thoughts + ideas

2021 has been a wild year, friends. i began the year in a new state with my husband and only hopes for the best. my mental health had been improving, i was starting a new job for the first time in a year, and i was feeling a lot more at peace with myself. sadly, as i started work it became evident that being a nanny was no longer a good line of work for me. i deal with chronic mental illness as well as a chronic physical illness. i was dealing with a lot of physical and emotional pain during my short time as a nanny this spring. i was not thriving. but God.  i got scheduled for a covid vaccination in April in Alexandria, Virginia, because i was considered an essential worker. on my way home from the first appointment, i saw a sign pointing towards "Virginia Theological Seminary," and my interest was immediately piqued. i drove the rest of the way home and googled more information about the seminary, becoming more excited with each new fact i learned.  it was a small school; 

i'm nonbinary. how does this reconcile with the verse, "male and female he created them," you may ask? the variety in God's creation emphasizes God's creativity as an artist. Genesis gives us several examples of this. God made "day and night." this sounds like a binary, similar to "male and female," right? but that isn't quite all we experience in 24 hours. sunrises and sunsets do not fit into the binary of day or night. yet God paints the skies with these too. On the second day God separated the sky from water. seems like another binary. yet the clouds hold water for us in the sky, the condensation and rain cycle refreshing our earth constantly. the sky, separate from water, contains and releases water. God also said "Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear."   that isn't the full story, either. consider marshes, swamps, bogs, and fens. not fully land, not fully waters. th