Same old, same new

If you’re visiting the blog for the first time today, you have not been privy to my gruesome house stories. You’re blessed, believe me. Suffice it to say, I have had oil and water problems downstairs that have caused quite an adventure.

The problems have also forced me to clean up. Part of the problem took place in the furnace room that held a lot more junk than furnace. Now that I can finally move things back into place, it has proved to be the perfect occasion to sort through all the stuff I have been moving from place to place for 25 years but haven’t looked at.

I have found some pretty interesting stuff – some funny, some sad, some too embarrassing to discuss (even for me). One thing I uncovered were the journals I kept while in London.

Smiling as I opened them up, I recalled how faithfully I wrote it all down, not wanting to forget a single moment of my time there. There were pages and pages of musings and memories and QUESTIONS. So, right in the middle of the clutter I was supposed to be organizing, I sat down for a read.

I am sort of please to tell you that the questions I had in the late 80s are different than the questions I have today – well, most of them anyway. And yet, I discovered that I am still the same in many ways. Some excerpts as examples:

“Starting tomorrow I begin living on rolls, old crackers, flat Coke and anything I can get Cindy to pay for.” Cindy was my roommate. I have never had money in my pocket, thus my husband’s insistence on keeping the checkbook.

Then there’s this one:

“Deserving comment is Andy’s first sexual experience. Apparently, the couple in the flat next to ours just got married. Andy keeps waking everyone up, telling us to listen. How he will function as a normal adult someday is beyond me.” Last I heard, Andy is married with 3 kids. Guess I was wrong about the normal adult thing.

One of my favorites was:

“Sometimes I’m afraid I’m not bright. I’m afraid I sound as ridiculous as some people sound to me, and I just don’t know it.” A classic, huh?

Yet I did discover some moments when God was growing me up. Moments like:

“It is truly wonderful when you become so comfortable with someone that you can scratch your butt in front of her. That’s how I feel with Cindy. Heavens knows we’re different! She’s the planful [sic] bossy sophisticate. I’m the disorganized dreaming bum. It pisses her off when I get an A without studying. It pisses me off when she tries to mother me. But she NEEDS to organize, to KNOW and to instruct. She feels important and needed by me if she’s showing me the way. So, because I love her, I let her tell me, even if I am already quite aware of the proper direction I should be taking. On the other hand, she sits through all my performances and gives me honest critique. She will stay up all night and help me memorize lines that I procrastinated learning. And even though she says, ‘I told you so’ and I say, ‘Get off my case’ – we stick with each other. It’s friendship for real.”

Twenty years later, I have found better words than “pisses” to express my feelings of relational frustration, but I am still trying to choose the harder, more narrow path of real love and community. Even when it ticks me off.