Anne (with an ‘e’) #reverb10

One of my favorite television series/movies of all time is Anne of Green Gables.  I must admit, rather sheepishly, that I have NOT read the books.  I need to.  I know I do.  They will be my first purchase when I get an e-reader. I promise. (I actually began typing this post before Christmas… got busy and never finished it.  I am pleased to report that not only do I now have a kindle… but I also was able to get the Anne of Green Gables books for free!!!!  I’m 73% of the way through the first book!)

A scene that always captures my attention is when Anne stands before Marilla Cuthburt for the first time and introduces herself.

“Would you please call me Cordelia?”

“Call you Cordelia? Is that your name?”

“No, but please call me that. Cordelia is such a romantic name.”

December 23 – New Name Let’s meet again, for the first time. If you could introduce yourself to strangers by another name for just one day, what would it be and why? (Author: Becca Wilcott)

I am absolutely stumped for a response.
I have never thought about what my name would be if it was not Katie.
I have always been a Katie.  It was the name given to me at my birth. I will always be a Katie.
Not a Katherine, not a Kathleen, not a Katarina…
I am Katie.
Well, that’s not entirely true.  In the first grade, we had three “Katie”s in my class.  And so we became Katie M., Katie W., and Katie Z.
Since then I have always been Katie Z. No one could pronounce my last name anyway, so Katie Z. stuck.
Even in marriage, I couldn’t let go of the Z. For so long in my life it has been who I am. It is a part of me, too.  I couldn’t decide if I should do two last names, or change my middle name, but I liked my family middle name of “Marie” – so now I have two middle names – and since I never signed with my middle name anways, I sign all of my checks “Katie Z. Dawson”
I am Katie Z.
And now that I am in the ministry, I have to say that my name has evolved again.
Pastor Katie is what everyone calls me.  It is how I answer the phone when a call comes in to the office.  Sometimes I even catch myself answering my cell phone that way – even if it is a friend or a family member calling.
So Pastor Katie is who I am now also.
I really cannot imagine myself with another name.  One thing that I have thought of is whether “Katie” is a little juvenille sounding… it has that “ee” sound at the end, like “billy” or “susie” might.  So, without having much scope for the imagination myself (sorry Anne, that’s why I have to read your books, instead of just imagining things up myself), I think that the first “new name” I would like to try would simply be “Kate.”   So boring.
So then I googled “top 100 names”  – I’m not having a really creative sort of day today, am I?!  And I found this “renamer” based on characteristics about yourself.  I hated every single name that came up on the first round.  Every single one.  I got only slightly better luck on the second round… but then saw one of my names was “Bernice” and that is what we named my best friend’s extensions last night.  Doh.
I give up.  What do you think is a better name for me?

Jumping Through Hoops #reverb10

I came late to this Reverb10 party, so I have been trying to do some catch-up on the prompts.  And I found myself absolutely stuck.  frozen. unable to think or move or do. I was floored by my inability to respond to some of these prompts.

December 17 – Lesson Learned What was the best thing you learned about yourself this past year? And how will you apply that lesson going forward? (Author: Tara Weaver)

The best thing I learned this year has taken me a long time to learn… all the way until this morning in fact. I was sitting here thinking about why this reflection stuff has been so incredibly difficult and I realize it is because I have not really been paying attention to my own life. I learned this morning that I have spent an entire year jumping through hoops.

That doesn’t mean that there weren’t incredibly high and incredibly low moments along the way.  It doesn’t mean that I haven’t been engaged in a number of important things.  But on a day to day basis, I have let my life go on without giving it much thought.  I haven’t taken the time to figure out what is important and so there wasn’t always time for family or friends.  I spent many days drifting along doing what I needed to do, instead of taking a hold of my life and really living it.
I did all the things I was supposed to.  I did what was asked of me. I did a few things that I wanted to. In fact, I was juggling an awful lot of hoops at various times this year.  I was often rushing from this to that with barely time to breath in between… so when I finally did stop, I crashed. In the midst of it all, I took a few chances – and those small moments glimmer in the sea of fuzzy gray that was my life this year.
How did I let this whole year slip away without learning how to play guitar?  without painting the walls in my house? without having the long and hard conversation about children with my husband? without finally taking my health seriously and losing some weight?  without reading those ten books on the shelf?
I took my life this year day by day.  I did what I had to do for the day and put those other things off to another time.  And that time never came.  I jumped through the hoop and then I turned right back around and jumped through the hoop again. Over and over and over without getting anywhere.
So next year, in 2011, no more hoop jumping.  I am taking charge of my life.  I’m not going to be afraid.  I’m not going to put something off until tomorrow.  I’m going to figure out the few things that are really important and make room for them.  I’m going to take that hoop and thrown it far ahead – challenge myself, set goals – real goals, and accomplish them.
I’m not going to let another year of my life slip through my fingers.

