brandyglows

I was thinking . . .

I could be a YouTube superstar,

or I could make my own natural, vegan makeup and sell it on Etsy,

or I could start a 24-7 prayer room in Fayetteville,

or I could read all of my books.

These ideas sound delicious. And I might pursue them all. But right now, sitting here for the past hour and a half, staring, wallowing, wondering.

If I can’t come up with a decent blog post, how in the world am I going to do impossible things?

I try to believe . . .

(Brooklyn sat up for the first time this week!)

anything’s possible

(I am going to be speaking at Children, Youth, And A New Kind Of Christianity this May!)

anything’s possible

(I’m giving up meat and dairy for Lent!)

anything’s possible

(A magazine I’ve been submitting to since 2006 has finally accepted one of my pitches!)

anything’s possible

It is easier to say it than to believe it. Even when impossible things are happening all around you.

But if anything’s possible, then surely it’s possible to believe.

Right?

What are you dreaming about that seems impossible? What are you going to do to make it happen?

The rhythm of Lent moves me. The movement stretches my body into places of wild and passionate love.

In her book, Rest, Keri Wyatt Kent  shares how Jesus’ rhythm punctuated his life. He swayed between periods meaningful engagement and quiet solitude.

I am fascinated by rhythm, but I often feel like I’m making noise instead of music.

The calendar encourages us to move our hips. During Advent, the rhythm is excited and expectant. Starting next Wednesday, the rhythm will become soft and somber. At Easter, the song will explode once more into a passionate Love ballad.

God is asking us to dance.

If we accept, we offer creative sacrifice. We give up something precious so that we will not become complacent.

As I type this, I’m in Barnes & Noble and it’s all I can do not to order a latte.

I write about radical Shalom restoration, giving all of ourselves to bring peace and wholeness to the world, and all I can think about right now is how much I want a bleeping cup of coffee.

I live in a country that’s grown accustomed to getting what we want.

It’s such a small sacrifice (it’s not even a sacrifice!) but the implications are monumental. What am I believing that makes it so hard not to buy that drink?

Next week we’ll celebrate Pancake Tuesday. The next day, we’ll put ashes on our face to remind ourselves that we are living, breathing dirt, dust that walks and talks and laughs and cries and has feelings!

Our Creator likes to play in the mud. God got holy hands dirty to make us.

For 40 days, starting on Ash Wednesday, I’ll do my best to let go of some of my vices. This year, it’s meat, and then halfway in, dairy. Last year, pregnant, preparing to move, and away from my husband, I sacrificed by adding instead of subtracting. I’ve learned that it really doesn’t matter what you sacrifice. As long as you sprinkle it with a little soul.

Do you feel compelled to give up or start something? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Let’s dance in the dirt and marvel at the beauty that surrounds us. Let’s get our holy groove on.

My little Kia sneaked into the parking lot around midnight. Me, my two best friends, Mary* and Amanda, and Mary’s friend Todd, the resident diving expert, were ready for an adventure. Luckily, the lot was empty. We jumped out of the car and got to work.

Lemons! So many lemons. Cake and bananas and pizza dough, oh my! Flowers!**** And so much more, all waiting for us, in the grocery store dumpster.

It was my first and only time dumpster diving. But it’s been on my mind, and close to my heart, ever since.

This food we found, it was still good. Some of it was about to expire – but hadn’t – and all of it could be preserved in a freezer.

A grocery store will throw out an entire carton of eggs if one of them breaks. 

People are starving.

The store will throw out the whole bag of limes if one of them has gone bad.

People are starving.

You know how your mom used to say, “Finish your plate, children in Africa are starving,”? I used to wonder what the connection was. What does me eating all of my rice have to do with kids in Ethiopia?

Alright, that’s a fair question.

