The blog I thought I was going to write today was full of enthusiasm, my typical gushing, my typical excitement. Because things really are going quite well. Another draft of the book is finished. I watch several lovely children who are growing and learning things. I lead a group of amazing women I absolutely love, and they are going to change the world. Against all odds, the checkbook stays balanced, and we are in the black. I’m going back to Congo in t-minus ten weeks and four days.

But, right now, everything is just so heavy. I’m not doing anything that I can let slide. Everything is important, and everything has implications that affect other people. This is going to sound stupid, and probably painfully lazy, but I wish I had something I could just slack off on. Not because I want to do a so-so job at something—but because I feel, especially after last night, the weight of what I’m carrying, and there are days when it feels particularly heavy.

Last night I stood in front of a room full of people—of advocates, leaders—and told them I believed that small group leaders are the leaders of the church. Which makes us—the advocates—the leaders of the leaders. So, it’s our ship. And it’s either going down, or it’s going to sail. And I don’t know if anyone else heard it louder than I did, the level of responsibility and authority in that. I’m not even twenty-seven yet! I can’t lead a church! I don’t know Greek! (Actually, wouldn’t it be kind of cool to know Greek? But unfortunately I don’t think that gets you any closer to understanding, because most of us can barely understand things written in modern English, so I’m not even sure that knowing Greek really means as much as we think it does.)

I posted on Facebook a line about pod stuff, and I think some context is appropriate. Our church has groups called “small groups”—they’re meant to be little communities where people can love each other and challenge each other. They’re supposed to make a big church feel small. And each small group leader is put into a “pod” with other small group leaders. And those pods are led by advocates. I’m an advocate, so I’ve got a pod, four women who lead groups, and my job is to make sure they’re the best leaders they can be, that they’re constantly growing, and that their groups are as healthy as possible.

We meet once a month as a group; we eat together, we listen to a message, we talk about the leadership book we’re studying. If it’s someone’s birthday month, she wears a tiara (a real one—no plastic tiara for my girls! Okay, but they are rhinestones, not diamonds, but I’m going to say that’s not because I’m poor but because I don’t want to put a bunch of conflict diamonds on one of their precious heads. Ha!) and the rest of us wear birthday hats and bring her presents. Everyone else looks at us like we’re crazy, but we know they’re secretly jealous. (Is that okay in a church environment? Probably not. Well, I’ve never claimed to be a role model.) One of the things that works best is we have a group identity. The pod is its own character, and we love the pod. We’re committed to the pod.

I’m currently doing evaluations on their groups and their leadership, something I’ve never done before, and I think it’s going to be another game-changer for our group, because we’re about to get real specific, real intentional. The proverbial rubber will meet the road. I’m excited because I’ve never felt like I had the authority to come into their groups and intentionally observe them as leaders. But that’s changed in recent months, and here we are. And I think it will work because I think they know I’m on their team. I so desperately want them to succeed, and when that means telling them the truth, no matter how brutal, that’s what I’ll do. Because I want their success as leaders above everything else, including my popularity or “nice girl” image.

And I told the group of advocates that I spoke to last night that I feel I have yet to reach the level of “bare minimum” of what an advocate should do and be. Heavy. But that’s how big I feel the job is, and I slacked off on this job for a year and a half, and I’m not going back, not ever. I’ll quit this before I go back to not really leading the group, to being a “facilitator.”

Which brings me back around. Look at that. There really isn’t anything in my life that I can slack on. Part of that is because I’ve jettisoned—or am in the process of jettisoning—the commitments I could slack on. The outliers, the ones my heart wasn’t in. But the unintended result of that is a night like last night, a morning like this one, where I feel the weight.

I’ve got the day off today. I’m going to write. I’m working on an essay I’d like to start shopping around (if it goes well, which we’ve yet to determine). I’m going to do yoga in my living room. I’m going to make biscuits. I’m going call Simona and lie around in my PJs and maybe watch a Rob Bell video. And I’m going to pray and read and just be at home, with my cats, with no audience but Oliver and Gracie, who love me no matter what…as long as I’m on time with their dinner.

Oliver has been impossibly cute these days. In the mornings, while Jesse showers I sit on our sink so we can chat before he rushes off to work. Oliver picked up on the pattern and now sits on my lap. Gracie sacks out on our bed (which is nice when I’ve already made it up, but poses a dilemma if I haven’t—do I move her to make it up? Oh, but she’s just so comfy!). I sit between our sinks, and Oliver sits on my lap, and Jesse showers, and we talk. The other day, I was getting ready to go somewhere and was putting on makeup while talking to Jesse. Oliver sat on the sink and meowed at me until I finished and sat down, at which point he quickly climbed into my lap and immediately began purring and licking his paws. He’s on my lap right now, as I type this. Making up for the fact that he was on the kitchen sink this morning, checking out the pan I’d left soaking from last night’s dinner, trying to see if he could find any morsels to supplement his diet-food breakfast.

I dreamed of Congo again last night. Jesse was there too, and we were eating Mama Lily’s cooking and I was showing him how to brush his teeth without using the tap water. Yesterday, I was thinking about electricity, how I have it whenever I want it, how it felt to sit around a living room with flashlights and candles, talking in the dark, about candlelit dinners that were born out of necessity rather than romanticism. Only ten percent of Congo’s population has access to electricity. That kind of blows my mind. And even the ones who do… Every day, we lost power at least once, and our compound had a generator. Bishop goes for days without power. He loves ice-cold soda. He apologizes to us when he has to serve it warm. Some days, it’s not war, it’s not rape, it’s just this—it’s just Bishop, looking embarrassed, handing his guests bottles of warm soda.

For days, I’ve been trying to write about Haiti, but it keeps coming out Congo. I have a friend who is tirelessly campaigning to get tents to Haiti, and she asked me to blog about it, and I’ve tried, I really have. I care about Haiti, and we’ve given money to relief efforts. But it’s not the same. Congo is more than a cause now. But what is it? I don’t know. I don’t know what it is. All I know is that I can’t write to you about Haiti right now, not with any real conviction or passion, you’d see right through me, you’d know my heart was saying Congo all that time, and while it makes me feel a little heartless, a little guilty, not to have enough room for both, what I really believe is that everyone has their Congo, whether they’ve found it yet or not, and we’ve all got to latch on and fight like mad to do something.

And there it is, the man who plays guitar until his fingers bleed, because he’s trying to say something. Something about life and about art, the way we couldn’t paint without dark colors, and there is a beauty about Bishop and his bottles of Coke and Sprite and Fanta that I will never find the words for. But I will not stop trying.

(If Haiti is your Congo, here’s one way to help: www.ahomeinhaiti.com. The rainy season starts soon.)

Lots of changes in our lives all at once. Your Dad got a new job at McDonnell Douglas, we are moving a short distance away, 4310 Abbott Ave., the car is having lots of problems, the family room flooded again (in house on Edgewood), just to name a few things.

You are changing in your personality, a little rebellious at times. When I’m angry or grouchy, you’re worse. You react a lot like my brother Stanley, you respond best to praise. Of course, Lora, David, and your Dad are the same when it comes to responding best to praise, but you get more cantankerous when I’m grouchy.

I’m sure there’s a lovely, poetic, and deeply spiritual reason behind Lent. But, frankly, whenever I hear the word, the first thought that comes to mind is, the other day when I was cleaning the cat box outside (spring cleaning for the cats!), I noticed that some fuzz was coming out of the little vent that connects to our dryer, and I wondered if that was a fire hazard. I mean, really, I clean the lint trap with every load—why is it coming out the other end? Should I be worried? Wait, something about giving something up? Oh. Yeah. That.

And, you know, I go to church, my husband works for a church for crying out loud, I volunteer at church, I tithe. You’d expect I should know about Lent. Oooh, look! I defy expectations! Oh, wait, that’s only good when you exceed expectations isn’t it?

I thought tonight, maybe I should investigate this Lent business. Seems like a learning experience or something. Growth, right? But then, I thought, I’d have to give something up. And that’s the main problem I have with Lent. That, and no one ever told me the point. So, I give something up. Then what? I think everyone should give up some money for Lent. We could fix Haiti and save Congo and stop human trafficking. I don’t really care that so-and-so from Wichita is giving up chocolate. Who does that help exactly? Right—so-and-so from Wichita. Maybe Lent should be something we’re always doing. Shouldn’t we always be giving something up for the betterment of others? Maybe the problem is that we only think about sacrifice roughly once a year, and even then it doesn’t seem to produce anything worthwhile.

Okay, I’ve just angered most of my friends and a whole host of strangers. Who are all probably very sincere and fabulous in their observance of Lent. Reference previous statement about “lovely, poetic, and deeply spiritual.” My hat’s off to you. You’re all better people than I am, much more self-denying and monastic in a way I can only admire from a distance. I mean that. I’m much too lazy to go about investigating Lent in a meaningful way, and secretly I’m sure that I’m threatened by people who are able to give up something they love for any length of time. I once didn’t have ice cream for forty days, and I nearly died. True story. (Well.)  So, whenever Lent is over, you can go back to chocolate or cleaning bathrooms, and you’ll have gained something lovely, poetic, and deeply spiritual, and I’ll still be in the dark, a little bewildered and feeling like there’s a boat I’m missing. But, it’s all good. I’ve got chocolate-covered gummy bears to console me.

After Sharon left for her mom’s group, Story and I went outside and played in the wind. A series of pavers led from the porch to an aboveground pool, and Story “jumped” from stone to stone—which meant, really, that she stepped from one stone to another, then paused, then kind of bounced while saying, “Jump! Jump!”

I thought, this is life for her. This is life—a backyard on a day when spring seems inevitable, a series of pavers to “jump” on, the wind. And I wanted to surround her and protect her from everything else, from everything that is not a backyard on a day that feels like spring.

She’s not yet two. She won’t remember these mornings with me. She won’t remember running in the yard, she won’t remember the time I picked her up and spun and spun and spun. But I hope that when she’s older she’ll have a sense, somewhere deep within her, of being loved, of being protected, of being cared for. That when she sees me she will know, even without an image, that we spent mornings together in between seasons, when it was not quite winter and not quite spring.

Your determination is admirable. Truly, a motivational speaker could use you as an example of Not Giving Up—the quality one must possess if one does not also possess unusual talent and/or impeccable connections. I’ve not given you a single indication that I’ll ever pick up, and yet you still call, trying out different times and days to see if perhaps you might catch me unawares. That perhaps I might be expecting a call and might answer without checking the caller ID. Or perhaps I have a demanding job and am only at home after 9:00 on Friday nights. No? Well, then you’ll try 9:00 Saturday morning. And then at 5:00 the same Saturday afternoon.

It began with a call every other day or so. Then you increased your attempts to once a day. Now it’s multiple times every day. I have not once answered. My faithful answering machine picks up every time, and says the exact same thing every time. I’m considering changing it from its benign “Please leave a message and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible” (you always listen to the whole message, but never leave one of your own) to something more obvious. Like, “Hey, if you have something I want, then you’ll leave a message and I’ll call you back. Otherwise, stop calling me!” But I fear even that wouldn’t deter you. Because you know you don’t have something I want, but are convinced that if you could get me on the phone, your stunning script would wow me into submission, persuading me to agree to whatever service or product you’re harking. Or, that with your celebrated persistence you’ll just annoy me long enough that I’ll agree to anything just to get you to leave me alone.

I’ll tell you now, whatever it is, I’m not interested. I don’t need a Discover Business Card. I don’t want a home equity loan or mortgage protection insurance or a free trip to Bermuda. The timeshares Hilton keeps wanting to show us? We don’t qualify for the minimum income level to see them. So, I can assure you that you’re wasting your time. And I am screening every call. Every time you call, I get a little more annoyed. Most of the time, I’m hoping to hear from a friend, and then I go to the phone, and it’s you! You! So, please, I’m begging you. Give up. Move on. Because the next time you call, I just may be tempted to answer…

I also snagged a prescription for Cipro but was warned that the drug can cause ruptured tendons and major birth defects. !!!! But there’s a possibility I might be allergic to the alternative drug. The frustrating thing is there’s no way to know until I take the medicine. My mom had a serious reaction to this drug—we’re talking an in-the-hospital, get-ready-to-meet-Jesus reaction—so I’m kind of petrified of trying it. Especially in the middle of Africa with questionable access to healthcare. But, ruptured tendons… Well, I’ve got a couple months to think it over.

Speaking of which, as far as I know the tickets have been purchased! We’re flying out of Raleigh at 6:15 the morning of May 18^th. That’s exactly three months from today. Which seems like a long time, but time has a way of passing quickly.

Right now, I’m taking a break from cleaning the floors, and I’ve got Congolese music blasting (it’s great cleaning music) in the living room. I’m enjoying the trip preparation more this time around, mostly because the element of surprise has been lessened. Because once the line has been crossed once, it feels easier to cross the second time. Well, having to get only two shots helps, too.

However, as I was going to sleep on Friday night, I realized to my great horror that I had neglected to pack my makeup. Now, for some of my friends who have abundant natural beauty, this would not be a panic-inducing realization. Moi? I had nightmares (literally—dreamed all night about makeup) and resolved not to go to the Saturday sessions at all unless makeup could be procured. Yes, that is the extent of my vanity. I’d rather leave home without underwear, or clean socks, or even a hair dryer (okay, the hair dryer would be upsetting too).

This is how you know you have a true friend. You call her at 6:30 on a Saturday morning at a marriage retreat (which she’s also attending with her hubby) to tell her you’ve left your makeup at home, and the first thing out of her mouth is, “Do you want to use mine?” and the second thing she says is, “I’m packing it up right now for you.” Kara Shaw, I swear, is an angel. I promised her one of my kidneys, should she ever find herself in need. (And what’s even better is she does Mary Kay, so she has really awesome makeup.)

Sunday, I decided to put forth serious effort into the whole “day of rest” concept. I didn’t check my email once. I stayed in bed after I woke up, then I got out of bed to read and then fall asleep again. Jesse surprised me with a scavenger hunt with rhyming clues that led me to Jelly Belly jellybeans (my favorite), a dozen long-stemmed roses, and a sweet card. Fight? What fight? He’s the best.

Today was spent on errands and laundry and a Jamie Oliver recipe (my favorite) for dinner. Oh, and did you know? It snowed here Friday night. When we were in Myrtle Beach. Gah! The good news? It also snowed in Myrtle Beach. What a sight—to stand on a hotel balcony and look at the ocean, waves pounding a beach covered in a blanket of the purest snow. We couldn’t stay mad.