"Thank You for my life."

Source: google.com via Rachel on Pinterest

I think I might have an ulcer from stress, and from trying to take care of my acid reflux with natural remedies (AC Vinegar and Aloe Vera juice).  At this point, it is almost comedic to me. But I think I have to stop drinking coffee if I want to keep my esophagus.

This has been a rough season for me, (post college, and my weird stomach, and finishing ALIAS) and might continue to be until the plane touches down in the Paris airport in a few weeks.

But what I have gotten out of it is

-more loving, desperate quiet times
-a hunger for God and his word
-an appetite for books and fiction in general
-time to paint, call people on the telephone, time to watch old movies, time to run 4 miles a day
-anger to run 4 miles a day
-plants. A lot of them
-a clean, happy room
-a better version of me?

I have so much to be grateful for, and I say it out loud to myself, while I choke down tea instead of coffee, and drink nothing but water at night.



Patricia: Nobody knows anything, Joe. We'll take this leap, and we'll see. We'll jump, and we'll see. That's life, right? 
Joe Versus the Volcano (1990)

we were never supposed to leave

I walked back into the room and specified the smell to air conditioning and soggy graham crackers.

And how do you say goodbye like this?

I pictured myself floating away in a small rowboat. Gliding through the night into the wide waters where the ripples that my small boat made....they affected no one but me. Only I could hear the splashes of my rowing, and how God has called me to be content with these nightly trips around the island. To row back, and to dock while everyone is sleeping next to someone else's beating heart.

I console myself that someone is flying above, in a helicopter, and can't see me, and they think that perhaps they are alone as well. Besides dispatch. Despite air controllers. 

Despite that God loves us and knows us and speaks to us.

Sometimes it is hard to hear him above the white noise and the neighbor's dog, and the paddling of your oars. But you hope he is still guiding you to a place that the sand is not as rocky, and that your ulcer could be solved by ice cream, and to where none of your loved ones have accidentally bleached your favorite pajamas into a color less than purple....

That is where I am drifting in the summer night air. And when I drift north, and the sea freezes into floes, there will be grace for that time too.

God of Jacob, God of Rachel

Some weeks ago (or was it months?) Steele (was it Steele? it had to have been) said something during a teaching that struck me about how God created me, and picked out what I would be like, and it made me view God as nicer guy than I had for a whole lotta months.

Suddenly my Facebook page popped up in my mind, and I saw all my interests displayed, and I thought, how incredibly romantic. The past ten years I have been waiting for a man to show up, and love me for the things that make me Rachel, when it was Him all the time that had already loved and picked me out.

He picked out my affinity for Wes Anderson movies, and the way literature would speak to me (and my which degree I'd end up with), that I would have more art prints than wall space to hang them on. That I would love corn fields more than cityscapes. That the sound of a football game would give me a headache (I think, deep down, this goes back to Ft. Collins where the library was open on Sundays and when I brought home VHS tapes, I was never able to watch them right away because my mother was watching Sunday Night Football). And He knew that I would catalogue the things that my friends say, to laugh at later on.


But also he picked out the weird things like my ridiculous obsession with air quality and precipitation and humidity. He decided that jewelry would SICK ME OUT. (I have never met anyone else yet in this huge world that is disgusted by all jewelry. My dad asked me a couple weeks ago, "Is that a real thing, do other women feel the same way that you do?" And I said No, Dad, no other kindred spirit has shown herself up to me and put her arms around me, and told me that earrings are the grossest thing to her too.) He picked my bruisy skin and my original hair color. He alone understands why every birthday, I think I will get murdered before the next. He knows the time and place of my actual death, and every scar and haircut I will get before that day.

He gifts me with small moments where I find lovers who see me for me, and share my sentiments, but ultimately it is just a reflection back to Him. To my one true love.

And in that blinding moment that Steele was talking, I realized that after 20 years, God is rooting for me. And it lifted a lot of guilt and loneliness off of my shoulders. And the days I have woken up since then, and remembered that God picked out my profile, I feel like--

I feel like "You know what? I am a brave and pure daughter of the King."
And it makes the rocky times easier.

road blocks

I've been sitting at this airport for a lot of hours, Brad. I've been thinking about ways that I burned the chicken, and how you wouldn't even choke down the coffee.

I've been thinking about the ways I would get up in the morning, like I didn't even know you. I'd swing my legs off of the bed, so easily like the alarm clock was nicer than any of us really knew. Like we really didn't know that all this time, it just wanted to keep sleeping just like we did.
I'd make the bed with you still in it, and pull my hair into a ponytail like you didn't need to use the toilet at 5:30 a.m. and I'd shut the bathroom door and do my makeup for twenty minutes.

I know you've been suffering Brad, and I think you should go home. Go back to your mother's seventies-style living room, and go back to your dad's workshop with the peg board.
Take the hammer off of the wall, and smash whatever you need to, even though you are a gentle soul. I know I've been killing you so slowly.

I will call you in six or seven hours, and we will just breathe across the static, and the telephone company will rip us off of minutes we can't see. They'll charge us for all the seconds that we don't know what to say.

I know what I want to say, but my voice will get somewhere in the walls, the plasma, the whatever. You know, between my lungs and pit of my stomach.

And what I would say is what I've already said in the text messages and the silent dinners at restaurants.
That I'm made of stuff.
That I'm made of cardboard and charcoal and cotton balls and TV screens.
That you're made of cinder blocks and Burger King and air-filter-fibers and even sometimes plastic sacks from Target.

And for some reason, we can't build a time machine out of that. Can't go back to the beginning, and it is making me sleepy.

It's making me the end.

I still see Your gospel

Some nights it feels like every person you ever knew and loved is holding a balloon to your mouth, and asking you to fill it with air. But you find your lungs have quit working the way a real human's should.

Sometimes the streetlights taunt you and say that you don't know what you are doing, anyway. They say you are breathing the air for no reason.

And then you have to reiterate that you are a soldier. That you are asked to fight harder battles, with the promise that, in a few hours, it could possibly be morning, and though God has called you to suffer in a harder way than you thought He would, you've still got promises.

You have promises that one day you will wake up to the One that loved you first. That made you the way you are and knows the times you had to wear Kevlar or had to count to ten to keep breathing.

building Spaceships

"Eat your chicken, or go to bed," Shannon said, assertively sticking out the green tupperware plate.

"I can't go to bed, Mom. It hurts me," he said, playing on her iPad.

A few weeks ago, Leo looked out the window and said to Shannon, "Mom, how do we get to the moon?"

And she told him, "In a spaceship."

And I think that might have been one of the first moments that I actually wanted to have a kid. But what I also think, when both of her kids are crying, is that there is definitely a reason God has protected children from me thus far.

But I spent the night helping Shannon build a spaceship, under the porch light, with duct tape and Starbucks boxes, and for a moment I forgot all the things that wake up my stomach in the morning with too much acid, and forgot to drink a beer, and I forgot to go workout til my legs fell off.

It felt really nice.

Megan-isms

"Is this game over? Because I'd really like that."

"He gets cuter everytime I see him. He's like, husband material."
-when she saw baby Wesley on Saturday

"The older generation is obsessed with the iPad. Are you guys agreeing?"
-over a glass of wine, the same night


This post was originally about Megan, but then I remembered two other recent ones.


"Oxycodone, I'm on oxycodone?"
-Isabel, said like a true druggie 8 hours after her wisdom teeth surgery

"All I wanna do, is touch your butt. And I've gotta feeling, I'm not the only one."
-Emily, she sings this one a lot if the rooms gets a little boring