life in truth

want to live well?
submit to truth
wherever you find it
refuse
to the point of death
to wield it

1000

HAhahahaw! I have exactly 1000 unread emails in my inbox as evidenced by the Inbox (1000). It's a magical moment.

heart matters

The heart of a matter—the heart of anything—is the truth of it. Everything else is just packaging.

Packaging is ok. There’s nothing inherently good or evil about it. It’s just packaging, though.

Sometimes the packaging communicates something about the heart, sometimes it obfuscates.

Imagine the difference in the way you feel when you get two gifts. One is a cheap trinket packaged exquisitely. The other is a beautiful string of pearls wrapped in a shoe box with newspaper.

I have a huge distrust of packaging. Maybe it stems from my first gag gift. It was at our family Christmas. I must have been 6 or 8. Everyone drew names that year. One gift under the tree was much larger than the rest. Turns out it was from my cousin Cathi, my elder by two years, to me. Everyone was excited when it came my turn. I opened the box. Another box. Wrapped like the first. I opened that box. Another box. Also wrapped. This went on for about 5 or 6 iterations. Finally, I got to a very small box, wrapped with Christmas paper and ribbon. I shook it. Everyone looked on with anticipation. I opened it. It was a cheap, used tube of red lipstick. Everyone laughed. Ha ha ha ha! I was confused. “It’s a gag gift” someone said. “What’s a gag gift?” I completely didn’t understand.

I do now.

Since then I’ve been gagged many times. But never again with boxes and ribbons.

And I’ve found lots of treasures in stinky shoe boxes wrapped in yesterday’s news.

It’s the heart that matters.

in Spanish color ii

I enjoyed so much looking back through my pictures of Spain that I put together a new album. Such a beautiful place.

From the album in Spanish color ii

without the frames:

From the album in Spanish color ii (full)

like or what

Our friend Carla came over today. I was in the kitchen making coffee when my five year old ran in and started rummaging through the cabinet for a drinking cup. “We need to make Carla feel like she’s welcome!” he said. “But she is welcome,” I said. “I know, but we just need to give her pretty stuff,” he said. “If you say so,” I thought. It really was a sweet gesture.

There is a subtle but rather important distinction between “we need to make her feel like she’s welcome” and “we need to make her feel welcome”. I think Joshua actually meant the latter, even though he said the former.

There is a subtle but rather important distinction, isn’t there? This runs through all our beliefs and practices and gets at the core questions of what is the truth.

Do I want to make someone feel like they’re welcome, or do I want to make them feel how welcome they truly are?

Do I want to make someone feel like they’re forgiven, or do I want to make them feel how forgiven they truly are?

Do I want to make someone feel like they’re chosen, or do I want to make them feel how chosen they truly are?

Do I want to make someone feel like they bear the image of God, or do I want to make them feel the image of God they truly bear?

Honestly, when I look around, I see a lot of the former. Call it marketing, call it spinning, call it training, call it exposition, call it disbelief, call it spell casting, call it whatever. There is a lot of trying to make people feel LIKE they are, rather than feel WHAT they are.

in Spanish color

Last year we visited my Spanish sister and her family in what was a breathtaking trip to Spain. The whole family. All seven of us. It was a great idea in so many ways. It was an experience of a lifetime for my kids, most of whom had never even been out of the States. It was theraputic for us to spend time with a family who really treasured us. It was not only educational but very soul-settling to breathe the air that birthed the discovery of America with the voyage of Columbus, and planted the seeds of liberation with immortal words like

no es causa justa de guerra el deseo de ensanchar el imperio
(it is not a just cause of war the desire to expand the empire)

There were so many sensations...smells, sounds, colors. I don't know why I'm just getting around to posting some of the photographs I snapped. Maybe it's because I didn't know the best way to do it. Anyway, I took a couple of thousand pictures with my (then) brand new Canon A620 digital. It is a remarkable camera. Highly recommended.

So here's a link to the album. These pictures are untouched. I only applied this framing effect and compressed them so I could enjoy the whole picture when I set it as my desktop background. Enjoy.

From the album in Spanish color

Update: Awesome! I was over on Molly's blog and found out that you can embed a mini-slide show. :)

infallible

I have been thinking a lot today some continued thoughts. More confessions of an amateur Christian. One is the idea of the Bible being infallible. I don’t know if technically it is or is not, but practically it’s not.

But there’s this idea that the Bible is this book with no errors and is infallible, which means it cannot fail, I think. But it can fail. It can fail easily and often. For example, it fails to justify Hitler’s murdering millions of people, many of them Jews. It fails to keep an elder-in-training I know from devouring the life of a young woman I know and love. It fails to keep people from bludgeoning weaker Christians with its supposed rules. It fails to keep a former friend from blaming me for everything that didn’t go their way. It fails to keep people from having sex before they’re married, or sex with lots of people afterwards, or sex with people of the same sex before or after. It fails to prove that people are right when they put sinners down. It fails to make people regularly meditate and have consistent communion with God. It fails in many ways.

Of course I’m being master of the obvious here. And I’m sure I could be straightened out so that I have to admit some doctrinal tenet of infallibility. I’m sure it goes something like this, that human beings are fallible but the Word of God in the written form of the Bible is not. People fail the Bible, and not vice versa. And I would say that’s just about right. The problem is that the Bible is not written for anyone but people. So the claim is that it is perfect and incapable of failing when read and applied perfectly. Which it never is. Because we haven’t yet found the perfect person to read it and apply it. And if we did he/she would probably be disqualified because they’d be either lying or delusional about being perfect.

So the thing is, it doesn’t really mean all that much to have a perfect book that is incapable of failing when a person perfectly reads and applies it. What would really make a difference in the world is if someone treasured the ancient words and traditions so much that THEY decided to be infallible. Now that is something I could get really excited about. And I would love to be an apologist for a group of People who, no matter what they did wrong, never failed to love, and leave Book defending to people going the way of the dinosaur.