"Remember the 3 Ts: Things Take Time"

Great quote found on FB page of a former girl for whom I was a summer camp counselor. Now she's counseling me!

Transplanting

It's Saturday morning. As I look back over the week, I am pleased with the amount of work and getting out of my apartment I did! In fact, the two go together, it seems. Don't get me wrong, home is the best place to pound out large amounts of academic work in pajamas, all while near the coffee maker. But, being outside of my room and dining room and the sofas in the front room help me stick to my task. On Tuesday, I treated myself to a bubble tea and read half a book in one three-hour sitting. I have barely ever been so into my reading as I was that day! Then I took a one hour run, then went to the library on campus for the first time ever from 9-1 a.m. After a good time of searching, I found myself a desk coral (sp?) and was able to work undistracted on a large assignment due that following morning. Wednesday morning, I finished the assignment off at a local Einstein Bagel coffee shop, about one mile from my house. That Wednesday I also had a 3-hour root canal operation completed, and in the afternoon met with a woman to start tutoring (to pay for the teeth. For more on my feelings about teeth, see a previous post...fortunately, I have grown very fond my my dentist here, which might be a little sad, because that's like my form of being social, LOL!). To top it off, I had lacrosse practice that day AND went to an Emory community event, where the legendary and vigorous duo Woodward and Bernstein spoke.

This previous weekend, T's cousin took us out to classic Atlanta hang outs, 2 lounges. We also went to a great burrito place in Decatur. We enjoyed the park with a lake and long hanging pedestrian bridge near my condo, too, Lullwater Park. Basically, I am getting to know my surroundings, and am getting attached. YES! Transplanting!

Letting 'letting go' do its work

So I realized this morning a recurring event in my life: what I had made a stressful thing became far less stressful as soon as I let go of it. And the pieces fell into place...later. The letting-go process isn't immediate, by any means, but when my own attempt to force my way finally reaches a pronounced point of no effect, like I have passed the deadline for it to work out, then God is giving me the grace to finally have the ability to let go. And how many times, how often, has God demonstrated to me that He is interested in my dreams? After all, He provided me even with the embryonic passion! Before I even desired, He desired it for me.

So this is to say, I am again in that spot of confident, grace-filled, letting-go! What will happen next? in His care, I can proceed confident that His grace and presence will meet me anywhere I go (next).

The Job I Love

I am grading undergrads' essay exams now. I am realizing, this is what I am missing in life right now. I am feeling the emptiness of role loss and transition. I need to get back into teaching somehow! I don't know if tutoring will cut it. I need a classroom. I really miss my students...they are LIFE to me.

This weekend, I will need to read Annette Lareau's Home Advantage. I can't help but pray to God that my dissertation work mirrors hers. How totally inspiring and invigorating. She sat in on an upper-class and working-class elementary classroom for an extended period of time (a year, maybe?) and got deeply intrenched in the parents' and teachers' lives. Plus she did some really impressive qualitative field notes coding. She poured her blood, sweat, and tears into that work, and it came out SO GOOD.

I hang on to P's words: "I see you pioneering something big in the area of sociology of education, especially with teachers." I am remembering this morning WHY I am here, and where I hope to be one day, who I hope to be teaching, what I hope to be writing. May God give me the grace to persevere and cling to those dreams! Yes, it is grace, because I need not only endurance, but also an increased measure of His love so that I do it in a way to glorify Him-- not in a socially-absent or isolated way.

Elaboration & a new book

I said I was going to elaborate on why I admire Kozol, Park, Lareau, Pizzigoni, etc. Let me limit my elaboration to, each of them do their work passionately. Respectively, they: have a fierce sympathy for their subjects, the ability to inspire sociology students deeply and the courage to foresake his elite affiliations in order to teach in HBCUs in later life; the tenacity to redo an enormous qualitative study when the first approach of organizing and interpreting data wasn't good enough; and a devotion to rich lecturing that I can't help but envy already! I long to do, have these attitudes, accomplishments, traits. Let it be a healthy envy... motivation by admiration.

remember my chapter by chapter reflections to Jane Jacobs' book? Well, I want to do the same -- albeit more abridged (given the constraints of being in grad school now) -- with a book called "The Sociologically examined life." It is a great choice for me to read now, because I hope it will keep me loving this field. I have every confidence that I will stay in that condition (loving it), but any opportunity to fuel the fire will be seized happily!

The chapter I started in, after perusing the table of contents, had to do with understanding ourselves by understanding others, and the mirage of "personal" choices. First, the author, Michael Schwalbe, points out that blacks know more about whites than vice vera, or even than whites do about themselves, because they have had to examine them closely for their own survival. The ones (or group) with more power is thus the group with less self awareness. Interesting! The (a?) drawback of having power. Second, the author argues, there's no such thing as a choice we make that has no bearing, directly or indirectly, on others (perfect example: an unplanned pregnancy). I love this next point: "It is not always easy to see how this is so, and in some cases we may not want to see" (p. 52).

If I could be like anyone...