First, a few facts:

• Every year in America we throw away 96 billion pounds of food.
• One half of all food prepared in the US and Europe never gets eaten.
• The Department of Agriculture estimated in 1996 that recovering just 5 percent of the food that is wasted could feed four million people a day; recovering 25 percent would feed 20 million people. Today we recover less than 2.5 percent.**

It wasn’t always like this. My parents’ generation valued food preservation. The world wars taught them that saving food was patriotic. After WWII, scientists worked hard to come up with ways to make our food last longer. The Ramen you ate last week that’s still in your stomach? Those Little Debbie snacks you had today? They are the results of that initiative.

Yep. We’ve created a monster.

What and how we eat, it’s so out of whack. We put noodles in our tummies that are made to last a nuclear bomb. And grocery stores throw away the healthy, perishable food the moment it loses an ounce of its original luster.

That’s why some people, like Jeremy Seifert, producer of the film Dive!, have decided to do their part to lessen America’s wastefulness by sneaking into dumpsters late at night to grab food that will feed their families the next day.

But maybe that’s not your thing. Regardless of whether you find diving into dumpsters thrilling or chilling, you can still play a part in ending world hunger and curbing our country’s wastefulness. Here are just a couple of things you could do (none of them involve a dumpster of any kind):***

• Educate yourself on food safety stuff. Those carrots in your fridge? Have they really gone bad? Often, if a food is on the verge, you can freeze it or use it for baking.
• Make a game of it. See how long you can go without wasting any of the food you buy. Purchase only what you know you’ll need and serve yourself smaller portions (you can always go back for seconds and you’re less likely to throw it out if it’s still in the pot).
• Become skilled in the art of making leftovers into a new feast. And then brag about it.

If you’d like to go the extra mile:

• Call your local grocery stores and ask them if you can come and pick up the food they were planning to throw out. If they’re hip, go and get it and take it to the nearest food bank.
• Volunteer at a homeless shelter or a food bank.
• Start your own organic garden. And then – bonus points – donate your excess to folks who could use some delish, organic produce.

What else can we do? Leave your ideas in the comments below.

*Names have been changed to protect the divers. Dumpster diving is illegal in some states. We considered what we were doing an act of civil disobedience. But if you decide to dive, check the laws in your area and dive at your own risk.

**These facts came from the Dive! The Film website.

***Doing these things will not only fight hunger, but they will also help to combat our growing energy crisis. Now that’s amazeballs.

****Happy Valentine’s Day! Last week, I shared my thing on Tanya Geisler’s Thing Finding Thursday. I suppose the implications of realizing my thing played a role in my decision to write a piece about diving into dumpsters for food on the most romantic day of the year. Happy diving!

In 1945, a group of British soldiers were sent to rescue the survivors of a German concentration camp called Bergen-Belson. One of the soldiers, Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin*, penned the following passage into his diary:

I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and children collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diptheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand propping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentary which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated.

It hurts to read that. I almost added a disclaimer of warning at the top of this post. But I was afraid if I did, you wouldn’t read it. And you have to read it.

This was hell on earth, quite literally, a stripping of humanity. The purpose of a concentration camp is to dehumanize, to take away a human’s being.

Shalom on earth is about restoring our humanity. Sometimes it’s taken from us, like it was from the people in the passage above. Sometimes, we give it away because we don’t realize  how precious it is.

I gave mine away.

Desperate to love and be loved as a pretty young girl, I freely exploited my own humanity in drunken stupors on dirty mattresses. It was a short rebellious stint, but it cost me more years and tears than I could have imagined possible. I feel it in the intimate moments of my marriage and I wish for a miracle. I pray to return to that hungry little girl I used to be. I want to hug sense into her.

But I can’t. And until God grants me the gift of time travel, I will have to be content with restoring Shalom in the present and urging you, if you are reading this and you are giving your humanity away, to let me hug you through this screen until you know that you are a miracle. There is a divine spark in the center of your soul.

I want to whisper that hope comes in all shapes and tubes:

It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don’t know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tatooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.

Photo credit: William P. Gottlieb Collection (Library of Congress)

*I first read this quote in the book SexGod by Rob Bell.

