Walking partners

"Walking Partners, found here

This is a check in about my promise to live a more healthy lifestyle. It is now my fifth week of walking almost every morning with my friend, Olga. We walk a good 40-45 minutes up a hill, past an orange grove, down a road from which we can see the entire Inland Valley, and then back home. The first week it was hard to make it through the day without falling comatose onto my desk. I was exhausted from all that walking.

Now I'm used to it and if I wake up tired or with a headache or something, I just call Olga and beg off. I've done that twice in five weeks. Then there was the time I had to drive to Palm Springs early in the morning. But for the most part we've walked five days per week. We've sometimes varied our route according to how we feel, but we are still out walking.

I feel better and it's obvious to me that my blood pressure has improved as a result. I haven't turned into a fashion model though. I think Olga may have even gained weight. I'm not sure sometimes if the walking is good for her. She says it is.

One can learn a lot about another person by chattering away every single morning. We talk about our mothers (she has an elderly mother living nearby who has factitious disorder and issues daily demands to get her to a doctor, the ER, or call 9-1-1), her children, her divorce, my job, our mutual musical interests. Olga grew up in a country in Eastern Europe in which the nurse came to the school and vaccinated the entire classroom with one needle. Many of the people from this country have Hepatitis C. Olga does, so she lives with great uncertainty and discomfort. I am fortunate to have her as a walking partner because she has been so sick in the last year that we both wondered aloud at times if she would survive. 12 years ago I helped Olga get away from an abusive womanizing husband. He continues to be active in the community and to go uncensured by his church, whilst she lost her standing at the church and holds only a peripheral position to the one she enjoyed before she divorced him. But she can laugh and be her own person now, even though her ex-husband almost ruined her financially and she will never own anything. She has her life, her children's love and loyalty, and she has several part-time jobs.

Every morning my eyes are open to new possibilities and ways to think about life because Olga's views are different from mine. I enjoy hearing a European perspective about relationships from her and she laughs at all my stories and thinks I'm witty and a good friend. It is a win-win.

Back to my report to you: my next focus is to eat more carefully and healthfully. I'd like to be eating less white foods (potatoes, pasta, bread) and more brown foods: beans, brown rice, whole wheat, and lots of vegetables and fruit. As we get closer to the summer in which I don't have to do any teaching (just live at the computer, writing), I'll work on the next part. For now, I'm delighted to have made the changes in lifestyle and feel much better.

Flee as a Bird

This morning I stepped out of my office into the hall of our counseling building into the midst of flapping wings that sailed past my head. A mourning dove had gotten inside through the open windows of the courtyard. The panicky little thing sailed off down the hall at knee level, rounding the corner toward the religion department. Hearing my gasp of surprise, my next door neighbor appeared at her office door wearing a black plastic file holder over her head.

"That bird was in here yesterday and I shooed it out the window. It must have gotten back in" she said matter of factly.

"And you are wearing a file holder on your head because..."

She lifted it off. "To protect myself from that thing."

Obviously not a country girl. No need to protect herself from that terrified little dove. She looked ridiculous.

I wondered if I could catch it. I'm not sure what I thought I would catch a bird with, but I went around the corner where I had seen it disappear. There it was on the floor looking very tired. A mourning dove looks washed out color wise anyhow, and this little one looked worn down to nothing. It must have been in the building for quite some time because there was quite a collection of bird droppings on the floor under the window.

As I got closer, the bird lifted off and sailed down the hall and around the corner back toward our department (the hall is in a rectangle with an atrium in the center). Hustling down the hall past the bank of windows, I noticed another dove looking very curiously over the edge of the building. It was making its little "whoo-whup-whoo" sounds, probably calling for its mate. That devastated me. Mourning doves mate for life and when one dies, the other kind of hangs around until it dies, alone. It is tragic and the thought was very sad. I don't know about other people, but I'm particularly torn up inside when I see animals who are hurt or scared. It is almost unbearable, so my level of motivation to help this dove was extremely high. I was afraid it would be so scared or dehydrated that it would drop dead if I frightened it too badly.

