Immortalized

Today I walked out of the job that I've held down for four years. Five, in May. After saying "I'm looking for a new job" for the past year since I graduated from college, I finally revised my resume, sent out my applications, had the interview, and put in my two weeks' notice.

I tried, OK? I tried to find something that would be "worthy" of me. I have a degree, for God's sake. I spent four (and a half) long years studying and writing and cramming and presenting so I could be the proud owner of a piece of paper with "B.A." scrawled across the top and give that dopey grin from the commencement stage to let my parents know, "See? This will dig me from the depths of student loans! This is the answer to all my questions of purpose and fulfillment!"

And then I got into the real world and realized it, like nothing else, is that simple. The jobs I thought I'd somewhat enjoy thought I "wasn't quite right for the position," and the ones I really wanted required fifteen more years experience than one recent college grad could possibly provide.

So I became desperate. I changed my way of thinking. Instead of asking "what would be worthy," I thought, "What would I enjoy?"

Novel concept, I know.

In the next week or so I will start as part of the custodial team at Cedarville University, like I did during my senior year there. As one of my dear friends so tenderly put it, I'll be a janitor.

If you're quick to wrinkle your nose, let me stop you right there. Do you realize what it's like to be a new adult these days? Particularly a new adult who is knee-deep in planning (and helping pay for) a wedding, up to her eyeballs in student loan debt, a recent homebuyer, and the proud owner of a clunky pickup that likes to fall apart every few months (preferably right before road trips)? Nutshell: it's expensive. And while my other half makes a decent living, I need to make more than minimum wage to pull my weight. Oh, and need I mention insurance: it's a fine-able offense these days to be caught uninsured these days. While it would certainly be ideal to hold out until a good-paying job that requires my degree comes along, I don't have the luxury to wait for that. In short, I'll take what I can get.



For those of you who don't know, I graduated in 2014 with an English education license. I, my friend, am fully qualified to teach English/Language Arts anywhere from seventh grade to twelfth grade. So naturally it's easy for you to sit back and say, "Well, hell, why aren't you doing that then?" And for those of you who haven't kept up with my story for the past year or so, I'll cut you some slack. But let me also fill you in:

To be a teacher means so much more than standing in front of a classroom full of bright young things ready to sop up the knowledge you come to bestow. Sure, you get summers off. But your work months are grueling for shit pay, and unless you have years of experience under your belt and recycle the same material every year (which you really shouldn't do, you should be constantly tweaking your material), you can kiss a social life goodbye. While I was doing my student teaching, I would teach for eight hours a day, then come home and work for another four to five hours every night developing lesson plans, writing tests, reading the material I got to teach my kiddos (luckily for me I actually enjoy Beowulf - I got to teach it four times a day for three months straight), and grading papers. (I once assigned essays to all seven of my class periods to be turned in during the same week. That was the nearest I've ever come to suicide.) Oh, and I was working sixteen hours every weekend. I think I went three months without a day off.

Long story short: this workload requires nothing less than 110% dedication, or you run the risk of hating your job, negatively influencing the precious flowers you get to instruct, and/or dying with your head in an oven. And life is far too short (and simultaneously much too long) to waste your time doing something you hate.

Dear friends, I've learned much in the last year-and-a-half. And the greatest of these lessons (aside from "don't put powdered sugar and candles on a birthday cake") is to find what you enjoy and do the heck out of it. Do not let money be a factor. My sister is living on the bare minimum in a city far away working theatre jobs left and right for shit to no money, and she loves it. I met a lady on Wednesday who's been a seamstress for decades, and while she has to work a day job on the side, she continues to alter dresses in her 114-year-old house because that's what she's passionate about. Do what you need to in order to survive, but for the love of God, do something you enjoy. And I, dear friends, love to clean for people. I love the idea of doing the same thing every day at my own pace and seeing the product of my labor when I'm done: what once was filthy is now sparkling. After five years at a job where nothing is predictable and playing the politics game is just as important as slapping on the fake smile for customers, I know enough to say I don't play like that.

And there's something deeper. Deeper and much, much more important.

