Hope

What is hope?

Hope is believing that God is good. Tradegy often illuminates unbelief. Hebrews is a great book about faith - believing what is not always seen - the goodness of God in the middle of evil and pain. Often times people will ask in the midst of a crisis if God is good [I certainly have]. But the answer to that question is not a mystery, it is not hidden, when circumstances fail to point to His goodness, His Word still stands in testimony to it. The question is not if God is good, the question is whether we will believe Him when He says He is.

I know, with all the tradegies hidden up my sleeve, that this is very hard, sometimes impossible. But I also know that God is the one who always brings me back to the place of belief; He always brings me back to hope.

Reading

Here's an update on two books I read recently.

1. My very first Agatha Christie book: The Mysterious Affair at Styles. I have always heard of and seen people reading them and wondered. Well, not anymore. She is a great writer. Her red herrings are masterful, she leaves you disliking the narrator (very unique) and yet you find yourself being just like the narrator, believing you know exactly who did it. Except, of course, you're wrong. After getting used to figuring out Authur Conan Doyle's villians, I thought I could peg Agatha Christie's with little problem, since there is a great similiarity stylistically in how they write and develop the plot. But for those dang red herrings! It was a great introduction into this part of the literary world and I enjoyed it very much. The only thing I was right about was in proclaiming to my roommate that I would have the book (which belonged to her) finished by 11:30. The minute I turned the last page, the clocked ticked from 11:29. :-]

2. Adopting Aloysha cannot acurately be summarized here. And yet, I'm still going to try :-] It is perhaps one of the best books I have read in a very long time. Where I would give Agatha Christie a 4 on a 5 point scale, I would give Robert Klose (the author) a 7. It is about the journey of a single man adopting a son from Russia. It follows his emotional ups and downs about why he's adopting and all the paperwork, setbacks, hopes, complications, and eventual joy. Even though you know the outcome, he writes so well that you feel as if you're right there with him at that point in the journey, not having a clue what will come next. What I particularly like is his descriptions of the attitudes and encounters with Russian culture - which was done so well and reminded me of my recent experiences in the orphanage in Ukraine - and of saying "spasiba" everywhere I went. [Russian for "thank-you"] :-] Anyhow, I LOVE this book, it shows the joy in adoption where so often we who do mission work only see the heartache. It shows one man fighting with everything he has, even when hopeless, to bring his son home - which is a beautiful picture of the gospel in many ways.

Each book I read in the course of a day, so if you don't have alot of reading time, they are good ones to pick up. :-]

Recipe

Ingredients:

Coarse salt and ground pepper
12 ounces ditalini or other small tubular pasta, (or other short tubular pasta)
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 cup (4 ounces) crumbled feta cheese
1 pound plum tomatoes, cut into 1/4-inch chunks (3 cups)
3 cups (12 ounces) shredded cooked rotisserie chicken, (skin removed)
1 cup torn fresh basil leaves

Serves 4.

Directions
In a large pot of boiling salted water, cook pasta until al dente, according to package directions. Drain; rinse well under cold water. Transfer to a large bowl; toss with oil, lemon juice, feta, tomatoes, chicken, and basil; season generously with salt and pepper. Serve at room temperature or chilled.

This is an excellent recipe from Martha Stewart. I'm not normally a Martha fan but my roomie is and she made this for us to eat and it was yummy!

Anchor

We do alot more talking than we do acting.

And the action we do do is often empty.

Hebrews says that: 'God, desiring even more to show to the heirs of the promise the unchangeableness of His purpose, interposed with an oath, so that by two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have taken refuge would have strong encouragement to take hold of the hope set before us. This hope we have as an anchor of the soul...'

What fills your life and anchors your soul?

Attitude

It's all about my attitude.

Because there will always be days like this, no matter what happens in life, what profession (if any) I end up doing, where I end up living, if times get easier or harder, life is put together or not, there will always be days like this - where its only 9:00am and the day is wretched. There will always be days where, even if I have the best job ever, I will hate it, where I will have to deal with incompetent people or, despite my best efforts, deal with my own incompetency. There will always be days when, even if my family and friends are the greatest, I will be frustrated and irritated with them.

