30 that his burden is easy and his yoke is light.  It means that we always have a partner to share the load.  It means that we have a place to set the worry, because His perspective changes our stress levels. 

Again, that sounds like a pretty image, but it doesn't help in the practical everyday part of slugging through a tough day, does it?  No.  That's because in order for all that to work, for it to function, it means you have to treat God like a person you can trust, and not an intellectual agreement you've made about your ethics.

Because of our pride and our tendency to blame shift, we cling to that debris I was talking about: our justifications for our behavior, the anger that we think makes us strong, the envy and jealousy that feeds our belief that other things will make us happy. 

To be yoked with Jesus means that you trust Him more than you trust your own abilities.  That's why the burden is light.  Because it's HIM working through you to accomplish things.

Philippians 2:12-13  So then, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.

He is a real person, with his own plan for your life.  Most of us humans just don't like letting someone else have control.  At our core, we don't like someone else to have the ability to screw up our plans, goals and dreams. 

Trust is what it really comes down to then, isn't it?  Do you trust Him?  Is He a real person who is vitally interested in you, desiring to spend time with you, to heal you, to give you Joy and Peace? 

It's all decided in those tiny spaces where we make the choice of trusting in Him or relying on our own resources.  If you have not submitted yourself to the Lord while you are still liquid and malleable, then when the stress (heat) goes away, the metal of your being hardens again, and the scum on the top makes it even more difficult to hear that still small voice.  After a while, you build your own thick wall between God and you.  "That's just the way I am" and we justify our behavior.  All the while it eats at us that we are left with a plastic Christianity that has no power because we no longer have access to the one who can make us pure, make our burdens light. 

But first... we have to come to him.  Stop trying to do it on our own limited resources as though we don't want to bother him with it, and bring our crisis to Him.  Because the power to do the mighty things are decided in those small spaces between cause and effect.

One Step Forward and Two Steps Back

Today was spent working on my novel.  I had a fellow writer friend call me and it got my juices going, so I pulled out the novel and spent some more time working on it today.  As I'd reported earlier, I'd deleted a couple of long scenes and that brought my word count down from 51K to 44K.  More, it put me in editor mode instead of writer mode and that nearly derailed me.  I'm not going to delete anything else going forward until the first draft is done.  *holds up two fingers in scouts honor* I don't want to kill the novel before it's done!

Part of my problem is that I'd ended at a natural breaking point in the story at the end of Nano.  My main character is literally moving from one state to another and a whole new cast of characters need to be invented that she's going to interact with.  I'd started Nano in November with a solid cast out of the gate and in some ways this feels like I'm starting over in telling the second half of the story.

But that can be good (if I can keep the editor in the closet).  So, here's to adding another couple of pages and updating my WIP meter on the side.  (I keep playing with the color of the progress bar...  which is procrastinating, I know!) 

Okay, getting offline so I can plunk a few more words down on the story before I take the clan ice skating.  They have one more week of vacation before school starts again.

I hope you are able to enjoy your after-Christmas break.  No matter if it's getting a project done that you finally have time for, or finding ways to unwind...

Okay, really closing now.

Scio Community Church - New Year with New Things

There are lots of fun things happening at Scio Community Church with the coming of the new year. I'm so excited about them I have to tell you about it.

The first thing is the theme for the year. Pastor Kirk calls it the Radical Experiment. (based on the book he used to preach from in the last few months of 2011)  If you click the link it will take you to the page that explains it better.  But here are the essentials:

The Radical Experiment is a year-long commitment to five specific challenges:

• To pray for the entire world
• To read through the entire Word
• To commit our lives to multiplying community
• To sacrifice our money for a specific purpose
• To give our time in another context

To put those initiatives in play there are lots of things we are doing.

To pray for the entire world, we are using the site Operation World.  It breaks the world down into continents and then sets up a prayer list by the day.  Cool eh?

To read through the entire Word, corporately. You can follow along with us if you like. Here is a link to the pdf file of the reading plan that you can download, and here is a link to the YouVersion - online plan. We are using this bible plan as the structure to talk about the bible in a corporate fashion through a blog, called The Scio Journal.  You don't have to be a member of the church to join the conversation.

