This may not be very well put But I sort of need to vent.
Today, and at several points throughout this past week, I have been battling an evil that has not had a huge presence in my life lately. Anger. The source is clearly the pain and frustration I feel over the health of my children. Ill spare the details but in short, niether of them are "healthy and developing normally". Halle was always such a relief from the intensity that Hayden brings to our life but now her delayed development is giving way to a whole new set of worries. I could write forever about these issues but what I really want to address is the anger that has been buiding up inside me. I am angry at the direct effects of these issues on my life (sleepless nights, bleeding infected wounds all over my son's body, the behavioral effects of Hayden's lack of sleep due to itching, confusion over how to discipline him in light of effects of sleeplessness, frequent and expensive visits to doctors and specialists......the list goes on). I am angry that my countless prayers seem to be falling on deaf ears. I have prayed and prayed for healing and if not healing then at least some relief.....no response that is noticable to me at this time. Then I get angry at myself for getting angry with God because I know better! I get so angry at Hayden in the middle of the night when he wakes up. Then, in the morning, Im so angry with myself for getting angry with him. My maternal instinct to fix or at least help my childrens' problems is so strong yet there is so little that I can really do. I hate these feeling of uselessness and failure, they make me so angry! My anger takes form in a number of different ways but it is all so ugly. I know that allowing these feelings to fester will only make my life harder. My intention is to give them over, detatch myself from them. But, in order to do so I have to fully realize the extent of this evil and writing this is helping to do just that. Ofen I feel guilty and stupid for even being so frustrated by the the cards Ive been dealt. I know that things could obviously be much worse in terms of the chronic conditions that plauge my children. There are way bigger problems in the world, I know. But that doesnt seem to help me at all right now. This is me and as real as I get. If Im going to get anywhere in this stuggle I cant be anything less than real. So here it goes, I am putting my anger onto this screen, symbolic of giving to God, and moving on in the freedom of being without it. I'll let you know how it goes.......

I have been reading from a book called U2 by U2, my mother's day gift from Brian. I was very interested to read what Bono writes here:
" Sometimes it comes across as if I got into U2 to save the world. I got into U2 to save myself. I meet people out on the street who approach me like I'm Mahatma Gandhi. And when someones says, 'Hail, man of peace', I can hear Larry laughing under his breath: 'You're lucky he didn't nut you.' The band are very bemused by my attarction to non-violence, because they know you couldn't get further from the songs than the singer. They understand that the reason I have for being so attracted to these characters, the subjects of the songs - because in my life and temperment I am so far from them. There is a rage in me and it is not all injustice. I have developed good manners to disguise it."
I appreciate his honesty about not being nearly as "good" as his image paints him to be. I appreciate that he is real about the fact that he is often times a mess (he went on in that passage to describe some of the ways in which he is so UN-saintly) and doesn't have things figured out yet at the same time strives for greatness. This, more than the ONE campagn or Product Red, inspires me. When I am feeling like a mess and a total loser all of my ambition for doing something good and meaningful in my life is lost. I have some pretty lofty goals for myself (which I know I can not achieve without a gigantic portion of grace and mercy from God Himself). I would like to live a life of simplicity that is so radically different from any way of life I have known, I would like to be a more conscious consumer in light of my convictions about contributing to oppression in the agricultural and textile industries, most of all, I would like to be a really, really, good mother. Not quite as lofty as ending poverty in Africa but if what the myriad of famous faces tell me on TV is correct, to do so might infact be easier than what I have set out to achieve. Who knows. The point is I am not very good at living with the reality of this duality in me. The fact that I can be a fleshly, sinful disaster and still do something significant with myself. It's refeshing to think that maybe I can. I know that God in His word tells me so in slightly different wording, but for some reason it was more impactful coming from a real human being example (Bono, of all people...goodness.).

