My work environment has changed drastically in the last couple weeks. The first month or so was this frenzied ad campaign and I just never felt caught up, much less able to really be trained on the basics of my job. But now I have much more time on my hands at work and it feels good. Now if only I could just enjoy it and not move on to other more personal tasks and worries.

I am thinking a lot about my friends today and this week. This week feels pretty heavy with the election. A lot of my family and dear friends feel so differently from me. How can it be that you can connect so well with people and then have such opposite views? Always a mystery to me.

My house had a ROCKIN Halloween party on Saturday. I hate party planning. It's just not my thing, but once it was going and tons of people were dancing and laughing, I was just thrilled with the whole thing. Tons of people were there and I was pleasantly surprised at how many love to dance. Part of my job had been to create a dance-able playlist and it was good to see people enjoying it. Funny photos to come!

It was just the perfect weekend all around. There was that perfectly exhausting party and then Friday a bunch of us interns got to go FREE to an all-day seminar with Richard Rohr. Have any of you ever heard of him? He is a Franciscan priest who runs the Center for Action and Contemplation in New Mexico and has written a ton of books about simplicity, personality, Job, and lots else. Anyway he was talking with us about Scripture as liberation, especially the prophets. I want to try to give you some of the great things I learned, but all I will say for now is this:

He shook up all our ideas about what is really important in our faith and salvation. It is such a top-down approach to boil the Bible down to a line between who is saved and who is not. To read the Bible as it was meant to be read (from the position of a weak, lost people who God is constantly working with to bring to liberation), means that His word is about more than those distinctions. That is the first thing people want to do in any religion isn't it? Draw lines. Decide whats up and whats down. Make it neat and organized and manageable, and maybe it's just not that easy. He was saying that that was the whole job of the prophets. To give people a greater capacity to hold the tension of the complicated world we live in and the astonishingly simple call of God's grace. I took so many pages of notes, friends. I am still internalizing all of the things that struck me in the seminar.

And then yesterday, I went to this awesome church service at a place called New Community. It is only about 40 people and one of the most diverse churches I have ever been to in race and age. It met in a simply decorated rowhouse and was so interactive. The sermon was like a discussion at times as if we were really working through the issues of our faith together. Yet despite how different the church was, they still have communion every Sunday and read from the Lectionary. I love that! We don't need to throw out everything just because it is tradition in my mind. Drawing together the readings that thousands of other churches are reading at the same time and being able to really understand them as a community just felt good and right to me.

In other news for those readers like my mom who like to know about some of the more everyday things:

a) Liam is a great boyfriend so far. I am sure I'm not making it very easy for him, but I love that he kinda knew what he was getting into. He is the first ever who already really knows me and that is a freeing sort of thing to have already.

b) I think I found my volunteering job. Sarah's friend Alonit is a Girl Scout troop leader for a group that meets within blocks of my house. They are 6-8 year old girls and she really needs help because there are like 30 of them. Um, how perfect is that for me? I'm excited to start doing that.

c) I voted. Sorry G. Dub. You got no love on my absentee ballot, but my prayers are with this election. I feel a lot of peace about it in the sense that I know there will be a lot of work to do no matter who is President. I just know God's hand is on this and that He cares about it.

d) I COULD NOT GET MY CHATBOX BACK. So I have taken the way Rhea did and have enabled the comment option so please leave some lovin, criticism, questions or kicks in the butt to keep updating.....whatever you like.

Grace and Peace, friends.