To commit our lives to multiplying community, we have small groups in the form of prayer groups, bible studies and opportunities to disciple and be discipled.  I'm excited to tell you about the new trilogy bible study starting this January. Each book, Falling in Love with, Living in Love with, and Forever in Love with Jesus is a 10 week study, with daily devotionals, Scripture memorization, and worship songs. Each series has a companion video with teaching from Kathy Triccoli and Dee Brestin, followed by group discussion.  This is a study that you can participate in person or online or both.  Here's the link to the blog with more information.

To sacrifice our money for a specific purpose.  As a church, we have committed to supporting Hope Clinic, The Water Project and our very own Great Commission Air, lead by Scio members Rob and Jennifer Rice.  These are corporate initiatives, and doesn't touch the times and places where God calls us to give on an individual and case by case scenario.

To give our time in another context.  This translates to 2% (one week) of our year.  Go on a missions trip for a week, spend a few hours a week volunteering somewhere God leads you... whatever.  The idea is to GO.  Not forever, but for a time, out of our comfort zone and for the purpose of serving our world. 

Well...  That's a lot.  A whole lot.  But it's good.  I hope you join us when and where you can.  Read the bible with us?  Join a bible study?  We are on a couple of social networks too, search Scio Community on Facebook and Twitter.  There are so many places you can step into the conversations, consider this your invitation!

Rules of Prey by John Sandford

Rules of Prey by John Sandford

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I've been on a mystery/thriller kick. I'm currently reading through Robert B. Parker's Spenser series, Janet Evanovich's number series (They just made a movie out of One for the Money, due out on January 27th). And so I picked up John Sandford's first book to sort of round out my reading rotation. I was excited to discover that there is a movie on this series too with Mark Harmon (from NCIS as Gibbs), playing Lucas Davenport. So I'll definitely be checking that out...

On to my review. Lucas Davenport plays a cop in Minneapolis who is hunting down a serial killer who calls himself Maddog. He has a numbered list of rules he leaves with every woman he's killed. Rules he lives by in order to not get caught. So ensues the chase of cat and mouse typical to every story in this genre with the good guy winning.

Of course that's not why we read the book, is it? We know how it will end.

We read to book to find out if we LIKE the character we will spend the next umpteen hours inside their head as we escape from our own lives to follow his / her chase for the bad guy. We evaluate their choices from our own, what lines we would, and they do cross. We read to find out if the author can really pull the magic trick of making us feel like we are really there. Can they engage all our senses, can they make our hearts race, can they pull us into specific moments and transform our humdrum for their fantastic? THAT is what takes us from the first to last page. Otherwise it's just a procedural, right?

In my assessment, this book does a fair job of that. Especially for his first book sold. It's a solid read that doesn't disappoint. But there is a niggling question of "Do I LIKE the character?"

Lucas Davenport is touted to be intelligent, a problem solver. But I honestly don't find the character to be very honorable. He's a womanizer who also takes the law into his own hands and covers up his own crimes. He irresponsibly gets one woman pregnant, and sets up another woman who is throwing herself at him to be bait for the bad guy. (She catches on and goes with it because she's a media hound herself but the fact that he sets her up without her consent or knowledge is still out there). Meanwhile he has another affair with a witness that he has tucked away in his upstate cabin. I don't like him. He has no honor. AND he's a game player who chooses to use other people as pawns for everything from catching a murderer to warming his bed. Oh yeah, and he's a professional game inventor, which sounds cool as long as you have your own set of rules to live by too, separating fact from fiction, you know?

I realize that every character needs an arc, a place to begin that he grows from. I get that, and will likely read a few more to find out if any of those bad choices he made in the first book have the kinds of consequences that will provoke change in future books. If not, I'll look for another series to pick up.

As for the quality of the book itself, it will keep you turning the pages - even though you know who the bad guy is early on.

I gave it three stars for now. I'll wait for more stars as I read further into the series.



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A Christmas Reflection ~or~ The Ties That Bind

Picture of Megs and Max taken last year
during a romp in the snow.

