365 Thanksgivings

Turkey Day, along with its delicious and indulgent culinary traditions, gives us the opportunity to outwardly express our thankfulness. Not that we shouldn't be thankful every other day of the year, but the fact that it's tradition, I s'pose, makes us actually really think about it and talk about it.

There's a website called Cool People Care that publishes "5 Minutes of Caring" everyday. (If you're interested, you can get it in email form every morning or just check the website.) Anyway, their 5 Minutes for today involves...wait for it....giving thanks! I know, big surprise right? At any rate, it's about being thankful all the time, not just on the fourth Thursday of every November. Start today, the article says, but don't stop after all the turkey's gone. Today write down a few things that you're thankful for, and then keep it up every day. At least think about them, if you don't make an actual list.

So here goes the beginning of my "Things I'm Thankful For" list...and after this, I'm going to try and include at least one thing I'm thankful for every time I make an entry on the good ol' blog.

I'm thankful for...

home

a loving family

Baxter

coffee

Camp Grier

Nashville

pumpkin flavored things

...and so many more things, but we'll get to those later.

I'm thankful to have so many things to be thankful for, and I hope you have a lovely Thanksgiving, friends!

Love,

Allison.

Jesus Mints

Yes, Jesus mints. We'll get to that part eventually.

As per usual for a Tuesday, I went to Luke 14:12 today. Well, not Luke 14:12. As it turns out, now Tuesdays and Fridays are being run by a group called Isaiah 58, which is the homeless ministry of Belmont Church, where lunch has been taking place. At any rate, the same thing happens, just someone else is in charge.

Today I made a couple new friends. I met a woman who was also volunteering. In the process of getting ready to serve the meal for the day, we started talking and I got to hear a little of her story. As it turns out, through whatever chain of events, she was homeless for a few years, but is now back on her feet working as a cosmetologist (did you know that wool coats can damage long hair that rubs against it? Grab a scarf, girls!). She was so willing to talk about how God is working in her life, and how incredibly blessed we are. Then as we were pouring water and tea, she says: "You know, this is what we can do for others. We're pouring ourselves out, pouring God's love out. We're so full."

We. Are. Full. 

Really, we are. At least I am. I've been so blessed. While the whole quote in that last paragraph may not be precisely word-for-word accurate, that part is. Now I could've told you before I had this conversation that (in my opinion) God's love is in everyone and part of what we can do as Christians is to share it, whatever that looks like. But it struck me that something as simple as pouring water or fruit tea can have such a deep meaning. Talk about something to make your heart smile.

At one of our YAV vocational discernment times on a Friday morning a few weeks ago, I made comment somewhere along these lines: we hear so much about how God blesses those that have struggles in life (you know, "the meek shall inheret the earth..."), but I haven't had many struggles. I've often wondered where we that haven't struggled so much fall in God's plan. The man that was visiting us that week responded that perhaps the loving support system I have around me can be a basis for me to go out in the world and reach those that don't have one. Maybe pouring tea is part of that.

So, after all of this pondering and pouring, I was about to leave lunch and a nice man eating there walked up and handed me a mint. One of those Wint-o-green Life Saver ones...I mean, it could be peppermint, but you know what I'm talking about. Well, I looked down and the was a little fish-shaped sticker on the wrapper with "Jesus" printed in the middle. Again I was reminded of the liberation theology lecture I saw last week (check out the last blog entry to read more about that). That people that have so little and still make such an effort to share the love of Jesus (on a mint wrapper or just with a smile) is pretty wonderful.

Until next time friends. :)
Love,
Allison.

Theology, country music, and sports.

The father of liberation theology, an awards show, college basketball and the NHL...all in less than a week! Sorry it's been a while since my last update, friends. Life in Nashville has been pretty exciting lately, so here it goes...my latest Music City adventures, and in all likelihood some rambling to go along with it.

