becoming known.

This blog has absolutely nothing to do with what I've been up to the last month or so.

And it has everything to do with it.

You see, the events of the past month, Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, "the Sundays after Epiphany" have been intense times of solitude + community, late, late night conversations, early mornings alone, phone calls, emails, no fewer than 5 letters and 6 emails from different people from my time in Spain, transitions at work, new friendships, and reconnecting.
Last week I had two snow days, one 12 hour day, and then a day where I planned a spontaneous road trip to Memphis with two guy friends. Why not? This weekend, we drove about 16 hours round trip, learned more about each other, talked about everything from Elvis to civil rights to Jesus (and maybe combined all of them in an adult-sized onesie), arrived in time for Sunday night church and Po's Dumpling Bar (and a "Love Potion: Management not responsible" drink). Then my parents picked me up (cute!), I recounted our Memphis adventures for the... seventh time, we went home and I heard about their weekend party, putting away the Christmas ornaments, and how our van - which we took in Friday at 7:30am - was still in the shop.

It's no wonder that today, Monday, I am having a hard time sitting still and being alone. A person gets used to momentum, and even though I sorely needed some "blank space", me cuesta acostumbrarme al silencio.

So now I'm sitting cross-legged on my floor, bent over my Mac-mac. Typing to think. Writing a blog as a means of creating space in my own life and as tracing over all this activity to connect the dots in a pattern I think I see forming. I think I need bullet points. But not bullets.

• It takes a long time to develop relationships with people. And if God is relational, how much longer does it take to develop relationships with God? And like any friendship that has been through the rocks, survived, and grows with time, how much more beautiful does our relationship with this creator become over time?
• I've logged a lot of hours with new friends this past month. A lot of life together. A lot of shared experiences. It was beautiful... And yet, I'm constantly reminded, sometimes painfully, of how much more life I've spend outside the context of those relationships. Sometimes it feels like Spain is this year that no one can really comprehend... and part of it is that a lot of things happened during those nine months that I'm only beginning to express. I NEED to talk about it. I want to share it. So many good stories, characters, painful experiences, raw beauty, and lots of emotion. A place that is so different from this, my native landscape, and is yet somehow my home? It's still a bit incomprehensible. I want to go back. I don't want to go back. I don't know. I think I need to talk about it more.
  
• My car is broken somehow. It is the classic story of taking it in for an oil change and there is some part that takes in air on the engine (I don't remember it because mechanical vocabulary does not stick in my brain.) that doesn't work quite right and costs $1200 to fix... One hour later we found out that the minivan also is flawed in some way that, coincidentally also costs $1200 to fix. It's a tense day in my house. Neither vehicle is going to get completely fixed. This is not really related, but it's stressing me out and I wanted to add it to the post.
  

As life continues, as I develop these relationships, enjoy time with others, it is contrasted with this idea that my friend Katherine keeps telling me, "Schmellen, there are so many stories you don't know about me yet!!"
Every time Katherine (who I really want to call "Schmatherine" and probably will in the future) says this, I think "YEAH! There are so many stories you [collectively] don't know about me!!!"

And I wonder if this is how life is... we keep loving each other, creation, God and entering deeper into life together, sharing stories, adventures and becoming known... forever and ever. I hope so. Becoming known is not easy; but it is beautiful. Let's keep after it.