Winter Solstice

I went back to Missouri for Christmas, and was there for the beginning of winter. In fact, it snowed a bit during my second day in Carl Junction.

Less than 24 hours after arriving in Missouri, I left for Fayetteville, Springdale and Rogers, Arkansas with some friends to visit an old bookstore, eat one of the best burgers of my life, and ice skate for free. (I love road trips with friends. Or without. I just like driving places.)

AND I got to hang out with Luis, one of my best friends from Chile, who recently married Katie, a classmate of mine from Ozark. It was sweet to see them together, since I knew both of them even before they met each other.

On our way back to Missouri, we drove through Rogers, AR, and looked at a new impressive church building, which had 3 amazingly huge crosses at the edge of a pond, in which they baptize people. (The white spot at the bottom, in between the crosses, is where my friends were standing.) I’m especially proud of these pictures, although the lighting was weird to work with.

I also met my brother’s puppy, Doug the Pug. He is pretty cute, but I think he truly believes that he’s a human.

I’m more poor than I have been in past years, so I made a lot of my gifts this year. Here Matt and Ashley (my brother and his wife) are displaying the matching hat & scarf sets I made for them. And then my brother seemed to think that the purse I made her was actually a hat. (I must add that I do like my sister-in-law. She's fun.)

Christmas Eve Day, my dad’s family came over, and so I got to see my two favorite cousins. We were only able to talk for about 2 hours, but it was really good to see Michael and Maria. Maria invited me to come live with her in Tulsa, and the truth is, that sounds like a lot of fun. She and I are simply silly around each other, and really enjoy one another’s company. Plus, I really like Tulsa. So who knows what my future holds.

Did you know that mistletoe was the Oklahoma state flower until 2004? And that it is actually a parasite? I found out when we visited Mom’s family. We went on a walk after lunch on Christmas Day, and I found some in the wild.

I also got to have coffee with one of my best friends in the world, Ceri. She had just gotten back (as in, an hour before hanging out with me) from visiting her family in Ohio with her husband, Jason. She was exhausted from having been in the car for 12 hours, so it took us a while to get a good picture—13 tries, to be exact. This was the best one.

My brother is one of my most favorite people in the world. Even though he's quiet, he's hilarious! As you can probably tell from the pictures, he is adopted, but has been with us since he was 5 months old. Once, when we had company for dinner, my sister referred to him as "the one we do not speak of." He totally got a kick out of going along with it, to the horror of our guests.

So I take advantage of any moment I might get to spend with Matt. He tried to teach me to play Halo3 the night before I left, which was really sweet, because I’m not very good at video games. He hung back part of the time to protect me when others (namely Cory, Paddy and Liam) were hunting me down. I only got one kill all night, but it was supremely satisfying, as it was Cory, and he didn’t even realize I was the one who killed him. (And by the way, Cory, you can keep the Switchfoot pick. I won’t be needing it.)

As I flew back on the small Express Jet aircraft, we were moving into the west at sundown, which means that the sunset lasted about 4 hours. Pretty impressive, actually, as the sun and sky took on all the normal hues, but didn’t fade immediately. What beauty!

And now I’m glad to be back. I’ve never been really close to my extended family (since I grew up on another continent), but it was a good trip. It is simply hard to go back home. As Jon Foreman put so well, I'm not so sure that home is a place you can still get to by train. Or by airplane.

And as he also wrote, every lament is a love song. But that is a story for a different audience.

Honesty

Be careful, because when you ask God to break you so that he can mold you into a more perfect image of his son, he just might.

And it sucks.

A Few of My Favorite Things

In no particular order:

Relient K and Switchfoot concert with Paddy

Adam Sandler's Chanukah songs--all three of them

A hot cup of Earl Grey or Amaretto tea

Niall's hugs

Unexpected gifts in the mail

Jon Foreman's new EP

Striped toe socks

Stepping into an outside muted by falling snow

My red iPod from Gudymente

Stories with which to get caught up in their immensity

Watching superhero movies with Trevor

Talking with Solomon over a cup of coffee

Mom's cooking and Dad's homemade bread

A Week of Farewell

Paddy's just been gone 5 days, and I miss him. However, I got to spend the best week with him before he left. For example, I got to give him a haircut, the second he's gotten from me.

And then we went to six flags where we got to stand in line a lot. And about 2 hours of that was in the rain, which, because he had called me the night before, I was prepared for, with my heavy-duty storm jacket. It made for a long day, though, as the rides kept having to stop for extra maintenance because of the rain. So Paddy slept wherever he could find a spot. Unfortunately for him, I don't think that the walls leading into Riddler's Revenge were very clean.

Here's Paddy, going up on our first ride of the day (which was at about 2, because of the rain), Riddler's Revenge. I think that's Tatzu in the background...we got an awesome view of the park as we were going up. The view was better from Goliath (I had the privilege to share this coaster with Paddy for his first time!), but my camera battery was dead by then.

And here he is with Katie, about to ride Tatzu for the first time. We decided it certainly was a rush, although not quite as much as X (that ride wasn't for the faint-hearted!).

I'm surely going to miss him...

On Being Good

Ungodliness is not always about the really bad people. Sometimes it is about the really good people who are more restrictive than God...
If we're not careful, we too will equate being good with loving Jesus.
--Joseph M. Stowell

My life's journey has mostly been about being good. Not too long ago, my way of looking at people was something like this:
Good Behavior & Habits = Godly
Bad Behavior & Habits = Ungodly

And while it was my working definition for those I met and lived alongside, this is in fact how I defined myself.

