How do you praise and admire beauty in someone who has ceased to see it in their own life?
How do you create art that does something life changing without being commercialized and stripped? How do you change the world without being altered a bit for mass consumption?
How do you admonish honesty and remain pure? untainted? Where does goodness fit in our desire for truth? Raw truth is often grating, dirty, unpleasant. How do we reach into the world's truth to connect, without being "of" this world?
How do you live out a lifestyle in response to things you know are true about God when no one around you seems to live or see that way? How do you step in and out of living as if those things are true?
September 4, 2006
September 1, 2006
The Most Beautiful Words
Number One most beautiful thing said to me in the past week:
Me: "I just don't know what I'm doing with my life- I'm such a committment-aphobe."
My beautiful friend Karen: "You're not a committment-aphobe. You just haven't heard your lion yet. In Sheldon Van Auken's book A Severe Mercy, he says this about dating other women before falling in love with his wife: When you hear a hyena in the woods, it's easy to think it is a lion- until you hear the lion roar. You're not afraid of committment, you just haven't heard your lion yet."
Wow, that gave me such freedom... I pray that I can just have that sense when the Lord calls me to something. I am not passionate about tutoring kids or working at camp or serving food and scraping plates. I am only semi- passionate (and mostly for silly reasons) about the whole coffee industry. I am perhaps good at all these things which makes me think that maybe I am just being too picky and should just settle down, work hard at some of those things and call it a calling. But I hope that the Lion's roar is more gut-wrenching than that. I hope it scares me to death and that it grips me in the heart to the point where I can't escape and I don't want to.
Hearing the lion's roar makes you say "That is it." and diminishes any thought that you should have believed that the hyena's shrill snarl was enough.
Second most beautiful thing told to me this week:
My amazing friend Molly: "Basically I woke up this morning [mind you, Molly is in Nepal] and thought i want to write to Anna. I want to tell her that it's ok if she doesn't know what she's going "to do" for the next while. i think it's more important who we "are" and who we are becoming than what we do. it's more about how we do it than whatever it actually is. and i think that you are precious and that you are a fool according to the world (which I love and also aspire to be).
Humbling words from a woman who I consider to be an example of this beautiful foolishness of following Christ. Who we are. The way we do things. Even things we don't like. Scraping plates in view of God's glory.
Me: "I just don't know what I'm doing with my life- I'm such a committment-aphobe."
My beautiful friend Karen: "You're not a committment-aphobe. You just haven't heard your lion yet. In Sheldon Van Auken's book A Severe Mercy, he says this about dating other women before falling in love with his wife: When you hear a hyena in the woods, it's easy to think it is a lion- until you hear the lion roar. You're not afraid of committment, you just haven't heard your lion yet."
Wow, that gave me such freedom... I pray that I can just have that sense when the Lord calls me to something. I am not passionate about tutoring kids or working at camp or serving food and scraping plates. I am only semi- passionate (and mostly for silly reasons) about the whole coffee industry. I am perhaps good at all these things which makes me think that maybe I am just being too picky and should just settle down, work hard at some of those things and call it a calling. But I hope that the Lion's roar is more gut-wrenching than that. I hope it scares me to death and that it grips me in the heart to the point where I can't escape and I don't want to.
Hearing the lion's roar makes you say "That is it." and diminishes any thought that you should have believed that the hyena's shrill snarl was enough.
Second most beautiful thing told to me this week:
My amazing friend Molly: "Basically I woke up this morning [mind you, Molly is in Nepal] and thought i want to write to Anna. I want to tell her that it's ok if she doesn't know what she's going "to do" for the next while. i think it's more important who we "are" and who we are becoming than what we do. it's more about how we do it than whatever it actually is. and i think that you are precious and that you are a fool according to the world (which I love and also aspire to be).
Humbling words from a woman who I consider to be an example of this beautiful foolishness of following Christ. Who we are. The way we do things. Even things we don't like. Scraping plates in view of God's glory.
Acting Lessons
And we get to this point in our friendship
The point where I start feeling insecure again
And wonder in the hours and hours that we spend
And wonder in the wrinkles of your smile
or the careful stare of your attention
If you are acting
You are such a good actress if
if that is what you are
And it worries me a bit
And I tense up
My smile curls a little more
I laugh a little more
I ask a few more questions, now just to keep up with you
I become the desirable one
I am such a good actress
The point where I start feeling insecure again
And wonder in the hours and hours that we spend
And wonder in the wrinkles of your smile
or the careful stare of your attention
If you are acting
You are such a good actress if
if that is what you are
And it worries me a bit
And I tense up
My smile curls a little more
I laugh a little more
I ask a few more questions, now just to keep up with you
I become the desirable one
I am such a good actress
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