Lent.

I know we’re already almost a week into most of the Lenten traditions of this time of year, but I’ve been on the move for the past five days and haven’t had a chance to catch ya’ll up on my life. Last Wednesday, I drove to Pittsburgh to work a few days from the office there, and I also got to spend two nights with M, which was a particularly special extra since we don’t frequently get to spend weeknights together. It was just a little glimpse of how our life might work after this time apart is over, and it made me both giddy and a little bit sad. There’s something that feels a little bit grown-up about getting up early, getting ready and leaving for work together in a flurry of shaving cream, high heels and briefcases. But it also made me just the tiniest but resentful that we can’t live like that right now. Resentful of my job and my decision to move to DC and the distance between us. But for now, I know this is what’s best for us, so I’m focusing more on the infrequent moments that we get to share these types of mornings.

On Friday, I headed to Philadelphia to celebrate my cousin’s 25^th birthday and see my family. It was so lovely to see these special people in my life, and though I left Pittsburgh feeling lonely and sad, I felt so loved, relaxed and joyed this weekend. The anniversary of my uncle’s passing was on Wednesday, and though that sadness shrouded this week, we spent the weekend remembering happy memories of him and talking about so many of the funny things he said. It was really special for all of us.

Anyway, after spending the past four nights in four different beds, I’m supremely grateful to be back in my little nook of Virginia tonight. And in fact, I’m planning on being here for the next THREE weeks. This coming weekend, I’m looking forward to a visit from M, and the following weekend I absolutely can’t wait for one of my dearest friends from high school to visit. I might actually be able to buy more than three days worth of groceries this week.

Now, back to the real reason I started this post—Lent. Let’s start by saying that I’m not Catholic. Not that Lent isn’t an important season in other forms of Protestant religions, but it doesn’t seem to be marked with the same traditions as the Catholic faith. And I don’t know much about the origin of the “giving something up” ritual, but I like the idea of making room in your heart and soul and life for God by giving up something that takes you away from Him. That’s always a good thing. However, the part that I have a hard time understanding is how giving up Diet Coke would make me feel a greater presence of God in my life. I’m thinking that it has something to do with self control and sacrifice, but somehow it doesn’t come across that way for me. That’s probably why I have a hard time understanding it. I also don’t really get the whole “no meat on Fridays” thing, and I always give M a hard time about it. If someone could explain that tradition to me and where feeling God fits into no-McDonald’s-on-Friday, I would very much appreciate it. M would too so I can finally get off his back.

Back to the story. So, this year I decided I was going to give “giving something up” a shot. But it couldn’t be Diet Coke or sushi or blogging or Twitter because those things all bring me a lot of joy, and I don’t find that they interfere with my time with Jesus, so that doesn’t seem like the right thing for me. In fact, it seems like my biggest obstacles in feeling God most clearly are all around my reactions to other people. I let myself get mad or offended or unhappy or hurt because of the way I let other people affect me. That infiltrates my heart and blocks out anything good or beautiful, like God, because I get so encompassed by these feelings. That’s definitely not good.

So this year, I’m trying something really hard. I’m giving up “not celebrating other people’s happiness” for Lent. I am surrounded by lovely people. I have amazing friends and family and coworkers. And by the grace of God, these people have wonderful things happen in their lives. They get promoted and get engaged and have babies and buy new cars and new homes. They have really great days and find big happiness and make delicious dinners and have fancy purses and shoes. And I am so, so proud of them for all of these things. But I’m also a little bit jealous, and that jealousness douses the flames of joyousness in my heart. I don’t allow myself to enjoy their joy because I’m comparing their great achievements to my shortcomings. And that’s not fair…for me or for them. I want to experience unencumbered happiness when great things happen in my friends’ lives. I want to burst with love and scream and cry with the amount of love I feel for them. I don’t want even the teensiest little bit of jealousy to get in the way of my celebration of them. So for Lent, and hopefully for seasons beyond, I am giving up not celebrating. I am carving out that piece of my heart and making room for only love, only happiness and only God.

