brenda's thoughts, watch out I'm Christian

I have just come from filing bankruptcy. It is both painful and humiliating to admit that you haven't the ability or the discipline to pay your own debt. If ever I needed God's grace it's now.

Andy Griffith did an episode once where he was forced to admit that he had misjudged someone. At the end of the show Opie asked him, "What are you gonna eat for supper Pa?" Andy replied, "I reckon I'm eat'en crow."

That is what I'm doing today except my meal is humble pie. Last night the Ugandan Children's Choir sang at my church. They were beautiful, so enthusiastic, energetic, a joy to watch. The woman who brought them here to perform  said that they live in an orphanage with more than 500 other children on one quarter acre of land.

I am humbled and you should be too. I have complained about my circumstances. I have electricity, working restrooms, plenty of food, more books than I can read, temperature control, a pest free environment, personal transportation, and room to roam. I name these specific things because this is what they do not have.

If you would like to learn more about these children go to www.suubi.net

I John 3:17-18

Like a banana peel or moldy bread become compost that fertilizes a garden this camper experience should be fuel for greater understanding, but I'm just not getting it.

• Am I learning to face my fears, because I've already squared off with more than one roach in way too confined an area?
• Am I learning to see life from a humbler point of view, because I am already intimately familiar with poverty and its nuances?
• Am I learning to live alone with myself in small places? You've obviously forgotten who you're talking to. I'm the girl who hikes the Appalachian Trail alone and likes it.
• Am I learning to enjoy roughing it, because I already do but you can't entertain well in these cramped quarters?
• Am I learning to enjoy the small things, no pun intended toward the camper, because I would already take a sunset over a widescreen TV any day?
• Am I learning to trust God? I can and probably will always need to improve in this area.

I must take this camper experience, the proverbial bunch of lemons, and make lemonade but I don't know the recipe. I can't just throw a bunch of bananas in the blender. It would be bitter and chunky, in word, undrinkable.

One of the girls at the "cottage" was talking about "how it feels when you're trying to get what you want without bothering anyone else" (a discussion on maintaining your own boundaries or being a people pleaser. I highly recommend any of the series of books written by Dr. Henry Cloud or Dr. John Townsend on the subject of boundaries.)

I understand this concept well. I said, she said, we said that "it's like when someone walks into the kitchen and someone else is cooking scrambled eggs and the person says to them, "I don't like scrambled eggs. Make mine fried." And then walks away without a thought about how the person feels about cooking eggs in any particular way. Then another person walks into the same room and sees the same person cooking scrambled eggs and though they don't like scrambled eggs either they'll eat the eggs because they don't' want to upset anyone, but later they will dwell on the fried egg that they missed out on.

Of coarse there are many degrees of people between these two. If you're not a people pleaser then you might not understand how much anxiety can be generated from their own lack of ability to say what's on their mind.

Went to the lake early this morning. The mist had risen off the water and just hung in the air. A couple times it sprinkled but mostly it was still and peaceful. Even the usually noisy and territorial Kingfisher was quiet. Like dragging a finger through a still wet Monet landscape my boat affected the surface of the water. 

I was fairly alone on the lake. Three fishermen, one who stayed on shore, puttered around searching for fish and watching me, whether it was out of curiosity or annoyance that they watched I could not tell.

The water was as reflective as my thoughts. I haven't been impressed with the way I have dealt with the girls at the house. I'm not sure what to do to fix this, either. 

Earlier in the month I had met another kayaker on the river. He was an older gentleman who had been paddling for some years. His strokes were subtle, almost invisible and yet effective. He was a work of efficiency as he paddled back up river. I knew I had found a new role model as I beat the water into submission with my own paddle.

“Finally made it out to the woods”, I say. “So they’re still in the same place”, my mom says, as if the woods were a collection of living organisms instead of a single geographical location.

I’ve taken up the observation of a new species. I am working (night an day) at a kind of halfway house for recovering addicts. A paradox: a species so set on individual (and global) self-destruction while simultaneously compelled to compassion for it’s own frailty.