whirlwind update

I’m sorry I’ve been so quiet lately! Things have been a bit crazy. Also didn’t mean to leave the blog on such a downer. So a brief update:

• College has gone back and I’m excited to be there! Doing two youth ministry subjects and old testament B this semester, and even though it’s only week two I already love the youth min subjects. I’m with a group of three other women (Annie, Marette and Amanda), so we’re kind of the youth ministry gang. I made a crack at lunch one day that we were like the Charlie’s Angels of youth ministry, which Jane, the convenor, found hilarious. I’m still not entirely sure what I meant by it, but it makes me smile. Expect a bunch of posts on the importance of youth ministry as I develop my thinking on this!


• Salt Magazine is almost in the can! It’s always a struggle to boot my creative brain up, and this time was no exception. But I think we’re going to have it in on time, which is fantastic. The issue is called ‘Revolutionary News’ and the design aesthetic has been inspired by street art and propaganda kind of stuff. This was especially influenced by going to see the excellent Banksy ‘doco’ Exit Through the Gift Shop, which I highly recommend. Here’s the cover, and it’ll be out at a campus near you soon...(let me know if you’d like a copy):


• Have almost finished my artistic contributions to the Plan to Take Over the World, which is our name for the comics anthology that the amazing Karen has spearheaded. It’s called ‘Kinds of Blue’ and is a collection of comics on the theme of depression. Karen has written most of them and gotten a number of very talented artists to contribute the images to her words. I have been collaborating on one comic with Guan, and one that I have written and drawn myself. It’s been quite hard to get them finished - the irony of working on comics about depression while struggling with depression is not lost on me. But it’s almost at the layout stage (which I am also doing), and it’s going to be so cool to have the final product. I will keep you updated on its progress and, you know, invite you to the launch party.


• I didn’t know if I was going to say anything about it here, but lots of you know about it already anyway and it’s the thing in my life at the moment that’s constantly making me go squeee, so here it is: I’m in a relationship and will have been for about 2 months as of tomorrow. His name is Lachlan, we go to Wild St together, and he is an avid reader of this blog so it feels a bit weird to be writing about him when I know he’s going to read it. So I’ll just say that this is what’s happening, I’m extremely happy and we’re taking it one day at a time and trying to continually commit it to God.


• My dad and his wife are expecting a baby in early March. Um...not much to say about that really other than, yeah...well...yeah. I’ll be praying lots for this child. And praying that I can be godly in the way I treat him/her, and dad and J. Haven’t talked to my brother yet. No idea what he thinks.


• Mum is back from Canada and looking for work. So if you hear of anyone who needs an awesome Executive Assistant and pays well, let us know.

That’ll do for now…

pumpkin time

Why is night time so hard?

Someone who worked at a hospital once told me it seemed that people tended to pass away in the early hours of the morning more than other times. I remember when I had chronic asthma it was always much worse in the middle of the night. And, so it would seem, my depression/loneliness is worse around now.

It’s odd because normally I don’t mind being up at night. Even if I feel I should be sleeping, night time has always been my time. I always seemed to get the most writing done at night. I could read and read and read until I heard the morning birds. I just liked being awake when it was so quiet and still. But there was something about knowing my mum or flatmate was asleep in the other room that made me feel safe somehow. But at the moment, being home alone for extended periods of time, it just feels wrong. I feel adrift and alone.

You’d think I was a little kid or something, wailing at being away from her mumma for a night or two. One night I can handle. A couple of nights, that’s fine. But at the moment, 10 nights out and with another week to go before mum comes home, I just lie awake in my bed, feeling like time has stood still and I am going to be stuck in this long, dark night forever. Reading can’t distract me; my eye scans down the page but doesn’t take the meaning of the words in, and my brain is still ticking over, catastrophising, despairing. I try to pray but they are fits and starts (never am I more grateful for the Holy Spirit’s intercession than at times like these). I am grateful for my friends, and being occupied during the day and the evening, but those times aren’t the problem. It’s this time, the graveyard shift, post-midnight, the time when it isn’t seemly to call anyone up for no apparent reason. The time when I lie and stare at my cat and wish she was capable of human speech. It’s a bit worrisome really.

I’ll get through it. But, as always, if you’re a praying person please pray for me that I would be able to maintain perspective and common sense, and that my brain would allow my body to rest!

Amazing grace

I dropped mum off at the airport today for her two week holiday in Canada. I was at once excited and a little melancholy to see her go, but mostly I’m really glad she gets to have a holiday.

As I was driving home past the giant billboards that line the road from the airport, I noticed one massive billboard of woman wearing a come-hither expression (and little else) under the words: “Life is short. Have an affair while in Sydney.” Curiosity got the better of me and I googled the website being advertised when I got home (not actually wanting to visit the website itself). Its description calls it an agency for “Married Dating, Affairs, Married Women, Extramarital Affair.” Okay then of course I clicked through to the website because I couldn’t quite believe it. But yes. It’s an agency with the sole purpose of setting married people up to have casual, sexual affairs.

What. The. Hell.

Sometimes our world just makes me want to scream. Then it makes me think about how this is nothing new, that right back since humanity began we’ve been behaving like this, taking good gifts from God like relationships, marriage and sex, and treating them like garbage. It makes God’s grace all the more overwhelming. Isn’t it mindblowing that he would send Jesus to die to save us, to make us clean and whole and alive when we deserve nothing but death for the way we’ve treated him?

If you want to hear a great talk on God’s grace, have a listen to Rod’s talk on Ephesians 2 from Wild St yesterday. It’s gold.

warm

I went on a short break to stay with the Tonkses in Bundanoon. I got to play with a fire. This made me happy.