Post-Grad Living

[an addendum to the accompanying post from today]

This fragment comes to us from June 10, 2014, though I'm publishing it 4 months later:

I graduated last weekend, and on most fronts I've ostensibly got it together: I have a job, and I bought a car, and I don't have any debt.
But I'm trying to figure out the purpose of these fleeting twenties, a third already having left.

I'd like to point out that while my diploma is still intact in an envelope somewhere at my parents' house, the other three things I had "together" are, humorously enough, not: I quit the job (before starting), sold the car (no need for one in NYC, baby!), and am... well, still not in debt, but not really saving any money since that's tricky to do on a volunteer's salary (read: less financially stable than I expected... see "job" above).  As for the purpose of my twenties, I'm realizing it's not different than any of the other decades: love God, love people, and fear not.

Being Worn (not in the knees)

I wish there were more moments in my life recently of which I could say that I was knocked down to my knees and decided to pray instead of dusting myself off and getting up right away.  See, I've been working for the past month and a half at a shelter for homeless, runaway, and trafficked youth in New York City (more on that later), and I've been knocked down often.  It happens.  It happened a few weeks ago when I did an initial comprehensive history with a newly-arrived minor who had been (somewhat willingly) trafficked into New York from several states away then brought by her pimp to our shelter to "work out her issues before coming back" to him, and then returned to the shared staff office where a resident was in tears over having just witnessed another resident be beaten bloody by police for jumping the subway turnstile--went home and cried and prayed.  And it happened more recently when I accompanied a resident to a two-hour psychiatric evaluation in which the exploitation of a friend-turned-abusive (is that redundant?) pimp and the anguish of an antecedent stillbirth that I'd learned about in her comprehensive history were painted in even sharper, fuller strokes--went home and sat on my bed and tried to find some comfort in the familiar Psalms.  But that's a mere two days of a few dozen to date, perhaps not all as intense, but all bringing me face to face with what feels like the underbelly of a world that's stubbornly asunder.  The rest of the days I come home and watch TV or cook and eat dinner or talk with my housemates.  It's not all that often that I remember that praying is breathing.

Usually I pride myself--and that's not a word I use nonchalantly, pride--on being able to bounce back so readily.  Cursed out?  Well, it's not personal.  Girls fighting?  Deescalate and call security if that doesn't work, then write up the incident.  Out of towels?  Apologize since there's not much you can do, already having requested some earlier that day and the previous two days.  But keep moving forward, because there's already a line out the office door: someone needs a metro card, someone needs a letter certifying their residency at a homeless shelter to apply for food stamps, someone needs their room changed because their roommate refuses to clean, someone needs their medication, and someone is just bored and wants to hang out in the office.  And it's good, because that's just what you have to do.  But it's also bad, because having accomplished so much in a day makes me more prone not to let myself be knocked down to prayer.  I can do this!  Really, though, I can't; wasn't built to.  I tell myself this to remember it's true and to make it true; some days I really don't believe that I can't.  Again and again though, the catharsis of the cross wins out over the catharsis of even the most wonderful of housemates rehashing with me the injustices and the trauma of just-another-day-at work, at least when I let it.

I'm lacking.  I hope I've made that clear.  My heart is often more worn than the knees of my work pants, which should be the most prayer-torn pants knees I own.  But that does not mean my experience of working is devoid of spiritual insight.  When I go to work, I know it's an honor.  It's early in my experience of working at the shelter, and I have no qualms admitting that--but still! most days I wake up and I can't believe I have the privilege of going to the shelter, at best to be of help but at least to just be a person who cares enough to be there.  Even when I'm proud of myself for a successful shift, I'm not self-congratulatory in a good-for-you-for-working-at-a-shelter kind of way; this, too, is a gift that's given to me, to not be allowed to close my eyes to darkness and injustice for too long and to see my residents at both their absolute best and their most wrenching worst and to be knocked down, at least to have the call to prayer resound in my knees striking the ground even when I don't answer it.  Yeah, this is the place for me to be.

I've been perhaps a bit vague to this point about what it is I actually do: I work at a shelter for youth who are experiencing homelessness (and often a lot of other things, from domestic violence to substance abuse to sex work to mental health issues).  I work on the females crisis unit, where about 75 girls from the ages of 18 and 21 (and sometimes younger, 16 or 17) spend an average of 30 days while we work with them to find more stable housing and also remove barriers to a successful transition out of the shelter, for example by providing mental and physical health care, GED classes, job readiness classes, and the like, or helping our residents obtain their identification or prepare for upcoming court dates.  Technically I volunteer for a program through which all my basic needs (housing, food, transportation, etc.) are covered in exchange for my service at the shelter, but for all ostensible purposes I am a full-time resident adviser working 40-hour weeks.  I make a lot of referrals and help in various capacities with all the things I listed above and many more as the need arises.  The opportunity to be here is one for which I can credit only God, who allowed me to dally in some other foolish ideas of where I'd be working after graduating before making it clear the game was up and taking me to this exact place.  I'd like not to romanticize my job, and I hope I have not--but I hope equally, and perhaps more fervently, not to have overemphasized its challenges at the expense of communicating the joy I receive from working there.  For now I will limit myself to that.  My words have likely been needlessly complicated; I apologize.  I can only say they reflect my thoughts and my heart, which I hope in time become clearer too.

