I just got off the phone with my one of my favorite people in the world, my disipler from Summer Project. She told me,

"God wants you alive today."

God, wants me alive. Today. Right now. In this very moment. To be sad and call my disipler. To listen to her. To cry on my front steps and sniffle into the mouth piece on my phone. Just because I want to be dead, doesn't mean He does. And if He doesn't want me dead then, He must want me to be doing something pretty cool, then. Right?

I gotta get out of my bed, go to class, take bike rides, pursue my friends and damnit, be grateful for a change.

I want to think in poems again.

10 Things.

I've been really afraid to go home these days. I know there is a desire in my heart to live and be in the mountains, but there is patience because I must go to Ohio for at least a year to finish school, etc. This is something I'm not looking forward to. I'm worried about missing the mountains, missing my new friends, missing the ability to hike and hammock by rivers. It's going to be hard. But, I want to focus on then things I'm excited for when I go back home:

1. My own bedroom.
2. Sitting at Grounds for Thought and reading and drinking coffee.
3. Hammocking in backyards.
4. Bike rides.
5. Specific friends
6. Applying what I've learned on project to BG.
7. Swimming in the Quarry with Cholena
8. Brookside church
9. Meeting new freshman
10. The Seifferts and Baby Roo Seiffert

Home

I have two weeks left of summer project, then I come home. It's a bit of a strange experience to refer to two places as "home" at once. I often consider my apartment in Colorado my home. But the feeling is familiar. I recall calling my tent my home on the three month road/camping trip I did a few years ago. Home. The more I live life, the more I understand that home so much more fluid and less concrete than I ever thought possible. This has been bothering me the fast few weeks, as I struggle wanting to leave this home, for my other home. I love the mountains. I love hiking. I love the stars. I love the nighttime sounds. I love prairie dogs and waterfalls and even afternoon thunderstorms over the mountains. But, regardless, my life as other plans for the next year and unfortunately, the plans don't contain a location anywhere near mountains. I have to keep reminding myself that this year has a purpose, even though I often feel without purpose without the mountains surrounding me.

I need to learn to love God more than the mountains. A friend texted this prayer to me one day and it hit me hard. But, it's a brutal truth that brings light on why I have to go back to Ohio yet one more year (and maybe then some...) before I can move back to Colorado.

I pray this prayer, well, often. It pains me to love something MORE than the mountains, for some reason. It truly does. But, I have to remember I'm not giving up the mountains, I'm giving them up as my end all, be all. Because God is even better. And He's the one that made this beauty I call home around me. So, thanks, God, for allowing me to spend three months basking in my favorite things about you. Mountains.

Vail in photographs.

A River.

Dave Lassoing Richie.

My roommate and new assistant project director, Leah and I.

One of my closest pals, Liz

A mountain goat we saw while climbing a 14er.

The top of the mountain after climbing the 14er. One of the hardest things I've done but definitely the most rewarding and beautiful.

One of my most favorite people on earth, my discipler, Shawna and Liz.

The best. Bible. Study. Ever.


Bible study laughin.


The whole gang, including staff.

Beauty.

Another view at the top. Snowy peaks for as far as you could see. SO INCREDIBLE.

Friend's on a hike.

The most hilarious bear ever.

Colorado wild flowers.

Vail in bullet points.

Because unfortunately, bullet points are all I have time for.

-No job, but looking and hopeful
-Lots of hiking.
-Wildflowers.
-Good friendships happening.
-Best bible study imaginable.
-Lots of vulnerability.
-Ice cream cones.
-Learning the importance and vitality of God's Word.
-Receiving and writing letters.
-Broke & Happy.
-Amazing discipler, Shawna. Who is incredibly authentic, tells me the truth, teaches me things, and laughs at my jokes.
-Working out Dad stuff.
-Playing guitar.
-LAUGHTER.
-Always good weather.
-Feeling God in the mountains.
-One of the best times ever.

