What do you think?

I was looking at my blog and decided that it was pretty, but didn’t fit with summer.  Now that Blogger has nicer templates, I think I will change it with the seasons.

I’m also experimenting with a new title.  “All This and Heaven, Too!”  I remember reading something a long time ago about someone experiencing a season of great peace.  As she listed all the ways that God had shown His love and faithfulness, she mentioned how amazing it was that not only do we experience moments of joy, receive great blessings, etc., here, but we have an eternal reward that far outweighs them all.  The phrase resonated with me and it is often on my mind. 

What wondrous love is this, Oh my soul?

And I have to close with some pictures.  Two of my dear friends from Grove City, Adam and Laura, welcomed a precious baby girl on June 7 (which was also their 2nd wedding anniversary).  Here are some pictures of beautiful Samantha Addison!

I want people to like my blog. 

I have know idea what people want to read.

So, what do you want?

Randomness, like what I’ve been doing?

Links to interesting things I read online (I’m willing to do that but if that become the whole blog, I will quit.  I have too many of my own thoughts)?

Book reviews?

A documentary of my life in my soon-to-be new home of Lexington, VA (aka LexVegas)?

Let me know….

I have a serious problem with anxiety.  Or fear.  Worry.  Lack of faith.  Call it whatever you want, the result is the same.  I am a total mess.

I have one primary method for dealing with it – plan, plan, plan, and plan some more.

Get this – I make between 3 and 5 “to do” lists on a daily basis.  [To admit this is rather humbling because I think it signifies that I may or may not have OCD….or at least OCPD.]  Throughout the day, whenever the worry or stress of life begins to overwhelm me, I pull out a post-it note and a pen and write down every minute task I need to complete and when I plan to do it.  The anxiety disappears (do you see where I’m going with the OCD thing?…). Sometimes I keep the list in a prominent place with a Sharpie nearby so that I can enjoy crossing off each completed task.  Other times I just ball up the list and throw it away.  I don’t need the list in order to remember what to do next (that will come in about 20 years – at least I’m in the habit of writing it down already).  Instead, I like the feelings of power and control I receive from the action.  It’s as if by writing it down I convince myself that I am the authority about that which concerns me.

Like many of us, I “need” to be in control.  I need to have a plan.  I need to know the outcome.  I need to be sure of the result.  I need these things in order to feel safe.

Don’t misundestand me.  I’m not alwasy this high-strung.  It goes in waves, and I am currently experiencing many intense stressors and having weeks of high anxiety.  It shouldn’t be surprising.  I am in my last semester of graduate school and trying to find a job in a difficult economy.  My grandfather passed away unexpectedly, other dear friends and loved ones are going through various trials that I am powerless to change, and these events fall in the shadow of the April 16 anniversary…a time when it’s hard to live under the illusion that I’m safe.

It’s like I said to my mom the other night – “I just hate feeling helpless and vulnerable.”  Her response: “But you are totally helpless and vulnerable.”

Thanks, Mom.  Thanks a lot.

But’s she’s right.  And I know that.  I just don’t like living day-to-day with such an acute awareness because I don’t like my default response.  Instead of kneeling to pray, I make a list of all the things I plan to control.  Instead of, “Lord, I’m acknowledging that this day is Yours to do what You will,” I clutch my pen and paper and document all that is mine.

The truth is I am helpless.  The truth is I am vulnerable.  The truth is that even as a daughter of the King trying to live a life that honors Him, I am promised no safety in this life.  And no amount of organization and contingency planning is going to change that.

I am as fragile as the cherry blossom in the picture.  Fortunately, I have a Father who knows my weakness and treats me with tenderness…

I was about to write that in His tenderness, He cares for His blossoms so that they are not crushed.  That’s not quite how it is though.  In His infinite wisdom, many blooms fall and are trampled underfoot.  But it is then that their fragrance intensifies and they bless the world in a different way. 

“But thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumphal procession in Christ and through us spreads everywhere the fragrance of the knowledge of him.  For we are to God the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing.  To the one we are the smell of death; to the other, the fragrance of life…”

I’ve been writing this post since Monday without much success.  To be more truthful, I’ve written three completely different posts and three times I’ve deleted it instead of publishing it.  Nothing I’ve written seems to fully capture the magnitude of what that day three years ago meant for us in Blacksburg.

In this post today, Sandy said much of what has been on my heart.  A huge part of me is never going to get over this.  There are days when the events of 4.16.07 (and the later losses of Audrey, Ian, David, and Heidi) are ever before me and it hurts. 

In the past three years I have become profoundly acquainted with grief.  Every time I start to think that maybe, finally, this town has suffered it’s share, we are given another reason to mourn.  But by His wounds we are healed.

This isn’t something I am going to get over.  While I didn’t know any of the victims personally, something was taken from me as well.  I no longer live under that sweet but terribly false illusion that I am safe and because I belong to Him, nothing horrible can happen to me or to those I love.  It can, and it has.  And I have asked Him the hard questions.  “Who told us we’d be rescued? What has changed and why should we be saved from nightmares? We’re asking why this happens to us who have died to live – it’s unfair.”

But in moments of desperate despair, “I waited patiently for the Lord; he turned to me and heard my cry.  He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire; he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand.  He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God.” (Psalm 40)

I’m not claiming to have figured it all out.  I still don’t understand.  I still ache.  But I have been comforted.