I chose this job because of the pay, but also because of the early hours: I start at 5am, which means I have to be up by 3.30 to be there on time, but I'm free to go at 2 in the afternoon. While my weekends won't line up with my fiance's anymore, I'll be home in the afternoons to be with him. And this also gives me time to write. Because of all the things I imagined I could be, the thing I keep coming back to - the thing that I was born to do - is be a writer. I'm working on a book right now, and the nature of the gig combined with the time off gives me the opportunity to leave my job at work and make my passion a discipline every single day, while also giving me the stability of an income at a job that I enjoy.

It'll be a different lifestyle: I'm so used to driving two minutes down the road to the grocery store and working unpredictable shifts with people who are miserable and management that seems unreasonable. But I'm ready. It's time for a change. It's been time for a change for a long time. It's time for me to do what makes me happy. It's finally time for me to do what's best for me. And that, my friends, is so, so important.

Elephant

I just mailed our wedding invitations.

Now it feels real.

A year ago tomorrow Joey asked me to marry him, and I thought that next year would drag by. We knew we wanted a long engagement, and looking back I'm glad we did so we could take our time with the planning. (Stressed B is not a happy B.) And in some respects, this year did drag. Yet here we are, a little over two months from the wedding that has consumed our last 365 days (except for that super fun four months in the middle of it when everybody was falling apart - which, while the reason was awful, was admittedly a nice break), with only a handful of details to work out.  And while it's been stressful and at times not very fun at all, our special day will be a beautiful culmination of careful planning and detailed orchestration, an elegant kickoff to the journey that will carry us for the rest of our lives, the coming together of a couple of kids who don't believe in fate but know that they're meant to be together.

Someone asked me at the shower on Saturday if I was getting cold feet yet. I guess this is normal: the bride or groom suddenly has second thoughts and the blissful union runs risk of being scrapped. But while we've kicked ourselves at least once a week for not eloping months ago, I have to admit I have yet to have that "Father of the Bride" moment when I get offended about something and demand that all the gifts be sent back tout suite.

Trust me, I know what uncertainty feels like. I'm well acquainted with that quiet nag in my gut of "oh my God, I can't do this." I'm pretty good at deciding between irrational fears and that God-given wariness that this might not be the right decision. And while I've felt those feelings in nearly every single area of my life in the past eighteen months (well, five years, really), I have never once had those doubts about my marriage to my gentle giant. Of all the things that I worry about, of this I am most certain. Naturally I worry that I won't be a good wife and that thirty years down the road it'll all come crashing down revealing the illusion that it's always been, but those are merely the imprints of someone else's reality that I lay on top of our story and call our truth.

I have this feeling in my gut that we will work. We are one of those old-fashioned stories of two people who fell in love and will fight to stay together for the sake of a promise, an active commitment to something larger than our petty arguments and trivial anxieties.

I don't imagine that agreement will make it easier. But I'm a firm believer that anything worth having is made so much sweeter by hard work. I am ready. I'm ready for this next phase as the one we've been in for the last year will reach fruition in just sixty-five days. I'm ready to enter a God-honoring union with the man whom my soul loves.

I don't think I've been more ready for anything.

Christmas in Retail

This is the first year I've been at my job from the start of the holiday season (which began about two hours after Halloween ended) to the end. I worked on and off at a grocery store all through college, with the intention of getting a job worthy of my degree upon graduation. But graduation came and went last December, and here I am a year later, still stuck at a job for which I'm way too smart and viciously overqualified, ready on a daily basis to do battle with hateful customers as they vow one by one never to return to the store our manager seems determined to run into the ground.

And it's worse at Christmas. Dear God, it's terrible at Christmas.

See, that schmaltz about "good will toward men" is checked at the door when you work in retail. Of course, there are the rare gems: the German ladies admittedly a little disgruntled that you don't have the white chocolate she's looking for but realizes that it's that time of year when everybody wants white chocolate and it's not your fault you're out; the little old men who still say "Merry Christmas" from their motorized scooters even though it's not politically correct anymore; those saints who stand outside and ring the Salvation Army bells and say "hello" to you even though you've walked past them six times on your way in and out from the smoke hut; the ladies looking for turkey basters because their husband needs one for getting oil out of a machine at work and they're cool with the cheap-o kind because all the good ones have been snatched up by last-minute Thanksgiving shoppers and the shitty kind is the only kind we get in on a regular basis during the holiday season. They're not bad. Some are even downright pleasant.

