Stray Thoughts and Minor Obsessions

That title makes this post sound more interesting than it will be, so fair warning. I've been keeping a list on my phone of what I suppose you'd call stray thoughts, and this seems like a good place to put them. Some of those stray thoughts might be considered borderline obsessions of mine at the moment, and oftentimes my blog is where I go to figure that out.

In no particular order...

Iced coffee. Definitely an obsession. I refrigerate whatever is left in the morning pot and drink it over ice later in the day. Like right now. I'm having an iced coffee. When you spend the summer moving it's the little things that keep you sane.

The Royals. Almost an obsession. As in I adore them and read the websites and look at all the pretty pictures every time one's posted. Kate's hair, Kate's clothes, George's soft blue cardi and mischievous grin, baby Charlotte and her fabulous pram, the English countryside...they're all happy distractions from so much turmoil going on in the world.

Earthquakes. Trying not to make it an obsession. Mostly succeeding although hubs and I may have ordered an earthquake kit for our daughter and son in law yesterday. We're not crazy or paranoid but we do have a little too much time on our hands right now, and this is where your thought train travels while in limbo.

Who read the super scary article in The New Yorker called The Really Big One? The tag line under the title is 'An earthquake will destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest. The question is when.' Huh? Why is this the first I'm hearing about plates colliding somewhere besides California? The article goes into great detail about the likelihood of a major earthquake striking the Pacific Northwest.

The same Pacific Northwest where my daughter1 and son in law live.

When my daughter first told me she and her now hubs would be moving to Washington after they married I was sad about the distance, but a little bit happy she was leaving D.C. In D.C. she rode the metro every day and worked a block from the White House, and I remember thinking how much safer she'd be under the soaring evergreens of Washington State than in our nation's capital.

Safety is an illusion. I suppose deep down we know this, but some weeks it's made more real to us than others, and this has been one of those weeks. I've heard so many sad things in the past few days, and that combined with everything splashed across our headlines and TV screens can make me want to hide away somewhere with all my people.

Which brings me to another obsession. This song by King and Country. Oh my word I am obsessed. I play it loud and sing along only slightly off key. I let the lyrics and the melody wash over me as I remember I'm not carrying the weight of the world on my own two shoulders.

None of us are. So many people I talk to feel a general sense of uneasiness these days. The world is shifting in ways that are sometimes confusing and hard to understand. Despair feels close enough to touch.

But then so is hope.

We don't have to carry the burdens of this world alone.  We can set them on the shoulders of the One who knows our every need and weakness. He set the world in motion and nothing is too big or too hard or too heavy for Him. Sometimes it's good to write that down and say it out loud.

Sometimes it's good to sing it at the top of your lungs and a little off key.