(Hey - I've emerged from my long silence! Thank you for hanging in with me until I was ready to write again. It's been a very busy and full couple of months, and although I have had "writing pangs," I just haven't had the impetus to get in here and post. Today, it came in the form of an email.)

There is a lovely post at Irenic Thoughts. Naturally, I think it's lovely because it quotes a post of mine. :-) But there is more to it than that. His closing paragraph sang to me, about sharing a little bit of one's own struggle to help support someone else who is suffering.

My daughter Ladybug shows signs of possibly being bipolar, like me. She has experienced the depth of depression, when you know that you are utterly worthless, a burden on the people you love, and that you not only deserve to die, you need to die to free your family and friends from the worthless sponge that is you. Just a couple weeks ago, she had sunk into the Pit. I recognized the place, and I knew what I had to say to her, just as I knew that she would be unable to hear it. I told her how she is wrapped in our love and in God's love, even though it didn't feel like it at the time. I told her that I would do anything to spare her this pain, but that I knew that I couldn't, that she would have to slog her way through it. I told her that there is hope, she is worth something, and suicide is not an option, just the way my therapist used to tell me. I don't think she was seriously suicidal, just talking about it. And believe me, I know the difference. She seemed to pull out of the black mood and become more of her normal self later in the day.

A couple days after this, Ladybug started asking me questions about my own depressions, most especially about the times I had been hospitalized, back in 1998. She asked why I had to go into the hospital, and whether I was locked up, and how people treated me. I was mostly honest. I have shielded my children from the knowledge that I made an actual suicide attempt; it may be wrong to keep this from them, but I think it would hurt them unnecessarily, so I keep it between Panda and me. But I think she found it helpful to talk about. Maybe it will help her see the mental hospital as a safe place where one can find healing, rather than the dark and scary asylum or loony bin. I think it helps Ladybug to see that I've been in the same neighborhood, that I've struggled through some of the same feelings, and that I'm still here to talk about it.

I don't know whether I brought any healing into Ladybug's life during our conversations, any more than I know whether I have brought healing into the life of anyone who has knelt in front of me during the Eucharist in church. I just try to humble myself and let God work through me. I know that I'll never be able to change my daughter; she is a fiercely independent and strong-willed person. But if I allow God to work through me, then God can mold her according to God's own plan. All I can do is hold her in my prayers, another stone in the river of the Holy Spirit, ready for the waters to shape and mold her.

Peace be with you!

I know I haven't been posting for a couple of weeks. I have many excuses and little inspiration. Life has just been really busy. Yesterday, for example, I worked in the morning, then I quickly drank 32 ounces of water on the way to the hospital for an ultrasound, then went to TCC to pay my tuition for my Accounting II class that starts in two weeks, then picked up my daughter from school, did the grocery shopping, fed her, answered some questions for a study buddy over the telephone, and then went to class for my final exam. It was a full day. Today I worked in the science lab at Ladybug's school, so I was away from work for a couple of hours again. The science lab was a particularly fun one, on force and motion. We did bunches of wonderful physics demonstrations to illustrate concepts they'll see when they go to Kings Dominion next Friday. Ladybug is tremendously excited about that trip, particularly because Panda agreed to chaperone this year. (Bear had an awful experience last year when he took this field trip.)

Today I got my security clearance application back in the mail. The apparent problem is that the signature is more than six months old. As if it's somehow my fault that DISCO sat on it for six months before looking at it! So I have to print a new signature page, sign it again, and send it back in. Maybe this time they'll actually look at it within six months, so I don't have to go through this nonsense again! I just love bureaucracy.

I am excited about the way work is shaping up lately. After two years of producing reports by hand, painstakingly, we're finally getting the budget and hardware to develop the reporting system that I was hired to build. I've been in requirements analysis for a few weeks, and I've just got a couple of final touches to put on the requirements document before it goes to the senior management stakeholders for review. Unfortunately, the person I need help from on getting those final touches in, doesn't appear to be responding to my emails... That's the one problem about working halfway across the country from people; I can't just walk down the hall to his office and bug him about it directly.

But speaking about people I work half a country away from, my boss is in town this week from Minnesota, so I'll get to see him tomorrow. It's always good when he visits, and not just because he always takes us out to lunch. Last time we only had time for Taco Bell between conference calls, but it was still good to have his company. This boss is the best boss I've ever had; when I grow up, I want to be like him. That is, if I ever grow up. :-)

My parish has a semi-active healing ministry. We have a corps of dedicated lay healers who serve on the fourth Sunday of each month, as well as on special Sundays throughout the year, like the first Sunday in Lent. We used to have a monthly meeting, where we got together, read scripture together, learned a little more about the healing ministry, and discussed how the ministry is going in the parish. Unfortunately, we took the summer of 2004 off, and we haven't met since the school year started in September. I miss our meetings, strange as that may sound. They were a good time to connect with one another and reflect on what it is that God is calling us to do.

