Vacations are supposed to be fun, so why do they contain so much stress?

I’m having a serious college flashback. I’m sitting in a stairwell, smoking. You see the problems of addiction? Actually, I was in college so long ago, you could still smoke in dorms. This flashback should be to days at Gale, in the Penobscot Building in Detroit, when I would work on weekends. We couldn’t smoke in our space, but still could smoke in the hallways – and stairwells. This is part of the smoking thing – I’m young again, indestructible.

Why am I smoking on vacation? This is supposed to be relaxing, wonderful. My roommate, Kathy, and I have issues about car trips. We both have issues with the way the other one drives. This leads to tense conversations about how close that truck is, and how fast one is or isn’t driving. It’s about control, of course.

I’m really a homebody. It’s so hard to leave, I always leave late, always underestimate how much time it takes to pack the car. Having kitty-minders means we have to leave the kitchen relatively clean. It’s complicated!

Vacations tend to be better in retrospect. I have the journal entries to prove that my visit to Holden Village was fraught with tension and feelings of conflict. I remember it well, however: I read lots of books, enjoyed nature, ate good food.

I wonder if it’s a questions of roles. Out of my home element, away from my congregation, who am I? How am I supposed to act? I’m always dealing with identity issues.

This experience has clarified for me why our next vacation needs to be on Amtrak: neither one of us will be driving, and it’s smoke-free. I suppose that won’t make our control issues go away, but it will end the tense conversations. Those ones, anyway.

cyclamen – a cancer surgery gift – and wonderful color in the dark winter

From revgalblogpals: a really good weblog whose ring I look forward to joining, when I know what I’m doing:

1. Did you celebrate Mardi Gras and/or Ash Wednesday this week? I worked at the party store on Shrove Tuesday. I remember thinking, I should get a pacski, but the place to get them around here is Wesco’s (a gas station with good doughnuts) and they pale in comparison to my memories of what they tasted like in Detroit. I missed not going to the pancake supper at St. Luke’s. I sacrificed celebrating Tuesday in order to clear time on Wednesday, and then we were hit with upwards of 10 inches of snow, and I made the difficult decision to cancel worship.
2. What was your most memorable Mardi Gras/Ash Wednesday/Lent? This year might be up there, with no worship. One of the cool things about the (relatively) new Lutheran worship book is that it includes liturgies for Lent. On the first Sunday of Lent, I dumped the confession and forgiveness in the bulletin and asked people to turn to page XX, and we used the Invitation to Lent and Confession found there. An acceptable compromise.
3. Did you/your church/your family celebrate Lent as a child? If not, when and how did you discover it? No, I grew up Presbyterian, and I don’t remember Lent being a concept at all. It entered my consciousness in college, I remember a friend in band missing class to go to Ash Wed. worship.
4. Are you more in the give-up camp, or the take-on camp, or somewhere in between? I have done both, think both are good disciplines. As long as we remember, it’s not about what we do, it’s about what God does.
5. How do you plan to keep Lent this year? I’m focusing on my daily devotions, working on having the bible in my life beyond sermon prep. I had intended to use Lent as a deadline for quitting smoking; after eight years smoke-free I started again last fall, just a few a day, but still. I made it a couple weeks, then went out with a friend who’s still smoking, and bummed a few. Went another week, then did a double-shift at the party store, gave in to the wall of cigarettes behind me. Today I said to Kathy (who really wants this to not be a part of our lives), in the face of chemotherapy, I don’t want to be a smoker, but I also can’t quite face giving it up altogether. So I’m concentrating on limiting the addiction. Oh, I know, I know. Maybe for me this year, the key is, how’s my relationship with God? Am I open to how I’m going to be changed by chemo? I’m afraid I won’t be courageous, that this is another set of expectations on the pastor. The psalms are helping me keep God close.

Ever since my call went less-than-full-time, when I got the job at the party store, I’ve been wanting to write about it. I’m approaching my anniversary of retail experience, so it’s time to stop procrastinating and start writing.

Some people may think it odd, that an ordained pastor would work in a convenience store whose claim to fame is cheap beer prices. I’ve always been glad Lutherans aren’t teetotalers.

I think it’s an interesting juxtaposition of the human experience. I’ve learned a lot at the party store, most concretely, how to operate a state of Michigan lottery machine. More amorphous are the lessons I’ve learned about boundaries and kindness.

Now past time for bed. Stealing time in the middle of the night, even though I’ve been coughing out a lung all week, is somehow related to the procrastination thing. I find that I’m incredibly productive at one thing when I’m supposed to be doing another thing. I think that’s why I’m late to shut-in visits: my focus sharpens when I should be putting on my coat and leaving church.

So the procrastination is over, and the site is born. I hope to write about my jobs, my faith, my experience with breast cancer, my love of television (which is an art form).

Since I can’t quite figure out how to end, I’ll leave you with lines from a favorite hymn:

Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it. 

Prone to leave the God I love. 

Take my heart, oh take and seal it

Seal it for thy courts above.

More later.