Changing

I decided it was time to change the design of the blog.  This blog is no longer about "Life in a Chinese Foster Home."  It's about life now and here.  I'm not going to lie... it's a hard transition for me to make.  (And to be fully honest, a big part of the reason why I rarely write.  I was the "life in a Chinese foster home" blogger.  Now that I'm not that, I seemed to have a hard time seeing myself as anything else.)  How hard it is to fully remain in the present, for as Brennan Manning said in his beautiful book, Ruthless Trust, it often feels like nowhere. 

So I'm going to be working on a new look... might take me some time.  But I felt like I needed to at least start the change, and I gotta say... it made me a little sad.

For now, I'm leaving you with some beautiful words written by a dear friend, Katrina.  She sent them in an email to me and several others this morning.  I asked if I could share them with you, and she said yes...  the theme of change, God doing something new in a sometimes chaotic and "unorganized" way, the fact that sometimes His creation looks like destruction to our orderly human eyes... all of that just spoke to me this morning, and I wanted to share it.

The mundane is often the most beautiful.

Straight lines, the perfect kind of 180 degree angles, are the creation of man.

I walk home every evening, admiring tall glass storefronts cut into perfect squares and rectangles.  A Holiday Inn near my home is being constructed from the ground up.  Every day I see the progress.  There are concrete-lain staircases at least 4 stories tall, waiting for the rest of the building to be erected.  Cranes and scaffolding change each day.  I watch men connected to cables be lifted towards the heavens, to drill into metal beams. Only a block away, buildings hundreds of years old are settled along the street row with roofs and windows and doorways, all cut from straight lines.  Every window, every archway, is unique.  The sidewalks under my feet are in blocks, divided by lines that were produced from a mold, from a stick, from an instrument that measured 180 degrees.

In nature, there are no beautiful straight lines.  The stripes in a tiger's fur, the jagged bolt of lightening through a night sky, the rings of a tree, stem of a flower. They are all round or jagged or slightly slanted.  God doesn't own a ruler or a protractor up in space.  His hands don't follow rules.  And when we least expect it, He cracks the edges of a perfectly planned sidewalk with rain.  He sinks the foundation of 100 year old buildings, bringing windows and doorways into tilts.  The roots of trees grow up through cemeteries, pushing over 17th century headstones, slowly cracking through perfectly pressed letters that spell the name and dates of a time and friend once fondly remembered.