It flapped up into a window by the side door of the building. There was a 12-inch ledge and the dove hovered up against the warm glass of the window where the sun was beaming in. It would have been a good spot except being dehydrated, it probably was not good for it to be in the sun.

The problem with that perch was that it was about 10 feet over our heads and in a stairwell. There was no way to open the window over its head--I tried, with a broomstick. Then I picked up a fake tree and tried to sweep it across the windowsill to get it to fly down. Nothing but flapping wings. That was definitely not the thing to do.

By now, two students and my neighbor with the file case over her head, were all wringing their hands and near tears. A bird can't fly into a therapy department and not have an array of feeling responses from the faculty.

Finally, a maintenance man happened by with a long handled broom, knocked the bird out of the window into a trash can and released it out the front door. The little thing flew off immediately so it must have had both strength and enough moisture in its body to do so. We all heaved a sigh of relief before we ran around the halls shutting windows. The dove on the roof flew off to join its mate.

If I was so concerned about this innocent, albeit, not-so-smart bird, what must God's heart of boundless love feel about it--and all the other lost birds, dogs, children, people--in this sin filled world?

God sees the little sparrow fall,

It meets His tender view;

If God so loves the little birds,

I know He loves me, too.

God paints the lily of the field

Perfumes each lily bell;

If He so loves the little flowers

I know He loves me well.

God made the little birds and flowers

And all things large and small;

He'll not forget His little ones,

I know He loves them all.

He loves me too,

He loves me, too--I know He loves me too.

Because He loves the little things;

I know He loves me, too.

Original Trinity Hymnal, #635.

Maria Straub, 1874.

Outbid

Good news: We are very excited about finding the perfect home.

Bad news: There were 9 offers on "our" house.

Good news: We have not lost one penny.

Bad news: We didn't get the house.

Good news: We are going out looking at more houses on Sunday afternoon.

Bad news: Most houses on the market around here are short sales, which are neither short, nor do they follow your usual home sale rules. (Avoid them at all costs! is what we're hearing).

Good news: We love our realtor.

Bad news: It will take us hours of traipsing through one house after another to find the right home.

Good news: God is going with us.

Wanna come along?

We're on a real estate roller coaster and I thought it would be good to have company as we go along for the next few weeks.

We've found a foreclosed home that is in marvelous condition and is very big (3200 SF, 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms). It is only three years old. Apparently, someone had an interest only, or balloon payment loans and lost the house. It is an absolute steal because when we moved here, it was more than twice the current (very reasonable) price. We can't even get a 2 bedroom condo in our town for the same price! Here are some pictures:

As you come in the front door, onto the Travertine ceramic tile entry, there is the staircase to the right and the den directly in front of you. To the left of the entry is a living room with fireplace and about 15 feet ceiling. To the left of the den is a full bathroom and guestroom. The kitchen is to the right of the den. Unfortunately, the previous owner had no color sense. The walls are chartreuse, even though they look a bit more tame than that in this picture. Absolutely shocking. "Bilious," as my father would say.

Here is part of the kitchen. There are Travertine ceramic tiles on the floor and granite countertops. There are also enough cupboards here to make me weep with joy! The door to the pantry is standing ajar, which means there is space for all my china, all my catering dishes, Mother's dishes, and all my appliances (unlike our current rental, which requires me to almost stand on my head to get my Tupperware out of the back of a teeney little cupboard). There is a breakfast nook in front of the windows and also a full, formal dining room back around the corner. Incidentally, there are very odd filmy curtains hanging over the windows that don't have wooden blinds over them. It will all have to go.

Here is the backyard. I would be happy to have something bigger, but we can't have everything we wish for. If you click on this picture and look at the larger version of it, you can see some of the mountains a bit better. You can see Mt. San Bernardino (very pointy and tall) from the upstairs master bedroom window (which is hidden behind the neighbor's house).

