Watch for it... :-)
ok, first a quick disclaimer on my last post... the title says "first night alone in 11 years". Actually make that 7. Seven years and seven days ago, I was alone for 9 hours, after I drove myself to the hospital at midnight to deliver my second child, while my first child was watched by a good friend who answered my SOS in the middle of the night. So I spent 9 hours alone in a hospital bed awaiting my second child, then once he popped out, the next night I spent alone was, ta-da! tonight! wow. such a weird feeling. miss my babies, yet so excited I don't know what to do with myself!! well, first things first, a trip to the grocery store to stock up on some guilty pleasures, like this Cappucino Chip ice cream! So many things I could do in these 3 days of alone time, my mind is swimming with ideas, so best to do what I love to do: make a to-do list:
My Official Gluttonous Introverted To-Do List when given Extended Amounts of Alone Time: (like 3 days!)
1. take a nap. (*yawn* That reminds me, that ice cream & wine are making me sleepy. gotta finish this later. :-)
ahh.. that was nice. now where was I?
oh by the way, this movie I'm watching now is called Boxing Girls of Kabul. It's a documentary about these girls in Afghanastan who dare to become the first female boxers for their country in the 2012 Olympics. Film starts out with hidden camera footage of what happened to 3 girls who attempted this in 1999: they were captured by the Taliban, brought to the center of a stadium and got their heads blown away by machine guns. amazing. no, not the sight of heads blown off, but by the bravery of these girls, risking their lives to do something so frowned upon, when many girls there are not even allowed to go to school or leave the house. The movie is all in their Afghan language so I have to stay awake and read the subtitles. Good thing I had that nap...
so some more things I"d love to do while on this Introvert's Paradise of 3 Days of Alone Time:
2. Eat what I want. Like veggie-only stir-fry with cilantro if I want, or cereal 3 times a day.
3. Play all my old CD's so loud the house shakes.
4. Let the cats walk across the counters and lick the milk from my cereal bowl.
5. Realize that writing these to-do lists is too exhausting, lie back and enjoy another movie, another round of ice cream.
One last thought about this movie that just ended, Boxing Girls of Kabul: I love watching documentaries about other countries, places unlike the U.S. where we have it so good and take so many things for granted. I often feel like I'm living in the wrong country. I need to be out in the world someplace where I can make a real difference, and am motivated to make a difference by seeing the contrast between what we think we need here (all our materialistic junk) and what really matters. yes, I need to be a missionary of sorts. just not sure how it's going to happen.
While in this thoughtful mood, let me share a thought I had in church today. The topic was Invitation: inviting others to come to church, inviting them to begin a relationship with Jesus. The one person who came to mind as someone I would love to "invite" sometime...was someone I just met at my new job recently. She was training me on the barrista basics of making all the coffee drinks. I could tell right off that she was a tough girl, a graduate from the school of hard knocks, so to speak. Young but tired, pregnant with her 3rd child, but not married. Tatoos liberally sprinkled everywhere, even though the rule at work is no visible tatoos. I didn't catch much of her story, as the steady flow of customers kept us focused on the job at hand, of trying to remember all the recipes, number of espresso shots or pumps of syrup per drink. She spoke softly due to a sore throat from a cold, but it didn't disguise the tough edge from her voice. She assured me, at one point, that if I ever worked her drink station and left it a big mess, that she would "cuss me out". She was not joking. She repeated the threat later on during the morning, too, just for emphasis. I got the hint: don't mess with her or her stuff. My initial thought was that I needed to "invite" her to my boxing gym, help her get some of that anger out. A tough one, but something told me there was a soft heart beneath all of that hard exterior, a heart that had been hurt or betrayed by life. Perhaps she & I had some similarities. It used to be I was always drawn to these troubled teenagers, just like I was when I decided to serve in a ministry for them years ago, but it just seemed like a curiosity, never really understanding why I somehow felt I had something in common with them. I was never a runaway, a dropout, a druggie, a teenage unwed mother or any of those other labels that could easily be placed upon the kids I worked with. My life seemed pretty sheltered compared to all that. But here I was, learning the coffee drinks from this girl many years younger than me, working while both sick and pregnant, who had just lived through "a hell of a week" as she put it, referring briefly to her failed attempt to transfer to a store in a nearby city because the apartment complex there wouldn't accept her, and her oldest child was supposed to start kindergarten like, tomorrow, and she seemed to have no clue what school he was even going to, and she'd moved here from another state, so who knows if she had any other family support. At one point during the morning, a regular customer, a kind older woman, came up to the bar and was talking with her and offering to lend her some baby equipment for the new arrival. The girl seemed genuinely appreciative. And she did seem like a kind person at heart, looking past the harsh edges. Really cared about treating the customers right, filling the drinks up all the way to the top, making sure the cups weren't dripping with foam and people given the benefit of the doubt, the extra whipped cream at no cost. Not the type that would automatically say yes to an inviation to someone's church, no, I think that would take time. But I hope that if her current path in life doesn't take her away from this store, that I would have a chance to get to know her better and somehow share with her that no matter what anyone has ever judged her for in the past, that there IS a place for her in the Body of Christ.
That's m;y thought for today. Now on to my next movie. Think I need some ocean images, I'll choose Blue Crush 2, good surfing movie, I hear...
later!!!!!
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