Mr. Telephone Man, There's Something Wrong with My Line

I stopped by the Verizon store on Saturday morning to see what, if anything, could be done about my phone’s battery. After charging the phone overnight, sending and receiving a text message, my battery was half-full (or was it half-empty?). A 20-minute conversation the night before ended when the battery was completely sapped and the phone died.

I explained this to the Verizon man who was very accommodating, and possibly still drunk from Friday night. After looking around for a replacement battery for my phone, he came up empty. He told me that everyone who had my phone must have replaced its battery, leading to a Verizon-wide shortage. It was kind of a cute conversation.

He: Why did you buy that phone? It’s terrible.
JW: I didn’t buy the phone. It was free.
He: Did you get it online? I’ve never seen it before.
JW: Yes. It was free and it had a keyboard.
He: Well, it’s a horrible phone.

After a discussion with his manager, he returned with the news that they would have to replace my phone with something similar. Because my horrible phone was a Smartphone, they would give me a Blackberry. It would be shipped to me by Tuesday. Just like that, free Blackberry.

The next conversation went something like this…

He: It comes in pink or silver. I’m guessing you want silver.
JW: Why? Is it because I’m wearing a bandana?
He [flustered]: No, you just don’t seem like a pink-phone kind of girl.
JW: I am, in fact, a pink phone kind of girl. I had a pink razor phone.
He: Really? So did I. For like a week, it was embarrassing.

So my pink Blackberry arrived on Monday. After activating it, it took about 10 minutes for me to understand why people call them Crackberries. Sitting there, in a little pink case, are sports scores, weather forecasts, text messages, e-mails from Harris Teeter, and many more features I have yet to discover. Its capabilities scare and overwhelm me and I am hoping it’s the last new phone for a while!

Oh, Cookie Cookie Cookie Starts with C!

Every year, my mom and I bake cookies at Christmas time. It seems like every year we wait longer to start baking and are more frenzied when the last day of school before break arrives (this is the day on which most of the cookies are delivered to co-workers). We can be found in my mom’s kitchen the night before, feverishly packing Zip-Loc containers with doilies, cookies and Hershey’s kisses, while my dad sits placidly in the living room watching Law & Order reruns.

This year my friend Carrie is doing a cookie exchange on her blog. (Sorry, Carrie, I can’t even blog about holiday baking in a timely manner!) Hopefully, digging out this recipe will kick-start my holiday baking season. Enjoy!

Light Sugar Cookies
Light is kind of a misnomer, as you will see from the ingredient list, but this is an old favorite of mine. I wrote it down while watching The Frugal Gourmet back in high school.

Combine:
2 sticks (1 cup) margarine
1 cup sugar
1 cup powdered sugar
1 cup vegetable oil
2 eggs
4.5 cups flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. cream of tartar
1 tsp. vanilla

Chill dough for two hours. Roll into walnut-sized balls. Press with bottom of a glass dipped in sugar. Bake on ungreased sheets at 375 for 10-12 minutes. (Yields quite a few, I often halve the recipe!)

I Feel the Earth Move

Today I visited Disney's Hollywood Studios while vacationing in Disney World. It was my first time to Hollywood Studios and I was eager to check out its American Idol Experience. Upon arriving at the park, I begged my family to indulge me with a stop at the American Idol auditions.


Here I am in the Coke lounge choosing my songs. I went with Carole King's I Feel the Earth Move and also took on Heart's Alone. My performance of I Feel the Earth Move was good enough to get me into the 5:00 show.


Rehearsing before the show.


Being introduced with the other contestants: Paula, a pregnant former cruise-ship singer and Justin, a 17-year-old who performs in show choir (but says his life is not like Glee).


To vote for me, the 800+ people in the audience had to push button number 1.


The teenage girls in the audience voted Justin through to the show's finale later in the day.


While Justin waited around to do another show, I got to have fun in the park.


My dad, who also auditioned, was pretty proud of me. That added to the fun of the day.

You're so Vein

This morning was a perfect morning to sleep in—a midweek day off from work, rain and wind blowing outside. Instead, I woke up at 6:15 to hit the gym, knowing it would be my last chance to exercise for a couple days. Today was the culmination of a process I began seven months ago—getting varicose veins removed from my left leg.

My friend Emily dropped me off at the doctor’s office and I moved very quickly from waiting room to surgical table. The nurses were awesome, as they have been throughout the process. They were very thorough in answering my questions. I asked about returning to my regular exercise routine and the head nurse told me there would be no cardio classes or running for the next two weeks, not even an elliptical! At times, I swear she was reading my mind. I would be thinking, “I don’t need to take ibuprofen” and she would say, “Even if you’re not in pain, you have to take ibuprofen for inflammation and you have to take it with food.” Then I would think, “I won’t be eating much because I won’t be burning many calories,” and she would say, “And not just a handful of crackers—meals!”

The atmosphere in the operating room was very relaxed. I was surprised and disappointed that it wasn’t fraught with drama like an episode of Grey’s Anatomy. Dr. Todd has a well-stocked iPod that he plays while he works and he takes requests. He graciously indulged me with some Bruce Springsteen, which led him to telling stories of his first encounters with the Boss’s music in college. He continued to wax nostalgic about his college days and the guys he knew when. As I suspected, Dr. Todd had a lively young adulthood. And though I trust his work, there was something a little strange about hearing my doctor describe himself as a “dumb redneck” while threading an IV through my thigh.