What “Little House on the Prairie” Leaves Out…

As a child, I absolutely adored the “Little House” books.  I fawned over the pages and the stories of Laura Ingalls and imagined her life growing up in the midwest in the late 1800’s.  They were full of rich detail and you could put yourself into that little sod house or the cabin in the woods or the shanty out on the prairie with FULL detail.

There is one thing that I think Mrs. Ingalls Wilder forgot, however – a small tidbit about life for women that perhaps she just couldn’t bring herself to mention.
I almost didn’t notice, until I finally finished a book on life in Iowa during the Great Depression called Little Heathens.  It is an autobiography, perhaps much in the same way that Wilder’s was – but with a slightly more matter of fact sense about it.  Mrs. Armstrong Kalish recounted her days as a little girl and described everything from butchering chickens to taming racoons, from school days to first kisses.  It was charming but not sentimental.  I really enjoyed reading it… so thanks Glenn and Maggie for the gift!
And in the last chapter of the book, as she told in some ways “the rest of the story,”  Kalish tells the story that Wilder forgot – what happens when little girls became young women.

Perhaps it is the fact that decades separated these women and the cultural allowances just weren’t the same when Wilder sat down to write out her stories.  But in the back of my mind, as I was becoming a young woman myself, I secretly wondered what exactly they did in those days.

Now, I know. Safety pins, old blanket scraps, and a bucket of water by the dresser… until she could save up her pennies to buy Kotex.
(I got curious after I typed this post as to whether I was wrong and Wilder did mention her “coming of age” somewhere in her journals or books.  I found this comment: “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s 1890s diary of the move from Dakota Territory to Missouri hints only: ‘I am not feeling very well and cannot go [river-bathing]’. Her daughter (technically also a Victorian, although quite forward-thinking as early 20th century standards went) deleted even that from the published version of the diary.”)

Why a family vacation is not a sabbatical

This past week I was able to spend 8 glorious days at Lake Okoboji in a teeny tiny little house with my in-laws. 9 people shared the two bedrooms, one bathroom, and living space. We got some sun, we played in the water, we laughed and ate a ton of food.  And by the time we got back home, I was absolutely exhausted.

I had taken two books with me for the trip – a novel that I’ve been working on called Sophie’s World (think Alice in Wonderland meets a history textbook on philosophy) and a book that a congregation member gave me called Tattoos on the Heart. Both seemed like good reads for a quiet morning or afternoon by the lakeside.

But you see, when you are vacationing with 9 (and at times 11) other people – there aren’t quiet moments.  There isn’t private space.  You bounce from preparing breakfast to eating to cleaning to packing lunch to the water and by the time you get back, it’s time to make food and eat and clean again.  And then you’re tired. And then you can’t sleep because there are 9 people in the house and some of them snore and one of them is a baby who needs to cry and eat in the middle of the night and some of the people get up really early to make coffee and others like to stay up later. It was a beautiful chaotic mess and I enjoyed almost every minute of it… but it was not restful.

As a pastor and as someone who likes to be around family, it is very hard to take some time away for me.  It is hard to find value in using my vacation time on myself.  I save it for holidays and weddings and celebrations and family get-aways.  And I really, desperately, need to take some time away for myself. My husband could probably come, too =)  But only if he lets me get up and read in the mornings.  Perhaps a good suggestion would be to take one of the four weeks that we are allowed each year for vacation and use it solely as spiritual retreat and renewal.  Just me in a cabin with some books and good restaurant nearby. Time to walk in nature and sleep in the sun and read and write and dream a little.

Some time set apart – some holy time.

I had a wonderful time on my family vacation – but I realize now that I’m back that I probably had far too many expectations that it would be restful or rejuvenating.  It was nice to have a break from the day to day business of the church and to get away… but my spirit is still struggling to catch up with the whirlwind.

beginning again

Spring is here in full force and that makes me want to be outside… but it also reminds me that winter has been a time of sloth.

I got up this morning and worked out with wii fit. I did yoga and strength exercises and then finished with a little bit of cardio. I know it’s not much – but if I do a little everyday, that will add up to a whole lot more than I’m currently doing.

I’m also trying to get up at 7:30 every morning. I’m going to use my mornings off to garden, spend time reading on the porch, and getting chores around the house done. I’ve just realized that when I get home from church I don’t want to do ANY of those things and so they just don’t get done. If I stick with that schedule, I’ll have three mornings a week to myself.

Numbers.

