Tag Archives: faith

Laura

Sabbath?

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I love when God chooses to communicate with me by (lovingly) slapping me across the face with clarity. Now that the Lyric‘s opera season has begun, I get a day off about every week to 10 days. Whenever that day happens to land on a Sunday, I am thrilled to be able to go to church. Today was one of those days! My beautiful 15 minute walk to church was spent mentally organizing all of the work I was going to get done when I got home. I have to work on the next opera role I need to have learned and memorized soon (since my days are now filled with sitting in rehearsals for the current IMG_2160role and understudy responsibility), memorize a number of arias in preparation for upcoming auditions, translate the massive German and Italian roles I have coming up (after the previously mentioned upcoming role), send in a couple of competition applications, catch up on emails, set up my upcoming Pub Theology meeting (yep, I’m a geek… I’m sure I’ll expand more on this venture in future posts), write this blog post, and do all the life things I don’t have time for during the week, like grocery shopping and laundry. That list was what I got done on my walk to church.

And then the sermon today was about the importance of the Sabbath and resting well.

As much as I personally HATE HATE HATE admitting to faults (the curse of the Wilde trait of “Always Being Right”… it’s a real problem), I have NO problem admitting that I do not rest well. I am terrible at this. When I was working with a fabulous therapist last year dealing with some situational anxiety issues, I was given the assignment to spend time “just walking.” I was told to wander aimlessly without going somewhere in particular, doing it for exercise, or listening to music I needed to learn. My therapist laughed as I literally shrank in my chair at the thought of doing something without a purpose. As much as I took pride in following all the steps to conquer my anxiety issues (I basically thought I was THE BEST at therapy. Ha!), doing all the exercises, and asking for regular assignments, I have yet to do this one, simple task.

I know how to relax, to sit and binge watch Netflix or lazily sleep in, but I don’t know how to really REST and to rejuvenate. The hard part of a job like mine is that the work is never done and 75% of the “work” I do is not counted as work hours. The translating, learning, memorizing, and figuring out how to sing each role is done before the first day of scheduled rehearsal even begins. How do you prioritize rest when there isn’t an end to improving the craft or knowing the languages well enough. Or there aren’t “work hours”? When you can’t delegate any work tasks to anyone else? Where do you draw the line when all that you really get paid for is the product? No one cares how much or how little work went into a performance, only that you can deliver. This self motivated aspect of the career is often difficult for the less naturally organized, artistic-types, but makes my type-A side light up with delight and motivation. However, it’s also very easy for me then to slip into a state of burnout and not realize it until it’s too late. If all of this rest stuff is that hard for me, I can’t even imagine how much more difficult it is for those of you who are also parents, like my sister. How do you do it?!

Binge watching Netflix is relaxing, but I end up just as drained as I was before. One question Brian, my pastor, asked today was “what activities in your current life fill you up and give you Life?” I paused and realized I couldn’t readily answer that. I remember discovering something similar when, after going on a couple of different dates, I couldn’t answer the “What are you hobbies?” or “What do you do for fun?” questions. I love spending time with friends, having good conversations, being involved with my church and small group, and have started this Pub Theology group, but I am primarily an introvert, without introverted activities. If I don’t refill my energy, all of those social fun things can become just as draining as work.

I have only recently started finding some introverted, life giving activities. This Blog has very quickly become a beautiful way for me to spend time with myself and process through varied aspects of my life. I’ve also started reading for fun again. I’m getting back into working out regularly and hopefully going on walks. The easiest thing for me, still, is to turn on the TV and veg out, but I’m hoping that will change as I train my body and mind to remember how much more fulfilled I am after an hour of reading or taking a walk.

