I haven't even started writing yet for the night, but I wanted to get my daily blog posting out of the way. I'm being a total slacker. Here's my post - a quiz result from the blogthing's quiz: What crappy Christmas gift are you?
| You Are a Losing Lottery Ticket! |
 Full of hope and promise. But in the end, a cheap letdown. |
There's a documentary coming out this month called What Would Jesus Buy? Here's a brief description:
“What Would Jesus Buy?” examines the commercialization of Christmas in America while following Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir on a cross-country mission to save Christmas from the Shopocalypse (the end of humankind from consumerism, over-consumption and the fires of eternal debt.)
Today I voluntarily got a shot in my arm that has lovely flu-like side effects, even though it's supposed to prevent me from getting the flu. Um...yeah. Why can't they come up with a flu shot that won't make you feel like you have the flu shortly after you get the shot?
Although you can't see me right now to verify this, I am most definitely pouting. It's rather pathetic. And now, on top of the pouting, I'm whining about it via the written word. Awesome.
Now for an update on my book's (I use that term very loosely) nanowrimo word count: As of last night, I have 6,585 crap-tastic words.
That means I'm 83 words behind schedule. I'll try to catch up with what I write tonight, but, instead, I'll probably just end up pouting some more. And then I'll start feeling sorry for myself, which inevitably leads into a spell of writerly angst that continues indefinitely and delays all productiveness until I realize how dumb it is and start laughing at myself.
Good times.
Maybe I can just skip ahead to the part where I laugh at myself...
I recently read A Grief Observed, by C.S. Lewis. It's not a long book, so I read it in one sitting. It was heart wrenching to read, though (particularly the first half of it). I respect how honest and vulnerable he was in writing that book; I can understand why he first published it under a pseudonym, but I'm glad he later "came out" about having authored it.
Being that this weekend has been wedding-filled for me (it was an awesome wedding, by the way), I thought of this quote from his book:
One thing, however, marriage has done for me. I can never again believe that religion is manufactured out of our unconscious, starved desires and is a substitute for sex. For those few years H. and I feasted on love, every mode of it -- solemn and merry, romantic and realistic, sometimes as dramatic as a thunderstorm, sometimes as comfortable and unemphatic as putting on your soft slippers. No cranny of heart or body remained unsatisfied. If God were a substitute for love we ought to have lost all interest in Him. Who’d bother about substitutes when he has the thing itself? But that isn’t what happens. We both knew we wanted something besides one another – quite a different kind of something, a quite different kind of want. You might as well say that when lovers have one another they will never want to read, or eat – or breathe.
- C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
Two close friends of mine, Janelle and Brandon, are getting married to each other tonight. I've enjoyed getting to know them better over the past couple of years, both as individuals and as a couple.They are two people who are truly a great match for each other, and I do believe their relationship is blessed and God-centered.
It brings me great joy to see them entering into a marriage together.
They introduced me to the band Over the Rhine, which is an amazing group. Their music and lyrics are beautiful; I highly recommend checking them out if you haven't done so already.
And, tonight, Over the Rhine will be playing at their wedding reception (there's a long story behind this having to do with how they met each other). How awesome is that?
I'm really looking forward to seeing the band play live. Here are the lyrics to one of my favorite songs, Born, from their Drunkard's Prayer album (I hope they play it tonight):
I was born to laugh
I learned to laugh through my tears
I was born to love
I'm gonna learn to love without fearPour me a glass of wine
Talk deep into the night
Who knows what we'll findIntuition, deja vu
The Holy Ghost haunting you
Whatever you got
I don't mindPut your elbows on the table
I'll listen long as I am able
There's nowhere I'd rather beSecret fears, the supernatural
Thank God for this new laughter
Thank God the joke's on meWe've seen the landfill rainbow
We've seen the junkyard of love
Baby it's no place for you and meI was born to laugh
I learned to laugh through my tears
I was born to love
I'm gonna learn to love without fear
I wrote 1,758 words yesterday for national novel writing month. That doesn't even include what I wrote on here for national blog posting month (NaBloPoMo). Also, last night I joined a group on NaBloPoMo for Christian writers, and started a new group as well.
Hello, my name is Liz (and/or Elizabeth), and I have ADD. It's a beautiful thing. Sometimes.
Anyway, back to the novel writing craziness: I calculated how many words, on average, one would have to write each day to make it to 50,000 words by the end of November: 1,667 words per day. Thus, my goal is to write at least 1,700 words each day, so I'm right on track.
Speaking of calculations, I've started tutoring one of my neighbors in Algebra II. It has been, like, 10 years since I've had any sort of math class, so I told her I might not be the best tutor when she asked, but that I would give it a try.
So, this week I've been (rapidly) reintroduced to the world of algebra and calculus as I've been tutoring her. It was actually kind of fun to do the graphs and word problems and all that good stuff, and to teach someone else how to do it. I forgot how satisfying it can be to solve a multi-step problem and know I got the exact right answer. That's a great feeling for me.
Algebra appeals to my inner control-freak.
I mean, there's a right answer at the end of every problem. A solution that is clear and concrete - all I have to do is follow the steps and apply the correct formulas. It's so straightforward. It makes logical sense.
Often I have wished life could be that predictable, that formulaic. No risk. No unknown outcomes. Complete control to know where I'm headed and exactly how to get there.
