How time flies...

So I'm not the world's best blogger. To serve as a recap of fun things from the last month....

I went dancing with friends....



...earned a few bruises attempting skiing for the first time.....







....gained a new cousin (Ann)....







....had two wonderful birthday parties....



....and worked a 16-hour shift.




That's all that's documented by pictures. Everyone likes pictures better than words, right?

Winter Wonderland

Ok, I know I complain about being SO TIRED of people asking me about the weather. But it is kind of cool, and I wanted to share these pictures. I've enjoyed having a real winter. But I enjoy my springs and summers just as much!

Let's be honest here

I'll be honest. I haven't had the world's best attitude about work lately. It was bound to happen. I haven't been thinking evil thoughts or wishing death upon my patients, but I can't say I've been real happy about going to work. People are....(sigh)....inconsiderate, rude, mean, ungrateful, needy. Don't get me wrong--I like being needed--most nurses do. We thrive helping people.

So what's the deal? I want to help people, but there's a limit to my help?? That doesn't make much sense-as a nurse or a Christian who proclaims to love people and be a servant. Bingo. There's my problem.

While eating lunch with a friend the other day, I shared some of my recent sentiments regarding work. This was after I told her I wanted to move to Africa to be a missionary. (Yes, you can go ahead and smirk at my inconsistencies.) She shared a real pearl with me. She said, "You know, love is painful." And it hit me.

Love is painful. Yes, that is right. It fits right in there with "love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs..... It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails" (1Corinthians 13:4-8)

If I am truly going to love people-be they friend or enemy-it is going to be painful. If I love and expect nothing in return, it is going to hurt. I am called to love, to pour out all that I am until I have no more and expect to never be filled back up again by the words or actions of humans.....
So bring on the pain.

I have a lot to learn. Lord, teach me to love.

For those of you who wondered....

This is what I've been up to lately.....

Being amazed at coldness









Watching a best friend
get married









Helping the sister move









Hanging with the Honduran interns







That's all I've got pictures of. More stuff: surprising the family with a visit, hanging out with friends, going to church, repairing my car, starting classes, cooking, and working. But mostly praying and researching about some future opportunities and decisions. That's life in a nutshell for me.

Some things I've learned recently:
-how to knit
-people in handcuffs can still spit on you
-friends can offer priceless words of encoouragement
-friends can also offer priceless words of wisdom
-what a -30 degree windchill feels like
-that I'm pretty well acclimated to MN
-just because it's not your fault doesn't mean you don't get yelled at
-I really do like kids
-I don't really want to work in an American hospital much longer
-I've got a lot to learn about loving people (see next blog)

A Christmas Carol and Poverty

I saw a live production of "A Christmas Carol" tonight with some friends. I've got a few thoughts concerning it. I hope you know the story. If not, here's a quick synopsis.

Ebenezer Scrooge is a hard nose, merciless tightwad. He scorns Christmas and all feelings associated. He doesn't quite realize that his lack of compassion and generosity are causing others to suffer and make him appear to be a heartless person. That is, he doesn't realize this until he is visited by three ghosts: The Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. They show him scenes from his past life, the current situation, and what will happen if he doesn't change. This new knowledge lead him to become an extravagantly generous person, spreading Christmas cheer all around and being compassionate to other people. At the end, he is practically mad with helping people out and letting go of his shrewdness.

I didn't know until tonight that this play was originally written by Dickens to address social injustice and poverty. I kind of just thought it was a "be a good person" play. One of those that makes you feel good because Christmas is here. I didn't really care much about poverty until the last couple of years, when I was faced with scenes such as these......

This is the side someones house. Looks comfy, huh?


What about this one? You think it keeps the rain out?

Poverty is always going to be around; there are always going to be disparities among people. But why not do a little to help your fellow man out? Got a million bucks to spare? Put that to use. Got a dollar to throw in the red bucket with the bell ringers at the grocery store? Do that. Got a free weekend? Help out at the homeless shelter or visit a lonely elderly person. Though you may not find yourself giddy with compassion afterwards like Ebenezer, I guarantee you'll feel a little better about having made a difference in the world. There's a lot wrong with the world, but that's no reason to sit and do nothing about it. If you've been given much, please handle that responsibility appropriately, even after Christmas is over.

Thanksgiving Travels

Praise God for good friends! I'm so thankful that there are people all over who love me and like spending time with me! I was also grateful for time to sleep, read, and just be. This past week I was blessed with a long break from work long enough to travel to Arkansas to see friends. I drove by myself to the dismay of my parents all the way from MN to AR in one day. I spent a few days hanging out with some of the people who know me best-Jenel and Emily, of whom I neglected to get a picture of, but will include one from the past. I also ran into a bunch of my former professors and got to catch up with them.

