I'm Thinking About...

I’m thinking about an upcoming anniversary. Saturday marks three years since the day my depression was healed. Three years since God stepped into my life in a crazy way, and brought hope where there’d been only despair. I’m still working on plans to celebrate, but I know there will be a Mexican dinner with my roommates (a joint celebration of my anniversary and one of their birthday’s) and an evening of watching Anne of Green Gables.

I’m thinking about plans to pray tonight with my roommates. To pray over each other and our house. About how I’ve needed us to do this together, but haven’t known how to broach the subject, and how it’s come together naturally, after a week in which we have each individually experienced disturbing nightmares.

I’m thinking about hamburger chop suey – which is the only dish (other than hamburgers) I can think of that contains ground beef that I actually enjoy. I think years of eating A LOT of ground beef as a child (it was affordable when we couldn’t afford much) created a strong aversion to it.

I’m thinking about how delighted I am that I’ve scheduled a phone conversation with my best friend, currently working on the other side of the world in a hospital in Pakistan, for Sunday morning.

I’m thinking about my desperate need to shorten a pair of pants I bought a few months ago, so that I have at least two pairs of pants that are suitable for work.

I’m thinking about how nice it is to be loved.

I’m thinking about how healing the hugs of a child are.

I’m thinking about a little boy who struggles a bit with language fingering a medallion on a bracelet I wear – a picture of Jesus – and telling me “This God. This God. I know Him.”

I’m thinking about another friend, much older, who held that same bracelet in his hands the other night, looking at it as I told him the story of my little friend’s confidence in knowing God, and commenting that he liked the bracelet, that it “felt good” in his hand. That there was a sort of strength to it.

I’m thinking about pearls. About a string of them that were a gift from a friend, and about a pearl ring sitting in a box in my dresser drawer, that perhaps needs to be unearthed and worn a little more often. About the caution I was given when I purchased that ring – that pearls were beautiful, but notoriously soft and delicate, easily shattered and broken, thus making them somewhat more valueable. And about some lines from the Anne of Green Gables books years ago. Anne commenting on the fact that she’d been criticized for wearing a tiny circlet of pearls as her engagement/wedding band because pearls represented tears, and essentially saying that it was the many tears it had taken to come to this place of commitment that made the commitment, and thus the symbolism of the circlet of pearls far more dear to her than any diamond.