Saturday already

Hello dear friends.  I'm so very sorry to keep you, my half-million followers, waiting for the next episode of Extraordinarly Everyday.  Please accept my sincere apologies.

First, I give you some pictures from one of our recent outings to Indianola.  Indianola is a small town about five minutes away, with a great long pier and a rocky beach, each rock begging for an Ifland child's hand to hurl it into the water.  The Ifland children are more than willing to oblige, and so we pass our time choosing the perfect rocks, launching them through the air and waiting for the satisfying 'plunk.'

Things continue to roll along in a somewhat elliptical fashion, and while sometimes the days seem long, the truth is that the past month has held enough eventful change to last this (half-)Mennonite girl a good, long while (has it really only been a month?).  We are in the process of buying a house over in Seattle, and are thrilled with the prospects and promises it holds.  We are so thankful for the help of family during this geographic limbo, help which has made this necessarily awkward transition a little less awkward.  It is impossible to imagine how much harder this month would have been without their help (and their washing machine).  We have endured long, long hours of The Husband working late into the night (to make up for all the daytime work hours missed due to the logistics of setting up insurance and an American mortage and banking and new driver's licenses and and and...).

I am sitting next to Orion now, he in the gray rocker and me in the blue rocker, each of us with a laptop resting on our knees.  He is working; I've been looking at pictures of friends in Winnipeg.  You.  I miss you deeply.

*sigh

We're okay; just a little tired.  Orion gave me the beautiful gift of a morning in Bloedel Reserve all by myself, and it was the perfect gift.  I walked through the trees and rhododendrons, I listened, I looked, and I sat by a quiet pond and wrote a few lines of (mediocre) poetry.

dragonflies dancing over the water

the water lies still, gently shimmering with the ripples of quietly pulsing life

countless shades of green

breathtaking in the light and shadows

water reflecting the growth encircling it

light shimmering on the water reflected in translucent leaves hanging above it

it sings His glory

I am learning to worship in the everyday, with the rough stones that I have on hand, not waiting for the ever-elusive right moment.  In the midst of the uncertainty, in the midst of trying to plan another meal in a kitchen kindly stocked with utensils which are not my own, in the midst of the incessant "MOMMY MOMMY MOMMY MOMMY!," I can choose to give thanks.  I can choose to worship.

Let us remember that the life in which we ought to be interested is "daily" life.  We can, each of us, only call the present time our own....Our Lord tells us to pray for today, and so he prevents us from tormenting ourselves about tomorrow.  It is as if [God] were to say to us: "[It is I] who gives you this day [and] will also give you what you need for this day.  [It is I] who makes the sun to rise.  [It is I] who scatters the darkness of night and reveals to you the rays of the sun." 

-Gregory of Nyssa,

On the Lord's Prayer