A few weeks ago, my brother texted me and said, “Why don’t you update your blog anymore?” 

I’ve been meaning to, but it seems like blogging gets pushed to the very bottom of my to-do list anymore ((beneath chores, working-out, church stuff, sewing, editing photos, playing Super Mario Wii with Funnel, etc.))   Sometimes life just gets in the way.

This evening, I was reflecting on some of the big things that stood out to me this year:

Funnel and I bought a house. Buying a house was one of those things that we desperately wanted from the time we got married, but it always seemed so far off and impossible.  I am so thankful that we were able to finally do it this year. And I have a confession: I honestly wasn’t 100% sure about our house the night we put in our offer.  It was smaller than I had hoped, it was neglected and beat-up and filthy, and that all scared me.   And now I’m in love with it.  I think it’s adorable and homey, and it’s ours.   I told Funnel, “I don’t know if I want another house after this.  I think I might want to live here forever. ”

We found our church.  It was almost a year ago that Funnel and I started attending Xenos Christian Fellowship.  I’ve never been to a fellowship like it: it’s basically a community of “home churches” and we were invited to a home church by our friends Joe and Michele (I photographed their wedding two years ago) and we loved it.  I love doing church in this way: enjoying a meal with our friends, studying the bible in someone’s living room, praying together.  And within our home church, I’m in an even smaller group of women that meet every other week to read the bible, pray together and really just share what’s going on in our lives.  I am so thankful to be around people who love the Lord so much, and I’m really starting to understand what “community” is supposed to look like.   I love our church and I love the people in it.

Loveletter Photography is growing.  I had so much fun with the weddings I shot this year, and I am encouraged to think that I am a little closer to the day when I can quit my “day job” and do photography full time.   I love weddings, and I love, love, love that we live in an age that there is equipment that can document forever the most fleeting and precious of moments. 

I was reminded of how fragile life is.    This year, so many of our family and friends and co-workers were bombarded with death, loss, tragedy, cancer, illness.  I think I am more aware than I ever have been in my life of how fleeting our time on earth is .  Tomorrow is never guaranteed – for any of us.  It’s something that is on my mind a lot now.  This is something I wrote after my cousin’s son past away in February:

- the counterpart -

i go through periods of my life where i am consumed with death. thinking about the ways people die, how it feels to die, the transition into the afterlife, heaven, hell, epitaphs and obituaries. i don’t mean to be morbid, but i am just being honest. i am very afraid of losing the people i love, and even dying myself, and i have to really fight away these thoughts so that i can think and behave like a relatively normal person.

this last bit, was brought on by corey’s death. the little four-year-old son of my cousin.

a child is the last one you expect to die. especially a child in your family. you hear about a child dying on the news, but that is normal, expected. it doesn’t happen to people you know, people you love.

but it does.

and i wonder, sometimes, what else is written in my life book. what other “unexpecteds”. what other sadness. what other funerals i will attend.

but you can’t live like that, worrying, wondering, fearing.

thinking about one of the people who spoke at corey’s funeral. he talked about the human condition. we are embodied creatures and embodiment gives us the freedom to run, and laugh and play. to have picnics and go on long walks and clutch the people we love close to us. but being embodied means that we will stumble, fall, break limbs, break hearts. die. we can’t embrace the good and reject the bad. we have to accept it all.

in the good times, we have to be aware of the counterpart. not dwelling on it, like i often do, but be aware of it in the back of our minds. and in the sadness, we must think of the joy we have experienced. and will experience again.

I am thankful for 2009.  And I am excited for 2010.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 31st, 2009 at 1:24 pm and is filed under rock + paper + hand grenade. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.