gianna soderstrom

Author: Gianna

  • he dug down

    he dug down

    When I was half-grown, my family got horses. I thought it would be cool. It turned out to be a lot of work. My dad roused our family one Saturday and told us it was time to fence in a pasture for our future horse. He had outlined the perimeter of it, he said. Now we had to fence it. We set out, loading our supplies onto the four-wheeler. One of us took the post-hole digger and started digging. Dad would measure, and tell us to dig deeper. Two of us came behind, one holding the post with thick work gloves while the other slammed a post-pounder down on the top of it, over and over. Behind them we came filling in the holes, snapping on the insulators, stringing the wire. It was a long day. When we finished we could scarcely even see the slim wire fence against the thick prairie grass. It was there, and effective, but practically invisible.

    I read the parable of the builders today, in Luke 6. Jesus says of the first builder that “he dug down” and laid a foundation. It didn’t even take having a horse to know that I hate digging, and here’s God, saying you have to keep digging if you don’t want your life to fall over.

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    “Do you really think these trees have been here for a thousand years?” Tiffany asked. Jon looked up. We all looked up. Standing there under the towering fragrant forest, we couldn’t doubt that they had seen a thousand years of sunrises, heard a thousand years of laughter. Their roots, I learned, grow up to 6 feet deep and nearly 100 feet out. The Redwoods are anchored for the centuries.

    I spent about a year, maybe even more, digging through my crippling insecurity, trying to find the root of it, to dig that out too. You’ve got to dig down into yourself, but dig down into God too. It was only ever after I started with Him and His words as a foundation that I was able to dig up the crap I’d been standing on.

    I’m trying to build this life-foundation strong, because I want to stand tall. Maybe it is hidden work, but even if nothing of the foundation shows, then at least the life-that-does-not-crumble will. Perhaps it will take hours at my kitchen table, reading and underlining and praying the scriptures. Maybe it will take years. Maybe it should take years. But perhaps if we stay where we are meant to be, if we dig down deep enough, then in a thousand years we will be as beautiful as this.

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  • holy Saturday

    holy Saturday

    Truth, truth. It is like a dye, staining every thought I have this weekend. I have scripture ringing in my ears – a lying tongue hates its victims; Proverbs 26. I repeat it to myself, thinking not just of telling lies but of softening truths. It is so easy to sidestep truth, to just assume somebody knows my beliefs and positions and that I don’t need to clarify them.

    I never want to present truth unlovingly. It’s the spoonful of sugar with the medicine. But you can’t be nourished on spoonfuls of sugar alone, and that’s the way our culture has leaned. Religion is suddenly acceptable if love is the only real application. But truth and love are inseparable. That is actually my clearest memory from my recent trip to California.

    Redwoods are beautiful, don’t misunderstand me! I loved them. But on the way back to the airport, Tiffany reminded me of the absolute vitality of truth. It’s unloving to not speak the truth she said firmly. She’s right. I’ve been mulling over those words since I reached the airport and quietly circled the terminal with hot coffee.

    I read a post about celebrating Easter as a millennial who’s left church culture, and the post was about the spirituality (in a loose sense) of the holiday and the beauty of celebrating newness. I love newness and celebration, but the truth of Easter is so much more brutal, so sin-dyed. And it is so much more powerful, beautiful, so earth-shattering light-filled. Easter is the obliteration of our blackest wrongs through brutal death. Earth is the glory of new life where no life was even possible before.

    Tiffany was right about truth. To withhold the glorious beauty of Easter and just celebrate newness? That is no kind of love. I do not want to alienate people who are on the fringes of faith and church, but I’m not going to break the truth into pieces we can consume without fear. Truth in love, yes. Half truth, no.

    Those are my thoughts on this Saturday of waiting – the day in between death and Resurrection, a grave day of not celebrating, not yet. And this is my invitation to you: celebrate with us tomorrow. Celebrate life and grace and forgiveness, the truth of the holy day.

  • review

    review

    I went for a barefoot walk yesterday. It forced me to be more aware. I noticed the old, roughened sidewalk outside our home, the broken gravelly walk beside the Missouri Synod church, the fresh new sidewalk a few blocks away. I imagined the prickly dry grasses, the packed full gravel of alleys. I began to notice other things too, with my senses so heightened. The fresh pine scent of a new fence around a corner house. The rocky shadows as clouds gathered around Pikes Peak. The way my legs itched to walk and walk and walk, muscles begging for exercise.

    I pondered too, while I walked. In some smooth sequence of thoughts which I have now forgotten, my mind moved from the sidewalk textures to my aversion to review.