This Wednesday morning, like almost every Wednesday morning, I headed over to the local cafe for breakfast with other area pastors. Normally it is me and the LCMS pastor and the DCE from his church and it’s quite an odd combination. But we get along really well and have some fantastic conversations.

Occasionally we are joined by one or another pastor from town… this morning it was the Presbyterian pastor. If the ELCA Lutheran pastor comes, then I’m not the only female, but I haven’t seen her for a while.

I’m pretty routine about what I order. A cup of earl grey tea and a pancake. Sometimes a side of bacon. It depends on how much I want to clog my arteries that particular morning.

After breakfast with the lectionary group, I head back to church to study the bible with a small group of parishoners. They like to read through whole books at a time, so when I arrived last January, they were in the middle of Isaiah. They got through the prophets and decided to start at the beginning, with Genesis. We started Numbers today and I am always amazed at the repetition of so many passages in the bible. So and So’s family number forty thousand two hundred and fifty men, over the age of twenty, who were able to serve the lord. So and so’s family numbered…. you get the picture. We skipped some of the repetition this morning =)

It is so hard to imagine that the numbers describe in Numbers are possible. That over a million people would have been moving nomadically together through the wilderness. As we listened to each other describe each clan’s task in the movement and protection of the tabernacle, I got to thinking about a book I read recently, Water for Elephants. It describes the journey of a young man who joins a circus train, and I got to thinking about how the whole circus comes to town and how the big tent and everything gets unloaded and put up seemingly in a moment. And when the circus is ready to move, everything gets torn down again in the blink of an eye. It seems like as close of a paralell as anything else I can imagine for what it must have been like to travel with the tabernacle of God.

I spent the rest of my day at work finishing my candidacy continuance interview forms. In our church, you are commissioned first and then must be continued for the next two years, and then finally you can apply for ordination (complete with about 50 pages of papers and lessons and sermons). I’m grateful in the busyness of this year that I didn’t have to write all of those papers. But even getting the short questions I had to answer done seemed like a chore. So many copies to be made, so many envelopes to be addressed. I’m looking forward to my conversation with my interview team in March. There are more people on my team now, I think only two of them are the same as my previous two teams, so it’s exciting to talk with them about my ministry and where I can grow and what resources they might have for me.

bookworm? or not?

A post I recently read claims that the average American adult has read only six of the top 100 books ever written. I’m not sure who put this list together, or what (if any) significance there is in the numbering, but I thought this would be fun. Try your hand at the list.

The Rules:
1) Look at the list and put one * by those you have read.
2) Put a % by those you intend to read.
3) Put two ** by the books you LOVE.
4) Put # by the books you HATE.
5) (NEW RULE) Put ! by ones that you have seen in movie form
6) Post. (Don’t forget to tag me.)

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen !
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien **
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte *
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling ! (* for some of them)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee%
6 The Bible **
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 1984 – George Orwell*
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens*
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott*
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller*
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (* many but not all, and !)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien**
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger *
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger %
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot %
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell % !
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald*
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy %
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams%
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky %
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck %
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll %
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame %
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy %
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens %
33 Chronicles of Narnia- CS Lewis (! for the PBS versions – have read the first two)
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis**
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini %
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell*
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown**
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez %
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery **
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood %
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding*
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan %
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel **
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens*
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley**
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon **
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez %
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck *
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac **
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding%!
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville *
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath *
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens*!
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker!
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White *!
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare **
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl **
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo **

I’ve actually read 27 of them… but I am a bit ashamed of my lack of reading. I need to set aside time to read each week I’ve decided.

FF: summer books

1) Do you think of summer as a particularly good season for reading? Why or why not?

In some ways, I think curled up with a cup of hot cocoa or tea by a fireplace is a better time to read a book. But I also do like to read outside… when I have the time. Time is the hard thing about summer reading – there is always something else to do

2) Have you ever fallen asleep reading on the beach?

Yes! And got a little sunburnt because of it!!!

3) Can you recall a favorite childhood book read in the summertime?

I read a whole bunch of books in the Trixie Belden series one summer. They were some of my mom’s favorites and then became my own

4) Do you have a favorite genre for light or relaxing reading?

I don’t yet. I haven’t really been in the habit of reading for pleasure for a while. I am desperate to get back into the swing of it. When I was young, I would read book after book after book. Some of my favorite novels today are ones about the simple complexities of life: Gilead, The Cloister Life, I like reading about how other people are getting through the normal crap we deal with in our lives.

5) What is the next book on your reading list?

Right now I’ve started one called “A Blade of Grass.” But I haven’t gotten very far into it and its already overdue…. see, I’m having a hard time getting into this reading thing.