Possibly my worst date ever.

There are several things to catch up on before I tell you this story. First, I've been keeping up with (and even stepping up) my New Year's Resolutions. Hooray! Jeff and I have been working out three times a week for over a month now and I'm definitely starting to see results. I also decided that I also felt emotionally unhealthy because of my addiction to Facebook/StumbleUpon and other such websites where I'd lose myself for hours, so today marks week one of my two month internet diet. I'm only allowed to use certain websites that I actually need (and my blog so I'm not completely unconnected from my friends and family back home for 2 months).

As you might remember, one of my other resolutions was to try to enact a date night every other weekend. Yesterday was actually only our second date since we came back to DC, but we're working on it.

Yesterday also crashed and burned.

You see, a few weeks ago on his way to class Jeff saw a flier for a guitar/cello concert on February 15. He loves guitar and I love cello, so this sounded like the perfect Valentine's Day date, especially since I had class on the 14th anyway; so, we went online and found a little Italian place close to the church where the concert was held, and I was pretty pumped about it all.

First, we got to the restaurant and the "restaurant building" it was a part of turned out to be pretty much just a mall. Not the classiest. No big deal, though. Then we ordered, and the food was probably mediocre at best. I'm pretty sure I could've made better Italian food. Then there was a minor debacle over which dessert to get. I wanted to split a chocolate hazelnut tart; Jeff wanted... pudding.

As you can see, Jeff won. It was ok, though, because not only was it better than I expected, but this silly little Italian pudding also ended up being the best part of the whole evening.

After we polished off the pudding we headed over to the church for the concert. The guitarist started and only played for about 15 minutes. It was a very pretty Spanish guitar improvisation on a classical piece I didn't recognize, but that kind of guitar is really more Jeff's thing than mine and in any case I was just waiting for the cellist to start. You have to understand, I love cellos. I think they make what is possibly the most beautiful sound on the planet. So when this world famous, highly acclaimed, played-and-taught-at-conservatories-all-over-Europe cellist came out, I had high hopes.

What I was not expecting was an hour of the most painful cello playing I have ever heard. Seriously. This woman sounded like a little kid who's tired of practicing and just starts hitting his instrument with his bow. I was impressed... by how she was able to make such awful sounds come out of such a beautiful instrument. And she gets paid for this. People like this. Heck, the other people in the audience seemed to like it! I'd kind of like to tell you who she is but I'm afraid of getting a C&D letter in the mail, so if you really want to know so you can look her up and prove me right, send me an email.

So that was our first Valentine's Day as a married couple! Mediocre Italian food and horrific violence against my favorite instrument in the world. But in all honesty, we got each other cute gifts and we had fun together. And now I have an awesome/awful story to tell!

Oh, and one quick, barely related note that occurred to me as I was thinking about the atrocity of that concert. For a concert, a bunch of unrelated individuals come together and bond over their love of a particular artist as he or she performs. For a church, on the other hand, a bunch of people bonded by their love of God come together and listen to a message that speaks to each person's individual life. That's it... not terribly profound, it just occurred to me that a concert is the opposite of a church service and I couldn't sleep till I wrote it down last night, so I figured I should at least share it.

Oh, and at least we looked pretty:

Man. I am so short. Oh well.

I feel like a true DC resident.

It occurred to me as I was thinking about this that I've actually done and experienced lots of things that are probably necessary to be a resident. I've ridden the metro a zillion times, including once when the giant escalator of death in Tenleytown broke and we had to walk the rest of the way up. I've experienced a rally and been angry at the tourists not knowing how to cross streets/walk down sidewalks/ride escalators/use the metro. I at least attempted to hear a speaker at Busboys and Poets. I regularly eat at Five Guys. I can navigate a roundabout (most of the time). I've seen most of the monuments.

And now I've experienced a serious snow, shoveled off cars the next day, and eaten a Georgetown Cupcake.

Here's the snow from Wednesday night out our back window Thursday morning:

The final verdict was that it was about 8 inches. For some of my yankee friends this wasn't very much, but for this Texas girl it was absolutely insane. I loved it.

Then on Friday Jeff and I were supposed to go get our DC licenses, but since it was still snowing Jeff opted out of driving. So I went out shopping for the afternoon with a couple of friends, and we got Georgetown Cupcakes!

If you don't know, Georgetown Cupcakes is basically a DC landmark and I was told that they were worth the huge lines. Oh my gosh, were they. The one on the left was a Strawberry Champagne that I brought home for Jeff, mine on the right was Chocolate Ganache. I can't speak for his, but mine was heavenly. Oh. So good. Now I want cupcakes again.

