January 28

The sun was out today.  Bright and blinding, like it owned the place.  It didn’t feel real, even though I wandered around downtown Portland, bathing in it.  It has rained and poured so much in the last few weeks that when the sun finally came out, no one was really sure what to do.  I think it’s supposed to be dry again tomorrow.  Maybe the sun will show up, too.  After pondering it for a while, I decided to take it as encouragement that a little warmer weather is coming.  May be a few months yet down the road, but it will come.  I generally prefer winter over summer.  I don’t like hot weather.  But as a bus rider, I have to say standing in the freezing cold isn’t the most favorable way to wait for a bus.

As I wandered around Portland, I thought maybe it would be fun to grab some Voodoo Doughnuts and bring them home.  I walked over to discover they only take cash.  When I went to the ATM, I realized I didn’t know my pin, because I haven’t used it yet.  So I called my mom to see if she could find it in my room.  It took a while, but she finally found it.  Or at least she found what I wanted her to find.  

Which I realized after trying three more times was actually the paper my card came with and the number I was punching in was the last four digits of my card number.  In my frustration, I went home to find the paper with my pin on it, which I was surprised to find in a place that made sense.  Then I walked over to my bank, put my card in the ATM machine, attempted to change my pin and the machine told me I had attempted my pin too many times and it decided for my security it would keep the card.  How nice.  It turns out, the bank isn’t going to open that ATM machine back up until Monday morning, wherein I will already be on my way to George Fox Seminary to use the library.  I may or may not be going somewhere on Tuesday that requires me to leave before the bank is open and I have to work at 4am on Wednesday so who knows when I’ll actually make it to the bank.  

So a nice and peaceful day turned out to be comically frustrating.  sigh

At least the sun was out.

January 26

Today, I am re-emerging into general society.  I haven’t been sick.  I haven’t been traveling.  I’ve been reading.  Since living in Kentucky, I’ve had Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons sitting on my book shelf and I brought it back with me when I moved.  I recently picked up Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. For a while, I was really enjoying it, but it began, at first ever so lightly, to weigh on my soul.  Soon enough I was simply trying, almost desperately, to finish it before I picked up another book.  But I’ll be damned if The Fountainhead’s dreariness dragged me down so much that the time I spent with that book at each interval waned a little more every time until I just couldn’t pick it up anymore, as if it had become a bag of bricks (which is all the more figurative because I was actually listening to it on audio).  I do hope at some point to be able to finish it, if for no other reason than to say I have read it.  Maybe only for that reason.

So I finally succumbed to my greater desire to start the Tom Wolfe book.  I’ve been told if I want to understand what life is like on a big state or private secular university campus (important if I ever end up working at one), this book will let me know.  And for the last week, this book absorbed me.  All I wanted to do was read it.  I didn’t want to go out.  I didn’t want to work (I did, of course), and any break or bus ride I had, I was reading it.  I devoured it.  It was crude.  The dialogue was true to college life dialogue, which is to say riddled with likes and bad grammar and heavily peppered with the various uses of the F word.  But it was a look into the undergraduate life of any pick of large universities countrywide.  It is actually a thinly veiled depiction of Duke (complete with a top-notch basketball team), where the author’s daughter went to school.  And it was very intriguing.  

I finished the book last night and now I am coming out of my cocoon, ever so slowly, my eyes slowly adjusting to the light, because, hey, the sun is out in Portland today!  If only I were coming out with beautiful butterfly wings, but it’s not that kind of cocoon. That process of re-emerging after living in a book is always a strange one, and sometimes slower than it seems it should be.  I am remembering what I found important.  I am paying attention to the news again (such as my friend’s friend finally being rescued this week after being held hostage by Somali pirates!).  And I’m thinking about what I want to do tomorrow, because I get paid.

The next book I’m going to pick up is Robert Gilmore’s Alice in Quantumland: An Allegory of Quantum Physics.  For some reason, I don’t think it will be quite as much of a page turner.  I’m also going to delve into the gospel of John, maybe even with a group of college students.  But not from a big state university.  Not yet, anyway.

