Real Love?

I get Christianity Today magazine and read an intriguing article towards the end of the April issue last week. Here's the first line: "The report is in, and the eulogy has been delivered. Romantic comedies are dead. I say that's good news." I was hooked. What could the writer possibly mean?

The writer described Hollywood's typical romantic comedy and argued that a new batch of movies and TV shows seem to be getting at a different message. Many of these recent offerings are either portraying the challenges of romantic relationships or are featuring relationships beyond the romantic as central to the plot. The writer described scenes from several recent movies and TV shows to support her point, including an example from Frozen, my new favorite animated movie. Instead of the act of true love being a true love's kiss in Frozen (a hinge point in so many romantic comedies), the act is a young woman sacrificing her life for her sister.

After citing examples, the writer gets down to the real reason the death of romantic comedies is a good thing. She writes: "Against all odds, Hollywood seems to be discovering that when we make romance the highest form of love, we're missing what love is all about...More important, we forget that love is not just for people in romantic relationships. Real love occupies our whole lives."

This article hits close to home and crystallized some thoughts I'd been turning over in my mind. As I get ready to turn 25 on Tuesday, my thoughts have inevitably turned to broader questions about my life and about life as a whole. Am I happy to be where I am in life? Am I okay with being single at a quarter century?

On Saturday, some dear friends of mine--a dad, two daughters, and one daughter's son--picked me up for an afternoon together. We had lunch at Rancho Chico and then went to visit their aunt, who lives near by. The big occasion for visiting was so the aunt could meet my friend's four-month-old son. The aunt lives alone, so we sat in her plain living room, drank peach tea with organic honey, and listened to her talk about various subjects--doctors, church, her son, organic food, and marriage all being among the topics.

One of the daughters is just 10 days older than me, so she had turned 25 the week before. The aunt asked her how old she was, and my friend answered.

"Twenty five!" The aunt said. "We have got to get you married. We have to find some nice man to snatch you up. We can't let you be an old maid."

Why not? I thought, rather peevishly. What's so bad about being an old maid? It's not a death sentence.

I've heard people express sentiments like this before, and though I'm still young enough to revel in my independence without regret, I always wonder what they dread will happen if I'm not paired up with someone post haste. It's not that these people are mean-spirited. On the contrary, it's not likely romance is even what they're hoping for when they wish for a spouse for a single person. Rather, they know that romantic love can give way to a life time of companionship and deep joy. I can understand that desire. I even wish it for myself often.

But, in the meantime, here I am. Single. Unattached. An old maid (depending on your standards). What's a girl to do? As the article says: "Romance is not the only kind of love that makes life worth living." Even in my limited experience of life, about to swell with another year, I've found this to be true. I've got a blessed number of friends and family and a God whose definition of love is constantly shattering the molds we squeeze it into. I have a feeling this year is going to be a wild ride. Hang onto your hats!

The Beauty of Words

I've spent the last couple months tangled up in the beauty and excitement of language. This emergent theme in the last couple months prompted me to take a three-pronged approach to adding language to my life during this Lenten season instead of fasting like I've done in recent years. January and February were rich months of taking in words through reading, but I haven't been pouring words back out through writing. I've recently had an itch to write, so here are my Lenten goals:

1. Journal for 15 minutes each day. No less time, but perhaps more time if I feel lead.
2. Blog once a week.
3. Memorize Psalm 139 and a yet-to-be selected poem.

Writing has always been a helpful way for me to think through life, and I felt uncomfortable with my lack of discipline in writing the more I read. A couple things I read (or listened to) made me particularly sensitive to my lack of discipline. The first was that I started getting the Spokesman Review, albeit a recycled version. I mentioned to my mentor that I missed reading the paper every day. No sooner had I said it than we had worked out a plan. She would get the paper from her neighbors every morning, read it, and then put the papers in a plastic bag outside her door, so I could pick them up (usually several at a time) on my way home from work. It's great to read the paper as a whole, but I've particularly enjoyed the poems that are included in the paper each Sunday, chosen by a former U.S. poet laureate. There's something about poetry--some magic, perhaps--that conjures the love of words.

The second is a little embarrassing to admit, but fun, too. I listen to a lot of music at work while I type at a computer all day. Back in December, I saw the movie 'Frozen' and spent a couple weeks at work listening to the soundtrack. The sophistication of the lyrics caught my attention along with the heartfelt vocals. I started a Pandora station with songs from Disney movies and Broadway musicals, anything from 'Annie Get Your Gun' to 'Mary Poppins.' Lyrics catch my attention because so many of the songs tell a story and use the classic pairing of words and music to explore the meaning of life. Listening to these songs gave the week-in-week-out routine of work and home a new context. Life is full of adventure, humor, sorrow, and routine and words put to music give life poignancy. You can even sing to people instead of talking to them, like I did with my housemate when she bought a new car. She'd been thinking about it for a while, so when she finally drove the car into the driveway, I sang to her: "You did it! You did it! You said that you would do it, and indeed you did" (from My Fair Lady). She only thought me half-crazy.

