Much To Be Thankful For

For the first Thanksgiving ever, I didn't get to spend the day with family. While I missed them and our style of cooking very much, I had a very meaningful day!  Working at Open Arms, I have learned so much about the power of food and good nutrition, so it isn't surprising that Thanksgiving is one of our busiest times of the year in terms of meal deliveries. This year, I helped coordinate all of the Thanksgiving deliveries.  Clients either received a frozen free-range, organic turkey with all of the trimmings to cook their own Thanksgiving feast, or a prepared meal that we delivered on Thanksgiving Day (that arrived in beautifully painted bags!) 

In the 10 days leading up to Thanksgiving, we delivered something along the order of 25,000 meals!  Thanks Mom and Dad for sponsoring turkeys for 10 families here.  Thanksgiving Day, we all worked at Open Arms, coordinating the deliveries and finishing with a morning feast with all the staff and volunteers. It was such a special way to start Thanksgiving morning, and great to finish the week with a feast after running around like crazy for the two weeks leading up to it!

 The Open Arms Thanksgiving morning festivities!

 My co-worker Ellen and I after our successful Thanksgiving meal delivery coordination!

In the afternoon, Eric and I went to Rebecca's parents house in St. Paul, where we shared in a wonderful Thanksgiving feast with her family.  We had a great feast, and I got to contribute our famous green jello with sprite and applesauce family treat.  When we got home that night, I skyped my family over at Christy and Carl's house, which made me miss them more! But I'm so glad that they had such a good Thanksgiving too.

One thing I love about my LVC experience is that I am invited along to so many wonderful things.  Not being too attached to any one group, I accept as many offers as I can!  So Friday through Monday of Thanksgiving weekend, I was invited to join my LVC landlords and their 2 little boys up to the Lutsen ski resort on the North Shore of Lake Superior for a weekend of skiing!  I babysat the boys Linden (age 5) and Soren (age 7). We had such a blast playing board games, reading books, knitting, swimming, skiing and exploring the North Shore.  I will always be very grateful for these new experiences with people who want to share them with me! It was fun to tag along with another family for a few days. =]

 On our way home, we drove through Gooseberry Falls which is beginning to freeze over, so icicles covered the whole surface of the waterfall.  It was beautiful! A vibrant sunset on the way home and lots of car games brought the weekend to a great close.

As the end of November approached, I realized that I have so very much to be thankful for this year.  After graduating college, a lot of unknowns were ahead...who would have known that life could be so great after leaving a place like PLU?!

A few things I am thankful for after graduating college:

1. I celebrated my graduation with all of my family in the area.

 2. 6 days later, I flew to Europe to travel for 3 weeks with one of my very best friends: Annika Odegard--sharing in the trip of a lifetime!

3. I then spent a week at Flathead Lutheran Bible camp with another group of my favorite friends.

4. Jenna and Andrew got married, and I got to be one of the lucky ones in the wedding party! Followed by the best reunion of my PLU friends.

5. Mom, Courtney and I got to take a trip to Chicago and Virginia to see our old home and friends.

6. Dad and I roadtripped out to Minnesota with a stop through Yellowstone, and then he helped me move into my new home!

7.  I ended up with the best LVC placement--Open Arms--in the best new city--Minneapolis--with such wonderful new people!

 

Most of all this Thanksgiving week, I am thankful for my family!! Miss you all.

Breathe

Do you ever just think about the beauty of breathing? How it is the one thing in our life that can be both voluntary and involuntary?  How beginning to notice our breaths can slow us down and fill us with an energy and calmness that nothing else can?  How we can go days without noticing that we are indeed breathing as we are lost in our business?  Tonight, my roommates and I had our monthly spirituality night and watched this short video about breathing: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4657662595934098105.

If you have a few extra minutes, I highly suggest that you watch this too.  I would love to hear what it makes you think about.

I see it as a beautiful reminder that our breath, the very thing that makes us human, is the spirit of God flowing through our bodies.  This breath carries the oxygen that delivers energy to each cell to keep us alive.  I often think of our creation and what it means to be a human created in God’s image. As a scientist, I often think of humans as animals in one big animal kingdom—seeing the patterns between behaviors of nearly every creature that walks on this earth.  So what makes humans unique?  We are in reality just a bundle of atoms—quite literally dust from the earth.  But as Adam was created, God spoke the breath of life into him; man was created in the image of God, the very spirit of God pulsing through every vein.  The moment that we are born, we take our first breath.  We inhabit a temporary physical body that will enable us to live fully on this planet of ours.  Our breath, the Spirit, is what connects every human being together—as one in God.  And as we die, that bundle of atoms falls away as dust to the earth, and the spirit that moved through us, giving us life is now one with God again.  I find it really empowering to slow down and pay attention to my breathing.  To feel that breath, the very thing that gives me life, uniting me with all creation and with the Creator.

