january field notes
a monthly chronicle of this wild, precious, & beautiful life
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If you have been a reader of mine for any length of time, you’ll perhaps remember that I was providing little monthly update called The Haps, in which I detailed some happenings (naturally) in my life. While I still like what I’ve done with those, I found myself repeating the same haps each month, seeing as my life is not especially groundbreaking, and so, for the time being, The Haps is on the backburner. I think field notes more authentically share those pieces of my life with you in this particular season. The Haps will, however, remain safely tucked away in the archives for you to peruse at your leisure.
what i’m reading
The Outlander series has completely taken over my life, and I recently finished Voyager (the third book in the series), and decided to throw a few of my other TBRs for this year in between me and the fourth installment of the series. This is mostly due to the emotional devastation I know is coming when I finish the saga, but it also creates a little more headspace for my own book. Speaking of which. . .
what i’m creating
I’ve had a sudden surge of creative energy and have spent a lot of time working on Iona, primarily re-reading and reworking some plot points and character dynamics that I felt had fallen flat over the last month or so. Three pages of nearly unintelligible, labyrinth-like notes later, I have the entirety of the first book plotted out in detail and some power dynamics that I’m very much looking forward to writing in the coming months.
I’m also very excited to begin sharing more of my writing process and behind-the-scenes work now that I have a clearer path forward. Stay tuned, friends.
what i’m learning
I have roughly an hour-and-a-half commute roundtrip each day, and I’ve started listening to the music I used to play on my circa 2008 iPod touch (which I’m proud to say I still own and probably will forever) which includes all of the 2000s youth group culture Christian artists like Francesca Battistelli, Jimmy Needham, and Stellar Kart, and they just hit differently.
I like the familiarity of them. It’s almost like a buoy back to myself at a time when I both knew myself intimately and also had no idea who I was.
I wrote a post at the start of this year that staunchly rejected the notion of making resolutions but instead leaned into experiencing life in a new way, and part of that was finding ways to know and love the girl who definitely didn’t love herself at 12, 13, 14. Listening to the same songs I did in adolescence does something really remarkable in my heart that I can’t quite name yet but that feels a whole lot like healing.
what i’m pondering
I’ve shifted my focus this year to be far more intentional about reading and meditating on scripture. My heart has been a proving ground for much of the last eight years or so, since one of my LoveWorks trip leaders sat our group down in front of a fire in an old farmhouse in Northern Ireland on the last few days of our mission trip and gave each of us a word. Mine was wilderness, and I can’t even begin to articulate the ways in which my life has formed and moved and changed around that word. Not as self-fulfilling prophecy, but as a season in which the Lord has moved in so many ways I never could’ve expected. Twelve-year-old me who dutifully read her Bible every morning and went to church twice a week and joined life groups in high school and college and who led discipleship ministry and who spent three weeks pouring into latch-key kids in East Belfast and who thought she’d met the man she’d prayed for only to find heartbreak and confusion and who didn’t even begin to know what to do with it when she did actually find her husband could not fathom the depth or length or scope of what a season in the wilderness would look like.
But God.
“Dwell in Me, and I will dwell in you. [Live in Me, and I will live in you.] Just as no branch can bear fruit of itself without abiding in (being vitally united to) the vine, neither can you bear fruit unless you abide in Me.”
-John 15:4, AMPC
There is a constancy, an anchorage in reading words breathed and ordained by the One who already knows me. Really knows me. And it’s uncomfortable and the most reassuring phenomenon all at once. I want to be known, but I don’t want to be known because to be known is to have to face my sin.
“A lesson I learned this year is that a person’s capacity for growth is directly linked to how much truth they can face about themselves without running away.”
As I’m building a capacity to grow and change and walk in the newness of life I’ve been irrevocably promised, I’m realizing just how impossible this is without God. Sure, there are band-aid solutions and some legitimate wellness practices and resources that do actually help. But at the end of the day, the only way I can actually, truly examine my shortcomings and sin and the pain I’ve inflicted on others and the wrong things I’ve done is by pressing into and genuinely believing that I am fundamentally loved by God. That I have value in spite of these things. There is nothing truer about myself, nothing that can define me more intrinsically, more foundationally, more inextricably than this: I am seen, known, and still loved and valued by Yahweh.
This is the truth that I’m tethering to my heart and grasping with a white-knuckled grip.
I went many, many years with a cognitive and theological understanding of this without a heart-knowledge of it. I am so grateful that whatever scales were covering my understanding have fallen, because it’s changing everything.
Until next month,
e
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