I’m sitting in my office checking my email at my computer. My 14 year old son walks through the back door and into my office holding a birdhouse.
Son: Happy Mother’s Day! I made this for you in Tech Class.
Me: Thank you! You did a great job. What’s this inside?
Son: It’s a card. I made that, too.
Me: That’s great. Mother’s Day is Sunday. Were you going to paint the birdhouse for me?
Son: No. Why would I do that?
Me: Yeah. What was I thinking? Well, thanks!
It’s that kind of unabashed honesty that makes the poem he wrote for me inside the card all the more special, because I know he meant every word. I won’t be sharing that gift, though. Some things are meant to be shared by only the giver and the recipient.
But I will share the birdhouse:
Hope you all have a wonderful weekend. Especially all you mothers out there.
I came across a passage in a book I read a couple of years ago that beautifully reflected the heart of an artist who has chosen to follow Christ. “The God Who Smokes: Scandalous Meditations of Faith”(1) by Timothy Stoner (yes, that’s his real name) has served as a much needed reminder that the God of Mercy is also the God of Wrath. May I never forget that!
Anyway, just a bit of encouragement for my fellow artists:
The artist who follows Jesus explicitly resides in the world and participates in culture in a truly unique way. She helps others pay attention to, take notice of, and celebrate the goodness of the good creation. She does not shy away from the dark and the broken, the sorrow and terror–but crafts it in such a way as to point toward hope. It is revealing a pathway out of despair and chaotic meaningless. Her work is a candle that flickers and flares.
Her art is for the good of the world.
She does it for the blessing of the world.
She is intent not on reinforcing the curse but breaking it. She has and is a gift. She is sent, like Jesus, to open the eyes of the blind, open the ears of the deaf, or give words to the mute. She is sent on a mission of freedom. Her mission mirrors that of her Savior. She is sent to break chains of despair, set at liberty those tied up with cords of emptiness, futility, and death, and bring sight to those who have lost the capacity to see. She is sent to give us the forgotten vision of the glory that peeks out behind the bush and branch and sea and life as it was meant to be. She sings and shrieks and falls to rise again, to give voice to what we’ve forgotten or refuse to hear.
She pours out her blood that a world may be saved.
She serves not always willingly or well but in her best moments, when she has forgotten herself, she serves.
Still, her loyalty is not here. She has had her idolatrous attachment broken. She is free to be in but not of . She is not slavishly loyal to the patterns, the values, the demands, and commands of a world in love with itself. Her eyes look up even as she looks out, and in looking around she sees through. She is not bewitched by appearances nor overly and permanently distraught. She has seen a city whose builder and maker is God, and she pines for the day when it will come here so there will be light forever.
And the light will be the love and the joy of her life.
She has this secret. Her heart has been captured by a lover who is out of this world. But He is coming back. She wants to make herself ready and her friends and ever her enemies , too. So she does her work as best she can and prays that it is good, that it will shine so brightly as to bring glory not to her but to Him.
(1) Stoner, Timothy. The God who smokes: scandalous meditations of faith published by Navpress, 2008
A mix of pride and sadness came over me yesterday as I watched the Space Shuttle being piggybacked on a 747 to its final home at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C.
There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
President John F. Kennedy, September 12, 1962, at Rice University, Houston, Texas
As we say goodbye to an era, I hope and pray that we as a nation do not abandon the desire to do great things because there are great things yet to do, and to once again boldly go where no man has gone before.
I’ve been cooking and getting ready for my extended dysfunctional family to arrive, so rather than write a new post, I thought I would share my daughter’s turkey project from a couple of years ago…
Please Do Not Eat Me
As a parent, I secretly delight when I see my children take interest in or excel at something that I’m into. Just as I cringe when I see a less desirable trait that I share, like forgetting where they put anything, rear its ugly head. But in all honesty, as long my kids are true to who they are, I’m good with that.
Tonight was open house at the kids’ school. When I walked into my daughter’s classroom, her teacher greeted my husband and me, then immediately asked if we had seen my daughter’s turkey. Typically, kids this age and younger make a paper turkey, and on each feather write something they are thankful for. On this particular turkey, their instructions were to imagine the turkey could talk and write some of the things that he or she would say. (Her teacher is awesome.) Imagine my surprise when I read the following on my daughter’s turkey:
-Please do not eat me because I am pregnant.