I know there are still more things to do before I can really feel like a resident, like experience the cherry blossoms or Embassy Week or see the President (or, you know, get my DC license), but I do feel much more at home here than I did a few months ago. For 5 months here, I think I'm doing pretty well.

I will never be perfect.

As some of you may know, I am a bit of a perfectionist. Just a bit. Or maybe a whole lot, and it affects everything I do. You know.

Being a good person? Snapped at someone. Failure. That dinner I made? Scorched the bottom in one corner. Failure. That artsy thing I did (scrapbook, painting, sewing, journal-making...)? A piece is out of place and I can't fix it. Failure. Singing? Missed a note in the song. Failure. My grades? Got a B. Failure. My youth group? Not everyone likes every activity I plan. Failure.

Yeah, yeah, so I'm kind of hard on myself sometimes. Harder on myself than anyone else is, that's for sure.

Well, for my January term class on youth ministry I had to read this book, Sustainable Youth Ministry. It was a good book. I liked what I learned from it and am really excited to start implementing some of it. But it occurred to me as I was reading and planning things out and thinking how awesome everything will be from now on that this isn't going to fix everything. It's still not going to be perfect. And you know what? It never will be. Nothing about me, nothing I do ever will.

I will never respond rightly in every situation. I will never be able to make a perfect meal every time. I will never be an arts genius or a voice prodigy. I will never have a flawless 4.0 for my entire educational career. I will never be the ultimate youth minister with the ultimate youth ministry.

While this makes part of me want to cry, this makes the rest of me feel a lot better. I don't know how many of you struggle with this, but hopefully it will make you feel better, too. Take a deep breath and tell yourself right now: "I will never be perfect at everything, and it will be ok." It's kind of freeing, isn't it? It's OK when I mess up. The world goes on. I learn. Everything's gonna be alright.

Blessed are who?

One of my favorite parts of every week is Wednesday night. Every week here at Wesley the students who live on campus have what we call Open Room. It's a student-led discussion of any topic the leader for the week feels like discussing, usually with some sort of faith-related bent. We've talked about epic movies, economics, and the Wizard of Oz. We've talked about prisons and church buildings. While we discuss, we share bread and wine; it's not consecrated Communion, but it's communion for us. Afterward we head to McDonald's for fries or shakes or, every once in a while, the 20 piece chicken nugget deal.

This week the topic was the Beatitudes (listed below) and instead of discussing we spent the majority of the hour cutting out words and pictures and pasting them to the poster boards for each blessing. Totally my kind of night.

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
4 Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
5Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
6Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
7 Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
8 Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
9 Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
10 Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
11 Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely^* on my account. ¹²Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you." (Matthew 5:3-12, NRSV)


It was interesting to see the words and pictures people chose for each one. Personally, I spent most of my time at "Blessed are the peacemakers." But the most thought-provoking Beatitude interpretation of the night was, by far, a picture someone pasted on "Blessed are you when people revile you on my account." It wasn't a church or a cross or a middle-class white person praying and looking sad. It wasn't even a missionary in some deep, dark jungle. It was a Muslim.

A Muslim?

Yep. On purpose. At first it was jarring. Confusing. And then it hit you, looking at the words and the picture together.

What if God blesses the people that we as Christians persecute--in the name of God, no less--because they are not Christians? Or the other people who call themselves Christians that we disparage because they don't fit into our little mold (that happens to look quite a bit like us) of what a "good Christian" should be? What if it isn't just about us and our petty little troubles and trials? What if God really cares for every person? (I think it says that somewhere. Can't think where...)

Maybe you think I'm being blasphemous here, but... oh well. Hang out in Luke 15 for a while and get back to me, if that's the case. Here's what I know: I'm not responsible for deciding who's a Christian and who's not. I'm responsible for deciding how I will treat other people. With love.

Starting Over, Part 8,067

Well, 2010 was one heck of a year. I graduated from the best university in the world. I said goodbye to the city that I've called home for the past four years, not to mention all of the amazing people I loved there. I married my best friend. I moved a thousand miles away from my family, my friends, and everything I've ever known. I started seminary. I got my first position as a youth minister. I was stranded halfway across the country as my family fell apart and struggled to put itself together again. I made wonderful new friends (without whom I wouldn't have survived at all--CD group, Dumbarton folks and Thursday night bunch, I'm looking at you) and managed to succeed in my classes despite taking a ridiculous number of them.