While trying to peel apart the filters to make coffee, Max, our dog, went into a seizure while eating his breakfast. I'd just given him his morning pill with a dish of kibbles to chase it down - suddenly water and dog food are flying everywhere. 

So, upside? 

That mopping I didn't get to while prepping for Christmas dinner - is now done.  The snow we didn't get for Christmas is cheerfully falling now and Max is licking himself like a cat to clean up - even though we've rubbed him down with snow and cleaned him up.  Well, Megan did while I was mopping.  She tells me they had a snowball-catch game while they were at it.  My only wish is that I had pictures of the happy chaos outside.  (Picture above was from last Feb.)

My epilepsy-worry over the puppy is eclipsed a bit by the now clean dog, clean floor and snowball flight of the morning, and I sit down in my chair with a cup of fresh coffee to spend some of my morning with you. 

Christmas day was spent with Mom, Dad and Nate.  It was really nice having them over, though we missed Stacey and Stew - who just got engaged a few days ago.  (Congrats to them!).  They are planning on getting married some time this coming year.

It was a themed sort of Christmas this year.  Most of the kids were given gifts that let them explore their creative side.  We have a model car, rug hooking, and yarn with crochet hooks, needles and looms.  Now we all know how to cast on and do one-stitch in knitting, (it sort of went viral) Jessica has made several hats (amazingly good ones with a built-in cuff) and I foresee many pot holders and scarves in our future.

All good. 

It's the sort of thing you do side by side with someone while you talk or watch movies together.  There's one project going around that I've seen at least three people pick up and work on for a while and set down where it waits for the next person to put a few more rows on.  Even Bill learned how, so he could teach Jess.  She was getting frustrated and he wanted to decode the directions and help her learn by watching.  For him it was like a puzzle to solve.

He looked at me and said how he couldn't believe he was doing it.  It's not something he'd ever had an interest in learning how to do.  Ever.  And I smiled back at him and told him that his interest wasn't in knitting, it was in his daughter.  That man LOVES.  He's got the knack of it.  When they all were in a play one year, he did tech work behind the curtain, just so he could be near them.  That's the kind of man he is.  I've never known anyone like him.

We celebrated Christmas a day later with Mark and Robin.  Rebekah was with us for the day too (her car was getting fixed nearby and we were a happy landing place since we've been trying to make our schedules work to get together anyhow, love that lady!).  So when it was time to go over there, we dragged her along with us. 

We went to their new apartment and had pizza and a movie and exchanged gifts.  Robin has the place feeling like home with pictures hung everywhere, and Mark's got his movie posters mingled in with all the Christmas lights.  My favorite is the "Marvel Wall" of all the block-buster movies based on comics that have come out in the last few years.  Mina has had another hair cut since I saw her last, and the chickie feather, fly-away, hair that she used to have is gone.  It's coming in thicker and has body and a bit of swing to it.  Combine that with her legs getting longer and her vocabulary growing... *sigh*  She's growing out of that toddler phase and into a bright and inquisitive little girl.  Time is passing too quickly!  I'm so caught up in the active business that is happening in my own house and I miss seeing the changes in my granddaughter. 

It was a really wonderful Christmas, and I am blessed. 

Sometimes life is hard, sometimes it's easier to focus on the negative things.  The first-thing-in-the-morning-mess to clean up.  The nagging worry of a sick puppy that you can't fix.   Time speeding faster than you'd like.  The snow or rain that falls every time the roofers are supposed to come, and how you are going to pay to keep a roof over your kids heads.  The hundred other worries and expectations that dangle in my vision but aren't mentioned here...

I don't know where you are at, reader.  I don't know what kinds of joys and stresses orbit you, but I do know that how we approach them changes everything.  Do you come at life with a closed fist?  Are you so weighed down with worries and bitterness and resentment that your hands are too full to accept the joy and peace and love that are in front of you? 

We cling to what we know.  Those things we cling to, define us, because we mold our lives around them.

My Christmas wish for you, is that you would know Jesus.  That you would cling to Him and let Him exchange the things that are weighing you down for the good gifts that he offers. 

Thank you for spending part of your day with me, hearing about mine.  I am blessed to have some of you in my life, to know you on a personal level.  For others who have stumbled here from a wider net, thanks for taking the time to read through this long post.  It's time for me to step out of my devotion and journal portion of my day and go on to the next thing. 

