I Get Restless

  Alright, Anna, let's talk.  So you hate yourself.  Why? It's not like you always have.  You never understood it in your younger days, how a person could really hate themselves, because you never did.  What's changed? Maybe there's just more to hate.  Maybe you were fine before, and now you're not.  It started with Ferdinand, when your insecurities came up in ugly ways, and you looked at yourself for the first time and thought I don't know or like this person . So maybe it's because one guy (okay, two) decided you weren't enough.  But so what?  You always knew from your older siblings that you weren't enough.  You learned to be okay with that.  You got through it with yourself, and didn't break up in the middle.  You were okay. But...your older siblings stayed.  They never left you because you weren't enough.  They loved you anyway, because they had to.  Because they're family.  It's okay to not be enough w...

 There are stories that are written primarily because someone wanted to hear them, and stories written primarily because someone wanted to tell them.  I'm not deluded enough to suppose mine is the former. Yet there is a privilege that comes with being in relationship with others (and I mean any kind of relationship), where things that don't really concern them can still be interesting to them.  It's one of the strangest concepts, and I still don't fully understand it, but it's clear: people still want to know things that don't directly affect them. I'm sure the evolutionists would argue that we are more likely to survive if we are armed with more information, even information that doesn't seem to matter.  The basic urge to learn and know is still there and is part of being "the fittest". Me not being an evolutionist, my thinking falls more along the lines of John Donne's Meditation XVII from Devotions upon Emergent Occasions.   I read this ...

One year and three months ago, an eighty-five year old woman in my congregation, who we affectionately refer to as our church grandmother, drove to Kentucky to look at the Ark Encounter, and then kept on driving. Moppy has always been a free spirit, so while this was unexpected, it wasn't really shocking.  She kept in touch with her daughter, who is something of a mentor to me, so we knew she was okay.  As I understand it, she went out to California, meandered her way down the West Coast, and then got holed up in New Mexico or Arizona for about half a year when Covid hit.  She did most of her driving at night and slept during the day, usually in her car.  Sometimes she found friends, or friends of friends to stay with. We all wondered when she would be back, but she didn't seem to be in any kind of a hurry.  She got a smartphone and called her granddaughters sometimes, who of course missed her dreadfully, and stayed on the road. Well, a couple weeks ago, her dau...