Home for the Fall.

Hello all. This is my home now, for the next few threeish months. (It's much more like two, but I'm rounding up.) I am just inside the window just to the right of the door as I write this. If you look really close, you can see me waving at you. ;) This week, Mary and I drove from Dallas to Boston. We took four days to make the trip so that we could stop everywhere we thought there was something pretty to see or fun to do, as well as every hour so that I could go to the bathroom. We listened to Dixie Chicks in Arkansas, Johnny Cash in Tennessee, Nickel Creek in Virginia, and then made up the rest because no music came to mind when we drove through Delaware or Connecticut. Any ideas? Oh, and we accidentally timed our trip to where we drove into and out of Manhattan during rush hour, so we tried not to die, and once we were completely stopped we rolled down the windows and listened to rap songs that celebrated the Big Apple.

Now I am here, at L'Abri. Today I took a walk and looked at the leaves that are changing colors, went grocery shopping, helped clean the house to get ready for guests, and chose a Halloween costume. I know I'm early, but a friend at L'Abri has a green cape with a hood and a beautiful wreath crown thing, so I am going to be a woodsy elven Tolkien- creature. Or at least, try.

I am writing this because I realize being here how much treasure I left at home. You are likely my friends and my family, and I value you. I don't want to fall off the face of the earth, really. I would love a for real letter from you. And if you write, I'll write you back. I would also like prayer for two things. If you pray, please 1) Please pray that I my days would be filled with praise of the Author of all this beauty, and that I would count others needs more important than my own. 2) Please pray for my future, as I am seeking God's will and direction with this Next Step.

A thought about nature: This summer as I walked in Boston, sometimes things that I knew were beautiful felt very far from me, if that makes sense. I mean, I could acknowledge their beauty in mental assent, but I couldn't feel it. I knew it, I rested in it, but sometimes I couldn't be moved like it. I wondered if this was a sad part of getting older, or if I were still a little depressed, or what, what was keeping me from being moved. Anything I could say about the river floating by our house or the trees growing out of the water like huge mushrooms was stale and rigid. Yesterday I think I realized why that was. I was separating the spiritual and the physical again, trying to connect with God, and then trying to connect with nature, forcing both. Yesterday when I walked, I stopped and closed my eyes. I told God how meaningless nature and beauty seemed apart from Him. How stupid. How I would rather have peace and twinkling wonder from the inside out, rather have Him physically with me than any tree or mountain. And what amazed me was that when I opened my eyes, I found myself not asked to reject or belittle the beauty I saw before me, but asked to see it as it is: charged with love from the Creator, charged with meaning and purpose, trees growing tall and strong, saying something about our God (He said, "it is good"). The sun rising and setting, saying something about our God (Romans 1, Psalm 19). Nature isn't robbed of it's beauty, but charged as I look to Christ. Christ makes sense of the broken parts of the world, the robbery, the selfishness, the ignorance and lack of care for people without, the trashing of creation through pollution. And He makes sense of the beautiful; people created in God's image, with diversity and inherent dignity and little creators themselves, an absolutely stunning jewel like creation, imaginations that long for heroic stories, etc. He makes sense of my desire. So when I stopped and saw the trees and even the squirrels and the sunset in light of Him, I reveled. I talked to Him, I fell to my knees in worship.

For a while I thought I worshiped a God who asked me to turn away from this world. It was worth it, because I saw Jesus and I loved him, and I believed in sin and I loved people. I still think those things, but now I see that Jesus came to this world. He came here. Stunning. God became a human, and embraced this world. He touched people, and he ate and drank and went to a wedding. I am not asked to turn from this world but to love it well. To take care of it.

I have so many thoughts about that, but I'll stop now because I am small and tired and shouldn't talk too much about things I don't understand. But just this one more thing: I know that if I can't find beauty in the small things; a basil plant, a well baked cookie, a kind word to a neighbor, then I won't find it in the big things; the Grand Canyon, the ocean, etc. I will at first of course, but my appetites have grown now, and the Andes can't fill them and Europe can't fill them and neither can a piercing or a trip to China. If I can't find beauty in coffee with a friend, I won't find it anywhere. I don't know if that's the same for you. I'm finding myself turning to smallish, smallish things again. The very smallest actually. Oh, this has grown too long. Goodbye then. Tomorrow I'll tell you a funny story about my mother.