IMG_1402But to be honest, the most important aspect of the Sabbath and resting well is God. I so often find myself leaving Him out of the equation when trying to get filled up by activities or external things. I feel like He quietly walks with me through each day, helping me take on struggles, carrying me when I’m depleted, and celebrating in my successes, all the while quietly and unobtrusively asking me to stop and spend some time with Him. He never leaves me, but wants to give me so much more each day than simply “getting through.” I’ve been reading Brother Lawrence’s book “The Practice of the Presence of God.” This was a man who invited God into every moment of his day, allowing God to give meaning to even the most mundane tasks. It’s overwhelming, inspiring, and at times discouraging when I compare Brother Lawrence’s approach to his life and mine: the amount of time I’ve spent complaining about the mundane, switching on my phone or checking social media every time I am without stimulation or want instant validation, avoiding interactions with people around me for fear of awkwardness, or assuming God has given me this voice and then peaced out on the process of developing it. But the truth is, I am not obligated to MAKE Him part of my daily life, I am invited to ALLOW Him to make his presence known and give meaning to every moment.

The Sabbath is my day to stop the craziness for a moment, spend time with the One who gave it all to me, and reorient my heart and mind back to Him. I know I will fail over and over, allowing this crazy career and life’s trials to overwhelm me and give me tunnel vision, but the soft voice of an invitation to stop and rest will always be there.

Kristin

The Agony and the Sehnsucht: How I find the Fabulous in the Common

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Laura’s beautiful post on sehnsucht got me thinking this week (if you haven’t read it yet, you should! My post will make much more sense!).

What is it that allows me to find fabulous in the common?

It has been a particularly challenging couple of weeks. So digging down to find beauty in cleaning up the 37th pile of cat puke or the 102nd glass of spilled soapy-glitter-water-fairy-dust-concoction may have produced a few mumbled expletives and much more yelling and fist pounding than was necessary.

So, I started watching for the transcendent beauty around me.

Sigh.

I wish I could say that I find all my inspiration in the sweet smell of sehnsucht wafting out of a panoramic sunset, woven through the tiny intricacies of a monarch resting in Nick’s garden, or intertwined with Lidia’s infectious laugh.

But I can’t.

Often now, this soul-nourishing beauty is crushing, deflating and debilitating. I return to my life, look around, and can only see the drabness, the endless monotony and frustrations. I think partly it is the season of life in which I find myself, where the sum of my daily efforts do not culminate in a beautiful aria that allows people to reach out to infinity. Right now, because of the huge number of pressing, urgent daily needs, it is so easy to get lost in the world that only surrounds my immediate family. However, over the past few days, I spent a lot of time thinking and rediscovering the lens through which I am able to discern the fabulous hiding in the common.

I need to see the agony of real life juxtaposed with the beautiful foreshadowing hope of sehnsucht. Then I need to let this juxtaposition inspire me to confront the agony and work to bring the reality closer to the hope.


I first experienced this my senior year of high school when I spent two weeks at The Channel, a school for kids living in a favela of Fortaleza, Brazil. I spent the entire trip completely dumbfounded. I had never before seen such extreme poverty right next to such extreme wealth. I had never seen such pain. Such despair. Yet, I honestly had never seen such hope, drive and joy as I did in the kids who attended the school. At the school, the kids were told they were important and their life had a purpose. They were given a hope, a glimpse of what should be. They all lived in a nightmare, but those kids did not let the darkness engulf them. They looked outside of themselves, saw the light in each other, and helped carry the pain of their friends and family. Despite the darkness, the sehnsucht let them see even the tiniest bit of light and beauty in the most common things – homework, laughing with a friend, a bowl of bland rice, a barefoot game of soccer.

 It completely changed me.

There is something forcefully moving for me when I am reminded of the depths of the darkness that exists in the world. It drives me out of my narcissistic pity party. It puts my challenges into perspective and helps me distinguish between real hardship and mere irritation. It allows me to see my prosperity more clearly and share it with others. It helps me identify, ask for and accept when I really need help. The menial, monotonous and mundane tasks that make up most of what I do each day suddenly seem like a gift, because the utter darkness makes even the faintest light seem like a beacon. Suddenly, sehnsucht is not a taunting spotlight that only serves to illuminates how lacking my life is, but is the aspiring hope that gives me the inspiration to fight the darkness.

I really only want to see the beautiful. But I realize that I need to accept them both together, the agony and the sehnsucht. The excruciating beauty that ignores the present reality makes my life seem unbearably common. Facing the agony without the hope leaves me utterly forlorn. Sehnsucht gives life meaning and hope. Agony forces me to have drive and purpose.


