To be known

“I could not stop thinking about you and how much you will love some of these shots as much as I do! You may want to sit down for this,” her email read.

Curious as to what shots I was going to love, I clicked the link.  This is what I saw.

And this.

They really did take my breath away.  I read the article and watched the accompanying video with total jealousy that someone got to take those pictures.  And I felt gratitude that my friend knew me well enough to know that I love lava and I love the ocean and that I would love these pictures.

We lived in Durham for so long that I had a lot of friends that knew me well.  Living in Oregon for the last two years has been interesting—to feel like no one around me really truly knows me, knows what makes me tick, knows my little quirks and oddities.  No one here in Oregon knows that I need a nap every day, and that I probably need a piece of cheese, and that I like to think about everything.  I know that will come with time, but in the meantime I’m so grateful to have friends who really know me, because being known like that is love.

Overheard on the way to dinner

Jared: I had to put away 3 people’s music in band today.
Rachel: Yeah, we had to leave early for choir.  Jared, thanks for sorting all of our music for us!
Me: Aren’t you glad you let him come along for the ride?
Josh: Yeah, and that you didn’t kill him in the womb?

Smells like home to me!

Variegated evergreen honeysuckle blooming outside our front door!

Books that changed my life

I’ve been a reader for as long as I can remember and I’ve read far more books than I ever could remember.  As an adult, though, I’ve read a few books that have stuck out in my mind because they changed me in significant ways.  I thought I’d write a bit about them.  [I am deliberately not including the scriptures, though they have and do change me regularly.]

The Divine Center by Steven Covey –I read this book during the time we lived in Pocatello, probably when I was about 24 or 25.  The concept that we can only successfully center our lives on Christ is still something I think about regularly.  The really important thing for me in this book though was his writing about scripture study. The things he said changed the way I thought about scripture study forever.

Believing Christ by Stephen Robinson—I can still remember the issue of the Ensign that had the article by him that later became his book.  The idea that it was not enough to believe in Christ, but that we must also believe Him, that he can and will save us, was amazing to me.  I of course had never thought of Christ in this way, and it was the beginning of a new understanding of and appreciation for grace and the atonement.  I read this in the first couple of years that we lived in North Carolina, so I was probably 27 or so.

The 5 Love Languages by Gary Chapman—One of my friend told me one day about a class her sister had taught in Relief Society about a new book.  As my friend described these different “love languages” everything she said made so much sense to me.  I read the book as quickly as I could get it and felt like it helped me understand myself and my family so much better.  I think I was 28 or 29 at this point.

Leadership and Self-Deception and The Anatomy of Peace by the Arbinger Foundation—One year I was in Utah and my sister offered to loan me Leadership and Self Deception.  I was so impressed that I bought The Anatomy of Peace as soon as it was published.  These books helped me see myself and my relationships to other people in such a different way.  I am often not successful in living the principles in these books, but it sure is a noble goal to be working towards.  I think I read these books when I was about 37 and 42.

Real Love by Greg Baer—I blogged here about my experiences with Real Love.  I still try to live by these principles and they have made such a difference in my life.  I’m far from perfect at loving unconditionally, but in the places where I have really made a big effort in my life I have seen wonderful results.  I think I was between 38 and 40 when I first was introduced to Real Love.

Adventures with personal revelation

A few weeks ago I was in Miami staying for a few days with Lindsay.  She & her husband were telling me one night about several great podcasts that they had listened to.  They were so enthusiastic about them that I was motivated when I got home to put some on my mp3 player so that I could listen while I worked in the house and yard.

I listened as I was working out in the yard, then later while I was driving somewhere.  When I got home I set the mp3 player and earbuds on the back of the sofa and forgot to ever put them away.  A couple of days later I decided that I wanted to listen again but couldn’t find the mp3 player.  Remembering that I’d last had it on the sofa I looked around there without success.  I went and looked in other possible places, then returned to look around the sofa again.  I walked throughout the house looking in various places, always circling back to the sofa.  At some point in the evening Josh and his friend came into the family room to play xbox and I worried that I looked like a circling vulture, walking around and around the sofa hoping that this time I would spot the elusive mp3 player or the red cords of the earbuds.  Eventually I gave up and went to bed.

Several days later I wanted the mp3 player again and started praying to be able to find it.  Again I walked through the house and again I kept coming back to the sofa, even picking up the sections and looking under them, but not finding it.  I kept praying as I looked, but no luck.

Yesterday I wanted the it again and so I prayed again and looked again.  I even picked up the sofa pieces and looked under them again.  And then as I stood looking at the sofa, on a whim I pulled one of the seat cushions off.  There they were, black mp3 player and red earbuds.  They really had been in the sofa all along, the place where I’d felt impelled to look without even realizing it.

 

Several months ago I taught a class on personal revelation at a Saturday event for women.  For months I read and studied about personal revelation to try to understand it better.  I studied hoping to understand better what it was and to know how to improve my chances of experiencing it and recognizing it when it came. 

Teaching the class was a great experience.  Preparing to teach it was a great experience.  But in the end I felt no more certain of receiving revelation that I had when I started. What I did feel was more certain that revelation was happening in my life and that there were principles governing it.  That generally I had to be living worthily to receive revelation.  That it was harder to receive revelation when my life was noiser.  That revelation NEVER felt like revelation.  That revelation was rarely one bit “louder” than it needed to be to get the job done.  That revelation was often only apparent in retrospect.  That revelation was never mine to claim, but only God’s to give. 

