“Can I put the arm rest up?”

“Sure.”

[spilling over into my seat]  “I’m still a big girl.  But I’ve lost over 200 lbs.”

“Wow – that’s incredible!  Congratulations – what an accomplishment.”

“No more seat-belt expander for me.”

[high-five with a 70-year old woman, initiated by yours truly]

“I’m Pat, by the way, and this is my husband Bobby.”

“Hi, Pat and Bobby.  I’m Annie.”

- – - – - – - -

“Are you from Nashville?”

“No, but I work for a company that’s based there.  I’m heading back for work, and a friend’s wedding on New Years’ Eve.”

“The company that you work for – do they rate well in customer service?”

“We do, in fact.  It’s one of the things that we’re known for.”

“Well, I tell you what.  You need to move to Mesa, Arizona, and teach those nincompoops a thing or two about customer service.  I have never met such dolts in my life as I did in Mesa, Arizona.  Or as many Ethiopians as I did in the Denver airport.”

- – - – - – - -

“How did you two meet?”

“We were in high school.  I had a girl friend who wasn’t allowed to car-date unless it was with another couple.  So she begged me to go on a double-date with her and her boyfriend, and Bobby here.  I couldn’t stand him.”

“What?  How could you not stand Bobby?”

“I don’t know, I just couldn’t.”

“Okay, go on.”

“My girl friend liked the guy she was going with, but her family told her that she couldn’t marry him, because he wasn’t a Christian.  So she wrote him a Dear John letter.  But, you know what?  She died of typhoid fever.”

[gasp]  “That’s terrible.”

[somber]  “Yes.”  [gung-ho]  “But after that, Bobby called me up to ask for a date with just me.  And I said yes.  And we’ve been together ever since.”

- – - – - – - -

“How have you made marriage last for 49 years?”

“It’s give-and-take.  Always give-and-take.  I love him so much, I hope I die before he does, because I could never live without him.”

- – - – - – - -

“Bobby has had a kidney transplant, two knee replacements, and open-heart surgery.”  [fumbling for his meds]  “I hope we make it to 50 years before he dies.  Want a sugar-free yogurt-covered pretzel?”

“Sure.”

- – - – - – - -

“Have you met Mr. Right?”

“No, I haven’t.  Not yet.  I hope I do someday.”

“Oh, you will.  A girl like you can’t last much longer without being snatched up.  Blows my mind that it hasn’t happened already, actually.  Men are idiots.”

“Thanks, Bobby.”  Smile.  For real.  Big smile.

- – - – - – - -

“Girl, I’ll tell you what.  I can already tell that you have common sense – which is more than I can say for most people in this world.”

“Well, thanks, Bobby!”

“You do.  You’ve got it.  Common sense.  And pretty eyes.

I need to use the restroom.”

- – - – - – - -

I’ll be honest: at first, I felt tempted to open up my laptop and cut off conversation with them.  But I’m so glad that I didn’t.  Pat and Bobby reminded me that life is precious and fleeting, like a vapor, and that the only thing worth passing on is love.  I don’t know how to reconcile the notion that “life is meaningful” with “yeah, but everyone dies” – but this couple, towards the end of their relatively quiet, non-glamorous years, somehow made me believe that the two aren’t mutually exclusive.

I think I should switch them.

Everyone dies.

Yeah, but life is meaningful.

Extremely, intensely, marvelously meaningful.

Taken from “Teaching a Stone to Talk”:

One cold Christmas Eve, I was up unnaturally late because we had all gone out to dinner – my parents, my baby sister, and I.  We had come home to a warm living room, and Christmas Eve. Our stockings drooped from the mantle; beside them, a special table bore a bottle of ginger ale and a plate of cookies.

I had taken off my fancy winter coat and was standing on the heat register to bake my shoe soles and warm my bare legs.  There was a commotion at the front door; it opened, and cold winter blew around my dress.

Everyone was calling me.  “Look who’s here! Look who’s here!”  I looked. It was Santa Claus.  Whom I never – ever – wanted to meet.  Santa Claus was looming in the doorway and looking around for me.  My mother’s voice was thrilled: “Look who’s here!”  I ran upstairs.

Like everyone in his right mind, I feared Santa Claus, thinking he was God.  I was still thoughtless and brute, reactive.  I knew right from wrong, but had barely tested the possibility of shaping my own behavior, and then only from fear, and not yet from love.  Santa Claus was an old man whom you never saw, but who nevertheless saw you; he knew when you’d been bad or good.  He knew when you’d been bad or good! And I had been bad.

My mother called and called, enthusiastic, pleading; I wouldn’t come down.  My father encouraged me; my sister howled.  I wouldn’t come down, but I could bend over the stairwell and see: Santa Claus stood in the doorway with night over his shoulder, letting in all the cold air of the sky; Santa Claus stood in the doorway monstrous and bright, powerless, ringing a loud bell and repeating Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas.  I never came down.  I don’t know who ate the cookies.