I'm on the rota for healing on Sunday. Sometimes, this seems like a joke. For instance, just this week it has hit home that the depression I've been slowly slipping into since February is really here. It seems totally absurd to me that a broken, depressed person would have the audacity to stand up in front of the congregation and offer to lay hands on people for healing. Thankfully, our God is a God of absurdity. (Have you ever known anything more absurd than a God being born in a barn? Or a God being condemned to the most painful, humiliating death known at the time? Or even more, a human being coming out of his grave, standing in a touchable physical form, and eating with his friends?)

What will happen is that I will go in on Sunday morning in full touch with the absurdity of the situation, feeling like a faker and a hypocrite. Then, during Eucharist, I will lay hands on the first head that comes before me, and I will say the prayer for healing. And I will be completely present in the moment, which is transported outside of space and time while still being firmly rooted in the here and now, and God's grace will flow through me. I will do this again and again, for each person who comes to me. When it is over, I will realize once again why I continue in this ministry. I am not a faker and a hypocrite. I do not have healing power. All I can do is humble myself, put myself into the background, and let God work through me. And God does work through me, in wonderful ways.

So I don't have to worry about my own brokenness. In fact, it is probably because of my brokenness that I am able to go about this ministry in humility. I know I don't have everything together, any more than anyone coming up for healing has everything together. We're all a mess, we're all in this boat together, and we all need God's healing in one way or another.

Well, as a "J" rather than a "P" on the Myers-Briggs, I must admit that I'm much happier now that the new pope has been elected. All that indecision and not-knowing-ness was draining to me. I wish I were as happy about the man who was elected. I suppose that, as an Anglican, I shouldn't care that the new Bishop of Rome is one who has called my faith deficient. But as a small-c catholic, I can say that I know in my heart that there are many paths to the One God. There is no time or place I know this more deeply than when I am lying in the darkness of my bed, saying Compline in the silence. At once I know that through my prayers, I am connected with every other monastic, oblate, or other person who engages in the night office, and that through Jesus, I am connected with every other person in the Communion of Saints. There's something about the Communion of Saints. It includes every man, woman, and child who has been, is now, or ever will be, who has had faith in God through Jesus. And because I am sure that when we die, God reveals all to us -- even to those who had worshipped money, movie stars, themselves, or other gods during their lives -- that means that the Communion of Saints includes every man, woman, and child who has been, is now, or ever will be, period, with no qualification whatsoever. Because what person, when the amazing elegance, glory, truth, and love of our Almighty and Merciful Lord and that God's creation are revealed to him or her, would ever say no?

I will admit to pleasure that the new Holy Father has taken the name of Benedict. I treasure Benedict's Rule, and I hope that our new pope will take to heart Benedict's words about humility, silence, and hospitality. For in my eyes, the pope is both servant and host to the whole world. There is noone in the world who is more powerfully called to be voice and servant to the poor, the broken, the disenfranchised, the ugly, the lonely, the powerless, than our pope. I do not call him "our pope" lightly, even though I am not a big-C Roman Catholic. The pope is a leader for the world, in a much more visible way than Archbishop Williams. And even Archbishop Williams went to Pope John Paul's funeral, which says a lot to me. Although we Anglicans may not owe obedience to the pope, and although we may not believe in the infallibility of a brother human, he is still a godly man, a child of God, and he deserves our respect and our prayers.

... is right here. It's Archbishop Desmond Tutu's address at the University of Vermont, and it is called Diversity: The Law of Life.

Diversity is the law of life. A tree is not just leaves. It has a trunk and branches, and roots and leaves” none can survive without the others. They are interdependent and perform different functions for the good of the whole. If the leaves were to go on strike and refuse to be involved in photo-synthesis and all that, the tree would suffer and the leaves would discover they were really nothing without the branches and the trunk and the roots. And so also with the human body. We say, "I see", not "my eyes see” "I hear", not "my ears hear” and I am an organism precisely because of the diversity of my organs performing different functions for the good of the whole body. Without this diversity functioning harmoniously I would be nothing.

Now God created us different, some tall, others short, some black, others white (?), pink, yellow and red. What a fantastic array of remarkable difference and diversity, different languages, different cultures, different ethnicities, different this, different that. God wanted us to glory in our differences, to affirm our differences, to celebrate our diversities and to know that we are so obviously interdependent. Even now no single nation however prosperous and powerful can really go it alone. We must trade with other nations. We may find we don't have this commodity but they have it in abundance but lack what we have and God says I made you to be interdependent, to want to cooperate, to share, to care, to know that an injury to one will end up being an injury to all.