 

And that is why when I found the mp3 player and earbuds I had to smile.  That’s right, I thought, I was a little irrational in my searching, continually coming back to the sofa to look.  It probably was just the smallest touch of personal revelation, nudging me back and back and back again until I looked in the right way.  Prompting me to offer a prayer of gratitude, gratitude that I can listen to a podcast again while I work, and gratitude that God would help me, even in such a small thing.  Gratitude for personal revelation in my life.

Overheard at the dinner table

Last night the family started eating while I was at the front door talking to a friend.  When I got back to the table this is the conversation I heard:

Russ: None of the kids are going to let me live with them when I am old.
Rachel: Well I’m going to have lots of pets and he’s allergic.
Jenna: I’m not changing any diapers, that’s all I’m saying.
Jared: I’m going to be an astronaut so I’ll be in space all of the time.
Josh: At my house we are eating only chocolate ice cream and butterscotch candies.
               [Russ doesn’t like chocolate ice cream and was traumatized by almost swallowing a butterscotch candy when he was a kid so he won’t eat them now.]
Josh: Mom, what foods don’t you like?
Me: Well…I don’t like pickles and mustard.
Jared: She doesn’t like seafood!
Josh: At my house we’re eating fish stuffed with pickles every day.  DIPPED IN MUSTARD!

And there you have it.  Another family dinner where love flows (like mustard) around the dinner table!

Part 1: Operation survive the Portland winter

Durham Diaspora Book Club

At the end of February I flew off to Las Vegas for my first winter trip.  (Explanation back here.)  I could never write about it as beautifully and as truly from the heart about that weekend as Lindsay did here.  But I still wanted to write about the experience.

The whole idea started back in the fall.  Kim, who has lived in Vegas this year, had chatted a group of NC friends who are now living in the west, saying that her family was going to Utah for a weekend and could anyone else get there.  That conversation ended up with Katie suggesting that we should have a destination book club sometime during the winter.  I thought that would be a great idea (since I was already looking for fun plans for my long & dreary Oregon winter) and eventually 11 other women were on board.  Katie appropriately nicknamed it the Durham Diaspora.  [diaspora: a group of people who live outside the area in which they had lived for a long time.] 

In the end we had people from

• North Carolina—1
• Florida—1
• Northern California—3 (one sadly wasn’t able to come)
• Arizona—1
• Oregon—1 (me!)
• Utah—4
• Nevada—1

In the winter sometime before Christmas I had the best idea—that having been a book club in North Carolina, we should actually do some reading and have some discussion while we were together.  So I bit my tongue and waited until the holidays were over (and people were less overwhelmed) to make my suggestion that we read 2 books, one fiction and one nonfiction.  We ended up reading “What Alice Forgot” and “Friendship Doesn’t Just Happen” and both provided us with great discussions. 

I don’t know anyone who has read “Alice” and not enjoyed it.  My bookclub here in Oregon read it last year, in 2012 when we went to the beach in NC all of the women read it and loved it, we had a terrific discussion in Vegas and afterward Russ even read it (tore right through it!) and loved it. 

What took me a little bit by surprise was the stats when we started to talk about the Friendship book.  One woman was still living in Durham but her good friends were all moving this year.  Two of the women had been living in their new homes for 2.5 years.  One felt very much a part of the ward and community, but the other (who had had twins right after moving) didn’t.  Next to the 3 of them, I had lived the longest in my new home.  Two would be moving in the next few months.  This was seriously a group in transit and so the discussion about friendships was timely.

In addition to the seriously wonderful book discussions (and of course the conversations that followed) there were a couple of other great experiences.

On Friday afternoon before the Utah group arrived several of us went to an “art installation” in a  Louis Vuitton store on the strip.  The whole experience had a touch of surreal to it—from the moment when they brought us all drinks before telling us about the artist, to the moment where they brought us each a wooden crate to hold our shoes and purses, and definitely including the moments where we walked around in what seemed like 2 enormous egg shaped spaces while different colors came and went.  The highlight was when, after realizing what great acoustics there were, several of our talented friends sang “Let it Go” before we left.

 

From the Louis Vuitton store we went to a chocolate store for a snack before heading back to Kim’s house.  The hot chocolate there was a serious revelation!

The next day after we got our picture taken with a slightly creepy Elvis look-alike by the big Vegas sign.  When he told us we could come swimming at his apartment any time, (leer, leer) I said that we would love to, and that we would bring our 30+ kids along with us.  We were quickly uninvited!

The highlight of the experiences we had on the strip was definitely eating at the Wicked Spoon buffet.  It was not cheap, but I think that by the time we were done most of us felt it had been well worth it.  Most of the food was completely delicious and a lot of it was beautiful too.

We ate, and ate, and ate, and ate.  And rested, and ate some more.

Before I quit the subject of the buffet, I should mention that Martha is an excellent person to be sitting by at such a buffet because she is so bold about trying new things.  Here I am after we decided to try bone marrow.  (You can see Martha is wondering “why would someone eat this on purpose??)

By the time we were done with the buffet we all felt like we looked more than a little pregnant…

We had hoped to go out to see the red rocks but it ended up getting too cold before we made it there so we just took a picture.

Later back at Kim’s house before our discussion about “Alice” we had lots of hilarity brought on by the purchase of several packages of mustache stickers—one of the true “you had to be there” moments of my life.

Some people left late Saturday night and early Sunday morning, and the rest of us went to church together before leaving for our different locations.  I was last to leave and felt lucky to have extra time to visit with Kim before heading back to Oregon, totally refreshed in mind and spirit, though seriously tired in body!