Shaken

Well folks, today I experienced my very first earthquake.
And I have to admit, I’m still pretty shook up about it.

We are several hours north of Anchorage, but we experienced tremors from their 7.0 magnitude quake. My experience lasted about two minutes in real life---but it felt like 272 minutes in the moment. As most of you could probably guess, I handled it with exactly no chill.

I was sitting on a backless bar stool at my kitchen counter doing my daily Bible study. I suddenly felt really, really dizzy. I thought I was being struck with vertigo. I lifted the Bible from the counter and held it up in front of me so I wouldn’t have to look down to read. I was reading from Psalm 62:

“Truly my soul finds rest in God; my salvation comes from Him. Truly He is my rock and my salvation; He is my fortress, I will never be shaken.”(v1-2)

All at once it dawned on me that I wasn’t dizzy. I was shaking.


Here’s how the whole thing went down in my brain:

-I put the Bible down and stood up. Y’all, I kid you not--after reading that verse, I could have sworn the LORD was returning right then and there!! I think I actually said the words “Help me, Jesus!” out loud.

-I kind of ran around my house from corner to corner. Apparently I should have listened better to what my children do during earthquake drills in school…

-My children!!! Oh my goodness! My children aren’t with me!!! *activate crazed, hyper-protective parent* Mentally talk myself out of running to/calling school during an active earthquake…

-Earthquake! I’m STILL shaking. Are things falling? Let me assess. No. Nothing falling, but blinds and hanging objects are swaying really heavily side to side. Ugh, so am I…

-I feel awful. I get motion sick just from riding on an elevator these days. I was not built for earthquakes…

-Earthquake! Oh my goodness! How is this still happening?! This never would have happened in Texas. Texas just has tornadoes. Tornadoes are way easier than earthquakes. They come with warnings and sirens and shelters. I miss Texas. And tornadoes. (Okay, maybe not tornadoes.)...

-My dog always hides in the bathroom in tornadoes. Am I supposed to hide somewhere? Yes! Under a table! (I knew I listened to my kids when they told me things!!!)…

-Oooh, I feel sick. I’m not going to be able to squeeze myself under a table right now. Maybe I’ll find the dogs and hide with them…

-Locate dogs. (They were napping on the rug.)

-Phone rings. It’s my husband. Immediately feel validated that I wanted to call school ;)

-Tremors settle while we’re on the phone. Assure each other we’re okay. Tell husband I thought Jesus was coming. Laugh-cry a little.

-Text my mom.

-Receive alert from weather app---hmmm. Not helpful.

-Look at the “Alaska Bucket List” that the school counselor gave to my children and lament to myself that she included an earthquake box to check off.

-Put the dang checkmark on the stupid box.



After I settled my heart and my brain a little bit, I climbed back onto the (newly inadequate) back-less bar stool and looked at the verse I was reading when my world started to rattle.

“Truly He is my rock and my salvation; He is my fortress, I will never be shaken.”

Y’all, nothing on this earth is as secure as we think it is. We build skyscrapers up from the ground never stopping to think that they are only held up by a constantly shifting, thin layer of rock. I am certainly grateful for the roof over my head, but I was extra aware today that if the ground shook it hard enough, all of the walls around me would crumble. The feeling of the earth swaying side to side was so surreal, I recognized—maybe even for the first time—that the very ground we walk on can fail beneath our feet. The earth hangs on nothing, (Job 26) and one day it will all pass away (Matt. 24).

We have one sure, solid foundation.
One way to salvation.
One everlasting, never-failing, absolute hope.

One thing that holds us together when everything else is shaking.


I feel silly about how scattered I was in the midst of my first earthquake. But I also feel really settled.
God knew I needed that Bible in my hand when the tremors hit. He knew the verse I needed to see. He heard me call for His help. He knew I was going to be a fool and stand under a ceiling fan when I should have been under a table. And He held me together when everything around me felt unsteady.

That’s who He is. That’s what He does.
And that kind of revelation shakes everything up for me in a much better way.

“Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe.” (Hebrews 12:38)

Chasing Lights

When my husband first received orders to move to Alaska, we thought we were heading to Anchorage.
We weren't.

Just three weeks before the moving company loaded everything we owned into large shipping crates, we discovered that we were actually heading to a small installation a little ways outside of the northernmost "city" in the interior. I cried.
No mountains. No ski resorts. No whales. No coastal winds saving me from crazy arctic temperatures. There wasn't even a Target.

The one thing we did gain from moving a bit further north was an eight month access pass to one of the great natural phenomenons of our skies--the Aurora Borealis. Apparently the show has been going on since August, but I only caught my first glimpse of it a couple weeks ago.