The third concerns the two books I read for my Sunday School book discussion class. In January and part of February, we read 'Cry, The Beloved Country' by Alan Paton, a novel about South Africa in the 1940s. In March and April, we're reading a non-fiction book called 'Letters from the Land of Cancer' by Walter Wangerin, a series of letters the author writes as he's experiencing cancer. The written words on the page are beautiful, but the beauty of the words and stories also extends to the discussions we enjoy in class each week. Our conversations allow us to question what we don't understand, extend the stories to our lives, and share the phrases in the books that challenged, encouraged, and moved us. The language of the stories allows us breathing room to discuss subjects that are challenging--sorrow, justice, death, and love. These subjects need the flesh and blood of stories to come alive and move us.

All these experiences led me to miss the process of reflection that comes with thoughtful writing. Here's my attempt, if only for the Lenten season, to move the words from inside my head and heart to the page, paper or computer screen, and to put flesh and blood on my own story.

Extending Grace: The Ministry of Bearing

I can't remember when this idea first crept into my mind. We've been going through an excellent sermon series at church this fall about the facets of the Kingdom of God, things like fellowship, witness, simplicity, covenant, and persecution. It could have been in one of these sermons. Or the idea could have poked up its head in one of my conversations with a mentor or friend. I've also been leading a book study at church on Dietrich Bonhoeffer's pithy volume Life Together. I'm sure the idea partly came about through this book. Simply put, the big idea that's been on my mind and in my heart is the call that we have to extend grace to our fellow human beings.

Bonhoeffer gave me the words to express what this ministry is called in Scripture: the ministry of bearing. Paul writes: "Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindess, humility, meekness and patience, bearing with one another..." (Col. 3:12-13a). As I've thought more about it, my experiences in life recently have given body and shape to this idea of bearing with or extending grace to others. Or, more accurately, life has tested my limited ability to extend grace.

In church a couple weeks ago, my pastor introduced new members to the congregation. He said something like: "We have a divine call to welcome these new members into our congregation and to love them, to delight in their gifts, passions, idiosyncracies and oddities." The congregation laughed, but the truth is plain as day. We're all a bunch of idiosyncratic weirdos. Need any evidence? Spend 10 minutes with another person. Or, better yet, spend two minutes with yourself!

In my book study yesterday, we discussed the ministry of bearing with others as Bonhoeffer describes it. I was still trying to understand what this ministry was, so I asked three questions: 1) What is the ministry of bearing? 2) Have you ever thought of this as a ministry? 3) How do we practice the ministry of bearing? One person very thoughtfully said, "Well, it kinda sounds like putting up with others." We all laughed and agreed. I didn't expect to have my questions answered in one fell swoop, but there it was, clear as day. Bonhoeffer further describes the ministry of bearing:

"The freedom of the other person includes all that we mean by a person's nature, individuality, endowment. It also includes his weaknesses and oddities, which are such a trial to our patience, everything that produces frictions, conflicts, and collisions among us. To bear the burden of the other person means involvement with the created reality of the other, to accept and affirm it, and, in bearing with it, to break through to the point where we take joy in it."    

Notice he says that we "break through" to the point of joy. We don't usually get there right away. It takes struggle to bear this ministry faithfully. Perhaps this concept has been so striking to me recently because life has been so ordinary and this is a ministry of ordinariness. What could be more day-to-day than colliding with the created reality of our brothers and sisters? I could count out the examples from today alone in a few short minutes, but I do have two stories I want to share particularly.

The first story is from this summer when I took a day trip with my family to the Oregon Coast. For my family, family vacations are full of laughter and fun, but also memories of personalities colliding and expectations being thwarted. At the very beginning of the day, my dad insisted that he needed to deposit his check in the bank before we did anything else. Somehow, this started us off on a brilliant way of handling each other's "weaknesses and oddities." Whenever someone's oddities poked through and caused friction, we would gleefully shout: "Quirk! Quirk!" Instead of causing more tension, this simple statement released the tension, like the cap being opened on a soda. The tension fizzled away, and we would inevitably burst into laughter. But beyond just releasing the tension, acknowledging each other's quirks gave us insight into each other's needs and wants and gave us an avenue for communication. It opened up the possibility of extending grace to each other, and I learned a valuable lesson.

