When I'm not riding in the backseat of my Grandpa's restored vintage car "Mable," I'm doing other things like...
rising to most adventure occasions my husband proposes /
chasing our toddler around Brooklyn /
enjoying neighbors, strangers, and friends /
making countless trips to the laundromat /
writing for various publications and for personal reflection /
loving and serving our local church /
cleaning the bathroom /
hosting small and big crowds in our home /
meeting up with a friend for coffee /
thinking
Vocation is my strange frenemy. Though I have worked and existed in many stations/places, I am convinced that each day has good work to be done and that I am equipped and prepared to do that good work.
This blog explores the tension and the intersection of a constant vocational call - to good work, neighbor love, and living in the kingdom come.
My favorite things are coffee and creating and laughing (preferably with company). I love to listen to sermons and read biographies and make tea before going to bed.
As much as we would like the rain to go away, this news article says it will stick around until January.
The ground is already saturated and all the excess water makes a treacherous course down the mountains and hills, causing landslides in its wake. Much of the coffee and sugar cane crop has suffered terribly due to the rain, so this prescription of rain until January is more than bad news.
Read this article and join me in prayer for the people here in Honduras.
Click here for the article. You will need to translate the page (unless you are fluent in Español), so if you are using a browser capable of translating like Google Chrome, that is best.
These pictures below are from the article and show some of the patterns and movement. Don’t ask me to explain them… I am just relaying the information!
Honduras is affected by the phenomenon of rain has already happened in the 50’s.
A phenomenon called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation has distorted the thermohaline circulation and is producing more rain than they should.
The country is practically in the line of hurricane formation and climate affect Pacific and Atlantic.
This morning as I read this article, I was reminded that our comfort and refuge and peace is not a place in the distant future, but a promise for right here and now.
Be encouraged today by Seu’s words and remember that God invites you into His presence to experience His joy and perfect peace. After Hurricane Matthew loomed on the north coast this past weekend, a safe place seems much more urgent. In God’s grace, Tegucigalpa escaped with only rain, but our brothers and sisters in the North are feeling the repercussions of the tropical storm. Always – in times of uncertainty and in times of great promise – we will find a welcome location. Amen?
She writes,
Being “in Christ” was once an abstract doctrine. No more. It is a location. And when I obey His commands, those are doorways that bring me deeper into Him. The deeper into Him, the greater the experience of peace and joy. “Abide in me,” He says, and I had thought it was a metaphor, when all along it was a mystery.
I’m sitting here, under my tree, with books stacked high to my right and my heart full to overflowing with thanksgiving. I just spent way too much time looking at old blog posts trying to find some musings from the book, “The Four Loves” by C.S. Lewis, but I came up empty-handed.
I’ll have to rely on my memory to relate the bliss I’m feeling and how I think Lewis explains it best.
It is only fitting, I might add, that I’m comfortable under my tree, where roots are stretching out underneath, reminding me where I find life.
Many of you are probably well aware of Lewis’s famous book on the four different types of love, but I want to just skim the surface of what has me flying so high tonight: friendship. Lewis suggests (apologies for my crude summary) that friendship draws out God-designed parts of us that we never knew we were hiding. In community, we are able to watch God reveal Himself in us because of the way we are made to live in community together.
Isn’t that magnificent?
Today is a repeat of so many other times in my life where I realize there is joy bubbling up in my soul that is set free when I place myself in community. It’s like a pen full of words that finds paper or a box full of seeds that finds ground.
Community is a place God has specifically designed to reflect Him and point to His glory. I love how C.S. Lewis says that God ordains our friendships. There are certain people ordained for certain times in our lives for a very certain purpose – to draw out ways in which we never knew we were capable of giving God glory.
How beautiful!
I can’t tell you all the ways this makes sense for today, but I can tell you that this day (beginning, middle, and end) made me ready to burst with the joy and inspiration of community. God’s design is so very good!
Here is one of the reasons for my joy… one of my students Alejandra! She has a wonderful way of drawing out something strange and silly and spectacular… and I always walk away blessed!
I hope you are intentionally putting yourself in the company of others who are pursuing Christ. You will be so blessed by the new ways you find to give God glory for His design!
I love it when people call me granola… although I don’t think I deserve it.
If you are not familiar, it’s a term people use to describe someone who is a bit on the rugged side, earthy, probably makes chai from scratch and can, without much effort, throw on anything and pull it off. Again… not me, but I love my granola friends!
