The blurs in my peripheral vision.

A happy couple gazes at the Arkansas River, side by side, leaning into each other. They're resting from their work on the garden. The man props his shovel across his shoulder. The dirt is tilled and ready for seeds now. It's a pleasant moment, and I've happened to catch it, looking over their shoulders...

In truth, this couple is a miniature statue placed in an empty flower bed on the downtown sidewalk that meanders along the river. I am on my normal jogging route, and have just glanced at the statue on my way by yet again. I don't have an exact description of the little people, because I've never completely stopped to look. I do know it's a cute statue, and every time I promise myself I will come back when I'm not jogging so I can take a picture of it. It's a spring evening, so the slanting sunlight on the figure seems particularly artistic. But after the 10th time, I pass by again and mentally kick myself for forgetting to come by at a different time with my camera. By the time I finish my jog, I've forgotten all about the happy couple, only to remember when I see them again, a peripheral blur.

Isn't this like life? I've got my normal routine with its typical experiences. Not uncommonly, there is something that affects my day and makes me slow a pace, but I've got to keep on with my tasks, so I move on without documenting it. No photos of normal married life, my husband working on the cars; no written poems about how I've been especially loved or hurt by a friend; no creative sessions at the piano after hearing a word from the Lord... I tell myself I'll get to it one day, because these are things that matter to me, but they still haven't happened. Each time I forget, the details of poignant moments fade. They are blurs in my peripheral vision... but really, they're more central than I realize at the time.

What are your blurs?

The neighborhood cat.

A black blur leaps off my porch, runs under my car, and vanishes around a corner. What? I've just parked in front of my house after work and it takes me a moment to process what just happened. Oh yeah, it's the neighborhood stray cat.  

A puzzling creature. Is he friendly? Where does he find food? Does he find enough food? I don't know the gender, who it once belonged to, or the name. All I do know is that he's got long black hair and no one in my cul-de-sac owns him. One neighbor speculates that he used to belong to a former renter in the area, and was left behind when the renter moved away. Another neighbor said she'd try to catch him and bring him to the local shelter, but that hasn't happened yet.

He's got an ongoing challenge with one of the neighbor's outdoor cats, a black short-haired one. My husband and I amuse ourselves by watching these serious interactions from our kitchen window. Mystery Cat crouches in our yard, peering at Short Hair around another porch ten yards away. It's a feline staring contest. Mystery Cat ever-so-slowly moves closer, staying next to the edge of the next door house. After a couple tense minutes, Short Hair turns around and walks away, apparently ending the episode. Mystery Cat carefully leaps up onto another porch and settles down to watch from there. He's probably plotting their next encounter.

Personally, I don't mind cats. I'm not superstitious about black ones, either. On the other hand, I haven't tried to interact with this mystery. I'm not trying to scare him away. I'm not feeding him, and I'm definitely not petting him. I doubt he'd let me, anyway. I just observe him from afar. It's kind of like startling a flock of birds from the fields. They know they own the place; they're just leaving out of self-protection, only to return later when it's safe again. He was probably warming himself in the sunshine on "his" porch today. He leaps away as any outdoor cat does, all efficiency and stealth. I chuckle to myself. He'll be back again tomorrow.

Let's be grown-up for a minute.

I am so frustrated with the world of credit: financial credit. I don't like dealing with it at all.

See, I am a very practical person and a saver rather than a spender. This means I don't care about having the biggest or shiniest expensive toys. If I could live in a world without credit, I would. But because times come when you probably can't pay for a whole item straight from your bank account, paying things off is necessary. And because not everyone can know me personally and see how responsible I am, the only way the secular world can figure out if I'm trustworthy is to base it off how I handle money and risk-taking.

On the upside, it's harder to start getting credit these days than it was pre-2008 (when a bubble burst in the American economy, partially due to credit problems). On the downside, credit is still just as important today, so starting out now means getting credit these days is harder. Ah, such irony! What really ticks me off is that lenders and professionals in the money-handling world are still unaware of this change, and look at me like I'm nuts when I say that credit is hard to get.

