My first week in Texas was… rough. I was tired and overwhelmed. I felt my confidence completely deteriorating. And I found it unusually difficult to engage in a real way with the people I was giving time to be with.

Every time I opened my mouth and said something real that came from a place of any depth, I felt that I could, at any moment, completely fall apart. It didn’t matter where I was. It didn’t matter who I was with. If I dipped anywhere below the surface, I was sure to break down and begin bawling.

This was a problem. I did not want to burden my friends with my emotions. There was a lot of catching up to do. I didn’t feel like crying in public. I didn’t have time to go there. I didn’t really want to be that vulnerable.

So, quite naturally and with little thought, I suppressed my emotions. It took a lot of energy and an almost sub-conscious intentionality. But my once-perfected skill of shutting down my emotions kicked in and I was able to numb myself with very little conscious thought.

I stuck to the surface. If I felt myself about to crack, I would alter my course and steer away from the touchy things. I said relatively little. I felt very little.

There were two major consequences to responding to my emotions in this way. First, it became virtually impossible to relate to anyone in a real way, as I was setting apart significant time to meet with people. It’s hard to connect with a person with any depth when you are determined to stay at the surface. Simple contradiction. Second, I COULD NOT sleep.

Yes. I suppressed my emotions so thoroughly that it was keeping me up at night. It was exhausting.

After about a week of sleep deprivation, I finally realized what I was doing. So, Thursday morning, as I was failing again to fall asleep, the floodgates broke and I just started to cry.

From that point, I resolved not to shut down emotionally, for the rest of my time in Texas. Since then (the last three or four days)… I’ve cried A LOT.

One week to go. A lot of pain remains that I haven’t even touched. But the Holy Spirit, my Comforter, is with me. So I’m feeling pretty hopeful about the next seven days.

Well, I did end up going outside and playing in the snow after that last snow post. I couldn’t take it anymore. The snow was too amazing to not be in the middle of it as it fell.

I bundled up well. I would spend three paragraphs describing how awesomely warm-sustaining my outfit was… but I would probably be the only person who was excited about the drawn-out explanation of my moose PJ pants, wool socks, boots, jeans, scarf, two pairs of gloves, and leather jacket.

My curly hair is great for snow… it keeps the fragile little flakes far enough from the heat of my head that they are unlikely to melt unless I go inside. Thus, wearing my hair down practically functions as a hat. I love it.

(The melting of the snow when I go inside is a really awkward feeling, by the way. I had been in thick snow for about 45 minutes before I finally went in earlier. I had collected quite the layer of snow on my hair. Which quickly began trickling down my head as I stood in the coffee shop.)

It was such a great morning. I went for a backwards walk in the snow with a friend (no, really… we actually walked backwards down a hill… completely blind to the road behind us). I walked on my knees in the snow… I rolled in the snow… I crawled on my stomach through the snow… and I did that wonder/gratitude explosion thing that I predicted would be a significant portion of my “playing”.

I also spent A LOT of time in the bookstore. The first chunk of my morning was spent running between the snow and the inside warmth (and company of my friends). Later, I spent some time having a very good conversation with another friend in the back office.

It was such a good day that I didn’t leave the bookstore until nearly 3 PM. Yeah… that’s when I am supposed to be getting out of bed. The best part of this is that it will help me stay up all day when I  fly to Montana after our set tonight (Wednesday/Thursday). The worst part… I forgot to drink again. Until about 2 or 2:30, I consumed no water in those hours of being awake.

Now, a little over 24 hours after the magic began, everything is still beautifully white outside.

It made my heart really happy when I walked over to the prayer room at midnight. There was still snow everywhere. It was so perfect. So peaceful. And so not icy. I love it when the snow isn’t icing! I don’t like it when my friends fall and hurt themselves.

This is a good winter, thus far. (Even with all this pain junk… you know… the really unpleasant stuff that is causing my heart to mature, work through offense, grow in love, and find strength in the Lord.)

I drank painful quantities of  incredible wassail on Thursday night. INCREDIBLE. We found the most magical apple cider in the world. I don’t think future wassail could ever top that.

I have a prophetic egg-shaped alarm clock that is really fun to spin like a top. That’s right, prophetic. I’ve had the thing for one week and it has done 4 crazy “Ummm… OK, wow” things already. Hey, if God wants to talk to me through an alarm clock, I’m game.

New Jersey is really funny. My news magazine had a little story snippet about a two-hour stand-off at a bank… between the police and what was apparently a really threatening CARDBOARD CUT-OUT. Way to go, NJ!

The socks I am wearing right now are ridiculously warm. I can hardly stand it. But I didn’t properly warmify my feet last night when I left the house, so I figured I owed it to my feet to over-warm them tonight.

We’re about to reorganize our fridge. That makes me really happy.