And then I went to college and God threw me in the path of people who were good, but who weren't very loving or accepting. But I also met people that, while weren't so good, they seemed to have a clearer view of God, his grace, and his love for people.

That's when I began to discover that being good isn't all it's cracked up to be, especially if it set me up to judge others and to elevate myself as better than them. Nor was it helpful when I would fail my own impossible standards, and feel the same judgment come crashing down on me.

I certainly haven't arrived at the end of my journey; I still struggle with judging others (and myself) for not being good enough. But I'm also joyfully discovering that my lack of goodness is what drives me towards God. And that moves me to love him even more.

The Way I See It #200

Off my Starbucks cup—with apologies to Solomon:
“There’s a difference between interest and commitment. When you’re interested in doing something, you do it only when circumstances permit. When you’re committed to something, you accept no excuses, just results.”
--Art Turock

Now, while Art is an entrepreneur, and as such, is applying this to the business world, I think this applies to our whole lives, and certainly to the most central part: our spiritual lives.

Too often I have known people who are interested in being Christians…they go to church, they participate in the activities, they read their Bibles—as long as nothing else comes up. They would consider themselves good people, on their way to heaven; surely God will honor their interest!

But in truth, they are giving half-hearted efforts. They will live a degree of faith as long as they are not inconvenienced to interrupt the rest of their lives. Their identity comes from what they do and who they know—not who God has called them to be.

However, I also know people who are committed to God and the life to which he has called all humanity. While they recognize their deficiencies and the war between what they are comfortable with and what they know they are called to, they also refuse to give up. They realize that their commitment is not convenient—nor is it meant to be—but it is important, their first priority, and as such, minor things give in to its weight.

And while I would like to classify myself in the committed category, I know my heart too well. There are times when my spiritual walk slips into last place, and other priorities clamor for my attention. I become interested in acting like a Christian, instead of letting God take control of my life. The choices I make which determine how I relate to others, how I entertain myself, the thoughts I feed into my mind—all this is a reflection of my priorities, of where my commitment lies.

I know the cost—it demands all of me, who I am in the very core of my being. How much worth is Christ to me? Can I section off my life, and give him only what I’m comfortable with?

I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith.
I want to know Christ, and the power of his resurrection, sharing in his suffering and becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.
Not that I’ve already gotten there, or that I’ve already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. I know my deficiencies. But I also know this: only by forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead will I be able to arrive where I’ve always wanted—at the finish line, holding the prize of a faith well-lived.
(loose paraphrase by me)

So what’s it worth to me? And am I willing to pay the cost?

Die Hard

I've shared my love of the Die Hard movies with Trevor...and now we can't wait for #4 to come out. So...Die Hard or Live Free!

Too Much Fun...In a Bounce House

Enough said...

Borders

Sunday evenings usually find me hanging out at Borders, reading and just kicking back. This week Paddy and I were the only ones to be able to make it. He found an illustrated guide to all things X-men, and I discovered a history of the world, told by quotes from contemporary literature, as well as a book on how to interpret your dreams. We made ourselves comfortable, determined to not budge until it was announced that Borders had closed for the evening.

In the book of quotes, I discovered a quirky bit of

sarcasm penned by Tertullian, c. 200 AD.

"If the Tiber rises so high it floods the walls, or the Nile so low it doesn't flood the fields, if the earth opens, or the heavens don't, if there is famine, if there is plague, instantly the howl goes up, 'The Christians to the lion!' What, all of them? to a single lion?"

Now, as we were expanding our minds, this little guy settled in next to me. He took a look at the large tomes at my feet, and proceeded to read his book--"The Welder's Handbook". It was good to see that kids can be so decisive about a career at such an early age.

My Messy House

Lent is upon us, and as part of my pre-Easter preparation, I am going through an anthology of writings, Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter. The first of these, by Kathleen Norris, seemed especially apt to begin the season.

My Messy House

When I'm working as an artist-in-residence at parochial schools, I like to read the psalms out loud to inspire the students, who are usually not aware that the snippets they sing at Mass are among the greatest poems in the world. But I have found that when I have asked children to write their own psalms, their poems often have an emotional directness that is similar to that of the biblical psalter. They know what it's like to be small in a world designed for big people, to feel lost and abandoned. Children are frequently astonished to discover that the psalmists so freely express the more unacceptable emotions, sadness and even anger, even anger at God, and that all of this is in the Bible that they hear read in church on Sunday morning.

Children who are picked on by their big brothers and sisters can be remarkably adept when it comes to writing cursing psalms, and I believe that the writing process offers them a safe haven in which to work through their desires for vengeance in a healthy way. Once a little boy wrote a poem called "The Monster Who Was Sorry." He began by admitting that he hates it when his father yells at him: his response in the poem is to throw his sister down the stairs, and then to wreck his room, and finally to wreck the whole town. The poem concludes: "Then I sit in my messy house and say to myself, 'I shouldn't have done all that.'"

"My messy house" says it all: with more honesty than most adults could have mustered, the boy made a metaphor for himself that admitted the depth of his rage and also gave him a way out. If that boy had been a novice in the fourth-century monastic desert, his elders might have told him that he was well on the way towards repentance, not such a monster after all, but only human. If the house is messy, they might have said, why not clean it up, why not make it into a place where God might wish to dwell?

A Thing of Beauty

Few players can place the ball exactly where they want it, but David Beckham has won my respect and admiration for plays just like this one.

Notice the spin he puts on the ball, the way the ball skims the top of the jumping wall of defenders, and the exact placement in the upper left-hand corner, just out of the reach of the goal keeper.

Genius.

And he's coming to LA.

If ever there was a cause for celebration, this is it.