Crafting is probably the one area in my life where I have learned any semblance of patience, and also where I seem to glean some of the most profound spiritual truths. This weekend I buckled down and went to town on the felted musk-oxen slippers I started, oh, two months ago.  When I saw the slippers, they were so cute that I had to make them.  Never mind that I had never made footwear or felted anything before...must...have...musk oxen!


I borrowed the appropriate size circular and double-point needles from my school's resident knitting guru, and went to work on the slippers.  I'm pretty good with reading patterns by now, but it was still intimidating to roll a cuff and open the heel.  I soldiered on, however, and finished the slippers a few weeks ago.  As you can see, they were huge and awkward when I took them off the needles...

You can't tell from the picture, but these are about 14" long.

Being an ecomaniac, I decided that I wanted to felt the slippers and other pieces by hand because I didn't feel like running a whole washload of water for just a few little pieces.  From my research, I knew that felted pieces were supposed to shrink and the individual stitches would disappear in the process, but I had no idea how long it would take.  I did the off-white piece first, since it was just a rectangle, about 30" by 7" to start with and it was supposed to get down to 20"x5.5".  According to the website I consulted, heat and agitation are what cause the wool fibers to felt, so I filled a washbasin with hot water and a little bit of soap and proceeded to do my best imitation of a washing machine with my hands.

After losing most of the feeling and outer epidermis of my hands for the rectangle, I tried using other implements for the slippers but ended up using my hands at the end anyway.  Thank goodness for Mary Kay Satin Hands treatment!

About half an hour in, I started to feel despair creep into my heart.  The website had been kind enough to mention that after the first one or two 5-minute intervals, the piece might actually look bigger, so that had not worried me at all.  But after thirty minutes of making "twinkle twinkle little star" motions in the hot water, all I had to show for it was a wet scarf.  The stitches were still clearly visible and the piece was definitely the same size as when I started, if not larger.  Was this going to work or not?

I know it's much easier to felt things in the washer, but I'm almost glad I did it by hand the first time because I literally got to feel the fabric forming.  At about forty minutes, I finally noticed a change.  The fabric stiffened and felt heavy in my hands, and the stitches melted into each other. That 40-45 minute interval must have been the inflection point because it went quite a bit faster after that.  The last fifteen minutes were mostly spent shrinking the piece to the right size, since it already looked quite felted.  It took about an hour for both the rectangle and the slippers to felt to the appropriate size.

Here they are felted and now 10.5" long...still too big for me, but supposed to be size 10 women's.

The spiritual implications were readily apparent.  (You know I'm coming into a good place when the metaphor machine starts running again.)  Unfelted pieces are loose and soft and shapeless, and they can be unraveled if you just cut the right strand.  After felting, however, you have one solid piece of fabric that can hold its own shape and be cut into useful shapes without fraying to bits.  How is felt made?  Heat and agitation, as I said before, which pretty much describes how I've felt for the last year and a half.

And the process of felting unfolds stepwise rather than in a steady slow burn.  I think of boiling sugar for candy, or supersaturating a solution, or an acid-base titration, or the punctuated equilibrium of evolution.  It looks like nothing is happening for the longest time, but once things get moving--hard crack! precipitate! the awful magenta bloodstain of phenolphthalein! speciation!  I wonder if my life isn't like that too, periods of frustration, suffering, loss, stagnation, through I am nonetheless constantly moving to the place where things can change very quickly and very profoundly.  I was at that place two years ago, and it was glorious.  Might I be approaching another such peak...or is it the bottom of the valley?

I seem to have developed the unfortunate habit of only posting once a month. (Actually, it's just a manifestation of an existing habit of withdrawing from the world when I'm having a hard time.) I am recovering from a not insignificant meltdown precipitated by my long-standing and profound fear of...joy.

Just when I was closer than ever to the teacher and missionary God has called me to be, I had an involuntary Jonah reflex, but instead of hating the people I'm supposed to minister to, I turned on myself as a way of subconsciously running from God. It's very strange because it's not like I even wanted to, and in fact I would be having a perfectly good day, then suddenly I am warring against my own body with unprecedented violence. I finally scared myself straight last week, but I'm afraid that will only last so long...

I'm sad because I still don't trust God enough to give me good things in abundance. I'm sad that I am still, at some level, tensed up waiting for the next shoe to drop. I'm sad that even though I've forgiven the person for leaving, I haven't quite forgiven God for letting him go, and that fear of loss still clouds my vision. And I hate that I've given the enemy this weapon to use against me when I'm so close to being free.

"Sometimes I feel it's all just too big to be true
I sabotage myself for fear of what my bigness could do"
-Alanis Morissette, "Fear of Bliss"

But I do have hope that this will pass. I don't know how or when, but I do know that God doesn't want this for me, and maybe I can come to want better for myself.