    I’m not a perfectionist, but I am very success oriented. I’m wired to read social environments, to understand what other people value, and to try to be that as well as I can. It’s a comparison trap but one that’s always changing. If introspection and writing are what’s valued,I want to be the most introspective writer. If outdoor skills are in, I want to be the one acquainted with the most trails, the girl who makes her own granola for hiking snacks. If I don’t think I can do something well or impress a group on the first go around, I don’t usually try.

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    I hate to be told “That’s good, but you can do better.” All my rough drafts have to also be final edits. My first thoughts on a new topic must be airtight considerations.

    I once heard that reading your writing out loud is the best way to catch errors in flow and grammar. It’s true. I hate it; or at least I used to. Now I’m slowly learning the power of double checking.

    I view and read each of my blog posts as a preview before I publish them. I don’t catch everything but I do find a few improvements, errors, better ways to express myself. It’s still a challenge; I’m still a stubborn people-pleaser sometimes. But I’m learning. I’m learning how to practice, to let myself grow into skill instead of hiding anything that’s not immediately perfect. Mediocre is not always an insult; sometimes it’s a phase in between poor and excellent. Good work takes several practice rounds, multiple drafts. A series of photographs may reveal only one keeper. That is good. That is growth.

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    So, here’s to the in-betweeners, the ones who are practicing, who aren’t giving up even though they aren’t there yet. Tell me, what are you practicing?

     

  • quiet

    Today is quiet and I want to keep it that way. I am leaving for Redwood Valley, CA in two days and it’s going to be a bit of a respite from the challenges of daily life as a mama. But I need respite now, not just whenever I can escape to California. So I have set aside my goals for today.

    I am an expert at carrying goals. I create mental checklists a mile long and mutter over them internally all day long. Today is not for lists. Today is for quiet.

    The sun rose quietly, touching the frozen rooftops first; then she slid down the walls and windows, delicately touching her toes to the icy earth like a timid-eager girl. The house itself seems to be resting; it is half clean/half cluttered, but that could just mean it holds life in a balance of work and rest. Even my heart is finding rest. I read Luke 1 this morning, and chose Luke 1:74-75 as my next memory passage. “…that we, being delivered from the hand of our enemies, might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all our days.”

    These words are grounding me. It is for worship and service to God that we are freed. Not to keep our homes clean, not to press forward into to-do lists. For worship, for recounting of his blessings whether we find them in strong muscles, sunshine sliding across the walls throughout the morning, babies cooing and chattering, anything.

    Here is to the quiet we need, and cultivate.

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  • counting

    Songbirds are not as common in Colorado as they are in northern Minnesota. I miss them. Each time I hear one, I listen. I want to write it down, remember it. The songbird trills warm me gently like audible sunshine.

    Last year I created the habit of cultivating gratitude. Each morning as often as I could I wrote down something I was thankful for. Anything, even simple things. A healthy meal. A quietly playing boy. Baby smiles, husband flirting, slow dancing, clean laundry, sunny days, snow on the mountains.

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    I’ve gotten a bit out of the habit lately. This year I wanted to practice trying new things in courage, but I haven’t stuck to the gratitude as much, at least not to writing it down. But each time I hear birdsong, I still stop to listen.

    My friend Mariah once gave me a tiny book Santa Claus on the cover. There was twine strung through a hole in one corner – it was meant to be a Christmas ornament. Instead I started writing down what I was grateful for; 1, 2, 3, … I skipped every other number to leave space for her. Then late in the winter I gave the book back.

    “Here – it’s a gratitude journal for you!” She smiled and started writing; 2, 4, 6, … A few months later she gave it back.

    “I originally gave it to you – I want you to have it!” she said gleefully. I read through her moments of gratitude and remembered my own. I kept writing. Later I gave her a small journal I had picked up in India. “I got us another,” I said eagerly, “Let’s keep writing!”

    Journals have been going back and forth for almost four years now. We hunt down the sweetest, prettiest small notebooks and journals we can find for each other. One came to me at my bridal shower, a yellow leather book with loose-leaf pages on tiny five-ring binder. Another came with a baby package she sent us; this one a tiny journal with an adventuring compass on the front.

    I get to see her in four days. I have a tiny notebook that didn’t quite have space for 600 numbers, half-full and waiting to memorialize her happiest moments. Time and again when I’ve forgotten this habit of counting, counting, that I learned first from Ann Voskamp, I suddenly remember Mariah and our shared tradition. It brings me back to rootedness. I plant myself in gratitude, listening eagerly to the few songbirds we do have, counting their trilled whistles slowly and happily.