I also love… making GRANOLA! My roommate brought a recipe she actually got from her roomie last year and we made it yesterday and WOW. So good! I thought I would indulge you with the recipe and encourage you to try your own variations and report back!
YUMMY GRANOLA
Preheat oven to 250 then combine wet/dry ingredients in separate bowls.
dry:
2 cups wheatflour
6 cups oats (steel cut if you can find em)
1 cups coconut
1 cupwheat germ
1 cup chopped nuts
3 T powdered milk
1t cinnamon (i would add a touch more)
1 t salt
(also add almonds, craisins, sunflower seeds, etc. to your liking)
wet:
1/2 cup water
1 cup oil
1 cup honey
2 t vanilla
Combine wet and dry together and mix thoroughly. Spread onto 2 cookie sheets and bake for 30 minutes. Flip and bake 30 more minutes. It’s best if it is spread out thin – crispier that way.
eat on its own, with yogurt or milk… all the time!!
I scanned the last sentence of Eric Metaxas‘s Bonhoeffer and it was regret that stared back when I saw the next page titled, “NOTES.”
Over 500 pages of a beautiful submersion into a life lived completely and I find myself wishing the book were longer so that I could walk next to someone who understood how theology spilled out into and gave purpose to *viviology (knowledge, study, and act of life or living).
Few people, especially those blessed with academic minds, are able to meet the needs of the former without sacrificing the demands of the latter. Bonhoeffer refused to only stand behind a podium in the high brow, organized classrooms of universities and behind closed doors of churches. The more he learned and studied, the greater he felt pulled toward living out the Truth he so passionately taught.
I love how he didn’t abandon the books and the study to live among the people in radical opposition to his intellectual contemporaries’ expectations.
Bonhoeffer saw, in his travels to the United States, what could happen when people step away from Truth and place something else at the center. He traveled to the US first in 1930 to study and teach at Union University and then again briefly in 1939 to consider a teaching position. Both trips were filled with the realization that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is and will always at the center of Christianity. This is what he said during his first visit,
“The sermon has been reduced to parenthetical church remarks about newspaper events. As long as I’ve been here, I have heard only one sermon in which you could hear something like a genuine proclamation … One big question continually attracting my attention in view of these facts is whether one here really can still speak of Christianity, … There’s no sense to expect the fruits where the Word really is no longer being preached. But then what becomes of Christianity per se?
The enlightened American, rather than viewing all this with skepticism, instead welcomes it as an example of progress.
…
In New York, they preach about virtually everything; only one thing is not addressed, or is addressed so rarely that I have as yet been unable to hear it, namely, the gospel of Jesus Christ, the cross, sin and forgiveness, death and life.”
It’s funny … how timely these words are today. Maybe “sad” better describes how far we’ve come since Bonhoeffer’s evaluation in 1930. We preach on “virtually everything” but what will reach, save, and transform lives. We preach on trees and health and wealth and all the ways the world is evil, but we don’t preach Christ. Could it be because we are scared of the price? Bonhoeffer’s approach to life was, in large part, informed by God’s approach to grace and discipleship.
We want the discounted version – the less painful, less costly kind of grace – but with the full benefits of its original value. In what he would call “cheap grace,” Bonhoeffer explains how we do ourselves a disservice in settling for something less than what God originally intended (by straying from Jesus Christ at the center of the Good News). In his book, “Cost of Discipleship,” he says,
“cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline. Communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ.”
We’ve created a grace that strips it of all its power. When we’re done sermonizing, what we’ve given people is at best hollow and full of despair. There is no life in it. In contrast, is this costly grace:
“costly grace confronts us as a gracious call to follow Jesus, it comes as a word of forgiveness to the broken spirit and the contrite heart. It is costly because it compels a man to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him; it is grace because Jesus says: “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.” “
I still cannot figure out how Bonhoeffer merged his knowledge with his life, but I can certainly see that he did. For three months in 1931, he conducted confirmation classes in rough neighborhood of Wedding. He took the post shortly after being ordained and the zeal with which he approached the class of fifty boys might have been characteristic of a new minister, but the care and perseverance he applied in every aspect of his teaching was unique. His life with those boys emphasized community and sacrifice. The textbook was not drudgery, opened with great pain and resistance. The Text was carried around in their hearts and gave the greatest joy to its living out.
Even as the very church he helped to build up (The Confessing Church) failed to stand for Truth when it mattered most, Bonhoeffer’s resolve grew only stronger. He believed that he had been “grasped” by God – that he had been chosen for something. But, that something was only important because of (and dependent on) the God who decides to break through and use people, sermons, and situations for His glorious purposes.
