whitney dziurawiec

I feel old, you guys. It hits me like a snowfall, one tiny flake at a time. I feel it lurking in my back, snapping in my wrists, grinding in my knee. Not all at once, of course. I'm not 80. But just enough. Enough that I'm starting to see these senile snowflakes accumulate on the ground and it's getting slippery and I might fall down. Sometimes pain traps us in our bodies, but this pain oddly separates myself from it. What is this thing that surrounds me, moves around when I want it? Why does it hurt? I feel oddly separated from my body when my knee flares up; I find myself staring it at as I would a flat tire or a check engine light. This home of mine for 25 years that has stretched as I have grown, shook as I laughed, wiped its own tears away, seems foreign and  other  as it begins to wear down, which is disconcerting, but couldn't we all use a smack of eternal perspective every now and again? I even feel old as we sit in church and I fi...

We can officially call it Christmas now: whatever's been whirring around and nestling in our hearts. We have eaten the feast and set up the trees and as I sit here watching it glow and reflect, there is a relief in reading Advent words and listening to the songs of yearning; the world finally allows me to dance in the glitter of this time of year that normally hides away in my heart (I am a year-round lover of Christmas). The forecast says "snow" and I'm all giddy with the shades still open at 10 pm, on the lookout for any hint of it, because snow is the ultimate accompaniment to Advent. Weathermen predict snow while our baby Savior proclaims purity and forgiveness, promises stains to be blotted out; forecasts the fullness of salvation. Christmas aside, this time of year has always been one of celebration, and the reasons for cake continue to multiply. What started as the birthdays of two brothers, a cousin, and I, has added three more birthdays from my husband'...

October has flown by, along with most of the leaves, but the geese still waddle around the pond close to our home. November settles around us, not radiating like brightness of last month, but subtly, softly glowing. November has a darker backdrop, less leaves; it gives us a beautiful picture of the remnant; November provides us one of the few times that death is visibly stunning, only when it precedes new life. Perhaps if these were the last leaves to ever grow, their brilliant colors would fill us with certain dread and doom. If each tree that joined the ranks of barrenness would never see leaves again, our autumn would fill us with panic. But we know, we have seen the seasons change for decades, reliable as time itself, that life will follow this death. And this is the only factor that allows us to celebrate Autumn in its glory. Oh that I would see the death in my own life with such faith! Each time my plans crumble, or my pride shattered. Ea...

Summer has lost the battle, as it always does when October nestles itself into our trees, and this morning our sun room is gray from this rather sun-less Friday. Socks have become a necessity, blankets are pulled tighter, the windows must be closed at night. We feel normal now, our lives that were once cooped-up, packed up, are beginning to ooze gracefully out of our bodies, even out of our home; we are leaving our messes everywhere as students' hearts let us in and we let theirs in, as we pour out our selves to a church, spill out our hearts in prayer for new things, greater vision, changed lives.   We have done more than unpacked our boxes. We feel our hearts unloading, our guards diminishing, and calling anywhere else "home" grows more and more foreign. We drove back from our Fall Retreat on Sunday and as we found ourselves between the two Mankato bluffs, crossing the river, I realized that home, a once far-off dream is now a reality, and autumn makes any hom...

Long weeks have passed since my last post, but I sit here with measuring cups, bowls, and cookbooks surrounding me, bread baking in the oven, pots and cutting boards poking from the sink. I've been investing in my new love of the kitchen, turning ingredients into meals. I'm not sure how long this love will last, but I'll savor each sniff of bread that I can. The air has cooled down again so we've re-opened our windows while we keep watch for the leaves to change. From a slow, disappointing summer to a bursting, exciting fall. What an abrupt shift, like waking up to a brand new, exciting life from the discouraging and emotionally demanding nightmare that preceded it. I still feel like I'm recovering from a tragedy of sorts; still blinking and blinded in the sunlight from the passed-over fog that surrounds the ones who support raise full-time. Somehow, support raising does that to us: makes relationships and even conversations forced and awkward. I was worried I...

I write this post from a new town, a new home. And all our furniture is taking its first breaths of air since March, I have Febreezed everything and washed all the dust off the Tupperware and glasses. And yesterday was the first time I'd felt it. The rain fell enchantingly from the sky and soup simmered on the stove and piles grew in the sink and it hit me for the first time since we'd been here, the first time since we'd been homeless, since we've gotten married, really: Welcome, long-awaited normalcy . Intangible, inexpressible, and yes, fleeting. I knew normalcy was never the goal; I knew stability could always be (and was, often) ripped out from under us. I knew travel, moving, and packing were part of the job we have. I'd prayed for many things to occur after we'd moved here but this feeling was not on that list. Yet it flooded my heart warmly as I listened to the rain and emptied the dishwasher. I had planned to write about my hatred for this time o...

