This morning we had a late start due to weather. I had crawled back to bed after getting the good news and had just drifted back to sleep when I was awakened by a phone call from the parent of one of my farm kids. She wanted to know-- at 7:15 am-- if it was alright if her daughter brought boar semen to school. I heard once that words are merely vocalized symbols for mental images.  Being still half asleep, my brain fumbled around the memory bank looking for the concrete reality on which to hang the vocalized symbols "boar semen." Once my brain had the image fully loaded-- "okay, she said boar semen"-- I had to decide how to respond. "Uhhh, we're not really talking about that in science right now." (We happen to be talking about erosion; if I had been more alert I probably could have come up with some witty way to relate the two topics.) The mom assured me that she hadn't thought it was appropriate either but she had just wanted to check. When I told my husband about it, he asked if I wasn't even just the least bit curious to see what it looked like. And I will admit that in my semi-conscious state it had almost seemed like it might be an educational opportunity for all the townies in my classroom (including me), but then I pictured this student-- who tends to giggle and mumble about everything-- standing in front of the room explaining it to the prepubescent boys in the audience, and better judgement prevailed.

 We all got a good laugh about it at school. I told the band director that while we weren't studying that particular topic in science I had told the mom that perhaps the band students would find a use for it, like maybe valve oil or something.

Our family has gotten hooked on LOST, which is significant because I don't think we have ever all four gotten totally hooked on a television show. Anyway, I like the way the writers of LOST use flashbacks to reveal, well, the character of the characters. I think God is a writer like that, or at least that has been the device he is using to tell me my story as of late. My birthday is in two days. It's got me thinking about all the years' worth of memories stored up in my brain, and how from time to time it's like God brings to the surface some random thing that was relatively insignificant at the time but seems vital for me now.

One such memory: When I was eighteen my sister and brother-in-law took me along on their family vacation to southern California to visit our grandparents. The trip included a visit to Disneyland. We were there probably fourteen hours, most of it in blazing sunlight, and I developed abrasions on my eyes from my hard contacts. By the time we got to our motel my eyes were swollen shut and I couldn't hold my head up because of the throbbing in my eyeballs. I tried to sleep but my eyes hurt so much that I ended up begging Paul, my brother-in-law  to take me to an emergency room. There wasn't a hospital near where we were staying and the closest one meant driving a fair distance, in the middle of the night, through a bad neighborhood in LA. And then once we got there we had to wait a long time because it was in a bad neighborhood and they were dealing with things like stabbings. We were both very tired. I don't know what time it was (my eyes being swollen shut), maybe two in the morning, and I began to feel guilty that Paul wasn't going to get enough sleep and he would have to drive all the next day (he never allowed my sister to drive and for good reason). I told him how sorry I was about it all, but he responded so graciously:"Don't worry about it, Carolyn; you know I have found when I am in a situation like this God always gives me what I need. It'll be okay."

I guess that story has come back to me lately because we are being affected directly and totally without our control by something that someone else did.  Sometimes I wonder if everything's going to be okay when this all shakes out. It is not fair, that's for sure, and unfairness can make a person angry, like you want someone else to pay. But that's why I guess I keep flashing back to Paul's words that night: "God always gives me what I need. It'll be okay."

I dearly love the book Up A Road Slowly by Irene Hunt for many reasons, not the least of which is Uncle Haskell's advice to Julie:" Write of things you know about, Julie, familiar simple things that you have experienced; things that have touched you deeply. If you haven't lived long enough to have felt anything deeply... then you have nothing to say."

I have always known that I feel things deeply. A friend once shook her head at me and said, "you drip feeling!" Ironically, within a few days of that comment someone else scrutinized me carefully and concluded "you are a very tight thinker." I do both feeling and thinking to the extreme; I feel the littlest things deeply and at the same time feel compelled to analyze them to death, usually with pen in hand because for me writing is thinking. I write to process how I feel. If you want to know how I feel and how I think-- not just what I feel and think-- read what I write. It's an invitation to sort of read over my shoulder and watch an idea as I process it. It's an invitation to know something of my heart. It's for the people I love that I do this, offering my heart "vulnerable as all Hell and graceful as the sun on skates" (Rich Mullins).

I was thinking today that I (like everybody else) really am disturbingly gifted in my ability to wreck relationships.That is, if grace is not factored in. I am very thankful for grace. Yet how many times a day do I say or do things that could potentially tank a friendship?

• An ill-timed comment.
• A little barb here and there because I am feeling peevish.
• True thoughts hiding behind sarcasm.
• A touch of arrogance in some comments I made on a blog on Saturday.
• Defensiveness when I think I am being unfairly challenged.
• Insensitive remarks.
• Basic selfishness.

That's just the list I could come up with today. It's my list, but it's representative I think for all of us. It's a wonder any of us get along with each other as well as we do, there is so much forgiving that must be done. I used to hope that people put up with me because the overall package I offer as a person and as a friend makes up for how much I screw up, and maybe that's still true. But most of all I think hanging with a relationship is about a willingness to see each other's truest hearts beneath our various screw ups and a subsequent willingness to forgive-- or is it the other way around, who can say?-- but in short, it's always, only, about grace. It's like every day in our interactions with each other there are a thousand little reminders of the Fall and a thousand little reenactments of grace.