Times Past, Present, and Future

I do realize that I’ve been anything but an assiduous blogger as of late, but feeling guilt over something as trivial as a blog seems unwarranted. I make only a small apology to any individuals out there who might actually pop into this corner of the Internet from time to time, and whose annoyance grows stronger every time they are greeted by my October entry when the page finishes loading. Since my marked blogging decline, my main hits on this site seem to be directed from my Flickr profile or random searches on Google. (Last week, I was the #1 result on Google for search terms including “great unity nipple,” “nonsomnia,” “nude acrobats on a beach,” and “Belgian marshmallows.”) Life, as usual, is very good, but often busy. There never seems to be enough time to spend with people, or to enjoy the things that I delight in the most. Every night I like to make a list of things that brightened my day, and while there’s never a lack of fodder for my Happy List, sometimes I wish that there were a few extra days in each week to add to that fodder. Not that lengthening the weeks would help very much unless it subsequently lengthened our life spans, but I’d like to imagine that it would.

Fortunately, this leap year February graced us with an extra day, and I mostly managed to take advantage of the 29-day-month. Matt and I visited the art gallery, Upper Crust, and waterpark, three of my very favourite places. It’s always a joy to be able to share my favourite things with my favourite person. I packed in as many movies as I could before the Oscars, with the assistance of this strange Chinese web site that offers a wide selection of poor quality streaming movies (there probably is a more technical way of saying this that Dad and Matt would correct me on, but Google is not providing any better description). Heretofore, I hadn’t watched a movie without paying for it, except for once by accident, and I’m still not sure how I feel about the ethics of it all, but I really wanted to see all the Best Picture nominees beforehand and had no time besides late at night during reading week. Plus, Jess’ preferred Chinese web site even provides me with Mandarin subtitles with every movie so I can follow along.

I didn’t have any strong favourites of the 5 films, although Atonement was probably my top pick of the bunch, given that I wept profusely during its final scenes. I thought that There Will be Blood was very well done, but I wasn’t really moved by it. At all. My family insists that I must watch it on a regular TV to actually get the point of the film, but I’m skeptical. I was sad to read today that the Oscar ratings dropped to a record low this year, because I derive so much enjoyment from both the anticipation and actual evening itself. Jon Stuart was great as usual, and there were several dresses that Jess and I ogled over (Cameron Diaz, Keri Russel, and Jennifer Garner earned particularly loud shrieks from our side of the room). Crystal even dressed up in suspenders and a blazer for the occasion. Highlights of the night included Marketa Irglova’s belated acceptance speech, the absurdity of the Rock presenting an Oscar, and As per usual, I won the Oscar pool, and there were no real shockers besides the actress categories, but the speeches and Binocular/Periscope montage added sufficient excitement to keep me on the edge of my seat.

In other inconsequential news, the crotchetiness of my stomach is now rivaled only by Scrooge and the Grinch. I cannot eat most raw fruits and vegetables without having painful contractions by my cardia sphincter (fancy word!), which my doctor has told me nothing can be done about. Thus, I am limited to a potentially scurvy-inducing diet at times. Additionally, I now develop heartburn alarmingly easily, and take Tums most days. This isn’t really that unpleasant, and there are far worse plights that people face health-wise, but I do sometimes feel as though my body is falling apart at the young age of 22. I’m popping Tums like elderly men do, and feel sort of ridiculous when I have to explain to people why exactly I don’t want a piece of the apple that they’re offering me. On the digression of food and drink, I’m still toiling away at your local neighbourhood Second Cup, and loving it a great deal. I am now officially the veteran at the café, with my three years there being longer than anyone else’s residence at my dear place of employment (even longer than my boss’ 2 years). I feel blessed to be able to talk to my customers and fellow baristas about everything from God to boyfriends to the average cost of a marijuana joint, and never have a dull day when I work.