A post nano re read... cut a few scenes

I shouldn't have done it.  I should know better than to look back, but since I had set it down to work on NoteBored stuff, I did look back.  In looking back I deleted a scene or two (having decided to take it in a different direction than what I'd started with).  Result?  What I'd left in because of the crazy word-hungry days of Nano, I cut when I'd re read it.  It's only a few scenes though.  Now it looks like my draft less than it was.  And that's because it is, but I'm back to writing.  And it feels so very good!

The break (nano ending) hit in between the first and second portions of the book.  Though I have it set up as an expected 100,000 word story, I strongly suspect that it will be closer to 150,000.  At least in the first draft -  but we'll see.  So much of it is front loaded with back story right now, the next part might go much faster. 

Oh well.  It's late.  Tomorrow will be full of Christmas eve preparation.  We still have shopping and wrapping and cooking to do.  Just like almost everyone one else out there.

Enjoy your Christmas eve, friend.  Slow down long enough to live in your moments, to set the worries, stress and anxiety down long enough to be there with your loved ones. 

Merry Christmas to all and to all... a good night.

Blogging from email...

So I went to the blogger dashboard and explored some of the settings.  One of the settings allows for you to blog from any email program.  So I’m trying it. 

*waves arms wildly while jumping up and down* Can you see me?

You can?  Cool! 

Okay, you can go on with the next thing on your list.  Thanks for checking in with me today.

The Alchemist

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I'm in the process of pulling "classic" books that somehow slipped past me in school off the shelf and reading them now that I'm 40-something.

I went looking here at the Goodreads to see what everyone else had to say about it - sort of to get myself in the mood to read something I've thought would be good for me to read but wasn't on a shelf that I normally gravitate to. Turns out that it's a polarizing book. People don't just take it or leave it. They either rave over it or they throw it across the room!

So, I'm curious to see what I will think of it. I'll be back to edit my review and rate it when I'm done.

****

Back.

Well, I think I stand in the middle. I liked the prose, it felt a little over the top in some spots, but part of that is to make up for it's simplicity. I didn't hate it, I wasn't as impressed with it as some were, but I didn't hate it.

I love the economy within the story concerning magic use, that it has a consequence. Mostly because stories that don't have a check and balance - a physics component with the magic doesn't give me enough to hang the suspension of my belief. I enjoyed the exploration between evil and altruism. The play between power and helplessness.

In spite of all that, there wasn't anything here that explained why this tiny book is getting so much excitement over it.






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NoteBored, my reach exceeding my grasp?

Louisa May Allcat: Notebored's mascott

My daughter, Megan, asked me today what my favorite quote was.  The first one I always go to when asked that question is part of a poem by Robert Browning "A man's reach should exceed his grasp, else what is heaven for?"  Dictionary.com translates this to mean: (Cultural Dictionary)

 

Words from a poem by Robert Browning, suggesting that, to achieve anything worthwhile, a person should attempt even those things that may turn out to be impossible.

I'm excited for what's coming in January.  NoteBored will return from the ashes, but it's going to function differently than it has in the past.  (Though, the graphic design is more in line with the orginal version.)  This time, instead of paying for server space, domain names and fancy forum software, I'm making better use of free programs that are out there.  All powered by Goggle.

I'm building a website that will act as an umbrella to pull all the other disparate programs offered by google together into one website to enhance our community.  I guess it's my version of a content managment system.

We'll use Groups, as our conversation forum.  I've found a way to nest the website that holds all the group conversations inside one of the pages at NoteBored so that you don't have to go to the groups home web page (a separate url) if you don't want to - but now, because groups is essentially designed to work through e-mail you can easily continue a conversation throughout the course of the day from your data plan pone if you like.  Doing it this way has some limitations, but I've read that google plans to make the "group" program more versatile with the ability to create folders (or categories within your forum) to help keep conversations straight.

