{pretty, happy, funny, real} in a briefly quiet season

| a weekly capturing the contentment in everyday life |

We're easing ourselves into fall around here. After the busiest year (perhaps ever, for us) on top of an intense season of years before that, we've pressed pause on many things this fall. Brian's done with classes (thanks be to God!), I've moved to part-time hours, and we are not leading any small groups, currently. 

When we take this kind of pause, it reminds me of all the things that we shove out of our days when we're overscheduled: reading, reflecting, spending time with friends, eating meals, getting bored. Everyone needs to know what it feels like to be bored once in awhile, you know? When I'm bored I discover some of the truest things about myself and what I'm really expecting from this life.

Truthfully, what we've done is put ourselves on a "full" schedule instead of a "stuffed" schedule. I'm resisting the urge that creeps in (usually when I begin to feel the terrifying sense of boredom) to scheme up new plans. I'm re-reading old books (and journals -- see below!), reconnecting with friends, revisiting old dreams.

We're in a little quiet space before a series of life-changing celebrations that start next month. I keep ticking the list off to anyone who will listen because I can't quite wrap my brain around it:

November 14 - Brian's ordination as a Transitional Deacon in the Anglican church (transitional as a step toward ordained priest)
November 15 - Natalie's confirmation service with our Bishop
November 24 - we celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary
November 25 - we celebrate Thanksgiving
November 30 - we celebrate Alex's 22nd birthday
December 8 - we celebrate Natalie's 18th birthday
December 19 - we celebrate Rebekah's graduation from UNT
December 25 - we celebrate Christmas
January 2 - we celebrate Alex & Rebekah's wedding!
March 9 - we celebrate my 45th birthday
March 10 - we celebrate Kendra's 20th birthday
May 14 - we celebrate Alex's graduation from Rice University
May 29 - we celebrate Brian's ordination into the priesthood of the Anglican church
May 29 - (yes, we're already double-booked!) we celebrate Natalie's baccalaureate service
June 2 - we celebrate Natalie's graduation from McCallum High School
|epilogue: after the summer birthdays (Brian, Andrew, Amber) we send Natalie to college in August 2016, and Brian and I celebrate our Empty Nest.|

This is for real, it is not a drill. Life is happening in big ways, friends. And we're taking a few months here for quiet, to try not to forget all of the redemption stories that lead up to this moment even as we hope for many, many more.

In that spirit, here are a few photos of me practicing contentment this week:

| pretty |

pretty things in my house

I needed flowers for my table, and Brian delivered those purple beauties.  He also helped me hang the china plates I'd carried (ever so carefully!) home from my mother's house this summer.  The stack of green books was what I gathered quickly to participate in #31bookpics on Instagram.  Just fun.  And I adore green covers, don't you?  

| happy |

unexpected blessings

A sweet little love note my mother drew and prayed as blessing over us, and my friend Laura at an unexpected opportunity to have lunch together last week. Our girls are graduating soon and it was good to commiserate together.  

| funny |

love notes and eggs

Last week, Natalie had a "late start" day at school so we ended up leaving the house before she even got out of bed.  We left her this. If you're not a fan of FNL, you probably won't understand why this is funny.

| real|

re-reading redemption stories

I mentioned I was re-reading through old journals. I lost count of the number of times I'd find a little scribble or drawing or note from one of my kiddos -- just popping into the pages that collect my heart to say hello, I love you. I can't tell you the power of these little love notes have for me -- and old momma -- now.

This work of revisiting our family story is no joke.  And it's not the first time, but it might be the first time I've read with both eyes open in a spirit of gratitude and tenderness.  In the past I'd re-read some pages barely able to look at all of the angsty energy, all the seriously misplaced affections, all of the fears and resentments and shame and sadness and loneliness.  And, it's not that my current journals don't sound much the same, but I've been healed of so much, friends.  I can look back at those 40+ years of scribbles repeating to myself a prayer I scribbled in one of those books during the years I was reading everything the ragamuffin priest, Brennan Manning ever wrote:

"Jesus, You took the Widow of Nain's face in Your hands and whispered, 'Shhhh - I know.' You wiped the tears from her eyes with Your thumbs, and then said, 'Don't cry.' Jesus, You are the human face of God and at this moment - and every moment - [my family] is being seen with the same gaze of infinite tenderness. Because our hearts are enveloped in the tenderness of God, please allow us to pass that tenderness around indiscriminately, making no distinction between the worthy and unworthy."

