October 31, 2006
Darkness
“We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under control of the evil one. We know also that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding so that we may know who is true.” 1 John 5:19:20
In the book of John, Jesus calls the Devil the original murderer and tells the Pharisees that when Satan lies, he is speaking his native language, as he is the ultimate perpetrator and king of deception.
We started a new five-part series at church this week called “Twisted,” and on Sunday Andy Stanley told us that while it is sometimes hard to fathom, there is an unseen, invisible world that daily impacts the visible world. There are agents at work – whether you want to think of them as emotions or corporeal demons – whose primary goal is to twist the truth. Andy admitted that it’s hard to comprehend sometimes, but that he leans heavy on the Bible, because there is a lot that is hard to comprehend. And where else can you look but to what you know is true?
The Devil wants to destroy everything we hold dear: our relationships, our families, our friendships, even our bodies. His tool is deception and his desired result is destruction.
If you’re resistant to the idea of God, I assume you’re even more resident to the idea of a Devil. But our entire word provides evidence of both. It’s ying and yang. Dark and Light. A world without Evil would be a world where gunmen don’t break into schools with the intent to kill. Where terrorists don’t scheme – sometimes for years – to destroy. A world without Evil would be a world where the Holocaust never happened. How else do you explain systematic, intentional intended eradication of an entire people group? Without Evil, there is no Hotel Rwanda. (Which is also to say, without dark, how would you recognize the Light?)
I have no doubt the Devil lurks. He almost had me – it’s only through Grace that I escaped.
“You are from God, little children, and have overcome them; because greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world.” 1 John 4:4.
Posted by hannah at 02:15 PM
October 26, 2006
Training
Training for the 2007 Mardi Gras Marathon has officially begun.
Jennifer and I met at the office yesterday at 6:45 a.m. for an easy (and very slow!) jog around Olympic Park and downtown. Right now our plan is to meet twice a week, but I have to figure out how/where/when I am going to do my Saturday long runs.
This is the first time I'm doing this on my own - without the support of a Galloway group - and the prospect of waking up on a Saturday morning and heading out for six, seven, eight plus miles all alone is a little daunting.
The road to February stretches out before me and it may be only 13.1 miles, but it looks a lot longer when you're still at the starting line.
Posted by hannah at 04:42 PM | Comments (0)
October 19, 2006
I miss him. I miss him. I miss him.
Posted by hannah at 12:42 PM | Comments (0)
Around the World in 365 Days
Yesterday I told my mom that I would not travel as much in 2007 as I have in 2006 because I was just exhausted from all of it. "Except for Savannah in January and Florida in June, because those are for work. Oh, and when we go to Florida in the spring." And then I remembered: New Orleans in February for the Mardi Gras Half; the Missions team is planning a return trip to Romania in June. And I'm hoping there will be at least one wedding - if not two - in Ohio and I can't go an entire year without seeing Michael and I'm sure my dad would like it if I came to Houston at least once. So there I am again with a full year of traveling in front of me and it's still only October.
I love traveling, but it's hard to do when you have a pet. You either have to burden your friends or come up with a few hundred bucks for boarding (that I can now increase by 33% with the addition of a second dog - thankfully they don't double the price), not to mention the tickets and parking/cab fare/MARTA money to get to the airport in the first place. And I'm a homebody by nature - I like being in my house. When the dogs and I went back to our house yesterday after their eight nights at the Coole's (and my four), I was never so glad to be home, ever.
Sometimes I'm amazed when I look at my Flickr sets and see all the places I've been over the past year. How did I manage it all? How is my house still standing, unrobbed? Why is Montego even still speaking to me?
But I'm so grateful that I got to travel to all those places and see all the things that I saw. I got to hang out with my dad in Houston; see one of my best friends get married on a beach in Jamaica; spend a long weekend with my favorite female family members in Florida; gamble in Vegas; see the sun set in Hilton Head Island; stand among Roman ruins in Transylvania; hold my brand new nephew in Ohio; worship with 800 of my closest friends on the sands of Destin; and see hundreds of hot air balloons ascend into the sky in Albuquerque.
In two weeks I'll be in the waters off the Yucatan Peninsula and two weeks after that I'll be back at my dad and Ginger's house in Texas - one of my favorite places on the planet - to eat turkey and watch lots of DVDs and take long walks with their dog.
