Keeping up with the Castilles: Novembering!

I have a tendency to overestimate how much I actually share about the day-to-day life around here. Even though I've told you about my new conversation partner, last month's awesome retreat, and the crazy flood at my office, there's a lot that has gone un-blogged. So here: catch up on us!

Back to School:
One of the biggest recent changes for us is the fact that hubby is back in school! Four weeks ago, he began an online Masters program in Pastoral Counseling. It's a role reversal: when we were married 2 years ago, I was the one studying until the wee hours. Now he burns the midnight oil in our front bedroom while I go to bed.

He has a pile of impressive books...

Being his in-residence editor has its perks: it lets me learn a bit about such topics as the Intertestamental Period, the Maccabean Revolution, and the Herodian dynasty. This unashamed geek is planning to pounce on those books when he's done.

You can call me "Tink"
I finally did it--I got a pixie cut!

I was so afraid I wouldn't feel girly without my hair, but it actually feels extremely feminine and bold. My only regret is that my hair is growing so fast! I don't think I was counting on this level of maintenance.

40's Fun
My new workplace is big on social events--and food. Apparently, they also are really big into costumes, which is just fine by this recovering dress-up-aholic! The theme in our office for Halloween this year was "dress as your favorite decade."
I picked the 1940's, mainly because a) I had clothes that would work, b)someone else had already picked the 50's, and c) it's vintage--what's not to love?  

Some people said I looked like a flight attendant, but others swore I looked like this lady in Captain America (minus the hat):

Ok, I'm not in military gear, but maybe? I can dream.

(Side note: my pixie cut was postponed three days so I could pull off a 40's-ish hairstyle.)

Five Minute Friday :: Fly

Once again, I'm squashing my inner perfectionist. I'm linking up with a group of brave bloggers who were all handed a single-word prompt, a five minute timer, and told to simply let the words flow. No backtracking, no second guessing. Just writing for the joy of words, for the exploration of our own funny minds, and for the reminder that writing is fun.

Thank you, Lisa-Jo Baker, for making your blog a safe place for this much-needed reminder. :)

So here I go!

Prompt: "fly"

____________________________________________________

I was twelve. I was sure the other passengers knew it, but they were smiling at me like I was only three.

We were certainly all acting like three year olds--all of us squealing and crowding the tiny window and enjoying the rumble of the engines beneath us. It was our first flight. To see us, you would have thought it was the first flight in human history.

Grandma's car had to be brought from Houston. Daddy could have done it alone, but he knew that a thirty-minute flight would be like Christmas to his girls. So he invited us along.

I can close my eyes and still see the moment of liftoff. My braces are exposed in a permanent grin, the asphalt running by faster and faster until--

a sudden tilt!

The ground and cars and landscape became toy-like beneath us. It was so novel: tiny buildings and roads and points of insincere blue that we knew were backyard swimming pools, all beneath a truer blue of sky than we had ever seen.

My new Chinese friend

Have you ever lived overseas?

I'm not talking about a vacation packed with non-stop pictures and travel and fun. I'm talking about a time long enough for laundry to be done, long enough for grocery shopping routines to form, long enough for lonliness to set in.

  Someone once told me that the number of calories an immersed language student burns daily from sheer mental effort to understand and be understood is equivalent to what a bricklayer would burn if he worked eight hours in the sun. I believe them.

I had the chance to spend half a year overseas after high school. The mental exhaustion was intense. The new language was an extra layer of difficulty that had to be peeled back from the most ordinary of tasks. I remember searching for words, lining them up in my mind, rehearsing them over and over as I stepped to a desk or cashier and hoped that the other person would be kind.

Now I am the person behind the desk. In my new office, every other visitor speaks with an accent. Their syllables halt in strange places and their faulty intonations make commonplace words sound like music.

For a long time, I have enjoyed tiny slivers of interaction with internationals--a few minutes on the bus, visits with a Chinese friend who now lives 3 hours away, or a Turkish friend who is very busy with her baby. Because our ministry focus is on a student homegroup that has mostly American students (by accident, not design), there just hasn't been the opportunity to interact very much.

Now, not only do I get to see and talk to foreign students every day at my job, I have a new friend from China! Lynn* is a first-semester graduate student from Shanghai, and she is my new conversation partner. Several months ago, she jotted down her name on a sheet of paper at an international student welcome event to ask for an American friend. We got connected, and I'm so excited to get to know her!

I'm sure I'll have plenty more to tell as we get to know each other, but for now, please pray for our friendship, and for Lynn as she adjusts to American life and our (very!) strange language.

*Not her real name

Close to the Brokenhearted

"The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit." -Psalm 34:18

This is one of those verses that gets highlighted in almost every Bible. We write it in sympathy cards, and it's a favorite in Christian bookstores. When we are brokenhearted, this promise of God's nearness is pure comfort-food for the heart.

But today when I read it, God brought the faces of these brokenhearted ones to mind instead.

Ever since last Friday, when Typhoon Haiyan ripped through the Philippines, images like this have been flooding the news.

Bodies lie buried under the rubble of their homes or out in the open, rotting. On Wednesday morning, the death toll stood at 2,275, and the Phillippine government estimates that over 582,000 are now homeless.*

As staggering as these numbers are, the real danger is the health crisis that now looms with medicines, food, and clean water dwindling. Relief has been arriving, but with roads impassable, most of it is bottlenecking at the airports. If doctors, shelter, food, water, and medicines don't arrive soon, the death toll from hunger and dysentery will quickly dwarf the original casualties from the storm.

And even if all relief arrives in time, how does one simply move on after finding your 4-year old under a tarp at a makeshift morgue? 

And the Lord is close to the brokenhearted.

A beautiful truth, but how will they know it? If this statement remains only sentiment, thousands will die. 

The closeness of Jesus is meant to be tangible, just as he came himself in a literal, touchable body. Emmanuel--God with us--meant a baby who teethed, a boy who skinned his knees, and a man who touched the untouchables with very literal hands. 

Today, the Church--God in us--means that we who profess to follow Jesus must show his closeness to the broken with our practical help, our literal bank accounts, and even our physical presence. 

Why does God comfort us?  So that "we can comfort those in any trouble with the same comfort we ourselves receive from God." (2 Corinthians 1:4)

In other words, we are part of a Divine pay-it-forward, not for warm fuzzies or so that we can look good on facebook, but so that those crushed in spirit will be saved. 

If you sense God asking you to take action for the typhoon survivors, please pray about giving to one of the organizations below within the next 12 hours. At this point, hours matter. 

The Philippine Red Cross has teams on the ground to help with rescue and relief.

UNICEF is providing food, medicine and clean water to children affected by the typhoon. 

Doctors Without Borders is sending teams of doctors, surgeons, water and sanitation experts.

If you are looking for a list of other organizations that are helping with this tragedy, click here. 

*The stats in this post were taken from this CNN news article.