An Advent inspired reflection on identity

First, welcome to Advent. We started ours by having Allen's folks over for lunch and setting up our tree in the window. There aren't any lights or ornaments on it, but there is a tree in the window :) I should add that despite growing up with this monumental artificial tree (seriously, it was awesome) we're natural tree fans around here :) Can't beat 'em.

Our Sunday wound up with us at Andrew Peterson's "Behold the Lamb" concert, and we enjoyed hearing him and all the wonderful people touring with him. It was an odd sensation though - I attended one of his (possibly the first) concert he did in our area. I'd heard him on the radio and bought his music, and then I sat on the second row of a modest sized church and sang along with every song. I was probably a freshman or sophomore in high school. It was a rough time in my life. All family matters aside being 14 or 15 is just hard. You're starting to deal with freedom and attraction and all that painfully true rubbish about "finding out who you are" and beginning to map out your destiny beyond next month's dance or a summer trip to the mountains. In my case, it was compounded by family issues and by my having absolutely no clue how to dress. Dorky girls with glasses are cute in movies, but for all the heartwarming endings and comeuppances to cheerleaders and the like I don't think any of us actually envy her or want to be her. And yet, while sitting there listening to Andrew Peterson and Eric Peters and I'm not sure who else I was terribly happy. His music, like that of Rich Mullins, has come with me as I grew up and went to college and got married and bought a house where Allen and I try to remember that we're adults with Responsibilities and not just the kids we were ten years ago. It's a small thing and yet significant.

Sometimes my life seems divided into halves. There's the part where we lived in Georgia and the part where we bought a house in Alabama and the part where I met Allen. There's the massive rupture where marrying Allen seemed to break something sharp and fragile and yet beautiful and permanently divide who I am from who I was.  I tease people that estrangement makes the holidays so much easier, but they also make them more fragmented. Without those shared rituals that define us it's hard to maintain a consistent identity. It's particularly hard when you wish to scrap the essence of a flawed identity and still hold onto a recipe, a vacation spot, or a turn of phrase. We sort the shards of who we are from the broken mirror of our past and struggle to put them back together.

Sitting in that much larger church with Allen beside me, some of those shards came together. Reflected back in the music I was hearing, I could see a girl with loves and longings who had grown up into a woman carrying with her those same impulses and desires. That girl who used to stare dreaming up at the night sky while our rv rumbled across another state is the same woman who stopped the car one cold spring to count waterfalls by moonlight. With all the changes of the past ten years my love of beauty and poetry in song has remained constant. Rich Mullins and Andrew Peterson taught me that the Gospel is wherever you see it. A penny, a fallen tree, a falcon circling - in all of these things God's glory is revealed, and I'm driven along by it's beauty. Where this drive will take me I honestly haven't a clue. I'm not a poet to teach these revelations to others or a mother to impress them on my children. I'm simply Natalie. And, since God hasn't made me any of those other things, I suppose it's enough for now.

Ruminations from Tornado Alley

Some of you may know about the massive storms that ripped through Alabama last week. There were something like 35 tornadoes that day, whole neighborhoods blow apart, and hundreds of people dead. Driving through parts of Tuscaloosa reminded me of footage from Iraq right after the invasion. One moment you're driving through an ordinary downtown area and the next it looks like the street has been shelled. I've honestly never seen anything like it.

A friend of mine said that she was going down to help out, so I volunteered to go with her. A friend of hers was heading up a team from the diocese to sort and transfer donations to some of the harder hit outlying areas. Having seen the pictures I'm all ready to roll up my sleeves and start tossing bricks or handing out water or do something mildly awesome and heroic. Instead I found myself with a clipboard in hand writing down how many diapers and hygiene packs were heading down in a van to poor, rural Eutaw (pronounced Utah). Then I hopped in the car with my friend and a couple more girls to follow the trucks and vans down and sort out all the supplies onto shelves. That was it. I wrote down an inventory sheet and then helped to sort out soup and bottled water and cans of tuna. I didn't see much reward for my labor. I didn't even see much labor for my time. It honestly seemed like a complete waste of all my heroic intentions. Talking with my friend on the way back she mentioned that service was a great way to bring people together because when you serve it's all about giving of yourself - there's no room for "me" when you're serving. I wish I could agree with her. The whole time I was there a part of me was thinking "Look, God I'm doing something awesome. I'm giving up my Saturday to help tornado victims. I've even got a pair of gloves. Surely you have something more important for me to do than count diapers." Wah, wah, wah. Not very noble or self-sacrificing I don't think. But it reminds me of so much of life. We show up thinking that God is surely going to let us do something awesome when really He just wants us to count diapers. We're like a bunch of little kids begging to lift that really heavy log and having to be content with sticks. Sometimes, we aren't that awesome. We go to the right place with the best intentions and then we sit around thinking about much cooler the other aid tent is. It's not about us. But we make it about us. In our own little minds it's always about us.

So I'm glad that I went to Tuscaloosa. It reminded me just how much I don't love people. It reminded me how much I want to pose for the cameras and be a "hero." Yeah, I went down there with good intentions. With a different crew I might have learned a completely different lesson. My compassion might have been touched. I might have learned love and teamwork and service. By God's grace I believe I'm capable of learning and doing all those things. But, today, I learned again that all my righteousness is a shabby cover-up for my own expansive ego. Unfortunately I expect we'll be going back home before I can really get my hands dirty rebuilding this state I love. God bless those cans of soup I counted. Because, despite the unflattering lesson I learned, I really did go down there to give my best.