Author: Gianna

I’m crying my way through probably the biggest lesson plan God’s ever set on the table in front of me, and if you’ve ever been a grade school student with a homeschool parent or favorite teacher who handed you this year’s textbook in your nemesis subject, then you may understand why all I want to do is slam this thing down, wipe my nose on my sleeve, and walk away.

Just like any good homeschool parent or favorite teacher, walking away and pouting is not part of the lesson plan. Figures.

You know all those people who say that you are not your talents and gifts, not the food you eat, nor what people think of you? I’m one of them. I’m great a reminding girlfriends that one fellow’s opinion doesn’t make you what he said you were. Your skill or lack of skill at Tae Kwon Do or horseback riding or swing dancing doesn’t make you an amazing person, or a horrible one.

“You’re just you,” I say, “And we all love you!”

Yes, well. It appears I can recite the lesson word for word, tally up the addition and subtraction of it without a hitch. I get stuck on the word problems.

Solve: If Gianna writes two popular blog posts, one kinda popular blog post, reads 50 books in one year, and encourages 70% of the people around her, who is Gianna?

Answer: Mostly successful! Way go to!

Solve: If Gianna has a bad case of morning sickness, the bathroom doesn’t get cleaned, and there tissues on the floor, but she reads 55 books in one year and waters her daffodil regularly, who is Gianna?

Answer: Kinda failing at life in a big way- have you seen that bathroom?!

It’s true – my bathroom needs cleaning and there are tissues on the floor.

Yesterday, dozens of loving souls posted sweet and generous birthday wishes on my Facebook timeline. It’s usually one of my favorite parts of my birthday, getting to scroll through such kindness expressed from the most unexpected sources, and replying to them, thanking them. This year it just broke me.

“Thank you for filling my online reading time with such beauty” wrote one person, referring to my blog. “I’ve been thinking about you all day,” from somebody I’ve met in person only once, five years ago. I started to cry. Do they know I haven’t blogged at all lately? Do they know I have to rest so long and move so carefully that the bathroom kinda doesn’t matter? Do they realize I’ve barely been in touch with anybody? And when I am, I’m just griping about morning sickness! Do they know how hollow I am?

I couldn’t read anymore. And it was right as I closed the app and set down my phone that Grant began playing worship music. The pain of my realization – my own hollowness, the emptiness of my achievements – overwhelmed me. I couldn’t even face God feeling so naked and small.I curled up, leaned against my husband, and sobbed.

Songs played, one after another. All I have is Christ. Cecie’s Lullaby. Out of Hiding. Soft lyrics rolled over me, carrying whispers of God’s voice.

But that is how I made you, Gianna. Naked and small. You aren’t those things. You are you.

And I love you.

Those were the final words pressed on my heart the night of my twenty-third birthday.

You aren’t those things, you are you. Small, dependent on me, all those pursuits set aside; just Gianna.

I think maybe I get it better now.

If you struggle with insecurity like I have for years, I doubt my post alone is going to convince you otherwise. But there are books, other blogs, counselors, songs. Please, please don’t just walk away crying and wish you felt better, more secure in your identity, more confident in how you were created. Learn, grow, change. It’s hard – really hard. I’ve been thinking about and praying about this struggle for nearly a year. 

But it is worth it.

I love Steffany Gretzinger’s music. It is soft and warm and deep as a soul.

I will be doing dishes or driving or standing in the middle of the carpet, curling my toes and wondering what to do next when her Morning Song comes on – and I cry.

Night turns to morning, You have been waiting

He has been waiting – always waiting, always awake. Porch light on, you might say, candle in the window, screen door propped open. Waiting. There is no timer, no stopping. No giving up and running into town for a movie, no locking of the door, no turning in for the night.

I am waited for? The lyrics swell and sway and pull me into weeping. I am waited for.

It all reminds me of a really long road trip to a really rainy place to visit my youngest sister, the one who looks like me and craves salted caramel frozen yogurt with me and gives me those hugs, you know. That sister. And we drove – drove and car-camped and drove again and fell into bed at some late-early hour.

Night turns to morning, You have been waiting

Waiting to just get there, waiting to sleep in a real bed, waiting to hug my sister again, waiting to smile and laugh together.

We sit on a couch and she looks at me, and it comes out – we paid to come. We paid in gas and time and in nights on a hard car bed and in kinky necks and eating out and lots of coffee. We paid in grit and tears and love, and we were waiting.

