divorce and redemption

Tomorrow one of my good friend's parents are getting a divorce. He came over tonight and Kelly and him and I ate ice cream and sat in the midst of our half folded laundry and talked about it. I can't believe that it has been seven years since my parents divorced, and talking to him I felt like some kind of old, wizened pro at the issue. He, at least is talking about it to friends and has a strong community. I didn't talk about it for about a year, and the people at my college were shocked, and hurt, I think, that I held it in so long. But now that time is long gone, and life has become normal as it is. There are still awkward issues and sad things, but good things are growing now too. I hope I can be an encouragement, to tell him that it will be ok. Not perfect, by any means, but God will grant his grace and redeem what we cannot believe possible, and he will make it ok. That is his business. That is his gift. He is mighty to save.

MCN

Finally, here is the finished post. It took forever to upload all these pictures! Enjoy.



MCN is becoming a legendary event amongst a small group of my friends. I don't even know how it started, but last monday night was the third occasion, each becoming more elaborate than the one before.

What is MCN?

Men's Cooking Night



Here are John and Nate, the cooks hard at work.




The ladies all dressed up for this evening too, and even though it was about the hottest day of the summer so far, I must say I think we looked lovely.



Here is a picure of our dinner. The main course was lasagna. Six cheese lasagna with marinara sauce and green beans with almonds. Wow.



And here is the type of service you can expect to receive at an MCN event. Kelly and I have commented that there may not be many young women who have been given such a gift from the male friends in their life, and there may not be many young men who have given it. We totally adore them for this, and they know it, so a toast to the chefs!



This evening was also a celebration for our friend Rachel, who is moving to California this week. Blessings to you as you go. We will all be praying that God opens up amazing doors and leads all of your steps.
You look beautiful!


But by the end of the night, after our chocolate silk pie is eaten, and compliments are given all around, the pretensions thankfully dissappear and we fall into the normal relaxed chaos. Whew!





Thanks everyone! Until next time...

Hostas

Small is beautiful

I am off work today, which means I get to spend some time blogging again. I was working over the weekend at homeschool convention in the DC area, so this is my comp time. The convention went well. It had a warm atmosphere and we met a lot of people and even made some money, but the highlight was my drive home. I drove alone, my two co-workers rode together in the other car. Before leaving they decided to stop at Burger King, but I was ready for some quiet time to myself after all of the noise and bustle, so I left them in the drive-through and hit the road, my Mapquest directions lying on the passenger seat to be followed backwards.
Rt 15 is the main road on the trip, and it is a beautiful road. John and I were recently talking about how fun it would be to do a vacation road trip across the country and see America up close. Rt. 15 is a great place to start. You cross the Mason-Dixon line and several Civil War battlefields. You pass orchards and farm fields with rolled up hay bales. In Virginia you see large plantation houses built of red brick with round windows like Monticello. So part of me was ready to get home, but as I drove I also began to think that I should just take my time. No need to hurry. I thought about looking for an exit and parking along a field and just walking, but I just kept driving along. Until...
Just before reaching Gettysburg, I saw a small hand-painted sign along the higway. Black writing on a white sign. "Local Honey". And another one right beside it, "Sweet Peaches." There had been many little farmer's markets along the way, most of them closed because it was saturday night. But I was intrigued with the honey sign. I bought honey from a little table with a jar to put your money in, in front of a house here in Hershey last summer and it was delicious. But I never seen any since then. I considered stopping, but the sign gave no directions. My marketing brain scoffed a bit. Little did I know...
About half a mile further was another sign, the same writing, the same black paint. "Small is Beautiful" it said. My mind repeated the phrase over and over. Small is Beautiful. Small is beautiful. Another two signs in another half mile. "Small farmers love their work" and "Hand made pottery" Another half mile. "Juicy Plums", and "Come Meet the Potters".

So I did.

