Goodbye, and hello!

Friends, family, subscribers:

In case you missed the memo, I've moved! Not only from NJ to Greensboro, but my blog location as well. Catch it here:

http://jorutter.wordpress.com/

I thought it was time for a fresh start. I'll be really digging into some deeper blogging -- not sure what about, but different features and pieces to challenge myself as I try to grow as a writer and as a follower of Jesus.

You all have been an incredibly supportive community of readers: cousins, homeschool Shakespeare friends, college classmates and professors, and coworkers. And randos! I have a special place in my heart for random readers I don't even know.

I would be honored if you all continued to follow my new blog -- you can subscribe at the bottom of the homepage by email or by snagging the link and putting it in your blog reader of choice.

Thanks for everything -- I think I've had this blog since I was 16? That's a long time. And now it's time for something new. See you over there!

xoxo Jo

Picks of the Week #2

I read a lot for my job. Tons of great stuff comes across my screen that doesn't really apply to what I do there, so I started sending the articles to myself so I wouldn't lose track of them. This blog series exists because worthwhile stories should be shared. I'll try my best to put these out weekly, and I can definitely promise to make it worth your while.

THINGS YOU CANNOT NOT CARE ABOUT

Last week’s global news, Today’s US news: Have you heard about the missing Nigerian schoolgirls who were abducted by an Islamist militant group? Some girls have escaped and the rest are still being held. The Nigerian government is choosing to move forward slowly and diplomatically, which is obviously enraging a lot of Nigerians at the moment.

Minimum wage turned down for what? Rude, Republicans. I hear your fear of reducing the overall number of jobs, and respectfully disagree. Rude. Micha Kaufman of Forbes predicts that this “red and blue” division over the wage raise might soon be irrelevant as modern work is measured by output, not hours. Meanwhile, poor people are poor. So there’s that.

NUGGETS

This week’s installment of Developers Ruining my Homeland. Try not to choke on the shiny progress startup innovative optimism with no mention of how this may continue to bring wealthy people in and push the poor out. There’s a reason this section of Brooklyn is called DUMBO.

I love feminism and hate Frozen, but I really really hate BAD feminism like in this TL;DR Frozen critique (quickly scan, then back away slowly). Maybe let’s not overanalyze and then re-overanalyze a mega-billion enterprise that sells lots of pink plastic toys and has simply found another way to sell another pink plastic toy. And if you must go with Disney, there are better princesses to choose from.

I don’t know what rock I’ve been living under, but I discovered Nick Drake today. His sweet 70s jams and delicate guitar pluckings are making me sentimental for waterfalls, road trips, and my Grove City friends.

Interesting idea of the week: make environmental degrees free to boost eco-friendly business. I dig it.

LAUGHS

HALLELUJAH JOHN OLIVER HAS HIS OWN SHOW AND IT’S PERFECT. And if you haven’t been religiously listening to his podcast for the past four years like me, get started now.

This article is a riff on the silly ongoing conversation on modesty within Christian circles. What makes it the sad kind of funny is that it’s dangerously close to sounding like something you heard at a youth group retreat.

The Onion on minding your own freaking business.

An illustrated A through Z of Harry Potter. (Found via this fantabulous Pinterest fandom board, which is the answer to a prayer I didn’t even know was deep in my heart.)

BLOG OF THE WEEK

One of my closest friends in the entire world, Kate Krieger, blogs at Droplets of Blue. If you don’t have the special privilege of knowing her personally, this blog is a great way to meet her and listen to her conversations with God.

THE LAST WORD

This delectably miserable piece from Wired perfectly catalogues everything I find stupid with Silicon Valley and the startup world. My favorite quote from the whole article: “He had a PhD in AI from MIT. Just to contextualize what that means in Silicon Valley, an MIT AI PhD can generally walk alone into an investor meeting wearing a coconut-shell bra, perform a series of improvised birdcalls, and walk out with $1 million.” 

Thanks for reading and I'll see you next week!

Picks of the Week #1

I read a lot for my job. Tons of great stuff comes across my screen that doesn't really apply to what I do there, so I started sending the articles to myself so I wouldn't lose track of them. This blog series exists because worthwhile stories should be shared. I'll try my best to put these out weekly, and I can definitely promise to make it worth your while.