We did a home visit marathon on Friday--9 properties-- (and a marathon the week before that), and ended up with two houses we really liked. One had an outdoor entrance to an office type of space. I thought it would be perfect for a home office. And the view from the upstairs bathroom and bedroom was gorgeous--the mountains full on. I was ready to write a check out for earnest money right away but we came home to sleep on it. I hardly slept, actually. We prayed and prayed, and Sam went off to sleep within 15 seconds of saying goodnight. I kept thinking that I just didn't like the kitchen (of the house with the view) because it had kind of odd black granite tiles in the kitchen, and that front office space bothered me. You can only enter it from outside or through the garage. Sam really didn't like it because something seems unsafe about it. Someone could either accost me in there and he wouldn't be able to hear me, or else someone could break into the house through it, go into the garage and come into the house. He has a point. And the office is really wasted space.

The more I tossed and turned, the more I kept thinking about all the prayers I've offered up in which I've asked for a large home to have students over once a month for soup, sandwiches, and fellowship. Sam and I can hardly fit into our current house, so a large house has been prayed for repeatedly.

I realized, in the wee hours, that when I looked in this house, I never really looked. I was jarred by the items the former owner had left behind (typical of foreclosed homes), and pleased that the house was in such excellent condition: clean carpet, clean kitchen; clean stove, dishwasher, and microwave all present and matching. It seemed dark inside and the color scheme made me ill. The master bedroom is painted a pale blue that looks like a surgical suite. There is a black and dark brown marble tiled bathroom floor, which is shocking against the blue walls. Then there are these heavy wooden blinds against the chartreuse walls and oddball items left all over.

It will need a good carpet cleaning, all new blinds, paint, and some minor landscaping cleanup.

We heard a sermon this morning about how we cannot serve God and money, or possessions. The key word, the pastor emphasized, is serve. We own things in order to serve. We save money to enable us to serve. There is nothing wrong with having things--as we keep in view our mission on earth: to serve. I kept thinking how I've prayed to have a place to bring students, a comfortable home for the girls, space for Mother if she should want to spend some time with us, room for a grand piano if I am ever fortunate to own one, and a spare room or two for cancer patients who come out here for our specialized treatment regimen. That would be wonderful to be able to share such a home in this way.

Tomorrow morning we are going to go over first thing, throw open all the blinds and windows so we can see it by daylight. If we like it, we will put a bid on it probably on Tuesday.

I don't know what will happen but I'll keep you posted.

YIPEEEEE!!!

For the love of knowledge

I am writing this post after attending one of the most stimulating conferences I've ever experienced. It was entitled, "Strengthening Families in the 21st Century" and had the aim of bringing faith-based research findings to bear on local church functioning. The researchers behind the publication, Hardwired to Connect presented their research on infant-parent bonding and how early infant experience sets the stage for attachment to relationship style, learning, and EQ (emotional intelligence). The research was amazing--I'll discuss some of it later. But what I left the conference with was a loud question ringing in my head: Are my contributions to my field worthwhile? Against the stunning clarity and novelty of the other researcher's findings, mine were pallid in comparison and seemed like amorphous mush. I felt like a mental midget. (This is not a ploy for supportive or sympathetic comments).

Have you ever bumped into someone so brilliant in their line of thought that you wondered how you could be so plain or lackluster and still belong in the same field as they are? That was how I felt leaving the conference. It was two days of absolutely incredible researchers discuss their findings on faith communities, authoritative communities, and trends on spirituality and religious practices. The third day was a working day during which academics, researchers, donors, and church leaders, tried to brainstorm about how to bring the research home. As I drove home after that day, I just started crying in the car. Not just a tear, but a real good bawl. Why? Perhaps I was full to the brim. Maybe it was that I have wanted to see, just once in my lifetime, the church actually utilize research and be empirically driven. Maybe it was being in close proximity to impassioned conversations about what relevance scholarship and academia is to the local church. I'm not sure--but I sure had lots of tears about it. I was left feeling very, very small and humbled by what I had witnessed.