Have you noticed your breathing today?

Marebs and Carebs!

October was a such a great month.  To make it even better, Mary one of my dearest friends and housemates from PLU flew out to visit me for 5 days! What a wonderful way to bring October to a close.  Mary arrived downtown so I picked her up and took her over to the evening farmers market where a few of my LVC friends and their band "With or Without Dan" were the musical entertainment.  It was freezing, but a good time!

Wednesday through Friday, Mary came to work with me at Open Arms.  I love working for an organization that has a need for volunteers--anytime I have a visitor, I get to bring them along with me to work! The last month of work has been excellent. I am feeling more and more confident in my specific job role and appreciating the work that Open Arms does more and more.  My job is a perfect blend of my creative, organizational and people skills: I get to make birthday cards for all of our clients for their birthdays, I help organize the packout procedure for meal deliveries each morning and spend all day interacting with fabulous staff, volunteers and clients.  I loved getting to share Open Arms with Mary too-- she helped pack out food, deliver meals and make turkey hands for the wall! 

After work, we got to explore Minneapolis a bit too.  Biking of course, as Mary is the one who got me into biking at PLU this spring! 

 

Wednesday night my friend Pieter took Mary and I out to Minnetonka to pick apples at a U-Pick orchard.  For $5 a peck, we picked almost 38 pounds of apples which we plan to use for canning in the next couple of weeks. We enjoyed hot cider, and $3 hamburgers for dinner--it was such a fun evening!

 

Friday night, I left work a little early so I could take Mary out to Lake Calhoun and Lake of the Isles for an afternoon bike ride.  We had about 2 hours, which was the perfect amount of time, except we had a little "incident" as I like to call it!  Mary's bike was still at the Lightrail station about 10 blocks away, so we thought it would be a good idea for her to run down there to get the bike, and I would bike over to meet her so we could leave from there.  This may have worked, except Mary didn't have her phone, I had the only house key and the key to her bike lock.  For the next 45 minutes, we both rode/ran around the neighborhood to try to find each other, probably just missing each other.

I ended up walking both bikes home, and when I finally saw Mary at the end of the block we hugged and laughed it out for the next 10 minutes.  Let's just say, we never made it out to the lakes, but instead went over to Powderhorn Park by my house.  We took pictures in this canoe on land and met a very kind man who taught with a guy named Mark Gravrock that Mary and I knew from staff training at Flathead Lutheran Bible Camp. We shared a nice small-Lutheran-world connection.

  

Shortly afterwards, Eric and Hannah, other friends of ours from FLBC came to pick us up and we drove down to Decorah, Iowa for a weekend at Luther College! I have been excited to see Luther College for a long time, as many friends of mine are proud Norse.  That night, we had a reunion of about 16 camp friends in the hallway of one of the dorms--so much fun! It was fun to be at a college again, and Mary and I really enjoyed staying in one of the dorms that night--it brought back memories from our Tinglestad days a few years ago!

 

The next morning we all met at Eric's house for breakfast and Balto gave us each a Luther shirt from his collection so we would be in true Luther style for the cross country Conference meet! 

 

We enjoyed cheering on the 8 boys that we knew who were racing.  I had never been to a running event before, and had so much fun!! It was a very exciting morning and Luther did great.

 

That afternoon, a group of us girls explored the downtown and had a nice lunch at the Angry Monkey (or another ridiculous restaurant name along those lines) and had tea at a cute little coffee shop.  It was so nice to connect with such great camp people outside of Montana!  The whole weekend was great.

 

I ended up leaving on Saturday afternoon to come back for our LVC halloween party with all the other Twin Cities volunteers.  Eric decorated our house in cobwebs and helped make all the party food since us girls were out and about all day Saturday-it was great!  For the past couple weeks, we have been brainstorming house costume ideas, and eventually settled on using our house name: Wellstone.  We decided to be a variety of stones. I was Wilma Flinstone, Rebecca was a Rosetta Stone language learning book, Eric was Rolling Stones magazine and Emily was just a stoner.  It came together so well!

 

All in all, I had such a wonderful week with my dear Marebis!  Mary is a friend who's goofyness is compatible with mine and can talk about any and everything. We got caught up on months worth of life events, ate good food, explored my new city, and got in hours of laughter.  So thankful for her friendship!!

