Did anyone know that writing stuff on the internet is technically publishing and therefore public?
I had a very sheepish email exchange today with Megan from SortaCruchy who apparently checks her inbound links and didn't appreciate me snarking all over her kitchen makeover. Which, cough cough, is totally fair. My comments were pretty bitchy. Usually on this blog Dan and I try to avoid hurting people's feelings by insulting rich people (or parents, or Americans) in general, thus heaping approbation equally on societal problems as well as on our stage-three selves. When I do point out a blog in particular, like I did with SortaCrunchy, I figure my tiny opinion wouldn't make a blip on the radar of any professional blogger. Like I've said before, we have a very small audience, about 100 readers, mostly folks who know us personally and have stopped listening to anything we have to say long long ago.
I told Megan upon receiving her thoughtful email that I, like her, am trying to work out God's calling for me and my family amidst a world that's profoundly broken. While we may appreciate different aesthetics in home decoration, we both are trying to do the same thing: live faithfully with hearts that are broken for the wider world, taking tiny actions that we hope and pray will make some kind of a difference.
When I found myself so frustrated earlier in the week, I was thinking of Jackie Pullinger who writes in her book Chasing the Dragon about some of the distractions that kept her side-tracked at the start of her missionary work in Hong Kong. Her first year there she fell in with a group of other missionaries from Britain and spent one frustrating summer agonizing over how much swim costume was too little to preserve her modesty at the beach. It's not that God didn't care about her modesty, it's just that he had bigger issues for her to attend to, like the raging drug problems in Hong Kong's walled city. And this is what I, admittedly poorly, was trying to convey in my blog post about the war on stuff: that me and everyone, all of us American Christians (but especially me) are so distracted by what books I should read and how much tv I shouldn't watch that I'm doing a shitty job of loving the people that God put right in front of my face and asked me to love, the people just around the corner who I could love without stretching myself very much, and the people elsewhere in the world who I could probably love too if I gave Jesus one friggin un-scheduled un-bounded second of my time.
I have always appreciated SortaCrunchy for a being an earnest and thoughtful commentary on mothering with faith in America. Which is why, despite getting all worked up over the stuff issue earlier in the week, I didn't remove Megan's blog from my RSS. After all, it got Dan and me started on a useful conversation about what we have and what we value in our lives, and also it's nice to have other mothers to read about, and all the same I like making fun of things when the mood strikes because I am a rather insecure petty and broken person.
On a personal note, I have been so sick today with nausea, and I'm terribly fearful that I may be so sick every day forever, which is to say for the rest of this pregnancy, which is to say forever. Please send lovely warm wishes in my direction, I need them.