Until Then?

If I had a movie genre that defined my life, it would be romantic comedy.  Maybe that's why I don't like to actually go see them in theaters - they hit too close to home.  You know the scene, the single girl who's in a sad state then she meets/falls for the impossible guy then through some stroke of fate he falls for her.  That's all good and great, but I am stuck at the "Then" part. And have been my whole life. 

This is where my life turns more into tragedy.  It has happened to me pretty much continuously since I discovered boys in the 5th grade.  I even prolonged one of these relationships for 2 years.  

I haven't had a proper date in 4 years.  I've been hanging out a lot in the past few months with a pretty dreamy dude.  We've got a lot in common.  Family is a huge priority, learning new stuff is cool, we both like action flicks and cold beer with wings.  Life was pretty great - but - I just recently got to "Then".  

And just like the Ro-Com leading ladies, I'm at the moment where she catches the leading man in some sort of misunderstanding or they discover that they are at cross purposes.  This usually comes before the clarification of the misunderstanding after which he declares his undying love for her.  Generally during this part of the movie, it either rains or there is a gallon of ice cream involved.  (That's how you know that moment is coming...)

Insert any Katherine Heigl movie here!

I'm all kinds of good with living in Ro-Com land up until this part.  Honestly, it's pretty fun.  But it's not what I want deep down.  I'm not even sure I want a movie-perfect ending.  Heck, I'd just settle for an ending of any kind instead of languishing on the editing room floor.  For how I've been feeling - living in my Ro-Com turned Tragedy - I'd go back a scene or two and where the tension builds and builds and you begin to feel sorry for said single girl.  

So, I'm waiting for it to rain or for the gallon of ice cream moment to hit.  Someday something like that may happen to me.  Right now with this year's dreamy dude - I doubt it.  So - I'm waiting until "Then".   Again.  

Shalom – Stillness of Spirit

“Cease striving (in some translations – be still) 

and know that I am God.” Psalm 46:10 

Wholeness.  When you’re whole, there is a sense of “cease striving” that allows you to truly experience acceptance and affirmation that only God can provide.  Without wholeness, you strive for it constantly – some unseen reality, a standard too high, an undefined nirvana.  Even if you’re the achiever-type and who can visualize exactly what success will look like, what your 3, 6 and 12-month plans are to get closer to that, achievement is not always what it’s cracked up to be. 

Especially for achiever-types, and I know this because I am one, achievements only open the door to other things you need to do to get to the next level of achievement.  I started graduate school in 2000, and just graduated in May with my Ph.D.  As if writing a dissertation and getting it approved wasn’t enough, my advisor is adamant about having publications come from it, which truly is a wise thing.  Then the other mentors on my committee are also after me to present my findings at conferences. Another wise thing. But these things only lead to more work, which leads inevitably to more work.  It’s like I’m always a step away – as if I’m walking up the wrong-way escalator.  Each time I get up a step to the top, another appears.  My lack of excitement at my graduation has mystified some of the people I work with.  I should be excited about this achievement.  But one achievement’s children become the next stairs on the escalator that leads only to new stairs. It’s quite a tail-chasing way to live. 

 In the middle of all of this, I’ve been dealing with some very important identity issues related to how I will choose to live the rest of my life.  I have friends for whom the search for a husband is the most important part of their lives right now.  I have other friends for whom getting rid of their husbands (or wives) is the most important thing they have ever done for themselves.  Some of my friends spend all of their mental and emotional energy investing in their children or taking care of their aging parents.  I don’t have any of those things in my life right now, so sometimes their stories are just entertaining rather than instructive for me, and sometimes they just make me feel bad for the storyteller.  It makes me perversely glad that I’m not in those shoes.

I feel most whole when dealing in the land of ideas, concepts and translation of those ideas into the lives of others.  Maybe I don’t need a romantic relationship to feel whole, don’t need a family of my own, don’t need to invest my life in those kinds of things.  Maybe ideas are all I need.  I have questioned for years whether the romance/marriage thing was something I really wanted or whether it was a social norm that I didn't want to conform to.  I even considered very seriously becoming Catholic so I could become a nun.  That's a pretty serious statement coming from a Baptist girl.

Maybe I’ve been looking at the wholeness thing all wrong.  What if instead of achieving in order to be whole, Shalom comes for me through simplicity, through stripping down what’s not necessary, through becoming poor in spirit.  And poor might not mean having nothing, but having only what's most important.  It may come particularly for me through peeling away layers of ideas and experience to get down to what I really need – to feel accepted even with my own flaws, with my own createdness in all its uniqueness including being at home in the land of ideas and big high sounding words.  And only God truly provides that kind of stillness, that all-inclusive wholeness, that depth of affirmation.  I feel myself wanting to jump off that escalator all of a sudden. Maybe someday I will.

