Way recommending: "Who's Picking Me Up from the Airport?"

I am an unlikely audience member for Who's Picking Me Up from the Airport?: And Other Questions Single Girls Ask and for this reason, I read it with great relish. What I hadn't anticipated is how much I would enjoy it and, moreover, how much I would have needed it!

This book is effectively an encouragement for Christian women who are single and age 30+. These women are single not due to widowhood or separation/divorce but because they are still seeking a life's partner. Still seeking--that's the error in the perception as the book readily points out. Author Cindy Johnson lays bare what a raw deal single women, especially those in the Church, are given. Ever being postured as not quite whole, their lives not fully realized because they are not yet paired off with someone--we have done a terrible job of ministering to singles and focusing for way too long on their relationship status. The chapter that spoke most into my heart was "Call It What It Is: Why Being Single is Lame" where Johnson offers a "what not to say" to one's single friends. I have been the offender in almost every one of the points offered. Points. Well. Taken!

The book is not long--150 pages and it is organized in a brilliant way that reads easily, like a memoir. Johnson pairs her own anecdotes as well as letters from her single friends, both male and female, who share their stories in dating and seasons of singledom. Johnson discusses so many beautiful aspects of the single life and how rich it is, but she also shares her journey through relationships that she had expected to turn out otherwise. Her voice is delightful, not just in contrast to the voice one might expect from a non-fiction book on dating and the single life. Johnson's tone is consistently sincere and funny and she pulls no punches. This book is a gift and I believe that it would be a great gift for a friend, an addition to a pastor's bookshelf, and would be a great women's book club pick.

***

*Johnson and I have gotten acquainted through our mutual literary agent. I received a free copy of this book in advance with no expectation of review or endorsement.

4 pairs of Converse high-tops

We bought four pairs. You came into the world with four pairs of Converse hightop shoes. Daddy bought unisex colors: two sets of aqua (unisex? debatable) and two sets of black, because we didn't know if you were a boy or girl. But we were prepared with hightops, sizes 3, 5, 7, 9.

We didn't know how this would work, you joining us, no other family member for 1000 miles, Mama in grad school, Daddy working 3 jobs. When the nurses handed you to me, I couldn't tell if it was just the anesthesia making me shiver or if the great and profound weight of this new life in my care was making me quake. I was holding 8 lb. 1 oz. of beautiful you but the pull of gravity at that moment was much greater. Like a Mac truck had backed into my hospital bed and dropped a heap-ton of work and sleeplessness into my lap. Somehow--and I can't explain it because I think you have to experience it firsthand--a feeling washed over me that you were the only one thing in my life that I couldn't get out of, and yet we were going to be ok, you and I and Daddy, and that we were going to be so, so happy together.

I mean, for starters, at least we had shoes.

The first time I saw your Daddy walking up the hill of Schultz lawn, he was wearing Converse. They were red Chucks, the only appropriate choice for the man who captured my young heart.

Whenever we would go to visit your grandparents in Ann Arbor, we would visit Sam's to buy ourselves a new pair of Cons.

***

It's terribly naive to think that we should make this bulk investment in Converse for a girl who would not walk for another 13 months, but I suppose the shoes symbolize our naivete and our induction of you into our Converse club.

***

You put the last pair on today, the bookends on this shoe collection, and you complained that they were pinching your toes. It felt unfair, that you had outgrown these shoes that had once seemed so impossibly big without our even noticing it.

This, too, is a symbol of the invisible ache that your own growth causes the people who love you most in this world, and also of the wonderful shoes you have yet to fill that you do not yet own, in sizes we cannot yet fathom.

5 Magnificent Mistakes I made in my Twenties #definingdecade

My students are all reading The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter--And How to Make the Most of Them Nowmostly because it is an assigned text for a psych course, but also because maybe the twenties are the new Freakonomics, the new Malcolm Gladwell, the new Rachael Ray all wrapped up in bacon and birthday cake. I don't know. The twenties are trending, though, am I right? I haven't read The Defining Decade and I'm probably missing out on a TED talk that summarizes it, but something tells me it won't be groundbreaking for me. Because I spend much of my day with people on the fringes or well entrenched in their twenties. Because I have experienced the twenties, the whole decade of them, and I've lived to tell about them, which makes me an expert, obviiiiousssslyyyyy.

If Dr. Meg Jay is right and the decisions made and relationships forged in the twenties are clutch and will dictate the failures and successes of the future, then let us ponder the magnificent mistakes by yours truly in her twenties?

1. I made the magnificent mistake of having good health insurance.

Oh yeah. That non-profit I worked at right out of college? It took away my soul and good nature but boy was that health insurance top rate. So good, in fact, that when I did the responsible thing of going to the dentist, they took one look at my loaded dental plan and prescribed me 11 fillings for the cavities I didn't have. They were just the beginnings of cavities, so future dentists have told me. Nevermind that I'd never had a cavity before. Nevermind that I didn't know what it was to "get a second opinion." I always wanted to know what having my skull drilled was like....

2. I married my college sweetheart.

And because we never broke up prior to getting married, I never had a chance to figure out if I was just psychotic *with him* or if it was just a part of my general charms and abilities that would emerge in any romantic relationship.

3. I believed all the nice things people said about me in college.

I had emerged from undergraduate actually buying that I had unique skills that companies would be falling over themselves to bring aboard to finally, finally complete their puzzle and achieve sustainable success, if only for my winning and unmatched copyediting abilities! Then I entered a world of Working People at Real Jobs that sort of frowned upon the notion of a siesta. I forgot that life wasn't grading on the A-F scale, but rather the Hired-or-Fired scale. I somehow missed the memo that I still had crazy copious volumes to learn about maturity and comporting self and doing a solid job.

4. I cried on my 26th birthday because it seemed too old to not have started my family yet.

Because who does that?

5. I spent six months studying to be a financial advisor and an insurance salesperson.

I failed. Really magnificently, I failed. I learned tons about self sabotage and blocking out every reasonable voice that tells you gently that maybe they saw you more doing something in the humanities? I threw away hundreds if not thousands of dollars and felt worthless and directionless and angry. And because of my spiritual and emotional poverty, I was able to hear the voice of God more clearly, calling me home. Which is why I'm so grateful for the twenties. The defining decade. The very definition of how faith broke down the doors to my heart and set me sailing on a sea of redemption. The magnificently mistaken twenties. Thank you, Lord, for them. Amen.