And then there are the horror stories. We've all heard them. Some of you may have actually been them. In which case, shame on you. We're doing the best we can.

We cannot, for instance, order something for you that we normally don't stock, just because you bought it in Georgia and can't find it here. We cannot produce the kind of Keurig K-Cup you're looking for out of thin air just because someone "always manages to find them in the back" for you when you demand the brand-name kind and nothing else. We cannot scrounge through a tractor trailer full of boxes haphazardly thrown in because oh my God, it's freezing out here and I don't have enough feeling in my fingers to stack each box neatly on top of another for the single nutcracker you need. And dear Lord, if I have one more middle-aged man trying to sweet-talk me into letting him look through the eighteen four-foot-tall boxes of Hot Wheels backstock on a shelf ten feet in the air just so he can find the one collectible car he must have, I swear I'll take a shit on somebody's windshield.

You learn to pick and choose who you ask "can I help you find something". There's just that look that all difficult customers have. Normally it's a scrunched-up face as they stalk back and forth in front of the same four-foot section of shelving. Maybe venting to a total stranger about how "this store doesn't carry anything I want anymore." I know I shouldn't, but these are the people I normally direct to Walmart. After all, they probably don't have a manager who's an asshole and doesn't like to spend money on certain things (on, say, turning the damn heat on) because it comes out of his end-of-the-year bonus. I'm sure you'll find whatever you need there.

The absolute worst - and I mean, the absolute worst - department to work in during Christmastime is...well, every department. Nobody's exempt. If it's not a shortage of baking supplies that have the customers' panties in a bind, it's a lack of the Christmas lights that "I must have or my whole Christmas will be ruined and I'll personally blame you, lowly shelf-stocker who has no control over what is whipped every week and what isn't." Or it's this type of "Frozen" doll that "my child will literally die without." And don't even get me started on the assholes who scream in the back room (or, even better, march through the doors that say "employees only" and start looking themselves), "DO YOU NOT HAVE ANY MORE MILK?!??!?"

Perhaps you should not have come at 8.30 on a Saturday night - notoriously the busiest grocery-shopping day of the week - to buy that one product that nearly every household thrives on. I fail to see how this is my fault.

If I didn't value my meager paycheck, I would have told so many customers by not that no one is forcing them to shop at our store: if they're dissatisfied with the products we do or do not carry, go the hell somewhere else.

But I'm not allowed to say that. I get paid minimum wage to stand there smiling like an idiot and take abuse from inflexible assholes who think it's my personal responsibility to have their favorite product on hand at all times.

"I just stock the shelves, ma'am. Write to our manager. Though he just got transferred to another store and doesn't really give a shit either, so you might be better off to just keep griping about it while you continue to shop here."

At this time of year I am truly grateful to have a job. I look around and see so many other people who don't, and it's especially evident at Christmastime. But my time at this job has run its course, and while my job hunting has been put on hold as planning a wedding, buying a house, the recent bombshell with my parents, car troubles, working two jobs, and now the Christmas season have taken most of my attention, come the first of the year I'll start hunting again. But for now, I stock the shelves, build the displays, and handle the customers in whom the Christmas season brings out the worst.

A plea, dear friends: don't be "that customer." Retail workers are people too. We're doing the best we can in the busiest season of the year.

Merry Christmas, dear friends. 

The Tallest Man on Earth

A letter to the tallest man on earth:

You talk about living hell like we don't know what that is. You say you're stressed, you think it's hopeless, your heart is in pain.

How quaint, to suggest that you're suffering through any of this.

Living hell is when you hold your mom up while she bawls over a broken heart. Living hell is having the life ripped out from under you and the one who did it is standing there with it dangling from his hands, talking like you're the one to blame. Living hell is when the man who you thought could do no wrong, the one with all the answers, the tallest man on earth who taught you everything about money and God and cars and beer and work and travel and people and life is a liar and a fraud and a manipulative greedy spiteful son of a bitch.