:)

Lovin Vail but no time to really update. But, just know that I am happy as a clam and about to go hiking.

Here we go.

In t minus 36 hours I will be headed out to Colorado, one of my favorite places on earth to spend my summer.

I am both excited and terrified. Excited to see what God will do, excited to take a break from my relationship with Bowling Green, Ohio. Excited to work and love people. Excited to be immersed in an entirely different and new community. Excited to camp and feel free in the mountains.

I am also terrified. Normal reasons that aren't worth typing out. But you know the feeling. The one where you are between one place and another. You're still required to live in a room with empty walls and no bed. Your life, once again packed in boxes. The fear of everything comfortable basically torn from your grip. Anxiously waiting the next move. That's what I'm feeling. This room that I had for a year is no longer mine. I guess it never really was.


And so I'm off. To the state that gets the most sunshine a year, (Or so I am told) to Vail, Colorado. To hopefully see God move mountains (haha GET IT?). To Grow. Because I am still a little baby and I want to be bigger someday.

See you in two months.

School Year Memories.

My fourth year of college is done. And it doesn't feel like it. It doesn't feel like I've been in college for four years and it doesn't feel like it's over. It doesn't feel like next year will be my LAST year. (ew). But, whatever. Here's a trip down memory lane, eh? With some favorite memories.

-When Amy Seiffert got pregnant.
-WOMEN'S WEEKEND.
-Seeing mountains in New Hampshire. It was beautiful.
-Mustache party and sparkle party.
-Watching Jesus meet my friend.
-Breaking bread with Amy and Rob.
-When Robby told me I was his friend.
-When Katie came home from India and layed in my bed and shared life with me.
-Easter with the Duvalls.
-Finding out I'm spending my summer in Colorado.
-Car rides home with Amy after Cru.
-Lifegroup.
-The thousands of times Libby Foulds and I laughed so hard together.
-Getting on a roof in downtown BG.
-Working out with Kristin Wilson.
-The night I went to prayer and encouragement night and we sat around and encouraged each other.
-The nights Katie let me cry on her.
-The day Emily Fox taught me how to do a handstand.
-The time I got on stage at Cru and said something inappropriate.
-The night I saw the BIGGEST comet I EVER saw.
-The time Amy took me to wintergarden.
-Watching the first snow fall to the ground out my window.
-Making peace with my Dad.
-Getting a tap dancing orange tattooed on my ass.
-Eating meals with Tiffany, Grace and Amy Schuler.
-Getting the best letter ever from Elizabeth Fraizer.
-Kate Bonko as my pen pal.
-Learning about Grace.
-When we took grapes to Grace.
-Watching Roseanne upside down with Shayna.

Can you think of anymore? Share them with me!

You are a park bench at the bottom of the ocean.

I feel lonely all the time and I'm struggling to figure out how to make it stop.

Can't depend on people; must depend on God.

Dear eight page paper,

You are the bane of my existence. You are ugly, cruel and I hate your rotting, filthy guts. Your page length requirements made me want to punch you in the face. You are a terrible being. Even your mom hates you. That's how awful you are. You ruined my entire day and have ruined many other days of my entire schooling career. You are pointless to do and only exist to make me angry and nervous and lose sleep. You provide nothing for my education. You are mean to me and I hate you.

21 days. Wearing the dress.

Considering giving up. Not because it's hard. But because...I just don't care about wearing it. I care about the cause. But, I feel nothing when I put it on. Which has been causing some weird bitterness.

But, I feel apathetic in all things these days. Insecure. Not well liked. The dress seems useless, like my life sort of seems right now.

Lame. But true.

The Dress.

So, I've been wearing the same grey dress for 18 days. For the Daughter Project. Which is fine and great.

But..I'm not exactly sure how much I'm doing for it. It's not really that wearing my dress is difficult, or something I even think about a whole lot. Just put it on, put something over it, leggings, go. Whatever.