Maybe this week, you'd like to pray those words along with me this week, friends?

Have YOU captured any contentment this week? 

 I'd love to hear about it!

| Join in at P,H,F,R to see other wonderful people practicing contentment. |

from the book pile, 2012: Wendell Berry, Madeleine L'Engle, Brennan Manning

to see the book pile from 2011, click here


I've been working my way through the tower of books teetering off the antique writing desk that serves as my nightstand.  Working my way through reading and working my way through the thoughts and learnings each title provokes.

When I first started this blog in 2006 one of my goals was to nurture a forum that kept me accountable for the cultural goods I consume.  Of course, I didn't really know then to articulate the goal in those terms.  The truth dawns gradually: as in in worship so as in culture -- I did not make it, but it is making me.

Having also gotten quite clear with the truth that I will never be a professional book reviewer, I've let myself off the hook and changed up the way I document my reading.

Every new year, I consider making a number goal for books read in the coming twelve months.  It's never a good idea; rather takes away the enjoyment of arriving at December 31 and tallying up titles from the previous year.  Feels like an accomplishment no matter the number.  Hope you enjoy!

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1. Watch With Me: and Six Other Stories of the Yet-Remembered Ptolemy Proudfoot and His Wife, Miss Minnie Nee' Quinch

Author:  Wendell Berry

Genre: fiction, short story

Published: Pantheon, 1995

General Impression:  Whenever I visit the fictional town of Port William, Kentucky with Berry as my storytelling guide, something deep inside me stretches out and relaxes.  Even though his characters are not shallow, meeting their days with their own set of complexities, I feel like I can relax that truth will be told in the light of humor, humility and grace.  It's true that Wendell Berry tells his stories with a determination to protect the agrarian legacy of our nation, but his stories don't ever succumb to mushy sentimentalism about "the way it was" or, worse, back-handed sermonette between the lines of his character's dialogue.  (if only James Cameron had learned at the Wendell Berry school of storytelling!)

While, the stories of the kind, lumbering farmer Tol Proudfoot and his school-marm-turned-adoring-wife, Minnie, didn't capture my imagination quite as much as Hannah Coulter and her family, I loved every minute of time we spent together in these six short interweaving stories.  Actually, I sort of felt like I grew up knowing the Ptolemy Proudfoot sort of genteel, gregarious country men among my grandparents' generation.  And, really, Wendell Berry knows the basic elements of true romance, telling the story of Tol's unspoken admiration for Miss Minnie and his knight-in-shining-armor attempt to earn her attention, outbidding everyone for her pie at the school auction.  Who needs a super model leading man and woman with that kind of old-fashioned chivalry? Sigh.


Read this book to rest and delight in the ageless craftsmanship of good story-telling.

One of my all-time favorite character descriptions (an excerpt from chapter 1, "A Consent - 1908"):

"Tol was overabundant in both size and strength. And perhaps because animate creatures tended to get out of his way, he paid not much attention to himself. He damaged his clothes just by being in them, as though surprising them by an assortment of stresses and strains for which they had not been adequately prepared. The people around Port William respected Tol as a farmer; they loved to tell and retell and hear and hear again the tales of his great strength; they were amused by the looks of him, by his good humor, and by his outsized fumblings and foibles. But never, for a long time, would any of them have suspected that his great bulk might embody tender feelings."