Attitude is a beast. One that, if I leave simply to chance, will always grow into an unruly one, but if wrestled with can change a day like this into one I will rejoice and be glad in. I haven't always thought of attitude as something I could readily change - often I give it the term "mood" which feels like its a result of circumstances beyond my control, a faucet of my personality that I just have to let time fix. Go to bed, wake up tomorrow and it will be a better day.Well, I don't want to wait until tomorrow for it to be a better day. I do not want to sucumb to the laziness and even, dare I say: Lie, that I am not the master of my mood and my attitude and that if it is bad, the responsibility is mine. The thought that the responsibility is mine has never been a pleasant one before, until, I realize, Christ is in me and He has the power to change all this miserableness into gladness, even if the day, from 9:00am on, continues to be circumstancially poopy. :-] Attitude - be changed! [in reality, it is more like, Attitude, be submitted to the Spirit of God inside me] How much harder it is to do - but its a pretty good bet that anything worth doing will probably be hard. Worth doing - as in the doing of it results in wealth, or something valuable. No more focusing on the oft difficulty in having a good attitude, but on the wealth which lies on the other side it.

-never settle-

Camping

So, what has been going on in my life? Do you really care to know? Sometimes, I feel that the every day mundane things are not worth sharing. I don't like the times when life is boring but not restful - I don't even know how that happens. It seems illogical. :-]

But in case you really do care to know, here's something interesting from last weekend:

My brother and I went camping. Even though the last time he camped was at 13, and I have camped at least twice a year since highschool - my attempts to create fire failed miserably but within 30 minutes he had a fire which could've been on a Boy Scouts poster. Why are fires gender biased?

An hour before we set out, I went to the National Forest headquarters for Mississippi in the Federal building downtown and bought a map of the National Forest where I had planned for us to hike/camp. Two hours later as the sun was setting and we were making yet another u-turn, I read that the map was printed in 1997. 10 years ago. No wonder. Finally, using landmarks, we slowly progressed. "There should be some rail-road tracks" "There should be a church after a curve and a split in the road" None of the street names were the same so it was pointless to navigate using such a traditional method.

John had thought we were going to some common campground off the Trace - a well known/traveled historical trail in Mississippi. But I had decided long ago that such an idea was simply too tame. So as we progressed deeper into the forest and the darkness, he expressed frequent concerns that I had brought him out there to die. Especially when we finally found a sign that I had been looking for: wilderness area. HA! yes John, not just a National Forest, but the small patch of 'wilderness area' within the National Forest was our destination. After accusing me of trying to kill him once more, he commended my navigational skills.

I had wanted to give John a fine camping experience, for he was very impressionable concerning the merits of camping. Therefore, I planned a scrumptious meal of whole-wheat pasta penne cooked over the coals with a frying pan of olive oil, Salmon, green bell peppers and squash with a dab of rosemary and basil and a sprinkling of Parmesan cheese. Unfortunately, while the meal was ever bit delectable as I had hoped, Salmon is quite odorous and it was not soon before we started sensing the movement of large animals in the nearby forest drawing closer, no doubt led by their noses. I'm not exaggerating either. While at first I thought it was John's paranoia, when I stopped to watch and listen there was no doubt that something in the forest was moving and it wasn't very small.

So I cleaned the dishes in a hasty manner, packed up the remaining food and placed it in John's trunk. I was quite willing to sacrifice his sporty red car for my life. [it already had a trying time on the dirt road leading up to our camp site] While John moaned again that I had brought him out there to die, he proceeding to roast marshmellows with aplomb, so I deduced that his attitude was simply a farce.

After a restful night of sleep, I awoke to the need for the lue, so I began to slowly open the tent when, suddenly!, an arm reached out from my brother's sleeping bag and secured my wrist, as his frame blocked my exit. "Where are you going." he asked calmly. "I'm leaving" I replied matter-of-factly. "AH-HA!!! You have brought me out here to DIE!!" he cried injuriously. "YES!" I knew he had found me out! "I simply lured you into a false sense of security!" Well, it was not to be. We picked up camp and headed for the trail.