It's not that I don't think about the problem of sex trafficking. Obviously, I do. I'm spending an entire 4 (ok 5 and a half...) years getting a degree so I can get a job at some organization that stops it. I think about it often. But the dress? Am I really serving anything for the daughters?

Truthfully, it doesn't really feel like it. I guess it's raising some kind of awareness..but I'm not really doing that, either. My recent built up hate for the internet has really come out and I'm not really on the internet much talking about it. Nor do I have a good camera to take pictures of myself daily. I'm having a hard time really seeing the worth of what I'm doing, you know?

So what do I do? For the daughters, what do I do? I got no money, no car, nothing. So what? Will my schooling pay off? Will my dress convince ONE person that sex trafficking is abundant and needs stopped? Will I teach anyone? Not sure. Being in a Women's Studies culture...everyone knows. And I mean EVERYONE. Maybe even more than I do.

So what, then is the dress doing?

I have yet to figure that out. But I'm still trucking.

paper

Every three months, the experience of the doctor's office is like a ticking reminder of pseudo-crazy they made you believe. Sitting on scratchy paper lining, wondering why they're giving you the same survey because no matter what your answers will be, they will give you a pill.

"You sure you don't want to kill yourself?"

Yes.

That was the simple answer anyway, to a complex series of spiralling thoughts and memories that couldn't possibly be explained to a doctor sitting parallel to you in her swivel chair. Did I want to die? Sometimes. While the lingering possibility of putting an end it all will hover above me for the rest of my days, the probability of it comes in waves. It's the want to kill parts of myself, not the entire structure of my being. How can I explain that to a doctor?

It's the memories of a parents fist slamming into my spine.
It's the loneliness of a bedroom shoved into a corner and the fear of your roommates walking into open skin and broken dishes.
It's the secret desire that they will.
It's the school work that's violent to your free-spirited personality.
It's the constant panic revolved around preserving it.
It's the ringing in your ears.
The voices you don't wanna hear.
The thoughts you can't control.
The dreams that attack you while you're unconscious and helpless.
It's the selfish, reprehensible, piece of shit I really am.

(Ya doc, I do wanna fuckin kill myself. And if you sit across from me and try to convince me that you never thought of it either, I'd laugh in your fuckin face. I'm not a fuckin pill. I'm not your goddamn bonus on your paycheck. I'm a fuckin person who has been through a lot of shit and maybe I just don't fuckin feel like it anymore. K? So give me something else that's not a fuckin pill. How can you medicate me when the state of the world is against me? Attacking me. Luring me into it's cages and refusing to set me free? Don't you feel it? Have you been desentized like the rest of the world? The rape? The tourture? The murder? The sorrow and shame and sheer agony? Has the white walls and sanitized smell of this place blinded you?)

That part, too.

But yet, I sign up for them every month. Every month. It's like, if I don't, then I failed. I pushed away my only chance at survival. The whirlwind of the what ifs and the coulds and the shoulds and the panic settle too far in my bones to ever turn back.

I don't want these pills anymore. I want God. I want God to kill the part of me that I can't kill myself because that means actual death. I want God to open my skin for me because when I do it it results in bloody paper towels hidden underneath my bed. I want God to get me wasted, and fall so deeply in drunken love for Him. I want Him to see everything. Everything. I want Him to hold me and pray over me always.

It's the one two three of when it's gonna happen. Is it happening now?

3 am

It's 3 am and I can't sleep.

I put my head down on my pillow...and thoughts race. That familar lump in my throat. My chest tight. Hazy eyed.

One year ago, I was packing to go to India. This year, I'm insecure. Depressed. Fallen off my boat in the middle of the sea.

What happened? What happend? What happened?

This is famous question these days. This is the question I ask God. What happened to me?

And this: why love anything, or anyone, if it'll just leave you in the end?

My heart aches these days. Aches for what once was. Right now isn't too swell. It's ragged and it hurts. It hurts me to the marrow in my bones. I just want to be packing for India right now. That's what I want to be doing.