She posted this series of questions on her blog. I found them deeply inspiring. And so today, I’m answering Danielle LaPorte’s Burning Questions:

I want my day to feel like morning glories that decided to stay open.
I want kissing to feel like catching snowflakes on your tongue.
I want my next success to feel like glitter and confetti is falling all around me.
I want my body to feel like warm wind on a spring day.
I want smiling to feel like hope.
I want my friendships to feel like cake batter martinis, perfume lockets, and laughing so hard you cry.
I want my nervous system to feel like water from an untapped spring.
I want my gigs to feel like sunlight and dance music.
I want my neighborhood to feel like restoring Shalom.
I want my integrity to feel thirst-quenching.
I want my money-making to feel like I just won a rap battle.
I want my word to feel like a ripe, red tomato picked from my garden in the summer.
I want my laughter to feel like Christmas bells.
I want the end of the day to feel like grandma’s chocolate chip cookies.
I want being of service to feel like we really are changing the world.
I want my philanthropy to feel like the gift they gave to me.
I want my challenges to feel like the view at the mountaintop.
I want my love to feel holy and sensuous.
I want my writing to feel like you’re having coffee with a dear friend.
I want my ideas to like homemade bread, fresh from the oven.

How do you want it all to feel?

In response to the question, “What are you?”, my parents taught me to say, “I’m adopted and I’m special.”

I learned two things.

First, I am special – unique, quirky, set apart . . . AMAZING.

Second, I don’t always fit in very well. Growing up, I had this sense that I was abandoned by people who were supposed to love me. It wasn’t true, but it made me feel unwanted.

In reality my parents waited seven years to adopt me. My birth mom sacrificed dearly to give me a better shot in life. But the story I told myself conflicted with the story I was born into. It complicated things.

Everyone in Ruckersville, Virginia went to church. Except my parents. I wanted to fit in, so I started going, too.

I found God fascinating. I asked a lot of questions that made my Southern Baptist youth leaders uncomfortable.

My dad was an atheist. He was also the kindest, most loving, and generous man I knew, and I could not wrap my mind around a God that would condemn him to hell. I became obsessed with the second coming and I prayed for God to hold on while I worked on saving my father. Desperate and worried, I went to my Sunday School teacher.

She looked at me thoughtfully. Finally, she said, “Maybe God will make us forget the people who didn’t get into heaven.”

I know she was trying to help. But instead, she intiated my instinct to run.

Her God could not be real, or else he didn’t know my dad. Christianity was not for me.

Besides, there were things I’d wanted to do – stuff I knew I’d miss out on if I continued on that righteous path. Cigarettes, sex, alcohol and drugs: Christians had no idea what they were missing.

In the process of pursuing pleasure, I flushed my aspirations down the toilet. I morphed into the kind of person who would lie, cheat and steal to get what she wanted. I didn’t like who I was becoming. But it was getting harder and harder to go back to the little girl I used to be. I wasn’t sure I could change back.

When I look back at that scared young woman, I want to hold her. Everyone in my life at that time was quick to keep me stuck in my horrible habits or tell me what a screw-up I was. If I could talk to the girl I used to be, I would tell her she’s beautiful. And that she deserves more than what she’s become.

I was God’s beloved prodigal daughter.

Funnily, God became more real to me in my toil and trouble than he had ever been in my happy suburban childhood. I had no one around to whisper my beauty and worth (least of all myself!), but God had been there all along, wooing me with unconditional love.

It was not that God made me see the error of my ways. She believed in me – and so my conversion could be called the moment in which I started to believe in myself, because looking back, I knew the whole time that God was real.

This was a big, big God. This was a God I could trust with my life. And so I did.

And my life, at 23, was a hot mess. Cigarettes, pot, sex, diet coke – I was addicted to all of them. I couldn’t keep a job. I was dead broke. And I was a newly single mom.

We dated for three years and we brought out the worst in each other. I cheated. Several times. And then one day, I hooked up with an old flame only to discover he was cheating on his pregnant fiancé.