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2. Certain Women

Author:  Madeleine L'Engle

Genre: fiction

Published: HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins, 1992

General Impression:  

A while back I set a goal to read Madeleine L'Engle's entire body of work.  I intend to keep at that goal, but am so glad I didn't get to k now L'Engle first through this novel, Certain Women.  I liked the protagonist, Emma, well enough.  She had the typical similarities to all of Ms. L'Engle's female leads -- intelligent, introverted, compassionate, slightly traumatized, artistic, introspective, and a little bit lonely.  Really seems like each one is just a re-interpretation of Madeleine's own self and own life.  

Unlike some of L'Engle's other tight-knit fictional families, though, Emma Wheaton's family is highly dysfunctional.  Her father, David, an American actor who has lived for 87-years modelling unhappy marriages, capricious affection toward his children and other selfish tendencies.  Also unlike other plotlines, this novel includes more familial conflict than in others of her novels, more real-life trauma than I've read yet.  And some of it rings true.  

What got me sidetracked was the complexity of all the names and relationships between the main character and her father's many wives and children (with the various wives).  It kind of reminded me of when I was a little girl and dreamed of one day having twenty children mostly because I wanted desperately to name all twenty of the children and give them twenty horses so I could name all their horses.  And then name their children and their children's horses, and so on.  L'Engle tried to tell a story that paralleled the biblical King David and his dysfunctional household, but I couldn't ever quite climb into the narrative because I was too buy trying to keep track of who was who and whether or not I really cared.

No worries:  I still heart Madeleine.  I just won't probably remember much from this story.

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3   All Is Grace: A Ragamuffin Memoir

Author:  Brennan Manning

Genre: memoir

Published: David C. Cook, 2011

General Impression:  First things first, I love the cover of this book!  I wish I could show you some photos of some of my dad's family to explain how much similarity there is between Manning's face (especially those eyebrows!) and some of my second cousins and great uncles.  OK, now on to a more proper review...


It's been a while since I've read anything by this author who has had such a deep influence on my understanding of Gospel grace.  Over the past several months, I thought several times of pulling one or more of his titles off my shelf and re-reading.  A couple of weeks before my birthday, Brian and I were strolling through a bookstore about ten minutes before it closed.  I saw this on an endcap display and snatched it up without thinking twice, deciding it'd be a perfect early-birthday gift for me!


I read it one sitting -- until 2am.  Manning's story did not surprise me as much as help me connect all the dots between the bits and pieces of self-disclosure I'd read in his other books.  I was sad to hear so much suffering in his life, so much heartache, so many failures.  And I was a bit nervous to turn each page, afraid to discover the story that would ultimately discredit all that I'd learned from this alcoholic, de-frocked priest.  Instead, each sad story, each disappointing relationship, each new discovery of weakness served only to increase the man's credibility as a ragamuffin -- and now an aging, ailing man -- in need of grace.  His stark, naked transparency about his own history as a liar and a drunk made only one thing glaringly true:  all is grace, indeed.

An excerpt in which one favorite writer (Manning) quotes another favorite writer (Robert Farrar Capon):

"Some have labeled my message one of "cheap grace." In my younger days, their accusations were a gauntlet thrown down, a challenge. But I'm an old man now and I don't care...I have come across another [phrase] I would like to leave you with...I found it in the writings of the Episcopal priest Robert Farrar Capon. He calls it vulgar grace...My life is a witness to vulgar grace -- a grace that amazes as it offends. A grace that pays the eager beaver who works all day long the same wages as the grinning drunk who shows up at ten till five. A grace that hikes up the robe and runs breakneck toward the prodigal reeking of sin and wraps him up and decides to throw a party no ifs, ands, or buts. A grace that raises bloodshot eyes to a dying thief's request -- 'Please, remember me' -- and assures him, 'You bet!' A grace that is the pleasure of the Father, fleshed out in the carpenter Messiah, Jesus the Christ, who left His Father's side not for heaven's sake but for our sakes, yours and mine. This vulgar grace is indiscriminate compassion. It works without asking anything of us. It's not cheap. It's free, and as such will always be a banana peel for the orthodox foot and a fairy tale for the grown-up sensibility. Grace is sufficient even though we huff and puff with all our might to try to find something or someone it cannot cover. Grace is enough. He is enough. Jesus is enough."

