It’s a bit of a cliche, learning about God from parenting. God isn’t mad at us when it takes us time to learn, just as we’re not mad at babies when they fall down learning to walk. We don’t always understand why pain is necessary, just as babies don’t understand why we’re giving them shots.
It’s a cliche, but it’s what I find myself thinking about it a lot these days.
Read MoreThings that happened over the last year that you might not know if I haven’t talked to you recently:
We moved! Like a block. We graduated from our one-bedroom apartment where you couldn’t stand in the kitchen and open the fridge door at the same time to a two bedroom apartment where several people can stand in the kitchen at once. The walls are also white and there’s a lot of light, and every day Austin and I look at each other at some point or another and say, “I love our apartment.”
Once, on a bad day, in a bad month, in a bad year, Tal got a flat tire out at the Payson temple. For a variety of health reasons, he couldn’t take care of it himself. He called Sarah (who didn’t know how to change a tire) who called me (who didn’t know how to change a tire) who called our roommate Kaylie (who did know how to change a tire, but did not feel entirely confident that she’d be able to do so on her own). We wandered over to an apartment of boys, where one of them was sick and one of them was already dressed to do an endowment in the temple. But both felt bad telling us no, so all of us went.
As I mentioned, it had been a bad day in a bad month in a bad year, and I didn’t know how to change a tire. I was along for the drive and the people with no personal feeling of responsibility towards either Tal or the tire. So when it turned out that that, out of all five us, none of us knew how to change Tal’s specific tire, it was a welcome relief to sit down on a curb and laugh for a while.
Read MoreThe day Jesus learned that his cousin John the Baptist died, he went away into the desert, as he often did when He wanted to talk to God. And, as they often did when they wanted to talk to God, everyone followed him. He was tired and sad, and maybe he was thinking fondly of the days when no one knew who he was, but he didn’t tell them to go, not even when his disciples came up and said, “They should head back. It’s late, and they’ll want to buy food somewhere” (Matthew 14:15).
“No,” Jesus said. “They can stay. We’ll feed them” (Matthew 14:16).
“We only have five loaves of bread and two fish,” the disciples say (Matthew 14:17).
I wonder if they said and did not record or just thought what they really meant: that amount of food is not only not sufficient to feed this crowd, it’s not even enough for us.
Read MoreThings that happened over the last year that you might not know if I haven’t talked to you recently:
Austin graduated from law school, graduated from business school, passed the bar, and became an attorney at law at a law firm in downtown Boston, and we are Very Proud. (I am Very Proud. Austin is weirded out by having an assistant.)
I got a job at Harvard Divinity School as a faculty coordinator, which means I run schedules and process financials, do some occasional editing and research. It’s not glamorous or important, and I like that. I’ve liked having a job that I don’t care about very much, because it means that it doesn’t figure into my identity very much, which feels both healthy and unlike anything I’ve ever done before.