Bearing with each other isn't always so easy. It doesn't always have a good outcome. But this doesn't change our calling to bear with each other. In fact, I believe that God will, as he always does, extend grace to us as we extend grace to others.

Several weeks ago, my friend and I were cooking pancakes for breakfast. I had made a delightfully fluffy sour cream pancake batter, and my friend was in charge of flipping. As she poured on batter, flipped the pancakes, and slid the cooked hotcakes onto a platter, she told me about the tough time at work she'd had the day before. As she talked, I noticed that she was pressing all the air out of the pancakes with her spatula, thus ruining the airy fluffiness that had so excited me. The words were almost out of my mouth when a thought popped into my mind. She is upset, and she's taking her frustration out on these pancakes. It was a totally mindless act because she was focused on telling me her story. And what was I doing? Worrying about culinary perfection. Then came the three redemptive words: "Extend her grace." And I did. I shut my mouth and listened and ate flat pancakes with a new appreciation.

"Homeward Bound": A Book Review

I just finished an excellent book called "Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity." The book has many facets, but the primary theme examines why many women have recently embraced traditional values, such as being stay-at-home mothers, crafting, canning, homesteading, keeping chickens, buying local, gardening, and much more. The book examines the root causes for the rise in New Domesticity and delves into the lives of those who practice some aspect of this societal trend. (I'm not missing the fact that I took freshly-baked sourdough bread out of the oven half an hour after finishing the book.)

The three biggest root causes seem to be 1) the feminism of the 60s and 70s that encouraged women to work and be free of domestic duties, 2) the uncertain economic times we live in that have caused widespread distrust in corporations and government, and 3) dissatisfaction with the 9-5 jobs that offer no personal fulfillment or flexibility. Author Emily Matchar thoroughly explains how New Domesticity provides answers to these causes.

When I first started reading the book, I found it ironic that interests that had arisen naturally for me through the influence of family and friends were also part of a greater societal movement. I didn't look at a single DIY blog on gardening or canning or cooking when I first started doing these things, but somehow the zeitgeist of the times moved me. I didn't have any great moral pulpits to mount as I started to can, garden, and bake bread, but rather genuine interest in these domestic arts and now a love for supporting my local community. With two years in the work force and three years of canning and gardening under my belt now, I agree with much of what Matchar believes is best about the New Domesticity movement:

"New Domesticity comes out a deep desire for change in the world. We don't want to trade our souls for our careers, and we don't want to live in a culture that encourages us to do so. We want to embrace the richness, creativity, and comfort that can be found in domestic life...We want to live in a more sustainable way, both economically and ecologically. We've realized that the consumption-crazy Standard American Lifestyle isn't good for the earth and it isn't good for us. We want to focus on what really matters..." (249).

However, as with every movement, there is a shadow side. As I was talking to my housemate about the book, it struck me that New Domesticity is simply a secular way of living out the Christ v. Culture paradigms in Richard Niebuhr's book "Christ and Culture." (Thank you Whitworth Core classes.) The paradigms Niebuhr describes are Christ Against Culture, Christ of Culture, Christ Above Culture, Christ and Culture in Paradox, and Christ Transforming Culture.

Matchar's biggest problem with the New Domesticity movement is that it encourages many educated, middle class families to make decisions that put the individual good (or individual family good) over the common good. These trends include homeschooling, not vaccinating one's children, denigrating work outside the home, and seeing DIY (Do-It-Yourself) projects (e.g. raising one's own chickens to combat the evils of factory farming) as a way to combat the world's ills. Basically, it's an "Individual Against Culture" paradigm that's becoming a legitimate subculture in the United States. Matchar calls it "troubling hyperindividualism," which is already a characteristic of Generation Y. The same criticism could be made of the Christ Against Culture paradigm. It's better to cut oneself off from the world than to try and change it.

There is a very basic, human tendency in the Christ Against Culture paradigm, which is why I think we see the same trends in the secular world, too. Ultimately, I think Matchar's advice is spot on for both New Domesticity and Christianity. She writes: "The key to making all this work...is to be expansive rather than exclusive" (249). And Christians can be expansive in a way that no other group of people can because we serve a God who is expansive. There are limitless possibilities for the ways we can engage the culture, broken and suffering though it is, so that we can "invite the world" (250) into God's expansive family instead of quarantining ourselves from the world.

I highly recommend Matchar's book. Even if you're not involved in the proponents of New Domesticity yourself, the book will undoubtedly give you an understanding of this significant cultural trend and will reinforce the importance of keeping Christ firmly in the center of your life, domestically-focused or otherwise.