Living hell is having to scrounge up an answer for your mother when she asks you at 1:30 in the morning why we weren't good enough for him.

I've asked myself the same question so many times.

You always pop up - never announced, never fanfare-ed, just 'pops up.' Like nothing has happened. Because to him nothing has happened. Everything's the same: we talk about the same things in the same clothes we wore before to the same jobs in the same places and we come home again to the same house with the same people and the same song-and-dance about love and devotion that doesn't mean jack fucking shit. Nothing's changed. Except it's like that iPhone 7 commercial: every goddamn thing has changed. In the house that was a home we have to calculate what we say like we interpret what we hear because what we don't immediate anticipate to be lies will be turned into an untruth to ease the pain of the man who started it all. Nothing simply said, nothing simply heard. Complications. What did you say? 'Semantics.'

You say we're having meatloaf, I get my spoon in preparation for chili.

You told me that a wise man said she's not my problem. My role is not to hold her together by the fraying seams, it's not my responsibility to pick up her pieces. Unluckily for you I read what that wise man really said, and it sounds a lot more like, 'it's between mom and dad and God.' He said nothing about being there for the one who's falling apart and so far that person hasn't been you. You seem incapable of change - the one who told me to constantly reevaluate myself to ensure constant growth. And so for now my relationship with you remains at the stalemate you've seen for the past month. I hope it's what you're ready for.

Then again I don't really give a fuck what you're ready for. We certainly weren't ready for the bombshell you got to launch from a comfortable million miles away.

You've been in Florida for a few days and it's been so nice knowing you won't 'pop in'. I'm actually dreading Thanksgiving this year and the thought that we might have to sit around a table together and pretend that everything's fine when we'd all rather being doing something - or in your case, someone - else. How will we handle Christmas because I don't know about the rest of them but I won't have gotten you anything. Maybe the empty cigarette packs that she's smokes over you. One for every time she's asked me why she wasn't enough for you.

Do not come home for Thanksgiving - this isn't a home anymore. You can pull that whole 'I'm here because my name is on the mortgage' card. Maybe the one about 'a man's home is his castle' again, that was a gem. No one in your kingdom wants to see you. And if you're the honorable 'king' you think you are, you'll honor your subjects' wishes.

I doubt you will, though. You'll do what you want. You always do. Why should this time be any different?

I hope you're getting the rest you were seeking in Florida. You certainly must be exhausted from your half-baked piss-poor attempts to make progress. Don't forget your sunscreen.

R.E.M.

Another end-of-the-world prediction is upon us. Supposedly a 2.5-mile-wide comet will smash into the earth in the next few weeks, thus marking "the beginning of the end." Don't worry: I've got my Spam hoard ready.

With all the recent baloney going on in the world these days - Syrian refugees, cops versus blacks, gay marriage, and the subsequent inability to have a public opinion unless it's the same as the majority - people all over my Facebook are begging God to come soon. (Since, you know, God doesn't take requests and professions of faith seriously unless they show up on His News Feed.) You would think by the time my generation came along that we'd be past all of these shenanigans of intolerance and petty argument. But with each new generation comes old wounds, passed down from parents, ready to be rehashed fresh again.

Old debates, new debaters. The same damn result.

I don't buy into the idea that "the end is near": I'm pretty sure we're closer than we've ever been, but I'm inclined to agree with the words of God Almighty that nobody can know the exact date. And while we're taking Biblical hints and turning them into predictions of worldwide destruction, let's flip to the end of the book and look at what is explicitly said. We have the "man of sin" to look forward to (and no, I do not think it's Obama. I don't like him but I'm not about to turn him into the Antichrist. Some people think it's the Pope but I don't have the authority or the energy to say one way or the other), and I'm particularly interested in the mass animal deaths (polar bears and honeybees, anyone?). The point of all this, though, is not for followers of Christ to panic and hole up in bunkers with crackers and Tang. A woman asked my mom the other day if her pastor was doing his part to prepare his congregation for the end times.