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  • where courage comes from

    where courage comes from

    One of my friends talks a lot about courage. We went cliff jumping together once and it became our metaphor for doing brave things. We call each other cliff jumpers for pep talks, encouragement.

    I’ve been thinking a lot about fear lately. There have been long seasons where fear played too big a role in my life. Should it have any role? I don’t know the answers to all my questions about fear, but I think maybe courage is the better train of thought. Perhaps questions about courage will inspire, where questions about fear shame.

    I was wondering today where courage comes from and I think part of my answer is space.

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    Nearly every week Grant will send me away to get coffee, take a walk, spend some time coming back to myself. It usually works. I end up quieted. I come home with new energy and joy and ideas. Being alone gives me a chance to talk to God, to remember how much bigger he is than all my insecurities and doubts and nervousness.

    You may be thinking coffee shop and that sometimes helps but actual wide space is even better. My home state had space. Growing up in Minnesota the horizons stretched open like arms and when I looked up there were no peripheral borders besides the clouds. The sky was wide, wide, and I could remember how wide and deep and everywhere God was too. I needed the space then and I need it now still, maybe more even. Now I find it in the rock crevices and pebbly trails bordered with spiky yuccas, in the way the rocks reach for the sky like I do.

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    I climb for the sky with the rocks, and my courage swells up, drunk on all the space I can give it. It is enough.

  • reasons and things

    I have good days and bad days.

    On my good days, I think It is so good for me to blog! I am taking back my writing – I’m not giving in to the fear that I’m a horrible writer. I’m writing and publishing it and no matter who reads it, I’m writing with courage and joy and it’s so, so wonderful!

    On my bad days, I think Why are you writing a blog? You’re years late to the game. You’re just writing here because you’re afraid of writing an essay and submitting it for publication, aren’t you? You’re scared! This blog is just an excuse – so that when people ask about your writing, you aren’t empty handed, you don’t have rejection slips to show them, you have this, your blog! This is a cop-out from doing anything real, anything that takes guts!

    I keep trying to turn the bad days into good days by reminding myself of the encouraging thoughts.

    The truth is – and truth is the ground upon which I can stand through any day – the truth is that this is a safe place. It’s a place where I can learn to enjoy writing again, because there’s no pressure. Nobody who has read and reviewed and loved or critiqued my writing is reading this, judging by the WordPress stats. And I love that.

    I can write and publish and write and publish and if nobody ever knows, that doesn’t mean I’ve done nothing. I’ve written.

    So that is why I am blogging. I want to show the negative voices of fear who’s boss. And maybe, one day, one of the writers I love will tell me, “Actually, this is good. You writing, you claiming back joy and just writing. Even the words are good.” A girl can dream.

    On one hand, this blog doesn’t take a lot of courage. That’s important to me. I need this simple space to put the love of writing back into practice. But I want to write with courage too. So to you, reader, I’m making a promise. I will write and submit an essay, or poem, or story. Something. I’ll do some writing that takes guts and a tough skin. I need both sides of this craft; the safe, and the wild.

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  • quality days

    quality days

    I’m sitting in the couch across from him and he says, “We should do something productive with our Fridays.” I think of the side jobs we could pick up and wonder if it will interfere with our slow coffee habits.

    “Extra work? What do you mean?”

    “I don’t think a side job would be a good investment of our time,” he responded. I looked at him, confused and a little irritated. Was I supposed to guess what vague thing he meant by “being productive”?

    “We don’t really need extra money,” he explained, “I was thinking more like an adventure day.”

    I relaxed, and then smiled, “So something exciting! Could we still maintain our slow mornings with coffee?” I have priorities.

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    That is how we came to have a shared checklist on our phones with the title Quality Of Life Day condensed into the initialism “QOLD Fridays”. The list full of things we’ve always loved to do and rarely planned. Things we will remember when the Fridays have slid by, and the firsts-of-the-month, and then the anniversaries in their own soft and steady way.

    Last week we hiked a trail to a place called Pancake Rocks. We ate lunch in the sunny shelter of a boulder, and scrambled about on the sloped formations that genuinely resembled stacked pancakes. On our way down in the late-afternoon shade, we pulled on our snowshoes despite a particular lack of adeptness, and tromped beside the trail, as gleeful as if we were the first to discover the magic of powdery, snowy mountainsides.

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    In The Fellowship of the Ring, Gandalf says to Frodo, “‘All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’”

    There are a lot of important things we do with our time, Grant and I. Parenting, working, discipleship, resting. Drinking coffee. I think these QOLD Fridays are wise; a beautiful way of imbuing our time with quality, and slowing down this spinning world for just a second.