The trail turned out to be well marked with triangular white pieces of plastic until a mile in when it stopped abruptly. Having been obliterated by Katrina there was hardly any way to push forward without a path. But we were not daunted. With a smidgen of pink plastic flags marked on fallen branches and obscure limbs where the trail should have gone, we set forth. At many a place, we had to crawl through brambles and jump over limbs and push through masses of debris. Several times, we could not see a marker ahead, so we would split up and push forward until one of us found it and then we would call to the other and lead them to a rendezvous by the sound of our voice. Eventually, we found ourselves in a precarious position and could go no further. "If I go missing, the only one who will notice is my boss." John said "And since I didn't know where we were going, I didn't tell anyone." "But don't they have an emergency contact for you?" "Yes. It's you." Oh. Strangely, finding our way back was just as testing as finding our way forward.

Well, this post is long and our escapade came to an end. There will be pictures soon and perhaps even a small video. For now, we are rested after our adventures and I only had to pull one tick off of me - thankfully, the head came out with only several small tugs. :-} -never settle-

Better

I am reading C.S. Lewis’ Christian Behavior, co.1943.

He speaks about morality, using a ship as an analogy for the human machine. How the human machine is doing morally affects not only himself (he may sink) but others around him (he may crash into them) and if the whole fleet of ships is sea-worthy and unified they may still be heading to the wrong port. In this way, he gives us three things that morality is concerned with: social morality, how the individual is doing in relation to other individuals; individual morality, how one is doing with himself; and ‘the general purpose of human life as a whole’.

He talks about how modern man is almost always concerning himself with the first one – how peace is coming along and whether everyone is taken care of or not – all the while seeming to think that how one is doing inside is a personal affair that does not include anyone else. I would venture to say that while this may have been true of 1943, today, most people are actually concerning themselves with the second. They still believe that how they are doing on the inside is of no consequence to each other but it is of the utmost importance: the human machine should certainly focus on self. Our culture purports the idea that one man’s morality is of no consequence to another man, and we believe this, until one man shoots a lot of other men and then we say: someone should have taken responsibility for how this human was doing inside, someone should have noticed the human machine was broken and fixed it for this is terrible amoral.

And that is where the difficulty begins according to Lewis. For everyone can agree that social morality means being good and kind to each other, but internal morality, according to our culture, cannot be the same for everyone. And yet, in action, they do believe that it should be the same for everyone, that everyone should good and kind inside: for this will facilitate the goodness and kindness they display towards their fellow man. Lastly, the general purpose of human life as a whole is not bothered with in our society. They deny that it has any relevance for the first two kinds of morality. Yet is it the very foundation. His quote is best (naturally):

“Religion involves a series of statements about fact, which must be either true or false. If they are true, one set of conclusions will follow about the right sailing of the human fleet: if they are false, quite a different set. For example, let us go back to the man who says that a thing can’t be wrong unless it hurts some other human being. He quite understands that he mustn’t damage the other ships in the convoy, but he honestly thinks that what he does to his own ship is simply his own business. But does it not make a great difference whether it really is his own ship or not? Doesn’t it make a great difference whether I am, so to speak, the landlord of my own mind and body, or only a tenant, responsible to the real landlord?

Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live for ever, and this must be either true or false. Now there are a good many things which wouldn’t be worth bothering about if I were going to live only seventy years…..and immortality makes this other difference, which, by and by, has a connection with the difference between totalitarianism and democracy. If individuals live only seventy years, then a state, or a nation, or a civilization, which may last for a thousand years, is more important than an individual. But if Christianity is true, then the individual is not only more important but incomparably more important, for he is everlasting and the life of the state or a civilization, compared with his, is only a moment.”

-never settle-

Today

I want to be beautiful because of a godly spirit.
But today I am grumpy, ugly, and angry and I don't really know why.