-Please do not eat me because I am krazy.
-Please do not eat me because I am too big for your oven.
-Please do not eat me because I will explode in your oven and cover it with blood.
-Please do not eat me because I have diarrhea.
(I don’t know where she gets that from…Snort!)
Hoping you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving. I’m grateful you take time out of your day to visit my silly little blog.
On the off chance you don’t get enough of me talking about myself, my twitter friend Chris Goforth aka @pacnwdado6 asked me a few questions over at his place today. You can find my interview here: The Empire of One: Who is @katdish?
“If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and I desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” – E.B. White
A difficult choice, but one which must be made daily if my life is to have any meaning. If I choose to improve the world–even in small measure–then in doing so I may have the opportunity to enjoy it. If I choose simply to enjoy the world but not improve it, I fear this enjoyment will prove to be empty and ring hollow.
What about you?
Which choice will you make today?
Will you decide you only have time to complete tasks which benefit yourself?
Will you help others with a heart that views your help as an obligation, or with one which sees it as a gift to yourself and your Creator?
“Following Jesus isn’t about trying every day. It’s about dying every day.” – Kyle Idleman
I don’t know about you, but I rarely stumble across a television show. I’ll typically watch a show because someone I know recommended it or I see a preview that intrigues me. And honestly, there just hasn’t been much on TV lately that I’ve been excited about. There are only a handful of shows I watch faithfully and more than a few which looked promising but proved disappointing.
Along with a few of my favorites, I’m looking forward to this TV season, there are some new shows I’m hoping will live up to their hype. One of those shows aired Tuesday night on Fox: The New Girl.
Zooey Deschanel (right) pictured with her sister Emily Deschanel, star of one of my favorites shows, Bones
It was quirky and cute, much like its star Zooey Deschanel. The jury is still out on whether the characters and storyline will be strong enough to keep me watching, but the pilot was enough for me to give it a chance. When the credits began to roll, I almost turned off the TV. But then another show came on called Raising Hope. I’d heard of the show, but had no idea what the premise was. The only reason I kept watching it was because I thought for a minute that the main character was the same actor who played Mr. Tummus from The Chronicles of Narnia. It’s not, by the way.
It’s probably a good thing I didn’t know the premise, because it sounds like some horrible reality show:
Jimmy is a twenty-something slacker who lives with his slacker parents. The owner of the house is his great-grandmother, a crazy old lady who is the habit of walking outside without a shirt on. He has a one night stand with a woman who jumps into his van while running away from a man presumably wanting to cause her harm. As it turns out, said woman is a serial killer who is tried, convicted and sent to death row. Eight months later, Jimmy visits her in jail to discover she is pregnant with his child. Do you see where this is going? Here’s the trailer from the first season:
And while I do think the trailer is funny, I don’t know that I would watch the show based on seeing it because it depicts so many undesirable (albeit amusing) attributes of everyone on the show. Frankly, I’ve grown a bit weary of the quick laugh at someone else’s expense, even if it is a sit-com. What the trailer doesn’t show you is how smartly it’s written. Yes, Jimmy is a slacker and his parents are sponging off his crazy great-grandmother, but there is a depth to the characters–especially Jimmy–that caught me completely off guard. I was so impressed with the season premiere Tuesday night that I watched several episodes of the first season Wednesday. Love this show.
Raising Hope is cleverly disguised as a comedy about a family of low class, uneducated slackers, and I suppose to a certain extent that’s what it is. But it’s also a show about the importance of a loving and supporting family, no matter how dysfunctional they happen to be. If there’s such a thing as a perfect family, I don’t know of any. But that’s okay. Perfection is highly overrated and often boring.
What new shows will you be checking out this fall?
My friend Tamara suggested I watch a movie several months ago. I got busy doing other things, but said movie arrived from Netfix last week and I sat down and watched it Monday afternoon. The movie is called Temple Grandin:
Temple Grandin has a brilliant mind, but she’s right, she’s not like other people. For most children diagnosed as autistic in the 50s and 60s, the outlook was grim. Doctors classified autistics as infantile schizophrenics. It was common practice to have them institutionalized. When Temple was 4 years old, her mother was told she would likely never speak, that there was no cure for autism. The doctor who diagnosed her recommended that Temple be put in to an institution. Fortunately, her mother refused to believe her daughter could not improve.