...I'd like to be like sociologists Annette Lareau, Robert Park, Jonathan Kozol, or my Latin American history professor from Columbia, Caterina Pizzigoni. Elaboration to follow.

Natural Limitations

Romans 6:19 I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations. ... present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification.

I have a lot of stress and anxiety in my spirit lately. It's causing me to be unusually pessimistic, isolated, and fretful. Now, as during the period following Dad's death, I am facing that fear of becoming someone I don't want to be, of somehow losing my essence to external forces. But God has shown me that He won't allow that. He did it then, and He will do it now.

I love this verse, which I encountered late this morning. It basically tells me that yeah, God knows we have human weaknesses and failures, and that our limitations, those times when we feel overwhelmed or at the end of our own resources and familiar coping strategies, are not abnormal. These are part of being human, i.e., such that Paul's letter is written to us, in our language ("human terms"). Otherwise, he would be writing in say...political terms (for the power hungry), or psychological terms (for the success hungry), or economical terms (for the security hungry), etc. etc.

Graduate school has already taught me so much! In the words of P., it will teach me to come to value my intellect as my inexhaustible reservoir of strength in times of uncertainty. I am amazed at how the spirit and the intellect are connected...

Missing you, Dad

Dennis Nelson, RIP October 10, 2007

Little did I see your departure coming, Dad. But God gave me the grace to make it through those weeks and year following your death. And He still is, to this day.

Sometimes I wonder if living off of the memory of you is enough. Like a car running off fumes. When I think about all that lies before me, I am very intimidated. If only you were here to take some of the pressure off.

But then I think, it's OK that you aren't here. God is keeping me, just as He kept you. I think by far the hardest challenge to me in my life, Dad, as I live out the rest of my days, is to trust God more. I don't know why I am reluctant sometimes, after all the good He has done in my life, after all the ways He has proven His love. I wish you were here to tell me so. But I have friends who remind me always of God's faithfulness, abundant supply of grace, His strength in our weakness.

Dad, I want to remember you today, to pause my life and examine if it is honoring you. For the most part it is, but there are areas I can improve in, too. I know that as my father you would be gently leading me towards strength and goodness. You made a peaceful life possible for me, and I thank you for that.

How do I continue your legacy? The positive things you did your successes as a father? You did do much right. Today, I want to remember what you did, what you said, but most of all, how you loved.

* the watch you went to repair before I returned to Columbia
* the way you always wanted to have me home and spent time with me
* the comfortable day-to-day life we shared when I lived at home
* the incredible way you managed to let go of me when I went off to college
* your contagious hopes for my future
* your well-read-ness, transferred down to me
* the calm sanctuary you kept, providing me with a home (imperfect as it was at times)
* dinners you cooked
* hugs you gave
* jokes you carried on through the years
* softball and lacrosse games you attended
* gentle but firm discipline of your teeneaged Jemmer
* newspaper clippings of stories you thought I would care about
* educating me, loving me, knowing me, like few others do.

Filled with Skill

All the women whose hearts stirred them to use their skill spun the goats' hair. ... See, the Lord has called by name ... and he has filled them with the Spirit of God, with skill, with intelligence, with knowledge, with all craftsmanship, to devise artistic designs ... And he has inspired them to teach ... He has filled them with skill to do every sort of work done by an engraver or by a designer or by an embroiderer - by any sort of workman or skilled designer. (Exodus 35: 26, 30-35)

OK, so now's the time to concede that any skill any of us have, it comes by God's filling us. He pours both abilities and the "heart stirrings" to use them. How often have you seen people with skill, but no motivation to use it? Well, the remedy is simple. Turn to the Provider of these things.

These verses make me realize a few things. So graduate school would probably be agreed to be the time when one gets filled with intelligence. But today I recognize, that though I myself do the reading and writing, the whole time, it is God providing that transfer of knowledge from the ether into my own fibers. Another point: God gifts us in very specific skills, skills that the most secular of artisans can respect and admire. We're talking serious skill here. How can I not be excited, that He has promised me some serious skill, and the heart stirrings to use it? It's all in the name of His glory. Let it so be, God.

Socks

Today when I woke up, I was surprisingly cold inside my own house. It's the top of October, and it feels like it, too. I like when expectations and reality align. So my shorts and T-shift PJs wouldn't do during my pre-church reading. I whipped out the comfy lounging yoga pants, and a pair of fuzzy slipper-socks, striped white, grey and pink, in my bottom drawer with all that other random stuff: belts to certain dresses, my lacrosse uniform, etc.

I received these socks as a Christmas gift from a student from my first year of teaching. I think she graduated early last year. Behaviorally, she wasn't an angel, but she wasn't a devil either. Academically, she was the best of both worlds: very conscientious, and legitimately smart. Socially, very adept, polite, cute, engaging, sprightly (I am wondering if that means what I think it means...bubbly?). I saw P. and her mom at a DQ on Ellis Rd. after a tennis game one night. I was embarassed because I was in my tennis outfit that showed a lot of thigh. Fortunately, it was not as big of a deal as I thought at the time.

Anyhow, these socks, they continue to keep me warm 3 winters later. I miss P. and her peers very, very much.