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three dog night

I'm housesitting right now, which gets me a trio of fabulous labs. Two are yellow, and one is chocolate. The chocolate one is blind, and he's the sweetest dog. I woke up this morning with all three of them on the bed again.

I don't feel like sharing much right now, largely because there just isn't much to talk about. I'm moving forward, I'm doing the work, but it's all just the same old slog. I'm low on insight. Everything I journal lately feels like a throwback to a page from three or four or six months previous. And yet I feel movement.

The fear is pretty strong right now, because there's part of me that does not want to move forward, does not want to acknowledge that if I'm putting my trust in God, that means less power for Sara and what Sara wants. It means that we're on the boat now and turning back isn't an option and if there's transformation we're just going to have to deal with that however it shows up.

I don't really have the option to get off this path now, and that's where a lot of the fear comes from. You know the part in the baptism service that says, "you are marked as Christ's own forever?" That's how I feel. I can keep running as long as I want to, but it won't change anything. And I want to run. I really do. It's like my heart is committed but my brain is holding back and saying, well, yes, but isn't there some sort of middle ground here where I still get to be in charge of some stuff? And hey, if I live for myself, isn't that sort of like living for God? Well, um, no. Doesn't work that way.

If I were a real Christian, I wouldn't be having this fear, right? I'd be all trust in the Lord it's easy happy clappy bite me. Yeah, well, I suck. I haven't found a way to just flip a switch and be in All Trust All The Time mode. It happens incrementally. Wait, not incrementally. It builds up like water behind a dam and then there's a little giving way of the inner defenses and then fwoom, there's a rush forward. So the fear and anxiety are busy shoring up that dam and keeping all that water in, because once it blows, nothing is going to be the same.

I think I just have to go off on my own for a while and let this happen.
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Tuesday, December 30, 2003

what I did on my Christmas vacation

We made it! Welcome to Christmas!

I had a really amazing Christmas Eve/Day, and I'm still trying to figure out what to talk about and how much. Let's just say that I screwed myself once by over-blogging something and I'm really hesitant to make that mistake twice. I have exciting new mistakes to make and need to focus on those.

I'm still dealing with a lot of fear, sometimes bordering on panic, but fortunately I have a lot of really great people in my life who are ready with a listening ear, a bottle of wine, or a gentle cluesticking, as needed. These are not gifts to be taken lightly.

My projects that got finished turned out well. My favorite was what I did for Dennis. I kidnapped a pair of his well-loved jeans and did some functional patching of the buttular area, followed by some interesting patching and embroidery to produce what I consider to be a fine pair of hippie pants. I know, there's something kind of odd about giving him back his own pants, but they were cooler! better! stronger! and weren't a couple threads away from revealing his underwear anymore, so that's something. I was so happy with them, I put my This American Life flaming squirrel patch on the back.

I tried to get some photos the day after Christmas but they don't really get the detail, so I need to give it another try. I'll put them on sewgeeky.com and post a link here when I do. I'm especially pleased with the fact that I managed to cover the coin pocket with Chinese brocade. I really want to work over a pair of my own pants at some point, but I'm currently vacillating between jeans in 3 different sizes and I don't know which ones have the most longevity power. Since all the cookie-bombing that went on here over Christmas didn't send me back to the Fat Jeans, I think I can say those are out of consideration, though. Yay. Seriously, working in a church - highest calorie job ever.

Interesting...the spell-checker on Blogger wants to replace the word 'blogging' with 'flogging' - what do they know that I don't?
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