2020 – Thoughts from Blue Eyes

ode to my husband

Today my sweet husband went to work and I was puttering around the apartment tidying when I found a treasure. I was cleaning up the kitchen table and putting away his old laptop into its case when I found a giant cache of every love letter I ever wrote to him over the four+ years of our relationship. I knew he had saved them, but to find them all at once in one pile was overwhelmingly dear. I read through a few of them and smiled at the sheer amount of affection within them.

What a joy that our hope was fulfilled and here we are today, three months married, and the Lord helps me grow in love for him in deeper ways than I previously believed to exist. I did not know that I could have such deep attachment to another person who is so other from me. And it

ode to my husbandKaitlyn2020-12-13T20:09:25+00:00

joy

I have never felt such joy as I do now being married these two months. Committing to life with my best friends has opened a special gate of happiness into my life that truly proves marriage as a gift. The sweetness of waking up together each day, living and loving and serving together, sharing a life, is a divine blessing. I am happy in a new, deeper way. They were right, more than they knew.

Dying to self and serving someone else with your whole being brings, strangely, a new type of life injected into my heart. Being able to wholeheartedly belong, love, submit to another in such an intimate way of day in and day out – marriage is a joy.

Too many people say that marriage is hard. Yes, in the sense that denying yourself and choosing to love out of a decision when you don’t feel like it and

joyKaitlyn2020-11-08T23:29:17+00:00

it smelled like the august of 2013

I stepped outside and the scent of sunshine, of warm wind, of a very specific olfactory sensation hit me. It made me think of hope and memories yet to be made from late-night dorm talks, the smell of change and excitement and bewilderment, of discovering twenty one pilots and having eyes wide open to every experience happening to me.

I felt 18 again for a moment.

I’ve always been the type of person to take in everything and savor it, remember it, feeling the weight of the small hours and seconds that make up our lives. Sometimes a small voice shouts in my head, Remember, remember this! when a this tangibility happens, a snapshot that I ought to grab and file away and hold.

2020 has been one large roller coaster of weirdness, fear, hope, and curiosity. No one could have predicted what has happened in our world. I’ll never forget trying to plan

it smelled like the august of 2013Kaitlyn2020-08-17T15:33:54+00:00

valleys of shadow

It’s a quiet day at the desk here. I’m minding the phones but my mind is in a faraway place, pondering great human suffering and the broken, dismal bleakness of our world. I made the mistake this morning of reading a book I found in a pile our receptionist left behind. It is a fiction-ish narrative about a Holocaust survivor and I knew that it would be dangerous, one of those can’t-put-it-down novels that will leave me thinking down a hole and feeling heavy sadness for a while.

My heart shuts down at the brutality of human beings and the atrocious horrors experienced by real people in real time, fellow image-bearers who all had names and faces and favorite colors and loves and special talents and unique laughter. All I can say is, “Lord…?” There really aren’t words for such things.

In the darkest events of human history, it’s easy to shove

valleys of shadowKaitlyn2020-08-17T15:20:44+00:00

0.6 miles of holiness

Every evening around 10:30pm, if you’re hanging around a certain Chicago street corner, you’ll see a couple emerge from a yellowed apartment building, usually holding hands. They begin a 0.6 -mile walk in the twilight, cutting through some neighborhoods and past the parks, to a squat, brick two-flat on a one way street. She unlocks the door, he kisses her goodnight and assures she is safely inside, then he turns around and re-walks the 0.6-mile path in the dark.

It’s an inconvenient dance where I’m living out of a suitcase and sleeping on an air mattress in a near-empty apartment while my fiance lives a 15 minute walk away in a fully-furnished one. We aren’t getting married for another five weeks, and the back and forth is annoying and tiring.

Why make the harder choice? Why deal with the inconvenience of going home each night? This is stupid, many would say.

Nobody ever

0.6 miles of holinessKaitlyn2020-08-01T17:24:28+00:00

Lament // Waiting

I think it’s week 6 of my shelter-in-place/quarantine/coronavirus panic insanity? It’s a bit unsettling that I’ve somewhat lost track of the days. I’ve tried to keep track by baking something every weekend. But it’s blurry.

Our world is in chaos due to a tiny germ that broke out of the East and floated around the world on unsuspecting travelers. Many comparisons have been made to sin, the metaphors abound, talk of lament and prayer and reliance on the Lord are ABUNDANT. So many articles. Devotionals. Stories. I’m drunk on it, there’s too much to read, too many opinions, too m a n y t h o u g h ts.

The news is exploding. No one even remembers the Biden/Sanders primary race (was that really, juuuust a month or so ago?) There’s nothing else to say and nothing else to talk about. I know the names of a lot more governors and

Lament // WaitingKaitlyn2020-04-19T04:23:38+00:00

Dear Graduating Senior

My alma mater asked its grads to write a note of encouragement for all the graduating seniors this year, whose semesters were cut short by COVID-19. Below is what I sent – something pertinent, I think, to everyone who feels loss in this season of the coronavirus.

***

Dear Graduating Senior,

My heart is grieving with you during this bizarre, sad time. So many things that you were looking forward to and anticipating have suddenly been taken away due to circumstances you never could’ve imagined. I lament with you that you didn’t really get to say goodbye to your friends, people you’ve been walking through life with in an incredibly special way for the past years who have sharpened you and influenced you to love Jesus, who have been with you as you’ve wrestled and wondered, and now you won’t get to walk across that stage together and have a celebratory finale to

Dear Graduating SeniorKaitlyn2020-04-03T03:36:50+00:00

100 Days

In 100 days, I’m getting married.

What will the world look like in 100 days? It’s not something I’ve ever thought about before. Time usually just rolls on like normal. We don’t expect major bumps and blizzards and bizarre changes that completely curtail our expectation of the next several months. No one really wonders if restaurants will still be open in 100 days or if we will be allowed to leave our houses.

And yet, for the first time in my life, I and the rest of my friends, family, and community, are forced to take everything one day at a time. The coronavirus has crumpled our little wall calendars into magnified accordions where we can really only see today, honestly not knowing what will happen tomorrow. What kind of world will I wake up to in the morning? Will I be quarantined, will the grocery store close, will my roommate wake

100 DaysKaitlyn2020-03-19T18:42:00+00:00

Modern-Day Siloam Towers

Everyone is human. And that means everyone is broken – we all struggle and fight in this life, whether it’s circumstances, others, or our own selves.

I never thought Kobe Bryant would be the one to move me out of my long writing hiatus, but it’s been a strange week, and I’ve been wrestling for a while with thinking that I have things to say, but there are so many words already out there, that it doesn’t really matter in the end. But it kind of does, and keeping thoughts in my brain don’t usually serve a good purpose for anything besides my own mental filing cabinets.

Some would call the death of basketball star Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna tragic. I would agree to an extent – it seems so senseless, a helicopter crash that shouldn’t happened, an absolute star and his little girl and a group of friends taken

Modern-Day Siloam TowersKaitlyn2020-02-01T05:09:07+00:00

Yearly Archives: 2020