It was like looking in a dirty mirror.

It woke me up and shook me from my creepy ways. I stopped cheating, but I stayed with a man I knew I didn’t love. I believed that because he was my daughter’s father, I had no other noble choice. I wanted to do the “right Christian thing”. Jesus didn’t seem keen on divorce – nevermind that we weren’t technically married. I’d messed up so much already. I was afraid to take the chance and screw up again.

We went to couples counseling instead.

“He says he wants to be a Christian, but he doesn’t act like it.  Some of the stuff he does . . . it makes me uncomfortable,” I told my counselor.

“Brandy,” She paused and looked at me meaningfully, “Are you sure you want to marry him?”

I stared at her, unblinking, “I didn’t realize I had a choice.”

Leaving him was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. But it freed me in unspeakable ways.

I moved back in with my parents and began mending my broken life, again. My counselor recommended me for a housekeeping position at a mega-church.

That job saved me. It swaddled me like a cocoon so I could begin healing the damaged parts of my being. My boss was wonderful. He knew I had made a mess of my life and he gave me the space to decontaminate. He supplied me with a state-of-the-art vacuum for extra heady spills.

In return I scrubbed and shined that holy house until it sparkled. He put me in charge of the clothes closet and the food pantry (allowing me to take from them as I needed). Honored, I happily sorted those sacred spaces.

My time of healing nurtured my old love of reading; I frequented the church bookstore, “Vacuuming.”

One day I came across a book called Velvet Elvis by a guy named Rob Bell. It was in the clearance section and I liked the cover. I bought it on a whim.

It changed my life.

Rob Bell opened my eyes to a way of following Jesus that intuitively made sense. This was a faith built to last; a faith I would need before the end of that summer.

###

She was three. The event devastated everything. My little girl’s innocence, ripped away from her.

It was a such strange time. It happened less than a year after I started putting my life back together. I’d made some really good friends and these people rallied around my little family in ways I could not have imagined.

It was horrific. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. And the truth it, the person who hurt my baby is my worst enemy (I wrote a letter to him in Think Love Create. Sign up here if you’d like to read it).

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I met Jermaine on an “evangelism retreat” about a month before the trauma. It was a shaky way to begin a relationship.

Honestly, I thought I could marry him from the moment we met, but how could I expect new love to blossom in the midst of such sadness? Besides, he lived 400 miles away . . .

###

I wasn’t running, exactly. But I longed to break free from my painful past. And I didn’t see how to do that when I had to drive by the bars I used to frequent on my way to work every morning. Also, I wanted to get my daughter as far away from her abuser as I possibly could.

Suddenly, I was very thankful for my long distance relationship. This sweet, smart boy was the perfect excuse to fly away.

And that’s what I did. I packed up my daughter and filled a U-Haul to the brim. Off we went.

But I then began to second guess myself. It felt like I’d moved for him. And, if I had made this great sacrifice, wasn’t he required to sacrifice something in return? I tried to force it out of him by clinging, fighting, crying beautiful bitter tears.

Yep. Girlfriend of the year. That’s me.

He did the only thing he could think to do. He dumped me.

It seems hardly notable now. We got back together a couple months later. I worked on not being manipulative, and learned what a healthy relationship looked like. My intuition was spot on. We just celebrated our 3^rd anniversary. Heeey.

The months in between breaking up and getting back together, temptation struck. I bought a pack of cigarettes and got friendly with a guy in my English class. I knew I was flirting with destruction, but I didn’t know how else to cope. Breaking up with Jermaine hurt. And I wanted to numb the pain.

I also didn’t have a church. I had been going to his parents’ church until we broke up, but I had no desire to continue. I tried a few in the area but it seemed I didn’t fit in once again.

And so, I think that’s why, in the midst of our colossal break-up, I remembered Rob Bell.

He mentioned in his book that he pastored a church in Michigan. I went online to see if they taped their sermons. They did! I started listening every week. I have always loved listening to sermons – I was, perhaps, the only kid in my little Southern Baptist church that came on Sundays to listen to the preacher. I think it’s tied up in my love of words.

