Wow . . . speak, Lord. I'm LISTENING!

In my last post, I talk about a "pull" I'm feeling. It hit me, near the end of that post, that I'm doing something very big there: I'm acknowledging my belief that this "pull" is probably God's grace - and not just my own desires or subconscious. That's either a large step closer or a large step further from where God is calling me to be: I'm either right, and acknowledging a deep and beautiful truth, or I'm delusional and letting my pride and arrogance guide me into thinking I can know God's will in this way. This calls for prayer. I definitely believe it is the first option, that this is a deep truth, but my reason for believing that is the "pull" itself. It's circular. Then again, don't we trust our senses and reason for similarly circular reasons? Because our senses confirm themselves. Because our reason assures us that our reason is correct.

It's the three together that I find shape my perception of life: the "pull", which I believe is grace and conscience; the senses, which I believe are honest interpretations of the physical world around me; and reason, which I believe is a real talent humans have that allows us to draw new conclusions from the information available to us. The leap for me is to put what I believe to be my way of experiencing conscience and grace, separate from reason, on a parity with the senses as a way to gain knowledge about the world. It's a bit more difficult to accept this "pull" as real information, because I can't confirm my experiences with others as well. We lack a vocabulary to describe the experience of grace as richly and clearly as we can describe our experiences of sight, sound, touch, and so on.

My approach with any new, basic paradigm is to "try it on for size". While at some level I've accepted these experiences as real in the past, I've also kept a strong mental buffer that I could just be making this stuff up. Is it okay to let that buffer down, or weaken it? Can I trust these experiences in a way that is more like how I trust my own sight? Is this sense real at all, real but highly distorted (possibly by sin), real and very trustworthy? Can I experience "hallucinations" of this "sense" much the way I might imagine I hear DH saying my name - only to find out it was a radio announcer saying the words "and the"? So it's time for a trial run: Act as if the paradigm shift I'm considering is accurate, and see if I continue to have greater confidence in the new model of my world than in the old.

I may be just kidding myself, but I may also be learning to consciously use a new set of "eyes" for the first time ever. Yet even if there is some truth to this idea, I also need to be prepared for another possibility: Maybe this is God's grace that I experience, but maybe I am not meant to understand it. Yet part of me responds, "Surely God would want us to understand enough to know that we can trust Him! If He is calling so hard for us to listen, through His Word, surely there must be something reliable for us to hear!"

So, uh, God? I'm listening. Are you willing to give me a microphone check? Huh . . . wait . . . I'm suspecting . . . that I'm hearing one, and it says, "40 Days for Life, test, test".

Now, the big question . . . do I post this, and risk sounding like a crazy person, speaking of senses that don't touch the physical reality? Or do I play it safe and just leave it in draft form, saved on the server but never made public?

If you are reading this, then you already know what I decided.

40 Days for Life

Tomorrow is the start of 40 Days for Life, a pro-life effort to save lives of unborn children and bring our nation closer to protecting our most vulnerable, least vocal members (or at least, they should be members . . . but humanity has this tendency to try and exclude other humans from our group, and this time the excluded group can't fight back).

I've been a little out of the loop, but God has sent enough tugs that I looked into it - just in time. I think this is as He intended it. A quick round of prayer suggests to me that I don't need to go out of my way to seek out a visible role in this campaign. If God wants me distributing literature or participating in the vigil, I have this feeling that He will drop the opportunity into my lap. So on that front, I think I'm being called to "Let go and let God."

On the other hand, prayer and fasting have that familiar "pull" to them. I'm still praying on this, but looking at committing myself to 40 days of praying the Rosary daily and fasting from milk, tea, and coffee. Actually, I've been meaning to do these things anyways for health reasons - but my own good alone is somehow not enough motivation for me. To do these things for others is easier, and God will understand what I am giving - and will use the health benefits that I receive, I believe, to bring me closer to a place where I can be more actively and visibly involved in His work in the future.

The other thing "tugging" at me is to make a few phone calls. I know people who are also being pulled by this issue. I think I need to make sure a few of these people know what God is guiding right now.

The girls slept well . . .

They started their nap at 3:30 PM yesterday, or so DH tells me.

They woke up at 5:45 AM this morning.