This past week I made an interesting discovery. I found that it is easier for me to nap when my children are awake than it is when they are also napping. This is scary, I know. I could easily curl up in Hayden's tiny toddler bed and quickly dose off while the kids are playing in his room. Of course, it's the kind of sleep where you are still vaugely aware of what's going on around you (good thing!) while at the same time having random thoughts and images go through your head sort of like dreams. Still, it's somewhat restful. However, the other day I tried to nap when both kids were sleeping and even though I was exhasted from Hayden being up all the night before, I was dissapointed to find that the moment my head hit the pillow, my mind began to crank. The silence was like a lighting bolt that struck my brain causing trillions of neural impulses and a mad array of thoughts, questions, anxieties and emotions that I could not begin to sort through or make sense of. I couldn't handle it. My response: do the dishes....or anything for that matter but I needed to DO something to end the stillness that was making way for my impending cranial explosion. But my preffered level of noise while napping is not the interesting part of this discovery. It's the fact that I seem to do my best thinking and am most focused while doing something rather than being still and when there is a signficant level of distinguishable noise. This is when I am best able to enter into a quiet place inside of me either to rest, sleep, think or read. The stillnes and silence that one would typically expect to conduse these kinds of "quiet" activities produces a kind of schizophrenia in me. This has not always been the case and this change in the way I function has profound spiritual implications. The last year of my life has been characterized by my stuggle to regain a sense of consistency, intimacy and progress in my spiritual life without having those luxurious morning hours at the coffe shop with just me and God or ANY significant length of quiet day time. In effort to improve this situation, I have recently revisited a subject I dabbled in in college, "practicing the presence of God", to borrow the term from Brother Lawrence whose book (so titled) was what inspired me to strive for such spiritual loftiness. This new effort has allowed me to see that over the course of the last year or so, I have indeed begun to adapt to the limitations this present season has put on my life. In his forementioned book, it is said of Brother Lawrence "that he was more united to God in his outward employments than when he left them for devotion and retirement." This idea seemed so foreign to me when I first read it but now I can actually relate. Not that I claim to have achieved the same kind of consistencey in my communion with God that this man had but I am making progress forsure. Looking back on what usually seems like the "glory days" of my spiritual life, I now begin to notice how very compartmentalized things were then. Deep intimate communion was most often limited to quiet morning hours and I was lacking in the knowledge of how to genuinely experience or relate to God throughout the rest of my day. Now, after months of being burdened by guilt and remorse over my inability to have these regular, "standardized" quiet times, I have no choice but to adapt and do what I can do to once again, feel connected, rooted, to "abide". By the grace of God alone I am making headway. I now posess a greater ability to read, meditate and pray during the menial tasks of my day and even with interuptions from my kids. I can have "quiet time" even when it is not quiet and I am not physically still. In fact, its almost easier that way. Strange......... The whole nap experiece is what really opened my eyes to God's incredible faithfulness to me in allowing or causing (I dont know which one) me to begin to grow and change in this way. I will close with my favorite quote from this book because of how surprisingly (he was a monk from the 16th century) applicable it is to my daily life with my kids. ""The time of business," says he, "does not with me differ from the time of prayer, and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were upon my knees at the blessed sacrament."" (He was in charge of the kitchen in the monestary where he lived) Goodnight.

Well, it's almost midnight but here I am in my only free time of the day making a effort to address a dire need in my life right now......connectedness. It's seems so ironic to think that my best hope of achieving this would be through my laptop but such is the world we live in. It's a sad reality but I rarely ever have the chance to process let alone articulate the deep things going on inside me. I no longer have the luxury of hours alone at a coffe shop waiting for God to come and help me sift through and make sense of my thoughts and feelings. I miss those days but I have come to terms with the fact that they are gone and may not return until the age of retirement. But, that is not necessarily a bad thing. I have learned so much from this season of life already. It's just that the learning looks a lot different from the incubated accelerated version that was college. I live in the real world now, a world that is so very different from anything I have known. A world of small town farmers, farm workers and their families....with little place to go to find spiritual or intelectual connection. Even as I write I struggle because I would so much rather have connectedness with actual human faces in a physical place WHERE I LIVE rather than with screen names in cyber-space. But, until then, this is my best option for regular, any-time-of-the-day-like-with-college-roomates kind of interaction. Here's to it.