Side Effects of Adult Baptism

Were you baptized as an adult? Were you surprised by the way you felt afterwards?  Baptism into a new faith is an enormous life change. It is a beautiful and loving act of faith, but like so many beautiful things, it is hard-won, and it does not always lead straight to peace.

Saint Lydia’s Travels

While my second book has been making its debut, my first book has been making new friends. This morning at church, I learned that Letters to Saint Lydia just made it into a public school library here in Washington, one of the more secular states in the US. And the story of how it came to be there was the best part.

Fiction is like carrot soup.

“So, is this autobiographical?”

“I think this character is my aunt.”

“Was it that boy you dated senior year?”

Each time I write a book, its publication brings on a flurry of questions. The questions happen because the books are fictional, and I’m beginning to think there’s something about fiction that doesn’t make sense to us as human beings.

Apparently, we struggle to believe that a human being could actually make up another human being. Out of whole cloth. Straight from the imagination to the page. It just can’t be.

Why is that? Why do we start peering intently into the space between the lines, looking for the author’s real life in her unreal story?

God in Small Things

One day this winter, I saw a perfect stranger lose his glove. He walked quickly across a busy intersection where I was waiting in my car for the red light to turn green. As he neared the sidewalk on the right side of the intersection, a black glove fell out of his backpack.

He didn’t see it fall. He strode briskly up the hill. My mouth opened instinctively, and I had a flashing mental image of myself leaping out of the car to shout to him. “You lost your glove! It’s on the sidewalk behind you! Come back and get it!”

The Book’s Busy Day

The book had a busy day today, and I had a busy day running around after it!

First, the Nook edition is now available. You can find it here!

Someone just told me she was going to clean her house today, until she found out the Nook edition went live. Should I offer to go and vacuum, I wonder? Well, if I’m going to vacuum someone’s house, maybe I should start with mine…

True love, real life

We were in a wedding today. My whole little family. There were many lovely moments. Because we were in the wedding, we could see the faces of the bride and groom all the way through, smiling, tearing up, holding hands, thinking all the private thoughts that only they will ever know. It was one of those days that you know you’ll remember with a glow of golden light around it.

I loved watching the bride dance with her grandfather. I loved watching the bride’s mother as she watched the bride. But I think what I loved most of all was watching the couple’s first dance. There was something about the way they stood there together in that crowded room, so close together, face to face, holding one another the way you hold someone to help him stand, the way you hold someone who keeps you alive and well. There was such honest tenderness between them. They know each other so well already, and they chose to get married, knowing.

God bless and keep you, sweet friends.

Reading a book…

I just started reading a novel that might qualify as a member of the genre I was just discussing…Christian worldview, but simply because the characters are Christians, not because the author is out to hit us upside the head with his views. If it keeps up all through the book, I’ll be writing more about it here soon.

Fracture lines in Orthodox culture?

In our ongoing blog-versation about Orthodox culture, Jonathan Kotinek asked what  ”fracture lines” I see in the American Orthodox scene.  He noted that in his experience, the lines tend to be political lines, which in America usually means either liberal/conservative or Democrat/Republican.

I have certainly seen those lines also, especially here in Washington state where the same-sex marriage law is causing no end of acrimony and rhetoric on all sides, in and out of church.

But when I look at what I’ve seen of Orthodoxy (and I don’t pretend to be an expert), I see lines that are much deeper and more powerful than politics. The marriage law will be in the news for a while, and then it will be replaced by some other hot-button issue, and that issue will sink under another, and another. In some ways, politics are temporary. The beliefs underpinning the politics are not temporary.

Mowing and Musing

Today, I mowed my lawn.

On Thursday, I read a blog post by Jane Meyer that touched me. It’s lovely, and so are the photographs she included. But it reminded me of the quiet moments of my own life, the ones where I achieve a certain stillness, enough to reflect on the details of life around me and within me, and to understand who I am. These moments don’t come often. Not any more. I was thinking about that, after I read what Jane wrote. I feel sometimes like that sense of myself as someone to observe and understand belongs to a younger me. I was still figuring out what life was, then. Now, I’m living it. But do you ever feel, for a few minutes, as if you might lose yourself in the shuffle if you don’t find a way to be still once in a while?

Mowing my lawn is hardly an exercise in stillness. You may not be aware what an odyssey this mowing business is, in my life. You likely have not seen me stalking along behind the mower, cursing whatever president happened to be in office and further cursing his foreign policy and its impact on whatever ship my husband was on at that time. “If it weren’t for foreign policy,” I would mutter, shoving the grumpy mower over the uneven turf, “I might have some HELP mowing this blasted heath.”

Three Life Lessons, and a Caveat

After a few minutes in a Facebook conversation about my Orthodox culture post, I find myself inspired to share what I could easily call “Melinda’s Life Lesson #1.”

Which is:

Other people do not see themselves the way you see them.

You probably think this is a painfully obvious truth, but where is your evidence for that conclusion?