heaven or hell...

while reading, God still loves the french, i came across this saying,

heaven is where the welcoming committee is english; the cook is french; the poets italian; the mechanics german and the police swiss. on the contrary, in hell, the welcoming committee is french; the cook british; the mechanics italian; the poets swiss; and the police german.

how brilliant is that?!

it's happened again...

quite unexpectedly, at some point this weekend, it happened again. i should be surprised that it's taken so long, but then again, a lot has gone on in my life in the past 39 days. but right now, for this moment all is quiet in the world.

what is it, you might wonder...?

i want to go back to paris.

now, before you roll your eyes & say 'what else is new?', let me say that for a while, i was happy to let last month's trip live contentedly in my memory. i was so tired and so sick while i was there, and i had no desire to return to feeling that drained and icky. but now that the illness has passed, now that i've gone to calgary to visit the family, now that the cruel reality of summer is right around the corner, NOW i want to go back to my ultimate Happy Place.

but here i am. so NOT in paris, but home nonetheless.

contentedness is such a tricky thing.

more Paris pics...

from a bridge over the seine

the Rodin museum
(how often do you get to sit in a room full of torsos?!)

i don't remember who this is,
but it's right across the street from the Sorbonne.

a Parisian street close to the Seine

the area behind the musee de l'Orangerie
(why do Parisian park benches look so darn appealing?)

inside the Rodin museum
(the sculpture reflected in the mirror)

in the Luxembourg garden

more Luxembourg garden...this time including the palace

Notre Dame & the Seine

in the courtyard of the Louvre

in the jardin de Tuileries looking toward the Louvre

the Louvre...

Ctrl + Z

as we were walking into the mall yesterday during our lunch hour, some of the girls and i were talking about the ways in which our online, computerized work life has infiltrated our daily lives. one friend mentioned how there are times when she is talking to someone face to face and they say something funny, and her reaction (in her head, of course) is 'LOL'. :-)

for me, probably my most used function is the undo command, control + Z. whatever bad, wrong, stupid thing i have done, all i need to do is hit these two magical keys, and all my bad disappears.

how i wish i had a control + Z function for my life.

for those words said in haste. those actions that i did not think all the way through before embarking on. days that i wasted worrying or being critical, or bitter...or simply chose not to be joyful.

i used to wonder why God didn't give us the opportunity to magically undo, erase our mistakes. but i think i understand now. when i'm working on a Photoshop file i have room to play with it, to try to come up with the best possible image, by doing the best combination of actions to that file. what matters is the outcome.

not so with our lives. God is not so concerned with our outcome as he is with the process, how we live out the moments of our lives. what we do with those words we should not have said. whether we choose bitterness or worry, or whether we choose joy and trust.

obviously, i am still greatly interested in exploring the control + z function for life. i am far too consistently clumsy a person to not wish to undo the salsa that i spilled on a white shirt with a wave of hands over a keyboard. but for the rest of life, i will continue to embrace the process, the journey, living mindfully that there are no erasable moments in life, and along the way, i will become more like Jesus.

older

i woke up older today.

it has always been my firm belief that if the actual time of your birth is in the late afternoon or evening, then you did not wake up on the day of your birth older. and being born at 5:55pm on april 19 means that only this morning did i wake up older.

so, what will be the outcome of getting older? i don't dislike the whole getting older thing in principle. i think that what i dislike is the boxes that get drawn around you in regards to your age, by others and by our own expectations. by 25 we should have these things figured out. by 30 a whole other set. by 40...well, let's not go there.

in order to help me figure it out, i have to turn to a woman whose words and life have inspired and challenged me over the years. in The Circle of Quiet, Madeleine L'Engle wrote these words about maturity,

"...I will also grow into maturity, where the experience which can be acquired only through chronology will teach me how to be more aware, open, unafraid to be vulnerable, involved, committed, to accept disagreement without feeling threatened (repeat and underline this one), to understand that I cannot take myself seriously until I stop taking myself seriously--to be, in fact, a true adult."

and being a dichotomy myself, i love that a little later, in the same book she also wrote:

"I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be... This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages...the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide... Far too many people misunderstand what 'putting away childish things' means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I'm with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up, then I don't ever want to be one. Instead of which, if I can retain a child's awareness and joy, and 'be' fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup."

a challenge, to be sure. but i don't want to grow up any other way.

a new year begins...

paying attention

at small group this past week we talked about gratitude, and i asked everyone to do 'homework'of finding one thing each day to express gratitude to God, and tell him why we are grateful for that thing. it seems like an easy enough proposition, but i've learned that the hard part about being grateful is that you have to pay attention to your life...and paying attention is sometimes the hardest thing you can do.

paying attention means actually hearing a man tell someone how he lost his job and his home, and how he is dreading going home to tell his wife. it means seeing and not ignoring the desperation in someone else's eyes. it means facing those things you fear will one day find you, and not running away, ignoring the situation, or finding some kind of diversion so you don't have to feel the pain. paying attention costs you something.

and so does gratitude.

i know that i need to be grateful for the hard situations in life, as it is these hard things that produce the greatest growth in me. but when you're in the middle of a situation that you'd rather just go away, being grateful for it seems pretty much the same as those crazy people who go around asking others to punch them in the stomach, to prove that they can handle the pain. i don't want to prove anything to anyone, i just want everything to go back to how i want it to be.

but life seldom (if ever) runs on my schedule.

so, i am learning to be grateful for that which i consider sucky, because my own agenda for my life wouldn't produce much, if any, growth. and i will remember that my personal happiness is not the goal. and i will trust in my God, no matter what may come.

a new friend...

while in paris, i picked up a book called, If You Could See Me Now by Cecelia Ahern, and let me just say that it was magical and surprising in a way that i have never been surprised by a work of fiction.

i finished the book in two days, and at the paris airport, purchased Cecelia's first novel, P.S, I Love You (recently released as a movie starring Hilary Swank), and have since finished that one, and now own the rest of her works...which i am trying not to read all at once!

the sad thing about being such a fast reader is that books go to the 'read' side too soon. fortunately for me, Cecelia's books will be among those that i will re-read until they will surely fall apart.