(xaris and shalom)

"Hi, Hannah?" my doctor said when he called me this morning, sounding weary and apologetic.  "Your test came back positive." Aside from feeling like I have a sinus infection -- which is not surprising, as the weather in western Pennsylvania has been jumping up and down all through the fall -- I've felt fine.  Well, aside from that and the growing craziness as we go on week three of quarantining at home. We're thankful, still, that we knew  almost immediately after coming home from Thanksgiving that we had been exposed to covid.  (Something about our housemate not being able to smell or taste anything was a significant tipoff.)  We're thankful to get to make sure that we don't spread it, especially since many in our congregation are older, and one of our ministry team members has plenty of respiratory complications without any additional virus.  We're thankful that my jobs aren't impacted by me needing to stay at home, and that Jason has a job

Here's a curious thing that I find in myself: the more I experience the provision of God, the greater is the temptation that I feel to stress over doing enough to take care of myself.  The more I've been given, the more I feel like I should be able to justify why I deserved it.   Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash This point was illustrated (in case I needed illustration to convince me) when my husband suddenly lost his job yesterday.  Why am I so stressed about this?  I wondered this morning as my mind spun with schemes of how we can make up the gap in our income.  After all, a year and a half ago I moved back from China and had absolutely no idea what job I'd find.  I rented an apartment and settled into a community before I found a job, took a month to breathe and begin to reacclimatize to life in the US, and ended up with a job (at Sheetz) and a half (with Write Your Way Academy) and everything, everything , that I needed was provided for. Immediately, my heart be

Photo by Hannah Domsic on Unsplash I'm not a very serious gardener as of yet, but moving into an actual house this past spring opened up some possibilities for me to invest a little more in dreaming about growing things and cultivating our outdoor space as we do with the indoor.  Between wedding gifts and a church full of avid and generous gardeners, we soon found ourselves well equipped with a variety of containers, happily started plants, and abundant advice.  I set up a row of containers along one side of our yard and we got to enjoy some cucumbers, a few cherry tomatoes, quite a few peppers, and fresh herbs in everything .   My dreams for next year involved rototilling up one side of the yard (conveniently partitioned off by the sidewalk.) We broke down cardboard boxes for a month or two and now have that space pretty well covered with a layer of cardboard weighted down with a motley assortment of heavy junk -- pots, Adirondack chairs, an old shelf that's destined for the

Glory be to God for mundane things -- for Boo hanging from the attic vent; for yeast slowly stretching gluten strands; fun fabric for masks; stairway conversations; the grace of learning a new baby's name; and music streamed in this unsung season. All things small, quiet, discordant, unseen; whatever is sought, crafted (who knows why?) by hands, speech, instinct, need, delight He holds it all together in His joy: Praise Him. (For FVC, with obvious thanks to Gerard Manley Hopkins and Pied Beauty )

Although this blog has been quiet, life has been full (as usual.)  At the beginning of September, I ended my job working at Sheetz.  I really enjoyed my coworkers and many of our regulars, and I was very thankful for the steady income God provided through it (despite me initially saying "No way!" when my dad suggested I apply to a gas station!) and shifting to working from home felt a little bit like stepping out of a nice, solid boat and onto a very uncertain body of water.  Cool?  Foolhardy?  Incredible?  Anyway, it was time -- working overnight shifts was alright while I was single and lived a few blocks away, but it was much less ideal when married and living miles away instead. So I quit, Jason and I went camping with some friends from our small group, and I came home and plunged into new jobs -- working for Uncommon Universes Press and for Write At Home .  It has been a delight to get to deal with books and students and my heart is so happy with that shift.  Not only d

My house just finished our second watch-through of Hamilton  yesterday, this time with lots of commentary as we assessed characters, their motivations, their shortcomings, their shattered dreams, and ways they shoot themselves in the foot.   Aaron Burr in particular.   (photo by Xu Haiwei, from unsplash.com ) "If you were waiting for the opportune moment," Jason said as we watched, " that  was it." I find Burr a relatable character for many reasons -- his exasperation with Hamilton, his willingness to hold on and wait for what he wants, his reluctance to commit to something that he isn't sure how it's going to end.  His aversion to risk.  And it is almost viscerally painful to watch his character arc through the musical, how he is always just a little  too late to commit to a course of action, how the one time that he finally decides to pull the trigger is exactly the wrong and worst possible time to do it.  There are many threads of tragedy in the stories t

A week or two ago, I wrote a statement of interest for Signum University's summit on teaching the humanities, and realized that in order to talk about why I was interested, I needed to start by talking about my education before college.  It always feels to me like a gross misrepresentation when job applications only give the option of reporting educational history beginning with college -- the years that came before were incredibly formative and what I did in college felt like a continuation of my previous education, not like the beginning of something new. I was talking with my friend Catie (currently getting her MA in Higher Education) about this and she made the point that college really should  be a capstone. And then I was talking with my mom about it all, and she said that it was encouraging and why didn't I publicly share what I had written, so that others who are deep in educating their kids might also be encouraged by the perspectiv