This past Monday I cashed in on the living-near-a-div-school aspect of my life and went with three of the other YAVs to see Gustavo Gutierrez speak at Vanderbilt. For those of you who don't know about Gustavo Gutierrez, he's a priest/theologian from Peru who's widely seen as the founder of the liberation theology movement. So I was pretty excited about it. I know Wikipedia is far from a scholarly source, but here's their page on liberation theology if you're curious and want to know more. One interesting thing that stuck out to me over the course of the talk doesn't even directly deal with the specific theology of liberation. It's more of a context thing: until this movement, really, theology was for the most part coming from the developed, Western world. Europe and North America, basically. Liberation theology brought with it studies of religious practice from the perspective of the poor and marginalized. Now, to be perfectly honest, this is not a population that I feel I can easily relate to. I do, however, think it's so important for bubble-dwellers like myself to try and see things through a different lens. One of the things Gutierrez mentioned is that it is not sufficient to just help the poor...that we must be against poverty itself. This sort of thing, if perhaps in different words, has crossed my mind more than once over the course of my life...volunteering at Luke 14:12 and in the other relatively few experiences I've had working with the homeless. Yeah sure, it's great to go serve a meal (seriously, it is), but at the end of the day I know I'll go back to my house, pick something out of the fridge for dinner, and go to sleep in a bed. (Toolshed or not, it's still here and it's still far more than a lot of people have.) Now, that's not to say that I necessarily know who to or would be able to start fighting poverty itself, but it's something to think about. Despite the severity and expansiveness of injustice and poverty in the world, the fact that those in its grip can still be so strong in their faith and in their convictions of hope for the future is truly and incredibly inspiring to me. I'm obviously not the most educated in the field of liberation theology and injustice in the world, but listening Gutierrez on Monday sure got me thinking.

Well, fast forward to Wednesday and totally switch gears: I got to go to the CMA awards! Definitely a different world than that of liberation theology, and not one much concerned with the "simple living" we YAVs in theory subscribe to (but our tickets were free, I promise). Through Mary Kate's friend's friend, we ended up with two tickets! We laughed as we were deciding what to wear though...I wasn't exactly planning on going to an awards show when I packed for my year as a volunteer! I'm definitely far from a die-hard country fan, but it was still super exciting to be there. I was all prepared to take my camera and document this adventure, but alas the tickets specified that photography wasn't allowed. Little did I know that everyone else would take their cameras anyway...oh well. At least I've got a ticket stub to prove I was there! Part of me couldn't help but feel guilty as we walk.ed towards the arena, passing right by homeless folks on Broadway. Granted, we weren't part of the ball-gowns-and-tux crowd, but there's still so much we have. But guilt or not, it was still a pretty exciting night

With Friday came more (free) tickets, this time to a Vandy basketball game! Our tickets came from the Presbyterian College side though (thanks again Mary Kate...), so we put on our blue and garnet and cheered for the Hose. Sort of. Those of you who know me well know that sports are not exacltly my life's greatest passion. But Beth and Sally got to see their alma mater play, and despite the fact that it didn't end so well for PC, it was still some lovely community bonding time. A couple pictures, stolen from Beth...

Nashville YAVs (minus Michael)

The Shed

As it turns out, there's this great website run by a group called Hands on Nashville (there are "Hands on..." groups in different cities, too) that has a giant project calendar of volunteer opportunities in the area. In the process of looking for things to do with PSF, I happened across a can drive for Second Harvest food bank that was going on a Nashville Predators (hockey) game. Turns out that if you signed up to volunteer, you got a free ticket after the game started! So off we went, four of us YAVs, to experience another part of Nashville. And I think I may have found a new favorite sport to watch. I was mostly joking when I said in the first period that I hoped it would go to a shoot out (and that we'd win of course), but as it turns out that's exactly what happened! And, in what I can only assume is the typical Nashville fashion, there was a live band playing music between periods. Admittedly, before this game the extent of my hockey knowledge came from the Mighty Ducks movies and Miracle, but hey...gotta start somewhere right? I actually took my camera and remembered to take pictures, so here's the photographic evidence of our Preds adventure...

Collecting cans/money before the game.

Bring it on Chicago...bring it on.

With Sally, Mary Kate, and Vic

Mary Kate and Sally are fierce fans...

Shootouts are exciting!

Preds win!!!

And despite the fact that little to none of this post has involved my talking about work, I promise I really am still working for PSF! We're going ice skating next week...maybe my new hockey experience will help me make less of a fool of myself in public? Probably not, but I'm looking forward to it nonetheless. :)

Love,

Allison.

Devo #2

Twice now I've written the devotion (aka devo) for PSF's weekly newsletter, and I thought I'd post them here too, for those of you that are interested but don't get the email. The first one was back in September in a post titled Grace. Here's number two:

Back in August before I had settled in to the YAV life here in Nashville, all of the Young Adult Volunteers had a week-long orientation together at a conference center in New York. The week was filled with plenty of worship, singing, and lectures providing us with the information we’d need to make our 11 months of service a meaningful experience. There was also ample opportunity for discussion with the other YAVs--what we thought our different cities and countries might be like, what we thought the challenges and rewards would be. In one of our large group discussions, one new YAV made a statement that still, two months later, stands out to me. 