I think this is why we are called to bear each other’s burdens. It is why it is so important to us that we cultivate a habit of service and outward thinking in our girls. This is why we are filling up our garage with other people’s garbage. This is why I love organizations like The Channel and Preemptive Love Coalition, who confront the agony, but inspire us with the hope and beauty of sehnsucht.

Because it helps me to see the fabulous in my own common, and inspires me to diminish the agony of others. If I could only just remember. 😉

Kristin

The Dirty Truth About Working From Home

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The start of this blog fell smack in the middle of a grant-writing consultancy. I knew it. I thought about it for about 14 seconds. Then I shrugged my shoulders and decided to start the blog anyway, knowing I wouldn’t be able to post anything until I turned in my draft. In a way, it was a good reminder of the dirty truth about working from home.

When I first started working from home, I thought, “This is amazing! I don’t have to pay for daycare, I get to spend wonderful quality time doing all kinds of inspiring projects with my kids and I get to have the freedom to work whenever and pick and choose my jobs! I can have it all!”

Wrong.

The dirty truth is, working from home while trying to stay home full time with the girls is a lot less fun and much, much harder than I ever expected.

Being home full time, in particular, is very challenging. It’s actually really hard for me to admit this. I have a LOT of fun at home with my kids. We go to the beach in the middle of the week. I get to have coffee with friends on play dates. I can hang out in my jammies all day and sleep in on those rare days that my kids also sleep in. Nick and I both gladly made the choice together that we would make financial sacrifices so I could stay home.

But…

I find myself constantly feeling I need to validate my usefulness to society, justify the thousands of dollars spent on my master’s degree, and to do something each day that cannot be undone by sticky, boogery little hands.

I grew up desperately wanting to stay home to raise children while simultaneously travel to exciting places and do big, important things. I knew somewhere in my subconscious that these two things were simultaneously incompatible. But the desire for both is still there. So when Nick started his graduate program 5 years ago, partly out of the necessity to bring in supplemental income and partly to satisfy my need to feel useful, I created a watered down version of both these desires. I found myself trying hard to do both things and doing neither very well.

I plunked my kids in front of the TV or, when I felt guilty about the amount of TV they were watching, I would stay up into the wee hours of the morning while I worked frantically on meeting a grant deadline. Cleaning stopped. Doing dishes stopped. Laundry stopped. Cooking stopped. Enjoying my children and husband stopped.  Exercise stopped. Sleeping stopped. Enjoying life stopped.

Then I would spend the next two weeks after a consultancy trying to piece our life back together and cleaning up the mess left behind. If I had enough time in between consultancies, we would reestablish some sense of routine and normalcy, and enjoy some beautiful time together before everything started all over again.

Surviving.

I feel like we’ve been just surviving for years now, probably due to the lethal combination of my terrible habit of overcommitting myself, Nick’s incredibly intense doctoral program, being very financially strapped, and discovering all three children have some major health issue.

Everything came to an explosive halt this past fall. I completely broke down. Nick shut down.  The girls melted down. It was ugly. Something had to change.

We are slowly working out a new normal. I am spending time alone NOT working. I started running and taking pilates. Nick and I started having dates again. I started doing creative projects with the girls again. I am cultivating friendships. I am working on saying no to projects that have too short of a deadline and trust that the money will come when we need it. I am considering other work possibilities. I am spending more time in prayer.

But mostly, I am changing my attitude. There was a time when I was focused on living vibrantly in the now – realizing that every moment is a gift that may not be here tomorrow. I easily forget these things when my survival mentality creeps back in. But then I read something that reminds me, like a punch to the gut.

I am looking for the joy and sacredness in the tediousness of things I do not enjoy and am not very good at – never-ending laundry, wiping poopy butts, washing dirty dishes, constantly dumping pee out of the little potty, the endless cooking and living in a house that is never quite organized or clean.

Much like my sister, I am working on being patient with myself when I work really hard at things that feel like they are never going to change.

It’s a work in progress. But I’m learning to realize that is okay, too.