Saint + Loving Prankster=Friend.

Suddenly I'm voracious for writing, for filling the world with my words. making sense out of things.
I wrote a lot here in 2009.
I had a lot of stuff to write about. Not events, but big soul-searching stuff that was essential for me to move forward.

A lot of thinking and processing with fabulous friends about futures. Sometimes we may have included boys.
Now I'm married to one.
But last night as I was walking to my car from the Christmas concert with all the old ladies wearing Christmas red sweaters with appliques from 1982 I thought about one boy.
I never loved this boy in a romantic way.
But I loved him.
We had a relationship that I'll never have with another boy again--and that's not in a dramatic way, just a manifestation of what it meant to have something so unique and precious.

I've never been one of those girls that's always like, "oh-em-gee, I've always had more guy friends than girl friends. Girls are too much drama." Those girls are the girls I would like to shake and kick their teeth in, because what the heck? You are a girl. Anyway.

It started with pranks, like throwing water on us or turning off the power to our apartment. And I thought I was a good prankster, with my can of tuna fish under the couch. Child's play.

Somehow the pranks transitioned seamlessly into him being the big brother of our apartment, baking special cookies for us, taking us small 19-year-olds for rides in his car or inviting us to his fancy apartment for smoothie night, hot chocolate night, a special Valentine's Day dinner just for us friends. He was not usually in charge, but always the light bulb that all the people gathered around. He had quiet brilliance about him.
Intellectual brilliance, and emotional brilliance. He wrote neuroscience all over our whiteboard one night.

We asked his advice on everything. He joked with us and told us about the girls he was liking and we gave him wimpy know-it-all love advice back for good measure.

He was so wise, and I don't know what made that relationship flower in the first place because we were still a clump of teenage girls doing big soul searching while he'd been on the planet for ten years longer, loving and learning and sitting there with lots of things figured out for eons. I mean, we were just so freakin cool, I guess that must have been it.

I spent a lot of journal entries trying to convince myself to love him romantic-kind.
See? Clueless.
I especially have no idea why I did that since it wasn't like he loved me romantic-kind. Gosh I'm funny.

He cared for us that year, made sure we didn't do anything totally horrifying that would haunt us forever. We loved his playful sarcasm and his hilarious laugh and the way he would come over and talk for hours, as if we were his favorite people in the world.

I loved Ian Morris.
He is a saint and a real friend.

Amazed.

It's sometimes hard for me to believe that God doesn't get sick of my prayers, which are mostly all the same. A whole lot of "please help me"--over and over again. Sometimes, I'm just amazed that He's not just like, "Oh, you need something again?" "This girl again?"

But when I get humbled and realize (again) that I can't do whatever I've been banging my head on brick thinking I can do, He is there, waiting and anxious for that moment. Never resentfully. Never tapping His foot and watching the clock and wondering when I'm going to get past my latest bout of dumbness. I guess I figure as the Maker of the universe He might have more important things to do than pay attention to my mood swings or the small happenings of day-to-day existence as Brooke Schultz, but the miraculous thing is: He considers that intimate care of His children the most important thing.

This is the point where I get frustrated: I want to use something besides the maddening word 'indescribable,' although it is. I'll try to tell you.

See, God isn't just some wispy ghosty existence out in the middle of nowhere in the middle of everywhere and all heavenly and inaccessible. He's in each of us raw human beings. He's near me when I do wonderful things and when I'm failing at trying to move past my mountainous weaknesses, whether I ask Him there or notice Him there. When I, like Peter, cry out for the Lord to save me because my faith falters, He comes to my aid immediately.

But He doesn't pull me out to a paradise with white sand and lead me to a pile of glittery faith, mine for the taking. He still requires a lot of steps into the darkness, darkness that seems so thick and powerful that I get afraid. But I only get afraid because I've forgotten the full extent of the light--how penetrating it is, how infinite and limitless.

I have a hard time getting my puny brain around 'infinite', when I spend a lot of money and time replenishing things that run out--groceries, patience, light bulbs. It's beyond me that someone's power and love and grace could all be bottomless pits of abundance, never scarce, enough to go around for me no matter how many times my prayers are lackluster or how many times I have to back up and ask for the desire to keep going instead of asking for opportunities to do incredible things.

I want to say that God has magnified my tiny efforts to nurture it and He has made faith bloom in me. Sometimes I neglect it and petals drop off; sometimes seasons of my life make it more susceptible to withering; Mostly I just try to keep going, while trying to avoid running faster than I've strength.

It's just amazing that God cares about that whole process and recognizes its hugeness, even if it's easy as pie for other people. It's amazing that He stands by me through my stupidity because He knows I can be better, and He supports me in attempts at progress even when those steps seem so baby I'm not sure if they count.

This all sounds like I'm going through something gargantuan and hard, but I'm not. In trying to live with greater awareness and presence I'm not always ready for what I find, and that's what this is about. I'm just amazed, constantly, that change is possible through a perfect being--a debt I will never be able to repay.

I want my life to be molded by Him.