THINGS YOU CANNOT NOT CARE ABOUT

God help us all: if this rule gets passed, websites will be able to pay broadband providers to speed up their service, leaving behind, y'know, EVERYONE ELSE ON THE INTERNET. Freak out...NOW.

As of today, Obama's put new sanctions on Russia to punish them for being awful to Ukraine. USAToday says the sanctions won't be strong enough to affect real change, which the Washington Post echoes.

Here are my favorite piercingly shrill think tanks on the minimum wage debate: Think Progress leans left and Heritage Foundation leans right. Plug your ears if it gets too loud, or read someone closer to the middle, like American Enterprise Institute. 

Please don't forget about the Syrian refugees or the South Korean ferry victims. Just because the media gets quieter doesn't mean they go away.

NUGGETS

I really enjoy Wine & Marble, and this post on everyday sexism was just so fantastic.

Here's a recent "Room for Debate" on whether affirmative action, which was put in place to promote diversity in higher education, should be based on income, not race. I'm not sure what I think yet.

If you haven't already seen this, prepare yourself to get pulled down the rabbit hole: the WSJ extensively documented a walled city in a disputed area of Hong Kong...you have to see it to believe it. I dream of this project becoming a multimedia museum exhibit.

Someone has come up with an interesting idea for a 10-mile park loop that would protect Manhattan from another Sandy flooding catastrophe. I'm always suspicious of beautiful hipster parks as an urban planning panacea (High Line, anyone?), but a park that would save the city millions of dollars on an inevitable Sandy 2.0 recovery sounds okay to me.

Speaking of hipsters, here's what Forrest Gump would've been like if it had been directed by Wes Anderson. (The longer you watch it, the funnier it gets.)

This is a cute column from Calvin College's student newspaper on singleness at a Christian college. 

Having just recently moved out of my cubicle, it was amusing to read this article on the designer who invented the concept and how his utopian office dreams were crushed by corporate cheapness. Sorry, everyone.

BLOG OF THE WEEK

Um, you need to go check out Emily Perper on Diet Coker. Immediately. One post will convince you: she must read essays and fiction on feminism and humor as much as I read economic policy blogs, because she finds gems, and presents them brilliantly. Don't miss out.

THE LAST WORD

I recently discovered the Swan Children magazine. I'm horrified by the Quiverfull scandals, but enchanted by the various ways the second generation survivors of this cultish movement have been finding freedom, especially through the written word. I read two pieces of fiction on the magazine that have since been haunting me: a trip abroad wakes someone up to the hugeness of the world, and a woman is given an hour to explore the "lost and found" of her entire life. I enjoyed the first for its harsh honesty and the second for the spell it cast on me.

Thanks for reading and I'll see you next week!

searching for heaven on earth

The air is thick with a promise of spring tonight, mixed with the smell of turkey burgers that remind me of summer. My family sits in conference in the kitchen, arranged in a semi-circle, with the promise of spring blowing through the window on our backs. The sounds of disagreements and the clinking on forks on the white plates do not make this an extremely restful place, but it’s familiar and safe, which is even better. I savor moments like these like I savor Mama’s sweet tea.

Familiar and safe: two things I needed very badly. I moved back home to Jersey from Brooklyn last week because of an unlivable rooming situation. Now I can enjoy the last month and a half of my internship with Heron with a safe and quiet place to come back to. Other than the bad situation, a big reason I decided to commute from home was that my family will be moving to San Francisco at the end of the summer for my dad’s job. It’s something we’ve been anticipating for a while, and it’s a good and busy time to be able to be with my family, especially since I don’t see myself moving out there long-term with them. (I’m actually thinking and praying pretty hard about moving to a smaller, cheaper city with a large deposit of Grovers.)

My big epiphany from all of this which warrants this post is simple: there is no resting place for me on this earth, and oddly, that revelation’s been very comforting. I was surprised to find that the wealth disparity and the shrinking middle class in New York makes me depressed in a way only someone steeped in the liberal arts can be about such things. I realized that you need to make a lot of money to be safe in New York, and that’s not a life I have the energy for right now or maybe ever.