“You will never go where God is not.”

Now just think about that for a minute. At first it took me a little while to truly appreciate the significance of that one small sentence. And sometimes, I think, it can be really hard to believe it. How is it possible that God is keeping a watchful eye over places consumed by poverty, natural disasters, war and other tragedy? Or even in that stressful week with two million tests and papers, when not a single thing seems to go right? I don’t know, exactly, but it reminds me of one of my favorite Bible verses, Joshua 1:9. It says: “I hereby command you: Be strong and courageous; do not be frightened or dismayed, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go." (NRSV) The world in which we live may challenge that idea from time to time, but the notion that we're never going it alone can certainly be comforting as well.

Love, Allison

Life as a tourist...

One of the advantages of having your parents come visit you in a city they've never been to: they want to do all the fun touristy stuff you haven't had the chance to do yet! (And, while our somewhat humble YAV stipends are actually plenty to live on so long as you're intelligent about it, it was still nice to be taken care of for a few days.) So if you haven't figured it out by now, the lovely Margo and Dave Wehrung were here this past week, and we sure packed in the Nashville experiences. Here's the list...with pictures!

Tuesday night:

• firstly Mom and Dad got to experience the excitement that is PSF on Tuesday nights. :)
• Live music at the Bluebird Cafe (we saw Marshall Chapman and Will Kimbrough...neither of which I had heard of before, but both of which were great!) 

Wednesday:

• Lunch at Tootsie's Orchid Lounge, complete with live music, "world famous" barbecue (the menu said so...), and maybe a fermented beverage or two. 
• Some wandering around the Bicentennial Mall, admiring the capitol building and the nifty map of Tennessee that's in the ground (turns out I know more about Nashville than I thought...I could actually tell my parents what things were!). This was in lieu of a more exciting activity that was supposed to happen but fell through...but it was nice, anyway!
• Chihuly at Cheekwood = some of Dale Chihuly's awesome glasswork on display outside in this botanical garden...we walked around during the day and saw it in the light, then saw it again once it got dark! 
• Deeeelicious dinner at the Germantown Cafe.

Thursday:

• tour of the Ryman Auditorium, which has a bunch of really cool history that I didn't know until now! Still kind of bitter I'm not seeing the Avett Brothers play there this weekend, but one day...one day I'll see them live!
• tour of the Parthenon in Centennial Park. I'd been around the outside several times, seeing as the park is right across the street from my office, but it turns out there's an art gallery or two inside, and a giant statue of Athena. I mean, who doesn't need a lifesize replica of the Parthenon in their city? Totally normal, right?
• Annnnd then Mom and Dad came to TOT with me.

And that, my friends, is probably the busiest 2.5 days I've had since I moved here. I don't know, maybe not, but it's definitely in the running. Here's the photographic evidence for those who are interested...

Lunch at Tootsie's

Bicentennial Mall

Chihuly

Mom and Dad

Being good tourists at the Ryman

Athena's nobody to be messed with...

So there ya have it, my past week. I didn't realize how much I'd missed having close friends/family around, so it was a good few days. Hiking with PSF today, and some Halloween festivities later...then playing handbells in church tomorrow morning. Life in Music City continues!

Love,

Allison.

Homecoming...or one of them, at least.

Hello once again, dear friends!

This past weekend was homecoming at Furman, so Madame Blueberry and I headed down to Greenville, SC. It was a strange thing, though, to be in such familiar territory in such an unfamiliar context. Gone are the days of being around for and participating in the week-long competition between sororities and fraternities, and the days leading up to it looking forward to seeing those older friends that had already graduated. Instead, I am now for better or worse one of the "older friends," and homecoming week has become something more like homecoming 36 hours. Strange it was, but a good strange. Thanks to a lovely certain Delta Gamma little sister of mine (and her roomies of course), I had a futon to sleep on for the weekend...and delicious nachos to snack on at night. :) And I mean, it didn't hurt that DG and Beta Theta Pi (the fraternity we were paired with) won that homecoming competition I just mentioned.

