Simple Things

My dear friends, I'm not sure what to tell you about my life right now. The past few months have been outlandishly awful. Lost my job without being given a reason. Had to ask my parents for money to survive. Ouch. Hate that. had to let a good friend buy me a tank of gas. Went to my sister's wedding, saw all the family I haven't seen in years (except my favorite sister-in-law, but soon she'll be well enough to come see me!), and that was awesome. Got a great new brother out of the deal too! Definitely the highlight of my summer.

Leaving was hard this time. Last summer I was headed for a new place with all kinds of excitement, coming from 25 years near my family. But I've missed them a lot over the last year. And knowing I had no job to go back to didn't help. Don't get me wrong, I know I'm supposed to be in Nashville, and I love it here. I might not ever leave. Certainly not back to the midwest. But still, it was much harder to leave this time.

The next week, my favorite cat passed away. The vet said it looked like a heart issue that I couldn't have known about. By this time a lot of other random things had been thrown at me too, but it would take forever to take you through all of them. So i'm just going to highlight a few.

A couple weeks after Joey passed, I brought home a new kitten. I had concerns; the vet said to wait one more day and then bring him in. I woke up the next morning with a dead kitten in my bed. Talk about traumatic.

I gave 60 days notice to my apartment that I'd be leaving at the end of August when my lease was up. I had about 26 days left when the person i was moving in with decided we shouldn't live together. Just like that, I was scrambling to avoid homelessness. When I did find a place to go temporarily, I'm not allowed to have pets. So now I'm scrambling to find Phoebe a place to stay until I can find a place for both of us.

Had a big fight with my producer. To this point, we'd had only one intense conversation, that was more a misunderstanding than an argument. But it had shaken my faith in him. So this one, our first real, ugly, fight, was pretty rough. I had requested in the midst of the chaos in the preceding paragraphs that we wait on recording anything more and focus instead on writing until my life calms down a bit, hopefully mid-September. A couple weeks ago, he said something that raised some red flags with me about the fate of the project, so I confronted him about it. And not really in a great way. The dynamic that makes trouble is the fact that both he and his wife are two of my favorite people on earth. They know what my life looks right now. So he's refusing to work with me until he's satisfied that I can afford it. Though I appreciate the gesture, there's a lot more at stake in this than money. And we definitely disagree on the point where those factors outweigh each other. I am very much of the opinion that I'm the one who gets to decide where I want to spend my money. If I say I can do it, I can do it. It's my choice. In the spirit of protecting me, he vhemently disagreed. It got ugly.

By this point, I'm a mess. Complete. Mess.

But.

The other people in the house I've ended up in are really nice. If I could have pets, it would be a much more permanent place.

I have been surrounded by a group of incredible friends who have come together to help me. These are some of the best people I've ever known. The way they've rallied around me, even when I'm down so deep that I don't know what I'm doing or saying. They're awesome. I seriously have the best friends ever.

Ended up having a good talk with my producer where we agreed that we will finish the project at some point, somehow. And the details of that don't need to be discussed until we get there.

Found a job. I'm never too excited about cubicle land, but they pay me money.

God still loves me, even when I doubt it. Even when it doesn't feel like it at all. We had this incredible sermon from Revelation about how God feels about His people; how He takes us from being Babylon to being His bride. At the end, Derek Webb sang his amazing song "Wedding Dress." It's always been a favorite of mine, but that night it hit me hard again. The bridge says "money cannot buy / a husband's jealous eye / when you have knowingly deceived his wife." And I saw that everything I feel like I've lost, from my job to my record to my cat, and everything in between, was a deception. The lie is that they matter. That I should seek after them, that they can make me happy. The truth is that they're really just distractions. Jesus is the one I need. For now, I understand that. The cost to buy me back was indeed high.

I'm going to start a project. Every day, I'm going to take a picture of some part of my life and post it here. It's inspired by a friend of mine who has been doing it for about 50 days now, and I love getting little daily glimpses of her life. And inspired by another friend who has encouraged to notice the little things. So, here's today's.




One: "Immanuel's Veins"
This is a copy of Ted Dekker's latest masterpiece. In a trilogy of trilogies, it is the beginning of the end. The best part? It doesn't actually release for another 5 days. Amazon shipped it to me early for some reason. Maybe just so i can enjoy knowing the masterpiece before everyone else.