They were tears for knowledge: sadness for being so limited in my little academic corner; overwhelmed for the great needs in the church; the opportunity for continued servanthood; wonderment that so many voices had joined together in the search for new directions on the ground; and sheer mental fatigue from trying to contain all the information without having my head blow off my shoulders.

I'm still getting over the experience. There is so much to be done now, in trying to apply what I learned. Part of that will be discussing some of the ideas at the conference here. I think you may find it interesting, even if not mood-altering as I did, for the moment that you hear about it.

Hanging on

There has been an excellent conference here at our university, which I'll write more about later. Fact is, I've been caught up in it as both participant and planner and have not had time to blog. I want to share some of the fascinating facts that some very famous authors spoke about. But it will be later when things have slowed down.
I think I've said that before--when things slow down.
They never do...

More later.
Don't give up on this blogsite.

Furnace Life

It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt.

(Fyodor Dostoevski)

House Hunting

Today we went looking at homes with a realtor who had been recommended by our lender. If we go with this guy, we will get some special something or another--Sam knows what it is. I could care less what it all means since he's the numbers guy in this family.
Anyhow, we identified several homes we wanted to see in our price range and emailed him ahead of time so he could arrange for us to see them. I have no words to describe adequately what transpired. Let us just say that he has a voice that can cut steel and a need for an audience like no one else I know. Perhaps he was in a manic phase. In any event, he didn't come up for air the entire four hours. No questions about us, nothing interactive. Just a tirade of random facts about--you name it. We learned about his pastor who is having trouble at the church, particularly since his daughter just swallowed 100 Tylenols. Hmmm. At age 12, young girls don't do that for no reason. Now she is in a local psychiatric hospital and our realtor, the hero, is going to go speak with the pastor tonight to straighten him out about how to interact with her.
Then, he pointed out every home of every friend and client he'd ever had. In the middle of a non sequitor, he'd drop the name of someone who was driving past, along with the details of their home sale.
In a closed car without open windows, his voice was hard to take. He rambled on and on, without a break. Voluntary, rapid-fire, non-stop commentary on everything and anything having to do with him. Sam was so disgusted that he went mute about an hour into the fiasco. He nodded and had an occasional comment or two, but he shut down. That left me to --well, what does one do? Try to keep responding (read, reinforcing) his talking? Stop talking altogether? Ask him to take us back to the office and never call us again?
When we got back to the office, Sam jumped out of the car, extended his hand and thanked him for his time. The man acted like he never heard one word. He launched into a harrangue about how he was going to set the pastor straight in his dealings with his daughter.
We came home with headaches and ringing ears. He showed us only houses that were absolute wrecks. In this region there used to be 734 houses for sale. Now there are 8,000, many of them lender-owned. So many houses are trashed before the people who could ill afford them in the first place, leave.

Sam and I stopped and got something to eat on the way home. Our blood sugars had dropped, we felt ill and I just wanted to go to sleep for two weeks. That guy wore me out. How can one person generate that much obnoxia? (new word).

Sam is going to call our lender in the morning and tell him to find us someone else. It was curious that the lender told us initially, "You can change the realtor if you want to. We'll find you someone else if you need us to." Indeed, we need someone different.

I need sleep and absolute silence.

Midnight Visitor

This is who we heard outside on the back porch Friday night. He was polishing off the cat food that we left outside for Jack and Jill, our very sweet neighborhood cats. He's almost the size of an Australian Sheepdog--huge! This guy lives up in the fronds of the palm tree about 15 feet from the back porch. Sam saw him scurrying up into his nest just as the sun was coming up one morning. "He's like Dracula, flying back to his castle before he is killed by the sun."
Methinks our friend has a good thing going.

"I used to think I had some very wise things to say." Geraldine had been telling me about her work with inner city, substance-abusing, pregnant minority women. One had six children by five different men. She kept getting pregnant because she was hooking, trying to make enough money to get drugs. If she didn't have drugs she'd have to deal with the abuse in her childhood, which haunted her day and night with posttraumatic symptoms. There was no money for help, no way out of her neighbhorhood, no way to manage. Only despair, pregnant women in all directions, johns on the streets, and two-timing lovers who either beat them, sponged off them and molested their kids. She was only trying to survive.