A week from tomorrow we will have a real home. A return address, a place for our pots and pans, where our shoes will be inevitably strewn haphazardly around despite our various attempts at keeping them neat. My husband's green thumb will ensure we have plants and lots of them, and I will put a candle in every room. Perhaps we will finally print our wedding pictures. We will rebuild a home, and walk with as much faith we can muster into the next stage of our lives. The summer is almost over, and the heat is welling up inside with anticipation. It is quiet now, as we play house in my parents' home while they are away; finally cooking what we want, not being cooped up in a room when we need alone time. There is space to breathe in every room, and goodness is this how it is for everyone else? Next Saturday has always felt forever away, but now it is next Saturday and we aren't sure what to do with all of this. This summer has drug us to the outskirts of our trust, forced ...

Yesterday was Jon's birthday and I find myself most speechless on the days where I'm supposed to be the most full of praises and affirmations. And we spent the morning driving around the city to different churches with the air conditioning sputtering on and off, and the evening driving to Omaha and back, and we never acknowledged the sober reality that we'd spent most of his first day of 27 in the car. The heat is fading in slowly, in suffocating silence. Some days this farmland glows with glory. Others, it grows stagnate and stale. And we wait on the Lord out in this farmland. We wait on Him in relief that His faithfulness is not correlated with our trust, but with His own character. We cling to blurry hope on the stale days; we relish in the abundant glory on victorious days. We ask Him. He answers. "No's" sting our cheeks in shame and "yeses" feel foreign, abbreviated, delayed. But we have no other choice but to sit at His feet ...

This Starbucks is murmuring, my iced coffee is dripping, Norah Jones is crooning, and the world outside is swelling in anticipation for a storm they say will pass through. Jon took a day trip today so I've had a much-needed introvert day, complete with hiding from the septic pump people in desperate attempts to avoid all human interaction for the entire day. So the world is swelling and my soul is groaning because this world is so wearing, I'm seeing, for all of us. And often my personal pain hinders from me from seeing this, but we are all groaning, waiting, limping down our respective roads that are often riddled with pain and unmet desires. We all whisper those silent questions when night falls and we are forced to face our swollen hearts pregnant with longing, the when? the why? the how? I feel it too, friends. And I know you're here. I know your pain, though different than mine, is just as valid. It is deep. It is too complex for trite encouragement, too deep to de...

Oh, friends, it has been one of those days (weeks?). The sky and I have had a lot in common the past few days as we've both decided (simultaneously but separately) to start giving exactly zero craps, wailing and thundering at random times of the day, whenever we feel like it. Being 92% funded is both wildly exciting and wholly depressing. We have nothing to do. We have a few contacts left and if they miraculously get back to me, then we will have maybe a few hours of work to do and then we will find ourselves again with nothing to do, staring into oblivion and probably deciding upon another episode of Seinfeld, which has been our only anchor to the sea of sanity the past few months. We work from home, and so work at this point includes staring at my computer screen in my pajamas praying for God to give me an idea of something productive to do. Many times He's come through, but this week, ya'll, I have been scraping at the bottom of the barrel and I'm probably wron...

I'm caught between art nowadays, between listening to some good new (to me) tunes by my current faves James Taylor & Stevie Wonder, by this depressingly beautiful novel I'm working through, and a short story/memoir I'm writing that's too special to me to just slap together without much thought. Amidst all those things, though, I find myself here, where the words I spew are read by a handful of friends and strangers. Something about the inconsequentiality of writing these words keeps me coming back. I could be delving into timeless pieces of art, but I turn to this trivial space where my words will be soon forgotten. We are working hard, on this trek toward a percentage, a number, a dollar amount, a whatever. All we know is we aren't done yet, that we're homeless, that the days stretch long, and we feel guilty about not knowing what to do with ourselves sometimes. We pray more than we ever have, because we our motto now is, "If the Lord doesn't do ...

If you guys have never been to Sioux City, it is probably time for you to offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving to our good Lord. Jon and I are stuck here for a few days while we wait out a few appointments later on in the week, and find ourselves recklessly slandering this place without pause. Spring makes me too optimistic, I've decided, and all I brought to wear is shorts, tshirts, and a maxi skirt (not ideal for rainy, muddy farmland). So my outfit (one long-sleeved shirt and yoga pants) has remained the same (both daytime and nighttime) since Monday, which is surely a major turn-on for my husband. My conclusion from this week: I do better as a pessimist, in the winter. Speaking of winter, Jon and I have some news: we are moving to Minnesota! This exclamation point has meant many things in the past few weeks since finding out, but currently (I promise) it does mean excitement. We spent the last year preparing, support raising, and paying rent for our future home in Ames. I be...