I am lucky; I’m not complaining. But sometimes I wonder what I am missing here when I’m gallivanting off over there. Maybe in 2007 I’ll find out.
Posted by hannah at 11:14 AM | Comments (0)
October 16, 2006
Tie that Binds
My cousin Anne said that our grandmother is shedding her skin. She's lost 11 pounds since June, which is a lot considering she was almost all bone to begin with.
"We talk a lot about Daddy," my mom told me. "She wants to talk about Jo and Billy and Dick."
Last week she sent me a card, dictated to my mother, and as I read my grandmother’s words via mother's flowing script, I realized that I don't own anything with my MeMe's handwriting on it. I don't know why that would matter, but it does.
The card was just an I'm-thinking-of-you card and inside she'd stuck two $5 bills. She'd heard that Starbucks raised their prices (a whole nickel) and she wanted to pick up my coffee for the week.
"She wants to do little things like that a lot more now," my mom said.
They bought her "going away clothes" as she is calling them - a pink nightgown and a pink housecoat to wear over it. She finally decided who she wants to give her little diamond studs to - the earrings her daughters presented her with on the auspicious occasion of her 90th birthday, almost nine years ago. "I want Sophia to have them," she said. So my mother took out the notebook that lists furniture and books and china - a handwritten record of who gets what the day my last living grandparent dies – and wrote down, “diamond earrings, Sophia.”
The big pieces - like my grandfather's roll top desk - will be sold at auction for the sake of "fairness." The remaining kids agreed that whoever wanted whatever it was badly enough could pay the estate for it. That seems weird to me... that children would fight over or have to buy back something that belonged to their parents. It seems weird, but not unlikely. I should know, as I almost had a meltdown at the thought of a wash stand being sold at auction when I desired it so much. The wash stand isn't much of anything. It's old and it's wood and it's no big deal, but for some reason, it represents my grandmother. It belonged to her eldest sister, Lois, who was born in 1899 and who died a childless widow. She left almost everything to her little sister Jo - who else was there? - and my grandmother cared for Lois's things with reverence and respect. My mom told MeMe that I wanted the wash stand and she said, of course. So there is my name, in this amended, wouldn't-stand-up-in-court spiral bound record of all my grandmother's worldly possessions.
I asked my mom why she was telling me all this. Certainly she didn’t think my grandmother was going to die tomorrow. “No, I think she could go any day,” my mom answered. “Then again, she can afford to live to 105, so who knows?”
Our lives are short, whether we live to be 98 or not. But I know, and I know my grandmother knows, that eternity is what we are waiting on. That gives me comfort. That no matter what and no matter when, I will never lose her.
Posted by hannah at 10:03 PM | Comments (0)
Full of Hot Air
When we were in Albuquerque last week, we had the opportunity to attend the 2006 Balloon Fiesta. We arrived at the park before dawn, when the moon was still in the air and a few balloons were aloft in the dusky sky flying "Dawn Patrol."
Every so often, you could see them pull their burners and fill the balloons with hot air, lighting them up like dozens of giant lightbulbs high above us.
By 7 or 8 a.m. hundreds of balloons filled the sky and everywhere you looked, another one was going up - next to you, over you, behind you. It was quite a sight to look to the west and see nothing but balloons in the vast blue expanse.
It was beautiful.
Posted by hannah at 12:19 PM | Comments (0)
October 13, 2006
Southwestern
I used to think that the sky over Texas was the biggest sky I'd ever seen, but that was only because I'd never been West enough; never been so far West that there is nothing to break up the expanse of sky for miles and miles.
Tonight I stood outside and watched the sun set - bouncing off the Sandia Mountains in the East - casting pink and brown light across the mesa. My mom told me that she'd always found New Mexico to have a different sort of beauty, and I have to agree. I took pictures of the sky, but photos never give creation the due justice it deserves. You're always a little disappointed when you view them later, trying to drum up the memory of the moment you were taken in.
There are few places in nature that call to me like the ocean, but it's easy to understand how the mountains' stature can capture one's imagination and heart.
Last Sunday we taught the kids about the sky and the water and how God made it all and when I look upon the face of the largest rock I've ever stood upon, I am overwhelmed by His majesty.
My father is a geologist, so I know the science of it all. I understand their age and how over time wind and weather and water shaped the rocks, the mountains, the mesa. If you close your eyes, you can see where the rivers used to run; how they left behind rivets in the rocks. But none of that takes away the awe I feel when I regard them; the appreciation I have for a Creator who just as lovingly and patiently created me.
