Burning Ones

I’m taking a class called Models and Mentors in the Christian Tradition. One of the things that this class has begun to highlight to me through some of the models and mentors (especially Henri Nouwen, who I’m growing to adore) is the need to be fully present in what we do. I don’t know about you, but I grew up just like most people in a frame of mind where everything that I did was about how fast I could get through it and how many other things I could do while getting it done. If you’d ask my wife, she’d tell you that I’m embarrassingly obsessed with attempting to do many things at once. Obsessed to the point where I’ll make us late to an important event because I just want to kick off one more task on my computer, or I’ll stuff my bag full of things to do because I think there might be a chance to do some of it during whatever we’re going to. Everything I do I try to do with only enough attention to get it done quickly and efficiently.

That’s stupid.

Ghandi said, There’s more to life than seeing how fast you can get through it. I’ve been meditating upon that for a few days now. Many of you might know that I’ve been riding my bike lately as much as I can. I’m beginning to really enjoy it. There’s something about powering your own vehicle and being so close with what you’re moving with that is very attractive to me. I love getting up in the morning and putting on my biking stuff and then pushing off the steps in the front of our house and feeling the cool air on my face. But to be honest with you, I’ve been in a race to see how fast I could be. I wanted to get my time down to the absolute minimum that I could. I found that I was simply pedaling along as hard as I could for as long as I could with my eyes fixed blankly on the road ahead of me, blindly looking for spots that might trip me up and bumps I could avoid.

I encountered that quote from Ghandi in my Models and Mentors class and it got me thinking. I would be pedaling along and that line would come into my head. There’s more to life than seeing how fast you can get through it. And I would realize that I don’t need to see how fast I can get some place. It’s better to be a few minutes later to something and have been fully present along the way than it is to have been focussed on the future while the present was passing you by unnoticed and unthought of. You see, I really, desperately want to wonder at God. I want to be awestruck by him. I want to encounter what he has done in Creation and in my life and be thrown down upon my face in worship. And there’s a simple fact; I cannot do this while I’m in a rush.

A quote that I love from Stephen Charnock is this (paraphrased), It is not by thought that we loose our wonder, but by a lack of thought. I don’t want that to happen to me. I want to be fully present to what I am doing. I want to be fully engaged with the person at church who comes up to me while I’m doing sound and talks to me. I want to be able to identify what’s important in life and not be distracted. An interesting post that got me thinking about how to do this in my own life was put up on Haiku Productivity. What Leo proposed, basically, was that in order to do anything well, we have to commit ourselves to only doing a few a things at 100% involvement. We will get less done! But it will be done better and we will experience it more.

So, I’m trying to commit to not multi-task anymore. I’m fine with committing some of my time to kicking off tasks that can be done without my attention. But no longer will I be reading my e-mail and talking online and doing my homework and listening for my phone and and and… I’m going to do one thing at a time. And I’m going to be fully present to it. I’m going to attempt to slow down on my bike in the morning and look at the sun drenched trees that God made and the sparkling creeks and the people in their cars and wonder, how have I become so blessed as to see this? I’d love to invite you to think about it as well, and let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Love you guys!

So I’ve had an o.k. week, but a particularly good weekend, which leaves me with the feeling that the whole week was wonderful.

God has been über good to me this week and has given me some revelations that I definitely should not be getting. One of them has been that God is a god of process and He certainly enjoys the process more than the finished product. So therefore I can find more joy in the race than at the finished line because I am made in the image of God.

I’ve discovered that the goal is not to find out what God wants you to do, but to do everything for God. THAT JUST SOUNDED LIKE A BROTHER LAWRENCE QUOTE! ::pride… rising…::

And, don’t get me wrong, this week wasn’t the best. For some odd reason Tim and I have been fighting at the end of almost every night. This results in either one of the following:

1. We stay up for hours fighting, me crying, and then talking it out together (which Tim really shouldn’t do because he has work or school in the morning).
2. Tim goes to bed and I stay up for a couple of hours into the night watching various episodes of Sex in the City (which I hate), Family Guy (which I hate that I find funny because it’s such an awful show) and Friends. And then I crawl back into bed sobbing, wake up Tim, and tell him I’m sorry.