My advice to everyone person 18+ is this: if you trust yourself to handle a little credit, get a secured credit card as soon as possible. This is card for people with no credit, so it's sort of like a mini debit card account at first: send in $300-$500 as your deposit, and that's the limit for what you can spend each month before paying the bill. It builds "trust" in the credit company's eyes, and in 6-12 months, you will have begun establishing a credit score. If you don't have any troubles, you get the deposit back, the card becomes unsecured, and you get more benefits, plus continue increasing your score.

Is this a boring thing to be writing a blog about? YES. Is it important and something I wish I had done at 18? YES.

Look out world, I'm old enough to be giving advice. I'm playing with the big boys now...

Strange to think that, as a married person with a steady income, I can be seriously thinking about a nicer car that will last more than a couple years, having kids, and deciding if I want to commit to owning a house. This is big-girl-and-boy stuff, folks. And to be honest, I can't decide if I wanna go that route or just traipse around the Spanish-speaking world while my husband and I are so free from commitments...

So help me God!

--Ellen

The problem was obvious...

**Note: This situation didn't happen to me, but I saw a video of this interaction for a class. I took the opportunity to write about it as if I were in the counselor's shoes.**

The problem was obvious: he was beating his wife. It said it right in his chart. But we weren’t going to get anywhere if we started with that. He didn’t even want to be here in this office with me. His wife had coerced him into getting this counseling session and there he sat, shut up. He wouldn’t even look at me. And here I was, the very non-aggressive male counselor, trying to help in some way. We were stuck—or so it seemed.

Like in Al-Anon groups, the first step is admitting there is a problem. But he wasn’t the talkative type. “I have my problems,” he said simply. “Like to deal with them on my own.” Problems? That was an understatement.

I took the gander. “What kind of problems?” I stayed neutral, nonverbally open and receptive.

“Just… problems.”

Right. Okay. Patience was going to be the name of the game. I wasn’t going to probe too deeply, but let him indicate how much he was ready for, like squishing a ball of dough and letting it bounce back into shape. No stretching yet, just test the rebound. Let him hear what he’s saying, and show him I was listening, not a hint of accusation in my voice.

“You want to deal with them on your own, you say. So why might your wife want you here?”

“Well… My wife wants to go back to school. She nags me about it.” Okay. That wasn’t the primary issue here, but it was a concrete description. Definitely something to work with.

“She nags you. She wants to go back to school.” I repeated. I’m listening. Keep going.

“Yeah. But she works in a job already and she takes care of the kids too.”

I repeated his words again. “She’s got the kids and she works.” Keep going.

“Yeah, she works. Seems like she’s got enough going on.”

We continued in this fashion for awhile. Tedious but effective. Eventually, the issue of nagging is expanded. She nags him when he’s eating, when he’s falling asleep, when he gets home from work. He’s stressed already and it makes it worse, hearing she wants to go back to school. He dislikes change. Plus, he doesn’t want to lose her or for her to outshine him by becoming a lot smarter than he is by taking classes. But, as revealing that was, it wasn’t getting to the violence part yet.

“Nagging seems to be one part of a larger issue. Did something happen recently that brought you here today?”

It might seem like a lot of work and redundancy just to get him to admit one thing—he does beat her—let alone the one thing that I the counselor already know. But with a lot of patient listening, we got there. To gain any ground, I knew I’d have to build rapport with the guy. I would listen to his story and I wasn’t going to accuse him. He could hear himself describe how irritation at home had turned into a much bigger problem. I listened to the underlying factors and not just the violent symptoms.

No matter how dramatic or harmful the symptoms, even starting with direct, albeit well-meaning, questions would have put him on the defensive and halted any hope of progress. We wouldn’t have made it to positive, mutual steps to change if I had just started point blank with “How can we help you stop hitting your wife?” I heard his fear, his stress, and even how he cared about his wife. See how reasonable his side of the story begins: there’s enough going on already, he’s afraid he’ll lose her, she nags him even when he’s trying to fall asleep after a long day. Put yourself in his shoes. If you were stressed, afraid, guilty, and sleep-deprived, as well as having an anger management problem, you might be more prone to lash out at your wife, too! I’m not justifying his actions, but I saw what had brought him to that point. I believed that he wanted to change, and he began to see that too.