I have this weird guilt when visiting a church or helping with a volunteer event – I’m afraid to commit when I’m not 100% sure that I’ll be able to follow through. What this spring has taught me more than anything: that’s really not in my control! God asks me to commit myself to him and his will for today only. I am promised no tomorrow and it is not my concern to promise that to anyone else. I don’t dare love others less while I wait for some extraneous circumstances to change that will make me feel better about committing and then having to leave.

I’ve realized I will never feel this hypothetical safe and cozy belonging feeling until I’m gazing into Jesus’s face, so while I live my life until then, I think I’m going to finally be okay with being a traveler on this earth. A certain city won’t fix my extroverted craving for vibrant community. A certain church won’t meet the thirst in my heart for intimate worship. God in his goodness might choose to give me those things anyway, but I don’t think I need to hop from place to place and go through excitement-disillusionment-restlessness-move, constantly searching for a place to rest and call home. Frankly, it’s an old routine, and I’m still very young. So my new routine will look more like trust and giving my whole life to where God has me.

That's what's up.

the simple power of gratitude

Today didn’t start out great.

I woke up grumpy. I showered grumpy. I penciled my eyebrows grumpy. (Corrected the smudges grumpy, too.) I squished myself into the train grumpy. Then I sat down at my desk and was grumpy again. I waited for the grumpy to go away. It didn’t.

I don’t do anything halfway. (SURPRISE.) I’m built to contain extreme amounts of feeling, and I’ve accepted that. But I know I wasn’t designed to feel this grumpy, either. So there I was.

My heart's been out of whack all week. In between processing the fact that my family is moving far away and NYC is going to become my permanent home, I confronted friends but just ended up hurting them, was painfully honest with another friend but just ended up getting hurt myself, and generally was scared by the day-to-day physical void where my family and college community used to be and the intimidating prospect of starting over with a brand-new community again. (Not to mention I terrified myself by realizing that I finally hypothetically could be ready to date again. Trust me when I say that I tried my usual remedy and listened to “Ridin’ Solo” like five times in a row at work and it did not help me feel any less hypothetically romantic.)

To avoid suffocating in the grumpy, I had to get outside. I went to the Starbucks around the corner, walking in the sunshine, and got something sweet with the gift card Mrs. Fung randomly sent me. Walking back to the office coffee in hand, I knew something needed to change. But what was the fix? How to heal these big mysteries and insecurities? Bluhhhhh.

And then this radical idea, kudos of the Holy Spirit, finally came to me in the form of this wild idea:

What if instead of focusing on the things I don’t have, I focus on the blessings I’m experiencing right now?

WHAAAT? I know. Anticlimactic. Sorry it’s not actually radical. It’s pretty much the most “duh” spiritual moment a person can have – “golly gosh, if I’m thankful I see everything the way God intended me to experience reality!” YES OF COURSE DUH. Should be simple, right? 

Oh, friends…the immense power of five minutes of thankfulness.

I sat down. Plugged in my headphones and put on a great song. Opened the lid of my coffee and savored it as if it were the first I’d ever had – watched the steam roll over the rim, slurped the foam, let my brownie melt all over my fingers. Then I got out my pen and wrote a list of what I was thankful for today: my family, my friends, this job, my apartment, spring, the cross…

Those five minutes of gratitude transformed me from a scared child into a bold liver-of-life. (I’ve been reading/thinking in French a lot lately, so the stronger word I wanted to use there is tenir – je tiens a la vie. A holder-onto or gripper of life.) It is a gift given to me for the living, not for the complaining or the drifting.

I will not waste any more of my precious life fretting for what I do not have. Instead, I’ll hold on thankfully to what I have already been given and let go of my feeble attempts at being okay without the Lord.

The remedy to brokenness is a gentle, healing Jesus.

The remedy for overwhelming darkness is the true light.

So the remedy for grumpiness is gratitude.

make me broader

  

"You're going to find joy again."

Relief feels like grace feels like joy. Seriously.

