(see heidi, you go off and say these kinds of things in public forums and then you wonder why people kind of turn and look the other way when passing you in the hall at school or work!...there's always a reason heidi, always a reason)
my excuse? I just got home from another 12 hour shift of craziness...and I spend those 12 hours in a setting in which such topics are lunch conversation...but people, from time to time, let me in on the fact that not everyone in the world does...so let's just hope you're not eating lunch...or any other meal for that matter...
but really, on an entirely serious note - this is a real problem! I have got so many different kinds of things swirling around in my head, its totally ludicrous. How do people with any kind of a reasonably sized world view make it through everyday without their heads exploding like a go-lytely clean out? i mean really, folks?! just to name a few:
- the question of how do we know what we know? reason? testimony? faith?
- the question of how to translate the knowledge of high and low context cultures into a genuinely changed day to day experience of life in a high context culture as a low context person?!?!
- trying to imagine the immense responsibility and love that parents with chronically ill children live in every single day...blows my categories for/experience of such things wide open...
- and what about parents of chronically well children?!?! raising. a. human. being. - or more than one. it really is a miracle that any of us survive childhood...
- what is the best way for a person to manage money across oceans?
- can a reasonable human being in their right mind actually purchase a ONE WAY plane ticket to east africa that has in huge capital letters at the bottom NONREFUNDABLE - knowing that that return ticket won't be purchased for another five years trusting that what awaits them is nothing more than best for them in that time?! this is craziness people. and at the same time, TOTALLY the most sane thing in the world. but sometimes not exactly at the same time...
- what is a single woman to do with the Song of Solomon? just askin'. read it. it's totally the makings of a movie without ratings. let alone respond with a 2 page paper including the assessment of what this part of scripture means for my head/heart/and hands?!?! you've gotta be kidding me. but no. totally not kidding. it's definitely an important question. just not sure at all how to answer it.
- the job crisis. I am asking friends and family to give me money that I might go work in another country when a lot of those friends are struggling to make money in their own country, feed their own families...seems preposterous at times.
- what do we do as a country to provide well for each other...really...what does that look like? then how are we to think about how we might be involved as a country in the lives of our fellow citizens of the world?!
- what about the people in this little place in NY that have increased rates of cancer in their area because local industrial plants avoid the regulators who come to assess among other things their environmental output performance and dump tons of crap into the air...and how many other parts of the world in which this is the case they just have no idea yet...who advocates for them?
- I love and believe in a Person I cannot see.........whaaaat?!
- how to answer the mom who insists that there must be a way to prevent the illness that repetitively affects her son...I'm a nurse and I'm not so sure she's right...I'm not sure there is always a preventative option, or a solution for that matter...but needless to say, she didn't really like that answer.
and it goes on and on and on...
maybe the solution to avoiding back up with the likes of these and dozens of others, is a little something like a dose of miralax everyday...writing more often, praying more often, reading scripture more often, talking more often, asking questions more often? I'm not sure what my "miralax is" on this side of the pond...but something must be done...
maybe it's an introvert thing...maybe you extroverts are reading this incredulously wondering why in the world all this is rattling around in a person's head...not as easy as you might think.
or maybe I should take a dose of my own medicine...maybe there isn't anything that can be done...maybe it's just a part of who I am, how God wired me...put THAT in your pipe and smoke it...yikes.