Life Around the Table

For a while, I was going through a dry spell with reading. I hardly read anything except cooking blogs and then only scanned through recipe after recipe. Then I house-sat and couldn't get the Wifi password to work. You might call this a saving grace. Besides hosting several groups of people, I also re-discovered my normal hankering for reading. My housemate asked me tonight: "How many books do you normally have checked out from the library?" Without hesitation, I answered, "About 30." Many are fated to only ever sit in stacks on my desk, bookshelf, and nightstand, but, if a book is lucky, I'll actually read it.

Such was the case with a new book called Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table by Shauna Niequist. I just finished the book today and loved every sentence of it. Shauna, if possible, loves food even more than I do. It was a comfort to read the book and know that I'm not the only one in the world whose love of food veers towards obsessive. (Just ask my friend who went with me to Trader Joe's yesterday.) Better than that, Shauna grounds food and meals solidly in the living out of a faithful Christian life. You don't have to be a foodie to do this. In fact, I have a friend who hates cooking. But when it was her turn to host the Children's Ministry Committee from church, she made us a wonderful waffle, bacon and egg meal. Whether or not she enjoyed putting it together, there's no doubt that the meal unified us and prepared us for the discussion and prayer portion of our meeting.

Bread and Wine is full of stories from Shauna's life. Most of the stories were things I could relate to whole-heartedly and have experienced numerous times in cooking: spontaneity, inconvenience, unexpected mistakes and successes both, meaningful conversation, working-with-what-you-have meals, and simple, memory-evoking pleasures. Shauna also made it clear that it's okay for meals prepared for other people to be flawed. Perfection isn't the goal; fellowship is. I was comforted by this. I've often had friends over for dinner and have been more concerned with how something I cooked turned out than with the people at my table. Besides, what's life without a little imperfection anyway? It's why we try again (and again and again).

I always have cooking experiences from which I can draw useful spiritual lessons. One in particular stands out from recent weeks: making baklava with my friend Janie. She was making two trays of baklava for two different events, and I'd always wanted to make it. I came over to her house one Wednesday evening, and we got to work. After melting something like seven sticks of butter, we unrolled bundles of filo dough, impossibly thin and delicate. Following the complex instructions carefully, we layered the filo dough and brushed it liberally with the melted butter. Every once in a while, we'd spread a pecan-sugar mixture in between the layers. In the middle of the directions, we realized that we were going to run out of filo dough. Fortunately, mishap though it was, no one will ever know that we used 20 sheets of filo instead of 30.

When all the layers were assembled, it took us a good 15 minutes to score the baklava into narrow diamonds, so the honey-sugar syrup could soak into every crevice. By this time, it was nearly 9 PM, and I had to work the next morning, so I didn't get to help Janie complete the baklava. However, at work the next day, I had a visitor stop by with a package:

 

 

Biting into the honey-soaked squares of baklava made the work of the night before worth it. Actually, I take that back. Walking around my office and sharing squares of the baklava with my co-workers made it worth it. It was seeing my co-workers' eyes light up and hearing the crackle of the baked filo dough as they took a bite that made the often inconvenient work of making the baklava worth the effort. It's a tactile way of connecting one person to another. It's a blessed sharing and receiving.  

 

Shauna writes: "This is what I want you to do: I want you to tell someone you love them, and dinner's at six. I want you to throw open your front door and welcome the people you love into the inevitable mess with hugs and laughter. I want you to light a burner on the stove, to chop and stir and season with love and abandon...Gather the people you love around your table and feed them with love and honesty and creativity. Feed them with your hands and the flavors and smells that remind you of home and beauty and the best stories you've ever heard, the best stories you've ever lived."

 

All I can say to that is: "Amen!" Go and do likewise.

Fun with Color

I sat down to dinner today with the newest issue of Christianity Today and came across an article titled "Knowing What the Bible Really Means: Why Multiple Translations Might Even Be Better than Scripture in its Original Languages." I correspond daily with speakers of other languages who love to study Scripture, so I read the article. Amidst a short discussion of how to translate God's name in Exodus 3, the author of the article wrote this:

"Of course, God knew that a name was inadequate to reveal his full nature, so he used a long historical narrative full of poetry, instruction, and vision in order to communicate who he is in relation to us. By studying this comprehensive work, the Bible, we find out about--indeed, find--God."