The story of Temple Grandin is one of great personal triumph, but it is also the story of people in her life who understood that she had so much to offer the world; that she was different, not less. Most notably for me was her mother, who understood that even though many of the social morrells were foreign and often frightening to her, she insisted that her daughter conform to them because the world was never going to conform to her. The following is a very telling interview with the real Temple Grandin:
Grandin’s autism may have been a social handicap, but it was her autism which allowed her mind to work in a way most people’s don’t. She thinks in pictures and finite details which most people miss. As she said in the above interview, her center-track restraint system is used in over half the cattle handling facilities in North America.
image from Grandin.com
One of my favorite lines from the movie is when Grandin says, “Nature is cruel, but we don’t have to be.” She was referring to the treatment of the cattle before they are slaughtered, but it goes beyond that. I despise that we are so often cruel to each other when we don’t have to be. We are all so different, but in many ways so much the same. We all want to be loved, to be of value and worth. When we acknowledge our differences it doesn’t mean we proclaim our acknowledgement is an endorsement of their ideas being correct and/or true, only that they have the right to their ideas. When we refuse this right, I think we need to examine our hearts and ask ourselves why ideas different from our own (or the people who have them) pose a threat to us. We can conform to graciousness without conforming to what we don’t agree with.
If you have an opportunity to see this movie, I would highly recommend it, especially if someone in your life falls under the autism spectrum. Not only is it a wonderful true story, it is also the best visual explanation inside the mind of an autistic that I’ve ever seen.
Do you know why we celebrate Labor Day? How it got started? I didn’t. Not that it matters. Much like President’s Day, it’s become more about selling mattresses and a three day weekend, but…
According to the U. S. Department of Labor:
Labor Day, the first Monday in September, is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country…
The first Labor Day holiday was celebrated on Tuesday, September 5, 1882, in New York City, in accordance with the plans of the Central Labor Union. The Central Labor Union held its second Labor Day holiday just a year later, on September 5, 1883.
In 1884 the first Monday in September was selected as the holiday, as originally proposed, and the Central Labor Union urged similar organizations in other cities to follow the example of New York and celebrate a “workingmen’s holiday” on that date. The idea spread with the growth of labor organizations, and in 1885 Labor Day was celebrated in many industrial centers of the country.
Now that I’ve educated myself as to the origins of Labor Day, I’m wondering if this day should continue to be a national holiday. Seth Godin has a thought provoking article on his blog today. In Back to (the wrong) school he writes:
Our current system of teaching kids to sit in straight rows and obey instructions isn’t a coincidence–it was an investment in our economic future. The plan: trade short-term child labor wages for longer-term productivity by giving kids a head start in doing what they’re told.
Large-scale education was never about teaching kids or creating scholars. It was invented to churn out adults who worked well within the system.
Of course, it worked. Several generations of productive, fully employed workers followed. But now?
Nobel-prize winning economist Michael Spence makes this really clear: there are tradable jobs (making things that could be made somewhere else, like building cars, designing chairs and answering the phone) and non-tradable jobs (like mowing the lawn or cooking burgers). Is there any question that the first kind of job is worth keeping in our economy?
Alas, Spence reports that from 1990 to 2008, the US economy added only 600,000 tradable jobs.
If you do a job where someone tells you exactly what to do, they will find someone cheaper than you to do it. And yet our schools are churning out kids who are stuck looking for jobs where the boss tells them exactly what to do.
Do you see the disconnect here? Every year, we churn out millions of of workers who are trained to do 1925 labor.
I would encourage you to follow the link and read the rest of the article, especially if you have children in public (or even private) schools. Mr. Godin makes a short but compelling argument against the status quo.
With national unemployment over 9% and actual unemployment numbers much worse, the idea of celebrating the working man and woman by taking a day off of work just leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
Especially when millions of Americans would much rather be working today if they only had a job to go to.
Happy Labor Day! (insert sideways smiley face here)
