So uncomfortably close.

I am pulling into a parking lot in front of a dorm and of course there is a car blocking me, which is to say there are students sitting and diddling on their phones and laughing and looking around, like, What? This is a parking lot and we're parked. Except you are totally blocking me from pulling around so I have to back up like a garbage truck in a straight line. I can feel myself so close to angry about this, genuinely irritated and even dangerously close to doing something productive like banging my steering wheel because, dumb dumb dumb people in cars.

[showmyads]

In the trunk of my car are two bags of clothes for a student who has none. This student comes from a place with a different climate than here. There are no warm clothes in this student's wardrobe nor is their support from parents to pay their tuition or to help the student in anyway. I crowdsourced some clothes and a sweet mama friend of mine gifted two garbage bags brimming with perfectly lovely threads. In a matter of a day, I am able to bring this student some warmth.

Here I am out in the car with my bags of goodwill, getting hopping mad at people I don't know, because they are unwittingly Getting in the Way of my Trying to do Good Here, People.

This is the staggeringly sobering thing about being human. How close we are at any given moment from doing the right thing and doing the totally evil thing. How thin is this ice upon which I skate gracefully or break through, plummeting into freezing darkness.

Lately the love for my children is making me swollen. Like my skin can't actually contain my love for being with them. And yet sometimes we are just driving home from getting the car washed where we watched and marveled at how the soapy spray of jet-suds cloaked our car and washed us clean, and one starts to bicker with the other in the backseat and heaven forbid the other lets it go and suddenly my head is ready to spin Exorcist-style and stuff is just gonna get real right now, y'all. Words are going to be expressed and not ignored.

How was Peter one day begging for the Savior not to leave him and the next totally stunned into denial of even knowing the man? How do I eat like a clean foods advocate and run like a maniac on the treadmill and then stand on the scale and feel total ill will toward my body?

We hover, we ride fences, we flirt with the lines of goodness and malice and we know how powerful and also how powerless we are from moment to moment to keep ourselves from our very selves.

5 Magnificent Mistakes I made in my Twenties #definingdecade

My students are all reading The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter--And How to Make the Most of Them Nowmostly because it is an assigned text for a psych course, but also because maybe the twenties are the new Freakonomics, the new Malcolm Gladwell, the new Rachael Ray all wrapped up in bacon and birthday cake. I don't know. The twenties are trending, though, am I right? I haven't read The Defining Decade and I'm probably missing out on a TED talk that summarizes it, but something tells me it won't be groundbreaking for me. Because I spend much of my day with people on the fringes or well entrenched in their twenties. Because I have experienced the twenties, the whole decade of them, and I've lived to tell about them, which makes me an expert, obviiiiousssslyyyyy.

If Dr. Meg Jay is right and the decisions made and relationships forged in the twenties are clutch and will dictate the failures and successes of the future, then let us ponder the magnificent mistakes by yours truly in her twenties?

1. I made the magnificent mistake of having good health insurance.

Oh yeah. That non-profit I worked at right out of college? It took away my soul and good nature but boy was that health insurance top rate. So good, in fact, that when I did the responsible thing of going to the dentist, they took one look at my loaded dental plan and prescribed me 11 fillings for the cavities I didn't have. They were just the beginnings of cavities, so future dentists have told me. Nevermind that I'd never had a cavity before. Nevermind that I didn't know what it was to "get a second opinion." I always wanted to know what having my skull drilled was like....

2. I married my college sweetheart.

And because we never broke up prior to getting married, I never had a chance to figure out if I was just psychotic *with him* or if it was just a part of my general charms and abilities that would emerge in any romantic relationship.

3. I believed all the nice things people said about me in college.

I had emerged from undergraduate actually buying that I had unique skills that companies would be falling over themselves to bring aboard to finally, finally complete their puzzle and achieve sustainable success, if only for my winning and unmatched copyediting abilities! Then I entered a world of Working People at Real Jobs that sort of frowned upon the notion of a siesta. I forgot that life wasn't grading on the A-F scale, but rather the Hired-or-Fired scale. I somehow missed the memo that I still had crazy copious volumes to learn about maturity and comporting self and doing a solid job.

4. I cried on my 26th birthday because it seemed too old to not have started my family yet.

Because who does that?

5. I spent six months studying to be a financial advisor and an insurance salesperson.

I failed. Really magnificently, I failed. I learned tons about self sabotage and blocking out every reasonable voice that tells you gently that maybe they saw you more doing something in the humanities? I threw away hundreds if not thousands of dollars and felt worthless and directionless and angry. And because of my spiritual and emotional poverty, I was able to hear the voice of God more clearly, calling me home. Which is why I'm so grateful for the twenties. The defining decade. The very definition of how faith broke down the doors to my heart and set me sailing on a sea of redemption. The magnificently mistaken twenties. Thank you, Lord, for them. Amen.