We humans are slow learners, so it takes the full narrative of the Bible and a full lifetime to learn about who God is. But on second thought, I'm not sure it's just that we're slow learners. I also think that God is so infinite that each day we live reveals a new dimension of God's character. The article reminded me that on this Easter Day in particular, God revealed himself in such a new and surprising way that it does indeed take a whole lifetime to get to know the Risen Christ and to figure out how we can live in light of the Resurrection.

So what did I decide to do with this heady knowledge? I decided to dye Easter eggs! The only theological connection I can make to my above topic is that the way we choose to live as followers of the Risen Christ is infintely more varied than the colors of my brightly-colored eggs. Nevertheless, here are some photos from the process:

 

On another note, I served in the nursery at church this morning and got this lovely poem with a bag of jelly beans from our nursery coordinator. Enjoy!

What have you learned about God through Christ's Resurrection? How will you live differently because of it?

Lonely in a Crowd

On Saturday night, the Whitworth men's basketball team hosted an NCAA tournament game in the Fieldhouse for the first time in Whitworth's history. I decided to go to the game, even though I didn't have anyone to go with. As Whitworth is my alma mater, I figured I would be able to find someone I knew.

Before the game, I had a craving for Irish soda bread. By the time the bread came out of the oven and I had eaten dinner, it was 6:40 when I arrived at Whitworth. I walked into the Fieldhouse and tossed my $10 on the table, marveling at the noise of the crowd. The Fieldhouse was packed. I have never seen it so full, except perhaps for the Baccaleaurate service on my graduation weekend (and maybe not even then!).

Staring up at the crowds, I suddenly felt dwarfed and lost. I wandered around the perimeter of the room at the base of the bleachers searching for someone I knew and any seat in which to sit. Back where I started, I figured I was out of luck. I saw some professors I knew, but they didn't take initiative to motion me to where they were sitting. I finally found a spot to stand at the corner of the court against the wall. As I scanned the crowd, I suddenly felt an incredible sense of loneliness. I stood there watching the players warm up and was able to identify several familiar faces in the crowd, but no one made an effort to include me, to scrunch down on the bleachers to offer me six inches of space.

As the game started, I figured someone would see me and offer me a seat during the second half, so I watched the game closely, marveled at the incredible volume of the student cheering section, and enjoyed my close-up view of the action, careful not to let my distress show.

At half time, Whitworth alumni were invited to a reception in the lobby of the fitness center next door. I hoped this would be a good time to find people I knew. I walked next door, but soon realized that I knew no one in the room. I grabbed a cup of tea and went back into the Fieldhouse, where I expected I had a better chance of seeing people. It was no different. No one sought me out. No one walked down to say hi. No one invited me to sit or stand with them. For some reason, it became important that someone else take the initiative. It was hard to believe that in a crowd of 1800 people, I could feel so very alone.

Fortunately, the second half of the game was exciting, and I didn't think so much about myself. When the game ended (with Whitworth losing), I left quickly. I had no reason to stick around.

**
I got home that night and wondered if it had been worth $10 for two hours of feeling like an outcast. I have never minded being alone, as I have a personality that tends toward the introverted. However, I minded that no one took the opportunity to welcome me or to make me feel included. More than an indictment of others, the evening exposed my own selfishness. I know I have often been too busy or self-centered or scared to reach out to others who are lonely. The experience turned me inside out and made me vulnerable, but it also makes me want to be more like Jesus. Jesus who is the most profound example of one who includes the outcast, comforts the lonely, and takes the time to notice the individual.

**
The next morning in church, a woman said, "Oh Elizabeth! We saw you at the game! We wanted to invite you to sit with us but there was no room." On Monday, at lunch, a friend from Partners said, "Elizabeth! I saw you at the game. We were going to invite you to sit with us, but then I didn't see you again."

My encounters with these two women puzzled me. It made me wonder if, for some sovereign and inexplicable reason, God wanted me to experience loneliness. Their statements made me feel ashamed. I couldn't admit out loud that I had been achingly lonely. But perhaps if I had been bold enough to admit my loneliness, they would have understood. Surely I'm not the only one who's ever been lonely in a crowd.

In the Thick of Lent

It's funny to me that spring is at once bursting with promise and notoriously lean. The bursting-with-promise part is easy to imagine as spring bulbs begin to pop up everywhere. However, the notoriously lean part only occurred to me after reading (or re-reading) one of my favorite non-fiction books, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver. The second-to-last chapter in Kingsolver's book about eating locally with her family for a year is entitled "Hungry Month: February-March." She writes:

"January is widely held to be the bugbear of local food, but the hungriest month is March, if you plan to see this thing through. Your stores are dwindling, your potatoes are sending pale feelers out into the void, but for most of us there is nothing new under the sun of muddy March, however it might intend to go out like a lamb. A few spring wildflowers, maybe, but no real eats. Our family was getting down to the bottom of our barrel" (322).