To me, this seems to be what Lent is about: looking outward, looking beyond one’s self, finding God in bigger and brighter and more significant ways. Preparing our hearts for the death and resurrection of Jesus by honoring him in the best way we know how.

To making space this Lent,

Lia

Crazy week.

I had a really great blog topic planned for today. Insightful, thoughtful, interesting. But that his going to have to wait because tonight is one of those nights where I feel like I’m starting to unravel. I spent the whole day travelling for work, which made me behind on my day-to-day responsibilities. Plus, I’m going to be in Pittsburgh Wednesday afternoon through the end of the week, giving me just a short four hours in the office tomorrow morning to do the work that I usually do in 40 (or 50 or 60). On top of that, my apartment is a mess, I meant to go to the gym, I need to wash all the laundry that I brought BACK from Pittsburgh yesterday, and I’m just really tired.

Maybe this night is being difficult for me because I came off of such a wonderful weekend. Monday was a bank holiday, so I had an extra day to spend in Pittsburgh, and my mom and I had a great day outlet shopping and going out to lunch. We celebrated my dad’s birthday, M and I celebrated Valentine’s Day with my favorite Chinese food, I saw my “little sister,” we had lunch with my cousin and her husband, and I got to celebrate two very important milestones with my best friends from home: the first engagement among our group of friends and the 25^th birthday of one of my dearest friends. It was a weekend of love and celebration, and I felt really close to all of these important people in my life.

But tonight, all of that seems far away. I’m unpacking and repacking, I’m gathering up the mounting piles of trash (and wilted Valentine’s Day flowers), I’m microwaving dinner, and I’m responding to emails for work and otherwise. But, never the less, I am so excited to be heading back to Pittsburgh tomorrow. I know I should be looking at this week of craziness as a blessing. I get to see M two more nights this week. I get to catch-up with some of my favorite coworkers in the Pittsburgh office. I’m receiving an award at a work dinner on Thursday night. And, I’m so looking forward to seeing my family in Philadelphia this weekend to celebrate the life of my uncle and the 25^th birthday of my sweet cousin. Bittersweet for sure, but more sweet than bitter, I think.

I guess that’s all I’ve got for today. Next week I will be better about blogging and cover some of the topics that I’ve had on my mind. Lots to think about, for sure!

To crazy weeks,

Lia

Valentine's Day

Ah, Valentine’s Day. Under normal circumstances, I think this might be a holiday that I would like. It’s traditional, it’s intimate, it’s a time to celebrate the love in our lives. This might be romantic love, this might be best friend love or family love or baby love or self love. We have so many holidays that focus on gratitude, peace and joy…but we don’t have too many holidays that allow us to solely focus on love.

If you’ve been reading my blog this month, you know I’ve been a little glass-half-empty on love this February. Fortunately, today feels a little bit different. I know a lot of single ladies (and gentlemen) who are feeling down this day, but I also know a lot of ladies who have reached out to their lady friends and told them how much their friendship means to them. I’ve gotten numerous emails, texts and phone calls today from the ladies in my life telling me how much they love me on Valentine’s Day.

I think we take this day too literally. We don’t have just one valentine that we have to wait for cupid to align us with if we haven’t been lucky enough to find him or her already. We have valentines in our friends, family, boyfriends and girlfriends, co-workers, teachers and mentors. We don’t need candlelit dinners and prix fixe menus to celebrate the love in our lives. What we do need is open hearts and the courage to acknowledge the love that makes us happy, lifts us up and encourages us.

I have a friend whom I admire very much in her ability to love. She LOVES love. She loves romantic love and friend love and family love and self love and stranger love. Her heart doesn’t know how to be jealous. When I tell her sweet things M does for me or how much I love him, I know she’s sharing in my joy. Her heart loves that my heart loves. I am frequently guilty of comparing other people’s love to my own love. If a friend’s boyfriend does something incredibly darling, I wonder if M would do that for me. If someone’s family has a lovely way of showing love for each other, I wonder if my family feels that way. When I see someone be kind to a stranger, I wonder if I would give that love to a stranger. But we don’t get anything from comparing our love. There is more than enough to go around. It’s like that old cliché about lighting a candle. It takes no light away from my own candle to light someone else’s. In the same way, it takes no love out of my heart to love someone else’s love, to give more love, to grow the love I already have.