And I’m going to keep praying that a job I’ll love shows up as I continue to search for more meaningful work.  Sigh.

January 19

Over the last couple of days, snow fell over the Willamette Valley and surrounding areas intermittently and unevenly.  Yesterday, those of us here in Vancouver finally got some.  It was very wet and didn’t stick around longer than about twelve hours or so, but it was beautiful.  However, temperatures have warmed up, and now it is pouring.  It has been pouring all day.  Low-lying areas of streets are closed, people are getting into ridiculous car crashes, and in the rural and coastal areas, whole towns are flooding.  Some school districts are even closed down because of it.

One may think, but doesn’t it rain all the time there?  Well, sort of.  It does rain, but it doesn’t usually pour here for hours or days without stopping.  It showers and then stops and then showers and then stops.  But a couple times a winter, it does this.  Our streets are far better equipped for this kind of rain than most places around the country, but nonetheless, they don’t handle this much rain well.  The storm drains can only handle so much.  I will be leaving to walk to the bus stop in about thirty minutes.  I am trying to mentally prepare myself for wet feet.  I can not afford new shoes that won’t leak.  I may need to bring an extra pair of socks.  I am at least thankful that I am going to my Vancouver job where I have to take one bus instead of the two buses and two MAX trains (and ample waiting time for each) it takes for me to get to Clackamas.

It’s good to be back home.  

I guess.

January 18

I woke up early this morning to find snow on the ground.  Snow is a curious phenomenon.  That the sky appears abnormally bright in the middle of a snowy night is endlessly fascinating for me and so intriguingly beautiful.  Today I am thankful for a little snow, even though it didn’t hang out very long.  This week I am thankful for the opportunity to go to chapel on the Warner Pacific campus.  How it feeds my soul to be there.  I will go into that more in my next post (the one I was going to write today but got intercepted by Zelda on the Wii--oops).  

I found this the other day on Pinterest.  I absolutely love it.

January 16

It has been an interesting last few days.  This past week I got to hang out with one of my co-workers from Victoria’s Secret who I really enjoy working with.  We wandered around downtown Portland, ate at a Persian restaurant, went to Powell’s, and then went over to an art store where I bought a sketchbook and some pencils.  It has been YEARS since I’ve really wanted to draw.  I have decided I’m going to start drawing what I see (a different form of taking pictures) again.  It has been a long time since I’ve done that.

But something more interesting has happened this past week.  I have discovered something great about getting older.  As we get older, we begin to get wrinkles, we get pains in random places at unexplained times, we can’t stay up really late and still function normally the next day.  But one of the great things, I discovered, about getting older is you can run into people you haven’t seen in years.  A part of me finds it strange that I have lived enough years to be able to go years without seeing or talking to someone I once knew in my adult life, but mostly I just find it fascinating.  I was at Warner Pacific on Thursday and unexpectedly ran into an old friend I had worked at Walgreens with.  She had transferred her credits there and was finishing up school.  We spent the afternoon chatting and beginning to catch up and it was such fun.  And then on Saturday I went to the birthday party of a friend I haven’t seen since I was in high school.  We used to go to church together.  It is fascinating and really enjoyable to see how people change.  I think I like us all better now that we’re thirty.  We’re so much more comfortable with ourselves.  Of course, we still have a lot of life to live and a long way to go.  But I am glad I’m not in my 20’s anymore.

And yesterday I started my new job.  So far, I like it.  Back for more training today.  

January 12

I haven’t written in a couple days.  I worked a ten hour shift that started at 2am the other day and then yesterday they used my on-call, which they almost never do.  That’s okay; I can always use the hours.  There is nothing terribly interesting going on and the job search is stagnant right now.  I’m here bewildered at just how I’m going to get out of this slump.  I don’t see the way out which leaves me with only the ability to trust in God.  These days I am walking through an unlighted tunnel, not even a crack in the stone, so I am feeling my way along the wall and relying on God that I’m moving forward and not walking on active train tracks.  These days seem small and insignificant, so I think I will switch my focus and write what I am thankful for.  

