bags full of crumbs

Hi, friends! Thanks for coming to check out my blog. I'm really excited to start keeping it. Not only have I really been helped by reading other people's blogs, and recognized a lot of my own questions and joys in theirs, but it's also been helping me lately to write about stuff (okay, to think about what I would write if I wrote stuff) and just give my crazy thoughts some sense of order.

I became a Christian a little over a year ago, and I'm still (daily) finding out what exactly that means. What it means to me intellectually and emotionally, what it means about how I live and think, what it means to other people-- I don't expect any of these things to ever stop being affected or to stop changing based on the life and identity I've found opened up before me. Anyway, I was thinking about how much I still need to learn about giving. A huge part of Christianity is about "losing yourself"-- those who lose themselves end up finding themselves, those who give of themselves still get filled up. Sometimes I think it's possible to feel so full that the giving never even depletes you to begin with; you just stay up to the brim all the time-- everything you give is just overflow. I'm not really there yet.

At the source of my difficulty with giving is this: I'm overly concerned with equality. Quid pro quo is not the way we are meant to live. Demanding that I never be indebted to anyone nor they to me, in terms of favors, money, time, affection, anything-- is not only unreasonable, it's confining. It brings about a mechanical type of relating that is more concerned about evening out the scales than about the reality of each person's heart or needs. I'm sick of doing head math, thinking of what I owe and am owed.

So anyway, feed the birds. It was the image of a piece of bread, and hands pinching off little bits of it and tossing out those bits for--whomever. That's what the conscious act of giving and letting go feels like to me right now. That's what I hope this blog will be.  And it's a hope that eventually, the changes inside me will amount to more than just crumbs.