She goes on to extol the wonders of the chest freezer, but I won't go into that here. :)

When I take my almost daily walks up to Whitworth's campus, it doesn't look like spring will ever come. The grass is dank and yellowed and it's hard to imagine it will ever be lush and green or that the trees will ever have blossoms and leaves. If you really do live off the land and what you have to eat is all in your freezer and root cellar, you have to be creative with what you have left. The root veggies of winter are wrinkled and woody and the asparagus, lettuce, and spinach of spring are only just beginning. It's an awkward, in-between time.

I'm definitely in the thick of my Lenten discipline. We're already four weeks from Ash Wednesday, but we're still two-and-a-half weeks from Easter. For one deprived of sugar on a daily basis, Easter seems especially distant. (As I write, my housemate is making double chocolate chip cookies in the kitchen. Really? Is this fair?!) If I'm honest with myself, I am longing for Easter, but I also like that Easter feels distant and that my deprivation weighs on me and temptation surrounds me. These are the necessary and even, dare I say, good rigors of Lent. I love that the Church Year acknowledges the times in the course of a normal human life that are in limbo. It's not winter and not yet spring. It's not Christmas and not yet Easter. Primroses on racks outside Fred Meyer and royal purple crocuses are the only harbingers of spring.

That makes me wonder about the harbingers of Easter. When we look to Jesus' life and ministry, I would say baptism, temptation, cross, and grave. The road ahead of us to Easter is Lenten and is so very like this time between winter and spring. Where there is life after Easter and spring, we see only death during Lent. Yellowed grass and gnarled trees. Temptation and deprivation. Sin and selfishness.

But the great news about Easter is that it radically changes everything, and it's not just the appearance of things that change. It's not just that the grass becomes green and lush and the trees bud and the flowers bloom. It's not just that I can once again eat cookies and ice cream. It's that our very nature changes.

"We know that our old sinful selves were crucified with Christ...for when we died with Christ [in baptism] we were set free from the power of sin. And since we died with Christ, we know we will also live with him" (Romans 6:6-8).

Temptation gives way to victory. Darkness becomes light. Death leads to life. And, best of all, the crucified Christ becomes the Risen Christ.

Sehnsucht

Recently, I've been missing England. It could be because I'm neck deep in season three of Downton Abbey. Or because I never get a decent cup of tea here except at my college mentor's house. I even had a dream recently that I was in England with a giant list of activities planned out. Having studied abroad in Great Britain, I know exactly the places to which I would (and wouldn't) return.

I particularly thought of England today for two reasons. The first is that when the weather is good, I drive through the countryside to get to church, which is about 15 minutes north of my house. There is one spot on the drive where the Little Spokane River looks a lot like a spot my study group hiked to in Wales. Here's a photo from the hike:

 

There is also a walking trail down to the Little Spokane River about a mile from my house. I walked to the river on the trail this afternoon. There's something about the rushing water and the leaf mold smell and the fresh, clean air of the trail that brings beautiful memories to the forefront of my mind: memories of my grandpa's farm and the Columbia River Gorge and the walks I took in England in the Cotswolds and the Lake District. I think these places are the building blocks of many of my most poignant memories of creation's beauty.

 

 

When I was shielding my eyes from the bright sun and looking out over the river and the marshes and trees this afternoon, I identified the emotion I was feeling. Sehnsucht. C.S. Lewis is known particularly for his use of this word. Sehnsucht at its essence means a yearning or longing for beauty and goodness that cannot be satisfied through human experience. Lewis uses the term sehnsucht as an anchor for his autobiography Surprised by Joy, pointing to instances throughout his life in which he encountered beauty that left him longing for more. At the river today, I realized that God uses Sehnsucht for the purpose of drawing us to the end of ourselves. When we yearn for beauty beyond what we see and experience on earth (the nagging Sehnsucht), we realize that it is the beautiful reality of the Trinity--Living God, Word-Made-Flesh, Life-Giving Spirit--for which we ultimately long.   

 

The second reason for thinking of England today (by now you've likely forgotten there was a second point!) is that I made Cornish pasties (pass-tees) for dinner from an English cookbook called River Cottage Every Day. River Cottage is also the name of an English cooking show I watch on YouTube. When I tell people this, they usually make a strange face and say something like "Why would you want to watch an English cooking show?" Whatever your stereotype of English food is, the Cornish pasty is a tradition that's worth keeping. River Cottage Every Day has recipes for three pasties, so I made the vegetarian filling with lentils and butternut squash (and a little too much mustard, but oh well). They looked so lovely and authentic that I had to take some photos:

 

 

Like a pasty, you got all the "meat" of this blog in the middle. I'm sure that you, too, have experiences both of beauty and of Sehnsucht. As always, I'd love to hear your experiences in the comments section, over e-mail (even better), or in person (best!). May the beauty of this life always draw us into the beauty of God and may we be especially aware of beauty as signs of spring begin to emerge!

