color-ific

You Are a Yellow Crayon

Your world is colored with happy, warm, fun colors. You have a thoughtful and wise way about you. Some people might even consider you a genius. Charming and eloquent, you are able to get people to do things your way. While you seem spontaneous and free wheeling, you are calculating to the extreme. Your color wheel opposite is purple. You both are charismatic leaders, but purple people act like you have no depth.

What Color Crayon Are You?

tunes and tomes

Listening:
Kate Hurley, Sleeping When You Woke Me
Over the Rhine, The Trumpet Child
Wilco, Sky Blue Sky

Reading:
What is the What, Dave Eggers
Paste Magazine
A friend's project for her dissertation
The new Pottery Barn catalog

boxing God in *

September 2000, Gulf Shores, AL. I’m in a mid-level management position and I’m in over my head. I’m busting my tail and making it work. Clawing the walls pursuing success whatever the cost. Yet, spiritually I am dying on the inside. During a walk on the beach, a friend that was watching my downward spiral had the guts to get in my face and tell me that either God was enough, or He wasn’t - and I had to decide. Because I totally had God in a box. I hate the term "life-changing" because I think it is totally overused, but this was one of those moments for me, although I didn't realize it until later.

For months I had some alphabet magnets on my fridge that said ‘is God enough’ – a question that I really wrestled with. I don’t know the exact point that something changed, but it did, and one day I rearranged the magnets to say ‘God is enough’. Theology shift.

Last night I went to church with some friends. The theme of the message was God is Not in Your Box. It was an interactive evening, well done with a nice balance of reflective questions and audience participation. For me, the timing was impeccable as this came right on the heels of two long, bear-your-soul conversations with friends in the preceding 24 hours. The kind of conversations that you walk away from glad that you had, yet still wishing you hadn’t gone there because it is so vulnerable. And it stirs up your junk.

The last few days have been rather enlightening as I have realized how walled-off my heart has been and how shut-down I have been, both to God and other relationships. Not that I’m totally ready to do anything about it, but at least I see it.

And the whole God in a box thing – I’ve been searching for an analogy of it all day long. You know how when you try to put your sleeping bag into its stuff sack before you strap it to your pack, and somehow it just won’t all fit back into the sack nice and neat like it did when you packed it all up at home? Kind of lame, but that’s the analogy I’m currently working with…God just doesn't fit inside my compact parameters. Which I know is a good thing, but shouldn't I have this lesson down by now?

Processing as I go, this may seem disjointed, but writing helps me put the pieces together a little bit.

* painting by my friend Jenny of The Artist's Touch

where I am

"In the end, it doesn’t matter how well we have performed or what we have accomplished—a life without heart is not worth living. For out of this wellspring of our soul flow all true caring and all meaningful work, all real worship and all sacrifice. Our faith, hope, and love issue from this fount, as well. Because it is in our heart that we first hear the voice of God and it is in the heart that we come to know him and learn to live in his love.

So you can see that to lose heart is to lose everything. And a “loss of heart” best describes most men and women in our day. It isn’t just the addictions and affairs and depression and heartaches, though, God knows, there are enough of these to cause even the best of us to lose heart. But there is the busyness, the drivenness, the fact that most of us are living merely to survive. Beneath it we feel restless, weary, and vulnerable.

Indeed, the many forces driving modern life have not only assaulted the life of our heart, they have also dismantled the heart’s habitat—that geography of mystery and transcendence we knew so well as children.

All of us have had that experience at one time or another, whether it be as we walked away from our teachers, our parents, a church service, or sexual intimacy; the sense that something important, perhaps the only thing important, had been explained away or tarnished and lost to us forever. Sometimes little by little, sometimes in large chunks, life has appropriated the terrain meant to sustain and nourish the wilder life of the heart, forcing it to retreat as an endangered species into smaller, more secluded, and often darker geographies for its survival. As this has happened, something has been lost, something vital."

(The Sacred Romance, Brent Curtis & John Eldredge, pg. 3-5)

suck. we so live in a fallen world.

word in art

Join us...
creative artists showcase
at the refuge
sunday august 26 2007 at 5:30pm

we are excited to host a fall creative art evening at the refuge, coming up sunday august 26th. this will be a chance for all creative artists from any medium--music, art, photorgraphy, writing, drama, comedy--across ages & abilities to share their work as a form of worship.

invite your friends & neighbors to join us for this amazing evening together with music, multimedia, drama, art, photography, poetry, great food & more!

the evening will include 3 broad categories--sights, stage & statements.
* sights - visual arts, painting, photography, sculpture & other visual mediums
* stage - music, dance, theater, comedy, film, spoken word & multimedia
* statements - poetry, short stories, prose, fiction, non-fiction

blew out my flip-flop

sadness. the best flip-flops ever. gone. busted. going out with tomorrow's trash. i guess any footwear that lasts a decade deserves a rest. RIP red merrell flips.

latest read

Just finished reading Jim and Casper Go to Church by Jim Henderson and Matt Casper.

Jim Henderson hired Casper to visit a dozen or so churches with him and then write about his perceptions and experience. As Casper is an atheist, his lens is different than what you might assume. I agree with a lot of his opinions. Especially taking churches to task for theatrics and mega-million buildings.

If you read this book through a purely evangelical lens, without wondering how gen x/y folks of today perceive the church (especially outside the Bible Belt), you will be offended. If you read it from a less defensive posture, desiring to learn what others that are really inquisitive see, you will benefit from it. Quick read.

The details are still being worked out, but hopefully I'll be part of a group of folks here in Denver that are hosting Jim and Casper for a series of conversations around their experiences in September.