Shared Docs will become the meat and potatoes of NoteBored.  To be honest, I still have a bit of a learning curve to  the google docs function and how I want to structure it so that we have less clutter and better results.  But the benefit of using "Docs" as the workshop is that each person retains their own work, since the creator of a document is the owner and has the ability to share or unshare rather than loosing control of a copy that is hosted on another's server space.  And yes, there is a way to pull that inside the NoteBored website too, so that all those documents, and the conversation forum are still under one "roof" contributing to keeping all of us in community. 

Google+ will allow us to put notebored people in a "circle".  From what I can see Google+ is essentially the same as facebook.

Instant messaging and live chat functions are embedded right into the the email program, so you can have private conversations and live conversations while still being part of the community.

Google Calendar is easily embedded into NoteBored as well.  I can create several calendars if I want, and you can look at them stacked on one another or peel them apart and only look at what you want.  For instance, I can create a calendar for scheduled NoteBored activities.  (our virtual Christmas party, flash contests schedule, member birthdays) and another calendar for submission deadlines on various other publications.  It's a powerful program, with such a smooth and clean interface that it looks deceptively simpler than it is.

I can create forms that will allow me to make applications to join the community, and those same forms can be used for moderating writing contests, because they time stamp entries and funnel all the results to one document (a spread sheet).

There's also photo software that will let me publish a directory of sorts, for those in the community who are interested in promoting themselves as authors.  A small picture of themselves with a three or four line bio will ping on search engines and bring their names higher up in a google search - more visibility if you are a struggling writer wanting to make yourself known.

So I look at all these programs, I see how seamlessly the fit together - designed so that they would fit together, (most of which translate well to a mobile device) and wonder, why on earth would I want to pay hundreds of dollars to recreate the same basic thing?

There is a catch though.  There's almost always a catch.  In my case, it means I'm going to have to learn my way around these programs or hunt down a google guru who can help me trouble shoot issues when they arise.  Being able to huddle these programs into one website does not mean that I can problem solve each component.  While I know my way around some of them, I haven't used all of them.  I will need to create some tutorials quite literally while I learn them for myself and pray that I can trouble shoot for others or at least point them in the right direction!

But that is just the actual building of the site... there are other changes coming to NoteBored too.  I'm using the building of a website in order to get to what I'm really after, and that is the building of a community.  Part of doing that means that I have to establish the rules that govern it.  Here's what I mean:

An application  / sponsor form is the first step.  It's my gate keeper.  A typical writer's forum allows anyone to register with the idea that if you offer crits you will get your work critiqued in return.  Many people show up, some are only looking, some are looking for trouble or for ego strokes.  Most abandon the site and you end up with an inflated membership that doesn't reflect your true community.  An application weeds out anyone who isn't seriously interested. 

Also, we are a going to a co-op format and you must have a sponsor to get in.  No worries if you don't have one.  All who are not charter members MUST first be sponsored and then take their turn in sponsoring someone else. 

What does a sponsor do?  First they communicate with the newbie one on one, through whatever means works for them, to show them the ropes on our unusual google programs vehicle for community. 

Second, they are the first ones in line to offer crits for their work and respond to their posts.  A big brother sort of thing to ensure that no one falls through the cracks.  Notice I said "in line?"  This doesn't mean that they will be the only ones to help the newbie with comments, but they will have an advocate from the very beginning. 

After the probationary period is over (when presumeably they've made their own friends in the group and asked the majority of their orientation questions) then they are no longer a newbie and responsible now for taking on a newbie themselves.  Sometimes we will get a lot of newbies, and everyone will have their own.  Or things will be slower and a newbie might be assigned several people to watch out for them.  It all depends.

Code of ethics/conduct Boy this sounds so official and scary!  But it's not.  Mostly it's a document that states really clearly what the expectations are for behavior and the conditions under which we all agree to live by. 

Every community has them no matter if they are spoken or unspoken.  I want ours to be very clear because NoteBored, by design, takes on people of all ages.  We will have young people in our community who will need to be protected and nurtured.  That means that the community will be policed by it's members and the rules enforced, resulting in banning if problem situations cannot be resolved. 

