One of the benefits of participating in 7 Quick Takes but not being organized enough to remember that I have bookmarked the template for these posts is that I generally end up reading Jen’s posts before I ever write mine. She posted today about a pre-fab studio and I thought it was cute, so I followed the link to learn more. I dream often about someday owning a great big house and pretty much always having lots of people live there, but every now and again while I’m dreaming about that, my inner introvert wonders how I’d survive. This little studio would be the perfect guest house/ home office/escape – a place to go read or write, or to let friends come and stay for a little retreat. The modern studio was cool, but I looked around the website a little more, and they have a cottage. It’s a really good thing I don’t have $30,000 and a backyard. Explaining that sort of an impulse buy might have been difficult.
There have been a ton of really great posts written this week, but the one that made my heart seriously sing was this one by Natalie Trust: When A Jesus Feminist Comes Home To A Jesus Feminist. All I can say in response is, “yes. yes. a thousand times yes.”
I am still, as Natalie did, working my way through Sarah Bessey’s Jesus Feminist slowly. It is too good to rush through, and so freeing, so healing, so hopeful. I want every woman who has been told that she is too much and every man who has ever told her so to read this book and to really see what God is doing in his Church. I want them to re-read the Bible and see the way God has used women to advance His Kingdom purposes from the very beginnings of our Story. I want them to understand that this is true:
But we’ll talk more about this later, once I finish the book. 🙂 Otherwise this quick take is going to become an entire post on feminism.
I was thinking this morning about the tagline for my blog (which isn’t actually anywhere on my blog yet, I don’t think, but it is on my Facebook page): “Happiness Isn’t Complicated.” It really isn’t. I’m not talking about fleeting emotions so much as choosing to live in a state of contentment, knowing you are favored by circumstance. Even if it doesn’t always look (or feel) like it.
But even emotional happiness isn’t as complicated as we make it out to be sometimes. It’s really more just about being aware of what makes you feel a certain way and why. As I’ve learned to pay attention, and begun to study personality traits (which are never something you should use to define anyone, but can be helpful in understanding ourselves and others), I’ve learned that I am happiest when I am able to balance my time between longer periods of solitude and quality time spent with one to five of my closest friends. (That would be the introvert in me. Sidenote: introversion for me doesn’t mean that I like to be alone all the time. It just means that crowds are overwhelming. It also means that I am perfectly content spending an entire day with a friend on opposite ends of a couch just reading, and will feel like we had serious quality time at the end of it.)
I’ve also learned that a slower pace of life suits me best. That puttering around the kitchen, going for a bike ride, and reading for hours on end are three of the surest ways to restore my mental sanity. So I am happy (pun intended) to report that for the next two days, I am not working. (For those of you who don’t know how shocking that is, I usually put in 20+ hours over the weekends. No joke.) I am stocking up on healthy groceries before the next snowstorm hits, I hope to spend Saturday cleaning and cooking and reading, and my whole plan for Sunday is sleeping in(!), and spending part of the day with the kind of people who can cheer me up just by walking into a room. I cannot wait.
Sunday is my “re-birthday.” I’ll have been walking with Jesus for 23 years as of sometime between 10:30-11:00am on March 2nd. I realize there is a bit of irony to the fact that my plan to celebrate my re-birthday is to skip church and sleep in… but I’m really looking forward to spending that morning with Jesus on my own.
The series I’ve been running this past month on singleness and the church sort of came to an abrupt halt there – sorry about that. It was a combination of being really far behind on work, trying to catch up so that I really could take two days off, and having a really bad cold. Technically the series was supposed to end today, but I have at least one more post I (don’t) want to write kicking around in my head, and hope to finish it to “wrap up” the series tomorrow. I suspect it’s a topic I’ll come back to again, but I’m definitely ready to be done. I know I mentioned that last week, but seriously – thinking and writing about it every day for a month has really made me start to feel this way:
(Which is annoying, since I’m the one calling it out that being single isn’t something to be fixed. Sigh. I really do believe that…)
photo courtesy of ©Depositphotos.com / AlikeYou
Lent. I totally thought it started last Wednesday (was very happy to discover that it didn’t). I’d decided to give up coffee for Lent. And then I realized this afternoon that if I do that, I’m not going to be able to have any over spring break, which is tragic, because I would have time to go to J.P.’s for coffee that week… I may have to rethink this. Or maybe just make an exception for one day….
Oh, and for those of you who think I’m crazy for driving 3.5 hours just to get a cup of coffee? J.P.’s was just listed in USA Today Online as one of the 10 best coffeehouses in America. See? It’s not that crazy.
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