This is how you know you're loved:

When your dear ones spend 

quality time together in a totally different state,

 but text you and call you until you answer the phone,

to make sure you never doubt it.

For all these things, amen.

Tell them:

"At twilight you will eat meat,

and in the morning you will be filled with bread.

Then you will know

that I am the Lord your God."

[Exodus 16]

It's called:

Tiny kitchen/love to cook problems.

It's called: This is what Saturday morning is for.

My favorite little baker

"Don't think I'm weird," she says,

"but can we make it a baking night?"

I had to laugh

I just came upstairs to this:

Yes,

that's how I feel too.

There is More

This morning I wake up, early early.
I lie on my bed in the black moon dark,
and my mind is alive
with the hurts and the needs of
the ones my heart loves.
~~
I remember
a bright mid-day, lying flat on my bed,
back before my innocence got kicked
straight out from under me,
many years now, ago.

Was I napping? Just reflecting?
I saw before my eyes three visions.

I was not raised to know visions,
or to trust them as True.
I forgot them as soon I saw them.

They said: I would enter into a time of refinement,
that it was exactly where God wanted me to be,
that He was doing His work.

I didn't understand this, of course,
until after I'd walked through the season to follow,
so burning so dark so brutal.

Until after I was delivered from it,
by what can only be called the powerful hand of the Lord.

Those visions returned after a time
to my mind,
and I understood:

He had shown me my exile,
the place where I would learn Him.
~~
Then He called me out, into a spacious place,
and my mind was set free, to see.

Visions are commonplace to me now;
days that go by without one
have become the strange thing.

~~

In the early days of healing
I sat in a room with others, praying.
I was still reeling, from the brutal and the delivering.
I sat with my eyes bowed, and listened.

And then my head snapped up and I thought,
"what was that?"
Because in my mind's eye I saw:

A king, dressed in finest finest robes,
kneeling before a simple man dressed in sheath of white,
and the king held a sword across both of his hands.
He knelt before the simple man,
and he offered Him his sword.
And the simple man bent,
and took it.

The king, was me. The simple man, was Jesus.
And ever since, in every daily thing,
my prayer has been:

Lord, I hand you my sword.
~~
This morning I wake up, early early.
I lie on my bed in the black moon dark,
and my mind is alive
with the hurts and the needs of
the ones my heart loves.

And I remember the journey from innocence
through darkness
and into Truth and Light.

And I look at the hard stories of those I love
held here in my hands. The hopes and the dreams
and the delay of them, even decimation.
And I think:

He will do whatever it takes,
to loosen our grasp on this earth we call home.
He will do whatever it takes,
so that we might know: There is more.

That we might be given the grace
to kneel before His feet and say:
Here, take it. It's yours.

A New Year

My life has always revolved on an Academic Calendar,

and hence, here we are, at the New Year.

This year finds me a real grown up, 

with a multi-year contract, and a big fancy title:

​

Lauren Kooistra, Ph.D.

Associate Director & Research Associate 

Institute for the Arts and Humanities

The Pennsylvania State University

I even have a grown-up parking pass now,

indication that I have, indeed, arrived.

You might think that a new year might find me tucked safely back in my Penn State cottage, after a summer of working from home, but alas.

Renovations never take the time we think they might,

especially when the building is old,

and termites have been--apparently--rampant.

And so, this new year finds me relegated out 

to temporary space on the edges of campus,

in what I'm not even sure we can call "campus".

We moved in this week,

into what was the old Child Study Center--
which means that this giant mirror 

across from my desk is actually a two-way mirror,
used way back in the day to covertly study the behaviors of children

from a weird hidden chamber
tucked into the middle of a corridor of rooms.

It's kind of creepy, but kind of fitting,

all the same.

So today is my first day without getting-settled drama.

On my way over I thought,

"gosh, I'd like some coffee,

but on this end of town there isn't a convenient place."

And then, I remembered:

There's a Dunkin' in the gas station I go right past! 

And then I found:

A Dunkin' gift card goldmine sitting in my wallet,

from many years ago.

And so, treasures given long ago bear their fruit today.

Good news to remember,

as I settle in to This New Year.