First page of the worship song archive.

wonder.

Posted by jessica on May 1, 2011 with 3 Comments
in Funny Stuff, I Lift My Eyes Up, MP3, Performance, Thoughts and Feelings
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This weekend was so full, I am not even quite sure where to begin.

Maybe with a conversation:

Me: “I wrote another song. And guess what? It’s NOT a love song.”
(see, shane maintains that I only write love songs or love recovery songs or heartbreak songs)
Shane: “What’s it about, then?”
Me: “Um, it’s a worship song.”
Shane: “Which is still a love song. Just, to God.”
Me: “No–it’s not!–I mean, I basically took it straight out of Song of Solomon…”
which is when we both started laughing and Shane shook his head.

Because: SONG OF SOLOMON. The only book of the Bible that is entirely and wholly devoted to LOVE.

Geez.

So I quickly changed the subject.

(and if you wanna hear it, here it is: if a man would give for love )

Friday night, The Paper Janes played to a sold out show at MojoMain in Newark. Now, to be honest, it was sold out because we were playing with some bigger bands, but still. Sold out. We were very psyched, and I have to say the concert was a blast. I felt lucky.

Saturday morning, I went and played worship for the women’s retreat at my church. It was just me and my little red keyboard, and, though I was pretty tired from a late night, I was happy to be there. Then I got to be a part of a small group. My problem with small groups is that I want to make jokes. The. Entire. Time. So, I try to filter and choose just some jokes to make and I try to answer seriously the questions being asked, and I think I do about half of each for half the time. If you’re confused by that, so am I.

And then we each got to paint or draw on or basically decorate however you’d like one tile. The idea was that, in the end, we’d fit them all together to a bigger and more beautiful picture than one we would come up with ourselves. Nice. And now this, I was stoked for. I hardly made a joke at all. Instead, I grabbed colored pencils and a normal led pencil and a charcoal pencil (I guess I really could have saved some time there by just saying pencils, huh?) and went to work. I was happy with my little picture, too, but most people who saw it didn’t really know what to say. Actually, they simply made a sound–kind of a sad puppy dog whining noise upon first glance. I guessed it to be empathic. It wasn’t like a picture of somebody kicking a kitten or anything–don’t be too worried–it was just me as a girl with some words I had written on it, too:

When I asked for a life of wonder, I didn’t know I’d wonder about so much along the way.

I don’t really consider it to be a huge downer. I mean, it’s not like I drew a big D for you-know-what (ah that would be divorced, and not a certain first name that starts with the letter D). Life is full of wonder. The end result is redemption, but there’s a lot of other messy stuff that we happen upon along the way. And I don’t have all the answers and I don’t know what the results will look like in detail, and thus: I wonder.

And then Saturday night, Shane and I played for a bunch of lovely and oh-my-goodness-fun! midwives at a wisewoman conference in MD. I think Shane was pretty thrilled to be so completely outnumbered by the ladies. There was one man there at the dance party (yes. dance party!) that we were party to after we played our set, but both Shane and I agreed that since he simply sat on a couch and did nothing, he didn’t really count. And like I said, playing our music was super fun, but afterwards there was much conversing, karaoke-ing, and dancing, and that was a hilarious bunch of good ol’ times. Especially when the eldest midwife there grabbed Shane and made him dance with her.

ha. ha. ha.

And then Sunday came. I had my own little church-ish time by driving down to the ocean, sitting upon its shore and sharing quite a few moments with it. Oh, it was lovely. The ocean has a way of filling up the parts of me that feel empty. I walked along the shore for a very long time; as I did so, I imagined there to be healing in the cold, cold water. I imagined myself stronger and better because of it.

I think I was a sponge today, dropped into a whole bucket of peace. And since then, I have felt some squeezing, felt the peace try to leave my veins, but no thank you, squeezing. I will keep this peace, if you don’t mind. I will be squeezed and I will be peaceful; it will be done. Not because of all my trying, I think, though; trying gets me mostly just tired. No, I think it has more to do with surrender. And um, patience. And love–the kind you read about that says a lot about kindness and being slow to anger and oh, patience. Yes, that again.

Sorry, I didn’t take any pictures of the ocean. But it was very big and very wet and very loud, if that helps with imagining it. It had a sky that hovered over it, grey and full, and there seemed to be a razor sharp edge to the water that I could just barely make out in the distance, upon which a boat sat precariously. Don’t worry, the boat held its balance quite well, and never did fall off the edge. Not while I was there, anyway.

And now to be like the boat and not fall off the edge. To be like the sponge and absorb the peace. And to be like the midwives and dance like you mean it. And also catch babies. Well, okay–maybe just the dancing part, for now.

happy DBTDTB day.

Posted by jessica on May 7, 2010 with 44 Comments
in Funny Stuff, Thoughts and Feelings
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Today I was in the grocery store and happened to see someone with whom I barely ever speak.

We both said hi. It was a sort of surprised kind of hi because neither of us expected to see each other in the refrigerated meat aisle (could there be an uglier aisle title out there?). If it were church, then we probably wouldn’t have said anything, really–both being very used to seeing each other across the way and saying nothing because who shouts HELLO!!! across three hundred chairs and a very loud worship song? But like I said, we were in the midst of refrigerated meat. No three hundred chairs. No loud worship song. And the only thing left to us was to talk.

I had, however, just gotten invisalign this morning. This is braces for people who are shy about braces, as my friend Shane puts it. And so I was not yet in the habit of speaking to people with them–not to mention the fact that I was not in the habit of speaking to this particular person at all.

So my hi was short and I was hoping to just stroll on by. Except after our initial greeting, he very loudly exclaimed, Ohhh! Which made me stop. It was the kind of noise that would make the animals at the zoo stop whatever it is they are doing and wonder if Ryan the Lion had finally bitten somebody like he’d been threatening to do since ’01.

And after this guy’s exclamation, he looked at me and asked, Are you a mother…yet? To which I said no and then he sadly told me that he would have liked to have wished me a happy mother’s day. I told him that I’d pass the sentiment on to my own mother, who is more than deserving of it in her own right, and that was that.

And then I told my brother Jason about the exchange, just cause I thought it was rather odd and we often like to tell each other about life’s oddities. To which he said that I should have said, No kids. But I DID get invisalign AND a divorce, so yay for me!!!

And then I asked him if there was a day for that.

To which Jase said, Screw Mother’s Day. You have your Divorced, Better Teethed, Dropped the Bum* Day!!!

And so Happy DBTDTB Day to me!

Catchy, isn’t it?

Hallmark better get on the ball and start making some cards. I could certainly help with the text, if necessary.

*nobody means anything very serious by the word bum here. We are simply using poetic license to emphasize humor. And also, no bums were actually hurt or injured in any way during the making of this blog post.