But that's not reality. Maybe for an algebra problem, but not for this messy thing called life. And, yet, many times I've tried to make it safe and predictable. I've tried to make my five- or 10-year plans set in stone.
There's a Woody Allen quote that says, "If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans."
The need for this kind of control, this demand to know exactly where life is headed and to be assured that it won't be scary or painful or messy, is contrary to following God's will. For someone to let go of this delusion of control, it would require complete faith in God's plan and timing, even though to do so is risky and involves uncertainty about the path ahead, and there may be more heartache and struggles than expected.
A few weeks ago, while doing my thing on the elliptical at the gym, I was listening to a podcast of a Rob Bell sermon that addresses this quest for control. Here is a snippet of what he said:
"Essentially, the lie is that life is like an X-Y graph. . . . The ultimate lie is if you do A, B, and C, then of course God will do A, B, and C, and you’ll be fine. Like, all you have to do is trust Jesus, and you won’t have to go through any heartache because he wants you happy and wealthy. And these lies are deep within us that this is how the world works...
"You cannot control what’s going to happen to some of the relationships around you. You cannot control where the attacks are going to come from. You cannot control what dreams may, in fact, blow up in your face. You cannot control exactly where Provision or Guidance is going to come.
"But you can control the kind of person you are becoming. You can control what’s going on in your heart. You can control whether you’re the kind of person who is moving from indifference to compassion. Whether you move from having a hard heart to having a heart that beats for the things that God’s heart beats for…
“There’s this sense that, man, life could have been so much easier, but it hasn’t gone that way. It went a different way. Man, there’s so many places where a straight shot would have saved so much time and heartache, and yet, instead, life did this other thing and it twisted and turned and curved, and it’s not what I planned. And I think about the relationships that have blown up, and the dreams that just kind of faded away…there was a much, much shorter route, but I’ve ended up taking a much longer route.
"And yet, I wouldn’t be who I am, and you wouldn’t be who you are, if we had taken the shorter route. It’s all the twists and turns that have shaped you. So the question is: ‘Am I responding and becoming the kind of person God intends me to be?’ Because there are some things we can only learn from the curves and the twists and the bends.
"There are some things, if everything was perfect and fine, we would never learn, and we would end up so shallow and trite and not tuned in to the bigger issues.
I watch the Colbert Report most nights. He cracks me up. Last night, he opened with this:
Oh how I love Stephen Colbert.
Besides watching The Colbert Report, I didn’t do much for Halloween this year, such as dressing up in a costume, or anything like that (I had a prior obligation).
However, last year I went to a Halloween party at Resurrection, and I dressed up as the devil. I felt it was a fitting costume for a church event. My original plan was to make my own costume and go as “Snakes on a Plane,” and I even started to get the materials for it. It turned out to be a difficult concept to put into costume-form, though, and I didn't have enough time to get it together. I then considered making it “Snakes on a geometric-Plane”, but that was just too geeky to pull off, even for me.
I was one of the young adult team leaders when we were planning that Halloween shindig, and I remember that, at the leaders’ meeting, I jokingly said something about how our church group shouldn’t celebrate a pagan holiday. I was being satirical/sarcastic and completely joking, of course, but I think (at least for a second or two) that a couple of people thought I was being serious when I said that. I need to be careful with my sense of humor sometimes, I’ve come to realize, especially around people who don't know me that well. But it is kind of fun to satirize the uptightness of some when it comes to that kind of stuff, which is probably why I enjoy Colbert so much.
So, even though some may call Halloween a “pagan” holiday and refuse to celebrate it, it actually does have relevance to Christianity. And it's simply fun to get dressed up in costumes and be ridiculous all night, regardless of your religious beliefs. It also has Celtic origins, which makes it all the better:
“The last day of October marks the beginning in the church of a period known as Hallowtide, 'All Saintstide,' when Christians remember those who have died. All-Hallows Eve, or Halloween, October 31, has Celtic origins, being originally the feast of Sanhain/Samhain,(pronounced 'sow'inn), the last night of the Celtic year, when all kinds of spirits were thought to be active. The Celts believed that this was a time when the boundary between the spirit world and the earthly world is at its thinnest and when spirits are most likely to be seen on earth…. So when did Sanhain become Halloween? By the 9th century, Christianity had spread into Celtic lands and the celebration became known as the Eve of All Hallows and eventually Halloween… The word Hallow means 'Holy', (blessed, consecrated or set apart in a special way), so 'All-Hallows' or 'All Saints’ refers to the Saints—the Holy Ones. Those who died for their faith or who lived extraordinary lives.” – Rev. C. Royden, All Souls – Remembering our Loved Ones
I know that she was very spiritual (and very Methodist), stubborn, opinionated, sassy, feminist (not in a “men-are-bad” way, but in the true sense of the word: she believed that men and women were of equal worth), and definitely had a mind of her own, which she wasn’t afraid to speak. My dad has told me a few times that my personality is a lot like hers (and I don’t think he always meant that as a total compliment. Hehe).
Most of what I know about her comes from stories and shared memories passed down from my parents and other relatives. When they talk about her, I can see and hear how much she meant to each of them. What I personally remember, however, was that she had a nickname for each of her grandchildren – something she picked out for each of us that only she called us. Her name for me was “angel.”
Now, I know that I’m no angel, but that name still brings a smile to my face when I think of her. And it kind of makes me laugh that her “angel” got dressed up as the devil for Halloween.
Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. – Hebrews 12:1