This is what it means to be held
How it feels, when the sacred is torn from your life
And you survive
This is what it is to be loved, and to know
That the promise was when everything fell
We’d be held

I could go on and on and share with you all the songs, verses, and stories that have helped me sort through it all, and maybe someday I will. 

For now, I will leave you with this (from David Crowder)


At the start, He was there.
In the end, He’ll be there.
And after all our hands have wrought, He forgives.


All is lost, find Him there.
After night, dawn is there.
And after all falls part, He repairs.


Everything has changed
Things will never be the same
We will never be the same
But the GLORY of it all is He is here
With redemption for us all that we may live
For the glory of it all.

He is here, and our hope endures.
If all is lost for you, I pray that He will be found.

Lord, increase our faith.

Please add to this list in the comments…

My grandfather passed away unexpectedly yesterday.

I still don’t believe it. I’m writing this and it doesn’t feel real. My counselor training tells me this would be grief stage number one: denial.

I am thinking and feeling so many things right now that I don’t even know what to say. Except this: I am so glad I did my homework, and that I did it early.

One of my assignments for my family therapy class is to make a genogram of the past four generations and include key events and depictions of members’ relationships with one another. Being an observant (nosy) individual with an excellent memory, I already felt like I had all the information that I needed to complete the assignment and didn’t need any help from other relatives.

But for some reason I felt I should do it right and ask my Grandpa Mock about his heritage. I sent a quick email and didn’t expect much in way of a response. What I got was a ten-page, three chapter short story about my family through his eyes – much more than I needed for the assignment.

I thanked him and told him that I would save his words so that one day I could share them with my children if they wanted to know about their ancestry. Then I told him that I loved him.

Fast forward ten days. My genogram isn’t due for another eight days, and my grandpa isn’t here anymore.

Never in my life have I been more thankful that I am such an overprepared overachieving perfectionist. If I hadn’t, I would have so much regret right now.

Still, it’s so much more than that. God’s sovereignty is so real to me right now. His fingerprints are written all over the events of the past several weeks, and even during his final visit last spring.

I said it before and I will say it again. I did not want to talk to Grandpa about this project. Yet I couldn’t get it off my mind and felt compelled to do the assignment right. So I did. And while I didn’t understand everything he told me, I let him tell his story. I listened to what he had to say. And I did so with all love and no resentment.

Thank you, Holy Spirit, for using the smallest things to make a difference.

I don’t know if Grandpa was a believer, so this is really hard. I don’t know if I will see him again. I want to hope. I want to think he will be. He was getting ready for church when he died. I want to talk myself into believing he is with the Lord right now.

I just don’t know.

But this is what I do know. I know that the same Spirit that pounded on my heart’s door a month ago and caused me to reach out to him is the same Spirit that was speaking to him in little ways even to the end. He didn’t come back east to see us much after he retired to Arizona, but he came last spring, and I was able to make it back from Williamsburg to see him for the first time since the summer after I finished high school. My sisters all got baptized that Sunday morning, and Grandpa asked them to send him their written testimonies that they read at church.

…Maybe that mattered….

Then there was this autobiography. He expressed regret over some of the decisions he’d made and their consequences. He made it clear that he loved us all deeply. Then he thanked me.

“This exercise has been a bit cathartic for me! I afraid that at least some of that is still too sensitive for me to get into – so excuse me for huge holes there.”

There are some things in his life that he didn’t need to explain to me. There are some questions that don’t need to be answered publicly, especially to his granddaughter. But maybe, just maybe, this “exercise” lasted longer than the time it took to write me an email. Maybe the questions lingered. Maybe he fought through the emotions that always made it easier to just not address it. Maybe he finally found the redemption, forgiveness, and peace he needed.

…Maybe my homework was part of God’s sovereign plan…

I don’t know. I may not ever know in this life.

But I know this: I listened to God’s voice. I did the right thing, and while I have the pain of loss tonight, I don’t have the pain of regret.

I did the right thing.

I loved the Lord.
I listened to His voice.
I love my Grandpa.
I listened to his story.

May I always be this responsive to His leading, even when the reason doesn’t become so clear.

I had another “A-Ha Moment” in church today. Thank you, Jon Ritner. I don’t know why I ever thought about things this way before.

This past week was one I don’t want repeated in the near future. So much pain. So much sorrow. So much fear. It was one of those weeks when I couldn’t let myself stop and think about everything going on around me because when I did, I felt physically ill. That hasn’t happened to me since April 2007.

And so I sat in church this morning trying not to think, trying to enjoy the fellowship and sing His praise without involving my heart because right now it just hurts too much.

Then came words of life and hope in the form of the eighth point of my church’s statement of faith. “We Believe in the bodily Second Coming of the Lord Jesus Christ to claim His own people and to set all things in order.”

1 Peter 4:7 “The end of all things is near…”

I’ve never considered the Day of the Lord to be one to look forward to. I guess I should have, knowing that when He comes, He will claim me as His own, but instead I’ve always simply focused on that Day as the Day of the Lord’s wrath. I looked to the End with fear and dread.

But that was never how the Lord intended for His children to face His coming, especially when we know we are His.

The End means the end of all the things that are wrong with this world. Only the good will remain. He will make ALL THINGS right.

That means no more pain. No more sorrow. No more grief. No more fear. No more inexplicable tragedy, loneliness, or betrayal.

All of it. Gone. Forever.

“Therefore encourage each other with these words.”

I really hate it when people lie to make other people look bad.

I hate it a lot.