worth it.

Some days, I get exhausted in ministry and wonder why I didn't become an investment banker. Other days, I get to go on sunrise hikes with my small group and it's worth it.

.cheer up, human cannonball.

It's been a while since our last posting. I've been accused of blog abandonment by my very own mother, so in my defense, here we are. Back again...

We are fresh from a conference in NYC this weekend, and if we had a camera, there would be pictures to post. Unfortunately, our camera never made it back from the CD release party in January, thus no pixel pictures, only word pictures.

We stayed at the Hotel 17, located in downtown NYC, right across from Calvary-St. George's Church, where the conference and worship services were held. Hotel 17 self-depicts as a "chic budget hotel" where Madonna has rested, Woody Allen has filmed, and a slew of other New York details *should* make the space more than attractive to "travelers on a budget." We thought Great! We're sort of chic and we're definitely on a budget! Well, church paid for us and a more accurate description might be "creepy-weird hotel" for "travelers on a budget -- a rather LARGE budget, and then a few people who could have been featured as extras on Daria if Daria hadn't been just a cartoon."

Apart from the un-fun-fun-house feel of the rooms ("Hello, Mr. Torrence..."), the community baths and the many hours of high-decibel Oprah viewing in the room next to us made me feel *almost* like I was back in my freshman dorm. This time, however, there was only a skulking bellhop with bleached blond hair to run to for help when the wild-eyed, failed B-movie actor emerged from his top floor room and began his silent but murderous rampage (I was pretty sure that was what this whole set up was meant for...and I mean, I was afraid).

I didn't spend a whole lot of time in our room. The conference was great, though. Here's a link to the blog that will explain more about the vision behind the conference:

Mockingbird


For the past couple of months, I have been wholly and unabashedly obsessed with one Ryan Adams song -- Everybody Knows. One disclaimer: I am wholly against doing a Christian-y, "stick God's name in your favorite love song!" move, but this song is ridiculous. Lyrically, I've come across only a few songs that so directly describe what I understand to be our post-resurrection relationship with God, as one fraught with distraction and hatred in humanity, pursuit and rescue in God. The inability of the speaker to "give back" only makes the desire of the one to whom the song is directed in Adams' poetry even more powerful. Here are the lyrics:

You come for me in the worst of places
You come for me, you come and try to take me home
I'm always in need and it's hard to be reciprocating
The fabric of our life gets torn

And everything's changing so how I am to know
How I'm going to hold on to you when I'm spinning out of control
You and I together
But only one of us in love
And everybody knows

He says your name, it echoes in my head like it was a canyon
He says your name, he says it and I know what's up
You come to me sometimes when I'm thinking like a cannonball shooting out a canyon
And I forget whatever it was I was thinking about

With everything changing how am I to know
How I'm going to hold on to you when I'm spinning out of control
You and I together
But only one of us in love
And everybody knows

And finally, I had to put this blog up and give it notice. As a child, I had one singular goal, and that was to surround myself with Garfield paraphernalia. Now, as an adult, I think I may have been given the address to a blog that explains my obsession.

What's really going on in the Garfield cartoons, sans Garfield. Brilliant.










We have all been Jon Arbuckle, have we not?

Garfield Minus Garfield

Sane?

“If the world is sane, then Jesus is mad as a hatter and the Last Supper is the Mad Tea Party. The world says, Mind your own business, and Jesus says, There is no such thing as your own business. The world says, Follow the wisest course and be a success, and Jesus says, Follow me and be crucified. The world says, Drive carefully—the life you save may be your own—and Jesus says, Whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. The world says, Law and order, and Jesus says, Love. The world says, Get, and Jesus says, Give. In terms of the world’s sanity, Jesus is crazy as a coot, and anybody who thinks he can follow him without being a little crazy too is laboring less under a cross than under a delusion.”

From Buechner, The Faces of Jesus

You look great, honey.

We'll post pictures from the CD release party soon. The last few days have been blurry -- like the kind of blurry that happens when you've been looking out a car window for hours on end, scanning whatever it is that shoots past your line of vision, and you can't differentiate shapes and colors anymore. Thursday night was fantastic; tons of folks from our community, church, and city showed up, and the bands who preceded Alex were great. Then, Alex played, and did so well -- I was so proud of him. On Friday, he left again to lead worship for a retreat with the Falls Church in DC for the weekend and came home tonight.

I've been reading a bit more Wendell Berry lately, and celebrating the birth of the first son of our dear friend, Erika, and her husband, Jeremy. Over the phone, I laughed with my friend a few nights ago about some old jokes -- as she held her new son -- and thought about what Wendell Berry has been teaching me and how it massages the pangs of loss that I've felt in being so far from old friends and family. He writes that we live in the culture of the "one-night-stand"that we now know no commitment to place. We are not married to anywhere -- we are not forced to learn a place, to learn a people. Laughing with Erika -- and yet knowing that she, along with my other dear Rhodes friends -- are many miles away and not in my daily life because I, too, live in that culture, brings such pain. We need "enough time" to really farm the relationships, the jobs, the very life that staying promises. We do not know faith to a place anymore. And yet, Berry writes, that being faithful to place, staying, bears witness to the very gospel that became flesh and dwelt among us.

I am the worst offender of this principle -- I am constantly soothing my discomfort with thoughts of the next place we will go, or the move home I imagine we will make. And maybe God will call us to do one of those things, but I do know that the impermanence that plagues our lives is not the way things are supposed to be.

Oh Boise!

The CD's arrived today -- two days early for Alex's CD release party (which is on thursday, at 8 at the Satellite Ballroom, if you happen to be of a Virginia persuasion). He arrived at my job at the Study Center with one proudly in hand, and I must say, they look awesome. I mean, they're real CD's. Not to mention, the music is good. I married a talented boy.



In other boy news, this article on the Wittenburg Door is amazing.

John Eldredge: How Wild Is He?

Okay, so we're a little excited...

WOO-HOO!


Alex is FEATURED in the DAILY PROGRESS!!!

God Grew Tired of Us

Last night, we watched the documentary that came out a couple of years ago on the story of the Lost Boys from the Sudan, God Grew Tired of Us.


God Grew Tired of Us tells the story, of the Lost Boys, specifically of three as they move to the US. The film contextualizes their stories in the larger story of the war in sudan, and perhaps more subtly, but with a more lasting sting for me, the documentary nestles their courage and magnificently human bonds of community against the abrupt backdrop of the American shove for individual success.

Watching these men describe the moments of chaos and moments of joy as they negotiate the United States gave me a renewed sense that our Creator did indeed endow us with rich gifts of compassion, connection, and fortitude that bears eyes for the weaker and eyes of hope. It again became clear, however, the mechanisms that we have developed as a modern, more “productive” society often times function to isolate and dehumanize us – not that these mechanisms are all bad. The men featured in this story rejoiced in education and medicine, food and transportation, but they grieved their separateness from one another as brutal work schedules kept them from rebuilding the community they knew – the community that sustained them in an hour of horrific savagery and terror.

We loved this film.