Unfortunately, Jennifer couldn't be there, because she's in Africa. I was quite mad at her for this, because I really wanted to talk to her while I was making my 14-hr drive. Oh, well, I guess I'll get over it. :-)

After a few days in Searcy and lunch with my friend Tim, a group of of headed to Memphis to Jack and Linda's house. Jack and Linda are Ben's aunt and uncle, who are so welcoming to college-age friends of Ben. We were slightly delayed in getting there, for a few reasons. One was door-to-door salesmen offering a mass purchase of filet mignon. Let's just say the boys have a lot of meat now. Secondly, we got a phone call from Drew, Ben's roommate, saying his car had broken down in Little Rock on his way to Austin and he needed us to come get him. He ended up coming to Memphis with us. Thirdly, Greg accidently erased all of Ben's music from his ipod. This may sound like a benign statement, but if you know Ben, you know this was a huge catastrophe.

We finally made it to Memphis much later than planned to a nice lasagna dinner prepared by Linda. The boys went downtown for a while, but Amy and I stayed and relaxed in the heated outdoor pool until we were raisins. The next day we chilled and played around while helping some with the Thanksgiving dinner preparations. The day included a ride in an MG convertible and a rousing game of football golf with Drew serving as the hole.

Linda and her grandkids had made cute little namecards for everyone and had gone all out for Thanksgiving. We had a royal feast with other random people from the community. It was good to be there in such a hospitable place.

Headed back to Searcy for another rendezvous with Tim, Jenel, and Emily, and JD the cat. Then I went to Calico Rock, AR to spend the night with Jordan and her family. They are so amazing! I feel like I'm in a Little House on the Prairie book when I'm with them, though I don't remember anything from those books. But they are so loving, and truly care for each other. They spend hours talking, laughing, and sharing. We sat around and read poetry, listened to new music, watched the Matrix and discussed its implications. Random, huh? Jordan and I stayed up late talking. I also neglected to get a photo of their family, unfortunately.

I set off for MN again Saturday morning. 30 hrs in a car by yourself gives you lots of time to think as well as talk to others on a cell phone, though I don't feel like sharing too much of that right now. I'll just say I am happy, God is good, and I'm very excited about life.

Living World Religions Tour

So I went to Chicago this weekend with a few friends to meet a group from Harding coming there for a Living World Religions fieldtrip. I went with my roommate Amy to Madison, WI on Thursday to Julee Byram's house. I went to school with Julee. We stayed a quick night there, and left early Friday morning to go to Chicago. We first met the group of about 80 HU students and professors at the Baha'i House of Prayer in Chicago.

It was incredibly fun for me to see people. We weren't allowed to talk in the temple, and we barely got there in time, so I didn't get to talk to anyone before. It was so fun to see people see me and watch their eyes light up, but they couldn't talk! Most just gave me a big hug. Rebekah's reaction was my favorite. Rebekah was an intern in Honduras this last summer when I visited. I slid into a seat next to her while she was sitting alone contemplating the temple. She just gasped and hugged me for forever and continued to hold my hand long after that. She kept backing up and looking at me, then hugging me again in unbelief that I was there. I have hardly felt more loved than I did in that moment.

I started off writing a brief overview of each place I went, but just became frustrated with it. So I’m going to change the channel, and go a different direction. If you want to know more about each place we went, check out Amy’s website.

http://amyreflections.blogspot.com/2006/11/world-religions.html

Here’s the list of all the places we went:
Baha’i House of Prayer
Islamic Center of Elston
Soka Gakkai (Buddist International Center)
Jewish Synagogue (Rodfel Zedek)
Hindu Temple (Shri Swaminarayan Mandir)
Willow Creek Community Church
Sikh Religious Society
Plus, we had a devo amongst ourselves.

What am I supposed to do with this weekend? I was on emotional overload. So overjoyed to be with great friends, so grateful for the conversations we had. I was humbled by the impact others’ religions have on their lives and impressed by their knowledge and commitment. I wondered if I could get up in front of 80+ people and field questions about Christianity in an effective way.

I was disturbed by the beliefs of some. I could see the appeal in most of them, especially in this post-modern generation. But I was left with questions, such as how can you find the meaning of life in chanting a certain phrase? How can you not believe in right and wrong? How can you pray towards a book, treating it like a holy person? How can you say you believe in what Jesus said and believe that other paths are ok? How can you pay someone to pray for you to a little carved image decorated with fake flowers and get fulfillment out of it? Maybe that’s what bothered me. I didn’t see fulfillment in the faces of the believers who practiced that last statement. I saw desperation, fear, and anxiety. I almost cried watching the Hindu worshippers.