For so many years now I have known that this Santa Claus was actually a rigged-up Miss White, who lived across the street, that I confuse the dramatis personae in my mind, making Santa Claus, God, and Miss White an awesome, vulnerable trinity.  This is really a story about Miss White.

Miss White was old; she lived alone in the big house across the street.  She liked having me around; she plied me with cookies, taught me things about the world, and tried to interest me in finger painting, in which she herself took great pleasure.  She would set up easels in her kitchen, tack enormous slick soaking papers to their frames, and paint undulating undersea scenes: horizontal smears of color sparked by occasional vertical streaks which were understood to be fixed kelp.  I liked her.  She meant no harm on earth, and yet half a year after her failed visit as Santa Claus, I ran from her again.

That day, a day of the following summer, Miss White and I knelt in her yard while she showed me a magnifying glass.  It was a large, strong hand lens.  She lifted my hand and, holding it very still, focused a dab of sunshine on my palm.  The glowing crescent wobbled, spread, and finally contracted to a point.  It burned; I was burned; I ripped my hand away and ran home crying.

Miss White called after me, sorry, explaining, but I didn’t look back.

Even now I wonder: if I meet God, will he take and hold my bare hand in his, and focus his eye on my palm, and kindle that spot and let me burn?

But no.  It is I who misunderstood everything and let everybody down.  Miss White, God, I am sorry I ran from you.  I am still running, running from that knowledge, that eye, that love from which there is no refuge.  For you meant only love, and love, and I felt only fear, and pain.  So once in Israel love came to us incarnate, stood in the doorway between two worlds, and we were all afraid.

- – - – - – - -

As a follow-up, be sure to listen to eastmountainsouth’s “Still Running.”

Merry Christmas, friends.  May you all experience “that love from which there is no refuge.”

Is it better to have high expectations, or none at all?

You guys have come through with some excellent thoughts in the past – care to pipe up again?

With my Netflix membership, I wind up watching a lot of crappy movies.  “Noble Things” was awful.  “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” made me want to gouge my eyeballs out.  “Billy: The Early Years of Billy Graham” was the hokiest thing I’ve ever seen.  “The Invention of Lying” was I CAN’T EVEN TALK ABOUT IT.

These are horrible movies.  Never watch them.  I added them to my queue out of curiosity, but curiosity killed the cat and Annie Parsons.

However, I’ve discovered a few gems that are worth mentioning.

“The Greatest”

“Everybody’s Fine”

“The Boys Are Back”

“Last Chance Harvey”

These are movies about messy people, and painful events, and broken families, and broken hearts – but also, love.  Not Nicholas Sparks love – but complicated, nuanced, imperfect love.  They leave you feeling both sad and hopeful – which, isn’t that just like life?

(Also, when I did a Google search for “‘The Greatest’ movie,” this is what it rendered:

I can’t say that I disagree.)

Makes me want to fall in love.

Also, don’t forget: there is still time for you to enter the contest to win the gift basket from Burning Daylight!  Throw your name in the proverbial hat, people – the comments close tonight!

We are down to single digits: I am moving in 9 days.

And yes, I have Christmas parties 6 of the next 9 nights.  I might run out of outfits.

That said, posting may be light until after I get to Colorado.  I don’t want to miss out on a single moment of Nashville until I have to.  The thought of leaving these friends of mine – the ones I just tried to list by name and then had to stop because it would have been too long to read – keeps me awake at night.

I want to love on these people who have loved me for two years.  I want to write them each letters and tell them exactly why I appreciate them, exactly why I am going to miss them so much my heart might dissolve.  I want to sit face to face with them, and hear their voices.  I want to hug them while I can still touch them.  I want to take pictures with them, to capture this sliver of time that is flying by much too quickly.  I want to let them know that I believe in them, that I want good things for them – that, quite simply, I adore them.

Nashville, get ready for some lovin’.

The comments that you left in response to Thursday’s blog
I was blown away by a couple of things: 1) the TRUTH that was so evident in so much of what you were saying, and 2) the HONESTY about something that isn’t easily summed up in a cliché phrase.  I love that so many of you felt free to share a glimpse into your own stories and experiences with that curious thing called Love.

For the record, I am in agreement with many of you: I don’t believe in “The One”; rather, I think that I will wind up with “A One.”  If I believed in “The One,” I would have married JC Chasez when I was 15.

And on a personal note, I loved it when Casey said, “You ‘know’ when your introvertedness doesn’t mind sharing your space with that person.”  I’m pretty sure that in my case, that will be the flashing marquee sign telling me to go to Vegas RIGHT THIS SECOND.

