London I

What does a person do when they graduate with no plans, no husband, no sense of identity and a finance degree? They move to a foreign country… alone. I found myself walking along the streets of London, alone and swept up in the crowd. Hating myself for buying a round trip ticket that would not be headed home for six months. I had no job, no place to live, no friends but I felt this unwavering sense that the Spirit of God was with me, in me… and excited. I was horrified and lonely and scared but the Spirit was full of anticipation and I could feel it. It was the fellowship of the Spirit. I had to be that alone to experience it.
I literally wandered the streets for two weeks. I was living in a hostel, filling out applications to wait tables and looking for an affordable place to live…umm, in London. I walked around in a daze most days. I lost a lot of weight because I couldn’t get comfortable eating alone in restaurants and I didn’t know how else to get food. I just walked and walked and consistently found myself in internet cafes. I would write out my misery to my friends. “Me again…I haven’t heard myself speak in two days. Wondering if its going to come out in a British accent.”
I stopped one day in a coffee shop, and not knowing what else to do, I started to journal. This entry read like a prayer. I basically wrote out my wish list to God. I want to move out of the dirty hostel and live in a place where I can unpack my bags and don’t have to padlock them when I leave. I want some friends…actual people that I can talk to and maybe eat with. I would like a job so that I can make back some of this money that I’ve been spending. Ummm…anything else?...no, that about covers it. I looked at my list and I thought about how helpless I felt, then that newly realized friend, the overly excitable Spirit in me, asked me a few things.
“What do you expect from this time?”
“Um, I don’t know, something different I guess.” I answered.
“Do you believe that God is in control here?”
“Sure.”
“You want to have some fun?”
“Always.”
“What if you let go of the list?”
I had never felt so helpless in my life, so I figured, what could I lose? I ended my prayer by saying. “You know God, this list is what I want and feel like I need for survival. But let’s forget that…I want what you want. Do whatever you have in mind and I’m along for the ride.”
This prayer initiated a sequence of events that I could never have guessed. That very night I sat down for dinner in the home of one of my high school teachers…my mom’s friend who had moved to London a few years back. She lived on Abbey Road in an apartment that felt like an American home as soon as you stepped in the door. She had a knack for dinner parties and laid out a spread complete with hors d’oeuvres, grilled fish and warm rolls. She and her husband patiently listened to me ramble on and on, letting out all the words I had pent up in me for so long.
I told them of my adventures at the hostel and finding a place to live. That morning I had visited a potential living arrangement. It was a good part of town, not too dangerous. I would be living with an elderly woman who used Jesus Christ as her favorite expression of angst. She smoked and we would be sharing a bathroom. She hoped that I wouldn’t be cooking much because she didn’t want to share her kitchen. I guess it could be worse. It was the only affordable place I could find in the safe parts of town. My mother’s friend wouldn’t hear of it. She invited me to stay with them until I found a place of my own. The next day I checked out of the hostel and stayed in a warm bed in a home.
The Texas Embassy Cantina finally gave me an interview. Their manager had been in America for the last few weeks and he was the only person who could hire anyone. Upon his return, I sat down with him, answered his questions and started training a few days later. I was finally going to fulfill one of my dreams…to be a waitress.
The office where I got my visa was out of the way of everything in London. From almost anywhere you had to take two different trains on the tube then walk five blocks turn the corner onto a small narrow street, walk under scaffolding and enter a discreet black door. Inside, you would find many young people from all over the world busily trying to find a job and a place to live. There were postings all over the walls and people scrambling, using computers and printing out resumes (CV’s as they call them in Britain). I started going up there with no excuse other than a little social interaction. I had looked at all their postings for places to live and wasn’t comfortable with any of them. Is it so strange that I don’t want to live with guys I don’t know? Does that make me square?
I sat across the table from a girl that I later found out was from Texas. She was busy looking for a job and a place to live. She came with a few friends from college. What a novel concept...bring friends with you…stupid. We exchanged numbers, but since she already had friends in London I did not expect her to call me.
Later that night in my cozy home on Abbey Road I got a call from my new friend. She and her two friends would like to know if I wanted to live with them because having four people would lower their rent. Umm…I think that would work for me too. We found a tiny apartment on the third floor of an ancient building. (pictured above) Below us there was a hip hop record store called Major Flava. It was on the corner of Oxford St. and Tottenham Court Rd., within walking distance from my new job.
That is how I found myself where I was for the next six months only days after I prayed that prayer. Lets check the list again and see what God had compared to what I had…
1. I want to move out of the hostel…
God gave me a warm home that night, and an affordable and safe place to live in the next few days.
2. I want some friends…
God gave me three friends and roommates, all from Texas, all Christian.
3. I want a job..
God gave me the one job I really wanted. I was going to be a waitress at the only Tex-Mex Restaurant in London…right in Trafalgar Square.
While I don’t believe that God’s will always gets us all we want and more… God’s will sometimes has nothing to do with what we want. I do think that He delighted that I listened to His Spirit and that in this case it was His joy to be my provider when I had no one to take care of me. If its not too irreverent…I feel like he was a dog that knew just what he wanted to do, was even salivating over it, and as soon as I threw the stick of my own control, he set off with his mission. He could have done it either way, but He really wanted me to trust Him with it. I jumped out of a plane and instead of making sure I was paying attention to altitude and pulling the cord at just the right time, I just strapped myself in tandem with the Lord and enjoyed the ride. And this was only the beginning.

