When I walked in to tour my first post-grad, no-roommates apartment, I spent a few seconds inside, then walked out to the back porch and cried.

I feel like we’re telling a lot of stories about me crying lately, but the point is this: that apartment, objectively, was ugly. It smelled weird. It had reddish-brown shag carpeting. (The first time my brother saw that carpet, he asked, deadpan: Do you mow this?)

And then I moved in, and took an industrial-sized carpet cleaner to the floors, and cut paint chips into garland to hang around my room, and bought end tables and lit candles in the kitchen.

My dad helped me split the (admittedly generously sized) living area into two, so I had a little office, and I sat at that desk and paid bills and filled out job applications, so desperate to get out. I dreaded days at my job, rewarding as it ultimately was, but I cherished my time in that apartment, and I counted down to weekends there like I was counting down to Christmas. It was home.

I didn’t really know, until I started writing this, that I still miss it.

My current apartment is a step up. No one would think to suggest a lawnmower for the carpet, for one thing.

But it still doesn’t have what you’d call good bones. Not hardly. The last tenant (or the last ten) managed to stain and scruff up the off-white, non-shag carpet all through the main living area.

There’s a lot of cheap plastic tile in inconvenient places. It’s not in a great neighborhood. Most of my furniture was handed down by family or purchased from IKEA.

And I love it. Like, love it so much my heart swells up all big in my chest when I walk through the door.

My style has grown up here. I’ve started thinking about functionality, and how to accommodate other people in my home. It’s not a showroom, but it’s home.

That’s partly because I’ve been here for laughter and crying, and learning how to make a steak, and washing blood out of my hair after brain surgery. It’s also because I’ve taken care to shape it and make it. It’s home because it’s the accrual of all those little efforts to make something beautiful.

You do not have to own your home to love it.

You don’t have to buy thousand-dollar dining chairs.

You don’t have to walk on gleaming hardwood floors.

You can make it home right now. You can thrift, and buy things at dollar stores and glue them together, and hang paintings you love on the walls, and fill it with colors and textures you love and things that remind you of the joys in your life.

Home is not something that’s waiting for you way off in the future. When you own it. When it’s perfect. When you have those hardwoods and thousand-dollar dining chairs.

This is where you live. The future is not where you live.

Settle in. This is home. And that’s beautiful.

So, let’s get the elephant out of the room first: I am a terrible blogger. I have legitimately been crazy busy with work (and doctor’s appointments and just life) but I also find it waaay easier to spend the free time I do have scrolling through other blogs or reading zillions of books or switching the rug in my living room for the tenth time.

So. There’s that :)

While I was busy being a terrible blogger, I completed the all-day, one-stop radiation treatment I spent a solid two months worrying about. The last big thing. The final blow, hopefully, for this tumor that keeps sneaking back.

I have to say — of all the things I’ve been afraid of in life, this one broke the mold. Usually reality is smoother and easier — and, you know, less painful — than your expectations. This was ten times worse.

The radiation itself was just as everyone described — no pain, no pressure, no taste, no smell. But prior to radiation, I had to have a metal frame placed on my head, and then sit in that frame for 6-7 hours.

It took about eight shots of local anesthetic (two in each insertion site) until my head really started to numb. Needles don’t usually bother me, but those little shots burn. I don’t think I really felt the insertion of the actual pins, but all that pressure and heavy, heavy squeezing…it hurt. Actually, I think it scared me more than anything.

If all the whining above isn’t embarrassing enough, here’s the real confession: as all this was going on, I cried. And asked for my mom. In a room full of surgeons and nurses and physicists. I’d never, ever done that.

My neurosurgeon was an absolute gem, as was my oncologist. They both spoke gently and slowly the whole time, telling me I was doing great. I wasn’t, of course, but it was a very kind lie.

The rest of the day went by in a haze. I’d brought a pile of work and it didn’t get done. There was a TV all set up for movies, but they didn’t get watched. I somehow ended up taking a nap — which I still don’t really get, given all the obstructions to moving my head. (I think we can chalk it up to the pain and anxiety meds, if we’re being honest.)