My hope is that we will have enough people in the community that a group of individuals who have marvelous people skills will make this their own passion too.  The idea isn't to be autocratic and demanding but to train up people who are vastly different in age, culture and experience levels to use each other's strengths and make us a strong and diverse community.  But that has to be modeled and it has to be communicated in order to bring peace.  It also takes someone who is willing to hold a firm line in order to protect the integrity of the site and the welfare of the younger ones we've invited.

Editorial board eventually we will want a place to publish our community work.  We aren't there yet, and I won't be the one at the steering wheel for it, but hopefully some will rise from our ranks who have this passion and will help mold what it will look like.  Will we have an Ezine?  An Anthology?  A chapbook? I can't wait to find out!

Officers.  I touched on this a little, but I'll go into better detail here.  The idea of having officers within the community is so that specialization can push our boundaries outwards while maintaining structure within.  No one person can do it all.  I need people who are really, really good at the things I'm not, in order for this dream to become a reality. 

• I need administrators to help as gatekeepers, run forums, assign sponsorships and such. 
• I need a google guru team that can help us over the tech hurdles.  
• I need security officers who will resolve conflicts that arise.
• I need mentors and moderators to help newbies in the art of writing. 
• I need more experienced writers who relentlessly pursue excellence in their writing, and challenge others to do the same. 
• I need an event team that will facilitate for the community in things such as: conventions, contests, deadlines, reunions, lectures. 
• I need a community oriented team who will promote fun like word games, virtual parties and those who welcome the stranger. 
• I need reporters who will write articles about us to the writing community at large and articles that are about all those other arms inside our community I just talked about, who can keep us all connected.

Once your sponsorship has ended and you have served at least one term in sponsoring another, AND you have served for a time on one of those teams I just spoke about (in apprenticeship) you are eligible for... 

Elections.  Wouldn't it be awesome if we had so many people contributing to make this community operate - and so many people who wanted to serve, that we had to have elections to keep it from being an insider's clique? 

So now I come full circle, and I ask this humbling question: Is my reach exceeding my grasp?  Am I dreaming too big?  Am I setting myself up for failure assuming that more people will want this too, that they will indeed catch my vision and help carry the load into the future? 

This is a consumer-driven society that craves instant satisfaction, sound bytes, texting short-cuts and fluff.  We like things to come easy, and building this kind of community takes WORK.  It takes commitment to other people in order for it to function the way I envision it; rich in the building up not just NoteBored's corporate functionality - but into the lives of individuals, helping them find their own voice and encouraging them to use it!  Can you see it too?  Can you envision a small community in a little corner of the web, committed to enabling people to communicate their thoughts and ideas clearly?  Do you see the power it?

The word was spoken, and the world began.

The word became flesh, and lived among us, using stories to convey the vision of the kingdom of heaven.

We were made in His image, designed so that we crave communication and fellowship, ...stories.

Stories are what bind us together.  You see it everywhere from the drawings on caves, telling stories of hunts and families - to facebook and it's new timeline profile, telling the electronic version of an individuals story.

I'm afraid that in our race for instant communication on a global level (twitterspeak, facebook, texting, IM'ing), we've forgotten how to really communicate.

Is my reach exceeding my grasp?  Maybe.  But my desire to reach out and build into another individual, helping them find their voice and explore platforms from which to speak is just as powerful for me on my end is it is for them on theirs.  It's not just the art of writing I am interested in.  If that were so, then I wouldn't bother trying to create a community, I'd just keep submitting my work and focus on my own skills.  But I get such pride and excitement out of watching the people I helped build into on a personal level or offered critiques on their work, get published; knowing that NoteBored was instrumental in their growth. 

This is my vision, that far-off thing I am reaching for.

Dea's Pasta Salad

Here are the ingredients:

1 pkg. Noodles (bowtie, macaroni, shells, etc.)
1 pkg. Diced Ham (cooked)
1 Pepper (Green, yellow, red or orange)

1 onion, diced
1 sm. pkg. frozen peas
1 sm. can sliced black olives
1 tbs of garlic
1 sm. tomato
1/2 cup diced carrot
3 TBS of Parmesan cheese
1 cup shredded cheese
1/2 bottle of italian dressing
1/4 bottle of ranch dressing

Cook the noodles till they are just done, don't over-cook.  While the noodles are still in the strainer, run cold water over them to cool and to rinse off any lingering starch.

