Thurs, Feb. 6
... Along the banks of the Nile
I'm sitting at my computer wearing black dress pants and a bra, with my hair up in a towel, because I can't find anything appropriate for an interview to wear with black dress pants. Go figure. But everything is either sleeveless, or too slinky, or too bland, or something. I really need to get in better sync with my wardrobe.
But I have to do dishes anyways--maybe I should get my hair on its way to being done, and then do dishes in my bra, just so that I don't get dishwater on a good shirt, you know?
*sigh* I can't believe I'm talking about my underwear on diaryland. This is the kind of inane, pointless babble that I try to avoid. I mean, who really cares what I'm wearing?
It's so hard to believe that it's been a year since we auditioned for the trip and I found out that I wasn't on the team. It feels like it was so long ago--sometimes even the trip itself feels like a dream; something that I have the pictures to prove, but that doesn't seem real, even to me.
There are days when it just seems so incongruous to me that I was in Scotland. Or New York City. Or wherever. When any of us who were on the team talk about stuff, it tends to be more about the churches, and doing normal, everyday things that we could do anywhere here in Calgary... but we did them somewhere else. Somewhere hours away from here, after being on the road for a month. That sometimes strikes me as being the strangest--life was almost normal, except for the fact that we were sleeping in a new bed every night and living out of a suitcase for a month and a half.
I guess we had to find the normalcy in such an intense situation, and our relationships with each other were the one constant. No matter where we were, or how many miles from home we were, the one constant was that there were six of us, and no matter how much we got on each other's nerves, or how much we wanted to get away, we had to make the best of it.
And besides that--sometimes bigger than that--was the fact that everything we were doing was with other Christians. The Body of Christ is huge. It stretches far, and that's the most powerful common bond. There was something about going into a church in England or Scotland, thousands of miles from home, and being accepted and loved, just because we serve the same God.
But it's been a year, and how far things can come in twelve months...
One year ago today: Every night, my mom would put me to sleep by planting a garden on my back. I'd lay on my stomach, and she would, first of all, "rake" the garden by scratching my back. Then she'd make rows to plant the seeds in, and then she'd plant the different rows of the seeds I wanted. At age two, I always wanted flowers, candy canes, and chocolates. The rows would be "covered up," and then the sun and rain (back rubbing and drumming fingers) would help them grow. At the end, she'd make the seeds grow by pulling on the fabric of my nightshirt, and then make me giggle by gently pinching my back to "pick" them. All the while, she'd be explaining the whole process to me soothingly, in that gentle "mom-voice" designed to lull her children to sleep. Even as I grew older, I still wanted gardens; even until I was about 9 or 10 years old, on the nights when I couldn't sleep.
infinite || abyss
posted at 12:53 p.m.