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from the journey of a blind woman: a discussion on Hallelujah (part 3)

"Your ordinary self is exactly where God wants to work extraordinary
miracles. The inconspicuous nobody who shivers when it's cold and sweats when it's hot, who wakes up so many days feeling not-at-all-ready to face the world, who can barely get dressed and show up on time and at the right place, who has to read the paragraph three times to understand it, who feels lonely and hopeless, isolated, crowded, horny, left out, and taken in all at once -- YOU are the one God loves! Deal with it." (Brennan Manning)

"IN MY MIND THE NEW ALBUM IS ABOUT THE KINGDOM OF GOD, HOW IT REALLY DOES EXIST, AND IS AS REAL AS YOUR CAR OR YOUR KRISPY KREME DONUT, YOUR FAMILY, YOUR PROBLEMS. IF WE CAN FIGURE IT OUT, GOD HAS INVITED US TO LIVE in His kingdom in the midst of our regular existence. It is not a place of isolation and perfection, it is not far away where we cannot reach it. It happens at all the places where we intersect with each other..." (SARA GROVES)

Question #2 restated, is it possible to mix the sacred and the secular, the pure and the profane, without one diminishing the other?

This question came from the excellent comments regarding the original lyrics of the song by Leonard Cohen and its various rewrites by other performers. But the importance of this question is crucial beyond this tiny discussion of one song and one song-writer. One of the very interesting issues regarding Cohen's lyrics is that he includes both biblical and sexual references, but the two are not separated. They are, in fact, inseperable -- David and Bathsheba, Samson and Delilah and all that.

We must guard against the deception that our lives are compartmentalized into these categories of sacred and secular. This concept does not exist in the Bible (see: David and Bathsheba, Samson and Delilah, and pretty much the rest of the entire biblical narrative). It does exist in reference to some of the heretical teaching of groups like the Gnostics who taught a dualism that the physical realm was evil and the spiritual realm was good; therefore, the man Jesus who lived the crude life of a carpenter and suffered the cruel death on a cross could not be the Christ who was the transcendant Savior.


In the letter to the Colossians, Paul shut down the heresy, "We look at this Son and see the God who cannot be seen. We look at this Son and see God's original purpose in everything created. For everything, absolutely everything, above and below, visible and invisible, rank after rank after rank of angels—everything got started in him and finds its purpose in him. He was there before any of it came into existence and holds it all together right up to this moment. And when it comes to the church, he organizes and holds it together, like a head does a body." (Colossians 1:15-18)


Dallas Willard addresses the mindset this way, "There truly is no division between sacred and secular except what we have created. And that is why the division of the legitimate roles and functions of human life into the sacred and secular does incalculable damage to our individual lives and the cause of Christ. "In other words, it is not the act itself that is defined as sacred or secular, pure or profane, but our own sinful stupidity that muddies the waters. In the next post, we'll talk more about the artist's intentions behind the lyrics, and there is some analysis to be done on his interpretations of these gifts of love and sex and relationship and art that have been created by and gifted by our good Father.


But I believe, before we can even have an intelligent conversation about the artist's intentions, we need to be crystal clear about our own. For myself, I find a reflex of fear kick in whenever a piece of art even puts its toes into the waters of life outside of the pre-approved Christian feelings, thoughts and behavior . So in this line of thinking, references to, say lust, are taboo while references to Krispy Kreme donuts or Foghorn Leghorn cartoons are perfectly acceptable. I am not willing to live and think and feel this way any longer. I do not want to cooperate with the "incalcuable damage" this mentality does to my own life and the "cause of Christ."


If we become students of the Truth found in God's Word as well as the work of His Spirit being worked out all around us in our Christ-community, it is obvious that God does not categorize between sacred and secular. Together and alone, we experience the delights and agonies of living as spiritual beings in a physical world. We cry together over the death of a friend, we laugh at Steve Carrell, we eat pumpkin cake with cream-cheese frosting, we wrestle with the temptation to violate each other, we sing without tiring yet another Lincoln Brewster worship song.