I am thankful for the ability to knit.  It keeps my hands busy and stimulates my brain.  I love to watch things turn from a strand of yarn into something decorative and wearable.  It reminds me of the process of turning a blank piece of paper into an intricate work of art.  I am thankful to have access to great documentaries on Netflix.  The ability to still learn about new things when I have such limited funds is a blessing.  I am thankful for the Bible because reading it is such a rich experience and I love the picture it gives me into the people of God and of God herself.  The Psalms are beautiful.  I am thankful that far from being a crutch, my religion shows me a much more hopeful and less despairing understanding of humanity and life than the selfish and lifeless picture of human kind in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead which I am reading right now, a particularly interesting sentiment considering the atheistic bent of that book.  Though I have a great desire to move away and will do so as soon as possible, every time I ride the MAX over the Steel Bridge over the Willamette, I am so thankful to be in and from a city through which a river runs.  It is so beautiful, especially when the sun is beginning to set and shines its rich, warm light over the bridges. I am thankful to have spent time with my friend, Amalija, this week and thankful that she has moved into Portland for the next couple months.  I am thankful for the small exchanges of conversation I have sometimes over gmail with my good friend Marilyn.

And I am thankful for the opportunity today to go to chapel at Warner Pacific.  It has been awhile.

January 9

I wandered around Portland today with my great friend, Amalija, which included three cups of Persian tea at a Persian restaurant.  That made me so happy.  I’m not going to say anything more about it right now, though, because I have to get up in three hours so that I can be to work by 2am.  Glad I have two degrees so I can rendezvous at Victoria’s Secret in the wee hours of the morning.

January 8

We had a very tumultuous night in the house last night.  It was bad.  And I didn’t want to write anything.

However, I had today (Sunday) off and it was the first time in five or six weeks that I’ve been able to go to church.  I’ve been excited for the opportunity to go and after last night (which spilled into this morning--it was one of those situations whose residual effects will be felt for days), I was all the more relieved for the opportunity. 

Church has gotten a bad rap, and we young people (yes I’m 30, but I still consider myself young) are rather impressively cynical about church, a cynicism that is equal opportunity between church goers and non church goers.  But I would like to put in a good word for it.

We need church.  We don’t need every church, and we don’t need everything that’s in church.  But we need church.  We need it because we need each other and we need to know that we all know we need Jesus.  I walked into church today feeling distant and sad and beat down.  It took a couple minutes, but soon enough someone who recognized me from the month before came over and smiled and started to chat and then another and then the pastor briefly introduced himself and found out he knew me from a few years ago (seminary connections).  Within moments of the first smile of recognition, my whole body relaxed and then I felt my spirit begin to ease.  Pretty soon I felt, for the first time in a long time, like I was coming back to myself.  

At the church I’ve been attending, they do dinner before the service.  It has convinced me that this is the only way church should be done--immediately preceded or succeeded by a meal. There is little more disarming than eating food together.  It’s hardly glamorous.  True, you can all sit at a table and never talk, but unless you’re in prison, that’s unlikely to be the case.  There are no pretenses in meal conversation.  And in my church, if nothing else, you can always talk about something curious that happened in Portland recently, like the large group of people I saw today in Pioneer Square gathered together in coats and sweatshirts and...their underwear.  Don’t worry; they had shoes and knee socks on, and it was a balmy 45 degrees outside.  The longer you sit at the table the more at ease everyone becomes, and by the end of the meal, it seems only fitting to do some worship.  The transition is strangely almost seamless and the ability to worship along side each other feels natural and unassuming.

Today I needed church.  I needed the people.  I needed the conversation.  I needed the sermon.  I was so glad I went to church today.  Tomorrow I get to have lunch with a great friend.  This week may have started out with a bomb, but I think it’s turning around pretty quickly.