I kept running into a couple hangups whenever I would try to see it. For one, the Aurora often peaks around these parts in the middle of the night, and I love my sleep too much to waken. The sky might be awake, but this girl ain't. Secondly--and I'm not sure if y'all have heard this--Aurora displays take place outside, and it happens to be really, *really* cold here.
Pair those two things with the fact that you need just the right amount of solar activity in conjunction with a cloudless sky, the right elevation to keep trees from blocking your view, no lights at all, and constant watch (sometimes the lights will be out for hours, but sometimes just a few minutes at a time)... then you start to understand why people will pay bookoos of their hard-earned dollars to sleep in a remote hotel room with a specialty wake-up call if the lights happen to be out.
I'm not that fancy.

One clear, cold Saturday night, my family piled into my husband's pickup truck, we drove to the top of a hill at midnight, and we waited...
And we watched...
And we waited some more...

Finally, we saw it! Clear as day, a rippling streak illuminated the sky and spiraled across it. I could see the line "light up" at one end, and then it rose in columns. It was beautiful. It was big. It was definitely the northern lights.

But it wasn't green.

I was so confused. Every photo I had ever seen of the lights was a bright, neon green light. What I was seeing looked a lot like an illuminated cloud. I kept thinking there was a pale green hue to it, but I couldn't tell if it was actually greenish or if I just really wanted it to be. My husband and I took our sleepy children out of the car and we "ooohed" and "aahed" together, then we hopped back into the truck and drove around to get different angles from other places we'd read were prime viewing spots. Everywhere we looked it was the same thing. Huge, dominating, bright white *with a hint of possibly imaginary pale green* lines of light across the sky.

What I was looking at was absolutely wondrous. It just wasn't the exact thing I was expecting, so it bothered me.

Later that next morning, my husband and I started doing some online research. Why weren't our lights green?
Friends, take a moment to do a quick Google image search:
Aurora Borealis eye vs picture

(Don't worry. I'll wait...)

Y'all! Do you see it? It's mostly a trick of the lens!!!
Not on purpose, of course. Something about the filters of the lens and the different exposures capture that vivid hue. It's accidental photo-shopping. Absolutely spectacular displays will show up with brighter colors, but more often than not, it appears to our naked eyes as a white or pale green light.

I was spinning! How this is not more common knowledge is crazy to me!!

But true to form, it all got me thinking...

Nothing about those pale green lights was anything other than stunningly beautiful. It was glorious, actually. That night the sky was so clear, I could see the Milky Way blending in with the brightest stars...and because apparently that wasn't pretty enough to knock me right over, these dancing swirls of light appeared. And what in the world did I do when immersed in such natural beauty??
I griped that they weren't green enough.

That is just plain discouraging. But if I'm honest with myself, I do that mess all the time--I'm doing it here and now!!

I photo-shopped up a beautiful picture of Alaska in my mind, and because the real deal is not the exact thing that I was expecting, I let it bother me.

I don't know if you're at all like me in this way, but maybe you are.

Maybe your degree didn't take you as far as you imagined it would. Maybe your job isn't as fulfilling as you dreamed it would be. Maybe your house isn't Pinterest-perfect. Parenthood isn't as constantly rewarding. Marriage is not as blissfully romantic. Maybe growing up just feels like getting old.

But does that mean none of these things are good? Are these things not still bright accomplishments, brilliant motivators, and spectacular blessings--just as they really are?

Friends, I believe that most of us are so busy chasing the brightest version of things that we forget to appreciate the raw, real beauty that is actually all around us. I'm sure if we took a moment to look through a truer lens, what we saw would be pretty enough to knock us right over.

Maybe all of those spectacular pictures we created of what things ought to look like are totally fake--hopes that we've filtered and exposed through the lenses of high expectations and time.

Let's set aside the images of what we hoped to see and focus instead on the lights that are right in front of us.
Because things don't have to be the very brightest for them to be beautiful just the same.

Quiet Girl

Last week I decided to take a full-out break from social media.

There was no build up to it or boiling point that was reached to cause the break. There was no warning. There was no formal announcement. I'm not even sure if there was a real reason. For seven days, I just went...quiet.

Like all crash diets, the first 24 hours was pretty pain-free. Beautiful, actually.
But the very next morning I awoke to my first ever negative temperatures, and my fingers starting itching to share this experience with everyone I knew. (Either that, or they were shivering because I was FREEZING!)
Twenty-four hours in, and I was jonesing to log back on. Only one day, and my own silence was deafening.

