It's a little foggy.

"Two things I ask of you, O Lord;
do not refuse me before I die:
Keep falsehood and lies far from me;
give me neither poverty nor riches,
but give me only my daily bread."
-Proverbs 30: 7-8

I walked outside at 6:30am to the thickest fog I have ever seen. The streets were quiet, insulated by the thick air. In the distance, a thick roaring fog horn blared on the minute from somewhere in Puget Sound.

Even the city is nearly silent in the quick-fading dark of morning. Only a fraction of the usual crowds meander the streets. Half-sleeping, we drone to work.

My project takes me to Bellevue several times a week. I was there all day, on the 24th floor. Yesterday, I had a late afternoon meeting. I arrived at our workspace just in time to catch the sun falling behind the Olympics, leaving a trail of orange across Lake Washington. The sky was clear, and I could see every mountain peak and the snow that softened them.

Skyscraper elevators make me queasy. They move so quickly, and I can't help but think of how vertically high my body is going so terribly fast. My body feels heavy, as if it is fighting to stay on the ground, and my head feels disconnected. I lean against the railing for support, and when I get to my floor, I enjoy the view, but I try not to look down. It's not that I'm afraid of heights--they really don't bother me--it's just something about skyscrapers that makes me uneasy; they're so unnatural.

I didn't have to worry about looking down today. When I arrived at my floor, I walked towards our workspace, only to find that the windows were completely white--a grey-ish white that felt comforting and dull. There was no ground, no sky, no lake in the distance, only white. We were living inside a cloud--in limbo, as my co-workers imagined.

"It's like we're dead. Or ghosts. I mean, of course I know we're not... but it's just so weird," one of my co-workers said as the fog laid heavy well into the afternoon. I couldn't help but imagine if I were to leap from the top of the building, would I ever land? Was there really a whole world below?

Business continued, as usual. My project is busy. My project is fast. My project is a jumble of acronyms and action items and unknown deliverables. It has been an intense week of meetings and PowerPoints and adjusting to corporate culture--a place I never thought I'd be. Sometimes in my meetings, I wonder how we let ourselves complicate life so much. Who decided that we needed segments of marketing and sub-segments and that we should measure it all with complex formulas displayed in charts and graphs? Sometimes I wonder if we aren't wasting our resources trying to solve problems that we've created. Maybe I just don't understand the set-up well enough, but it seems like it should all be much simpler.

Every day, I see my dream of simplicity slipping farther away. My new job requires a smartphone, which my company will cover, of course. Well, I made it two months without one--was it long enough to train me from technology dependence or will the convenience of having one again lure me in to the screen-phased society of a life in pixels? I hope that my values will remain true, that face-to-face connections will remain top priority. Of course simplicity can be defined in many blocks. I believe organization to be a sect, and this job surely offers that. Funny how balance can be so difficult and compromising and necessary.

Looking out at the empty fog, I wondered if that was what my brain looked like. It sure felt like that today--full of nothing. Words clogged my eardrums, and my eyelids grew heavy. The week has passed quickly; I could hardly believe it was Thursday already, but my body felt weary--I could feel the days in exhaustion more than I could sense them in time.

I love my new job. I love the opportunity, the solidity, the challenge. I feel full and happy and not too stressed yet, but I can feel it slowly creeping into a tightness in my chest. I remind myself each night to try to get lots of sleep. This job is a blessing. It has kept me from running out of funds. It has provided a means to continue on. I didn't really understand the significance of that until now. Furthermore, it nourishes my mind; it keeps me thinking and problem solving and giving. I am an elf; I am here to help.

Tonight was Community. We talked about work. I found the timing spectacular. Life is much about balance: in this instance, how do we work adequately, without doing too much or becoming lazy and doing too little? I've been thinking about it a lot since starting my first real full-time gig on Monday. I'm billable for 45 hours a week. Overtime is expected as necessary. I am required to take my computer home, even though I rarely even turn it on outside of work. Home is home; work is work. I wonder how long I will be able to keep the lines separated. I wonder how to find balance between the two. Maybe that is the greatest challenge: to work a job that is constantly forcing intense thought and devotion yet to leave it there at the end of the day, to live a life separate from the bread-earning what you do.

Sometimes its hard to remember that even office jobs are important. For some reason, I always thought that people in offices played solitaire all day while the true hard workers made the world happen: the garbage men, the service technicians, the caregivers, the waiters, and the mechanics. The thought slipped back to me yesterday as I paused to wait for a man to tap his golf ball down the hall before I could pass through. But the discussion at Community tonight was helpful: every job is important. God is in everything, in every job. Even things that seem overly complicated or insignificant are meaningful and help the world as we know it to stay together. We do not work for personal short-term gain. We work for the long-term fulfillment in pleasing our creator; we work for the long-term hope of an enduring future for generations to come. God is in every work, whether unclogging drains or putt-putting in the hallway. I needed to hear it. I needed to be reminded that my work is meaningful.

And that is enough.

As I walked home, I began to wonder if today even happened. The fog never lifted. I wonder if this is what Antarctica is like: a constant blur of white. Light stretched from the lampposts that line the streets. It broke through the fog as a plant through sidewalk cracks. I felt it pierce my skin in gentle waves--direct streams of particles in the cold.

I listened to "Universal" by Blur on my walk: It really, really, really could happen... As the song ended, I felt an odd familiarity. I stood still and listened to the silence--the same heavy silence as this morning. I imagined that when I opened my eyes, I would see the field, the barn, the two trees on the hill, the big blue house in which I grew up, fog settled between the trees and in the dip of land at the bottom of the hill. Such strong silence is a rarity in suburbia. It almost felt like the home that I knew. I thought about the bullfrogs that sang in an echoing round on summer evenings at Beaver Run. Would I hear them in summer here? Summer seems a distant memory as I see my exhaled breath and the frosty strokes of grass.

Every scenario seems to offer something new that I haven't yet experienced in this second version of life, yet it still reminds me of what I know. As I unlocked the door to my apartment, I heard the fog horn once again in the distance--my new bullfrog.

How we adjust to change; how we learn to balance new and old, work and play. How we situate ourselves into routines of joy and fulfillment and community.

How we hope for nothing more than our daily bread.