We did go in and change them into diapers at almost 9:00 PM last night. They did not eat dinner. DH and I played video games and ate dinner at our keyboards. It was almost like being in college again. This morning, Iliana got a huge kick out of being awake before the sun (she's going to LOVE Washington's winters - she'll beat the sun up almost every day in a month or so!).

Cooking!

Okay, I know . . . most people cook. It's not a big deal.

But I still love getting time and energy at the same time to throw together a meal. I made peach cobbler and a "The Works" quiche (kielbasa, onion, green pepper, and olives). Actually, it ended up being three quiches.

The peach cobbler was made with rehydrated freeze-dried peaches, and looks AMAZING. I modified a berry cobbler recipe from my aunt, which requires you to sprinkle sugar over the finished cobbler and then pour boiling water on top. The result is a sort of "glazed" crust on top . . . yummy.

I think I take extra pride in my cooking because I am NOT a SAH parent. For me, this is working outside of my specialization, so when I do well I feel extra proud.

A big thanks goes to my husband, for finding the pie plates that were still packed in the garage. Thanks also goes to my children, for staying asleep long enough for me to get it all into the oven and then blog about it.

Next time, I'm going to try a berry cobbler. I have freeze-dried strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries hanging around as well.

Can "Food" be a love language?

There's a neat book about "love languages" that I borrowed from a friend recently, which has the premise that everyone feels most loved when love is expressed to them in a certain way. This way of expressing love is a person's "love language". The five languages discussed in the book are Words of Appreciation, Acts of Service, Quality Time, Physical Touch, and Gifts. I'm not sure it's quite that simple - five precise categories and that's it - but the basic idea that some people express their love differently from others, and it behooves us to learn their "language" so they can hear our love for them, seems solid.

If I do have a single love language, Words of Appreciation seems likely for me. But Acts of Service seems likely as well, especially one particular act: Feeding me. Food is love.

However, I also note that being given a meal falls under most of the languages. What better quality time is there than a family dinner? What better gift than a home-cooked meal? What greater daily act of service than providing someone with the food they need to live? Even DH's request that I stay seated when I rise to get the girls more milk makes me feel special - because implicitly, he's saying "You deserve a break because of all the things you do for us. Thank you. I love you" I can hear the Words of Appreciation clearly, even though the actual words are, "Stay seated. Geesh, I can handle it!"

I'm a great translator ;-) And exaggerating slightly for comic effect.

Last night, DH made a special meal with me in mind. Spinach, meat, peppers stir-fried with peanut butter and coconut milk and served mixed with noodles. We sprinkled Thai spice on ours, but left the kids' food plain. Yummy - but also very high in iron, and stuff that will help asorb iron. Just that morning, we'd learned from the 'Net that non-heme irons (not from meat) asorbed better when eaten with heme iron - and DH planned a meal for me based on that information.

I mean, wow. That's caring - hearing a little bit of information, and then figuring out a way to apply it to make your spouse healthier and happier, that very same day.

I just ate the leftovers for lunch. And I'm in love. I'll try to remember to give him a hug - his language seems to be Touch.

P.S. I cooked up the rest of the spinach for a side-dish for myself, and was eating it. The girls insisted that I give them some of Mommy's Food, and then gobbled it down. It's funny how making a food just for myself makes it seem "special" to them. This, plus chanting the name of the veggie, is how we got them to love broccoli too. And zucchini. ZU-CCHI-NI! ZU-CCHI-NI! BRO-CCO-LI! UGH! YEAH!

We rarely limit the amount of treats we let them have - we're more likely to limit their veggies (because DH never cooks enough!!! ;-) If we have something sweet to share, we usually just let them eat as much as they want until it's gone. The trick is that we don't share with them most of the time - we just wait until after they are in bed.

Back to work

I'm back at work, and things seem to be going well. I think the big advantage of having time off from work ended up being space to get medical care. Apparently, my poor performance at work wasn't due just to stress. I was actually low on iron as well. I don't think I was anemic, but I was definitely close enough to be getting many symptoms - fatigue, dizziness, restless leg syndrome (which impacted sleep . . . which caused fatigue . . .), irritability, and depression. I am now taking 16 times the normal daily recommended iron in pill-form with vitamin C, and am doing much better.

