freedom school

 

It’s one thing to celebrate accomplishment.  It’s another (glorious) thing to celebrate hard-won accomplishment.  Tonite — attending “Freedom School Graduation” at CFBC – I watched and celebrated with about a hundred students (elementary-high school) basking in such glorious accomplishment.

I don’t know many stories from the lives of these specific students (though I teach Sunday school to a few of them once a month so have a couple stashed away!), but statistics from the urban core where they live are enough to prompt my imagination and (then) my appreciation for what this summer school program means to them. Tonite’s graduation included performances in song & dance … recitation of original poetry & drama.  It was good.  It was messy.  It was genuinely funny.  Utterly endearing.

Watching the grand finale from the back of a full house, I saw 100+ beautiful, shining students singing and swaying to the tune of hope.  I cried.

Gets me every time: the story of redemption — success — smack in the midst of life’s ugliness.  And I am compelled to live deeper or more … or somehow more truly.  Here’s to beating the odds … (and so, shaping my world).

planned-obsolescence obsolete?

I was cheering inside (okay, maybe even whispering an amen or two) as I listened to this piece on NPR today.  (Got especially fired up over the bit about ownership; go get ‘em, Mr. Jalopy!)  Here’s the teaser:

On a basic level, the [maker] movement is about reusing and repairing objects, rather than discarding them to buy more. On a deeper level, it’s also a philosophical idea about what ownership really is.“If you’re not able to open and replace the batteries in your iPod or replace the fuel sender switch on your Chevy truck, you don’t really own it,” Mr. Jalopy argues. “The terms of ownership are still dictated by the company that assembled it and glued the iPod shut so that you couldn’t get into it.”

Mr. Jalopy, helped codify these ideas in 2005 with the Maker’s Bill of Rights. The list of 17 directives includes: “If it snaps shut, it shall snap open” and “Ease of repair shall be a design ideal, not an afterthought.”

–NPR, California’s Maker Age

Can I get a witness?

harelip prayers

 

I’ve cried my eyes out the past couple of days.  (My second mamma — Connie — left us to be with Jesus earlier this week.)  I had to dig out a couple of my favorite passages (some of which include the Scriptural Psalms).  One of which–found in David James Duncan’s The Brothers K–is a psalm of sorts in its own right.  (Okay, small p … but still.)  Because harelip prayers seem to be about all I can muster these days … (and because I love this story), here’s an excerpt:

“You know, Kade.  This whole thing, this shed business, it really is ridiculous.”  Then he smiled–and sadly, almost shyly added.  “But Vera says her stupid prayers no matter what.  Right?”

This remark washed over me in slow, silent waves: the shedding of the cigarettes, the tortured four-mile runs, the scavenged lumber and laborious building project–it was some kind of elaborate apology, some sort of self-imposed penance for having hit me.  It was a gesture, a wonderful gesture.  But a gesture nonetheless.  “Look, Kade,” he said, reaching down and squeezing my sagging shoulders.  “My situation, baseball-wise, is hopeless.”

My throat began to close.  I looked away to hide the welling in my eyes.

“The thing is,” he said, “I don’t want you getting worked up over nothing when I start spending time out here.  I built this shed because throwing baseballs keeps my head on straight.  I did not build it to inaugurate some sort of fairytale comeback.  Do you understand that?”

I stared at the little piece of diamond we’d just made.

“No matter how well I may eventually seem to be throwing, and no matter what your all-knowing brother Everett may say, all I’m ever gonna do out here is toss the pitcher’s equivalent of harelip prayers.  Okay?”

My tongue felt thick and dry now–not a hint of yak butter anywhere.

“Don’t think of it as baseball, Kade.  Call it my hobby, or some weird kind of worship maybe.  Call it psalmball, or shedball, or thumbball if you like.  But remember it’s not baseball.  It’s not a comeback.  You’ve got to promise me that.”

A lump of sandstone lay in my throat.  I couldn’t speak.  But he waited.  He waited till our eyes met, then bent my will like an arm wrestler bends a wrist: I had to nod to keep from breaking.  “Okay,” he said, handing me his hammer. “Let’s pound in that plate.”

We did so.  But I took no pleasure in it now.

–David James Duncan, The Brothers K

peace of christ to me

Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me,
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

I bind unto myself the name,
The strong name of the Trinity;
By invocation of the same.
The Three in One, and One in Three,
Of whom all nature hath creation,
Eternal Father, Spirit, Word:
Praise to the Lord of my salvation,
salvation is of Christ the Lord.

–Excerpt from St. Patrick’s Breastplate

(mistaken) ways of looking at the world

Most Western Christians–and most Western non-Christians, for that matter–in fact suppose that Christianity was committed to at least a soft version of Plato’s [philosophy] … A massive assumption has been made in Western Christianity that the purpose of being a Christian is simply, or at least mainly, to “go to heaven when you die,” and texts that don’t say that but that mention heaven are read as if they did say it, and texts that say the opposite … are simply screened out as if they didn’t exist.  The results are all around us in the Western church and worldviews that Western Christianity has generated … I have heard it seriously argued in North America that since God intends to destroy the present space-time universe, and moreover since he intends to do so quite soon now, it really doesn’t matter whether we emit twice as many greenhouse gases as we do now, whether we destroy the rain forests and the arctic tundra, whether we fill our skies with acid rain.