But Rob Bell did something a little extra. His sermons combined all of the things I was most passionate about: performance, poetry, stories, social justice. His creativity spoke to me.

I continued to listen after Jermaine and I got back together. And, really, I never stopped. Later, a few months after we got married, I heard “Rob Bell” and “emergent” in the same sentence. I was intrigued. I had heard that the emergent church was dangerous and heretical. But if Rob Bell was involved, it couldn’t be that bad. I wanted to see if there were any emergent churches in my area so I went online and typed “emergent church Maryland”.

In Cedar Ridge, we found a home. We found a group of people who were passionately committed to following Jesus and loving each other. I fell in love with the church’s vision and I was moved by the humility of the leaders. I’m not sure they would call themselves emergent (or if Rob Bell would, for that matter). They’re just people daring to imagine heaven on earth.

###

One fine day, before Cedar Ridge and after we got back together, I was driving along the highway and suddenly, I was sobbing. I felt it.

God was calling me to become a pastor. Me.

I’d been struggling to figure out what to do with my life. I knew I had been given a second chance. I knew I was a gifted writer and performer but until that moment, I couldn’t figure out how to combine the two. Pastoring fit beautifully.

Still, I couldn’t help but ask, why on earth God would want me to pastor his people?

After all, I was a girl.

I have long considered myself “the screw up”. That was my story.

But I realize now that there is a part in the narrative where it becomes less about me, the perpetual flunk, on the ground piecing my life back together, and more about me, a woman with the gift of wordplay, divinely appointed to a role that’s generally filled by guys.

God put me Cedar Ridge and surrounded me with women and men who challenged the boxes I had placed both genders in. God took my passion for social justice and situated me in the sociology department of the University of Maryland. He helped me reach the conclusion that “He” was not a he at all – that a gendered interpretation of God puts God in a very small box.

Part of this blog’s purpose is to deconstruct the boxes we’ve tried to put God in. My story is now about partnering with God to let our boxes go, and in doing so, to restore Shalom to the world.

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There is more to my story. And every time I read this I find new parts that need editing. But that’s life, isn’t it? I’m working to turn it into a memoir called Emergency Breakthrough. I suppose I’ll have to finalize my editing once that gets closer to completion, but for now, I’m content to tweak this page often. I’ll keep you posted on the progress of my memoir.

If you want to read more about this crazy Shalom restoration mission, check out 7 Steps To Restoring Shalom. It’s a free downloadable PDF. And if you’d like some help keeping up with my posts and purpose, subscribe to my newsletter, Two Shots Of Brandy. You’ll get my digital book, Think Love Create (also a downloadable PDF) when you do. And I won’t share your email with anyone else.

Want to start a riot with me?

I rock the mic like it’s my job. It is. And it’s all pro bono right now.

These are the stories I tell:

My Story

Young, dumb, and pregnant.

Ridiculous dreamer. No follow-through.

Adopted. Addicted. Arrested.

Blue collar. Red letters.

Tiger mama. Weeping child.

Methodist to emergent. Preaching radical inclusivity. Daring to seek and find heaven on earth.

Feminist. Homebirther. Writer. Dreamer. Ridiculous follow-through.

Abandonment and intimacy issues. Awkwardness abounds. Broke as a perpetually flushing toilet. Overcoming fear, anger, and co-dependency. Embracing hope, love and the God of possibility.

I would love to share my story with you and your group. I can concentrate on a single area or give you the whole shebang. Your call. Our stories can change the world and alter reality. Thanks for your interest in mine.

Human Trafficking

Last year, I volunteered in Kolkata, India with Made By Survivors. We took care of children saved from modern day slavery. In college, I majored in sociology and used every opportunity available to research and write about human trafficking.

I can share how to spot trafficking situations, who to call when you do, and what individuals can do to end slavery in our lifetime. I can help you launch a fundraising initiative to help support people and organizations who’ve dedicated themselves to fighting human trafficking.