Returning to work was a bit scary - but mostly because I wasn't sure I would be able to function better once I got back. In fact, the first day, last Friday, I didn't function well. I was almost falling asleep in meetings, exhausted by the time the day was over, and worried that I wasn't going to be healthy in time. Some dear friends were very nice to me when I stopped by after work, and I felt better in time to sleep well that night.

In retrospect, the issue was probably that I'd figured out I was supposed to be taking six pills of iron, and not just one a day, a mere two days or less ahead of time - and the iron simply hadn't built up yet. I was probably actually sicker than I was when I started leave (more on that later) when I started the supplements, near the end of leave. Over the weekend, I seem to have rebuilt up the critical amount of iron so I can function pretty well - I'm still getting tired and short dizzy spells in the evenings, but I'm enthused about work again.

So, why did I have iron deficiency? Often, this can be a sign of a much more serious issue - cancer, internal bleeding, and other yucky stuff. You will be happy to know that is probably NOT the case here. Most likely, I ran short because I donated blood, and apparently can't replenish my iron as quickly as many other people. I need to check with my doctor a bit more, and will badger him about further testing - but this explanation really fits the evidence. For example, things got a lot rougher after the move - and, looking back at email, I did donate blood about two or three weeks after the move. Before that, I remember getting despondent around December to January. I assumed that it was because covering for my teammates on vacation kept me from learning my own position and that was demoralizing, especially when the new person joined and I still didn't know what MY job was - but I actually also donated blood around late December, too.

And there's a big silver lining. DH and I are finally dealing with some major relationship issues that were unsurfaced by all of this. You know, the ones I've been blogging about? They weren't just products of my iron deficiency or bad mood, and they weren't my fault (although I certainly haven't been helping things get better lately, either).

So, looking at the results of being sick:
1) I came close to losing my job and lost some of my coworkers' confidence in me.
2) Our finances are really bad right now. We're scraping by for the next six weeks.
3) DH and I are finally working on a chronic problem in our relationship - in the past, the main person working on fixing things has been me. The chronic problem, of course, is that responsibility in our family hasn't been balanced appropriately. DH is finally taking on the main responsibility for working on this problem - and other responsibilities are shifting as well.
4) We got to see what happens when I can't function well, which clearly underscored the importance of #3. There really has been too much depending on me.
5) Following from #4, DH is seeing how important he is to our family from a new perspective: He is seeing how he can be strong when I am weak - and how critical it is that he volunteers to be strong. This next statement probably won't surprise anyone reading this blog - but dads / husbands matter! And not just as a paycheck or daily child care. Yet, I've been shocked by how many people are happy to give men a "pass" on participating fully beyond their basic 9-to-5 duties.
6) I now am healthy again, and have a better idea of what being healthy looks like. I think I might have been low on iron before and didn't recognize it, in retrospect. That probably won't happen again.
7) I am now better prepared to promote my expectations of my partner, and better able to trust in my ability to be reasonable. I spent a lot of time looking for outside confirmation that what I was asking from my husband was, in fact, reasonable. In retrospect, I know the answer: My expectations were not reasonable. I expected far too little, and the fact that DH was still struggling to meet those very low expectations was a symptom of a bigger issue and a sign that he needed some help from someone else.
8) I now know the value of considering the possibility that the other person is contributing to a problem as well, instead of assuming that if I do things differently or "get it right", I can make the problem will go away on my own. Recognizing other people's failings can be a good thing, if done with charity.
9) I got a month to spend with my family, with no parent working outside the home. "Some things, money can't buy." I'm saving my vacation time so we can do this again - have a long period of time, at home, just being together doing normal things.

A lengthy, wordy list (but hey, what did you expect from me?). The summary: Career and finances are in a bad position, but we're poised to make the most of it with flying colors. So things will probably continue to be annoying for a while longer as I repair my career and we get finances back on track. Then we'll probably regain our ground and have enough momentum to "get ahead", and then get enough wiggle room to make some changes and get a bit more "control" over our lives - although maybe "influence" is a better word; we never really get full control over anything in life. But we do get a lot of influence - if we keep our eyes open for it.