Unfortunately as seems always to happen, we perverted a good, our particularity, our peculiarity - some then used it as a reason to justify hostilities. We have used our differences to mistreat one another.

Go read the whole thing. It is awesome.

With props to Pat for the link.

Happy Easter!

I owe you an apology for not posting more over the last week. It's been busy, blah blah blah, and I've been in the doghouse with Panda, which completely enervates me. I could go into all the details, but it would probably bore you and do nothing to help me. Suffice it to say that I'm in the doghouse, and any effort on my part to move out of the doghouse gets me shoved further in. I hate that. I have barely slept the last three nights, which is starting to take its toll. I have a hard time remembering to take my antidepressant in the mornings, but I made darn sure I took it today.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published its annual report on CEO compensation. It was very interesting, and once I've digested it a little more, you can expect a post. I've ranted about CEO salaries before, but there are some positive examples out there of CEOs who don't rake in obscene amounts of money at the expense of their workers.

I asked my accounting prof last night for a recommendation as part of my application to Virginia Tech. I was nervous about asking her, but I figure that since I have gotten 100s on both tests we've taken so far, and I've been turning in phases of my project early, I probably don't have much to worry about. I just need to get to work on those application essays! I'm not sure of the tack I want to take with them. In the shower yesterday (where much inspiration comes to me), I was mentally composing an argument based on my experience with bipolar disorder, but I don't know whether that's a risk I'm willing to take on my application essay. If the admissions people are at all prejudiced by the stigma attached to mental illness, then I'll be sunk. But learning to live with bipolar is the hardest work I've ever done, and it's taught me that my limits are a lot farther out than I had originally thought. There are things I miss, though. The stability is awesome, but my moods seem to have very little variation. Panda misses seeing me excited about things. I can be excited on the inside now, but it doesn't seem to telegraph any more. And I have no sex drive whatsoever. My sex drive is so low that I don't even know if I want to have a sex drive. I know Panda misses that, too. He is patient with me, though.

We had a baptism in church on Sunday, and it was awesome. Baptisms usually move me to tears, and this was no exception. There's a song we usually sing while the clergy and family and godparents are getting all set up, called I Was There to Hear Your Borning Cry. It's kind of schmaltzy, but I eat it up. I want this song at my funeral. Speaking of my funeral, there's something my munchkins have said that really touches me. It's not like they think about my death a lot, but Bear has said that he wants my collection of books, and Ladybug has said that she wants the collection of things I've written. She read a bunch of it recently, and she was totally amazed. She said, "Momma, I didn't know you were a REAL writer! This is really good! Why did you stop sending it out?" It made my heart leap for joy within my chest. Think I should include all the technical documents I've written? Then she probably wouldn't be so excited any more. :-)

I wish you grace and peace today.

Alleluia, Christ is risen!

I've been away from blogging for a week or so, and I have to admit that it was wonderful. Last week was Spring Break for Bear and Ladybug, and I had the opportunity to be with them Monday through Wednesday. Panda took days off from his work on Thursday and Friday to be with them. It was a good week. Incredibly busy, but good.

Panda is starting a new business. He has already incorporated (in Delaware, natch), and is in the process of getting everything straight with the Virginia State Corporation Commission and our city and the insurance company and everything. I think we're registered to pay all of the various taxes we'll have to pay now. Anyway, Panda will be doing network consulting and systems integration work. Pretty much anything from adding an icon to user desktops to designing computer networks from the ground up. He's already got several clients lined up, and is registering with the SBA as a minority-owned business so that he can have a preferred status for getting government work. It's pretty exciting, but it's a lot of hard work. I'll be helping him set up his accounting system this week, which should be fun.

You can tell that spring has arrived in Tidewater, Virginia. It's not just the white blooms on the ornamental pear trees, or the buds on the cherry trees, or the riotous yellow forsythia. No, it's the yellow blanket starting to appear on the cars. And even though this particular pollen is too large to cause allergies, there are plenty of other pollens in the air that aren't. Panda and Ladybug were having allergy problems last week, and mine started up yesterday. My eyes water so that it's hard to focus on the computer screen, and my nose is all stopped up today, after running nonstop yesterday. This is why, as much as I adore the buds and blooms and green leaves of spring, autumn is my favorite season.

I am in a fun phase at work right now, getting to document requirements for a database system. Requirement definition is fun because you're establishing the functionality of the application. Of course, design is fun, too. So is doing the actual development. Testing is aggravating, but it can be fun to track down those pesky problems and get them fixed. The problem with testing is that someone else is trying to break my code. I mean, how dare they! :-) It's also a great deal of fun, and very satisfying, to actually see people using software that you've written to do their job. And I'm strange, because I even like documenting my code. I don't mind writing design documents and test plans and user manuals. When I was unemployed a couple years ago, I was interviewing for both development and tech writing positions. I'm glad I'm in development, but I think I would have had a fine time as a tech writer, too. It's good to enjoy your job, though. I know I'm very fortunate.