One Dress

I'm wearing the same gray dress for one month for the daughter project. Day 1 starts today.

thedaughterproject.org

More on the issue of sex trafficking to come. I gotta jet to my spanish exam!

my dreams consist mostly of mountains these days.

Feburary is the worst month.

A Dear Friend

My dear friend, Amy, was on the news last night for a really cool reason.

Look at her: http://www.foxtoledo.com/dpp/news/local/One-dress-six-months

I'm looking forward to joining her for the month of March. Only a few weeks away.

Yours

Yours

Her lips are like moths
fluttering around the light blub
that hangs over the dusty stair case
that leads to the basement that no one really goes into.
Unless,they're trying to find something
they had forgotten about for the past three years
or need a quiet place to cry.
But her teeth are like chainsaws,
you have to watch the kickback
but, they chatter motions of the moon
and big the Grand Canyon is.
They chatter stories of when
clouds took shapes of fossils,
and how seahorses carry their babies.
They chatter songs of open veins,
and the f-word during prayer.
But, she swears her heart beats faster than a hummingbird's,
at even the sheer mention
of how a blue whale is as long as three school buses.
And how every time she thinks of school buses
she remembers the time you sat next to her,
and told her you couldn't breathe
when you thought about breathing.
She doesn't look anything like photographs of herself, though
Because not even the greatest of cameras could capture
the crowbar jammed under her beating heart
nor the terror built behind her eyes
from twenty some years of
the train ride home
The funny thing about home, though is,
it's never too far away
but, damn, it takes forever to get there.
But not even the weight of that
could keep her from climbing to the top of mountains,
gliding brushes across canvas,
or crawling inside of God.
Because she explodes when she hears His name,
even though sometimes she can't hear it
or it sounds more like dust collecting on picture frames
or a the last breath from the lungs
hanging by a noose in her closet,
she knows it's there.
And if there's anything left to know
it's this: while her words aren't rational
and her actions and reactions don't apply to any rule-
she's got a pair of working man hands.
And they were created for one thing and one thing only.
To be held.

When God is teaching you patience a lot of times it feels like something scraping up against your paper thin bones. The only cure is for your skeleton to jump out of it's skin and run far, far away. I think it's because I don't quite understand God's timing yet. Or, at least, refuse to because you know the story- my timing is better.. blah blah blah.

India has a distinct set of colors and smells that can pluck even the un-pluckable heart strings. I want to go back, and I want to go back now. There's no time for patience when you've left half your heart thousands of miles away in a different country. It's where I'm supposed to be again.

And, God is going to give me the desires of my heart. My desires say, "go to India. Be with the women in the brothels." I believe he knows the words that dance around in my soul, and I also believe he takes them seriously. I also believe, that he will deliver when the time is right. And oh, the time never seems right, does it? It seems far away. Or too soon. Or something wrong. The right time always seems like a mythical story. One in which the right time is this beautiful bursting light-gospel choir-dancing sunshine thing. It comes right into your open hands- you knew it was coming and you had been waiting all day. But, it always seems to come when your in your pajama's watching re-runs of the Golden Girls and perfectly content with your bowl of frosted cheerios.

I get it. I have to wait for it. India cannot come this summer and it breaks me in two. I talked about patience with my friends Jacintha and Lori tonight. Jacintha said something I think I'm going to rest on for a while. She said, that God doesn't want us to attach ourselves to something [India], but instead to attach ourselves to Him. I like this idea. I like the idea of taking out my proverbial needle and thread and sewing myself to my God who never fails, and always has it right.

And there's comfort in that. So, while my heart continues to break and mourn over a loss of an Indian summer (no, for reals..), my heart is preparing for the excitement of a possible summer in Vail, Colorado.

more to come about that...

mmmm

Not much to say. Other than break was OK and I'm not ready for school tomorrow. But I did make my notebooks look fun.