The start of 30 before 30

Two friends of mine who are a little further into their third decade than I am were discussing their "30 before 30" lists last Sunday. During the course of the conversation, one of them asked me what's on my list.

Umm...problem. I don't have a list.

Both of them were scandalized.

This may come as a surprise, but I'm not a hugely enormous fan of lists. I tend to put enough things on my "To-Do-Today" lists to last me an entire week. Disgusted at the end of the day with my seeming inability to accomplish this reasonable amount in a 24-hour period, I give up on to-do lists for a whole week or two. At the end of that time, I realize that I haven't yet gotten done what was on my original list. Filled with good thoughts and determination, I make a new one, containing all the undone things, plus some new ones for good measure. And so the cycle goes.

I realize, though, that lists can be good. A reasonable list keeps me on track. A just-slightly-ambitious list motivates me to push just a little harder.

Considering my tendency to slump into the hummmdrummm, I am thinking a "30 before 30" might not be a bad thing after all. Especially since I have less than 4 1/2 years before that fateful event. (And HOW did that happen, I wonder to myself? I can't really be THAT old, can I?)

So...I am considering creating just such a list. I know I don't want to get to the end of my life, only to discover a lot of my time was spent watching sitcom reruns on TBS.

Here's the plan...over the next two months, I plan to write down things that come to mind that I have always thought "Wow, that would be fun to do!" and compile my list near the end of the year. At the turn of 2010, hopefully I will have a workable list...in which I am already planning to include things I've already done...thus to encourage myself and, you know, keep it workable. There is nothing quite like a workable list to keep me kinda-sorta on track. We'll see what happens from there.

In the meantime, I will continue working on tying up the loose ends of my life. Do you have those? That one project you've been working on for a few months that just has the really boring part or the really hard part or the really confusing part left, but that you feel like you have to finish before moving on to something else? I have a bunch of those. Lord-willing, by the end of this year, my loose ends will all be tied, and I will be eager and ready to face a new year.

Care to join me?

Wordless Weekend: Sanzoku in Autumn

Fall 2005

Obsessed with death...and life

A visitor from a foreign country who arrived in my neighborhood in the last week might be stunned by this culture's apparent obsession with death. Just down the street, there is a house with a yard full of gravestones. Across the street, my neighbors have a skeleton hanging in their tree in the front yard and a coffin on the porch. A visitor from another culture who has never been exposed to the American holiday that is Halloween could indeed say this culture is obsessed with death. Why? they would wonder. Why this celebration of death? Why this focus on the gruesome? Why this obsession? What's wrong with you people?

As I sat in my church's Lord's Supper service this morning, one of the brothers brought up the point that the same visitor might ask the same questions of us in that meeting. You're celebrating the body and blood of a dead man? You're singing songs about His suffering? You're meditating on how he was beaten and crucified? Why are you obsessed with death?

...but they simply had some points of disagreement with him about ... a dead man, Jesus...

They aren't new questions. Why celebrate this dead man, Jesus? Why the obsession with death?

The answer...

... whom Paul asserted to be alive.

We aren't obsessed with death. We are obsessed with life. He came, He died, He LIVES that we might have life, and have it abundantly. By proclaiming his death, we proclaim His Life. By celebrating His death, we celebrate His life...and ours.

(Scripture taken from Acts 25:19)

A Day in the Life

YLCF is doing a blog carnival this week, and this is my contribution...

*****

It's Friday morning, a few minutes before 7 as my alarm clock beeps. Anyone who has ever been around me in the morning knows I am *not* a morning person. Never have been. It's the way God made me. ;-) Thursdays are my late class night, and I don't usually walk through the door until 10:30PM...last night, true to form, I wasn't in bed until after midnight. I'm tempted to shut the ol' alarm clock off and go back to sleep for another half an hour, but there are things to be done. Instead, I groan in the same key as the floorboards above me that my mom is still stomping around on (she leaves for work at 7:30), and take a few minutes in bed to read my Bible (I'm in Matthew...what about you?), and a chapter of The Bravehearted Gospel by Eric Ludy. Hearing my sister emerge from our shared bathroom, I roll out of bed and head that way for my turn.