Flower Girl

I believe I was six years old when the thought came to me… “I have never been a flower girl.” The idea of a flower girl was so deliciously sweet and wonderful I had to find a way to do it. I wasn’t getting any younger. I thought of everyone I knew who was of marrying age. My aunt Jana… she’s nearly thirty! The next time I saw my aunt I casually asked her about her plans for marriage. You know, her time table. No reason, just wondering. “Honey, I don’t know if I’m ever getting married.” Blast that selfish woman! Doesn’t she know she’s my only hope of being a flower girl?
The image in my mind was a beautiful young girl…me of course…in a little white dress gently skipping through a crowd of people. She reaches in her basket to reveal it is full of flower petals. She lightly tosses them to either side of her, sprinkling the aisle with a pretty array of soft petals, giving the bride a beautiful path to walk down. The flower girl is a symbol of youth and beauty, purity and freedom. She captures people with her lovely radiance and her seemingly endless basket of beauty sprinkling the room and preparing it for the woman, the beloved. Like a fairy with her fairy dust. Oh that flower girls could have little wings and flitter about the entire room!
About a year later, I got my chance. Jana said yes to her boyfriend’s proposal. It was my golden opportunity. I was given a dress that was almost identical to the bride’s. Almost entirely lace with a big bow in the back. It was perfect. Everything was going as planned. Until the wedding day. We had rehearsed, but when the doors flung open and the music began, every head turned to look at me. I put my head down, walked step by step, trying to remember the pace that we practiced. I reached in my basket and dropped a few petals to my side before taking my place on the stage. Afterwards, everyone said I did a great job and that I looked beautiful. I knew somewhere inside that I wasn’t living up to my potential. It didn’t look anything like my vision.
I still relate to that little girl. Some weddings I have attended, the flower girls play the role to a tee. Completely unaware of themselves they twirl about, caught up in the beauty that is around them and in them. They capture the hearts of the audience, but, really, that was never their intent. They are simply enjoying being beauty. Granted, this usually happens with much younger girls, maybe four or five. Unfortunate. But I can see it in some women. You know the type. She wears her hair or clothes in ways that the rest of us can’t get away with. She has a scent that might be perfume or its possible that she emits a floral scent from her pores. She is not afraid to laugh loudly in public or cry…her makeup will not run. She is the first person you think of when someone talks about beauty. I think that every woman deep down wants to be her, its just part of being female. I am not that woman, but not for the reason's you might think.
I was running this morning and I came up behind an elderly woman. She was so enchanted with the hillside to our left that she was walking with her head completely turned to the side. Coming from behind her I noticed that her legs were so marked with age spots it was almost repulsive. How could she wear such short shorts? When I passed her she smiled at me with the most charming, youthful grin and said hello so warmly, I knew she was one of them. So unaware of herself that she exuded a beauty beyond the physical.
I am so constantly aware of myself. I am one of those that can’t pass a mirror or window without looking into it. Its not vanity, its that I’m checking my nose or my blemish or that piece of hair I couldn’t get to settle that morning. Maybe it is vanity come to think of it. I was praying this morning that the Lord would guard me from the darkness of fear, doubt and shame and replace it with love, kindness and generosity. Interesting that the first three are self-consuming and the last three are self-denying. Its so counter-intuitive that pouring out would actually fill us up.
That’s the power that the woman of beauty holds…its not that she was apportioned more beauty than the rest of us. Its her inability to see herself. Jane Austin would say she is unaffected. Most women, like myself, are not this way. We are absolutely affected. Starting at an impossibly young age we take hold of the idea that to be beautiful is to be lovable. We grasp and cling to anything that will make us more beautiful not realizing that the grasping and clinging are the ugliness. We apply and cover up and pierce and wax and clip and curl and straighten and nair and suck and boost all to get that natural look.
I’m starting to feel like I’m writing something I’ve read a million other places. I don’t have a problem with trying to look beautiful. That’s not my soapbox. My problem is with myself for holding back out of fear, doubt or shame and not taking the road of beauty…the road of life…not taking a chance. I don’t want to be the flower girl I was at seven. I want to take the vision of the woman I could be and live it…not with my head down…not half heartedly dropping petals. This life is my golden opportunity. In every situation I want to ask…where is the life?...where is the beauty?... and abide there. I will never be that woman of beauty; I think I try too hard. But I can dare to love, I can offer kindness and I can show generosity and there is so much beauty in that.