I followed the signs off of the exit and into a gravel driveway lined with shelves and shelves of green and blue mugs, bowls, and plates. The little table of honey sat right in from of me. Right behind that table was a backyard and the residents of the house grilling their dinner with friends. A little boy, probably five years old, with a perfect ringlet of hair hanging from his dark pony tail greeted me happily, and told me that they were going to eat supper. I looked around and picked out my jar of honey. The boys father came over welcomed me. He is a black man with a wild mane of white hair springing in all directions from his head, but his eyes are kind and his words open. He says his wife is Japanese and could I tell by looking at his son. I mumble something about that I didn't really notice, and he answers by placing a plum in my hand. "For you" He says. He asks me where I am from. I tell him about the convention and he says he would like to homeschool his children. I tell him about classical education and that our program teaches Latin to elementary students.
"Latin" he says, "That's very interesting... Are you a Christian?"
"Yes, I am"
"Praise the Lord"
I smile. I pay for my honey and a cantalope, and he tells me about an intern he has this summer, who he is training in pottery. She is a pastor's daughter and an art major, but cannot draw, he tells me. She worried too much about what people thought of her, so he told her to stop shaving her legs and to learn about herself. How can you know who you are if you don't even know what you smell like? He said she has opened up like a flower and is drawing like a third year art student and singing out loud by herself with her guitar. I listen and nod, like I am not the clean, white, often inhibited woman that I am. I think he notices this, and when his wife comes out and says that supper is ready, he says goodbye and turns toward the house with no further thought of me. I feel somehow dismissed. I want to say, "But I was an art student, and I was homeschooled, and I had the guts to actually pull off the highway and meet you!" But I get into my car and back out onto the road. As I head back to the highway I take a bite of the plum and juice pours into my mouth and down my arm and onto my pantlegs. My tastebuds reel at the strength of the flavor, and I marvel at each bite. The pit of the plum I toss out the window just as I pull onto the enrance ramp, feeling that it is more fitting that it stay there, near it's home. The stickiness of my hands on the steering wheel reminds me of the stop all the way home.

Here is the link to their website. It appears to be under construction, but even so, next time you drive through Gettysburg, try to stop and look them up. It will be worth it.
The Lion Potter

a good days work

Tonight is the first night that I brought work home with me. I often bring the worry home, but not the work itself. We are having a big meeting on wednesday to discuss the many different facets of the company and a five year plan and all of our different roles. We rented a conference room at a hotel with wireless internet and a coffee-maker, so this is big. I think it will be a great time, but I am going to be making my first presentation and since at the office, you never know when the phone will ring, I decided to work on it here in the peace and quiet of my own home. I wrote almost four pages of the various marketing efforts that we have tried and what has been succesful and what hasn't. I wrote about how I enjoy doing customer service and how that can be just as important as any fourcolor ad in a magazine. I wrote some recommendations and some new ideas that I would like to try, like a postcard mailing to announce new products or texts becoming available. Marketing is tricky and interesting because the results are not always easy to measure, and some of the stuff that we have tried has appeared to totally fail, but even from that, you pick up a new customer and may not even realize why. The options for marketing are unending. We could advertise in a hundred magazines, mail our catalog to a hundred different lists, and attend a million homeschooling conventions. But it takes so much money too, so we are learning. We are trying things and failing sometimes and succeeding sometimes, and are learning why. So think of me on wednesday as I present this crazy, unwieldy marketing effort, amd then as I attempt to carry it out.