I mean, how else would I be able to explain to you what it's like to be showered with undeserved, unexpected, unmerited grace? I began 2014 with the conviction to maximize my circumstances: "if everything around me stayed the same until my life was over, what opportunities would I have wasted, relationships disregarded, moments bypassed?" And then 3 job interviews, 2 craigslist roommates and 1 move changed those circumstances! One very quick month later, and I'm in Brooklyn now (WHAT?) and I work for a nonprofit foundation in their communications department (WHAT?). I could write a longer list of my post-graduate life wishlist just to prove to you how beautiful it is to let go of idols, because sometimes they can come back to you as gifts when you least expect it.

It's been a month of adventures, but mostly a month of feeling like I'm actually where I'm supposed to be for the first time in a very, very long time. Maybe it's having this internship, or maybe it's just New York drawing me back home like a magnet after many years away. It's strange to not have a shadow of melancholy following me around...I'm almost guilty about being so happy! (ALMOST. Mostly just delightfully surprised.) And the loveliest part: knowing God was the same God this month and in the ickiness of last fall. Same love, same guidance, same protection, same fierce jealousy. Same incredible story of creation's redemption and my thread in the tapestry.

I'm thinking of the Limberlost book, where Elnora's mother is overcome with the glory of God and shouts, "Help me to unshackle and expand my soul to the fullest realization of Your wonders. Almighty God, make me bigger, make me broader!” That's what I want this spring, and for the rest of my life: a constant deepening and series of surprises that fill me with wonder. Spilling over and spreading joy to anyone whose lives I touch, not because I can create any patch of light within my own darkness all by myself to share, but because I belong to the one who gives...and gives...and gives...and gives. To share even the tiniest portion of the grace I am given.

I ask him that with both feet planted firmly on love, you’ll be able to take in with all followers of Jesus the extravagant dimensions of Christ’s love. Reach out and experience the breadth! Test its length! Plumb the depths! Rise to the heights! Live full lives, full in the fullness of God.

Make me broader. Amen!

ALLOW ME TO EXPRESS MY FEELINGS IN GIFS.

sooooo
i have a job.

I got a sweet internship at a sweet nonprofit! I will learn things and do things and work with great people! I can freaking STOP applying to other jobs! HOORRRAYYYYY!

Waitasec, Joanna, you may be thinking. You don't have a job already? No, I did not already have a job.

Oh, sweetie honey baby child. Looks like I have to tell you the whole story.

First: you should know that in a lot of ways, graduating college feels like this:

So in the wake of my new life last summer, I resigned to apply to a bamillion jobs while I worked for my grandma and taught swim lessons.

But it wasn't that easy. It ate up my life and seemed that nothing really went anywhere. So I had a quarter life crisis.

My phone was constantly on. After all, an employer could be calling!

I edited my resume like, every day. And had about 40 different cover letters.

But I kept on hitting dead ends. Not to mention that I didn't even know what I wanted to do with my life (I told you, quarter life crisis!). I had no idea where I wanted to be in 5 years. And that question stressed me out.

This whole job nonsense drove me slowly insane.

So, add it up: failure to ace interviews + failure to get jobs + failure to have a great and well-thought-out plan for my life's direction = extreme shame. I became really private, because I was embarrassed to talk about my failure. Because, naturally, the only reason I didn't get offered each job I applied to was 100% because of some shortcoming or inadequacy on my part. (SARCASM)

Then I had an epiphany. The jobs that I was applying to were jobs that I didn't even want. I was looking for the wrong positions for my experience, so I wasn't really getting anywhere with those! DUH JOANNA.

So I started over, taking inventory of my own experience and what I'd like to professionally grow in. Then I looked for paid internships where I could grow those skills. I started getting more calls back and more in-person second interviews.

I was finally on the right track! Could these interviews be the last ones? Could I finally move on to the next chapter in my life?

I had a couple of false alarms in a row where someone else with more experience was chosen instead of me (which is okay, I understand that). It was still dishearteningly familiar. Throughout those letdowns I learned that I care wayyyy too much about success, and that I need to daily let it go.

And then. AND THEN. Yesterday I returned from a visit with a friend and oh-so-casually opened my email (which I usually am super paranoid about checking and refreshing every second of every day) and found a simple little "You're hired" email. I doubt anyone has been this excited to get an email since the invention of email itself.

So that's the whole story. I'm so, so, so relieved and excited and hopeful and ready to do a different kind of good, hard work. I love hard work. I'm so ready for this. SO FREAKIN EXCITED.

THE END