So on this Valentine’s Day I am loving all the love I have, loving all the love YOU have and finding ways to grow all the love in my heart.

To love,

Lia

Sweet Jesus.

I’ve had Kanye stuck in my head all weekend. I’ve been singing the refrain to “Made in America” while vacuuming, volunteering, shopping and lounging around this weekend. Sweet mother Mary, sweet father Joseph, sweet baby Jesus…

Maybe that’s why I was feeling particularly called this morning when I headed out to church. I’m ashamed to say that I don’t have a church that I call home in DC. I’ve been to a few, but I haven’t found a place where I’ve really felt like I’ve found my “church away from home.” Maybe it’s because I have such sweet memories of my two home churches that I have a hard time feeling the presence of God as deeply as I do in those two special places. But this morning I checked out a Methodist church in my neighborhood, just a few blocks from my apartment. I followed these two little old ladies into the church, and the fact that they instantly knew I was a visitor should have been my first clue. These two sweet ladies instantly busied themselves by getting me a hymnal and a bulletin from the stack in the lobby and introduced me to the pastor. Very sweet.

After making my way into the sanctuary, I knew why these ladies and the pastor had looked at me like fresh meat. The entire congregation was made up of seven tiny white-haired ladies sitting in the front two pews. Not only was I approximately sixty years younger than everyone in the room, but I was also the only one not sporting either an appliqued turtleneck or a velvet blazer with huge shoulder pads. Never the less, I quietly took a seat a few rows back and instantly each of the seven little ladies hobbled my way (some more easily than other) to offer me a frail hand and a warm smile. “So good to see you, sweetheart” they told me. Did they think they knew me? Or were they really just surprised to see someone with many good baby-making years left on her in their congregation. Strange as it was, it was oddly comforting. There is something about grandmotherly figures that make me feel like the most honest presence of God. Maybe it’s because my own grandmother is one of the most intentional people I know about her faith. She makes it to Sunday worship unfailingly, she does her prayer chain willfully, she prays for us unconditionally.

The service continued to surprise me. Of the seven ladies in attendance (eight including me), three made up the church choir. One was responsible for the fellowship hour, so we were a little light in the audience during the last hymn. The pastor (a spring chicken compared to these ladies…probably in his sixties), was decent, though I think his analogies were a little off. During the sermon about Jesus healing leprosy, he was trying to pull a connection between Jesus, who swore his patient to silence wanting to protect his own celebrity-ness, and Kevin Fetterline. About ten years too late (um Kim Kardashian, anyone?) and not the most powerful association, but I’m willing to buy it.

But despite the strangeness of the service, I had a few important realizations that I’d like to share:

1. Churches exist in lots of shapes and sizes. There are huge cathedrals with standing room only on Sunday morning and tiny chapels like this one with just a few strong followers of God. But the size of the congregation is in no way related to the strength of faith or the presence of God. A powerful connection to God can happen in the tiniest and the largest of places.

2. There is a generation of women like my grandmother who loved God so profoundly. Not to say that there aren’t strong believers among people of my generation, but frequently the most faithful women I see are like those tiny old women in church this morning. I don’t know whether it’s because these women have been around so much longer and have had their faith tested more times than my peers or whether they were just raised in a more spiritual time than we are today. I’m not sure, but I know I need to take advantage of the years I have left with women of faith like my grandmother.