Many of the products in our homes and in our hands were made, somewhere along the chain, by people enslaved. Let’s talk fair-trade, the top perpetrators, and what you can do to tell your favorite companies you will not support them if they use slaves in production.

The Third Way (The Subversive Art Of Peacemaking)

Fight or flight, right? Violence or pacifism? Those are our choices?

No.

There is a better option. Creative nonviolence. Right-brained justice. From Jesus to the man who stood in front of a tank, history is loaded with examples of The Third Way.

Peacemaking oozes creativity and ingenuity. At its best, it can change you and the person or group you’re resisting in genuine and magnificent ways. What we create molds us. I can teach you to make a beautiful mess.

How To Start Your Own Housekeeping Business

I’ve been in the business of cleaning houses for the past 15 years. Recently, World Relief gave me the opportunity to teach refugees how to start their own housekeeping business. I’m smitten. And I’d relish the chance to do it again.

Spoken Word

I’ve been performing in competitions and open mic nights for the past several years. I’ve spoken at Montgomery College in Rockville, Maryland, Busboys And Poets in Washington, DC, Forest Hill Church in Charlotte, NC, and The Coffee Scene in Fayetteville, NC.

I can host your event or perform, or both. I’m great at revving up a crowd and creating a welcoming and vibrant atmosphere for both the performers and the audience.

###

My 2012 schedule is wide open right now. But I have a hunch it’s going to fill up quick. If you’d like me to come speak at your workshop, church, retreat, school, or conference, don’t hesitate to email me at brandyglows at gmail dot com. Looking forward to making a ruckus with you.

I got a ticket! I’m going to Chris Guillebeau‘s World Domination Summit! I’m so bleeping psyched!

Brooklyn and I, we got nothing done today. Tickets went live at noon. I spent the morning in excited anticipation and the afternoon in elated jubilation. I couldn’t do anything but hug and kiss him. He’s very thankful his mommy got in.

If you haven’t heard of Chris or his plan to take over the world, then my exclamation marks may confuse you. Don’t worry, it’s nothing illegal (I don’t think).

I found Chris’ site, The Art Of Non-Conformity, last summer when the first WDS went down. To be honest, it sounded a bit hoaxy to me. But, Twitter was all aflutter and a lot of bloggers I admired were raving.

And not just a “check out the latest blogging conference” rave, but a kind of rare and genuine enchantment with this guy and his mission for world domination.

And then I became enchanted. Chris is kind of extraordinary. His blog is about living an unconventional life. And his own unconventionality has led him on a mission to visit every country in the world by the time he’s 35.

Being unconventional and setting massive (nearly unattainable) goals are things I’m vaguely familiar with. He intrigued me.

I found Chris and AONC about six months after my journey to India, which also happened to be my first trip out of the United States. My trip halfway around the world had been interesting yet terrifying (but that was mostly the morning sickness). I could not (and still cannot) imagine traveling as much as he does.

But reading about his adventures had me like woah. And then everyone was talking about WDS. It’s based on the idea that we, you and me, can be remarkable. We can scheme tremendous plans to change the worlds we live in. It’s about community, friendship, dreaming BIG, starting fires, and bringing the awesome.

This is so not your average blogging conference. 

One of the coolest things about Chris and his shindig, is that they’re both sponsor-free. He actually lost money putting on WDS2011. He still considers it a win. And he’s right.

I’m STOKED. I can’t believe I got a ticket! I’m beyond thrilled that I’m going to have the opportunity to meet Chris in person along with tons of other bloggers I’ve made friends with in cyberspace. I have this incredible feeling that I’m about to be a part of something that’s way bigger than me and yet holds many of the same Shalomy plots that get me going here in the little patch of digital land I dominate.

PS. If you travel like Chris does (or aspire to), you may want to check out his Travel Hacking Cartel.

