How do you measure a year?

10 points to those who got the cheesy Rent reference.

Scott and I celebrated our first anniversary at the beginning of this month, and while we ate the top tier of our cake and relived all of the great memories from our wedding one year earlier, we couldn't get over how quickly this year has gone. In fact, it hasn't felt like a year at all (although I guess that's a good thing...it would be a bad sign if we were going, ACK, it's ONLY been a year???). When we were little, the idea of "a year" was so out of reach, so beyond my level of comprehension, that it seemed like "next year" would never come...yet here we are. I now understand what all those adults were saying over the years - "Enjoy it, it'll fly by before you know it;" "Watch it, you'll wake up one day and 20 years will have gone by." So true. It's so easy to go through life every day, doing the steps, performing the motions, without actually living it. How scary is it that we can wake up one day and wonder where an entire year went? In light of this realization, I have vowed to at least try and reflect more often on where life is headed, what I learned today, what God might be trying to teach me through the moments that I may see as insignificant. Hopefully, instead of waking up next year, maybe I'll simply go to sleep tomorrow thinking, "I lived this day."

I'm rambling, so in celebration of one year of happy marriage (even a year later, it still sounds strange to say "marriage" in relation to myself), new friends, and growth, here are a few of the highlights:

1. Clearly the wedding :) But aside from that, getting to experience each day's highs and lows, serious discussions about life and where ours should be heading, and lots of ridiculously silly moments, with my very best friend...it has been such a blessing to get to a different level of knowing a person you thought you already knew so well.
2. Moving to a new city in which I knew 4 people and making it (definitely with many bumps and moments of "what on earth am I doing here?", and in large part due to Scott's persistent encouragement and the help of those mentioned in item#3).
3. Making new friends - these people have made this year not just less hard, but great for me. I was so worried about being able to do this a year ago, and I've already found friends who challenge me and whom I trust deeply.
4. Keeping up with my best friends from Trinity and elsewhere, seeing where life is taking each of them, and continuing to be there for each other every step of the way.
5. Every Tuesday night (related to #3).
6. New perspectives - God has used my new friends, our church, and various other things to get me thinking in new ways, and I think my goals and life in general are headed in a direction I wouldn't have considered or even been aware of in June 2007.
7. Wine and boardgame nights with Hannah and the mod crew.
8. Dreaming, musing, and making crazy plans with Scott for what we will do in the next 20 years.
9. Making friends with the best 18 month old ever.
10. Realizing that the saying, "You can do anything for a year" is absolutely true. Case in point: my job...1 year of the purple suit down!
11. Gmail's Chat feature and being able to stay up to date daily with some of my best friends (shout out to the group chat crew, thanks for getting me through this year at work).
12. Learning to allow myself to be open to others - friends, family, God - to speak into my life. I don't, and shouldn't, have to make life decisions or bear the burden of worry by myself, and how precious that feeling of community is.
13. Happy hours with Hannah and the mod crew.
14. Pushing myself, and letting myself be pushed to consider new options for my life that are outside of my "Plan A." And Plan B, or C, or whatever it is I'm on at the moment, is shaping up to be so much better.
15. Discovering Freddy's Frozen Custard (mostly with Hannah, working on the mod crew).

So, here's to a year, and here's to the next :)

We Must Go

There has been a lot of discussion going on in recent weeks - in church, among friends, in my head - about what exactly it looks like to live out our responsibility to serve the least, last and the lost in our everyday. We have been wrestling with what it means to be truly present and available to a community of people whose needs are so tangible and whose struggles sit right on their doorstep (if they have a doorstep) for all to see every single day. What it means to live a life of service and compassion instead of acting it out one or two days a week. What it means to love without strings attached, without agenda, in word AND in deed.

Scott recently attended a conference in Nashville for people in the healthcare field who want to serve the poor and underserved in their respective communities. They talked a lot about community development and gave examples of communities that have been literally transformed and given a new start by people who cared enough to go there. Scott came back more excited and passionate than I think I've seen him, and as he enthusiastically explained their philosophy to me, I got excited as well. These doctors, social workers, nurses, public health workers, whoever, picked one of the most dangerous, poverty-stricken, gang- and drug-ridden neighborhoods in Memphis and established a huge clinic that now performs approximately 80,000 patient visits a year. That's great. But the truly remarkable part comes next: after several years of working in this area, establishing relationships with people, and making themselves available to people who needed them, a group of them got up and moved. Moved. To the ghetto. A bunch of white, formerly suburban, Ivy League-educated physicians got their wives and children together and moved to one of the most desperate and dangerous places in the United States.

Because they went there, they were able to get to know the people in the neighborhood, form real-life relationships, and show this broken, desperate community that they were going to live right alongside them. After a time, kids would stop by and hang out at the house with the doctors' kids. After-school programs were started, as well as skills classes for adults and teenagers. Gardens were planted. Parks and buildings were revitalized. Families were taught how to manage their money, take ownership of their careers and houses. People were taught that they mattered.

This all sounds amazing, doesn't it? To actually get up, stop just singing (see video in last post), and go? It's tricky, though. It's all well and good to sing every day about what we need to do or how to do it, but it's a whole different thing entirely when you are confronted with actually doing it. Going requires a complete renovation of priorities, ambitions, and thinking. I definitely believe that the willingness to make that kind of life change is only something that God can put in our hearts. And He can do that in so many different ways - I realize not everyone is called to move into gang territory and live next door to drug dealers. But what an amazing inspiration.

How do we know when, where, or how, we're supposed to go? I have no idea, but I'm praying that at least being aware of the need is a good start. It's a struggle, a process, that has to be cultivated and grown. We know that it has to happen - we know that we're not just supposed to sing. But just singing can be easy...Going is not.

Keep us from just singing

LOVE this song...it encompasses perfectly so much of what I've been wrestling with lately...more to come.