January's Getting to Me

I heard radio announcers say earlier this week that Monday was supposed to be the lowest emotional day of the winter. Christmas is over, credit card bills are arriving in mailboxes, the days are short, the sky is gray, and spring is still months away. I don't usually suffer from the winter blues given my rather obsessive appreciation of the seasons, but January caught up to me this week.

In weeks previous, I've had plenty to keep me occupied, friends from college visiting, Owl City songs, and discovering a delicious pumpkin chocolate chip muffin recipe being the chief pleasures. However, reality started to catch up to me this week. Two of my housemates are moving out in the next couple weeks and we don't have new housemates lined up (partly due to my neglient procrastination). This certainly brings an increased financial burden; however, it's the lack of companionship I'm particularly mourning this week. One housemate especially has been a good friend for over five years and made my transition to Whitworth as a freshman infinitely easier and more fun. I pondered this reality--the soon-to-be lack of companionship reality--as I walked to my car after work this week under a steel-gray sky.

On Thursday night, I came home from work feeling noticeably tired. The rest of the week, I had been taking walks in the evenings around the neighborhood, but I simply didn't want to walk on Thursday evening. Instead, I ate my leftover Caramelized Red Onion, Prosiutto, and Goat Cheese pizza and watched Northanger Abbey. On Friday, I was home by 3:30 PM and knew I needed to take a walk to take advantage of the daylight. I hadn't had anything planned outside of work this week, which was refreshing for the introvert in me, but I was getting to be a little too introspective for my own good. I needed a fresh perspective on life and walking seems to be good for that.

I called my parents, to whom I often speak when on walks, but they were about to go out for a walk themselves. I wavered briefly in my resolve, but shook off my hesitation, jammed my feet into my boots and set off. In the daylight, I love walking in the large, hilly, open space behind Whitworth known as the Back 40. I trudged through the snow at the beginning of the walk, disgruntled and sulky. But the more I walked and breathed in the vibrant fresh air, the more relaxed I became. The open space of the Back 40, uncluttered by houses and trees, the nippy air, the crunching snow all did something to untangle my thoughts and soothe my rumpled spirit.

The funny thing about walking by myself is that I seldom think about anything profound. I don't usually have epiphanies about personal problems or take advantage of the time to pray for friends and family as they come to mind. Walking is a way to just be. In fact, the only epiphanies I usually have involve God.

I walked farther yesterday than I have in a while. I walked up the hill to Whitworth, through the campus, and came back down the other side of the Back 40, a distance of two miles. On my way across the upper Back 40 to start my descent into the neighborhood, I was suddenly struck by the difference in perspective from the top of the hill. The slushy mess of snow on the streets below faded, and I could even see a hint of blue sky. At the time, I didn't connect my walk to any spiritual revelation, but as I think back on it now, it seems that the change in perspective from the top of the hill was most striking because I could see more clearly where I had been before on my walk.

In the midst of the grayness of January and the unsettled roommate situation, my walk gave me a gift. It gave me the perspective to see that I have the choice to trust that at some point in the future, I will be able to see from the mountaintop what I couldn't see in the valley. This perspective, while it doesn't make me particularly happy or change the reality of my situation, does give me hope. And hope is a wonderful thing to have in the slushy cold of January.

Blessed Fellowship

I've had some great times of fellowship in the past week. Here's a couple snippets:

1. Last Friday night (1/4), I had a potluck dinner with two friends from church, Margaret and Bethany. Margaret's retired and Bethany is in grad school. I made Sweet Potato Black Bean burritos, Margaret had a delicious Italian salad with olives and tomatoes, and Bethany made a delicious chocolate pudding cake. We just had the most wonderful time talking together all about life and our Christmas vacations and families. I love hanging out with people of all different ages.