PPS. Since this is the last post of the first month of 2012, I’m wondering . . . what are your dreams for this great big year that spans out ahead of us? How do you plan to make it remarkable?

Lindsey Mead inspires me to no end. The other day she wrote a post about how the magic of the universe can be glimpsed in the details. And then she shared some of her own gorgeous details.

Thinking about what I would share was like searching the drawers of my life for divine clues. Here are some tiny things that make up me. What do your drawers tell you?

• I feel younger than most adults. Thirty seems foreign to me; I can’t claim it. I feel green, inexperienced, lite. Sometimes I think I’d like to feel like a grown-up. But most of the time I relish the awkwardness.
• Despite what I just wrote, I am learning to fake it. One of my goals for 2012 is to exude confidence in the day-to-day situations I find myself in. As I work on holding my own in front of my daughter’s teacher, our doctor, and Jermaine’s boss, I’m realizing that we’re all, on some level, just pretending we’ve got it together. I’m late to that game but just because I feel like a bumbling 12-year-old doesn’t mean I don’t have something important to say.
• I’m nearing the end of the third week of writing as my night job. I’ve picked up a couple of beautiful habits: praying the car in the car on the way to the bookstore and reading my Bible when I first arrive. I’m also starting to feel the sacrifice of this new endeavor and it makes me all the more thankful for my ever-supportive husband. I go back and forth between feeling a huge sense of responsibility to make every moment count and the idea that everything is material and it’s all worthy.
• I spend huge portions of my days trying to get my four-month-old to laugh. Smiles are frequent, but laughter is still a rare, precious gem. I think he knows what I’m up to and stifles his laughter to keep me singing silly songs.
• Last year I realized that I’m not great at reaching out to and/or connecting with people. At first it settled in my mind as a fact about myself – maybe one that I didn’t like but not something I could really change. I know now that’s hogwash. So, I work every day to love wildly. I want to become ridiculous at it.
• I feel fat. I try to stay positive and appreciate my body and the life it gave Brooklyn. But sometimes I look in the mirror and cringe.
• I have 20 tabs open on my internet browser as I type this. And that’s normal. When I come across something that interests me, I click on it. And I try not to close the tab until I’ve had the chance to study, save and share it.

Would you share some of your heavenly details?

I have a dream. I believe that the restoration of all things is possible in our lifetime.

We have the technology. We have the desire. We have the intellect. We have TED.

The question isn’t can we, it’s will we?

Will we love when we’d rather hate? Will we confess when we’d rather blame? Will we give when we’d rather get? Will we move mountains when we’d rather sleep?

Will we save some pie for future generations?

There are some things in our social system which I am proud to be maladjusted and to which I suggest that you, too, ought to be maladjusted. I never intend to adjust myself to the viciousness of mob-rule. I never intend to adjust myself to the evils of segregation and the crippling effects of discrimination. I never intend to adjust myself to the tragic inequalities of an economic system which takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes. I never intend to become adjusted to the madness of militarism and the self-defeating method of physical violence. I call upon you to be maladjusted . . . the world is in desperate need of maladjustment. Through such maladjustment we will be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man into the bright glittering daybreak of freedom and justice. - Martin Luther King Jr.

What gets you out of alignment? What can you do to fix it? If you don’t know what to do, share your maladjustment in a comment below and I’ll brainstorm some simple things we can do to solve the problem.

Everyone is maladjusted somewhere. It’s uncomfortable for a reason. Feel it. Find it. And then do something.

We don’t need the whole world to do this. One person can stamp out small pox. One person can feed all of the hungry people in his country. I’m willing to bet that the 73 of us can do something as big as end slavery or stop global warming. I triple dog dare us.

And, I believe this blog will grow. I’m envisioning a small army of co-connivers, hellbent on saving the world.

“The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority.” – an unknown quote from Seth Godin’s blog 

If you believe in my vision, if you desperately want to play a role in solving all the problems in the world, will you subscribe to my blog or share this post with your friends and ask them if they’d like to connive some awesome with us?