My soul wait thou only upon God; for my expectation is from him. He only is my rock and my salvation: he is my defense; I shall not be moved. In God is my salvation and my glory: the rock of my strength, and my refuge, is in God. Trust in him at all times; ye people, pour our your heart before him: God is a refuge for us.
Psalms 62:5-8
Posted by hannah at 08:47 PM | Comments (0)
October 09, 2006
Happy Birthday, Daddy
My dad turned 64 on Saturday. That sounds like a large, old number - I suppose it is - and it is one that is almost impossible to fathom.
Shortly after my parents separated, my brother went into counseling. In retrospect, it's a track my parents should've put me on as well, but I was so good at faking being well-balanced that it must not have seemed necessary. Even though I was only 11 at the time, and it was information probably best kept from me, I clearly remember a statement that the counselor made to my mother about Guy. She told her that my brother was struggling so badly because he didn't know how to reconcile his anger towards someone he worshipped so much.
Thinking about that now, I realize that statement applied to me as well. I've come out of that place, and as I have expressed before, I'm not angry anymore. It makes me sad sometimes still - it always will - but it no longer has its hooks in me.
My dad is just a man, a man with faults and bad habits and all the baggage that goes along with making it to 64 years. Now that I'm an adult, I understand how a lot of his parenting was a reflection of his own childhood and that knowledge breaks my heart all over again.
When I see Guy with Micheal, I see how different it is. I know that the cycle is over and I'm so grateful to God to healing our family. We haven't been a four-person unit in almost 20 years, but because I'm unmarried and childless, when I think about "family," they're the unit I cling to.
Several years ago, when I was leaving Houston after a weekend visit, my dad hugged me in front of the security line at terminal C (the terminal in Bush-Intercontinental that you literally have to go through a parking deck to get to), and he said, "I love you more than anything in the world."
Back at ya, Dad.
Posted by hannah at 11:20 AM | Comments (0)
October 05, 2006
Follow Up
We went back to the vet's office yesterday so the wonderful Dr. Drane could remove the drainage tube. The doctor said how lucky we were that the bite wasn't on the underside of Tego's neck, and as it was, she couldn't believe that Montego's skull wasn't crushed. Awesome!
"You don't know how many sad stories I've heard of people just standing there with their dogs on a leash and a loose dog coming over and attacking it," she told me.
As the Dog Whisperer is fond of saying, a dog is first and foremost an animal. Then it's a dog, then it's its breed, then it's Tego or Scout or Toto or whatever.
I am grateful. I don't know what I'd do without her.
Posted by hannah at 11:07 AM | Comments (2)
October 02, 2006
Montego's Bad Day
I'm sparing you the gory photos, but if you click on the one above, it will take you into the set, where you can see them for yourself.
On Saturday, during our routine morning walk, a neighbor's off-leash German Shepherd attacked Montego and tore a gash in her neck that required sedated surgery to close. The bite also created a "pocket" in her neck, between the skin and muscle, that now has a drainage tube sticking out of it.
It was traumatic, for all parties, and it was the first time in our eight years together that Tego required an emergency trip to the vet. She was severely doped up on Saturday, but by yesterday my only major concern was keeping Scout off her. (On Saturday, Scout gave her a wide berth. Probably because Montego smelled like a hospital.)
I gave the neighbor a copy of the vet bill (almost $400) and he is going to pay it, but I can't be reimbursed for my spent emotion and they can't repay me my feeling of safety. It was always in the back of my mind that one of the many stray dogs who roam East Point could come out of nowhere and jump us, but I never thought it would be a resident animal.
I'm going to have to fence in the backyard now - something that's always been in my house plans - but a fenced-in backyard isn't the same thing as long walks around the neighborhood. And allegedly, this aggresive Shepherd has jumped fences before. The owners' father, who lives next door to them, told me that they'll have to "make a decision" about Boo, but I don't know if that means they'll just get rid of him or put him down.
I'm a dog lover - no doubt - but some dogs are, sadly, beyond rehabilitation. What if Montego had been my literal child? It's scary enough to imagine losing my pet....
Counties and cities have leash laws for a reason. What is so hard about corralling your animal? Be a responsible pet owner or don't be a pet owner at all.
Posted by hannah at 02:05 PM | Comments (6)