Be aware, sure; but fear isn't the right response to something like this.

If we're supposed to be different - and that is the essence of true Christianity: to be different from our natural tendencies and the world around us - then the proper reaction is not to throw our closed-minded, dogmatic opinions into the chaos, only to have it lost in the social media battle that's more focused on who has it loudest than who has it right. We should be doing what we can to ease the worries of those focused on the perils of the unknown. Talk is cheap, and at this stage in our history, talk is expendable: the more there is, the less potent it is. Try doing something instead. Quit panicking about the end of days and try using that energy instead to love people while we still have time. That "repent, the end is near" schmaltz doesn't work. It never has. So how about we try a new tactic and make the way we believe a little more appealing by focusing on the love part that was so emphasized by our God on earth and leave the spreading of fear and gloom to those who hold man's religion in higher esteem than genuine faith?

It's a novel concept, but it might fucking work.

Foosball

Dear friends, if you work best to music, you should check out Jason Isbell. A lot of his songs have the same style, but it's that calm, methodical rhythm that makes it easy to listen to music and write or do homework at the same time. The quality of his voice is country but his songs are folk-y, and you can tell that autotune hasn't been turned loose to ruin his authenticity. I've been listening to him for two days straight and I love it.

Saw a school bus trundle down my road this morning. Which is major throwing me off because it feels like Saturday and in my early-morning stupor I thought, "Why the hell is there a school bus on Saturday, there can't be that many kids for detention already." When I signed on to my computer I realized that "Getting Started" weekend at my college begins today. And it suddenly hit me that, for the first time in nearly twenty years, I won't be going back to school this fall. I haven't been scoping out what color notebook I'll pick in the back-to-school aisle at work. I haven't packed up the shit I've packed for the past four years and loaded it in the back of my mom's Yukon to pile into half a dorm room. While this summer has just felt like a normal summer, today it is coming clear: I am officially a graduate.

Though I have found that I like working much better than I do being at school. Which is comforting because I was only a student for a limited amount of years, I'll be working until I die and I might as well like it.

I've been having epiphanies left and right in the past few days. I'm starting to view this period that I'm in as merely a pause, a redirection of my focus while I'm sitting still between decisions. And trust me, much is going on during this pause - you know that saying "still waters run deep"? But I've been putting all of my focus on my employment status. And really, I'm ahead of the ball game compared to a lot of people. I have a job. Whether I like it or not doesn't matter when I look at the fact that I'm becoming financially independent and bringing a little less than half of an income to the household Joe and I are about to start. (246 days, but who's counting?) It's certainly not what I had in mind after graduation - if I had gone with that game plan I'd be hating my life in a classroom right now and would probably be even more depressed than I am right now. Then again I didn't plan on planning a wedding and buying a house after graduation either, and look where we are.

My dad encouraged me to read a devotional book called The Disciplines of Life by V. Raymond Edman. (I've attached the link to an online copy below.) It's broken up into different sections on disappointment, declining days, discontentment, discernment, disease, delight, delay - altogether about 30 different "disciplines" (that all conveniently begin with the letter "d") that grow and develop us into the followers of Christ we are called to be. Most of the time I don't have a specific issue in mind when I randomly choose what chapter to read, but last night when I picked "the discipline of detail" I realized about halfway down the first page that it was exactly what I needed to read.

The chapter presented the structure of our lives much like the structure of a sentence. (How fitting for an English major.) Some are complex, some are simple; but all have a specific subject and specific reason. Edman likened the punctuation of a sentence to the direction of our God - commas being additions, parentheses being those unexpected moments of trial and difficulty that we could all do without, and periods being the finality at life's end, hopefully as a declarative statement rather than a question. By putting ourselves as the subject of the sentence, our purpose in life becomes very shallow and unsatisfying; whereas putting our God and His calling as the subject makes our existence as part of something much bigger than ourselves.

In essence, what we see is not all there is.