I’ll continue to work at the café over the summer while I take courses to finish up my degree (and graduate!!), and then plan on finding an actually decent-paying job and MOVING OUT. I’ve been quite lucky to avoid racking up student debt and live with my splendid family up until now, but it seems that there is a point in one’s adult life when it comes time to be independent and pay one’s own water, gas, and phone bills. It has always been agreed upon in my family that I would find a place of my own when I finished my undergrad degree, but I must admit that it’s a bit strange (and exciting and scary) that that time is nigh. I’ll be taking this next year off to work and figure things out before likely heading back to school next fall for a couple more years. I have a fabulous and kind-hearted roommate to potentially shack up with, and we did some thrilling house-hunting last night (or apartment-hunting as Matt would like me to qualify). I’m getting pretty keyed up. I have crafted the most beautiful monthly budget for the next year, with lots of Excel bells and whistles, and have made Jess come and admire its majesty too many times to count. I open my budget every single day at least once in anticipation of how organized and frugal I’m going to be. Matt is also going to be finding a decent-paying job and MOVING OUT (although it’s less scary for him because he’s already lived without parental supervision), and he too has arranged to live with a fabulous and kind-hearted roommate (in an area that I can actually bike/walk to with relative ease!). Planning ahead for things as grown up as living sans-parents for the first time can be quite uncertain and tricky, but God has come through big time in working so many things out. I feel lucky.

I’m blogging in part because I’m using this blog towards my ePortfolio for a course I’m taking on Children and the Web (as in the World Wide Web), one of the 5 great classes I’m taking this term. Being in my last year of my Bachelor’s degree has been bittersweet at times, because I really am going to miss some of my courses and university life so very, very much. This time of life is quite unique, and being entrenched in an academic environment like the UofA has profoundly changed the way I see the world and think about it. Not that I was an uninformed and close-minded teenager coming into university (egotistically, I think I was anything but that), but I’ve learned so much, both life lessons and scholastic lessons, over the past 4 years that I feel a sense of ignorance that I’ve never felt before. There’s so much that I now see I have left to learn, and I see a world full of questions and challenges that I’ve yet to figure out. I feel less comfortable leaving science and logic alone to answer these questions, and am not quite so assured about the things that I once felt so certain of. I’ve come to recognize that I don’t understand everything, and a lot of my questions will remain unanswered in my lifetime. I’ve made a boatload of mistakes, which I hope I’ve learned from, and I’ve grown into a Christian whose a bit more mature than the self-possessed 17-year-old I was coming out of high school. Over the course of this thing that we call a post-secondary education, I’ve made some lifelong friends, become an expert on psychology, found a home in a new church, hopefully become a bit of a better person, and fallen quite deeply in love. There are things I regret, and things I’m proud of, but most of all, I’m excited to find out what God has in store.

There never really comes a point where I’ve exhausted my ammo to ramble aimlessly with, but there is a point at which (if there are any of you still reading this), readers must inevitably tire of my thoughts. Thus, I’ll leave this entry at that, and try to update you soon on all things Cait-related. Hopefully I’ll get to see some of you in person in the near(ish) future, or I will fire an email your way soon (especially if your name also happens to include the initials CJ). I trust that you’re all relishing the first signs of spring, and are eagerly awaiting the arrival of Easter!

P.S. My blog is so much more meaningful than Matt’s occasional music posts. I still like him (and his blog) though.
P.P.S. Sigur Rós' Heima can now be seen on YouTube. Watch it.
P.P.P.S. The horrid bunny that resides under my family’s balcony and spies on me at all times of the day, and is very dissimilar from the Eater bunny, has returned. I loathe the balcony bunny.
P.P.P.P.S. Puddle-splashing season has arrived. Hoo-ray!!