I can’t imagine my life being on my shoulders and based on what I do. Maybe sometimes I live like that, but I don’t believe it. I just saw so many people this weekend running around like crazy, trying to please their god(s) in some desperate attempt for good fortune. It made me incredibly grateful for grace. Overwhelmed with grace. It made me want to serve God. Not the other way around.

I was so blessed to be able to talk with some outstanding professors from HU. Made me excited about….life. Maybe I’ll write more on that later. I’ll just say they believe in me, and that it huge.

It was a very eye-opening experience. I don’t know all the ways it will affect my life from now on. I wouldn’t trade some of the conversations of the weekend for anything. I’m very grateful I was able to have this experience.

On a totally unrelated topic, when we came back to Rochester, it had snowed! Apparently, it was about 10 inches, but a lot had melted by the time we got back. It was beautiful! I'm really warming up (haha) to this cold weather thing. Hats and scarfs are my new fun items.

I'm working on it....

Whoo, it's been a long time since I updated. I'll try to give a quick overview of life.

I went home for about 6 days for my grandmother's funeral. It was extremely beautiful and honoring, I thought. I was very proud to be her granddaughter! Everyone in my extended family got to be there and a ton of people from the community came out. I had lots of time to hang out with the family. Check out the pics of my newest cousins, Bell and David.



Since I got back, it's been a whirlwind of work, school, and etc. I put together two papers and two presentations. I visited a church I really like. I went to a Shakespearean play, a lecture or two, hung out with friends, and had people over. I bought a plane ticket to NJ for Emily's wedding. I'm heading to Searcy and Memphis for 6 days over Thanksgiving to see a ton of friends! Nothing that sounds really exciting to anyone else. But I'm happy! That's all I really wanted to say. :-)

It Happened

So, it happened. My grandma passed away today, peacefully and without a struggle. I'll be in TN from Tuesday about 2:40pm to Monday 8:00am. Thanks for all your prayers and kind thoughts for me and my family!

In Celebration of My Grandma

I’m starting to write this in anticipation of my grandmother’s passing. She is 91 years old as of this past September, and her life looks to be nearing a close. But who really knows? She has fooled us several times before. But this time seems more real. I’m writing this before she passes, because I want it to be ready when the event does occur. I also know I’m not going to want or have time to write when it happens. I make no apologies for this being long or overly sentimental.

I’m glad I’m not in TN for these last few, trying months. That seems pretty selfish of me, but I wish to hold my current vision of my active, spry little grandma, not the lethargic, sickly woman I know she has become recently. I do wish I was there to talk with her and hold her hand and watch her eyes light up when I walk in the room, though she can’t quite verbalize who I am.

Most people hold a vision of what an ideal grandma should be like. The grandma of storybooks, who spoils her grandchildren mercilessly and is actively involved in their lives. My grandmother was one of these. You could always count on the bowl of M&Ms on the end table and her willingness to read from any of the Golden Books stacked up in the back bedroom. She’d let me put sugar in my cereal, something contraband at my own house. Even in her seventies, she was always up for a game of “Red light, green light” in the driveway. She taught me the ins-and-outs of solitaire and Old Maid. She had this drawer of tiny toys and dishes in the coffee table that never ceased to amaze me.

I remember her traveling a lot when I was really little. She seemed to go everywhere: Hawaii, the Bahamas, sometimes more than once. She’d always bring stuff back for her grandchildren, like the big shells you can hear the ocean in or a little brown shell with Hawaii and a little beach scene painted on it. I still have them.

Nothing in her house every changed. Ever. I’m pretty sure the house looked almost exactly the same from the sixties when they moved there to when she sold it to her grandson a couple of years ago. A coconut from some tropical place served as a doorstop for as long as I can remember. I’m glad no one ever cut it open. The same giant television, the same sunburst clock, the same furniture that seemed to be built for short people. The same map of TN on the fridge so she would see where the weather alerts were. The same Christmas decorations hidden in the back corner of the attic up the scary pull-down ladder.