Lord of the Rings
Last week, my roommate Julie told me that she had never read nor seen “Lord of the Rings.”  I think that I shrieked, “WHAT??!?” and then fell down dead.  But after the disbelief came action, and we watched “The Fellowship of the Ring” and “The Two Towers” this weekend.

Have you ever had the chance to watch something epic – something that has changed your own life, something that has become an essential piece of how you view the world – affect someone else for the first time?  It was so, so fun – and I think that Julie is hooked, even though she kept calling Strider “Striker.”

Micah’s 6th birthday
Yesterday, my nephew Micah turned 6.  I saw him last week, and when I asked him about his upcoming birthday, he said, “I can’t wait to turn 6!  When you are 6, you can do SUCH FUN THINGS – like a cartwheel and lose a tooth!”

And my cynical, disillusioned heart melted into a puddle.

You know how some espoused people, when asked, “How did you know he/she was the right one?” answer, “I just knew”?

What does that MEAN?  What are they (you?) referring to?  And should single people be holding for it – whatever it is?

Or is it just a completely bogus statement, fabricated to assuage the general relationship-befuddlement that seems to expand and swell the further we get from college?

I’m curious.

I don’t always believe that Jesus loves me – even though the bible tells me so.

Oh, I know that Jesus loves me – in a “whole world in his hands” kind of way.  But do I believe that he loves ME?  That he sees ME?  That seems impossible.

It’s this thorn in my side, this snag in my otherwise fairly confident faith – which is interesting, since the love of God is what the gospel is centered on.  When I have a hard time trusting the central truth of the Christian faith, it has a ripple effect on the other things that I believe.

I find myself swinging like a pendulum between an inflated sense of self-importance and a groveling sense of shame.  Driven by a strong need for justice, I still buy into the lie that I can earn my worth, and that if I don’t secure my merit by my own accomplishment, then I’m done for.  I miss the whole grace thing, over and over again – and then just beat myself up for being a loser.

It’s hard to believe something that I can’t feel.

But lately, I’ve been coming back to that passage in Matthew 6 where Jesus talks about the birds of the air, and how they soar and glide and don’t worry about their lives because they are provided for – and that if God loves them, how much more does he love you and me?  For some reason, that has felt like a good line of reasoning – something that I could latch on to – and so a few weeks ago, I prayed that God would help me remember that.

Specifically, I prayed for a visual reminder of that truth.

And last week, I received a birthday package in the mail.

Greta’s note was short and sweet, simply saying that she knew that this was an enormously impractical gift, but that she saw it and just wanted to send it to me.  I unwrapped it, and found a doorknob.

It took me a second to put it together – because there’s no way she could have known.  Why on earth would she have sent me a doorknob – especially when I don’t even have a bedroom door?

But when the pieces fell into place, my heart almost burst.

Because the love of God will open the door and set me free.

How can someone’s story be simultaneously so simple AND so romantic?

This is Vadym and Sheryl Romaniuk.  Are they not darling?

I’ve been friends with Sheryl even longer than I’ve known my own sisters – we met when we were 18 months old in San Jose, CA, and when I was 6 and my family moved to Colorado, we started to write letters (yes, the kind that were signed “LYLAS”).  Our families vacationed together every summer, and when we both decided to attend the same college in Seattle, we were roommates for the first year.

Post-college, Sheryl made the gutsy decision to join the Peace Core, and was assigned to Ukraine.  Two years is a long time to dedicate oneself to anything, let alone to a country in which vodka is a vital tool in cat neutering.  But Sheryl dedicated herself to the Ukrainian language – which, I should add, uses the Cyrillic alphabet, so it’s even MORE impossible – became fluent, and in the process, fell in love with Vadym.

Long story short, and many twists and turns later, Vadym left his family, his home, his language, and moved to the United States.  In the same way that Sheryl had been so bold, Vadym left behind all that he knew – in order to be with the woman that he loved.

(Imagine me blogging in a low, dramatic voice, because I feel like this should be a plot synopsis on a movie preview.)

This weekend, I had the honor of standing next to Vadym and Sheryl in San Jose, CA, as they said their wedding vows.  Vadym speaks very little English, but spoke his English promises clearly and sincerely.  Sheryl looked like a goddess.

And I?  With all of the traditional Ukrainian toasting, I drank too much vodka and accidentally found myself in the middle of the dance floor during “Chattahoochee.”

But that is neither here nor there.

Vadym has decided that Sheryl is worth anything and everything that it takes to be with her.  And Sheryl has become a haven for Vadym – a safe place in the middle of the chaos that his life surely holds, far from all that he has ever known.

I am so grateful for this beautiful picture of what love and romance are in their most simple and true form.