January 6

A great friend of mine moved from Newberg to Portland today.  This translates as her moving from a place I can’t get to, to a place that is easily accessible by bus.  I’ll be heading out to church in Portland on Sunday evening, something I am very excited about because I have not been able to go for over a month.  This friend will be joining me, and then we are getting together for lunch on Monday and hanging out for a while afterward.  I can’t explain how happy I am for this.  I have a lot of friends, friends who are scattered all across the country and the world.  Unfortunately, none of my close friends are near enough for me to see often, or even seldom.  I have not hung out with a friend since my trip into Newberg in September.  

While I don’t feel expressly lonely, it is an isolated existence in some ways.  I spend the majority of my time with people who don’t know me and don’t care about who I am.  They care only about how productive I can be for the company.  It is no wonder I feel so discouraged and frustrated.  It is a discouraging way to live!  While I’m not quitting Victoria’s Secret any time soon, I can say I’ve had enough of working jobs where I’m replaceable, so replaceable that the atmosphere of the place doesn’t change from one worker to the next.  I want to matter in a a job and I want my job to matter to me.  Better yet, I want to love what I do.

I sure do pray that things change for the better soon.  Especially because I have more bills coming due soon to pile onto the ones I already can’t pay.  Dear God, I owe a lot of money because of college and seminary.  All I ask is for paychecks to cover them.  Of course, I’d also like to ask for the finances to pay them all back much sooner than I could dream for.  Specifically in the form of, oh...hmm...Sidney Crosby?

January 5

Today, I feel more hope.  I don’t know why.  I don’t know what drags me into the spiraling abyss of despair or what pulls me out of it.  But today I had the day off and I spent it knitting while listening to The Fountainhead on my iPod or watching the documentary “Buck,” which is fabulous, by the way.  Using my hands and creating something, whether it’s a knit hat from a pattern or a portrait painted from oils (which I haven’t done in years) or a clay sculpture (which I also haven’t done in years and particularly miss) is like food for my soul.  Working at Victoria’s Secret (anything that is driven by profit) slowly and steadily starves my soul and once in a while I remember that creativity I can touch begins to negate that the way exercise counteracts laziness.

Note to self: always be creating. 

I used to wonder at the idea that my fellow artist friends who are Christians would talk about feeling they were worshiping when they were painting or sculpting or whichever, because I never felt a sense of worship when I did art, and then I finally realized it wasn’t any one painting or another, or this bowl or that alabaster carving that was the connection.  It was the very act of creating that connects artists to God.  Always be creating.  Of course.  It would make sense.  After all, wouldn’t God simply wither away if she ever for even a moment stopped creating? The creativity of God is astounding.

Also I got Mastering Skateboarding in the mail today, so I opened it up, read the brief words on balancing and feet positions and pushing the skateboard forward, and then went out and practiced.  It’s so much fun.

January 4

The second morning is always harder than the first.  It’s almost, but not quite, 3am right now.  I’m up to be to work by four.  I did the same thing yesterday.

As the days trudge along, I’m finding myself more and more discouraged and frustrated.  I graduated in May with hopes of moving onto a job I would enjoy doing, even if it had some great difficulties.  Instead, I had to move back home because I couldn’t find a job and then it took me four months to find a job and it ended up being sales support at Victoria’s Secret at a mall it takes me nearly two hours to get to by bus.  Over time, this job is beginning to wear me out.  Without work that has meaning, I feel my soul starting to wither and a feeling if despair beginning to creep in. And so, I think I might try a little something new.  I think I’m going to do a series of posts of what it’s like to struggle with faith and trust and the work of God in the midst of great frustration and confusion.  

This is not a moral-to-the-story-solution kind of writing.  It will just be me and my thoughts and feelings.  And maybe it will help me gain a little perspective.  With no great guides and mentors around these days, perspective is a little harder to come by.  

Time to continue preparing for work.  Until next time.