This week all the fights were 100% my fault and I really don’t have anything else to say.

But the weekend was fantastic. I feel like I’ve been overwhelmed by the fact that I only see Tim (note I said “see” not “spend time with”) three hours a night during the week and I thought the weekend would be the same but we spent all of it together and we had a really good time.

I’ve been listening to a series of sermons called “God is Green” (which can be found here). And I just think it’s stupid and arrogant that if everyone in the world would live like me, we would need FOUR earths to sustain everyone (this is called your ecological footprint and you can find yours here). So with that being said I (and Tim) am making it my goal to live as simply as possible and to reorder my life to take care of my surroundings… even if I merely changed our light-bulbs to florescents or eat a meal without meat… I understand that the whole thing is a gradual process but that still doesn’t keep me from wanting to dive right into it and spend the week picking up trash from the side of the road. A lot of things I can’t do (like turn the backyard into a garden) because we’re still living with my parents. So throwing out all the paper towels and demanding that my mom use cloth for clean-up wouldn’t be very good, even though I think it’d be cool. So I encourage everyone who reads this to go the extra mile to pick up trash in the parking-lot or buy food at your local farmer’s market.

So to those of you who have been praying for me I feel SO much happier with life in general and it’s awesome because I can feel God so much more in my life than ever before. And I find that odd because I really haven’t been fasting or reading my Bible. Maybe God doesn’t care so much about those things as I thought. I could always be wrong though :-)

But thank you!!!!

Love,

Jessie V.

I thought I might begin to semi-chronicle my evolution into being a biker and I’m going to start today because I’ve had a phenomenal past two days on the bike.

So, reason number 1 why I like to bike so much (at least recently). You are able to go places cars are not. Yesterday, apparently, there was a massive accident on either Route 1 or I-95 that had traffic being diverted directly on the route that I take in to work. If I had been in a car, I would have been forced to detour, which apparently took some of my co-workers over an hour given the volume of traffic attempting to get across the Boulevard. However, because I was on my bike, I was able to cross the Route 1 with the blessings of the Police that were directing traffic. An hour detour turned into a 30 second crossing. That’s not bad!

As if that wasn’t good enough, the township has been working on a major artery of my route to CHC for the past few weeks (which has made the ride a whole lot less enjoyable due to the horrible condition of the road) and today they finally had to make a big push so they closed down the whole road. While cars went around to God knows where, I happily jumped onto the side walk and pedaled on past. Again, where I might have gone 10 minutes out of my way, I was able to just move on and enjoy the commute. Fun Fun!

Look for more thoughts about biking in the coming weeks, as I’m falling more and more in love with the bi-pedal commute

OK, we’re going to be doing an experiment tonight called brevity. We’ll see how I do.

God has been highlighting an extremely simple thing to me lately.

I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.

I’ve been gripped with an understanding that I am a sinner, and that I always will be. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’d rather be a tax collector beating on my chest saying, “God, HAVE MERCY ON ME!” than to have all the pomp and glitter and self-assuredness that comes along with being one who is righteous. I don’t ever want to look at another human being like there anything less than I am. This shouldn’t be hard, because as far as I’m concerned, I am the worst of all sinners.

God is relentlessly kind to me. Unceasingly kind! He will not stop giving me grace. And every time I tell him that I’m not worth the price he paid for me and that I’ll forget him in the next five minutes, he sits with me as I weep and puts his arm around me. And then I go and forget him. And I don’t publish his glory to my friends and I don’t tell of his mercy and forgiveness to everyone I see. The fact is, I am the worst of sinners because despite God’s relentless kindness towards me, I still find it in me to snub him at every turn.

Part of my journey right now is allowing that to have it’s perfect effect in me. If I realize this, that God himself will never stop loving me, despite my failures and my out and out spitting and vomiting all over him in my sin and destitution, then it drives me to say, I don’t have to be ashamed. I’m not disqualified by my sin today. I’m not disqualified because I have a terrible capacity for lust or because I loose my temper with my wife or because I become prideful around other Christians or because, secretly, I really think there will come a time when I don’t need God anymore to be worthy. God remembers that we’re dust! Our sin is always before him. We don’t shock him, we shock ourselves! This allows me to run to God when I snubbed him a moment ago. And I don’t need to understand why he let’s me do this! I don’t have to chide him and tell him he’s giving me better than I deserve and that really, if he would take another look at me, he’d send me to hell like I deserve and remove his grace from my head and allow my sin to be revealed to the world where I would be mocked and ridiculed and crucified like I should be. I can’t just rest, easy in the fact that he’s chosen to love me, and I can’t do a thing about it.