Let's listen to L'Engle again, "To be truly Christian means to see Christ everywhere, to know him as all in all. I don't mean to water down my Christianity into a vague kind of universalism, with Buddha and Mohammed all being more or less equal to Jesus - not at all! But neither do I want to tell God (or my friends) where he can and cannot be seen. We human beings far too often tend to codify God, to feel that we know where he is and where he is not, and this arrogance leads to such things as the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem witch burnings and has the result of further fragmenting an already broken Christendom." (Walking on Water, p. 35)


While I would not compare much of the legalism I witnessed in my upbringing to the Spanish Inquisition, I do have a collection of stories that smacked somewhat of persecution. Early on, under the influence of my pious grandmother, battles were waged against pants on women and playing cards...these were debateable, but were extremely suspect. However, there was no debate regarding movie theatres and alcoholic beverages; these were completely illegal. In high school with the advent of contemporary Christian music, our parents had to make tough decisions about new dilemmas such as rock music at the roller rink and drums in church music. (one of my friend's parents settled the decision by allowing her to listen to Amy Grant any day of the week BUT Sundays).


These examples of separating sacred and secular may seem ridiculous, but I am not that old and the discussions were real in my lifetime. This serves as proof that it is not the specific holiness-earning regulations being debated but the mentality behind the debate that creates all the problems. When we view God in categories instead of as a Person with whom we are invited into relationship, then we will continue these dumb-ass conversations ad nauseum. (speaking of which, consider how OK God was with entrusting his own sacred words to Balaam's dumb ass in the Old Testament story!)


When it comes to art, wouldn't it be exciting if the church would begin to consider more important how a subject was being treated instead of what subject was being treated? If God thought the same way about us as we think about art, we would all be living in ivy-covered Kinkade houses, eating Testamints, listening to Christian radio, watching Gospel TV, borrowing money from Christian debt services, reading Chicken Soup for the Soul, networking on GodTube and plastering yet one more Christian slogan on our car bumper. We'd never have to experience sorrow, never have to ask forgiveness from sin and never have to interact with anything that might give us sin "cooties" (to borrow a term from Pastor Craig).


What if, instead, we began to critique art based on the Truth, Goodness and Beauty it reflects. And, by this mean, I mean more than the rosy light of a Kinkade painting. You have seen, as well as I, photographs of horrific tragedies that demonstrate a respect for beauty. You have watched documentaries covering topics of evil that demonstrate a commitment to investigating truth -- even truth that is hard to swallow. You have read novels, listened to lyrics, rented movies, that celebrate even the smallest acts of goodness which bring redemption to cruel circumstances. After all, the story of the Incarnation (which we are about to celebrate in full-out frenzy!) demonstrates once and for all God's commitment to breaking all barriers between sacred and secular when he sent His very own self through the muck of embryonic fluid into a setting of cobwebby cow stalls and sheep dung. No ivy-covered walls here. No scented candles with a Bible verse plastered on them to cover the stench of the barn. No contemporary Christian muzak to make the envirnoment more spiritual. Nope. No such thing for our Savior.


We've got to rip out of this bubble, friends. It's killing us -- turning us into illiterate, dumbed-down, plastic-wrapped people.


I loved .love's comment, "I honestly worry more about music that is labeled 'worship' but lacks effort and creativity."

She's in good company. Here's what Dr. Hans Rookmaaker had to say, "In a way there is no specifically Christian art. One can distinguish only good and bad art, art which is sound and good from art which is false...A work of art is not good when we know that the artist was a Christian: it is good when we perceive it to be good. Nor is a work bad if we know that the artist was a hater of God." (Modern Art and the Death of a Culture)Imagine if Christ-followers who create art placed more importance on the godly traits of discipline, creativity and imagination than they did on the latest consumer demands from the Christian-bubble subculture. Imagine that! I imagine it would look a lot like the kingdom here on earth.


I officially clamber down from my soapbox, clear my throat and whisper, "Thanks for listening. What do you think?"