He resolved to not only preach Christ and Him crucified, as Paul declared in his letter to the church in Corinth, but he endeavored to LIVE in obedience to Christ’s costly call to follow as a disciple.
How do we marry Theology and *Vivology?
I think it means knowing the Word so well it becomes a part of you. I think it means keeping your bookshelves loaded and guarding time for study, even if technically no longer a student. I think it means dedicating uninterrupted times of prayer. I think it means loving Truth because you believe in your deepest soul it redeems and reveals life. I think it means fellowship around campfires and crazy games of soccer. I think it means coffee and conversation and debate. I think it means keeping Jesus Christ at the center – recognizing that every good gift is only good because God wills it to be so.
And, I think it means delighting in this life. I think it means being deliberate about our thanksgiving – walking in each day knowing that God’s glory is what shines bright to reveal He is at the center.
I must end this musing here, but I promise I will continue to ponder.
Until then, would you, with me,
.let LOVE FLY like cRaZY.
*I might have just made up this word, but give me credit because it’s got two parts that should work together – viv is the latin/greek root word meaning “live” and ology is a suffix used to describe bodies of knowledge. I’m trying to say that, just like we aspire to grasp theology, we must also pursue a grasp of vivology and a combination of the two. What is knowledge of God without a life lived out as a result of that knowledge? And really, how does one know about ‘living,’ exactly?
I’m not sure how much longer I will have power, but with the ground already saturated from an unseemly amount of rain during this rainy season, there will surely be flash floods and landslides.
Pray especially for those who have houses on mountains and precarious places… and for those without shelter.
Here’s something I wrote in May when my friend Heather was visiting, but it certainly applies to tonight. I just got home from a MARVELOUS night of capture the flag with my favorite seniors, then dinner, then dinner #2, and then various antics following. I think my joy almost burst a couple times I was so full of it!
I laughed and laughed and laughed and I praise God for every surprising snort and crazy convulsion. I love laughter. I will have to write more about that later. For now, enjoy this REPOST from May.
——————– After a crazy day, an afternoon filled with charades and catch phrase and laughter, and a typically cheesy serenade for the 11th grade girls… Heather and I went for coffee and finally caught up a bit. I chose the Latte Au-Lait, which means I am now WIDE awake and she’s zonked out (getting the sleep she needs so we can leave at 5:45 am to lead worship tomorrow at staff devotions).
I just want to write something quick tonight… maybe it will turn into a poem, but right now it’s just thoughts about pleasure. As I think about the students and this culture and (maybe) popular culture in general, I decide that our greatest sin is pursuing lower pleasures.
I know C.S. Lewis probably illustrated this idea more deeply than my brain can think it right now, but still it seemed a mini-revelation tonight.
God promises in Psalm 16:11 that in His presence there is FULLNESS of JOY and at His right hand there are PLEASURES forevermore. Wow! What a promise!
God promises the kind of joy that bursts out from inside our souls and overflows to uncontrollable laughter… the kind of joy that you can’t keep from showing on your face… the kind of joy you can’t wait to share with everyone you meet… the kind of joy that makes your heart feel like fire and makes you want to dance and shout and play in the rain…
NOT ONLY that, but also pleasures forevermore. God offers us pleasure that never ends – He created us with the desire for pleasures forevermore and He is delighted when we pursue the highest kind. He planted that little seed inside us, in the soil of our humanity, that tries to break the surface and soar toward the sun… all the ways our humanity longs to have pleasure can be traced back to the way we were created in His image to experience pleasures forevermore.
The moment I decide to pursue a less pleasurable pleasure than what I was created for, I am choosing sin. I know, it sounds confusing. Usually we associate pleasure with sin, but right now I am saying that we sin when we pursue less pleasure or lower pleasure. Because I know God created me and placed in me a desire to have infinite joy and pleasure, I know that anything less than a pursuit of THAT means two things:1. I am not experiencing the most pleasure possible (can only be found in and through God)2. I am trying to make lower pleasures fulfill my God-given desires for the BEST pleasure (which, of course is a fail from the start).
God created us, knows us, and delights when we are absolutely bursting with joy.
Normally, this day would have already ended. I’d be tucked in my bed and flipping pages (trying frantically to finish with Germany and Bonhoeffer so I can read over all the scratches I’ve made in the pages) until I finally fall asleep.
Not so tonight. After school and a teachers’ meeting, I met up with the first of two Vivians. We caught up and zoomed around town and jammed out to Coffey and smiled the perfect amount.