I love him. I’m weak, and I’ll forget him in 5 minutes and trade his glory for the works of my hands or some even more worthless thing. But right now, I love him. With everything that I am.

A study found that teens who watch TV three or more nights per week were 50 percent more likely to feel too fat than were other girls. Participants cited actresses such as Heather Locklear as an inspiration for changing their bodies.

That’s from my Consumer Behaviors book. Just before that quote, it talks about how eating disorders are beginning to show their ugly face in the women of Fiji who, to put it bluntly, had previously identified the idea of beauty with being rather hefty. However, somewhat recently (ok, not very recently), shows like Melrose Place and Beverly Hill 90210 (OK, for me, that was a while ago, but still recent in the whole history of Fiji) began to penetrate that culture. Within a few years, they began to notice that the teenage girls were trying very hard to get their bodies to look like the bodies on the TV!

TURN IT OFF!

Has anyone else gone on an anti-TV campaign recently in their own personal lives. Let us know your feelings about the Tube in the comments!

Well, I almost had a perfect blogging record save for last Sunday :-).

This week I learned how to knit and use my sewing machine- so I’m knitting (or rather finishing) a scarf that Tim’s mom had started for him before she died, and will shortly be hemming Timmy’s pants.

We went to Texas Roadhouse last night with my family and I’d probably give it a 7/10. My brother, who didn’t know that you were supposed to throw your peanut shells on the ground, turns to me and says, “Jess, this place is really dirty, hehe. The poor girl who was bringing us our food had just given my dad his plate and the whole tray of food fell and smashed to the ground. Beans, steaks and broken plate pieces everywhere! She looked really upset but we were all trying to assure her it was ok, haha.

So it’s all decided- we’re going to Kansas City in October! From the 7th to the 14th- YAY! We’ll be staying with Alex and Jaclyn for most of the trip- it’ll be good to be right across the street from the prayer room and seeing them.

For a deeper update I still have no idea what’s going on with me or what’s wrong, or what I am doing wrong. I still feel like I don’t understand the core of Christianity or God or what He’s doing. And sadly, I think I’m still offended at Him for not giving me what I wanted. I always sing that Misty Edwards song “Baptize My Heart” with the lyrics “I don’t want to be offended, no, I don’t want to be offended, when it’s all coming down” with such a determination that I would never deliberately be offended at God. Well, here am I, deliberately offended, and the moon hasn’t even turned red.

We’ll be going to the leadership summit while we’re at Kansas City, and I’ve never been, but Tim says there’s a time where their prophetic team prophesies over you… and I’m secretly hoping that some random holy man will be able to tell me everything and I’ll be all fixed and ready to go :-) Haha, my theology is horrrrrible!

So if any of you want to pray for me I would be most grateful :-)

This tip from Unclutterer is a wonderful little suggestions. I’ve never understood why people feel the need to use the dishwasher when by far the easiest thing to do is to clean up after yourself right when you eat. The only exception is for larger meals but most of us only eat one of those a day. The rest of the time we’re just eating leftovers or making something simple that only requires a plate. However, I see people all the time stick the plate in the dishwasher and let it sit there until it gets run. This seems ludicrous when all you would have to do is rinse the plate off and, voila! you’re done!

These ridiculously awesome tips from good ’ol lifehacker have me flustered. I don’t even know where to begin. It’s not just the pictures, it’s all of the tips from the creators of the pictures on cool little things you can do to your mac to make it better.

Enjoy!

Have the airlines become our barometer for whether or not we are dressing too outrageously?

More information on the horrible atrocity that just occurred in West Virginia. Indeed, where is the public outcry over this? I suppose that we care more about our dogs than this poor woman.

God, we pray for supernatural healing to take place for Megan, both in her body and more importantly her soul. Visit her during this time and comfort her.