3. Lessons from Jesus are happening all the time. Even when a sermon doesn’t speak to me intensely or when I skip church or when I find my mind wandering (as much as I try to concentrate), there is always an opportunity to learn something from God. He tests us, tries us, lifts us up, blesses us all the time. We don’t need to be inside the four walls of our home church to find God in powerful and deeply moving ways. God is truly our hearts, in our stories, our experiences and our actions. We are our own home church, and we take that with us wherever we go.

I’m writing this as I’m watching the Grammy’s. Adele sounded and looked so stunning, and tonight I’m grateful for all the beautiful music.

To sweet baby Jesus,

Lia

Biggest Flaws.

It’s Saturday night. I’m sitting on the couch in huge sweatpants watching “The Hangover,” eating Cheesecake Factory takeout, drinking mimosas and casually reading my Kindle. I’m still working my way through Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Committed.” I was kind of half-reading, half-watching the movie, half-slurping away at my drink. I hadn’t blogged for a few days, and I didn’t really know what to write about. I’m still feeling the February bitterness. Feeling it especially keenly this weekend as couples all over the country are celebrating Valentine’s Day with romantic dinners and red roses. I’m eating Bistro Shrimp Pasta with Korbel and watching possibly the least romantic movie of the century. But then I got to a passage in my book that made me put the TV on mute so I could concentrate, and I literally had to stop reading to blog about it because it was such a powerful thought for me.

I should start by giving you a few details on the book in case you haven’t been following Ms. Gilbert’s journey since “Eat Pray Love” was published. So she fell in love with a passionate Brazilian man during the last phase of her trip in Bali. She was recently divorced--so was he. They were madly in love in the most romantic, pure way, but they had promised themselves (and each other) that they would never get married again. They would mate for life, but never marry. Never share bank accounts. Never own property together. Never take each other’s last names. Then her partner was detained at the Dallas Fort Worth airport for suspicions on the frequency of Visas he was requesting to spend time in the US with Liz, his love. He was deported, and the officer suggested that the fastest way for them to be together in America (where Liz’s family, career and life existed) was for them to be married. Not an unusual suggestion for two adults in love, but this proposition was in direct competition with the life they had planned for themselves. The book is Liz’s journey in researching, contemplating, questioning what marriage is: why we get married, why we get divorced, how love flourishes in other cultures and how we can protect ourselves and our partners from making the biggest mistakes in our marriages.

Anyway, sorry for that digression. Let me share a passage from the book with you. As an attempt to prepare her partner for what a life with her will entail, Liz proceeds to list out her flaws matter-of-factly, prepared for her fiancé to run as fast as he could, but he responded with something I found so lovely, thoughtful and true that I need to share it on my blog:

People always fall in love with the most perfect aspects of each other’s personalities. Who wouldn’t? Anybody can love the most wonderful parts of another person. But that’s not the clever trick. The really clever trick is this: Can you accept the flaws? Can you look at your partner’s faults honestly and say, “I can work around that. I can make something out of that”? Because the good stuff is always going to be there, and it’s always going to be pretty and sparkly, but the crap underneath can ruin you.

So in an effort to be honest about who I am and the challenges I cause in other people’s lives, I’m offering up a list of my biggest flaws—the things I’m most disappointed in about myself. The things I try to hide, but rarely successfully. M—listen carefully:

1. I am not good at forgiveness. I hold my friends, family and acquaintances to frequently impossibly high standards, and I don’t let things slide. Once someone has racked up an injustice against me, it takes a long time for me to completely trust that person again.
2. I am not a friendly person. I don’t make friends easily. I don’t like striking up casual conversations with strangers or even people that I don’t know that well. Why am I in sales?
3. I am an indulgent person. I sleep in; I eat bad food; I lay on the couch. My perfect day does not involve going to the gym, waking up early or anything particularly strenuous.
4. I am the polar opposite of an open book. I don’t like to share my feelings, and I don’t like to talk when I’m upset. I feel like people should know when I’m upset and then fix it for me. It works in the opposite way too. I don’t share my happiness. I expect others to realize the good things that have happened to me and congratulate me, and I get frustrated when they don’t.
5. I am not good at asking for help. I would never admit that I’m in over my head. I’ll just become a miserable, angry person trying to do it all. And then come home and cry alone on my couch.

