Summer!

So my boss's dog is really cute but also slightly INSANE. A person can only play fetch for so long before feeling like the sound and the fury signifying nothing....

Why does it insist on looking like rain here. All the time- every day- it looks like rain. We watch the predictions, we check the news, we stare endlessly at screens with little green blobs turning into yellow and red blobs that in real life dump gallons of water on us. We keep wondering who the Jonah is among us, but he has yet to jump ship. And we face more rain, more profit losses...more early nights off work that nobody asked for.

License to Wed is cute but also includes cameos by almost every cast member from The Office. (Not that I don't love them but come on!)

Summer is half gone. More than half gone. It's been a blaze of good books, finishing my Master's degree, visits from wonderful friends, late late night drives home, and Shakespeare. An endless stream of Shakespeare.

Ironically, I was journaling a few days ago about my apprehension at the onset of lent. The literal question that I asked was 'What happened to Ephiphany?' and being the type of thinker that I am, I'm sure anyone reading this knows that such a sentence coming from me is at the very least ambiguous. Where is epiphany? Where has she run off too and how did she pass by so quickly?

The irony of all of this is that on Wednesday of this week- the first day of lent, the day of the ashes; where we are reminded that we came from and will return to dust- I had the first of several epiphanies. Ideas about living have been flooding into my mind endlessly since Wednesday. I've been thinking quite a bit about maintaining appearances, about honesty, about loving other people, about God. About what it means to believe in God. And especially what it means to believe in Jesus. About what it means to be a person of public mistakes who isn't trying to be perfect, who isn't trying to be right. But maybe who is trying to seek those things and find where they live.

I've been watching life these last few days- watching the way we are all frantically trying to be redeemed. And how little we realize we are doing it. I'm seeing us all building and burning bridges and trying to believe that life is good and we rarely look at our actions and see them for what they are. We are weak, but we do not own it very well.

In my sociology class the professor is encouraging us to consider our own biography regularly. And at first I was tired of considering my own biography. But that brings me to today's epiphany. In my office, by myself, I've been listening to last week's sociology lecture that I missed while in Nashville. And she was comparing positivism with Marxism and talking about how Marx believes who we are is a product of everything we were born into and that we have very little control of who we are as a result. And I started to daydream about the things we are prone to be wrong about as a result of our experiences. I am prone to disbelief because I realized those years in christian college that things you pin down as TRUE will disappoint you ultimately. God help us all if we believe all of the same things in our 50s that we believed in our 20s. I am prone to lack trust in beliefs because they change and they should. But to disbelieve and to lack trust is not the right answer. I am prone to want everything to be open because in conservative christianity everything was closed.

Sometimes we wake up to things. We wake up and see where we really are- the brutal facts. We wake up and see the things we've allowed to happen to us and the things we have caused. We see the things we did that took us off the path and we see the things that made all new paths from there. Sometimes we wake up and we've done well. And sometimes we have not. But usually we wake up and we've done some things well and have demolished others. I am waking up slowly this time- little piece by little piece. Just starting to stretch and take stock of what's really ahead. So here's to more epiphanies in lent....