Then, I met up with Vivian number two and we endeavored to make chocolatecupcakes for tomorrow’s even with the seniors (a hopefully very competitive capture the flag game). We got creative about the frosting and thought up this new recipe:
2 cubes almond bark 1/2 stick butter
1/3 cup powdered sugar
1/4 cup milk
1 – 2 tablespoons peanut butter
Add in this order over a medium-low heat stove top. Taste OFTEN and continue stirring. Taste for adjustments. Lick the spatula (then swear to not tell anyone you licked the spatula). Let it cool a bit and thicken. Add to cooled cupcakes and put sprinkles on top …..
I wrote this back in May of last year… full post here. I’m going to try to start re-posting some of my writing and poetry here so that I can have it in one place. I’ll admit, it’s also kind of fun to see what has found its way to the cyberpages over the last couple years.
How faint the fool who treads the way
and tarries about; runs blind to the fray.
How heavy the heart, hardened by years
of abuse and betrayal and manmade fears.
How sad the sigh learned by repetition –
disappointment, abandoned by man’s wild volition.
How complete the chasm built with words great;
explanations attempt determine eternal fate.
How stuffed the souls with semantics and speeches
and tolerant voices crowding out holidays at beaches.
How lost the lonely, desperate to find
a rhyme or a reason to be sanctified.
How dead is this end and reason to fight,
with an honest confession – broken and contrite.
How firm the foundation, without shame,
is the cross that bears my Savior’s name.
How perfect the peace in God’s Word alone
that restores and revives a heart once of stone.
How deep the depths of this Love, divine,
to reach through great wicked and make this faint soul alive.
—–
Before you ask about a traumatic encounter I had as a small child, I am completely unaware how this dreadful thing started. All I know is, surprises often find me on the floor or grabbing the nearest arm.
I’ve become pretty good at recovering from these episodes. Unfortunately, the stories keep piling up! The only good thing to come out of this fright syndrome is that I have crazy good material to make people feel better about their follies. I love to see people walk away saying, “I might be embarrassing, but HER stories make mine look like nothing!!”
So… with that, I’ll give you some material to refer back to the next time you feel foolish.
Location: Office
Cause: 7th grade student, Ricardo
Story: I’m not sure why, but I arranged my office so my desk and I face the wall opposite the open door. So, when students or staff come in quietly, I am unaware. It just so happens that Ricardo is a very wonderful and mischievous 7th grade boy who had not been informed of my response to surprises. Last week, as I worked away at my desk, Ricardo slipped in and gave a shout directly behind my chair. With the scream of an adolescent girl, I jumped and promptly fell off my chair, grasping the edge of my desk as I went. The worst part is the few moments following, when I realized the entire hallway had heard and several classes wondered who had just seen a ghost. SO embarrassing to have the guidance counselor be (rightly) the one to blame for such an interruption!
Location: Micah Project
Cause: Nelson slammed a door or dropped a chair, I’m not sure which
Story: This past Sunday, I was spending some fellowship time at the Micah house… and by fellowship, I mean, ducking from flying soccer balls and rough-housing with the boys who behave like wild brothers. So, we were fellowshipping and I had turned my back for one second from Nelson when I heard the most surprising BANG and my hand shot out, uncontrolled, toward Kristi who happened to be right in front of me. I grabbed her arm and scattered my feet until I regained my composure and then hid my head in her shoulder… Ah! The worst weakness to show a bunch of adolescent boys is that you scare easily! They wouldn’t let me leave without making me jump a hundred more times!
Location: Victoria’s house
Cause: this time I’ll blame it on the dark and the cowboy boots I love
Story: I had just spent some wonderful time hanging out with Victoria, a senior who has a special place in my heart, and her new puppy Milo. The cowboy boots were a gift from my mom this summer, anticipating the birthday in October when I’ll be here. It’s amazing how boots can make such an impression – it pretty much carried my smile all day long, straight up until I was walking out her front door. It was dark and we were talking… and then next thing I knew I was floating backwards through the air and onto my back in the grass. Slow and fast quite together explain the descent, but once I was there comfortably situated in the soft grass, I realized how silly it must all look to the guard who stood a few feet away! Victoria could barely pull herself together to help me up, she was laughing so hard. So, I lay there in my green cotton dress and cowboy boots, looking helpless and embarrassed as red punch. When I finally got up, I said, “Victoria! Oh my gosh, you can’t tell anyone that I just did that!” but, moments later I followed, “uh… just kidding, I’m sure I’ll tell everyone tomorrow!”
MUSINGS IN THE MIDST 