Wrapping the string around the tent

My buddy Bruce posted a comment to my last blog asking what else was on my mind besides Kenya lately. I confess, I have been sort of a one-track mind sort of girl, but in an effort to vary the life of this blog up, I've got other stuff to share. There HAVE been other things going on :)

First, I'm turning 25 on the 16th, and I have an almost certain feeling that this next year is going to be stellar. I'm thinking of ways to make an even bigger difference. I keep moving forward, growing, getting more settled into these bones. It feels good getting older and wiser. I'll post more about that later.

Aside from Kenya, the biggest extracurricular I've been working on is a new approach to a women's group. My friends Cass, Elizabeth and I started ruminating about ways to get a bunch of women together to really interact with each other and the world. We love having great one-on-one conversations about the world, culture, God, love, hurt, etc. and it seemed like a revolutionary idea to get people together to discuss the threads that tie through all of those issues.

Coincidentally, a woman recently wrote a book about the Red Tent phenomenon in the Old Testament that piqued our interest. The story is like this - when women were menstruating, they were considered ceremonially unclean, and thus, unfit to enter the temple. The women gathered in tents in the city for the duration, and basically had a really fun sleepover.

Can you imagine how much they must have discussed? For 3-5 days, the most intelligent women would mingle with the least advantaged. Puritans next to prostitutes. Surely they could only gossip for a little while, then the discussion must have turned to other things...other ways to relate through their differences. They could have discussed ways that culture merged with their religion, or problems that were common to all of them - issues with children, the world, their insecurities. What rich discussion! Women our age are STARVING for this sort of deep interaction. We are desperate to find a commonality amongst each other while preserving our individuality.

So, based on this ancient concept, we created a format to adapt this idea to modern day living. A group of 10-15 will meet on the first Thursday of every month to explore life and support each other. The format is simple: it's part field trip, part study session, part support group. It's not exclusive to Christians, although the majority of us are, and we're very respectful of where people are on their journey. It's extremely important that the environment is safe, honest and supportive, and most importantly, that no consensus is reached from our discussion. No matter what the topic is, I never want people to leave saying, "so we covered this, and here's our answer."

This last week was our first event, and it was a bigger success than I could have imagined. We met at Elizabeth's house and women who barely knew each other put their junk out for all of us to look at. People walked away with a different lens to view life through. We got to know each other, ate, laughed and cried. We explored what it's like to really be known, and what that means to each of us.

But the coolest part was...it went NOTHING like we had planned. We all had a framework, a vision of what we could discuss, and the group took on a life of its own. It was organic and beautiful. That, my friends, was exactly what I had wished for, but couldn't have predicted.

I'm happy to have an amazing group of friends in Kansas City that I'm constantly learning from. I'm glad that we don't gossip about each other because our life is too busy with important things. Our minds are too engaged with investing in building people up and being positive. We're not too important for earthly things, it's just that there's so much cool stuff around us to see and explore and dissect that we don't have time to get caught up in the crap.

And that is why I know 25 is going to be great :)