It’s the dawn of a new day You’ve painted for me

I watched lazily out the rear window while light drifted slowly into the sky. Haze – enough to illuminate only the horizon. Then dark lightened to gray dusk and invisible objects took shape, if not substance. Liquid – the light trickled slowly down the rocks and eastern edges of the hills until it pooled softly on the tops of the valleys and turned the world magic (again). I feel the light permeated with love. I catch my breath against it all and then the loveliness sweeps over and I am half drowned in it.

There it was, in the midst of a remembered road trip. God and Grant loving me, us loving her, so much passion flowing from one heart to the next. Waiting.

I squeeze my feet and knees together, still standing in the living room. A small part of me wants to go, turn off that song, not feel the deep hard hurty lovely feels. A bigger part of me stays, letting my heart unravel, letting me take the love for my sister and hold it up to God and realize he’s paid his love, he’s doing his waiting, he waits for me.

I’m waking up

 

[Song here]

He knocked quietly on the door, hoping I wouldn’t be home yet.

I answered.

“I got you flowers, and chocolate.”

I was speechless, like I always am when he romances me. I kissed him, and  put the chocolate on the back shelf of a kitchen cupboard for my own safety.

“Do we have a tall, narrow vase?”

I knit my eyebrows together, mental inventory. The short green one, the really narrow one that wouldn’t keep it’s balance…

“No.”

He grinned with an idea. I returned to washing dishes while he arranged the mountain sunflowers in something. I turned around;

His everyday not-roses were tucked into a mountain-lover’s be-stickered Nalgene water bottle.

I love this.

I love that they are different. The creative expression of love. The sunshine captured on our kitchen table. I love that they are vibrant and messy, and unabashedly, wildly reaching their crinkled petals in every direction.

I love this simple ordinary love that we keep in our regular old, favorite container. I love this bright mountain flower tucked into a used, loved bottle that seen its share of real life (so why not its share of romance, too?)

Build:

Verb.

1. To construct (especially something complex) by assembling and joining parts and materials.

2. to establish, increase or strengthen

Dictionary [dot] com

Building my bookshelf was easy. It’s from IKEA – complex enough to make one feel accomplished and proud of putting together such an efficient, beautiful piece of furniture, and simple enough that there is little challenge involved. I like that kind of building.

Building a home in a new apartment is less simple. My taste is difficult to describe and therefore decor is difficult to acquire – I don’t always know what I want before I see it, but when I see it I know I wanted it, and I work with and around it to make something beautiful. (I still haven’t found a lot of the things I think I want.)

But building a home means other things too. Like relationships. Memories. Places.

Building new relationships and new homes is hard. Much as I love the mountains, I don’t have anything like an old favorite hike, or a local place that is part of any tradition.

I’m starting, though.

I sometimes sit in a corner of the couch and tally up the memories I have in this living room, counting gatherings and lunches and laughter like beads on a string. Memories are piling up on my phone too. I’ve got selfies that I took for that one person who needed a laugh, and groupies with a little selfie-arm from that tall person who can hold the camera out the farthest. There’s autumn pictures from this year AND from last year – a stretch that I take particular pride in.

There’s a place too, up the mountain, that makes my heart happy just thinking of it.

Rampart Reservoir. Our favorite date (and we were separately quizzed on this, so I’m not romanticizing it.) The place where we got all those fun pictures and I wore my knitted yellow hat. The place where I picked out my favorite hill, and we scrambled off the trail over rocks.

The place where we took Luke and Jordan for a double date and played around with the old Minolta film camera – so much laughter bouncing between the hills. The place on the same range as where he proposed to me, kneeling in his hiking boots in a tussocky field with the peak behind us.

The place where the two of us old engaged people crept down the stream to sit on a sunny rock where they wouldn’t be able to distinguish a little kissing, but we could still keep an eye on them. The place where we always pull off the road to admire the sunset. The place where walking and conversation and adventuring and fellowship all run together like the stream, down towards the lake.

Yes, this is a good place, and these are good people, for building with.

We are obsessed, aren’t we?

Who am I kidding.

I. I am obsessed. I love new things. New posts. New photos. New blogs.

I wanted something fresh and I wanted the fun of creating it myself. (WordPress themes, shhhhh.)

So there’s this. Here’s me wondering if I’ll ever publish this blog, then figuring that I can create and enjoy it all I want without having to publish it, and reminding myself that no time spent creating something new and picking apart design is wasted.

Welcome to the really truly genuine me-site. The one I created on a whim.