It's still humbling to recall how, when news of the covid-19 pandemic first broke, I didn't think it was going to be a problem here.  Months and thousands of deaths later, with friends who have suffered from sickness and loss, it's obvious that I was incredibly wrong in my assessment of the situation.  I couldn't have guessed at how the spring and summer would unfold, at the changes that were written in the next few pages and chapters of my life that I never would have seen coming. hiking at the end of March with housemates April went by in a blur of confusion and exhaustion and grief as the US scrambled and reeled and states staggered with making decisions about how to cope with an incoming wave of devastation.  Pennsylvania's governor instituted a stay-at-home order that was prolonged a couple of times for the county I live in, which brought a twist I had never imagined to Jason's and my season of engagement -- in the same country, even the same county, yet no

Some moments feel like not only ordinary moments, but bear a weight of being a moment in history .  Times that I want to remember in years to come, to look back and recall we were together  and what a time that was. Thursday evening a group of us tugged and lifted and hauled all of the furniture and accoutrements of the sanctuary back towards the spaces where they belong.  And we followed a seating map for how to group chairs, measuring the distance in between (and being thankful for once that humans are such creatures of habit that we mostly sit in the same spot week after week anyway.) I've been back in the US for a year and a lot of my life has flowed through that building -- Sunday mornings, confirmation classes on Tuesday afternoons, and most recently, my wedding.  It felt good to be back in it, to look around and think, These are the people who I get to figure out how to do church during a pandemic with.  Although we wouldn't have chosen a pandemic, there i

After the months of watching COVID-19 roll west from China, like waves coming in that seem far away until suddenly they're knocking you over and pulling you under, it felt like life in the US changed overnight.  Many of us have been groping for the words to use to describe what we're living through.  Worldwide trauma, waking up in a dystopian movie, so weird, unfathomable.  We try out different comparisons: is it like the influenza pandemic of 1918?  like 9-11?  like fighting in the US war with Vietnam?  Each person, it seems, has their own story of when the crisis became real to them -- stories that I expect we'll be processing and listening to and talking about for years to come. More and more, the unfolding of this pandemic reminds me of my experiences living in China, only this time, it's like the entire world just got slammed down into a foreign country -- one that none of us chose to be in, one that we don't have a return ticket from (yet), one where som

Yesterday afternoon I went on a walk and after a short distance, saw this ahead of me. Well, that's how life feels , I thought. If you don't know me, this is not how I work.  I don't slow down for speed bumps (sorry, Dad, about what that does to the car) literally or metaphorically (sorry, Susan, for always making fun of you for doing the same thing.) But there I was, with a tree down across the path, and then a chainlink fence right after that.  Okay, I guess that's the end. I can't say it had been a particularly happy walk up to that point.  I was on the verge of tears, trying to wrap my head around how much the world has changed in the past week.  I'm grieving the loss of normalcy, of good rhythms and structures.  And I'm grieving the very real possibility that Jason and my wedding in June may not look anything like what we had planned. It's not as if I think that our marriage is going to be seriously harmed or that the world will fall ap

(I'm not a medical expert and I'm not writing with any claim to extraordinary perspective on the unfolding situation; I'm guessing that in a few months -- or weeks -- I'll look back and wonder what I was thinking.  But writing is how I process, and I'd rather be able to look back at some of the process later on than rewrite my thoughts to sound wiser than I actually am.) Grief When the news of COVID-19 first hit, an epidemic in China, I was concerned for my friends and former students and colleagues in China (and the ones who were just leaving China for a conference in Thailand.)  I was not  particularly concerned about it hitting the US; there has been plenty of panic in my lifetime over possible terrible pandemics that either didn't turn out to be nearly as bad as the hype or didn't end up coming anywhere near where I lived.  A few students messaged me about being stuck at home and bored; friends shared updates as they scrambled to figure out plans

A week or two ago, I posted on social media: "Out of the depths I cry to You/ In darkest places I will call/ Incline Your ear to me anew/ And hear my cry for mercy, Lord.../ I will wait for You, I will wait for You/ On Your Word I will rely/ I will wait for You, surely wait for You/ Till my soul is satisfied." {Shane & Shane} This time of year is, weirdly frequently, one where there seems to be incredible amounts of chaos and devastation going on in the lives of people I love. Whether it's cancer, depression, anxiety, suicide, break ups, or other drama, it usually feels like there's this desperate attempt of darkness to achieve a strangle hold as winter dies and we look forward to celebrating Christ's resurrection. I've appreciated the words of other Christians -- psalmists, songwriters, story tellers, prayer warriors -- who give voice to the depths of the darkness we experience and the sure hope of the light to come. And today, I'm thankful fo

I had a realization this weekend, which seemed blindingly obvious once I got there, but it took a while.  While I believe that God loves me, I don't really trust Him to keep  loving me.  I hope that He will.  I know, intellectually, that He will.  But on a practical, gut-level, I don't fully trust  it.  I want a backup plan.  That doubt spills over into a lot of other areas of my life -- if I don't trust God to love me unconditionally and always, how would I trust other people to love me when I don't feel like I'm earning it? Dave, by the grace of God, ended up preaching a sermon on Sunday that spoke to the exact things that I was thinking about, and reminded us that the gift of the Holy Spirit is an ongoing evidence of God's faithful love to us.  I am also reminded of God's faithful love, that He knows me  and loves me , by small signs in my every day life.  ...for example, finding a bubble tea shop the very day after I told Jason how much I wanted