Timothy Edwards fascinates me. I know I probably shouldn’t be so impressed… but he seems super smart for being so tiny. (Though tiny is also beginning to seem rather huge.) It’s REALLY fun to watch him organize things. He has a gift! (It made my organization-loving heart really happy.) And he’s super cute. Especially when he’s wrestling with his dad. Watching that little guy was one of the highlights of my night.

I’m a little sad about the fact that I will be out of town on my birthday. But I’m really excited about being in Montana for Christmas. I hope it snows in KC before I leave… REALLY huge drifty flake-clusters of glory… that’s what I’m looking for. And it has to snow in Montana on my birthday… it just has to.

I glitter-glued happy trees tonight.

Wendy: Yeah, but I don’t think that makes me weird.
Christine: It makes me different.
Wendy: I know, it’s weird.

OK… so maybe it was funnier when it was way past my bed-time. Wait… it is past my bed-time. Oh well… whatever. I’m still amused.

I am in one of those “stay up late crying” modes. So I thought a random blog post would be a nice diversion for a little while. But now… back to the prayer room.

Sleep has ALWAYS been a problem area in my life. I remember regular times in elementary school when I would lay awake for hours before I had any hope of falling asleep. When I first learned the word insomnia, I remember thinking “Oh… wow… so other people have this problem, too.” High school and college were especially sleep-deprived years. (My junior year in high school, especially.) And here I am, now… still struggling with the sleep thing.

I think I get more sleep on the night watch than I have at any other time in my life, on any other schedule. After staying up well into the AM hours, I tend to sleep rather soundly. But most of my friends still know me as sleep-challenged.

Considering how little sleep I get sometimes, I actually tend to function rather well. Usually, people can’t even tell the difference. I’ll confess that I am somewhere around hour 30 of being awake, and the person I have been working with for the last several hours will respond with great shock. I can sleep for two hours and have several people tell me that I look bright-eyed and well rested. And I tend to especially crush my opponents if I play Settlers of Catan after a night of little sleep.

I wonder, though, if people can’t tell the difference because they have rarely (if ever) seen me when I am actually well-rested. Perhaps they think that I am always that inarticulate. Perhaps they think that my face just… looks like that. Perhaps they have never encountered me when my mind is sharp and my body isn’t longing for a break. Perhaps they don’t see anything out of the ordinary because that is the ordinary.

There are days (more of them lately) where my sleep-deprivation gets the best of me and it becomes quite apparent to all that I have not rested. Days when I can’t complete a sentence, my eyes are burning, I’m generally dull, I laugh at more stupid things than usual, and I can hardly walk straight… or even stand up, for that matter. But, for the most part, I seem to get away with it.

My closest friends can usually tell when I haven’t slept. Though they are certainly in danger, after these last few months, of adjusting to this new norm. But I think that those who are closest to me know that I am capable, sometimes, of speaking and actually saying what I mean to say… of having remotely intelligent thoughts.

To some extent, I can tell the difference.

At the same time, though… my vocabulary often seems to improve at the times when I am most sleep-deprived. I would love to understand why that is. Perhaps it is only my fuzzy perception of my vocabulary and not actual fact. But I find myself more easily accessing certain words at those times (while struggling to find some of the easy ones, like fork). And I will often pause after saying something and realize, “Wow, I haven’t used that word in a really long time.”

Much of my life, the experience of laying awake for hours had a lot to do with an inability to relax the activity in my mind. Sometimes it’s just observation and analysis and contemplation. But, at the times when my ability to sleep was most impaired, I was in the depths of my struggles with anxiety. There’s a reason that my speech at my high school graduation was all about Jesus and worry.

Lately, though, this hasn’t as frequently been the culprit. I have the occasional night when my mind won’t stop racing. However, my internal traffic calmed significantly in the last several months.

And then we have resignation. After so many years of little success in the arena of sleep, I just kind of adjusted to it. I resigned to that struggle as the unavoidable reality of my life.

And then we have the factor of poor choices.  After so many hours of laying awake in bed, you eventually just give up and get out of bed. Eventually,  you stop waiting as long before giving up on the sleep thing. And… once you’ve learned that you can function relatively well, with seemingly few consequences, on just a few hours of sleep… you start to make decisions that violently rob your potential for getting sleep.

This last week has been particularly bad. Less than a week after finally switching back to the night watch, I had to stay up until 3pm for something. (Well, I thought that staying up until 3pm was my best option.) The sleep patterns that I kept (just a few hours of sleep here and there, when I could fit it in) for the few days leading up to (and immediately following) that night have left me in a really bad position. I keep waking up after about three hours of sleep and cannot seem to get back to it. And I’m having a lot of trouble getting to sleep in the first place.

Which brings me to this point. I’m done with it. This is ridiculous. I’m not going to reconcile with the fact that I just don’t get much sleep. I’m going to do something about it. This HAS TO CHANGE.

I have a lot of bad habbits to break. I have a lot to learn about trusting and resting and waiting on the Lord. I have a lot going against me. But I am desperate to do what my mind and my body need… I need to sleep.