I’d expected the day to be hard and dramatic and BIG, the way the surgeries were. But it wasn’t. It just…happened.

And now it’s OVER.

I can’t quite let myself think about forever. Maybe if I have a clean six-month scan, I’ll feel comfortable saying this thing is really gone. Or maybe not. Right now, I’m just trying to live in the spaces in between.

But it’s over for now, and there’s a kind of strangeness in that. There was sweetness in this season, surprising and raw, and it’s hard to leave that…but it’s also hard to leave the bad things, and the mundane things, too. I’d gotten into routines — nothing meaningful, just things like shopping at the Target near my doctor’s office after appointments — and it’s hard to leave even that behind.

So that’s the weird space I’m in now. I’ll keep working to figure it out, and pushing through this busy season at work, and reading too many books and trying, trying, trying to be a better blogger.

And what happens next…well, it’ll happen.

I still haven’t rounded up the highlights of 2014 in a post.

I still haven’t solidified (or come anywhere close to solidifying) my goals for 2015, in a post or elsewhere.

I know some broad things I’d like to work on this year, but that’s it. And January is passing by, and that’s okay.

If these goals come together by the end of the month — that’s okay. If I don’t know what I want to do until February or March, but I have goals that were developed thoughtfully and that I’m able to tackle…that’s wonderful. That’s the only thing that needs to happen.

Lara Casey said this better than I did above in the introduction to her 2015 goal-setting series:

“You can microwave some goals and have a pretty list by January 1, or you can dig deeper and set goals that matter to you…you can pray hard about them and really weigh whether or not they are the best use of your time. You can set goals that are twenty levels below the surface, where the fiery good stuff lives, or you can just make resolutions that get forgotten and tossed aside come February 1.” 

I do have three very broad goals that I’d like to shape my year around (and that Christine at The Hipster Housewife was kind enough to put them on paper for me):

So those are my big, overarching goals for 2015. I’ll be back — maybe soon, maybe later — with more detailed lists on what I’d like to improve in the areas of health and work and finances and service and social life :)

For now, from me to you, I hope you are having a wonderful 2015!

“At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in. When human souls have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch.” // C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

I live in a run-of-the-mill apartment complex, but a lucky roll of the dice put me in a unit set back in a wild tangle of trees, with big bedroom windows looking out on it all.

It was glorious in summer and dreamy in fall. I thought it would get ugly when winter blew in, but it didn’t. The limbs are tall and grey, and they arch up to the sky and they make my heart thud.

This has always been, to me, the strongest sign of a creator-God — not a proof, but a reason to search for proof. I think about the things humans make, which are sometimes beautiful, and then I think about the world, the natural world. Is it really possible that the thing created by accident is the thing with the most grace?

Men make mountains too. I see them every day on my walks in and out of the office, buildings pounding up into the sky, sparkling windows, stripes of color. They’re beautiful, they make my heart soar. But the dimmest hint of leaves changing on the worn-down Appalachian mountains puts them to shame. Put the two things up next to each other. Think about nature, about tree sap, about the smell of dirt. The things humans make cannot compete.

But there’s the problem, there’s the rub. Here’s the next part of that C.S. Lewis quote:

“For you must not think that I am putting forward any heathen fancy of being absorbed into Nature. Nature is mortal; we shall outlive her. When all the suns and nebulae have passed away, each one of you will still be alive. Nature is only the image, the symbol; but it is the symbol Scripture invites me to use. We are summoned to pass in through Nature, beyond her, into that splendour which she fitfully reflects.”

 You have to draw the line, you have to realize that nature isn’t it. Those arching trees aren’t it. The smell of dirt’s not it.

You have to draw the line between Creator and created.

And how wonderful to think that all of this — every beautiful thing — is just a copy of a copy of a copy, just a breath of what we’ll see in the future.

“And there, in beyond Nature, we shall eat of the tree of life.”