Living in the Tension

I’m often struck by the dialectics that define our lives. So often, we are required to balance the various aspects of our lives and find where we fit amongst the extremes of this world. Rarely is spending all of my energy on one activity, dwelling excessively on one line of thought, or identifying with a fundamentalist belief a very wise course of action. Instead, I think that life is lived most fully when we embrace the tension that defines it. Life is messy, and imagining it to be black and white is rather ignorant in my estimation. Fleshing through life’s muddledness can be tricky, and it’s often easier to deny the mess that we find ourselves in. In my experience, Christians especially get caught in this trap of pretending that life is uncomplicated. While the truth of life is remarkably simple (God loves you, Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life; end of story), I’ve found that living this truth out is anything but clear-cut. Without God’s guidance and dialogue with others in my life, life can get awfully confusing awfully fast. How do I live in the world, but not be of it? Am I dismissing the command to love God sometimes when I concentrate so heavily on the command to love others? When do I need to go beyond saying the “nice” thing, and be candid? Questions like these are tricky to flesh out on my own. But I think failing to recognize that life is complicated means that we miss out on the full potential of life; working through the complications is ultimately so gratifying, and always takes me closer to the truth.


So often, North American Christians have supported black and white ideas like the “if you’re not with us, you’re against us” notion, despite Jesus’ converse words in Mark 9: “whoever is not against us is for us.” Jesus teaches that the weak are strong, and says, “blessed are the meek;” straightforward logic would contradict these statements. Life is not always straightforward, though. My favourite chapter in Rob Bell’s Sex God is the one titled “Angels and Animals” which pursues Blaise Pascal’s (AKA Bono in the Lobe household) idea that “man is neither angel nor beast.” In the context of Rob Bell’s book, this means that the church’s tendency to view ourselves as angels without flesh and a sexual side misses the point, while living as if we’re untamable animals isn’t any better, of course. Instead, recognizing the tension that exists between these two extremes, and working through this tension, is where we find the truth. I feel the struggle to flesh out life’s messiness most strongly at Easter. The days between Good Friday and Easter Sunday can be so strange because I want to remember Jesus’ sacrifice and the fact that my sin put Him on that cross, but at the same time I know that He lives again, and lives in me. (If you’re reading this, Caitlin, you’re not allowed to make fun! I know this sounds absurd. It’s true though. Too bad. Sometimes the most absurd things are the most true.)

I miss Zion a lot at Easter and Christmas, but McKernan really does have a beautiful Good Friday service that makes up for its lack of Zion-ness. Everyone takes Communion receives prayer at some point, and it’s a time of vulnerability, the kind of vulnerability that I miss from Zion. It’s a time of Communion, not just in the sense of the Eucharistic rite, but also in the sense of fellowship. I’m always struck in moments like these by the ache that people normally hide when they’re being invulnerable. Seeing people’s hurt on Friday, and thinking of Christ’s pain from the physical anguish and our heart-breaking betrayal, I feel especially aware of life’s ugliness and injustice and difficulty. Of course, I was also struck in this moment by the fact that we’re able to be in communion and receive salvation through Jesus’ blood. There was a tension in my mind between contrasting sentiments, but it was a tension that led me to a fuller understanding of that day’s significance. I want to live in the reality of life’s pain, whether it’s friends who are struggling, the suffering that so many people face on a daily basis, friends at work and school not knowing that Good Friday was for them, missing my old church, recognizing that it was my sin that held Him there, or simply wishing my grandparents were in town for Easter.


Of course, I want to rejoice always, and live in the reality of life’s beauty as well. I spent the morning with my oh-so-lovable family, remembered Jesus’ self-sacrificing love with a church that I care about very much, cooked a turkey dinner with some beautiful friends, walked around in the chilly-but-sunny Albertan spring, and spent the evening with some of my favourite people enjoying fellowship, silliness, and food (even under-appreciated hot cross buns and red Ecuadorian bananas). Matt, my corn-loathing friend behind such hit albums as Can You Say Indie? Volume 3: A Collection of Kintrasts, sent me Vega 4’s “Life Is Beautiful” a while ago, the chorus of which goes “life is beautiful, but it’s complicated.” It’s incredibly cliché, but true nonetheless. No matter how tough the going gets, I’ll always know God’s love and grace, which matter infinitely more than anything else. Even when life is easy peas, though, I don’t want to stop praying for friends who don’t know God’s love, I don’t want to become complacent, and I want to be able to share the burdens of others and hurt when they hurt. Life is messy, and I want to be willing to get dirty in the muddled disorder. There’s a tension in living between Jesus’ salvation-giving sacrifice and the time when God will restore everything, and there’s a tension in being part of an upside down Kingdom, and I embrace that tension.