But with everything that happened, I feel like I slacked off in some things, like this blog (which, I'm told, "people actually read, you know!"). And in keeping up some of my relationships. And in remembering to take care of myself. So let's see if I can keep this up, shall we? Maybe if I share my resolutions I'll be more apt to keep them, or so I've read. So, in no particular order:

-Lose my newlywed weight. Apparently that's a thing? No one warned me!
-Do so without going back to looking as anorexic as I apparently did when I started college. Again, no one told me!
-Pay more attention to my readings for school. They're assigned for a reason. Mostly.
-Go to chapel more. Since I'll be in choir this semester that shouldn't be too hard, right?
-Work harder on serving other people, especially Jeff.
-Finally establish that date night we've been talking about since June.

And to that end, we decided to start the new year with a date day, which was wonderful. Actually, we started the new year with the wedding of some of Jeff's friends, then a day of catching up with some of our best friends before they/we head off again, and then we got to have a day to ourselves. Slept in, did a little work to justify taking the rest of the day off, then headed out to do whatever we wanted. Which meant getting a little dressed up, going to the gigantic playground in town, playing and taking pictures, getting some amazing TexMex while we can, spending almost two hours in Starbucks (next town over, of course, because Sulphur Springs is one of the few places in the world that still doesn't have one) just reading and drinking tasty warm drinks, and attempting to see Harry Potter again. I say attempting because turns out the theatre we tried to go to closes at 8 now, at least according to the guy who stuck his head out the door to ask if we needed any help. Despite the fact that the internet said they were showing HP7 at 8:45. But I'm not going to go so far as to say that it was shady, or allege that they were having massive drug deals behind the theatre facade, or anything like that... maybe.

All in all, though, it was a fantastic way to start off the year.  And now to get organized with work and doing reading for school, and we'll be back in DC at the end of this week. As much as I've loved being in Texas and everything that goes with it--family, friends, places I grew up, accents, friendly people, access roads on the freeways, warmer weather, Houston thunderstorms, Dr Pepper in every restaurant, TexMex, Bluebell ice cream, everything being cheaper--I'm also really excited to get back to DC and our life there.

I wanted to end with a picture from yesterday and one last thought. We were watching TV (also crazy, since we don't have it in our on-campus apartment) and saw a commercial whose premise was "What if we treated every day like New Year's Day?" I loved it. I've always loved that thought. Every day is a chance to make your resolutions again, to change the way you live or the way you look or the way you feel. So even though it's January 4, happy new year! Go out and be the person you wish you could be.

Living as the church, not at the church

For one of my classes we got to choose from a list which book we wanted to review for our midterm. I chose Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture. I didn't agree with everything the author (Michael Frost) said but, wonder of wonders, it did make me think. I could rewrite most of my review for you, but I don't think you really need all of it to think about what I want to talk about.

I've been hearing for a couple of years now about needing to rethink the way that we do church. I guess I've been hearing about it for a long time in terms of adding praise and worship bands or screens and projectors or any of the other things so many churches are trying out to make themselves more progressive. But I mean a serious rethinking of how we do church. I've heard several people say that we should go back to the early New Testament way of doing things, with house churches and all that. Or that, rather than a song-sermon-song paradigm we need to include all different kinds of sensory worship experiences. But that's always what we mean when we talk about rethinking church. Changing the service, maybe the building.

One thing that Frost talked about that I found really interesting was our persistent identification of church  with worship and of worship with singing. He talked about how a big part of that mindset is a carryover from the Middle Ages, when everyone was a Christian because everyone was baptized at birth. This removed the evangelistic function of the church, and besides doing some support work in their communities, all the churches had to offer was worship services. We forgot all the things that church can mean. Variegated worship services and forming small group churches start to address that.

But I think that the bigger issue with our obsession with the way we do church right now is another that he addresses: we live at church, not in our communities. Or, differently put, our churches are our communities. And they're often our only communities because we devote all of our time to them. Personally I think this is another hold-over, this time from when the church (read: church building) was seen as a literal refuge from all of the darkness in the world. I think a lot of people still think of church that way. And that's not to say that the church isn't a refuge; I just don't think it should be our home away from home.

Why not? Many churches today ofter after school programs and camps during the summer. That's great! They offer Bible studies for almost every possible self-identification. Awesome, you can meet people like you! And then, of course, there's the service projects and the meetings and the potlucks and the retreats and the picnics and church choir... on, and on, and on. Again, I'm not saying that these are bad things in and of themselves, or that church communities are not legitimate communities. Lots of programs that the church offers are really good (especially the after school programs and summer camps, I can say after many years of camp counseling).

I'm just saying think about this:
You spend approximately 1/3 of your time sleeping.
You spend approximately 1/3 of your time at work.
And if you're even moderately involved in a church, I'd be willing to bet that a good chunk of that last 1/3 is spent at church or doing something with your church community.

So how much time is spent out, talking to people? Getting to know the people in the community where you live? Being involved in life outside of the church? Offering hospitality to your neighbors? Living in the world?