At last, two songs to share (shout-outs to J-Mel and T-radz for bringing them to my remembrance), the first of which represents how I know I am and the second of which represents where I know I need to be.  Peace my friends!  Let us know whose we are and whom we serve.

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Be Grateful

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God has not promised me sunshine;

That's not the way it's going to be.

But a little rain,

Mixed with sunshine;

A little pain

Helps me appreciate the good times.

Be grateful.

Produce: a new paradigm

I was praying this afternoon, because I knew I really needed to (obviously.  unceasingly, right?), and the only thing I could think to pray was, "God, I'm so cranky and so grumpy right now, and I'm annoyed at my friend, and I'm hungry.  I know you know, but I thought you should know.  Anyway, here I am."  And it was odd, having proved to myself immediately prior--and unequivocally--just how foolish it was to have tried to assuage my crankiness and grumpiness and annoyance and hunger by reading about Ph.D student debt and wallowing in other similarly vapid internet practices, to get this response: "Produce fruit in keeping with repentance."

Simple: "Produce fruit in keeping with repentance."  I recognized that, from John the Baptist, Luke 3:8.

And that's it.  Not it, the end of this musing (clearly)... that's it, the Word I needed for this season.

See, it was last week that I was again acting the fool and veritably calling for locusts to come and feast on my time--which meant I was being an especially poor steward of my waking hours--that I came across this: an article entitled "Why I Bought a House in Detroit for $500."  I read it, and I was enthralled, and I came as close as one like me, who is not at all given to emotional decision-making and who is fairly conscientious in weighing wisdom and discerning a way forward before deciding such things, to deciding then and there to move to Detroit in June and buy my own $500 extreme fixer upper.  I knew the thought was a bit silly, and maybe somewhat impractical, but I was unsurprised by the inclination in myself.  Restoration like that, which perhaps I've romanticized but which I also know would be backbreaking and dangerous and frigid in the winter and dirty, is redemptive.  Making newly good the bad things, or the unfinished things, or the rejected things, is itself good.  I loved wood shop in middle school, I took a machining class a few years ago, I'm not experienced but I like cooking; there's a sort of reverence I hold for such physical makings; something in me likes to create things.  To produce things.

And thus my mind was recalled to an article I read a few months ago, that I had sampled but not digested, and to which I had to return to give it the proper time to metabolize.  READ IT, please.

So our fundamental orientation in the economy of the Kingdom to which we are called is alien to that of capitalism: We are not consumers, but producers.  We are to be fruitful--to produce fruit!  (This makes me think Marx was perhaps onto something more Kingdom-minded than he knew--not with the "opiate of the masses" thing, but more with the "alienation of the laborer from his labor" thing--but I can't be sure.)   And the fruit we produce is nourished, and therefore produced, only when we are connected to the True Vine.

Reading The Atlantic and Buzzfeed and The New York Times and Boundless?  (I'd include the clear analog, shopping, but since I do so little of that it would be almost irrelevant to a personal post like this one.)  All, for the most part, consuming.  Not altogether bad, but certainly unfit to occupy much of the time of one who should be producing.  Building and budgeting wealth so I can share, restoring a house with no owner to a home, investing in the growth of younger brothers and foster children and siblings in Christ, bringing a musical to life from some ink and paper, keeping a blog?  Producing.  And by the grace of a good and loving Father who grafted us onto His own Vine.

Moreover?  Spending time in prayer instead of spending it on my own selfish pleasures?  Producing fruit in keeping with repentance.  That's the key to my desire to be satisfied in the Lord: to allow myself to choose to produce fruit--that is, plug into the Vine and be nourished--rather than to consume everything I'm told should fill me up and turns out only to give me cavities and a stomach ache.

I may not be packing up and heading to Detroit, and I probably will continue to read the news online; but somehow, I know this is big, and I daresay--or foolsay, though I hope not that one--it's a shift in my paradigm.

Produce fruit in keeping with repentance!

A Life That Matters

The other day my friend prayed for me that one of the things that would mark my last semester would be good, renewing relationships--which is something I have in no way been asking for myself or even thought of asking for myself, but which I was so thankful for her to have prayed for me.  Because I really need that.  Because it's really hard sometimes, the past few years in particular. 