–NT Wright, Surprised by Hope

i’m all for change, but …

Part of the problem in our contemporary debates about asylum seekers or about the Middle East is that our politicians still want to present us with the dream of progress, the steady forward advance of the golden dream of freedom; and when the tide of human misery washes up on our beaches or when people in cultures very different from our own seem not to want the kind of freedom we had in mind, it is not just socially but ideologically untidy and inconvenient.  It reminds politicians that there is a gap in their thinking.  The world is in fact still a sad and wicked place, not a happy upward progress toward the light.

–N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope

Postscript: I deeply appreciated Obama’s candor and vulnerability in taking political discourse to a different arena during his speech, A More Perfect Union.  I listened to it a few weeks ago and did not regret it.

 

ways of looking at the world

At the risk of gross oversimplification, we suggest that there are two quite different ways of looking at the future of the world … The first position is the myth of progress.  Many people, particularly politicians and secular commentators in the press and elsewhere, still live by this myth, appeal to it, and encourage us to believe it.  Indeed (if I may digress for a moment), the demise of serious political discourse today consists not least in this, that the politicians are still trying to whip up enthusiasm for their versions of this myth–it’s the only discourse they know, poor things–while the rest of us have moved on … That is why the relentlessly modernist and progressivist projects that the politicians feel obliged to offer us (”vote for us and things will get better!”) have to be dressed up with the relentlessly postmodernist techniques of spin and hype: in the absence of real hope, all that is left is feelings.

–NT Wright, Surprised by Hope

mia?

I’ve been away from the blog-o-sphere for a couple of days.  Internet trouble on Monday, and heavy eyelids last nite … (I was snoozing by 9 p.m.)!  Alas, I’ve returned to the land of the living (& typing) to drop a quick update.

Even in my absence on-line, God’s been showing Himself strong & fully present with me.  (Something I’ve been needing desperately as of late, amidst my own small season of disorientation.)

After some tearful, earnest prayers last weekend, I felt that God reached out to me today through Letitia Washington (the woman we’re building our Habitat home for this year).  Letitia called out of the blue and left a message saying she had no agenda; just hadn’t talked to me for awhile and felt she should call.  I — in a rare moment of reaching out beyond expectations — decided to call back.

It was an awesome conversation.  Turns out, Letitia and I have some important things common these days (as we both navigate through the acquisition of a new home).  The best moment was when Letitia said to herself (or so she thought), “you know, God will never leave you or forsake you.”  This, after my pestering-prayer of the weekend had been “God, are you with me here?” (emphasis on each syllable, please).

It’s amazing how God’s Word — enlivened by God’s Spirit … enfleshed by God’s people — does, in fact, change the day.  I’m still reeling.  (And still quite disoriented, I suppose — but that’s for another post.)

Sometimes — more days than not, it seems — I just can’t believe God is interacting with me in such real and invasive ways.  You’d think I’d get used to it after 20+ years.  I find the converse is true; I am more surprised each day by the nearness of Christ.  Amen.  (May it be.)

how can i believe in god and pain?

I’m writing an e-mail to folks in my community … to give them an update on some of the workers we partner with in China and to help us think together about some of the world calamities in recent weeks.  I really liked a couple of paragraphs I stumbled across, written by Michael Ramsden (who is a riot, btw, not to mention brilliant speaker).  Maybe you’ll find his thoughts instructive & challenging as well:

The heart of the questions … people most commonly ask [is]: can I trust God even when faced with great evil?  Is He morally trustworthy?  Can I trust Him even if I don’t understand what is happening?

These are profound questions, and whole books could be written about them.  But I will offer one more thought.  Maybe the reason we question God’s moral character when bad things happen is that we live our lives largely independent from Him.  In other words, we struggle to trust Him in times of trouble because we do not really trust Him when things are going well.  Maybe we struggle with suffering so much in the West because we are so comfortable most of the time that we feel we don’t need God … As I said earlier, I have never been asked questions about God and suffering when I am travelling in countries riddled with the realities of it.  In fact, when I visit churches in parts of the world where they are faced daily with horrific affliction, I normally leave inspired.  They trust God in everything, even when things are going well.  When times are hard, they cling to God because they have already learned to trust Him.  They have learned that God does not change, even when our circumstances have.

n.t. wright is blowing my mind

And transforming my Mother’s Day graveside visit.  Just a sample from my latest read, Surprised by Hope:

I hope that those who take seriously the argument of this present book will examine the current practice of the church, from its official liturgies to all the unofficial bits and pieces that surround them, and try to discover fresh ways of expressing, embodying, and teaching what the New Testament actually teaches [about death, resurrection, & heaven] rather than the mangled, half-understood, and vaguely held theories and opinions we are meeting [in our world].  Frankly, what we have at the moment isn’t, as the old liturgies used to say, “the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead” but the vague and fuzzy optimism that somehow things may work out in the end … What we say about death and resurrection gives shape and color to everything else.  If we are not careful, we will offer merely a “hope” that is no longer a surprise, no longer able to transform lives and communities in the present, no longer generated by the resurrection of Jesus himself and looking forward to the promised new heavens and new earth …

Easter was when Hope in person surprised the whole world by coming forward from the future into the present.  The ultimate future hope remains a surprise, partly because we don’t know when it will arrive and partly because at present we have only images and metaphors for it, leaving us to guess that the reality will be far greater, and more surprising, still.  And the intermediate hope–the things that happen in the present time to implement Easter and anticipate the final day–are always surprising because, left to ourselves, we lapse into a kind of collusion with entropy, acquiescing in the general belief that things may be getting worse but there’s nothing much we can do about them.  And we are wrong.  Our task in the present … is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and a foretaste of the second.