Geraldine didn't grow up in anything remotely related to the way her therapy clients had. It was hard to even understand the logic of why they did what they did. She couldn't imagine why they kept getting pregnant, used drugs so much, and never left the ghetto. But when she finally grasped that they were trapped and didn't have a vision of anything different except what they were caught in, she was speechless. They were doing the best they knew how and her wisdom was irrelevant.

It reminds me of being a camp counselor. Having breakfast with seven giggling nine year-olds at a log table in the camp dining room, I watched something that was logical but that left me surprised. We were having hard boiled eggs, cereal, pancakes, and fruit salad. One little girl tried to cut into her egg with her fork, only to have it flip off her plate and onto the floor. It had bounced across the wooden floor that looked like it had been mopped with a bucket of mud. "Yuck!" "Ick!" "Gross!" little girls squealed, peering over the edge of the table at the egg, that had come to rest against the main support post in the dining room.
The little freckled egg owner matter of factly got down from the table, walked over to the egg and carried it back to the table.
"Yick! What are you going to do with it?" one little girl gasped.
"Watch," she said. "This is easy."
Taking the egg in one hand, she filled her glass halfway with milk. In went the egg and she swirled it around inside the glass. Using her fork, she spiked the egg and brought it out of the glass onto her plate. "See?" She looked around at the admiring girls. "Now it's clean."
Her little friends were delighted. One started to "wash" her English muffin in her milk.
I was fifteen years old and I was speechless. The girl's logic was great, and what I knew about going over to the sink, washing the egg and coming back again, seemed awkward and unnecessary.
"I don't think you should do that," I started to say in a commanding way. The little girls ignored me and went on with their breakfast, swilling breakfast sausages and pancake bits in their glasses of milk. I poured a new glass of milk to replace the egg wash glass and sat down, silent. What I knew didn't make sensse right there, just then.
I used to think I had some very wise things to say, too.

Geraldine and I talked for several minutes about how the women's logic made sense, given their context. Although they looked like down and out addicts, there were some good qualities and clear logic that wouldn't typically be visible to outsiders. They were generous with one another, sharing cigarettes, watching each other's babies, "watching the back" of each other. One girl gave a diaper to another woman who didn't have anything for her baby. It was clear that she had taken this woman under her wing and was trying to watch out for her. The context and meaning was just very, very different from anything Geraldine or I would know.

There are some things we can't weigh in on, shouldn't weigh in on. And there are some situations in which we can ask questions, introduce new ideas, respectfully explore. But always from a position of not knowing. There is too much in the lives of others that comes from a place that is unlike our own experience, that when we assert that something they do, feel, or think should be the way we do, feel, or think about it, then is when we have overstepped our bounds. We are interpretive bullies who would be better off being quiet.

When I was a teenager and struggling internally about what to do with my musical future, people used to tell me that if I just did X, Y, and Z, then I would have success, happiness, and a bright future. But they had no idea of my context and how impossible any of their suggestions would be for me to attempt. So, much of their wisdom was useless to me. In later years, as a client in therapy, the therapist began to tell me what I should do, how I should feel, and what choices would be best for me. Then she told me how I really felt and what my inner needs were. I was speechless, because she had reduced me and my context down to a story line that she could understand but that had no relevance to me. She wasn't interested in my framework. I never went back.

I love the comment that Job (in the Bible) said after God swooped down and put him in the hot seat. "I thought I knew, but now I put my hand over my mouth." He realized that he had been rash and that his wisdom didn't shed much light on God's actions or God's ways. After another chapter of questions, he said, "Now I detest myself and repent in dust and ashes." You can't be more repentant than that.

Most of us would do well to put our hand over our mouth and listen rather than blurt out "wisdom" that makes sense to us but not to others. Being tentative and speaking from a not-knowing stance can open doors for communication that don't come from asserting our own beliefs in foreign places.