Jump

So I’m at the bank. I was going to give it six months, then nine months, then a year sounded good. Something was bound to come up…it always had. My first plan of marital bliss and babies wasn’t happening for me. Funny how we think we can plan those things when we are eighteen. It was becoming obvious at twenty-six that I was going to need a new plan… one that I had more control over. Control is a funny thing…when we think we have it, we realize we don’t at all and when we try to give it up we find ourselves taking it back before it even leaves our hands.
Growing up I spent countless hours jumping on the trampoline. It was solace to me. I would jump and jump and try with everything to jump straight into the sky and never come back down. I would jump until I had no breath to breathe then lay there looking at the sky, heaving and daydreaming. One day I would have a house where all the floors were made of trampoline. Of course it would have to have high ceilings and the floors would have to be dug out at least four feet below. I had thought of everything.
I learned many tricks as I prepared for the first Olympic gold medal in trampoline for the most back flips in a row. My record still stands at 32. But my favorite thing to do on the trampoline was to jump as high as I could in the air and lay out horizontally spreading my limbs as far as they would go out to the side, stretched to all four corners of the earth and wait for the impact of the canvas. As I allowed my body to receive the canvas it in turn threw me back into the air and on to my feet. I would do this over and over trying to embrace that sinking feeling.
This is what I felt as I continually tried to give my career to God during this time. I was ready to “let go and let God.” “God, you are so much more capable to make this decision than I am, I trust you to bring something perfect along and I give up complete control.” I kept getting confused when I found myself back on my feet again. Without the effort it took to jump there was no way to figure out what it feels like to fall.
I felt as if I was supposed to make the decision of what I will do with the rest of my life. I knew I could plan for the next year or the next six months even, but I wanted to ensure that I would never be in this position again. I’ve never been the type to know exactly what I wanted to do with my life, or even what I was really good at. I’ve been careful all along to make decisions that would provide me with more choices. Go to college so that I will have more career choices, go into business because there are so many different opportunities, finance has so many options for women and more varied career alternatives. That’s what someone with no plans or dreams other than getting married and having babies does. It was more of a waiting game than a path to something.
During college I also had the unfortunate timing of going through the phase of life where I have no idea who I am. I guess its all part of “coming of age,” but for me it was a true identity crisis. How do you make the decision that will forever be the answer to the question “What is your degree in?” when you are going through a phase like that? I had no defining sense of self; my choices were based solely off of what others were doing around me. I tried to convince myself that I liked my sorority and the date parties that came along with it. But I think they only fed the insecurities.
I made the friends of my life while I was in college. I am continually baffled that they saw anything beyond the false façade I was throwing out for everyone. I wasn’t purposefully trying to be fake, I just didn’t know what else to do. I prayed often that God would allow me to be myself, or even reveal to me who that is. It’s almost impossible to find any value in yourself when you don’t even know who that person is. I felt like a shell and I was ashamed.
But that was college. Sitting there at the bank four and a half years after college, I was well aware of who I was. I was so keenly aware of who I was that going to work everyday sometimes hurt. I would put on my suit and heels, dressing the part, but feeling more like I was dressing for Halloween. I worked hard, so hard that you might get the impression that I cared about my work. I would try to do as much work as I could possibly fit into my eight-hour day, knowing that every spare minute felt like an eternity. I guess a few people there got the idea that I was ambitious about my future at the bank. They started changing my title so that I would feel more important. Like Dwight… “Assistant to the Regional Manager to Assistant Regional Manager” I’m pretty sure I got the same promotion twice and they forgot they already gave it to me.
Eventually everything came to a head. I’m patiently waiting on God’s perfect timing (i.e. Crystal Ball) to reveal to me my future. More accurately stated, I am not doing anything toward changing my future because I’m preoccupied with daily life. Meanwhile, I start spending hours in the office of my boss’s boss’s boss. We keep having these discussions about my future at the bank…where do I see myself? He gives me some amazing options there, that timing and circumstance just randomly opened up. I start wondering about timing and circumstance. Day after day he calls me into his office and continues to question me and finally after a month or two of blowing smoke up his ars, I decide to be honest. “I could give this a shot, but you probably want someone in that position who is going to care more, who wants the job and sees a future in it.” I tell him I would love more than two weeks to figure out what’s next. He agrees to two more months.
Walking away from the bank at the end of May, I still had no job. I had a few irons in the fire and some hope for the future. This hope, though not as steady as a paycheck, provided me with so much more security. Ahh... hope. That old familiar friend. I floated from there…falling, falling, falling…embracing the sinking feeling. I anticipate landing on something that will not hurt or crush me. An impact that will accept me, the real me, and envelop me and throw me back onto my feet. But first I had to jump.