Ah well, that's enough for now. Back to my sniffling and sneezing and weeping at the eyes, while I try to get agreement on the priorities of these requirements. I wish you a fine spring day, and all the blessings of Easter!

... who have no idea what it's like when the bombs start falling.

... then you need to go read this post at TheoSpora. Read the comments as well; there is important stuff there.

This world is populated with people-- women, men, and children --who are already demonized because they suffer from mental illness. People who suffer from depression have difficulty keeping their health insurance, because depression is "incurable." Mental hospitals are shut down for lack of funding, their clients returned to a world that does not accept or understand them. Children and women are abused at enormous rates and many suffer with a number of physical, mental and emotional issues for the remainder of their lives.

These are some of the people who inhabit the pews of churches, they are the ones seeking solace from the storms that tear at the fabric of their lives. For these hurting people Southern Seminary wants to populate pulpits with this type of pastor.

“Our churches need pastors and leaders who understand depravity and the Fall to the degree that they are able to see the ways in which fallen human self-interest often masquerades as objective ‘science’ -- especially when this ‘science’ seeks to explain and prescribe a cure for the fallen condition of humanity,” Moore said.

Tell me how a pastor of this sort of biblical nature would respond to an autistic child? An abused woman or molested child? Tell me what they would say to someone who is experiencing a psychotic break? How about a person suffering from a manic episode or someone with schizophrenia, mental retardation, bipolar disorder, narcissistic, borderline, oppositional defiant, or anything else mentioned in the DSM-IV? What are they going to do, talk about demon possession, tell them to get off their ass and quit being lazy, or better yet just say a prayer and send them on their way? I believe that pastoral care and counseling is one of the central messages of the biblical narrative, I am also not naive enough to believe that it is the only source of revelation for the healing that people need in their lives...

It's always frustrating to be on the road, closely accompanied by a rude driver. It's even more annoying when that rude driver displays Christian symbols or bumper stickers on his or her car. It just boggles my mind that they would think that it's okay to profess love for neighbor, but then to drive without any compassion or consideration for others. People become so competitive on the roads - "I have to be going the fastest!" or "I have to be in front!" - and they seem to lose track of their normal decency. I think we all dehumanize other drivers, simply identifying the other cars on the roads as machines, without stopping to realize that those machines are being operated and inhabited by real human beings, who want to get where they're going, just like us. But in my mind, it's far worse for someone who makes a public show of his or her Christianity to make this kind of mistake. Christians are called to mindfulness of others, compassion for others. Driving rudely is the opposite of this.

Yesterday, while I was at the Navy base, I came upon a car that was illegally parked. The driver had parked at the end of a row of cars, beyond the marked parking spaces, so that he or she was in the actual traffic lane. The license plate said, "GOD B1SS." And I wondered why this Christian thought it was okay to park in a traffic lane rather than in a marked parking space. Is a Christian immune to the laws of people? Is a Christian not obligated to uphold the same standards of courtesy and decency as other people? Or is it okay for a Christian to park inconsiderately because, after all, Jesus died for his or her sins, and God will forgive him or her?

When I read Jesus' admonition to render unto Caesar, I interpret this not just as tax money, but as obedience. While we are on this earth, we are called to obedience to earthly authority. This is not to say that there is never an occasion when disobedience is appropriate. There are unjust earthly powers who use their authority in ways contrary to God's law. But in the case of parking one's car in the traffic lane, I'm sure that the rules about parking in parking places do not oppose God's law. To me, there is no justification a Christian can make about this case of parking in the traffic lane. It is simply the parking lot at work. There is no life-or-death emergency. This was merely one person's selfishness and laziness, pride and sloth.

I know that this seems like a small thing. After all, there was enough room for me to go around this car, so it really didn't hurt me in any way. But I know that God can be found in the small things. God can be found in the person who holds the door for the man carrying sacks of groceries. God can be found in the person who lets another driver into the lane in front of her. God can be found in the person who lets the lady with two items and three young children into the grocery line ahead of him. God can be found in the person who takes the extra moment to say please, and thank you, and you're welcome. God can be found in the person who smiles at the people she encounters each day, not to mention at strangers along her path. God can be found in many, many places, if we are willing to make a little room for God in our lives. I believe that it is these small gestures of love for each other that reflect our witness, more than any grand sacrifice. A martyr may be assured of a place in heaven, but so also are those who treat each other with gentleness, humility, and tenderness. And by the way, this includes driving.