I had dinner with a different friend a few nights ago, and it was one of the most affirming things that I have experienced in a good, long time.  Do you know what he said to me?  He told me that he's noticed that I'm always the one listening, and so he figured that it would be nice for me to have someone to listen to me sometime, and asked me to share with him my life story.  The whole thing.  And when I tried to give him the politely abridged version, he stopped me and told me that he wanted to hear the whole thing, not just the highlights.  Wow.

We continued our conversation a couple of days later, since our dinner was cut short (we didn't make it past middle school...), and one of the things we were discussing was our vision of the successful life: when we started thinking about it, what we thought about thinking about it, what it is... Anyway, I watched this today, and all that little anecdote was meant to set up was that, though I've thought some about success (particularly around the time when I jumped off the pre-MD ship and swam as fast as I could to the pre-PA flotilla), when I saw this, there was no question: 

These surrendered people, this great and extravagant and mundane love?  This is the successful life.

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P.S.  Shout out to my life-story friend, who has no idea that I have a blog and will probably never read this... but if he ever does, a most genuine thank you.  But by then I think it will be redundant, as it would be silly not to say "thank you" in person.

This.

"Love God and do as you please. If you love Him, then you love holiness. What you please shouldn't present a problem."

-- N.D. Wilson, in his Notes from a Tilt-a-Whirl, describing St. Augustine's philosophy; I haven't read the book, but feel like I should now


Two brief additions:
1 - My prayer for this year, my senior year, has been that God would make me faithful in the small things.  It was such a blessing yesterday to hear from a friend that she sees that in me; it's one of those things that can be hard to see in oneself, so I'm grateful (anew) that God "seriously hears prayers in accordance to his will," as she said, and that she encouraged me in that way.  That's actually amazing.
2 - My prayer for this year, 2014, is to be fully satisfied in the Lord--that is, not looking for "outs" in other things, like rest in Yahoo! News or relaxation in watching the Food Network.  Nothing against those things, but... come on.  Jesus satisfies.  Full stop.

Heritage and MLK

Yesterday, I was having dinner with my grandparents who were passing through on their way to New York, and they happened to casually mention that they had gone to the March on Washington.  So casually.  They drew a diagram, nails as inked point and fingers as pen shaft, on my napkin, diagramming in invisible vividity where they had been positioned--very near, they told me, to Dr. King--relative to the National Mall.  There was a friend of theirs, they said, who hadn't come to the march, hadn't joined them and their fellow church members to feel that crowd, and to be it.  They told me about the race riots in Harlem, where they lived, in that great city from which my grandma says thousands of buses were just streaming, filled, toward Washington in preparation for the March that day--about living within the several blocks where rioting was most intense and watching Molotov cocktails sail through the sky and ignite on the ground during long nights in the city.

There was something profound about that to me, just so striking, to be related to these people.  For their stories to be my heritage.  I don't quite know what to make of it.

Accounting for these last 4 months

I've been pondering no less than usual in the past third of a year, which has elapsed quietly (at least as the blogosphere is concerned, with nary a post from me): not for a lack of things to say, but for a lack of energy, or perhaps eloquence, with which to say them.  That, and the fact that I generally quite like not having my private thoughts displayed on the internet.  I'd rather ponder them, bring them into prayer, perhaps share some with a particularly dear friend, but mostly just kind of let them mull; I've had a mostly lazy summer, which has included a surprisingly high intake of episodes of Chopped on The Food Network, and so the metaphor I'll choose is that I'd rather be eliminated from the competition, from the increasingly frenetic and dwindlingly private social spaces I see my generation occupying, than serve a dish that's unappetizingly underdone, only carried to partial completion and given woefully inadequate time to simmer and develop.

Still, to be completely private undermines the point of a blog (the purpose of maintaining which, after the inciting circumstance of my Bridge Year ended three years ago, I find unclear, though I endeavor onward because I can't shake the idea that there's something redemptive about writing it, whether for me or someone who happens across it).  With every intention of publishing a particular post, which has been percolating for quite some time now, very soon, prior to beginning my senior year in a couple of weeks, here is a sampling of some posts I began writing, but which were relegated to the archives of Blogger because the yolks were still too runny:

April. "How to Study All Night."

This post was to be a running commentary of the final 18 hours before my junior independent work, which ultimately amounted to a 25 page research paper on the anthropological critiques of obstetric and midwifery interventions during childbirth, was due.  Praise the Lord, in all seriousness, for sustaining me during that time of foolishness; unnecessarily esoteric, if exact, academic words; and harried editing, and may he lead me not into the temptation to ever do such a thing again.

May. "Organic Chemistry, or, How God Feels About Cs."

