further snapshots of community

watching the basketball game while dan and dan are hitting each other in the butt and sara and i are shielding our eyes. having flashbacks to high school because we can't figure out what to do with our evening.

saturday afternoon

slept in today. continuing to organize, organize, and organize - everything from old papers, to bills, to various house things, to the various articles cluttering my room. i am an organizing machine. i'll have to take a nap soon.

we've had several different people stay in the house this month. the bywaters family from virginia (a rowdy bunch, let me tell you), 2 recently graduated-from-college girls from toronto who are considering regent, and a middle-aged couple from boise idaho who are also thinking of attending regent. also some dear friends who just graduated from regent last month came back to visit, which necessitated the barbecue celebration/reunion. tonight, and an old college friend and her husband are also stopping through on the way up to whistler. phew. it's been a full house - seems like we ought to put a revolving door in.

but it's all good. it's great to have people over, makes the house feel more lived in, and welcoming. which was what got me started thinking the other night. i think the word "house" refers mainly to the actual physical structure of the place in which i live. in the house there's the living room, several bedrooms, a bathroom a kitchen and a basement. i sleep there. i make food there. we watch tv. i will live in many different houses in my lifetime. when i first moved in here, and the place was mostly empty, save for some hand-me-down furnishings from friends, the place was just a place, a house.

after a month, after hosting people, after laughing and talking with friends on the deck or in the living room, after finding a free couch and rocking chair on craigslist (and getting a free tv in the deal, also), after discovering what the various mysterious light switches activate (and there are many of those), i am more willing to call this place home. discovering what kind of atmosphere we can create here for friends, for ourselves, how we interact with each other ... this is what goes in to making a house a home, and each home i live in during my life will be unique. i am growing roots here, as i have been for the past two years at regent in vancouver, and will continue to do so until i leave (in a year - yikes!)

i stumbled over an old journal entry the other night, in which i am considering what kind of home i would like to have. it was back in january before i knew i was going to live in a community house/home. funnily enough, the physical characteristics i considered - like a deck, bbq, fireplace (gas, no less) are here. and the intangible things - like welcoming atmosphere, laughter, good cooking smells, nights of good conversations with friends... those are here too. good stuff.

chilling out, maxin', relaxin'

we've broken in the new (to our house, anyway) grill tonight with our first house party. good times.
wendy, one of our prospective student visitors, said she felt welcomed into our home and comfortable and that she enjoyed being there with her husband (and other things that i can't remember right now because i'm tired, but i know that i agreed with her). what she described is pretty much what my hopes for our community home, so i was happy to hear her say these things.

home/house ... words that are used interchangeable but i think carry subtle but powerful nuances. more on this later

home sweet home

the last few weeks have been spent pouring a lot of coffee, finishing up coaching crew, checking craigslist obsessively for free stuff, hitting up thrift stores, browsing at garage sales, and getting hand-me-down things from friends. our house is starting to seem more like a home, and that makes me happy. life has settled into a more manageable rhythm.

so i've been puttering around doing lots of little things. it's been hard for me to sit still long enough for contemplation and i sorely need to. hopefully i can set aside some time before i start up with summer school.

at church yesterday, the sermon was about persecution - that it is something we all face as christians in one form or another, whether it be imprisonment or violence, or apathy. it is something good to remember. some bible verses were offered as pointers in how to deal with persecution, "do not be discouraged" and others along the same vein. and i was annoyed. because what if i am discouraged? does that make me a bad christian? as our lives go through the undulating highs and lows that is the human experience, there are going to be times when we are discouraged frustrated and cranky, or just outright angry. what then? how do these verses speak to us in the midst of that? as we undergo persecution, do we recognize just how hard it is to follow christ? or are we just supposed to put on our christian happy faces and pretend everything is okay?
all that to say, i'm not on the verge of giving up my faith or something like that, but i think i'm just continuing to discover and appreciate that life is much more nuanced and complex than we take the time to notice. and then sometimes life is breathtakingly simple. i don't know. just some haphazard thoughts...