Suckers

The word sucker keeps popping into my mind lately. Its a label that kids put on people to imply that person has fallen for something that is less than something else they could have had. And the worst part of being a sucker is that its usually said behind your back…you don’t even realize you could have more. One of my worst fears is to find out at the end of my life that I spent most of it being a sucker…taken in by my culture, my surroundings…completely oblivious to true reality.
I open at Starbucks most days, which requires me to leave my house at 4:45 in the morning. I’m usually grabbing my green apron and my keys as I race out the door, hopefully remembering a banana or granola bar because my first ten-minute break won’t be for a few hours. That’s usually when I stop to realize that I did in fact wake up that morning and make decisions to get where I am at the moment.
The other day I was racing to work…not obeying the speed limit because after all I was the lone car on the desolate street. I come across a red light at which I obediently screech to a stop. My subconscious is annoyed, realizing the ridiculousness of stopping at an empty intersection, but there is a distinction in my mind between breaking traffic laws by speeding and breaking traffic laws by intentionally running a light. About that moment two tow trucks approach from the opposite direction. One makes a command decision to disregard the red light altogether. It speeds through the intersection as the other one slowly comes to a halt. There is a moment where the stopped tow truck and I seem to have a brief meeting of souls. Like when you accidentally make eye contact with someone from across the room and you both grin before looking away. “Hi, I see that you exist and I choose not to ignore it like most people. I’m of the friendly type and I see you are too.” In this case we are both the law-abiding type. We stare at each other for a brief moment. Then, in the same moment we are both hit with it…”We’re the suckers!” We simultaneously run the last few seconds of red light.

I decided to quit my job at the bank. I was only a measly credit analyst. Though you have to have a finance degree for that position, it is usually held by newly graduated students and they pay you as such. I was above it…I had graduated three years before I got the job. I had real world experience…three whole years of it. Most of my real world experience told me I would never like working at a bank. I took the job with my eyes wide open to this fact. Almost taking it as proof to myself, or my parents, or to society as a whole that it would never work out…me and corporate america. “See, I tried it! Now leave me alone…societal pressures.”
I worked there for a year and a half…no… a year and nine months. I felt trapped…by the windowless grey walls and the grey fabric of my cubicle. I felt taunted by the eagle in the picture framed above my desk that read “soar to new heights.” Next to my cubicle there were floor to ceiling file racks that we locked every night and unlocked every morning. They rolled on wheels through a groove in the floor and had a large spinning handle to separate them. Sometimes I felt like I was standing in between the walls of files and someone was slowly spinning the handle. It was probably Barbara, the eighty-year-old woman who decided my first day that she didn’t like me. As the walls came closing in around me I kept frantically looking for some way to escape, then wondering if I could find something to jam in the wheel to slow it down, then wondering if it was even worth it and I should just let it envelop me.
I quit four months ago and I am currently a Barista. I make lattes and sweep floors and exchange people’s money for sustenance. I am always moving, its fast paced and I love it. I love making the drinks and talking to the people. There is so much more life there than in my old cubicle. There are a few things, though, at Starbucks that make me feel like an underling working in the food service industry. My all black all leather shoes, the ten minute timer that we have to take on our breaks because we are not responsible enough to time them exactly and taking out the trash. The dumpster is around the side of the building and we have to roll the big black trash can behind us as we carry as much as we can in the other hand. It usually takes at least two trips to get all the stacked up bags out on a trash run. It is a humbling experience for me.
The other day there was a group of young business people standing on the sidewalk as I lugged the garbage along behind me heading for the dumpster. I had to ask them to move out of the way in order to pass. I glanced up and saw pity in the eyes of the good looking young man that just ordered a grande vanilla latte from me ten minutes before. For a brief moment I began to feel pitiful. But a few minutes later, as I walked back past them empty handed watching them try to impress each other and say just the right things to the right people, I said in a barely audible voice that sounded like Nelson from the Simpsons…”Suckers!”