Bed made, clothes on, face applied, and hair done, I finally hurry upstairs at 9AM to help my sis finish getting her lunch bag put together. She knows more than to expect any conversation from me...I don't feel a part of the human race until I've had my tea in the morning. No time for breakfast or a leisurely tea sip, I brew my cup for the morning in my Japanese Starbucks mug, and we're out the door at 9:15. I don't usually skip breakfast, but this morning, we're going to try something new. Having seen dancing cows on streetcorners yesterday, my sister has told me that Chick-Fil-A has free breakfasts on Friday. I've never been to Chick-Fil-A for any meal, breakfast or otherwise, so I'm eager to check the place out. (And I feel compelled to mention also that I eat breakfast "out" so rarely, that I don't even remember when the last time was...probably a couple years ago...) Thankfully, there's a Chick-Fil-A on the way to my sister's job, so we stop there to pick up two of their cinnamon clusters, and I eat mine and enjoy my tea as I finish the drive, dropping my sister off at work.

After meeting her new co-worker, I head to our church. I am teaching one of their "creative home nights" this Monday...ten ladies in my group will be making gingerbread houses. I have never taught anyone to make a gingerbread house before...I always figured it was pretty intuitive. Anyway, we are assembling the houses from kits (horrors! ;-D) ahead of time. I meet two other ladies, and we spend the next three hours trying to figure out how to get very lopsided pieces of gingerbread to stay up long enough for the royal icing holding them together to dry. I chat for a few minutes with the church secretary about a babysitting situation that came up last Sunday, and then it's out the door to head home.

On the way home, it occurs to me I should stop at the fabric store. Now, I rarely need a valid excuse to stop at my favorite designer fashion fabrics store, but I actually have a reason today! This evening, one of my sister's former co-workers is coming over and we are going to design her wedding dress. I want to check what Denver Fabrics has in stock, so we can do some preliminary fabric discussion. I manage to make it out of the store without buying anything (an amazing feat for a fabric addict like me!), and, not being able to think of any more stops I should make, arrive home around 2 o'clock.

It's time for lunch! I'm in a hurry, so it's a bowl of shredded wheat while I fill out an online student opinion survey for my school. I grab some frozen hamburger out of the freezer to defrost for dinner, and then I do a little house cleaning to get my workroom, which doubles as my living room and computer room, ready for my customer tonight (and while I'm at it, I tidy up the kitchen, bathroom and my bedroom).

In the middle of a cleaning tornado, my guinea piggie starts begging for her afternoon vegetable, so I take a break to feed her and watch a program on the DVR. (Yes, I watch TV mid-day!) Then it's back to cleaning, which ends up taking much longer than I expected.

It's 5:30, and all the cleaning that's left is to vacuum the upstairs kitchen. I get dinner started, tossing my still-frozen hamburger in a skillet and digging out a can of refried beans, chopping vegetables, setting the table, and generally running around like a chicken with its head cut off. ;-) My working family will be home and hungry soon, and my customer is coming around 7PM.

My mom comes home, and promptly leaves again to pick up my sister from work while I finish dinner. It's 6:30 before we all finally sit down. In days past, we usually ate every meal of the day together, but now between three full-time jobs and my school schedule, we're thankful to have three or four dinners together per week.

My customer calls around 6:45...she won't be able to make it until 8:30. I am both bugged and thankful about this because I know I won't be ready for her at 7, but it also means a later evening than I had anticipated.

We all work together to clean up from dinner, and then I get to work on a couple mending/alterations projects I have for other clients. I don't particularly enjoy alterations and mending (to put it mildly), but at this season of life, I am taking whatever sewing jobs I can get. Right around 8:30, my customer arrives, accompanied by her 16-year-old son, which surprises me. He turns out to be a quiet boy, though, who spends our appointment talking to my guinea pig and looking through my sister's cake photo albums. Meanwhile, Leslie and I thumb through my pattern books. She doesn't know what she wants beyond a 50's style, tea-length dress, but she says she'll know what she wants when she sees it. Thankfully, she sees it after only a few minutes of looking through my 500+ vintage patterns, and "it" happens to be one of my favorites! We set a date to meet to go fabric shopping, and they leave around 9:30.

Knowing I need to have my mending and alterations jobs done before Sunday, I get back to work. These things always take longer than I expect, and after fighting my sewing machine tension for a while, and ripping out a couple things and re-doing them, it is 11PM, and I am ready to be done for the night.

After a quick shower, I crawl into bed and thumb through my most recent High Country Gardens catalog while listening to the end of my current Out to Canaan audiobook CD. It's 11:45PM when I shut off my bedside light, remember a few friends "as brought to mind" in prayer, and finally go to sleep...