Proud Mom of 3 Graduate Degrees

An article by Slate.com recently explored the experiences, motivations and rationale for women who remain childless.  Since I am a childless woman who is nearly 40, I was fascinated.  I’ve always said that my excuse was that I had my nose in the books and didn’t have time for boys.  Come on, I have three graduate degrees that I have collected in the past 12 years – that’s a lot of attention on the text on the page instead of the dudes across the room.

The first real truth is that I would love to find a man.  I just would like him to already have kids.  The men I know who have become dads since I’ve known them have expressed the most wonderful qualities since their kids have come along.  I remember my younger brother having a complete freak fest when he held my niece for the first time.  Now, he’s the primary care provider for his two kids, ages 2 and 6 months.  He’s more patient, more gentle, more relaxed, and has become the king of follow-through, bath time and diaper changing.  With my niece, he was in denial that there was even a living creature in the baby burrito much less was he willing to deal with the contents of her diapers.  The problem with the single men I know is that they need to be trained – in soooo many ways. 

The second real truth is that all of the moms I know who have young children is that they have lost themselves in their kids.  You see this on TLC’s What Not To Wear all the time – women who have become frumpy and without any thought of a gym membership.  No wonder it seems like celebrity moms buy their children on Rodeo Drive.  I touched base with an old friend over the weekend because I saw something that reminded me of her, and she told me she had no memory of it – which was odd because it was so much a part of who she was for all the years that I knew her.  I wondered at her response for a moment, and decided that my sister-in-law (mother of 2 under 10) swears that motherhood kills your brain cells.  My friend agreed but had to quit the conversation to go chase her boy down because he was being too quiet. 

So, between wanting a man who already has gone through the delightful dad metamorphosis and not wanting the medusa mom transformation to happen to me, I am childless and proud to be an aunt of 4 fabulous young people whom I love to spoil on a regular basis.  The possibility of children is not off the table – for me, it might be about finding the right person who could become the delightful dad and temper my medusa mom.  But for the time being, I’ll stick with the story that my graduate degrees are my children – at least if they are too quiet in the next room, I know that all’s well in there.  

The Goodness of Coffee

I grew up in a family of coffee drinkers.  If you were not drinking coffee, you pretty much were not allowed at the adult table at holiday meals.  I didn't get my first invite to the adult table until I was in college.  That's when I discovered the local coffee house - Sweet Eugene's.  I also discovered that black was not the only way to drink coffee.  "It puts hair on your chest," my Dad would say.  Maybe that's why I put off the coffee conversion for so long.  I could not imagine how that would be a good thing for me.  


Being introduced to Foo-Foo coffee is what keeps me coming back for more.  I have sought out the best way to make coffee, the best tasting coffee, and have a daily ritual surrounding these things.  I almost won't drink my Mom's coffee flavored water anymore - unless I sneak in to the kitchen after she has prepared the coffee pot for the morning and dump in a few more scoops of grounds.  I'm really glad my brother works in a country that produces good coffee, and that I get to partake of that abundance. 


I am a coffee snob.  I prepare coffee every day in my French Press - one cup of delicious goodness while I eat breakfast and blow dry my hair.  I have been committed to the French Press for years now...until my friend Kate bested me with decaf. 


Now decaf generally tastes like drinking aluminum foil to me, but Friday night - it was the best coffee ever to have crossed my amateur foodie palate.  She made this coffee in what looked like something you'd see in a mad scientist's lab - using filter paper and all.  I felt like I was back in Chemistry with Mr. Ramsey, just as clueless now as I was then.  I was doubtful, because the French Press is superior in every way to any other method.  Well, she explained how this method was actually better, and in the end - that few sips of decaf superseded any other past cup of coffee - smooth, no aluminum foil taste...it made me wonder what goodness it would bring out of my Guatemalan beans.  I might have to give in and get me one of those chemistry sets - if it's going to be that good every time.  It might be time to break up with my French Press.  

Holy Relationships, Batman!

In the June 2012 edition of Baptists Today (BaptistsToday.org), there are several articles summarizing and editorializing about the recent conference for Baptists and by Baptists focusing on sexuality.  Whatever views folks might have on this issue, it occurs to me that having deep dialog about a deep topic like sexuality is one of the greatest needs on Christian life today.  Topics ranged from human trafficking to homosexuality.  The collection of articles about the conference makes for thoughtful reading if you have half an hour to take that in.