I learned a lot that day. Made me wonder what’s on the inside of people that I miss with all my direct questioning. Made me glad progress could be made with such a resistant client. It reminded me how a point-blank statement like “he’s beating her” can have so many pre-formed judgments that immediately pop up in my head. Those judgments make me less empathetic and less willing to listen, because I want the change for that person now. However, if the client isn’t ready, then that’s where I’ll stay too. The key is tapping into his intrinsic desire to change. And thankfully, we got there… eventually. It’s just that the way there wasn’t so obvious.

Stoplights and names on paper.

I tend to believe that God does big miracles and is involved in grand schemes but I'm less likely to see God is small, seemingly-no-purpose events. For example, stoplights. My husband told me one day several months ago that he believed getting all green lights through a city once was a God-thing, a small blessing meant to bring him joy. I pooh-poohed that. "Stoplights?" I said. "You weren't even rushing someone to the hospital! What's the point? Would God do that just for you?"

You see, I don't see faith as something that simply "makes you happy", that God caters to our self-centered, little-kid wishes that have no lasting impact. I am a principled person. I care very much about the shoulds and the musts. Sure, I'll appreciate a beautiful sunset and give Him the praise for it in a quiet you-and-me moment, but purposefully interfering with electronics and man-made patterns that affect many people in traffic just to make one person smile? Not so sure about that. The idea didn't even sound biblical. Yes, God intervened many times in the Bible to show Himself, to bring people to Him or to grow the "key players" in His story. Yes, Jesus said even the hairs on our heads are numbered (Matthew 10:30), but I just thought that was showing God both knows all and that he cares about us as individuals. But I don't see stories about God-ordained occurrences that made people smile, nothing more.

Then this week has been an amusing monkey wrench in all of that. First, a little more necessary backstory. Carrying on my family's tradition, I have a "prayer bowl" at my husband and I's dinner table. Each night that we are home for dinner, one of us chooses a piece of paper from the bowl that has someone or something to pray for, making sure not to peek before we pick. I wrote the names months ago: family members, work places, the president, etc. Usually we decide who will bless the meal based on who is more connected to the name we drew.  

This week, however, we've nominated the other person to pray and "taken our chances" that the name will be related to the other person. And it's worked out. After it happened a few nights in a row, I wondered out loud if God was specifically "planning" who we'd pray for. Ben jumped on that. "You believe God would do that but not intervene with stoplights?" I had to laugh. Touché. My faith is probably too small.

The following day, Ben and I were asked to consider more involved roles with the worship teams of our church. Somewhat unexpected stuff. An hour later, we were sitting down to dinner and who should we pick from the prayer bowl but "Vineyard worship team". I laughed and laughed. If anything, I think God has a sense of humor!

As a Christian, I'm inclined to believe there are few coincidences. Some things seem too significant to be pure chance, yet sometimes too small to be the "hand of God". I don't know... I don't have it all figured out. Here's what I do know however:

1) God's in control of everything, directly or indirectly. He also has cosmically big purposes. I may not see the point of "small" happenings but ultimately He may be working them out in a certain way for the sake of the bigger picture. 

2) Prayers matter. The missionary Paul wrote frankly to one church, "you help us by your prayers" (2 Corinthians 1:11). So God may well be wanting an extra prayer for someone one day, so out of the "random" prayer bowl comes their name.

3) He cares about growing my faith. There are lots of people in the Bible who had specific encounters with God that were ordained to increase their trust and belief in Him. I'm particularly reminded of Gideon from the Old Testament, who was chosen by God for a big task. He had the audacity to test God about this: “If now I have found favor in your eyes, give me a sign that it is really you talking to me." (Judges 6:17) So he places a wool fleece out over night. If it has dew on it but not the floor around it--that'd be God's sign. God does it this way. Gideon tests Him again, in the opposite way: no dew on the fleece but dew on the floor. God does it that way. Gideon is convinced and goes on the quest. That's awfully patient of God! He must have really cared that Gideon had enough faith!

Years ago, my sister chastised me years ago for not praying when I had lost something. I have prayed in those circumstances ever since--not just so that I'll find them, but also to show God I trust Him with everything and that I believe that He cares. Still not sure where I stand on the stoplight issue but that's okay. I'm guessing my God is challenging me to grow again: to believe He is so big, He's that minutely involved.

Thoughtfully yours,

Ellen

"And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose." (Romans 8:28)

"You have searched me, Lord, and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways." (Psalm 139:1-3)

 "Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows." (Matthew 10:29-31)