She was pretty predicable as a person too, in some ways. She had a glass of buttermilk and a half a grapefruit with breakfast. She snored when she slept. If she was going to eat breakfast out, McDonald’s pancakes were her favorite. It was usually strawberry milkshakes from Snow White. If she was cooking, it was probably roast, with carrots and potatoes. How I tired of roast! She never was that great of a cook, but she did ok. She could make some killer sweet tea though, stored in reused glass Tropicana juice bottles. She loved to watch “her stories,” the cheesy soap operas she taped every weekday afternoon so she could go back and watch it if we kids distracted her. I was pretty into “Days of our Lives” for one summer thanks to her influence. Just one summer.

She taught me other things besides how to have a sweet tooth and how to play card games with the best of them. I remember the annual corn parties, where the women of the family would come together and shuck, boil, cool, and cream corn to be stored in a variety of zip-lock bag sizes. Sometimes it was at our house, sometimes at hers. It was an all-day event. We did the same thing with beans and peas. We would sit in front of the tv and shell peas till our hands were raw or stained purple from purple hull peas.

My grandmother was always a very active person. She awoke at 5:45 am every morning to go for a 3-mile walk with some ladies from her neighborhood. She was involved in MMM, LLL, and a few other three repetitive letter organizations. I never could keep straight what the letters stood for. I just knew she did a lot with them and would sometimes bring back good things to eat or homemade crafts from the meetings. She would go play in the rock garden with us grandkids, which is this area of large, limestone rocks at the back of her property. It was huge when we were kids! Now it seems so small. But many hours were spent hopping from one rock to other, avoiding the ground, or examining the countless crevices and interesting facets of the giant rocks.

My grandmother adored flowers and birds. She usually had this large row of tube roses on the edge of her garden that the strongest smell ever. She raised many different varieties of flowers, and she knew the name of each specie. She’d raise these big, impressive looking flowers and let me enter them in the county fair every year. Somehow I got credit for watering them once or twice. It was a major part of the day to water all the flowers because there were so many. She would work the rose exhibit at the county fair every year, saving these tiny little vases all year round to prepare for the big event. People expected her to be there. Even when her mind started to slip, she was still able to tell you the names of flowers long after she started forgetting people’s names.

My grandmother was a very impressive seamstress, and always had a project going on. She served as seamstress for Castle Heights Military Academy for years. She made quilts for each of her grandchildren. I’m her favorite, of course, so she made me two. The most beautiful one I think she ever made now decorates my bed and is one of my prized possessions.

She was always healthy up into her eighties. I don’t remember her ever being sick, but maybe it was overshadowed by my grandfather being really sick for so long before he passed. It all started with a scary incident where she “passed out” and fell while walking with some friends. Within a few days, my active, healthy grandmother went from being perfectly normal to being very strange. She couldn’t talk right, she dressed up in the most ridiculous outfits, and she didn’t know my name. I remember being in the back bedroom at her house that first time she didn’t know my name. I was stunned. Long story short, she had to have emergency brain surgery for a bleed on her brain. It didn’t look good.

I guess you could say I pulled my first night shift when she had that surgery. The hospital asked us to have a family member with her twenty-four hours a day. One night it was my turn, and I hardly remember a time when I have been more frustrated. She was up constantly, moving around, pulling on tubes, and unable to communicate. She had her head wrapped up like a mummy, and her speech was just moaning. I had not slept in preparation for the battle, and was delusional myself by the time the night was over.

She made a near-full recovery. She moved into a wonderful assisted living apartment. She made me laugh when she said she didn’t want to sit in the common room “with the old ladies who just watch people coming in and out and talk about people.” Things were good for a while, then the last few years have been a series of ups and downs.

Some things she does in her dementia are funny. One time at a family party we had chips and cheese dip as an appetizer. She took a big dollop of cheese and stirred it into her water glass. And drank it! She seemed to like it, but we just laughed at her and gave her a new glass. She pulled out her PICC line (a big IV that’s threaded through your arm to your heart) three times. I laughed. She tells me I’m her favorite grandchild, and whispers to me secretly not to tell the others. When we look through my scrapbooks, she point me out in pictures, saying “I know who that is!” but is unable to recall my name. She’d see my sister and just say “Ooo!” She knew us, she just didn’t know our names. Her speech is garbled now, but I can still make out “ I wub ooo!”

She has seen a lot: the Great Depression, World War II, Vietnam, two sons in the service, the loss of an adult daughter, the loss of her husband. Five children, ten grandchildren, six great-grandchildren, and one on the way. She’s had a good life. She’s got a ton of friends, most with names like Mildred and Ida, many who have passed on. Nothing spectacular about her, and yet she’s been life-changing at the same time. I can’t imagine life without her, but she’s ready to go now. I’m ok with that because I know where her trust lies, but I’ll miss her. All four foot, nine inches of her.

I love you, Grandma!