It struck me as I was reading those reports that what is lacking in this conversation is a broader concern for Christian relationality.  Sexuality is a small facet of overall human relationality.  As a single person who hasn’t really had any/many boyfriends to speak of much less been married, as one who is attracted to men, and who is 37, I think that casting any discussion about sexuality in larger terms of Christian relationality would be valuable.  Baptists Today reserves one page (my favorite page) for various quotations about hot topics.  One of them this month goes like this:

“I got to weddings and hear how the two people getting married were ‘incomplete and now they are whole.’ My heart breaks for those who are single sitting in the crowd who just heard publicly that they are not whole persons.”  Jeanie McGowan (ethicsdaily.com)

This perception pervades Christian life, and I have heard this in sermons about romantic relationships, in Christian dating books, and in cultural norms regarding the reality that most folks my age are married (and some divorced multiple times by age 37). 

As a Baptist teen, I sat in countless youth group meetings focusing on the question of “how far is too far?”  As a dyed-in-the-wool BSM-er during my undergraduate days, there were at least as many conversations and sermons about that each year as there were in 6 years of youth group.  As a university minister, I have to confess that I failed to see Christian sexuality as part of the larger issue of Christian relationality.  We encouraged students to be “in the world, but not of the world” by equipping them (sometimes quite poorly) to fend off their partner’s friskiness. 

One minister I worked with commented that he had dealt with numerous students whom he said could quote verse after verse about avoiding sexual immorality while enjoying sex with their partner.  We also taught students to share their faith and to be friends with people whose ideas were just like theirs.  There was never a discussion about how to respect differences, how to dialog about the deep divides between people, or how to be consistent in difficult relationships.  There were glib statements about loving people, helping the world, and being a good Christian.

This approach, both to sexuality and relationships, was to essentially the “moat” mentality – keep the undesirables out and go on the defensive if threatened.  No wonder dialog in Christian life is unheard of.  It’s impossible to have a discussion through a brick wall and across a ditch of your own filth.  (Unless you and your buddies yell from the tower, ‘Your father was a hamster, and your mother smelled of elderberries!’ then hoist cattle over the wall at your enemies hoping they will scream out ‘Run Away, Run Away!’ as they haul it back to the forest.) 

Because of the moat mentality, I am now not surprised that when things start to get hot and heavy, things go wrong and good Christian girls get pregnant at 17.  I am not surprised that the divorce rate for Christian couples is no different than for non-Christian couples.  Ministers are not actively offering guidance about Christian relationality.  There is enough out there about what NOT to do, but just like dog trainers tell us, if we don’t know what we WANT them to do, why do we punish when they do the opposite?  Ministers need to focus on what TO DO, which includes a greater context of holiness in Christian relationships with all people. 

If sexuality was not isolated as its own issue, and if it was included in a larger conversation about what is dysfunctional about relationships in the Christian community, and if (I know that’s a lot of if’s) this inclusive approach was taught and lived in all levels, ages and denominations of Christian life, I bet my bottom dollar that things would begin to be different and Christianity would no longer have Christians as its biggest problem.

Someday May Never Come

My to-do app on my phone has three time designations – Today, Tomorrow and Someday.  I wonder about the Somedays.  I mean, it really does sound like an honest to goodness day of the week.  It would sound even more like a day of the week of we used it a little differently.  Instead of “Someday, I’d like to eat Sushi there,” it might be easier to think of Someday as an actual day of the week if it was said like this, “Does anyone want to eat Sushi there for lunch on Someday?” (It works better if you give the ‘e’ a little black Baptist preacher getting-uh worked up-uh about-uh Jesus-uh in her sermon-uh sound like “sum-uh-day”).

Someday, I would love to climb a fourteener in Colorado.  Someday, I would love to tube down the Guadalupe.  Someday, I would love to tour Viking sites in northern Europe. Someday, I would like to visit a city and only eat at places featured on “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” (and then spend time becoming acquainted with a cardiologist and a personal trainer).  


Someday, I would love to do all kinds of exciting things like this and more, but most of these really are the kinds of things that are best experienced with other people.  Someday, I’ll pitch one of these activities and someone will actually say they want to do it too and then we’ll actually make plans and actually have a really great story to tell! My Dad has always said that Someday, he wants to go to Alaska, but he has always been waiting for Someday to roll around.  The truth is that Someday may never come.  It’s not a real day of the week, though I tend to treat it that way.

I don’t know when the Someday tasks on my app actually roll over onto the Tomorrow screen, and then Tomorrow becomes Today. (Dont you love how it is sunny and kind of dreamy on Someday?) I don’t have anything entered on that screen, as you can see.  I think you have to actually intentionally move those Someday tasks onto an actual real day in the actual real future.  Otherwise, Someday will always just be out there in the Land of Intentions, which I imagine to be like the neon graveyard outside Las Vegas where all of the once glitzy and flashy neon signs are now rusting, broken and forgotten.  


So this leaves me with a decision.  I can plan tasks and other adventurous excursions for Someday, or I can really actually plan them for Tomorrow, or even better – for Today.  Now that puts a smile on my face.