The One With January's Challange

As January winds to a close, I thought that I should give an update on my how my goal for this month went. As many of you know, I gave myself a challenge a month for 2011 and January’s was to learn to snowboard. I have never been sporty or athletic, and this was proved time and time again as I would end up in the resort clinic with a concussion or the lift would be stopped when I pulled my fellow snowboarder to the ground with me during ungraceful lift exits, but I have to say that this has been a super fun challange. I am still TERRIBLE at snowboarding, but with at least a month left to go before the season is over, I plan to be able to execute excellent heel side AND toe side turns down by mid-march.

My biggest surprise in this challenge came not in the challenge itself though, but in how much I have LOVED working at Whitetail this season. I only got the job for the free pass to snowboard, but my soul has been filled with meeting fun new people (hi Jamie!), learning new things, and being in an energetic environment while the rest of PA hibernates the winter away in their houses. Whitetail is like a beehive of excitement on the long, dark, cold nights of winter and I have enjoyed the benefits of having it as part of my life this season. I mean, what more perfect job could I have then getting to dress up as a hippie and Ginger Grant in one weekend?

And since my plans tonight have been canceled, I am going to try to slip one more trip to the slopes in before February graces us with its presence…

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. The point is to live everything. -Ranier Marie Rilke

The One with the Battle Scars

A few years back I had a medical scare. The doctors were concerned that the combination of a family history of skin cancer, the amount of time I spent outdoors in Central America growing up, and a suspicious freckle on my chest, that my potential for cancer was great and that I needed a biopsy. After the decision was made, and the procedure done following all the guidelines, a few weeks later it became evident that I was going to have a raised pink scar on my chest for the rest of my life. The doctor was devastated for me seeing as I was unmarried and now “maimed.” I, however, was delighted! I love scars. Battle wounds: they tell the story of your life, add character, and remind you to be careful in your future choices.

That October, my eyes were opened to how stuck in life I was. After going through some serious soul searching, I came to the conclusion that in order to move forward in my life, I needed to deal with my past. And that process started with evaluating my present. As I started peeling away the layers physically and mentally, throwing away boxes of stuff in my house, recognizing lies that I had believed, validating feelings and getting wise counsel on them, I realized that it was way harder to the peel the layers back and throw them away then I thought it would be. Then epiphany struck… I had created a giant scar out of life for myself. The items (both in a mental and physical sense) that I had placed around myself as a protection, had turned into a prison. What if I forgive and it washed away the scar in my life that reminds me to be careful, to be guarded, that I have been loved, that I have been hurt. What could trusting do for my life.

Well maybe if forgivness WOULD actually wash away that scar, I could be free to be open and vulnerable. To love freely again. To give myself completely to others again. To not be guarded.

What if I cleared away all the clutter out of my life? What if I went into something unprepared. Maybe then I could allow others to step up and be the hero. To see my weakness and pick up my slack.

And so it started slowly, one closet cleaned out, one drawer organized, one more box to the dumpster, one more pound lost, one more person forgiven, one more resentment let go. And I realized a funny thing… this process that felt so scary in the beginning, has actually turned out to be the most freeing journey of my life!

The One with 52 Books in 52 Weeks

I once met a girl who said that growing up they never had books in their house. I found this absolutely impossible to imagine. Our house was quite the opposite. I grew up in a house where once my father oh so lovingly informed my mother that if the stack of books beside her bed that needed to be read got anymore out of control, they would end up toppling over and crush her in the middle of the night. From this image above you can see that I have inherited my mothers love of collecting books.
SO THE CHALLANGE... One of my personal challanges to myself this year is to read 52 books in 52 weeks. Happy reading!

The One with all the Time

Time is a funny thing. If you are having fun an hour can pass so quickly that you feel like it was only 5 minutes, but if you are anxiously awaiting a great event such as opening presents on Christmas morning, 1 hour can feel more like 10.

The American society has an obsession with time.

As we get older, there is more pressure to concur the big adventures in life by a certain time. We feel the pressure to get married by a certain age, buy a house by a certain age, hold a management position by a certain age, and the ever present pressure of Mennonite society to procreate before you are 30. If you do any of these things earlier or later than the average society member, a lot of attention is paid to you. The timelines are different if you live in a city or small town. We use time as a way to measure how far we have come since a prior event, or to make something that happened seem further away.

Time is not a bad thing. It is actually very helpful in running a society. The issue comes into play when we put pressure, shame, blame, and guilt on ourselves for not accomplishing everything we wanted to accomplish by a certain time frame. We often fall into the trip of “getting old” feeling like since we haven’t accomplished it yet and don’t see it in the foreseeable future, we start to believe that it will never happen. The old phrase, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks” doesn’t hold up very well when you see ladies in their 90’s graduating from high school. It is all in a mindset and not a clock or calendar.

You see, God doesn’t see the beginning from the end. He works on His own time schedule. Unlike us, he doesn’t get stressed out by the pressure of society if we aren’t married by the time we are 25 or still rent an apartment at the age of 35 when we expected to have a pool in the backyard and a white picket fence by now. He sees the bigger picture and His timing is always perfect because it is based on our best interest instead of emotions. Instead of stressing about when events will happen or laying on the floor having temper tantrums because what we think should happen in our expected time frame hasn’t, let’s put our energy to good use and prepare our lives for the desired event. It might look crazy to those around us, but then you will be in good company as I am sure that people told Noah he was crazy when he was building the ark.