Retreat

        To retreat is a wonderful thing.  I have found myself so busy over the past few weeks, filling up every evening with cooking new recipes, spending a few hours crafting, skyping with dear friends back home, writing letters and spending time with friends I have connected with here in the Cities.  The weekend of October 20-24th was a much anticipated LVC retreat, in which all 19 of the Twin Cities volunteers drove down to Webster City, Iowa to meet up with the Omaha volunteers for a retreat and continued training.  I think we were all anxious about it a bit, hoping that it wouldn't be a repeat of our very emotionally and intellectually intense orientation week in August!  Instead, we were all pleasantly surprised--we really did spend time in retreat mode.

     We stayed at a corn farm, which seemed fitting for our middle-of-nowhere location in Iowa.  Our time was spent cooking meals for each other, reading, walking around outside enjoying the sunshine, meeting other volunteers and comparing experiences in LVC, singing music in the common room, and attending a few different seminars.  We continued with our anti-racism training, this time doing a closer analysis on our placement organizations--better understanding institutionalized racism.  I learned a lot, and felt much more empowered by the end of the session with Pastor Mike.  We also each took an Enneagram personality test (many of you know how much I enjoy personality tests!!) and spent quite a bit of time with our housemates learning about each others personalities and learning how to better understand one another.  I really think people should do this in every living situation. It is incredible how the community dynamic changes when you take the time to really understand every level of a person!  I feel like I became even more connected to my housemates--hours of conversation, new inside jokes and a weekend of laughter really strengthened our bond as the "Wellstoners."  Not only that, I got to connect more with all of the other volunteers in the Cities and spend time with a few wonderful people from Omaha.  It seems like everywhere I go, I keep meeting incredible people--it makes me confident that no matter where I end up living in life, I will be blessed by new relationships. 

      We also got to present our house covenant to the group.  Every house prepared a creative version of the covenant that represents the written document of what we want our community to commit to in this year together.  This is a painting that my housemates and I made.  Rebecca and Emily helped come up with the idea and the words behind it, Eric sketched the tree and I did the watercolor painting.  It really was a great community effort!  As it hangs on our wall, it is a great reminder to the community that we are trying to foster over the next several months.  We are holding each other accountable to staying committed to a more simple and sustainable lifestyle--putting more energy into relationships than on technology, learning new skills (canning, knitting, sewing, cooking everything by scratch, gardening, composting, biking everywhere, etc) and being very intentional about our consumption habits.  We are committing to staying involved in issues of social justice, remembering that inequality for one is inequality for all.  We are committing to spirituality, supporting one another in growth, and meeting each other where we are at.  We are committing to creating a supportive, fun and deep community that challenges every member to live well.  I have enjoyed taking the time to reflect on such things, as these moments, conversations, and habits are what make my time here so rich and meaningful!

The North Shore

When Mom visited me several weeks ago, we met up with our Idaho friends, the Wards.  Rachel Ward was one of my best friends in Pre-K at Hope Lutheran back in Idaho Falls.  They moved to Minnesota when we were 6 years old, and I hadn't seen her since!

 

Rachel and I in kindergarten.

Rachel and I after college!

Upon moving to Minneapolis, I connected with her again on facebook and after visiting with her parents in September, they invited me to join them on a weekend up North!  So this past weekend, I took a road trip with Scott and Becky to visit Rachel in Duluth, Minnesota, where she is now a grad-student.  We rented a cabin on the North Shore of Lake Superior and spent some quality time catching up on the last 16 years of our lives!  It is amazing that we have so much in common after all these years: biology majors, studied abroad in Rwanda/Uganda, learned Norwegian, did marching band in high school...I love it!

 
Over the weekend, we drove along the shore and spent the day at several state parks, and walked around lots of waterfalls. It was beautiful!  We had bright sunshine and blue skies, but you can definitely tell that we are entering fall as it was really windy and cold.  I think we missed the peak day for fall colors by about a week, but the colors of the leaves were still beautiful on the ground, that is for sure!  It felt almost as if we were at the ocean.  Sandy beaches and water that touches the horizon--who would guess that we are in the middle of the US? 

 

Jon (Rachel's boyfriend), Rachel, me, Scott and Becky

  

Split Rock lighthouse

 

We also enjoyed time back at the cabin.  Highlights include: an hour session in the sauna next door (my first sauna experience!), playing games until 1 in the morning both nights--Yatzee and Rummikub, both played more intensely than I have played in a very long time...but we had such a blast!  And trying mead for the first time--why hasn't anyone introduced me to honey-wine before?!  

I am enjoying building my Minnesota connections, and re-connecting with people from my past.  This weekend was a perfect retreat to spend some time outside of the city, while seeing a new part of Minnesota and spending time with old friends!