sunday afternoon

I think this is one of the first spare moments that I have had since posting last saturday. I have been trying to cut down on busyness too! But it has been a great week with a lot of good times with friends and family, and I wouldn't trade any of it. So now I am sitting with my laptop on my bed, my legs crossed in front of me, often staring out the window over my computer screen. And I feel grumpy. Now that I have nowhere to be or people to talk to for the first time in a week, I am grumpy. Maybe I am not as much of an introvert as I think I am. There is something about sunday afternoons that makes me very tired though too. Maybe it is church. There is nothing else that I do on Sunday mornings. Perhaps God made sunday a day of rest because church makes us so tired. Or perhaps it is that we come to a time of quietness, and it surprises us, and it takes some effort to stop the inertia of the business of our lives, the stimulation of constant movement, and remember what to do with ourselves. And in that grinding halt, we end up grumpy.
It is hard to not work though too, or to not feel guilty if I don't. There are plently of other things I could be doing. Like washing the dishes or cleaning up my room. But I am not. I am laying on my bed and just thinking.
The sermon and the theme of church today was grace. All of the songs were about grace. Grace Flows Down, Marvellous Grace, Grace Alone. God is reminding me of his grace again. For the last couple of months, in a great effort to honor and become more like Jesus, I forgot it. I saw so much of his holiness and goodness, and wanted to be right with him, and be sure that I was following him first. I examined many different parts of my life to try to comb out all that might be distracting me from being who God would want me to be. But slowly and gently, he has brought it all back, and given me such good gifts in them. Grace is certainly his answer and reward now, just as it has always been. There is no other. And it has been with me in church, in my friends and family who keep caring about me more than I understand why, and in a grumpy sunday afternoon alone with my computer. He has given me, in his grace, time to rest in Him alone.

my garden

I am like a proud parent, especially of the snapdragons and salvia which I started from seed. And I love my camera.

mowing the lawn...

Last night after getting home from work I decided that I had to mow the lawn. It was bad, the weeds were growing up past my knees. It had rained for almost a solid week, which is bad for mowing in two ways,
1. the grass grows faster because of the water
2. it is impossible to mow because it is wet
So I change out of my work clothes, put on shorts, a white tank top, and my sturdy hiking sandals, and set out to mow. I start where I always do, plowing along in a straight line next to the road, but keeping a careful watch out for the large sticks and stones that run off the road into our yard during hard rain. The mower stalls a bit in the thick weeds, and I pulled it back to the cement path to restart it. This time I cut through the center of the yard where the grass is dryer and thinner and the mower cranks along beautifully. I come back through the yard and head back up to the road again, and proceed along nearing the busy corner, the luxury cars of Hershey flying by. I go over another thick and high patch of weeds, and hear a dreaded loud thump, and the mower stops. Dead stops. I have killed my mower I say inside my head, and pull it back away from the road. There is something protruding from beneath it and I turn it over on it's side like a horse lying down in pain. There is something twisted around the blade, and it is brown and long and strange. I nudge it with my foot, and dislodge it. I nudge it again as it lies on the grass and then stoop to pick it up and only when I smell it do I realize what it is. It is a dead thing, a carcass of something entirely unidentifiable. I hold it away from me by the tips of my fingers and walk down the hill grumbling and indignant and throw it in the bushes thinking that I must find a man who will do this for me. I must, it is no longer an option. This is unacceptable. But I come in to the kitchen and wash my hands and glance out the window. The lawn is unmowed, the mower is still lying on it's side out in the grass, and I know what I must do.
I walk out again into the sunlight, picturing my shoulders being bronzed by the sun and thighs flexed as I push though the weeds. I am like Joan of Arc going into battle or the goddess Hera glorious in her rage, or the Proverbs matriarch whose arms are strong for her tasks. I tilt the mower up and again walk back to the path. I hold the pull cord in my hand and pull with all my might. There is a small puff of blue smoke and the handle begins to vibrate and the blade begins to turn. We set out once again, now a team working in perfectly in unison. We know all of the nuances of this lawn, we know where the thick juicy grass is, where we must go slowly. We know where the dips are and where there is an old, broken headlight laying by the road, from some long past accident on the corner. We know where the mint grows, because ground under the blade it smells like all of the sweetness of summer. On and on we go, back and forth, the tips of my toes turning green, and sweat collecting on my back. The lawn if finished again for this week. Kelly finished this morning what I left, and I turned to washing the dishes. And that is another story, but I used to think a wild unmowed lawn, soft and feathery, was lovely, but now, just like seeing a pile of newly washed dishes stacked high in a drying rack, the sun shining and rippling through clear, wet glass, I am amazed at how strikingly beautiful straight rows of short cropped lawn can be.