I'll admit that I'm not the best at keeping in touch with people from far away, but the fact that I could still go back for a short weekend and that people were so interested in what I was doing, or so willing to tell me about whatever they're doing...it's a special thing, I think. In a way it was kind of like we never left. Not to mention the entertainment of reminiscing about various events of the last four years. So, to any Furman folks who may happen to be reading this...thanks for being lovely, friends. :)

The reason I titled this post the way I did: I started actually thinking about the word "homecoming." Home. Coming. Coming home. I've been blessed with multiple homes, each of which I hold close to my heart, for different reasons. There's Davidson...home home, and a place in which I'll forever be comfortable and content. But Furman is home, too. Camp is home. Nashville isn't, yet, but I think there's a good chance Music City'll make the cut by the end of this whole YAV deal. I'm so so thankful for all of these places that have people I love, and it's pretty wonderful to feel at home (whatever that phrase means, exactly) in all of them. So, this post talks about one of them.

Mom and Dad are in town this week and we've been doing all sortsa touristy/fun things. Be on the lookout for another post in a few days after they're gone...with pictures, too!

Love,
Allison.

Fun Fact

Hey friends! 
So, as I learned at church on Sunday, 2PC is a More Light congregation, which means they officially support More Light Presbyterians (which in turn supports "the full participation of LGBT Christians in the life and ministry of the Presbyterian Church"). Now, personally I think this is pretty awesome, and the fact that a group like MLP exists makes me like the good ol' PC(USA) even more than I already did. I'm fully aware of the fact that not everybody agrees with that, and that maybe some people will be pretty uncomfortable when they read this. But it's just something that I think is cool and wanted to share.


Off to Furman for homecoming this weekend, and I'm quite excited to see everyone! :)


Until next time...
Love,
Allison.

Peace and Playgrounds

Hey friends! 

All sorts of things have been happening lately (including a lovely weekend with some very dear camp friends), but I'm just going to write about a couple here...in all likelihood this'll still probably turn out to be a lengthy post. It won't hurt my feelings if you just want to skim...


The sermon at PSF this past Tuesday was about peace. About sharing it, and about receiving it, with and from the most unlikely of people. We heard about how most people nowadays (myself included) worry too much about "stranger danger" to really consider sharing the peace of Christ (or whatever sort of peace you believe in) with people that are different from us. As unfortunate as it is, we live in a world where sometimes you really do have to worry about strangers...there are just some really mean people out there. But I'm hoping that this year I can challenge myself to go out on a limb and share a different kind of peace. Or if it's the same kind, maybe share it in a new way. Passing the Peace is common practice in a lot of churches (at least the ones I've been to), but as with a lot of things we say in church, I think it sort of becomes a reflex. "Peace be with you...and also with you." That's not to say it's not meaningful, but once we say something enough, I think we tend to stop really thinking about what it means. The beginning of passing the peace during PSF worship is a little different...in a really great way. Before the standard hand shaking (or ideally, if you ask me, hugging), whoever happens to be the liturgist that night says: "Not an easy peace, not an insignificant peace, not a half-hearted peace, but the peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you." I don't mean by saying all this that the regular kind of peace we pass is bad. But if the peace of Christ isn't easy or half-hearted, why should sharing it with other people be? So...I don't know. Just something to think about.


I've spent the past few days on PSF's fall break "trip" doing flood relief work here in Nashville. The first two days we worked on houses through Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, and the third day we cleaned out a (mostly) dry river/creek bed. If you don't really know anything about the flood that happened this past May (I didn't, really, until I came here) and you're interested, here's a Youtube video somebody made. On the first day we (the four students and four PSF staffers that were there) arrived at a house with an empty dumpster and huge piles of stuff in the backyard. We left at the end of the day with a full dumpster and significantly fewer piles. :) Seriously...there was some legit strategy going on to pack that dumpster. The entire first level of this house had to be gutted because of the water damage, so the piles we cleaned up consisted of everything from soggy drywall and wood to a sink, carpet, and broken tiles. We even came across two black widows in a dresser we had to take apart...yes, the sledgehammer I used to kill one might've been a wee bit excessive, but hey, the sledgehammer was already in my hand. One of the students did the other one in with a shoe. Day two's house was being rebuilt by Habitat for Humanity, which in the Nashville area has added rebuilding/flood relief to their usual building-houses-from-the-ground-up agenda. We PSFers worked on several different parts of the house, but I spent the day painting baseboards and pieces of door frame. Six hours of the same white paint got a little tedious, but it was still great to be able to help get a house that much closer to being livable again. Day three was my favorite...maybe the hardest, work-wise, but the best nonetheless. We cleaned debris out of a (mostly) dry river bed. Now this was some serious debris. Like...there was someone's wooden porch in a tree. (Also in trees: a gas can, and a couple hoses.) I think I might now be somewhat of an expert in using a crowbar to pry apart pieces of decks/porches. It was crazy though, some of the stuff we found. I mean I'd heard that the flood was really bad, but finding a little girl's shoe, a pink Crayola marker, a stuffed monkey caked in dry mud and practically squished flat...I can't imagine just having life as I know it washed right away. It was pretty surreal to listen to the chainsaw cutting the washed up playground into pieces small enough for us to carry away. And to think of all the new things that have happened to me since May, compared to the fact that there are still so many people here just trying to get back to life as it was. 