What I am at right now is a semi-colon - a pause in events, a turn of the head as I shift from one God-directed path to another. Edman offers the biblical example of Paul and Silas being called to Macedonia, only to be tossed in prison once they got there. There is no mention of them messing up along the way and so being imprisoned as punishment; it's just a hiccup that they encountered on their journey to do as they were compelled by God. Edman writes, "God's semicolon...means that He wants to change rather radically the course [of your life]...that He desires to enlarge its content, and not at all that He has cut you off from or forgotten to be gracious...The Lord is changing the direction of your life, not to close it, nor to constrain its significance within narrow horizons; on the contrary, He wants to make it broader, deeper, richer; and therefore He puts a semicolon after a given line of thought that you would have desired to have continued" (131-2).

This is no crisis at all. I'm not missing the point, and I'm not going astray. It's just a change of direction. This pause is teaching me to be patient, which I struggle with almost on a daily basis. And so I will wait. I say it with such conviction but I really don't have a choice. In the past I've waited as a matter of pausing until I heard my God's approval, but now it's simply out of...well, lack of choices. Which I guess is sort of the same thing: I'm holding off until my God fires up the spotlight and says, "Here, do this thing." Supposedly the journey is more important than the destination, and it's a good thing because right now all we are is journey, I see no tangible destination. So at this point I'll turn off the car, grab a cold Coke, and kick back until the GPS gets its shit together and gets me back on the road.

You know a little earlier when I said I was depressed? I'm actually not. I tell you right now, I have never been happier than I am right here in this moment. I am physically able to go to a job every day and provide for my future, even if it's not as much as I'd like it to be or doing what I want to do. I have made it a point to use my passion for writing as much as I can, refreshing my soul every single day. I am making the most of the time I have left living in my parents' house, where I have deep breakfast talks with my brother and share coffee with my dad in the living room and cook dinner with my mom and talk to my sister across the hallway while we're getting ready in our rooms. I get to see the love of my life every day and I am counting down to the day when I become his wife and start a life with my best friend. And while I've had my fair share of griping over my current situation, I know that this pause is merely preparation for something else. This is the training ground where my patience and my trust in a bigger plan are growing leaps and bounds day by day. And that, dear friends, gives this whole phase a much bigger spin.

If you're interested in reading Edman's book (which I would highly recommend), you can find it here: http://www.ccel.us/disciplines.toc.html

Game

This morning I stood on my back porch, preparing to write the biggest check I've ever seen, let alone penned myself. Joe and I are buying a house. Which requires lots of money. We've been smart with our finances so far and we have more than enough for the down payment, but still the worrier in me (which is basically all of me) sinks under the covers and wonders, "What if something comes up? What about hidden costs? What about my students loans? What if my car takes a shit again?"

All these "what if's" that threaten to make me back out of this house that we want so badly. It's exactly what we're looking for. It's perfect for us. And yet the fear inside of me grips that four-figure check and says, "Hang on to it for as long as you can."

While I was standing there in the morning summer sunshine, a cardinal landed on the tree just off our porch. Everybody knows that God takes care of birds, so how much more will He provide for you, but I've mentioned in a few previous posts that cardinals are a different signal for me: from sophomore year of college when I was angry at everything to the week before I started student teaching, the red birds have whispered to me, "You'll be OK." This morning, though, something in my heart started singing:

Great is Thy faithfulness, O God my Father...

The minute we walked into the house, we knew that this was the one. Homeowners say they understand that feeling, and now we do as well. It goes even further back to last summer when I knew that Joey Gaut was the one, and that I wanted to be with him, and it didn't matter where. And for maybe the second or third time in the chaos that has been the last six months, I felt peace - delicious, unmistakable, wash-over-you-like-a-wave peace that this big adventure is falling into place in exactly the right way. We aren't acting on our own here. We are being guided and molded even as I write, and we are balancing being smart with being reliant on our God's promises.

If all goes well, we should move Joey into the house by mid-August. We both appreciate your prayers through this crazy process.

Happy Monday, dear friends.

Great is Thy faithfulness, O God my Father.
There is no shadow of turning with Thee;
Thou changest not, Thy compassions, they fail not:
As Thou hast been, Thou forever will be.

Great is Thy faithfulness! Great is Thy faithfulness!
Morning by morning, new mercies I see;
All I have needed Thy hand hath provided -
Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me.