The anesthetic kept me from feeling what was going on, although I was very aware of Dr. Todd pulling veins out of my leg. Think about pulling the seam out of a garment. I was angled on the table so that my head was closer to the ground and my legs were elevated, so I couldn’t see anything that was going on, which is probably for the best. Meanwhile, Dr. Todd and the nurses were talking about Thomas Jefferson and the John Adams mini-series. (You mean doctors don't talk about affairs and love triangles during surgery? Have the Grey's doctors been perpetrating a lie all these years?) The worst part of the procedure was that about an hour into it I had to go to the bathroom. How is it that, when I’m teaching, I can hold it for six hours at a time while drinking 2 liters of water?

After the nurses mummified my left leg and cut me out of my paper shorts, I was able to get dressed and limp off to the bathroom. From there, I maneuvered into the back of Emily’s car and headed home for the hard part: taking it easy and allowing my body to recover. Another of life’s ironies: when I have so much to do, all I want to do is lay on the couch. When I am ordered to lay on the couch, I can think of 100 things I want to do!

Deep Enough to Dream

Lately a lot of things I’ve listened to or read have mentioned Heaven. Heaven is usually a fleeting thought for me, as in, “Heaven will be better than getting up before dawn and going to the gym.”

But as I was driving to church on Sunday I was listening to Chris Rice’s Deep Enough to Dream, and this lyric, “Deep enough to join a billion people for a wedding feast…” gave me pause. The thought that came to me was, “Ugh. I hate crowds. That’s going to be awful.” This thought was quickly followed by, “WHAT??!?!?” So I began thinking about how, in Heaven, I will not have my claustrophobia/discomfort in crowds, because I won’t have to fear people trampling me, because there is no trampling in Heaven.

I couldn’t get my head around it, so I went on to another incomprehensible thought: in Heaven, I won’t be plagued by this icky, sinful nature of mine. Right now, my sin is so familiar to me; I don’t even know it’s there unless someone/something brings it to light. It’s kind of like this pain in my legs—try and follow me here, I know it’s a stretch. Because of the varicose veins in my legs, they have been hurting for over a year. The whole time I’ve been running and taking zumba classes, I have done it with pain in my legs, but I am not aware of the pain. It’s something I am used to and have managed to live with. Next week, one set of veins will be gone and I will experience what not-hurting legs feel like and I can’t imagine it. It’s been so long since I felt normal; I have forgotten what normal feels like. In the same way, I’ve never been without sin, so I can’t imagine what a day-to-day existence without sin (mine or other people’s) will be like. But, just like I believe my legs will feel better, I believe my life in Heaven will be better.

One more thought about Heaven. I read today how, in Heaven, Jesus is going to reveal a special name to me—a name for me that’s just between me and Him. I hope it’s a really cool Irish name, like Siobhan.

Sweet Land of Liberty

I’ve mentioned here before how interesting Facebook has made my life. A couple weeks ago the girl who sat beside me in fifth grade found me. It was a laugh reconnecting with her, realizing that my current sentence to a lifetime in fifth grade was probably punishment for all our shenanigans.

This week brought another blast from the past. In 1992 I went on a mission trip to Germany. I met a kindred spirit on that trip. We hit it off immediately and enjoyed a month of adventure together. After the trip we wrote letters (this was pre-internet) and she visited me in Philadelphia once. Somewhere in the middle of our college years we lost touch—until last week.

It has been an enormous blessing to reconnect with this old friend. She is married, a mother of four, living on a farm in rural Tennessee. We’ve been emailing frantically this week, trying to catch up on 17 years a little bit at a time. Our conversations have been the highlight of my week.

This sweet reconnection exposed an ugly part of me, though. When I saw my friend’s “stats” on Facebook, I was instantly disappointed with my boring life. (When I related this story to my high school small group girls tonight, they were quick to say, “Joy, you are NOT boring.” I heart those girls so much!!) When I see a friend has married and had four kids in the past 17 years and I’ve taught fifth grade and, um, taught fifth grade in another state, I can’t help but feel like I’ve missed out.

It was no coincidence that I also found this quote from Charles Spurgeon this week, “If there were any place better for you than the one in which you find yourself, Divine Love would have placed you there.”

As I start this new week, I want to remember that Divine Love has placed me here. And I am thankful that Divine Love has placed a dear friend in my life—again.

I've Been through the Desert on a [Church] with No Name

I’ve been wanting to post something on here about the church plant of which I am a part. What has kept me from writing is an inability to give words to what excites me about this process.

The current associate pastor of my church has been moved to plant another church in a different part of our town. This summer, he invited me to join the plant and to coordinate its women’s ministries. At first, I was simply excited about the possibility of growing a women’s ministry from the ground up. Now my excitement is for the whole project. As my pastor has shared his vision with a group of us (the launch team) and as we’ve read articles and surveyed people in the community, I’ve become really eager to see this church get going. But why?

The church has no name. We’ve got some ideas, but no clear favorite. The church has no address. We’ve got some locations, but nothing is decided. Still, every Wednesday night, a group of people gets together to plan, to dream and to pray. It’s given me a picture of what the Church really is.

I grew up in a Philadelphia neighborhood where I could walk to a number of churches—old churches, established churches. It never occurred to me to ask how they got their names. And their buildings were old, stone things with steeples and pews. But someone built them. Being a part of this church plant has given me an appreciation for the magnitude of starting a church; of taking an old warehouse and making it a place of worship, of taking an idea and making it a name.

Most importantly, I’m seeing that a church is more than its name or address. The people are the church. Every Wednesday that we meet, I am growing to love the people in the room more and more. I can’t wait to be part of a church that bears the mark of our Creator, as well as of these passionate, creative people.