Spring Things

In honor of the absolutely beautiful weather - which some people keep complaining is too hot and humid, bah to them - I return to my blog with a couple of random observations.

Drama is relative. I have a couple of friends to whom my life seems terribly chaotic and full of drama. Here's news: I've got nothing in the drama department. I have minor ridiculousness, but I am surrounded by people whose entire lives are DramaRama. It gets tiring, especially when I have to babysit them in the midst of their insanity, and their insanity never ends. I'm trying to cultivate friendships with people who are not quite so draining.

With the coming of warmth, I have returned to life. Seriously, I become an entirely different person when I can sit in the sun after the long winter. I always thought seasonal affective disorder was a big of a crock, but I'm starting to believe that I may need a UV lamp or something, because I have clearly been in a haze for the last two months or so.

The sun is disappearing, and I am still in the office. Gotta go.

Four-footed Grace

My dog was just a puppy during the year when I served as a college chaplain. Well behaved she was not; back then we were walking 5-10 miles a day just to make her tired enough that she would sit still for fifteen minutes. But when a freshman girl died in a car accident, Laila was my "assistant" as I sat with her friends and floormates. She provided a kind of support that I couldn't, snuggling her furry little body up against sobbing young women and giving them another living creature to just hold on to. Somehow, she intuitively knew to be still, to be cuddly even though she generally isn't, to simply let people cry into her fur.

It's been a rough week around here. The fourth teenage girl in two months committed suicide, and it's just starting to come out that they may all be related, and that there have been several other attempts that also seem to be part of the same plan. It must be terrifying to be a parent right now, or to be another kid at that school, wondering which of your friends you'll have to see in a casket next.

I've also been dealing with a couple of marriages on the rocks, a homeless teenager, a couple of young adults with serious illnesses, and some emotional wackiness on my own part. I've been trying to take a lesson from Laila. I don't need to solve it all. I don't need to have the answers. I don't need to overtake the world with my brilliant plan to heal all things (which is good, because I don't so much have a plan, brilliant or otherwise). Sometimes just being there and letting people be upset and not asking anything of them is doing something.

In the midst of all this, there's been the general busy-ness of life: youth stuff, meetings, wedding season, and, oh yeah, Holy Moly Week. I think I'm managing to pull it off, but when I stop moving, I'm feeling a little weary, shell-shocked, beaten, and sad.

Meanwhile, I've noticed that Laila has been much more of a lap dog this week than usual...

News from California and Iowa

As some of you may know, I serve on the board of an organization called Room for All, which advocates for the full and equal participation of LGBT persons in my denomination, the Reformed Church in America. A couple of pieces of news came my way this morning from other members.

The first is a video you should watch. It represents some of the 18,000 couples who were married before Proposition 8 was passed - and whose marriages and families will be declared legally void if Prop 8 is upheld. I'm not a weepy type, but I bawled my eyes out at this one.

The other was this article from the Des Moines Register. It seems that, back in my old college stomping grounds, they have unaninmously ruled that limiting the definition of marriage to one male and one female is unconstitutional. I can't say that I expected Iowa to be the third state to allow same-sex marriages (hello, New York?), but I really wish I was there to celebrate with them. The ruling itself, once you wade through the legalese, is pretty powerful...but sadly, I cannot figure out how to attach it to this post. If you want a copy, drop me a comment with your email and I'll forward it to you.

Here is the joint response from Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal and House Speaker Pat Murphy. Makes me proud to have once been an Iowan.

Sometimes Things Implode

This week, for me, it was my coffee pot. I thought I was doing a good thing. It never occurred to me that scrubbing a bit of dried coffee out of its bottom held the potential of disaster. But with a loud bang, the interior of the carafe shattered. Bye bye, coffee pot.

I enjoy being melodramatic about my very minor traumas, but the truth is that I've been surrounded by more serious implosions all week. Half the world seems to be in divorces or relationship breakups this week. The other half is losing their jobs, homes, health, and loved ones. Of course, there is often overlap there, like the woman who said to me, "I've lost everything I ever had, even my hope."

I can buy another coffee pot. You can't buy trust, love, stability, or a time delay on mortality.

I guess I'm just thinking about the inner resources it takes to pick up the pieces after an implosion. A couple of the people I've talked to this week...well, I'm not actually sure they are going to come through. I'd like to give them hope and help them live again, but all the answers just seem cheap and too easy - not to mention completely unhelpful. My vocation has made me more prepared to listen than some, and that's never a bad place to start, but there are still times when I wonder if there shouldn't be more I can do than that.