*****

Care to share a day in your life?

Sentimentality

Are YOU a sentimentalist? (Maybe I should make a Facebook quiz on this! Lol!)

Sentimentality is indulgence in emotion for its own sake, or expression of more emotion than an occasion warrants. Sentimentalists are gushy, stirred to tears by trivial or inappropriate causes; they weep at all weddings and all funerals; they are made ecstatic by manifestations of young love; they clip locks of hair, gild baby shoes, and talk baby talk. Sentimental literature is "tear-jerking" literature. It aims primarily at stimulating the emotions directly rather than at communicating experience truly and freshly; it depends on trite and well-tried formulas for exciting emotion; it revels in old oaken buckets, rocking chairs, mother love, and the pitter-patter of little feet; it oversimplifies; it is unfaithful to the full complexity or human experience.
~Perrine's Literature

Am I a sentimentalist?

Guilty.

;-)

Seasons of the Soul

It feels like the last three years have been a time of transition for me. I'm still not sure where I am or where I'm going. But...after the hot, lazy days of summer, the change in the air and the change in colors always makes me feel energized and hopeful for something. Something more. Something better. Just as I know that the seasons will change in nature, I choose to believe that life as it is now is only a season. Perhaps it is a season that will last for the rest of my life. That's okay. One day, the season will change forever, and I will be standing on the hills of home, experiencing the light of my Savior's face. What a marvelous day that will be.

As the azure skies of summer
Give way to autumn’s cold
‘Til all signs of life are buried
Under winter’s dormant cold
And the kiss of spring awakens
The hidden life it holds
So life fulfills its cycles
Such are the seasons of the soul

The season in the rain will end at last
The season full of pain will surely pass
The reason will be plain someday when love reveals its goal
Such are the seasons of the soul

Oh, you never dreamed you’d be here
Oh, you’re sure this can’t be right
And you feel you’ve been forgotten
Left alone here in the night
But the darkness hides a treasure
Forming diamonds from the cold
So pain contains a promise
Such are the seasons of the soul

The season in the rain will end at last
The season full of pain will surely pass
The reason will be plain someday when love reveals its goal
Such are the seasons of the soul
Such are the seasons of the soul

Like a child
In the womb
Like the Son of God
Concealed within the tomb
Light will come
Once again
Oh, the dark is just the middle
Not the end

The season in the rain will end at last
The season full of pain will surely pass
The reason will be plain someday when love reveals its goal
Such are the seasons of the soul

The season in the rain will end at last
The season full of pain will surely pass
The reason will be plain someday when love reveals its goal
Such are the seasons of the soul
Such are the seasons of the soul
Such are the seasons of the soul

~Unknown

A brief paper on holistic Christian education

I'm taking an English Lit class from Liberty University Online this semester. Our first assignment was to write a (very!) brief paper in support of or opposition to one of the first week's lectures. This is mine...

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What is Christian education? Is it “reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic” with a little Bible study added for good measure? While a Christian education involves all these disciplines, learning them is of little or no value if what is learned is not applied and integrated into a Christian’s life, as discussed in Lesson 1. Indeed, a Christian should regard every concept and image he encounters, both in a scholastic environment and in daily life, as an opportunity to grow in his understanding of the world and its relationship to God.

Paul’s direction from the second book of Corinthians explains how a Christian can take what he is learning and use it as a tool to further his spiritual life. There, Paul instructs the believers to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. This means that whatever enters the mind, including that which comes through non-Biblical sources, should first be examined carefully under the light of the authority of Scripture, and then be responded to in obedience.

A truly holistic approach to Christian life and education requires that Christians be willing to approach all of life as an opportunity to learn and apply God’s will in their lives. In his letter, the apostle James warns believers not to be like a man who, having looked at himself in a mirror, goes away and forgets what he looks like. The apostle encourages the believers to take what they have learned and act upon it!

The educated Christian thoughtfully examines every concept to which he is exposed, integrating into practice that which is true, while rejecting and refusing to practice that which is false. An educated Christian remembers what he has learned and is changed to be more like Christ.

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Now my job is to go over the other students' papers and write a response to one of theirs. I think I'm going to respond to the one that says we can learn "new truths" about Jesus from extra-Biblical literature. Hopefully, I can manage to be kind AND truthful!