Hey Ladies,

I was just missing you and thinking of you all and thought I would do a quick catch-up on my life since it has been so long.

Life for Colin and me over the past few months has been a bittersweet transition, a combination of missing our first home together in Atlanta and fully embracing this new season God has for us with both hands.

Here are just a couple of reasons I miss my life in Atlanta:

Friends.

Friends

Friends

And, friends. Especially friends who can cook like this one:

Here are just a couple of reasons I love my life in Houston:

Getting to know my Aunt Gay again after many years. The purest redemption I have ever witnessed.

Sunshine with Mom.

Jackson.

Watching Amanda transform into an impromptu barista at Bible Study:

Fighting with Mom over our favorite coffee cup at work.

Wearing my favorite slippers at Living Proof. They’re really feminine, right?

Tex Mex.

Tex Mex.

And, oh my goodness gracious, Tex Mex.

Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. Thank you, Roxanne Worsham.

Watching Jackson bond with his lizard who he first named “Lizard” and then, later, “Longtail.”

Annabeth Jones.  She is too busy and wiggly to take pictures but here are a few.

She is the cutest thing on two legs.

Also, she has taken to domestic life. Who knew?

Generations before and generations after.

My Pawpaw and Memaw.  My Pawpaw is in his hard hat with his house plans watching his new house get framed exactly like he wants it.  The two of them were sitting in folding chairs watching 6 men work.  A classic moment.

And here is one very good reason I love my life no matter where I am:

In addition to the big move from Atlanta to Houston, the biggest change in my life is that I am back at the Living Proof offices writing some small segments for the James study with Mom. I was joking on Twitter the other day that I am able to write about one sentence per every fifty pages Mom writes. It is a slight exaggeration, but not much. I am a very slow writer and Mom is a machine. She has to repeatedly tell me, “Remember you don’t have to say everything to say something.” This is probably the best piece of advice I have gotten since I started the project. I think about it multiple times per hour.

Over the past several years I have grown quite comfortable with working at the research level. It is nice and convenient. I can remain detached from the conclusions and implications of the data with which I am working and can’t be held responsible since Mom is the author and I am not. I am smiling right now because I know Mom would be smiling at that comment. But, seriously, writing is a different beast. It is vulnerable. I feel stripped and exposed. I am finding that it takes a whole lot of courage. The ugly truth is I am inordinately afraid of making a mistake. And this is not humility, folks, but a very sneaky and dark form of pride.

In Madeleine L’ Engle’s reflections on writing, she quotes a few lines from Anton Chekhov’s letters that have been restorative to me in this new process: “You must once and for all give up being worried about successes and failures. Don’t let that concern you. It’s your duty to go on working steadily day by day, quite quietly, to be prepared for mistakes, which are inevitable, and for failures” (Anton Chekhov quoted in Madeleine L’ Engle, Herself, 72). Just reading that is liberating.

While I obviously think writers and teachers should think carefully through content and style, perfectionism really is incapacitating. And it can become an idol. All that to say, I am practicing the art of being patient with myself.

So, that is me and probably a lot more than you wanted to know.

How are you?

This entry was posted on Monday, April 4th, 2011 at 4:56 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.