When church and the yoga studio are kind of the same place

Worry not. You didn't miss anything. I'm not going all Eastern religion on you. Sometimes I go to church on a Saturday (actually, I always go to church on Saturday, who am I fooling? I am married to the Jim Bob Duggar of Korean Adventists. Saturday morning, a-churching we will go!). Then I go to yoga on Sunday. And the church and the yoga studio? I've realized they are not so distinct from the other.

Yoga starts and it is hot as all get out. That's the point. You get all sweaty betty and your muscles loosen and hey! look! You're contorted like a seahorse, you flexy lexi!

Church can be equally steamy, or it's freezing cold. There is never a happy medium at church, have you noticed this? Either your make-up is melting off your face and the choir is passing out under its robes or you are shivering your tochis off and you no longer wonder why elderly women always wear seven cardigan sweaters on top of one another in July. It's because they spend so much time grocery shopping and at church. Which are also the same thing: the frozen food aisle and church.

Once you get into the yoga routine, you are trying mightily to keep your third eye open, and I don't even know what that really means, other than the yoga instructors always say it when we're supposed to Be Mindful and Have Awareness. Awareness of how many women in the studio are wearing lululemon athletica and how I'm wearing Target yoga pants from 2001? Oh sorry, not that?

Everyone knows church is a fashion show. It will always be a showcase. The hats, the bags, the shoes, the dresses. I have nothing new to contribute to this, other than that I've lived in four different regions of the country: Midwest, Midatlantic, New England, Southeast and it is all the same. Except in the Midwest. People sometimes wear sneakers (white! ghastly!) to church and that is pure blasphemy in the South.

By the time we're really into the vinyasa flow of the yoga class, the instructor will say something like, "Yoga is all about showing up. You show up for your practice and that is enough." I always internalize this because this is often the point in the class when I do a faceplant onto my mat after attempting crow or eagle and then I remember I'm not a flying species. So I can hear the yoga teacher offering these platitudes for the class while totally looking straight at me (maybe with her third eye?), like, Hey girl. Points for trying.

Back when I was a reluctant churchgoer in the Haus of Catholicism, my old man told me that once I made my first communion, I had to go to church every week. And that happened. Every week for a long lot of years. You pretty much had to be hit by a stray bullet to get a church pass when I was growing up. When I got to college, I still went to church. I can't say for sure if it was the Catholic guilt or if it was what my dad said, about having reached a part in my life where I was grown up enough to have to do something like go to church on a weekly basis. I'd like to think that somewhere I've always believed that we gain a blessing just by showing up. Sometimes our church practice, like our yoga practice, is just lazy and sloppy and tired. Sometimes we're feeling strong and secure in our pew or on our mat and we're smiling even when the sermon or the vinyasa runs a little long or gets a tad repetitive. Showing up. It takes courage, doesn't it? For church where we sing and sit and listen and pick the play-dough out of the carpet that we foolishly brought thinking it would occupy our children when really it is occupying our time in the wrong way. For yoga we sit and bend and starfish out next to the guy who is sweating out the garlic he ate for lunch.

Church and yoga studios are, for all appearances, neat and tidy places. But they are in the business of doing very messy work. We sit on parallel seats, be they pews or mats, and we try to stay quiet except for when we're not meant to be quiet, as with singing or heavy breathing. We follow our cues like good little boys and girls but then the past week's stresses come pouring out, sometimes without warning. Something strikes us as true in a sermon or something pinches a muscle that we overexerted this week and the real messy stuff comes uninvited. And yet, this is precisely where it should be.

Because beyond the climate control and fashion show and the whole attendance policy is this sacred space where hurts are dealt with and minds are allowed to focus or run wild and people grapple with the eternal and the right now.

At the end of a yoga class, the yogis bow with their third eye and utter a Namaste. Sometimes they clap. Good job. I've been enriched by you practicing alongside me. Even if your lululemon swag offends me with its cuteness and your sweat is now all over my mat.

At the end of a church service, we usually close the service with a blessing and a song. The difference I see is that the work was not just about what happened here in the service, but ultimately, about what Jesus did for us; this worship was just a response to that glorious sacrifice, that eternal expression of perfect love.

We all need our sacred spaces where we feel a sense of predictable and orderliness but aren't afraid to deal with the untidy business of life, either. The most important part, in my view, is that we be changed by the sacred, that we not file the experience away as another class, another worship service.

I want always to be changed because of what Jesus changed for this world and by what He is preparing for us in the next. I strive to be changed by showing up, no matter the weather inside or out, and no matter what I'm wearing on the outside or what's happening to me on the inside.

Change me, Lord. That this little body might be something of its own little sacred space. Hot and cold, strong and weak, fancy and sloppy, totally neat and one giant mess in need of your grace.