silent reverie

I wonder if anyone else uses the day they met as their anniversary. But exactly one year and three months ago, I was pulling up to Father's Heart Church in the backseat of a car driven by Jacob Navarro's mom on a cloudy Monday morning, and caught my first glance of you behind a beaming Pastor Steve. That entire first day still plays out in such fine detail in my mind: the first song I sang during sound check, the way your voice effortlessly harmonized with mine in worship, spraying air freshener and trying to air out my smoke-saturated hotel room, and then tossing and turning in distress all night because I couldn't get you out of my head. We've captivated each other from the first day we met, and here we are, 15 months later, and I'm still excited to hear your voice, to tell you about my morning and what I'll be having for lunch. I've been waiting for a long time it seems for my life to change. I've always been frustrated by my own inability to be ...

It's been so long since I've poured out my thoughts and feelings in text. I've realized that I'm a much more private person than I had originally assumed. Or at least I've become more private after my angsty high school days.. But tonight I'm here sitting with my mind a little blurry from 4 sleep-deprived weeks of Ob/Gyn rotations, and my heart a little sore from the aftermath of several emotionally trying days. I won't go into the details of what has been happening (see previous sentences), but it has gotten my writer's mind churning and I find that it is oftentimes in these exhaustive situations that we learn what we're made of. I am rarely overdramatic. If anything, I err more on the underdramatic side. I like to minimize my negative emotions by brushing them off, and convincing everyone around me - in an attempt to convince myself, of course - just how trivial these emotions are. If I am wronged or hurt, my first instinct is to limp off...

When people ask me what it's like to be a pastor's daughter, I often wonder instead what it would be like to be a pastor and a parent at the same time. There's often a big ruckus kicked up about how PK's almost always turn out either wild or weird; angry and disillusioned or sheltered and irrelevant. But how about the parents who are trying so hard to figure out how to carry out their life's calling and raise a family at the same time? As the oldest in my family, I've watched my parents struggle to find the balance between meeting the demands of church members and providing a secure environment for us to grow up in. One of the things that I think I will always remember and cherish about my childhood was that everyday after school, at 2:30PM, we could count on my dad's silver CRV pull up to the curb to pick us up. And when we filed out of the backseat of the car and ran inside the house, there would always be a snack for us to eat before we started our h...

I just woke up from a 3 hour nap, having collapsed into my bed after coming home from an ACLS certification course at school. It wasn't the fact that I had to go into school on a Saturday that made me so tired, but I feel so strongly that my spirit has fought one of my hardest battles this week and I've been left utterly drained. It's almost funny (notice that I say "almost") how as soon as David Herling gives a message on spiritual warfare and describing the difference between a "golfer Christian" and a "boxing Christian", I've learned first hand how much conditioning my golfer spiritual body needed. But it has also lit a fire deep in me so that I now see not only how formidable my enemy may look, but the incredible power that runs through me as well. I don't think I'll go into detail on how the last couple of days went, but today I had one of the worst feelings I have ever had, and it wasn't even directly related to anything...

I sat before my computer tonight in a flurry of emotions, and in fifteen minutes, I hammered out a convoluted string of words in a desperate attempt to punch out the way I felt at the moment and leave it as an abandoned draft in this abandoned blog. But after I had furiously typed out all my loneliness and frustration, I took a deep breath, saved my work, and decided to browse through some of my old entries. I'm not sure what happened but I felt a calm come over me, and suddenly I'm sleepy. The reason I had begun typing in the first place was because I was physically exhausted but so worked up that I was afraid to sleep; afraid of the kind of thoughts I'd be left with if I turned the lights off. It dawned on me then how the desire to sleep can be so telling about a person's peace of mind. Many times this week I had been unable to sleep, my mind bursting with gnawing thoughts and future worries. I've tried to make it up by taking long naps during the day. But ...