Jesus didn't spend all of his time in the temple. He didn't do most of his ministry there. He spent his time and did his work out among people, living where they lived. Frost talks about the idea of third places. Third places are the places outside of work and sleep where most of the life in people's lives is lived. Places like coffee shops, book clubs, and bars. This is where real interaction happens, where you really get to know a person and see just a piece of their life. So if the church is our third place, if it's where we spend all of our time and have all of our relationships, who are we meeting? Not many people.

Hiding ourselves away is not what Christianity is about. We can't be the church out in the world if we're always in the church and out of the world.

Don't Feed the Ponies

Wow, I'm so behind. I have at least 4 entries (including this one) that I've meant to write for a couple of weeks now. First the internet was down, then I was out of town, then I had family issues and finally I was catching up on schoolwork that got put off because of those family issues. Oh, and this weekend is both Halloween and the Rally to Restore Sanity, so there's likely to be another post or two over that. So the next week might be an entry every day or every other day kind of week. Enjoy!

The out of town that I just mentioned was actually a fabulous camping trip with Jeff and three of our new awesome friends here at Wesley. See, Wesley does this awesome thing called Fall Break (UT, take note!) where basically we just get a week off to catch up. It's actually called Reading Week, but I'm going to go ahead and posit that not a whole lot of reading ever gets done by anyone. It's Fall Break. So the five of us decided to take a couple of days at the beginning of the week and go to Assateague Island-- yes, like Misty of Chincoteague, for all of you little girls (and little girls at heart) who are screaming with jealousy right now. And yes, there were ponies.

Awwww! But no, we did not ride or pet the ponies. Sorry to disillusion any of you, but ponies BITE. Also, they want your food. They want it in a stick-their-head-in-your-trunk-and-steal-it, take-it-right-off-your-table-while-you-eat, lay-seige-to-your-campsite kind of way.

          (I love this picture. Andy and the pony are just staring each other down over the trunk of our car.)


They do this because silly mothers say, "Look, kiddies! A real, live pony! Go give it this apple!" And then the child gives the pony the apple and the the pony says, "Hmm, is that a carrot with that apple?" And the pony bites the child's finger. If it doesn't, it's still learned that people = food. Thus, you have ponies wandering up to your table while you eat.

In any case, they're still pretty and the little ones are adorable and it really is pretty cool that they're just wandering all over the place, wild. Just remember that wild is the key adjective here. Not pretty, not cute.  Wild.

But enough about the ponies. The other wildlife that needs to be discussed is the MOSQUITOES. Good Lord. I'm from the Gulf Coast, so I'm used to humidity and therefore puddles and therefore ridiculous amounts of mosquitoes, but never in my life have I been chased down and mauled by mosquitoes like we were that weekend. They literally swarmed us. Andy in particular. In fact, I'm going to go ahead and say that Andy was the beacon that called them and then they realized that there were actually FIVE tasty humans there. So we all came home looking like we had the pox.

There were also lots of tiny crabs everywhere. Like, TINY.

Also less tiny crabs, and horseshoe crabs and a jellyfish and bioluminescent plankton. The plankton were by far the coolest things we found on the beach, but I'm not a good enough photographer to take a picture of tiny, faintly glowing green things.

Speaking of glowing things, I'm also not very good at taking pictures of fire (apparently), but that turned out alright because we weren't very good at building fires. Somehow we managed to utterly fail both nights we were there, despite both Mike and Andy's heroic Eagle Scout attempts and despite Jeff, Heather (yes, another one) and me standing around encouraging the fire to freaking light already. We did get a good enough fire to toast marshmallows for s'mores, though, so it really worked out in the end.

Oh, and by far the coolest thing that I couldn't take a picture of was the Milky Way. Yeah, I said it. The Milky Way. This may not be so big of a shock for all of you who are from places small enough that there's no light pollution, but I'm a city girl. AND I COULD SEE OUR GALAXY. One arm of it, anyway. It was incredibly awesome, and I mean that in the literal awe-inspiring sense of the word. I got to go to a presentation by my friend's dad a while back on how small we are in the universe, but man, this brought it home like nothing else. It was amazing. I really wish I could have taken a picture.

I also wish I'd taken a picture of our friend with dreads who gave us fire and a frisbee and a science lesson the first night, or of when Matt joined us and we went to Ocean City, or of making lunch (two separate pots of pasta and a third of sauce) on the one tiny little burner that Andy brought.

But I did, at least, get a pretty picture of the ocean.

And here's a pretty picture of my friends, super excited to go home and shower.

I love my new friends :) That is all.

Oh, and whatever you do, don't feed the ponies.