Well, congrats if you made it through that whole post...until next time, friends.
Love,
Allison.

Weekend Happenings

Hey friends!

Some fun stuff happened this weekend, so I thought I might share them with those of you who are interested enough to be reading this blog...nothing too intense in this post, just some weekend happenings. :)

So there's this First Friday service at Christ Church Cathedral downtown that happens every (you guessed it...) first Friday of the month. It's an Episcopal church that puts on this monthly service for the community. In place of a sermon, each month there's a different...expression of faith, I guess you could call it. We YAVs have gone both first Fridays we've been in town, and it's been really great. The free wine and snazzy cheese hors d'oeuvres that happen afterwards may or may not be extra motivation to go, but it really has been a cool experience. The first time we went it was Labor Day weekend, and the "sermon" was a local group performing songs from the musical Working, about different professions. This past Friday there was some liturgical dance goin' on while a woman read something having to do with creation. I can't remember what exactly the reading was adapted from, but it wasn't biblical...just kind of having to do with a vague spirituality and the interconnectedness of things. I liked it. There was also a lady that, throughout the service, was working on a chalk drawing at the front of the sanctuary. It's the kind of worship service that's just different enough to be refreshing, but not so unfamiliar that you're made uncomfortable by it. That's not to say that getting out of your worship/religious comfort zone is always a bad thing, but you get the idea. I also like that all of us can go together. I've really loved being at 2PC, but worshiping with all seven YAVs is pretty lovely too.

Saturday was such a lovely day. Started off hiking at Radnor Lake with Vic and a new friend, Kenna. It was far from a super intense trail, but it was wonderful to spend more time outside in the fall weather. (And hey, the trail went uphill some!) We saw a few deer chillin' out right off of the trail, and later some wild turkeys (one was eating a snake...cool stuff). Here are a couple pictures of the lake...

After hiking and some chill time in the Shed (as in Toolshed/my house), I went with Mary Kate and her friend that was visiting to a cultural festival in Centennial Park. Las Paletas (seriously, best popsicles you'll ever have) had a stand, and I decided to try out the hibiscus flavor. Kiiind of worried it'd be like eating a flower, I decided to try nonetheless. It was kind of odd, but good! And I mean hey, how many times do you get the opportunity to try a hibiscus popsicle?

Post-park-wandering, it was back to the Shed for a while, then we YAVs headed downtown towards Broadway, where we found a trailer park themed bar, and, including at the karaoke place where we ended up, about 2039842 bachelorette parties. Quite the entertaining night, and quite the excellent weekend.

Love,
Allison.

Grace.

So today Holly and I went to Luke 14:12 and helped serve lunch to the homeless folks there. We'd just finished pouring the last of our milk and water when a friendly man walked up to the table and said one simple word.

"Grace."

After a pause (the length of which admittedly made me mildly uncomfortable), he began to explain. He explained that between dawn and 11pm you have the grace to be in the park, but after 11 at night, you can be arrested for the same activity--just being there. On game day at the Titans stadium, you have the grace to sit in the parking lot and drink a beer, but at any other time the same activities in the same parking lot would be severely reprimanded. "Grace is a period of time," he said, "but God's Grace is a lifetime."

Now at this point he began sharing his opinion that the King James Version is the only version that's really the Bible, and that the other versions and translations out there don't count because humans have messed with them. I s'pose we'll leave that discussion for a different day though. Back to the grace. Our new friend said several times: "I teach definitions." It's incredible to me how much a word can change when God's behind it. We Presbyterians like the whole idea of salvation by grace. That's not the kind of grace that lets you chill in a park or tailgate before a game. It's the kind that lasts a lifetime. The kind that says that no matter what you do, you will have God's love. My aunt and uncle gave me this book for graduation called God Never Blinks: 50 Lessons for Life's Little Detours. One of those lessons is: "God loves you because of who God is, not because of anything you did or didn't do." And that right there folks, that's grace. We don't deserve it, we take it for granted all too often, but it's there. And it's the lifetime kind.

Love,
Allison.