[edit] I also realized that even though I don't trust God nearly as well as I'd like to, I do trust Him enough so that my doubt doesn't scare me quite so much as it used to. It's comforting to think that, despite it all, I am still on my way to keeping God in His proper place and me in mine. [/edit]

"The land enjoyed its sabbath rests; all the time of its desolation it rested, until the seventy years were completed in fulfillment of the word of the LORD spoken by Jeremiah." -2 Chronicles 36:21

Forgive the hyperbole, but it has been a year of desolation. I left on the Taiwan mission trip on this day last year, which itself was a year after I had the rug pulled out from under me by someone I thought I knew and trusted. The mission trip was difficult yet gratifying, but it turned out to be the high point from which I sank steadily downward for about eight months. The first four months after I came back from Taiwan were marked by a vague but growing sense of discomfort; for all my efforts to seek God, I seemed to be sliding back into that dreadful numbness I knew at the end of my freshman year.

I came up for air at the winter youth retreat, then was dragged to the depths with a vengeance. My body sort of fell apart after four years of anorexia; inexplicably, I gained about ten pounds in about two months' time, to which I responded by active purging in many forms, which only made things worse, of course. (Ironically, my outer life couldn't have looked better: I made a 4.0 that quarter and was selected for a scholarship interview and a national quiz show.) It was then that I was once again plagued by the gnawing fear that things were never going to get better from that point. I saw a viral video of a child's post-operative behavior under the influence of laughing gas, and he mumbles groggily, "I feel funny. Why is this happening to me? Is this going to be forever???" And that's how I felt all the time. (I should note that throughout this entire period I was torn between maintaining and exorcising a past relationship, which I now realize was a significant drain on my emotional resources.)

Things turned when I started going to a Christian support group for women with eating disorders. Meeting others who knew exactly what I was talking about because they had been there...and beaten it...brought me to a turning point and I declared my first victory over my disorder. In keeping with the spring season, my life bloomed again, and I found myself wishing that things could, indeed, be like they were then forever. Of course, all things must come to an end, but this end did not mean a return to sorrow but a transition to something new, which I am in the midst of right now.

A passage from Elisabeth Elliott's devotion for today:

There are dry, fruitless, lonely places in each of our lives, where we seem to travel alone, sometimes feeling as though we must surely have lost the way. What am I doing here? How did this happen? Lord, get me out of this!
He does not get us out. Not when we ask for it, at any rate, because it was He all along who brought us to this place. He has been here before--it is no wilderness to Him, and He walks with us. There are things to be seen and learned in these apparent wastelands which cannot be seen and learned in the "city"--in places of comfort, convenience, and company.

I usually characterize the summer after my freshman year the worst period of my life. When I compare this past year with that summer, I think that the circumstances may indeed have been worse this year, but the difference is that this time I did not hide from God as I did then. I cried out for Him, and He answered with silence only to let me cry out more. When I strove to fix things myself, He put up walls to absorb the brunt of my futility so He could, finally, carry my powerless self. (Quite literally, He hit me with a car to break my compulsion to exercise!) In the past I would have resented this way of teaching, and many times I still grow terribly discouraged. But I often take encouragement from the book of Hosea:

"Therefore I am now going to allure her;
I will lead her into the desert
and speak tenderly to her.
There I will give her back her vineyards,
and will make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.
There she will sing as in the days of her youth,
as in the day she came up out of Egypt.
"In that day," declares the LORD,
"you will call me 'my husband';
you will no longer call me 'my master.'

Hosea 2:14-16

Life is a cycle of desolation, rest, and restoration, and each enhances the experience of the other. I don't pretend to remember this all the time, but I try. Now the question is, Am I resting now or being restored?

"It's like He sees who you could be, and that’s what he remembers."

These words of wisdom came from a dear friend, and were brought to life for me by another friend that I've known since high school. We were catching up last night and I was telling her about how education is such a good fit for me because it combines my passions for people and for learning. I told her how I had never really paid attention to people like I do now, and how my master's program is almost like being in high school again, only this time I planned to be more socially successful. She looked at me and said, "That's funny, because I sort of always saw you that way. Everybody loved you!"

This struck me as mildly ridiculous. I never felt fully accepted by my peers when I was growing up, except for my friends, and even those relationships were not nearly as deep as the ones I have cultivated in colleges (and some of these are expansions of friendships I had in high school). Now I am very secure in my friends' love for me, but I wonder if maybe that was there all along and I just couldn't see it.

Aren't our friends sometimes better at seeing us than we ourselves are? I could have said something very similar for her. She was an avowed atheist throughout high school, but I saw the way she passionately pursued knowledge and thought, "Man, she would make such a great Christian!" And now God's gotten a hold of her and I cannot wait to see what amazing things He will do through her life. I'm not claiming to be any sort of clairvoyant about people; all knowledge is God's knowledge and sometimes He imparts what He knows about us to other people to pass on to us.