On another tangent, I’ve become increasingly aware of the fact that, as Mr. Longbrake puts it, the less you have, the better off you are. I was bothered by my love of clothes and pretty furniture last fall, and have been praying about it since then. I don’t really want to want possessions, but it’s hard for me to shut off that desire. God’s somehow managed to convince me of this truth (in the way that my heart knows it, not just my head), and I’m caring decreasingly about these things. There’s nothing very profound about my diminished desire to consume, but I’ve found it to be quite encouraging and freeing to know deep-down that I don’t need things, and that God can work in me in ways that don’t seem at all plausible. I finished Sex God the other week, and Rob Bell speaks on lust for a portion of the book. Lust, as Bell paints it, is about buying into the promise that something will gratify and fulfill us in a way that nothing but God really can. Whether it’s sex, the admiration of others, pretty turquoise Lux ballet flats from Urban Outfitters that cost $39, or a trip to NYC, the good in these things is ultimately meant to point to God and live in the joy that He intended for us; these things were not meant to replace God. I’m not a very big fan of capitalism, and our small group was pondering the inescapability of “the system” in our society last week. We can’t really not go to school and subvert the get-a-job and make-a-living way of life in North America, because each of us is best equipped to love others by following this system to some extent in a capitalistic society. But as Shane Claiborne writes, we’re called to do “small things with great love,” whether in Calcutta, the grocery store, or our workplaces. It kind of stinks that I have to be a part of this system, but God can work even in this greed-based society that we’ve created (amazingly enough).


I would just like to reiterate how beautiful life is as I wrap up today’s blog entry. This morning, I woke up at 5:30 for some reason or other, and the sky was too beautiful to not get up and enjoy. I love orange skies, no matter what C&C non-city friends say about the city sky. The orange just looks so warm, and reminds me that there are people all around me contributing to the orangeness of the sky in some indirect way. Especially at 5:30 in the morning, God’s presence is so very apparent, even in the sky and falling snow and frosty wind. I was pondering God and life and people (the best things to ponder, of course), and the sky became the most remarkable shade of indigo purple. It was a beautiful moment, and it was so clear that God is so much bigger than anything else I’m facing. He’s bigger than the hardships of my friends, the things that money can buy, the poverty and injustice that exist in this world, and my exams and assignments and readings. He’s much bigger than even the sky, which is, of course, the biggest thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life. There’s not really anything more comforting than that. Not that His bigness or the backwardness of capitalism and competition give me an excuse to not care about any of the aforementioned things, but the fact that He loves me unconditionally and matters more than any of these things gives me a great deal of peace. And with that, I’m off to study! I trust that you’re all enjoying the snow rather than bemoaning it ceaselessly, as has become a trend at work. It’s cold and a nuisance, and really not suitable for springtime, but if you resolve to enjoy its delicate prettiness, it’s much more bearable.

P.S. Any of you who voted for peas on Saturday night have pained me deeply. Your betrayal was very harsh, and I don’t think I will ever cook corn for you again. Except that I will cook it again because you must all learn that corn is FAR superior to putrescent peas.
P.P.S. I am currently in love with Patrick Watson’s “The Great Escape.” Find a copy of it for yourself; he’s my latest favourite Canadian artist.
P.P.P.S. John Mayer is here in 18 days! And then Feist! And the Police! Plus, with K-Days, the Folk Fest, jazz concerts, and various other music fun, I’m exceedingly thrilled about the music that this summer has in store for Cait et al.
P.P.P.P.S. Jesus died for you. I pray that you know that deep-down.