Those of you who are reading this that know me well might be thinking that the list is much longer. I’m sure it is. Those are the top five that seem to challenge me most frequently. These are the wrongs that I repeatedly commit, even though I know I’m doing them. Even though I know I’m causing harm to myself and others. I’m not listing these flaws out because I think I can change them or because I want to announce to the world how awful of a person I am. I’m saying them because the people I love need to know these things. You don’t need to like them or agree with them, but you need to find a way to work around them. You can help me improve them or possibly eliminate them, but at the core of my core, these flaws are as big a part of who I am as my brown hair, my love of Nine West shoes or my library of books. And this might seem selfish, to say that people who love me must deal with this. I agree. I should by trying to improve myself (and I am), but I think it’s more important to be honest, up-front and blunt about these things. If we’re trying to hide our imperfections, particularly from the people we love, we’re just kidding ourselves. Our flaws are most obvious to the people who love us. Likely, they’ve already probably decided that they love us anyway, despite of the unlovely things about us.

So even though this post listed a lot of bitter things, I’m not feeling quite so down about February any more. It still is the month of love. But maybe, for me this year, February is a month of more honest, real love. Not the romantic dinners and red roses, but of the hard times we’ve made it through together. The heartbreaks, the losses, the sadness that has brought us together and made us stronger. That’s the real stuff. That’s the love that gets us through the other 11 months of the year, flaws and all.

To loving us anyway,

Lia

Random thoughts for February.

February is a funny month. It’s a few days shorter. It’s usually the coldest month of the year, but this year we’ve been treated to weather that’s downright balmy. (Does this mean we’re slated for snow in April??? I hope not!) February means Valentine’s Day, which is either super exciting or super depressing or super irrelevant depending on where you are in your love life.

I’m feeling just as funny as February this month. I’m in year two of my new job, which should mean that I’m feeling more confident, more prepared and more graceful…but instead I’m questioning what I’m doing more than ever. It’s a feeling of starting over after the excitement of the holidays is over. Summer still seems a long way off, and achieving my sales goal feels like a picnic WAY on the other side of the mountain. I like picnics.

February is also a bitter month this year because just twelve short months ago we lost my uncle to a six year battle with brain cancer. That least year was hard and sad, and I wasn’t even around for the vast majority of it. My aunt and my cousins were tested in ways that rocked them to their core. Our family was changed in ways that we never imagined, and I think this past year has brought us closer together even though it’s brought us such bitter sadness, too. I know Uncle Reid is watching over us, and I feel him in little whispers when I need to be more brave or strong or voice my opinion. He was many things that I’m not, and I really believe that he’s the one giving me strength in moments when I don’t have enough of it myself.

Even Valentine’s Day this year isn’t looking too bright. I wouldn’t consider myself a hopeless romantic by any means (just ask M), but if forced, I would choose love over “not love.” (Gosh, that sounded downright grinchy.) But love on a workday when M is far away while I’m spending the most romantic weekend of the year doing art projects with bussed in children from local community programs at the Air & Space Museum doesn’t exactly scream fantastic love. Fantastic love is fancy dinners with rose petals and diamond rings and lacy undergarments that are pulled off carelessly after one too many glasses of Prosecco. That’s not the kind of Valentine’s Day I’m in for this year. I know, I know…super pity party. (M, hopefully you’re taking this paragraph with a grain of salt…if you’ve made it this far.)

Usually this is where I’d start writing about how among all these miserable burdens of February, there’s still a little silver lining that makes all the heartache worth it. I know that’s what you’re waiting for. But for this month, I think I’m just going to have to leave February in the shadows. Sometimes life just really is sad. Sometimes we need to grieve and remember and smile when we can. This year, February feels like loss, but I’m not giving up hope for next February. I know March will bring happier times, but for February, I’m just focusing on getting through it all. And remembering.

To love and loss in February,

Lia