If I started every blog apologizing for how long it's been since the last blog, you'd probably all hate me. Oh wait, I'm already doing that. That's alright, let's move on, okay? Nothing is quite noteworthy besides the fact that I finally get warm running weather, I have my maxi skirt back from our apartment, I now follow more food Instagram accounts than people ones, and am really getting into James Taylor. We were on the road all last week and so our diet consisted mainly of trail mix and Caribou coffee (sorry haters, we were up north). Oh and we also have kind of have two announcements but we can't say until our prayer letters have reached our supporters (hate that I have to clarify this, but it's NOT a baby). Fine, I'll tell you one of them: Jon and I are extremely close to perfecting our biscuits & gravy recipe! The wind is warm and soothing, and our roommates (AKA the people who let us live with them while we finish up support raising) h...

Spring came and smacked us all in the faces, but in the best way. Like a smack of cake in the face. Spring came early and smacked its sweet frosting of warm breezes and golden sun right in our faces and I'm licking it all up in a frenzy, vowing to never take warmth or sun or shorts for granted ever again. I didn't know I had Seasonal Affective Disorder until I realized that I now have a motivation to get out of bed that never existed in the past months. IS THIS WHAT LIVING IS LIKE?!?! While spring budded in newness and change outside, God decided to smack our faces with a change of season we never anticipated. Picking us up, turning us around, asking us to run in a new direction. Utterly disoriented, we staggered on this path for days before even taking a step. We cried, we went to happy hour, we processed. Our hearts did not beat, they throbbed; our lungs didn't breathe, they sighed; our feet did not walk, the...

I write this with a bit of fire in my belly, and I'm glad to have this fuel for my fingers; Lord knows if my heart isn't about to scream it, it won't get written, which explains the sometimes long gaps between posts. This has been stirring for some time and today in the shower was when it all culminated in my heart, so amidst the busyness of today I've mumbled phrases to myself in hopes of avoiding the trite phrases that easily enter into Valentine's Day posts like these. Valentine's Day is swiftly approaching more quickly than we'd all care to admit, and thus my heart has been mulling over the concept of love (as well as the concept of chocolate, but I'm trying to remain single-minded. But seriously, you need to go buy the Ferrero Rocher variety pack right now if you think Valentine's Day could be hard for you in any way. But I digress). I wrote about  this topic (love, not chocolate. Stay with me people) a few years ago in the middle of a heartb...

The morning sun poured in through the windshield, and the purity of the winter morning kept us silent as the minivan drove through Iowa's highways. We sat reluctantly, depressingly, unwillingly. I felt my soul lift up silly prayers about this church we were driving two hours to visit. We reviewed our presentation but it was the same as last time. I watched as the country houses slid by us, still adorned with cheeky Christmas décor, staring suspiciously at us city folk. I felt myself desperate to be known by their inhabitants. Will you know our lives? That we are packed up once again? That we are defined by a percentage? That our apartment is empty and lifeless and its thermostat is set at 55 degrees because we won't be back? But the houses kept sliding by us, uncaring. Snow powdered in the fields in the distance but lay lifelessly in the ditches beside us. It was the old, gray snow. My husband was singing to himself. Some things you do for money, And some ...

Because I'm the exact opposite of a hipster (unlike my husband, who claims he wore moccasins before they were cool) and so in lieu of just downloading TriviaCrack, I thought I'd jump on the Christian cultural bandwagon of naming my year ahead in faith and prayer. Last year, I was the recipient of lavish generosity, on behalf of parents, in-laws, friends, strangers, and the Church in general. Though support raising is hard, it thrust us into the delight of receiving radical and beautiful generosity flooded into our hearts, homes, and yes, bank account. And this year (now that our income is no longer poverty-level), I long to be on the giving end of that. The one flooding. Because possessions grip me hard and invite me to trust in them rather than my All-Satisfier. Don't you feel it too, when you go to the mall and this appetite roars inside you with a hunger you didn't feel until you stepped inside? It's a mosquito bite disguised as an attractive J. Crew model fo...

I welcomed 2015 in bed while my tender-hearted husband tried getting sweetly sentimental on me about New Years. I lay there listening and nodding and smiling but feeling absolutely none of the same sentiments. And I sit here tonight while candles flicker and the holiday dust settles and I'm just not feeling this new year. 2014 is not on my list of favorite years. Too many hours with a seatbelt strapped around me, too many days with a Faraway uniform on, too many nights in brothers' beds, too many months wondering how we will pay those bills, too much of the year we've spent living elsewhere than our apartment. I've been blatantly ignored multiple times (instead of just saying "No thank you we aren't interested in hearing about your ministry"). The Sundays I've dreaded going to church because of all the people there we "couldn't get a hold of". The clothes/accessories/money/gift cards we've lost amidst all the moves. The hundreds of ...