An early New Year's resolution

How different would our interactions with each other be if in looking at each other, our first thought was “Here is the work of God’s hand—someone that God is using to reflect his own likeness.” My husband has been preaching through the book of James, and in last week’s passage we came across this: (James 3: 9, 10) “With [the tongue] we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so.”

Through a variety of circumstances, it occurred to me that this would have been and is very present in Jesus's interactions with people. After all, can we even imagine that Christ—the living Word himself, through whom the Father made each of us and all things would ever have forgotten that he made us in his likeness?

So here's my goal for the New Year: read through the gospels remembering this. Watch how it shapes Jesus's interactions with people and attempt to look at the world through the same lens.

Thankful meme

The latest meme going around is "Five things I'm thankful for." Unfortunately, this thing kicks off the Christian school trained self-righteous little prig in me . . . there's still a little voice in the back of my brain that says, "Now the right answer is to start off with, 'I'm thankful for Jesus because he died for my sins, and . . .' " It's a true thing that if this were the fourth grade Bible class assignment on why we're to be thankful to God, that answer would have received an "A."

Now, God knows that I'm thankful for my salvation, and a whole host of other spiritual riches, etc., but I'm going to skip quoting the first chapter of each of Paul's epistles (you can go back and reread them yourselves). And my husband Rob has written beautifully about our children (and over-flatteringly about me). I'm also going to skip returning the favor. I'd rather tell him in person how thankful I am for him--it's not generally something I care to share with the rest of you. And finally, I'm going to skip starting my list with coffee. I'm afraid that the title of this blog makes my hopeless addiction all too clear already. So:

1a. The full moon on a clear night at 8500 feet
1b. The alpenglow on the mountains
1c. The sun shining so brightly off the snow that it's blinding.
2a. My daughter's (age 7) questions that continually remind me to keep on noticing the world
2b. My daughter's (age 4) asking "Can I help?"
2c. My daughter's (age 1 1/2) asking "Other one--cookie? Pease?" It's just too cute. I'm a sucker.
3. The NY Times Sunday crossword with my husband
4a. Immersing myself in a book I love to spend time with old friends--the characters
4b.. Immersing myself in a book I love to notice the beautiful way that the author has constructed the story, polished the sentences, included all the best details and left out the uninteresting ones.
4c. Immersing myself in a conversation with someone else who loves books to debate all the merits and non-merits of fine and not-so-fine literature
5a. Doctor Who DVD's with campy special effects, goofy costuming, and great commentary
5b. Looney Toons Golden Collection DVD's. I still love Road Runner and Coyote.

Enough to be going on with.

Emerging adulthood II

In going back for further reflections on emerging adulthood, I think that we need to start with a question: What does it mean to be an adult? Is it to simply to have one more birthday, to turn eighteen? At eighteen I could vote, join the military, be sentenced as an adult if I committed a crime. I could do whatever I wanted without the consent of anyone else, except, idiotically enough, enjoy a glass of wine with my dinner at the restaurant. And yet. I was not financially independent. There was still a lot that I didn’t know. I didn’t feel the sort of assurance and confidence that the child me expected adults to feel. And culturally I wasn’t expected to feel like an adult or to act like one. I didn’t expect to be treated as an adult.

Most of us, in making the transition from childhood to adulthood have very little useful sense of what it is that we’re supposed to be growing into. Is it maturity? Well, there are some remarkably immature senior citizens out there. Though maturity is certainly an element. And what about the various aspects of maturity? Physical, emotional, spiritual. What else is involved?

I think that adulthood is that season in our lives when we can reasonably demand, expect, and be viewed and treated as an equal—as an adult—by all those adults around us in society. We’ve given it some age tags: by this point you should at least be starting to make these adjustments, even if you haven’t finished them. And it’s a relational thing. It’s me expecting to be treated in a certain way and you treating me in that way. It’s younger people asserting their peerage and older members acknowledging it. Rights and responsibilities and priviliges are all tied in, but all they all stem from a certain basic recognition of the equal worth of each human being and how we give each other the dignity of recognizing that equality.

So why does our culture, one supposedly based on freedom and equality have so many problems with people making that transition, and what's the church's role in all this? More, eventually.

WWJS to me?

I've been tagged in a meme by a good friend (thanks, Happy) who's decided that my not having posted in the last couple of weeks needs to be corrected. Never mind that my time has been consumed with travelling cross-country with my husband and three small children for his job interviews, and as a result, purchasing a house, securing a mortgage, starting to pack up our home for an interstate move. Life is feeling more than a little bit out of control. I feel like I'm making huge decisions without the time or flexibility to consider them properly. And oh, yeah. In all of this, the laundry still needs to get done, my kids need to get fed and I'm also burning a fair bit of writing energy on an ever more futile attempt to complete NaNoWriMo 2007. Don't know what posessed me to sign up for that one. The Holy Spirit maybe. Or my own cracked psyche. Or one working through the other. It somehow seemed--well, if not like a good idea, at least like something that God was for some insane reason indicating.

So then I got tagged with this thing. And actually managed to stop for all of about 30 seconds this morning and start to pray and sort of start to think about it and heard the non-audible voice of God. Jesus. That Jewish, bearded, blue-jeans and Birkenstocks clad Son of God that lurks around my subconcious. His speaking inside my head the way that characters from a book do when I'm reading or writing. "I am with you."

Christ with me. Leading me. I'm not alone in this chaos, nor is it simply random. In this insane season, Jesus is walking me through it. And, oh yeah. When Jesus first said that to his disciples it was together with the Great Comission. Maybe that's God's way of reminding me that all this feeling of being swept up is simply the way that I get to where God is taking me.

The person who started this over at Lord, I Believe asked everyone who responded to link back, so here's the link.

Emerging adulthood

To anyone working in ministry with 20 and 30 somethings, I highly reccommend Christian Smith's article "Getting a Life" in the Nov/Dec issue of Books and Culture. It's given me a lot to think about and hopefully will spark a whole series of related posts.

You can read the article here:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2007/006/2.10.html

Item the first: The mere premise of the article came as a huge relief. The whole idea of "emerging adulthood," this extended, weird, in-between time . . . this difficult transition of coming to feel like an adult and expect to be acknowledged as one by someone 30 years my senior . . . The fact that these issues are not just not unique to my husband and me, but are in fact epidemic in our demographic means that we're not just making them up. They're real. How to think about these things, how to deal with them, how the church needs to minister in this context . . . all these thing hopefully forthcoming.

How to win the bean bag toss

So I took my kids to the annual elementary school Halloween carnival last night. One of the games is a bean bag toss where you throw the bean bags through holes in a decorated board. So I took three bean bags and was showing my 19-month old how to do it. Tossed one through a whole. She looked at the board. Looked behind the board. Saw the bean bag lying on the ground. I handed her a bean bag. She carefully walked behind the board and set it on the ground next to the other one. I showed her how to put the beanbag through the holes. She stuffed a few through. I clapped. then I held out the bowl of prize candy so she could choose one. She took a bag of malted milk balls . . . and stuffed them through the hole . . .

Treasure

Okay, so this is sort of stupid. But it made me laugh, and isn't this so like what Jesus says about laying up eternal treasure? That we have not much clue about what is really worth what and Satan's constantly trying to cheat us out of the good stuff . . .