Return to pan and add all the diced ingredients and the dressings.  Then add most of each of the cheeses and stir them into the mixture, saving a little back to sprinkle over the top.

Feel free to make substitutions with the dressings (regular or low cal) or vary how much you use.  You don't want the noodles to clump, so you'll want enough oil to coat them, but beyond that it's more a matter of how dry or moist you prefer the salad to be.

Here's the nutrition break-down on my version:

Recipe name

Number of servings

Serves people

Ingredients	Calories	Carbs	Fat	Protein
Kroger - Diced Ham - Fully Cooked, 1 container (2 cups ea.)	240	8	6	36
Great Value (Walmart) - Rotini Noodles, 1 container (6 cup dries ea.)	1,680	328	8	56
Onions - Raw, 1 large	63	15	0	1
Bell Peppers - Yellow, Raw, 1 pepper (186 g/3.75" long, 3" diameter)	50	12	0	2
Peas - Green, frozen, unprepared, 1 package (10 oz)	219	39	1	15
Kroger - Olives, Ripe, Black -Sliced, 1 container (8 tbsp ea.)	100	4	10	0
Gilroy Farms - Minced Garlic In Water, 2 tsp	10	2	0	0
Fresh Produce - Cherry Tomatoes-Raw, 5 ounces	35	6	1	1
Carrots - Raw, 0.5 cup, chopped	26	6	0	1
Cheese - Parmesan, grated, 3 tbsp	65	1	4	6
Kraft Natural Shredded Cheese - *Colby & Monterey Jack 2% Milk , 1 cup (28 g)	400	4	20	28
Condiments - Zesty Italian Dressing, 0.5 container (32 tbsp ea.)	880	16	96	0
Kraft Salad Dressing - Ranch Dressing/Dip, 0.25 container (32 tbsp ea.)	520	12	52	0
Add Ingredient

Total:	4288	453	198	146
Per Serving:	172	18	8	6

Twitter Confusion

Okay, I admit that I am new to the whole Twitter thing.  To me it feels like a room crammed with people who are shouting at one another.  It's crammed because I did figure out how to "follow" people.  But most of those people I'm following don't know one another, are too famous to follow me back, or are strangers that I've followed because I think there is an etiquette to this and I don't want to do it wrong.  Just because I am listening in on their posts, doesn't mean I am hearing the other side of their conversations. 

So.. I guess it's better to imagine that in this crowded room, everyone is talking on their cell phones... 

In twitterspeak...

full of codes with hash tags...

and links.

Oh! and btw, you can only use 150 characters per post. 

...Including the hash tags and links.

So to make better use of your character limit, everyone uses text abbreviations.

*sigh*

Does this cereal come with a decoder ring?

How is it possible to actually communicate anything this way? 

I write short short stories.  Really short stories.  500 to 1000 word stories.  I can deeply appreciate it when each word carries multiple duties for saying more while using less words.  It makes a story sharp and clean.  But twitter has such a steep learning curve to  decode that it's a lot of work for me to slog through.

This reminds me a lot of when I learned HTML, once you figured out that all the commands were shortened down to initials, and you knew what the initials stood for - the language was easy to understand.  Then you just needed the rules that governed them like how to <open> and </close> them nest them properly like those Russian dolls, so that the text and images landed in the right spot on the page. 

So today I am <rant>ing about it here, and I'll post this link over there - Maybe someone will take pity on my confusion and walk me through how to use the hash tags to stitch a conversation together with someone.

After spending a cramped hour or so on twitter, confused and opening links to unpack comments, it's nice to come here and use as many words as I want to wind my way through the thought process.  I can wriggle my toes in the sand and stretch out on my own beach after surfing the web.   

I feel better now.  Like I've been heard.  After all, you did come here to listen to what I had to say - even if you don't leave me comments.  But please do.  Leave me comments, I mean.  It's nice to have space to talk, but I really would like to have a conversation about this with someone.  Are you a twitter user?  Do you understand it?  Is it a satisfying way of communicating?  Reply to my post and help a girl out!

Thanks for giving me a part of your day.   

</rant>