I realized I was going to have to be okay with people not knowing things or I was doomed--So of course, really fun things kept happening to me this week.
My kiddos went trick-or-treating in snow (a completely foreign experience to this Texan.) The sun didn't rise until 9:45 am. I saw my first Aurora Borealis. I also saw my first completely frozen body of water.

(No swimming? Yeah...no worries there, friend.)

As the week progressed and I got a better hold of my itchy fingers, I became very aware of two things: 1) how much more productive I was being when I wasn't constantly "checking in," and 2) how much more inefficient it is to communicate with people on a one-to-one basis.

Even beyond keeping up with my personal relationships, I discovered how challenging it is to keep up with anything when I'm not logged in.
Businesses here in Alaska don't necessarily have websites, but all of them have public pages. The heater went out in my son's taekwondo building, (important in the negative temps, I'd say,) and I didn't have a way to get the heads up that class was cancelled. Instead, I drove the twenty minutes in the snow up there, found the handwritten note on the door, and drove twenty minutes back home carting a disappointed boy in white pajamas. Meanwhile, the message to prevent such things sat nicely on a social media page that I wasn't looking at.
I can Google weekend events in Alaska all I want to no avail, but a quick events search from my newsfeed and I can find plenty of information about things happening right under my nose.

The fact of the matter is, social media isn't going anywhere. It is a wonderful tool to help keep people connected with the people, businesses, and the world around them. But when used in excess, the opposite happens: it can have an extremely depleting and isolating effect.
So it's up to us and our "jonesing fingers" to find the right balance: that beautiful space where we get to be really present and productive without taking our kid to a closed taekwondo building.

I don't pretend even for a minute to know this balance. But I do have a few humble suggestions for anyone who is willing to experiment with a little more...quiet.

Choose only ONE social media account.
It would probably destroy businesses to limit themselves in this way, but many of us aren't selling anything on social media--We're just spending our valuable time. Even with this blog, I only stick to one social media account. (By the way, be sure to follow The Crazy Woman Driver on Facebook, friends!) ;) Which one are your favorite people on? Which one do you enjoy and use the most? Just check and post in that one place.

Remove the application from your home screen.
I won't lie. My social media app was the very first thing I installed on my smart phone all those many moons ago, and so it appeared right smack on my home screen. I never even thought to move it for many, many years. Eventually I realized that if it was the first thing I saw on my phone, covering up that cute photo of my kiddos' adorable faces, it was going to be all too easy to click on. I removed it from the position of importance on my screen, and that helped me limit some "accidental clicks."

Choose one day every week to "go quiet."
For several months now, I have set aside Sunday as my "social media-free day"...and honestly, I can't see how I will ever go back.
Not only does this give me a chance to honor the sabbath and keep it holy, (something that has become increasingly important to me,) but it also really drives home that idea of true rest that every week needs.
On Sundays, our family gets to hike, bike, play games, watch football, bake, craft--all with my full attention.
Now I must admit, it sometimes seems as if my friends wait to have all of their babies and major life events happen on Sundays. But I promise, celebrating with them is just as sweet a day later.

Limit your social media activity to the same time every day.
I don't know about you, but I am a girl that has to operate on a schedule. (A poor, poor reality for a military wife, it's true.) It's not because I am extremely type-A, but just the opposite. I have to be intentional with the hours in my day, or they tend to get away from me. My daily planner is actually an appointment calendar, broken down into fifteen minute windows--and while the kiddos are off at school, those windows are FULL UP so I don't drift away.
However, I do give social media one of those fifteen minute spots in the morning. After I do the morning dishes and before I do my morning workout, I pause to check in on my friends and family. It makes me happy to stay connected, and at least most of the time, it helps keep my itchy habit under control.
All things in moderation...and all minutes on purpose.

Remove the application from your phone altogether.
Listen, friends. Some of us can keep potato chips in our house, and some of us can't. We just have our own triggers. (And I happen to be one of those people who can keep chips but not the app.)
My Bible study plan is downloaded in File Commander. Every morning I would wake up with the best of intentions to click on File Commander and my sleepy finger would wander over to the tile directly to the left--Facebook. Half of the time, I didn't even make the conscious connection I was doing it until everyone's sweet faces and sometimes not-as-sweet opinions were flashing in my freshly woken face.
So even with one account, even with removing it from my home screen, even with my quiet day which had operated successfully for months, even with my daily time allotment--I still failed from time to time. It happens, y'all!
Removing the app maybe seems like a strong and scary choice to some people, but it was one I knew I needed to make. Now social media is available to me, but it is not always so easily accessible, and that is the particular land that I need to live in.

Maybe even to my blogging doom, but hey...
Silence is golden.


What about you guys? Any tips or tricks to managing your social media habit?