First week of COVID-19 closures: a week of strange dreams.
Once, I dreamt I was driving in the dark, but my headlights kept flipping off. I kept protesting that I could hit something.
Another night, I was unprepared for a trip to a writer’s conference I wasn’t sure why I’d signed up for–but my editor was there, anticipating I would have great things to say. I’d forgotten shoes, blouses, my computer charger.
A friend asked me today on email how my Advent was going. I may have remarked it was still tightly sealed with the rest of the decor in the garage.
My lack of decorating thus far allows me to ignore the fact that I would like to be preparing my heart.
So now that I’m a mom of teenagers and all their weirdness, we talk about things like we did last week: Is it okay to date a non-Christian?
This naturally means I have introduced things like oxen into our conversations before (cue the “unequally yoked” verse, 2 Corinthians 6:14). What’s a good dating conversation without lowing livestock?
After the all-too-recent my-kid-might-have-lymphoma scare? There are some things that have been going right.
For one, after a year of doing my freelance writing and marketing for my only employment, I filed for my own business. I am now the owner of Fresh Ink, LLC. So that’s pretty cool.
Blogging can be a little too much like having an imaginary friend.
Picture sitting at the smallest table at your coffee shop. (I’m having a seasonal special with half of the pumps, decaf. …Because as someone told me, with natural enthusiasm like mine, I should remain uncaffeinated. You?)
Stress is like wearing a flannel shirt when you’re washing dishes, you know?
One minute, you’ve got your hands in the water, scrubbing, the edge of your cuffs kissing the water. Next minute, the water’s bled up to your armpits. (For this reason, my husband’s told me that in Boy Scouts, they always said “Cotton is death”: If you’re wearing cotton when you’re active in the cold, it absorbs your perspiration, and can quickly bring you to hypothermia in bad weather.)
Late one night last week, my husband arrived home to tell me we needed to get the car in the shop pronto. I decided to take it in after my dentist’s appointment the next morning (y’know, all the things I love at once: the dentist’s chair, taking an ailing car to the mechanic). As I pulled up to the stoplight, there were indeed some alarm bells going off in my head. You know it’s bad when the engine light is on. But what about when it’s, uh, flashing?
Well. Now I think it’s a little bit like the “blue screen of death”. The engine was shot. And when I say shot, I mean shot. As in, oil pumping out of a broken piston, etc. Even I, with my wee knowledge of mechanical workings, know this is bad.
So that happened.
Every now and then, living overseas, you get one of those pregnancy-worthy cravings (even if you’re a guy, apparently). For my husband, it was one of those drive-thru burgers and a fountain Coke. Ooh, and tortilla chips and salsa. For me, Greek yogurt with blueberries, then some edamame, with a Starbucks Frappuccino on the side (decaf, with whip). And really good cheese.
Thankfully, none of these were really nutritionally driven. Sometimes I think we’re just hungry for what our hankerings represent. For comfort; ease. Home.
Ever feel a little bit…tippable?
It was late, and she was crying now. Her marriage had been hard–hard for a long time.
I think it was there that I really saw Him, though He’d been there the whole time. Sometimes the Holy Spirit is a little like an I Spy book to me. Knowing what He looks like, I’m learning to spot Him among the clutter of circumstances, ones He’s meticulously arranged.
I want to tell you what He looked like, there in that dimly-lit room, where she was just so tired of waiting for God to change things. Even there, in her road-weary face that longed for a break in being “tough” and “strong”–I saw Him making beautiful things out of dust, as the song goes.
One of the unexpected delights of our final couple of months in Africa was the arrival of a college friend who’s known my husband and I since the beginning. She watched us meet, cautiously date, giddily become engaged. She played the piano when the two of us spring chickens said “I do” forever. Later, I stood with her as she spoke her own vows beneath a spreading tree. And when she visited us in Africa and we stayed up entirely too late, she gave us this gift: I told my husband, “I love that she reminds us how good we are together. That you and I together are a really good thing.”
I wrote before that this time of leaving Africa, of setting a foot on two highly divergent continents, has delivered unavoidable stress to our relationship. Both of us are strained, so it makes sense that our most intimate relationships would bear that weight. So it was kind of God to remind us that despite the ways we occasionally feel like the losers in a three-legged-race right now—“us” is still a really good thing.
Part I of this post outlined some essential reasons we need to identify when we’re stressed. If you’re convinced, let’s get down to it. What are the signs your marriage is under stress?
![Now You're Speaking My [Love] Language](https://www.janelbreitenstein.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/love-languages-text-1.jpg "Now You're Speaking My [Love] Language")
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