That's pretty much the summation.  I'll say I pushed through last semester (read: year) on pretty much one prayer: "Dad, I know you know how hard I'm working, and you know that I'm just exhausted and I can't really do more than I'm doing--but so long as you see my heart, which you do, I only ask that you be pleased with it, knowing, like you do, that all I want is for you, who do not judge from outward appearance, as man does, to get glory and praise from me and from all I do."  Ultimately, I ended the semester with a C in organic chemistry (which made me think very deeply about how God gets glory when people work with skill, but how I still knew he was not disappointed despite my evident lack of it), a lot of frustration and exhaustion, and, soon, a diagnosis (which, ultimately, was pure grace) of extreme--or, as my doctor called it, "abysmal"--iron deficiency that would explain why junior year felt to me like perpetually banging my head against a wall of academics.

June. "Wise, humble, and courageous."

Actually, this title was more a note to myself, but I guess I was going to expound it into a post.  It's the list I told my friend she she asked me what three qualities were most important to me in looking for a husband, given that he was a Christian.  "Courageous" was more of a placeholder for a word I never quite apprehended, but it was something along the lines of brave, or not fearing man, or something like that.  Valiant, maybe?  Still looking.

July (a). "Moving Forward."

I'm actually not quite sure what this was supposed to be, but I do know it contained a reference to the percentage of my life (approximately 6) during which I had considered myself "premed."  This leads me to believe I was intending to hash out all my reasons why I don't want to be a doctor and what to be a physician assistant instead, but the evidence was too overwhelming to corral.  It also included a link what I considered to be a thoughtful, nuanced, and horribly disturbing op-ed on the Trayvon Martin case, though the possible link between the two thoughts has escaped me; likely, there was not one.

July (b). "Church."

This sort of post is one that I've been considering writing since last summer, or maybe last spring, on my understanding of the role, the responsibility, the frayedness, and the ravishing beauty of the bride and the body of Jesus.  I went to two strikingly different churches (well, and my own at home, but that one I'm leaving aside) this summer, and their uniqueness inspired a lot of thought in me about what the church must be, what it can be, and what it should be.  This is one that will not be quite completed until I get to heaven and ask the church's groom to tell me, as I imagine his eyes glowing and fiery, all about his beloved, and how he sees her, and who she is to him (though from down here I get glimpses)--but it's something I don't go a week without thinking about.

So that's that.  I guess in light of my shrouded, and somewhat hypocritical, explanation on my blog of my ambivalence toward blogging, I'll close with one of the wisest pieces of advice I've ever heard on developing into a tool that Jesus can use, which in no way undermines the vital importance of wise mentors and dedication to a Christian community.  This from a wise brother named Daniel who loves the Lord: "Be formed in hiddenness."

get yo study on

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Spring Break 2013

= so, so good.

So far, by the numbers, in exactly no order:

1 wonderful conversation with one of my lovely zees about calling, and consolation and desolation (I'm really into that), and discerning God's will when the sort of God you're talking to also literally sent a giant fish to eat a man and regurgitate him in the right place when we was intent on going to the wrong place.

3.5 pages of my nitration of vanillin and nitrovanillin lab report done.

6 CPR mannequins (plus bags of fake lungs, disinfected plastic mannequin faces, pocket masks, and all the other accouterments of CPR teaching) lugged around the campus center and properly stored after one long morning of teaching.

1 surprise paycheck that I forgot I had coming.

2 dear, godly friends with whom to share a blessed and relaxing weekend, and pray and laugh and talk about biblical womanhood.  You both mean so, so much to me, more than I can write, so I pray that I can just live it.

3 chicken breasts poorly thawed but eventually cooked and served with what is really my culinary masterpiece up to this point in my life: alfredo sauce!  Sort of, but it was quite experimental and thickened up nicely in some sort of roux-like fashion.  My brothers would be proud (not only of the roux, but of my weekend of non-vegetarianism)!

7 text messages home trying to figure out if there's a way I qualify to not pay full price for the MCAT; that stuff is expensive!  Still unclear, but at least I can try!  Also, 2 incredible and patient parents who love me so fiercely and well and patiently, and who also help me out with things like taxes and making the MCAT cheaper and teaching me to fix blown fuses in cars.

150 pages of my print quota gone.  Because readings and lab reports and presentations and problem sets and case studies all ought to be done to the glory of God.

2 houses of worship in which to celebrate God's goodness, find conviction, and praise God.  Redeeming Eve at Epiphany, and Rejoicing Sacrifice at NCC!  Amen, and thank you.

3 wonderful tromps in the slushy, sleety rain-ish precipitation.  I secretly love it.

1 (but 3--no oneness theology up in here) awesome Onyame Okyankop)n Twereduamp)n Awurade Papa making it all happen.