The same pattern happened during the "crucible" period of my recovery from eating disorder. Each week while I was attending my support group, I asked for God to show me something new about myself to replace the twisted images and thoughts. And He did, only they turned out to be all things that I already knew but had forgotten. A physical representation of that process was reintroducing foods like carbs and dairy...I'd tasted them all before but made myself give them up along the way. God was showing me how He saw me and how others saw me, and my weight and physical appearance were actually negligible parts of the person they saw. I still struggle with body image and probably always will, but it's been a joy learning to see myself the way others, most importantly God, see me.

1 Corinthians 13:12
For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

I Can See Clearly Now
Johnny Nash

I can see clearly now, the rain is gone,
I can see all obstacles in my way
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind
It’s gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright)
Sun-Shiny day.

I think I can make it now, the pain is gone
All of the bad feelings have disappeared
Here is the rainbow I’ve been prayin' for
It’s gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright)
Sun-Shiny day.

Look all around, there’s nothin' but blue skies
Look straight ahead, nothin' but blue skies

I can see clearly now, the rain is gone,
I can see all obstacles in my way
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind
It’s gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright)
Sun-Shiny day.

P.S. I think I'm going to get Lasik in September.

Psalm 3

O LORD, how many are my foes! How many rise up against me!
Many are saying of me, "God will not deliver him."
But you are a shield around me, O LORD;
you bestow glory on me and lift ^b]">up my head.
To the LORD I cry aloud, and he answers me from his holy hill.
I lie down and sleep;I wake again, because the LORD sustains me.
I will not fear the tens of thousands drawn up against me on every side.
Arise, O LORD! Deliver me, O my God! Strike all my enemies on the jaw; break the teeth of the wicked.
From the LORD comes deliverance. May your blessing be on your people.

It's hard for me to keep up posting on here since I write everything down in my journal but I have to decide what to share, and then make time to make it a little more coherent. About a week ago I was having some major body image issues again, and the temptation to purge became extremely strong. But as I prayed in desperation, I saw in my mind the face of a friend whom I had asked to pray for me the night before. The thought of him, and all the other people who love me, praying for me stopped me short of sinning against my body.

How great God is for protecting His own victories! He is not army that invades, vanquishes, and destroys; He stays and rebuilds the land and governs wisely. Before my recovery began, I knew that my eating disorder would hurt the people who cared about me, so I never told anyone just how bad it was. I figured they wouldn't understand, and I was right, but I was wrong to think they wouldn't care. A crucial part of recovery for me was the ability to talk about it, first to other women who had or were experiencing the same things, then to my spiritual sisters, then to my parents, and finally to the world at large. In this way I constructed a system of accountability, but not in an oppressive or coercive way. I was open with these people because I knew they loved and cared for me; in the same way, they could better love and care for me because I was open with my weaknesses. There were a lot of things that helped turn things around for me, which I will write about eventually, but this was one of the most important ones, the true knowledge that I was loved by God and people and that there was no need to hate myself.

Here's proof of how far I've come...I went downtown Sunday with some photography buff friends to model for them, and when I saw the shots, for the first time since I've been at this weight I actually thought, "Hey, I really like the way I look in these!" And that is such a huge breakthrough for me. Thanks, Paul and Shing, for making me look pretty, and thank you, God, for making me pretty.

I just love my ceramics class this quarter. I like to think that I'm not half bad at the wheel and I can't see why I was terrified of throwing while I was in high school. It's certainly an example of "Practice makes perfect," and I'm happy to report that I've basically mastered centering the clay, which of course, is the most important step.

I discovered that it helps to sit on a slightly higher stool because the extra inch of elevation helps me better see if my clay is wobbling. In the same way, it's much easier for God to center us because He is so much higher than we are.

It's also a lot easier to center soft clay, and I've discovered that I much prefer working with reclaimed clay. This is clay that's already been thrown before, but didn't quite make the cut. I break it into pieces, water it down if it's too bone-dry, spread it on a plaster board to dry a little, then throw, pummel, and wedge the heck out of it to get a soft, pliable clay. Some people don't like using reclaimed clay because they don't like wedging it to get the air bubbles out, so they just use the ready-made clay available for purchase. (Which I'm pretty sure is also reclaimed from the communal slop buckets, but it's been pugged and processed so it's bubble-free.) My problem with the prepared clay is that it's just too darn hard, and it takes a lot longer and a lot more water to center.

I think you can guess where I'm going with this. The analogy isn't perfect, because God didn't make any "mistakes" with me, but I have certainly had the old me broken, thrown, pummeled, and wedged in the past few months, and I've been reclaimed. And now I'm ready to be reformed. For the first time in a long time I am reconciled to my body and to God. The Spirit of God is near and I am the closest to whole I have probably ever been. I still have some air bubbles that need to be popped, and I know that things will not always be this smooth, but I have faith in the Potter to make good use of me (Rom. 9:21).

Ezekiel 11:19
I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh.