* not with ink

It is Christmas Eve. I am sitting in a cafe a block away from my fiance's church, where he is now prepping three (count 'em, THREE) Christmas Eve services. I will attend two - the first, where he is preaching, and the late one, after which we will drive out of the city and all the way to his childhood home. In the meantime, I'm going back to our new home to pack for the holidays with our families, wrap gifts for his family, and maybe unpack another box of my things. For the first time in 2.5 months, I feel like I can breathe without panic seeping in. For the first time in over 3 months, I feel a strong urge to write a little blog post. And for the first time in almost 4 months, I really truly believe that I'm getting married on Sunday. It has been a bizarre and often difficult fall. Our collective goal has been to just make it til Christmas. And now it is Christmas. And we made it. And the last of the Big Things fell into place this morning, literally under the wi

I think the time has come for white men and women to reflect critically and honestly on how their whiteness makes them different. How their whiteness accords them privilege and access to resources that they withhold from those who are "not their kind." How their whiteness has been made the unacknowledged norm of what it means to be human. How their whiteness has brought hardship and misery to millions. - Asian-American theologian Gayle Yee. Mea culpa.   I try to avoid being publicly political, but the past few weeks have been beyond outrageous when it comes to race relations, crime, and oppression of non-caucasians. I didn't feel like I had much of anything to add to the conversation, as a caucasian Canadian female - we need to hear voices from within marginalized communities. At the same time, silence leaves me seated on the side of the oppressors, the majority who are not aware of the roles we often complicitly play in maintaining the unhealthy status-quos.

Folks. This semester has been a bit unreal. I know we talk a lot about whirlwinds and busyness and time flying by, but this has been a new height of chaos for me. Maybe chaos isn't the right word. Stress and fullness and struggle. There have been a lot of those things. There have also been a lot of good things - laughter and someone to hold me when I cry and learning new ways to be. So that's good. There are two huge-life-things in process these days: a condo purchase and a wedding. They require a lot of energy, have near-unending details, and are gateways to goodness. So I'm hoping I come out alive on the other side. (I'm mostly kidding.) But here's something exciting I want to tell you all about! A book that is quite literally changing my life. It's called Difficult Conversations . If you're anything like me (that is, human), there are difficult conversations in your life that you either actively avoid or brashly plow through. This bo