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  • explore

    Erik is crawling. He used to scoot around on his blanket from one end to another, searching out the toys I’d scattered across it for him (although they were only ever an alternative to looking for any charging cords we may have left out.) Now he’s on hands and knees, back and forth from one end of the house to the other and almost as fast as me.

    He crawls to the washing machine to watch the bright clothes swishing behind the door. He crawls to the reflective oven door and leans towards himself until he bumps his forehead on the glass. He crawls to the broom and touches the bristles that stick out at odd angles. He crawls to the bedroom and stares at the mirror; opens the door, closes the door, opens, closes. Again.

    I love it.

    He’s exploring and learning and searching and in all this I get to guide him. We go outside on the warm days and he crawls across the patio from one end to the other, touching the grass and marveling at the texture.

    “Grass!” I say, “It will turn bright green in the summer, and you’ll learn to run across it barefoot.”

    He picks up dried foliage from last fall.

    “Leaves!” I say, “They grow green on the trees in the spring, and then in the fall they turn colors and fall down. We’ll make piles of them and jump into them, and hear them crunch under our feet.” I crumple them in my hand for him, “Crunch!” I say. He crawls back to the other end of the patio.

    It is all a marvel to me. He smiles when I help him stand. He stares seriously when we go outside. He grins and giggles when I play crawling games and call him over to me. He is piecing together the world. I am piecing together parenting; stringing together happy moments to balance out the hard ones. We learn together.

    That is what most of this life is, after all.

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  • the talents

    the talents

    I’ve had a lot of trouble understanding the Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25 before. The parable is about investing – servants of a master who are given different amounts of money and expected to use it to good purpose while he’s gone. Two of them invest it and earn back double what they were given. One just hides it so that nobody steals the amount he’s given. It’s pretty obvious on one front: use what you’re given.

    But I get caught up in trying to understand it so much that I never get around to investing. Hear me out. Maybe it’s because their word for the currency, “talent” sounds the same as “talent” in English, meaning special skill or ability. My usual train of thought after reading passage is “Talent… what talent do I have? And how do I use it? I don’t have a lot to write about right now, so scratch that. I don’t have a piano anymore, so scratch that… I don’t know.” And by then it’s dinner time or the dishes need doing or a certain wee boy is calling his mama and the train of thought derails until months or a year later, when I circle back around to that passage.

    I always though a talent (currency) was a lot of money. Bible currencies are confusing and I’ve never taken the time to sort them out, but I just assumed it was a lot. But then in verse 21, the master says to the servant who returned 10 talents “You have been faithful with little. I will set you over much.”

    That. That’s what clicked today. I can be faithful with little. Maybe I don’t need to be getting up in front of people playing piano on worship teams to be in ministry. Maybe it’s not about writing truckloads of spiritual memoirs (or even writing one.) Maybe it’s less about talents and more about responsibilities. I have a tiny boy to take care of, and maybe just letting him yowl into my shoulder and get snot everywhere while teaching him how loved he is by God and by me is all I need to do. Maybe “talent” is about wiping his nose over and over, and reminding him how much I care. Doing the laundry full of baby boy boogers again and again because, well, it keeps piling up. Maybe my investment is the few times I remember to get the coffee ready for my early-rising husband. Maybe it’s remembering to give thanks for something, even if I’m trying and failing to find the source of infant yowls.

    It’s probably going to be a lot harder than using skill-oriented talents, but if I can only be faithful in this, in living Christ’s love to my tiny family again and again; I will probably be so much closer to hearing his “well done” than I ever knew before.

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  • celebrate

    celebrate

    I wake up and roll over and twitch the curtain aside, one hand still clinging to warm covers, just checking if the sun’s awake with me, and she is.

    I eat something little and savory – first morning food always making me nervous with nausea – and move into the light. Set myself in the blue chair, legs curled under, gratitude journal open and pen clicking on off on off on off while I think happy morning thoughts and squeeze cold toes in the sunlight.

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    Fuller, stronger, take my fuzzy blanket and cold toes out to the back patio. Sit in the sunshine, feel warmth holding joy against the calendar box of today. Pen scratching journal paper; “403. Sunshine. 404. Singing birds. 405.”

    I always leave one blank at the end because I always want to remember that I will be thankful, again, later. There will be more little happy things scattered among my hours and more evident faithfulness piling up where I forget even to write them down.

    Always more.

    Sunshine following me inside and I leave the door open, spend the day with shoes on and bike tires whirling, or feet moving and climbing, or self settled in a hammock, swinging. Always in the air, always bringing the outside in, bringing the books and joy out, letting God show me how he can make a day just like I like it.

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