One Last Post for 2007

I've been trying all day to figure out what to write, how to end this year off on my blog.

I don't really know what to say. Tomorrow I'll reflect backwards, and then turn and look forwards, but tonight, there aren't quite words.

I'm sitting here in the semi-dark. In a few minutes I'll go back to the episode of Grey's Anatomy I'm watching on dvd. But for a few minutes I paused the dvd, and crept up into my stairwell.

My upstairs neighbors are African - Christians we're quite sure, though we've never met them except to smile and greet in passing on our way to and from our respective apartments. I sat in my stairwell in the dark, on my side of the door and wall that separates my home from theirs, and listened. They are singing and praying and worshipping in the New Year. Such beautiful harmonies, accompanied only by a tambourine, and such passionate prayer, though all in a language I'll never understand. I crept up the stairs to listen, to sit in the dark and let their prayers flow over me because I recognized the tune, if not the language, to one of the songs they were singing. "Oh How I Love Jesus." So beautiful.

I'm glad, I think, that the people who live above me bathe their home in worship and prayer. Tonight it makes me feel safe, and cozy as I stay alone this week while my roommate is out of town. I live in a building that (at least half of it anyhow) is regularly bathed in prayer. Beautiful.

Happy New Year!