things I resonate with

I've been reading Walking on Water by Madeleine L'Engle and it seems tonight that every couple pages I want to scream, "yes!  yes!" because I resonate with it.

This, this is sort of how I feel with the career thing:

     "There's [a] New Yorker cartoon that shows a woman opening the door of her house to a friend.  We look through the door, and in the back of the house a man is writing at a typewriter, with a large manuscript piled on the desk beside him.  The friend asks, "Has your husband found a job yet?  Or is he still writing."
     "A successful businesswoman had the temerity to ask me about my royalties, just at the time when my books were at last making reasonable earnings.  When told, she was duly impressed, and remarked, "And to think, most people would have had to work so hard for that."  I choked over my tea not wanting to laugh in her face.
     "A young friend of mine was asked what she did, and when she replied that she was a poet, the inquirer responded, amused, "Oh, I didn't mean your hobby." 

(Walking on Water, pg. 109 in her chapter on Names and Labels.)

 When asked who I am, I am an artist.  It is not a hobby, it is a way of living.  What do I do?  I make stuff, and to help make ends meet I work at a recreation center.  I know in my previous blog entry I mentioned my dissatisfaction with this, but the main dissatisfaction is in feeling that what I do is not a mainstream choice - I don't have a normal career like teaching, or nursing, or administration, or something in the sciences - I don't bring in very much money in what I do - and that somehow because of that I have failed.  But I shouldn't care how I am viewed in the eyes of the world.  I know it isn't the choice that brings in a lot of money, but it is a conscious choice.  I want to work part time because I need the space to create and to live and be and figure out this life thing that God has given me.  How can I live it and to the full?  I believe God provides, he always has and always will.  I have these moments of doubt when I am living outside of belief or maybe momentarily forget God's promises.  He created me to create.  I don't care about having a lot of money, I care about having enough.  God grants this, and more.  Not in the ways I expect, but in the ways I need, in the ways that fill my heart and soul to overflowing.

you know, jobs and futures and stuff.

I talked a bit at church today with a guy who is dissatisfied with his job, which I totally understood.  I told him how in January I quit my retail job and went the next four months without one... and he asked what I was doing now, so I told him about working at the rec center, which also doesn't sound like an ideal job.  If anything I feel like what I said would be discouraging - going from one non-career job to another.  But I feel like I am where I should be.  I feel like the rec center was God's answer to my prayers.  It's what I need right now - not a lot of money, but a low stress job that I can do while living and figuring out this making art and selling it thing.  I have an annoying relationship with the concept of "what I do."  I don't feel like the rec center is a "real" job and I don't feel like making stuff and selling it is either.  So what do I do?  Well, I make stuff and sell it.  And I sit at a counter and sell city spaces to people.  And I live.  Not on a lot of money, but God provides enough.  I feel like I've been treading water since I graduated from college, and I've been unsure how to use my life - how to let God use my life?  Sometimes I'm not sure whether the directions I think about going are mine or God's.  When I first came to Texas all I wanted was an excuse to run away - teaching English overseas sounded great at the time.  I don't want to run away anymore.  I think that's progress.  Now I'm trying to figure out why God brought me here in the first place.  I feel like he wastes nothing and has a purpose for everything, so why am I in Texas?  In Dallas?  In Duncanville?  Why did I study art?  Why was I born to linguists in the Philippines?  How will my story make sense?  At first I thought I was moving to Duncanville as an in between place until I figured out where I was supposed to go and what I was supposed to do.  But I'm realizing that my "in-between" place might be God's "destination" place for me.  It seems like he has a reason for leading me here.  I just haven't figured it out yet.

feeling blue...

I've cried every day for the past five days.  I don't know the significance of this.  I do know that it's not exactly acceptable to cry in public.  People ask you what's wrong, as if it's so terribly unnatural to cry.  Well, maybe it is.  Why do I cry?  So many things are changing that I can't control and that I have no desire to control.  These changes are good things, but letting go of old and letting in new is hard and scary.  For the last couple months I haven't cried a lot, so the need for it I think has been building up and maybe I'm finally at a place where I'm willing to grieve?  What am I grieving?  change, the things that are different now because of change.  I feel blue, but I also think I'm in a good place.  There are other things in my life that I wish would change that haven't, but I guess I'm a work in progress?  I don't know.  I felt the need to write something, so I turned to this illustrious blog.  It's nothing spectacular, just feeling like if I don't write I'll simply burst into tears again.  There is probably a whole list of reasons for the tears and to explain them I would have to tell you a story of my life over the last several years.  Yes.  Years.  Because those moments are what have led me to this one.  No moment is detachable from any others - life is a continual flow of moments, and to understand one, you have to have some understanding of all the moments that led up to it.  Why do I process life in a certain way?  You might have to return to my childhood upbringing in another country to begin to understand that.  Why to some things make me cry easily?  You would have to look at the experiences I have had that those things remind me of.

I cried through church on Sunday -- mainly through worship, but I was in a blue mood all morning.  Particularly moving was... "you're a good good Father, that's who you are, that's who you are!... and I'm loved by you... that's who I am, that's who I am!".... I think it particularly moved me to be reminded that God loves me.  Sometimes I feel like that ought to be an impossibility.  How could he love a sinner like me?!  But there is so much more to my tears than that.  Growing up really sucks sometimes.