2. The first Tuesday of every month is a lunch with Partners friends that we call FIRED, Food is Really Ethnically Delicious. We moved the lunch to the second Tuesday this month because of New Year's Day, and we had the most wonderful experience. We were going to eat Thai food, but the restaurant was closed, so we ended up eating at an Ethiopian restaurant in a gas station/convenience store that's just opened about a mile from work. The couple that runs the restaurant came from Ethiopia 10 years ago to give their children a chance to get an education. It was our first truly ethnic meal for FIRED. We didn't order, though there was a menu. Rather, the owner brought us each a dish she made, a sampling from the menu. Before we ate, she walked around to each person with a special bowl and pitcher. She poured a warm stream of water over our hands while we scrubbed and then we dried off with a towel. We did this because you eat Ethiopian food with your hands by wrapping pieces of Injera flatbread around the meat and veggies. The food was delicious and the owner also roasted coffee beans and made us strong Ethiopian coffee. I even tried a bit just for the experience. It was fun!

3. On Tuesday, despite rather treacherous road conditions, five women met together at one woman's house for our montly Colbert Women Connecting With Women event. Because there were only five of us, each of us had a longer time to share than normal. We shared all about our Christmas breaks and the emotions that accompanied our vacations. It's always so good to share in these circumstances because several of us were experiencing similar emotions, especially reflecting on how family dynamics change as children age, move out of the house, and get married or have kids. Did anyone experience a different Christmas with these kinds of changes? What was it like?

4. On Thursday, my friend Kari who is visiting for the week, my housemates Pam and Heidi, and I had Blueberry Yogurt Multigrain Pancakes for dinner with grapefruit, scrambled eggs, and kale/craisin/goat cheese salad. It was so fun! I love breakfast for dinner. After dinner, we had an awesome dance party! Yay for Owl City and One Direction! :)

5. Yesterday morning, my housemate Heidi and I had book club with our former professor Laura Bloxham. We've been discussing a book of short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri, which I highly recommend. But the most lovely part of the morning was the way Laura asked thoughtful questions about my and Heidi's lives and about the story we were studying. She is always interested and listens attentively and graciously. It gives me the wonderful feeling of being heard and understood. It was a good reminder to me that I need to continue to cultivate these qualities. What a lovely gift to give to someone: careful listening and thoughtful questions!

Each of these experiences and many more this week are evidence to me of God's continued and unmerited grace in my life. I tell these stories to inspire you to look for times of fellowship in your own life and to thank God for them. And honestly, my weeks vary. I'm not always surrounded with such opportunities for fellowship, but when the opportunities arise, I want to relish them.

The last thing I want to write about that's unrelated is the snow today. It's been simply gorgeous the past two days with blue skies and sun and continued so today. As I was sitting in church this morning, I looked out the window and the snow was falling so gently and quietly that it looked like it was floating in slow motion. It was magical. When I walked to my car, the snow sparkled on the ground like crystal. Thanks for the beauty, God!

May God bless you each with times of precious fellowship this week!

Year of Plenty Part 4: The Material v. the Spiritual and My Struggle With It

I've been working on another blog post for the better part of a week and still haven't posted it. It's about a great topic, but I was having trouble narrowing it down. So I'm going to keep working on it and will post this instead.

I always start off the weekend days with a grand plan for how I'll spend them and what I'll accomplish. In Sunday School today, we talked about how Year of Plenty author Craig Goodwin struggles with the dualistic divide in the Christian faith between the spiritual and material in which the spiritual choice is seen as the better option, i.e. joining a monastery instead of apprenticing with the local blacksmith (a random medieval example, but it works.) The physical/spiritual dualism isn't as much a struggle for me as it is for Craig, but I do struggle with another kind of dualism: what I should accomplish and what I actually accomplish.

For instance, I got a free compost bin at the Spokane Solid Waste Fair yesterday. I had planned to set it up in my backyard yesterday afternoon, but when I went out to set it up, I ran into one problem after another. The bin is basically a sheet of rolled-up, stiff black plastic that you're supposed to be able to arrange in a neat 3x3 square, but it had been rolled up so tightly that it didn't want to unroll. I had to jump on top of it to make it stay flat and put spider-webby bricks on all corners. I also realized that to actually put it together, it needed stakes, which I didn't have.

Basically, I realized in dismay that I do not have the brain for mechanics or tactile creativity. Putting this compost bin together was far beyond my ken. Instead, I planted 12 daffodil bulbs, swept a ton of pine needles off the back porch and thought about how I had spent way longer on the compost bin than I intended and still accomplished very little. And my Sunday sped by with little care for my carefully crafted weekend to-do list of which I crossed off exactly two things.

The problem that the compost bin revealed is that I have trouble concentrating on reading or writing when material things are left undone. The contemplative tasks get pushed aside for the tyranny of the urgent. Reading my newest creative nonfiction book can wait, but if that pan sits there another minute with a film of potato soup, it will be a nightmare to clean.

In A Year of Plenty,Craig's year of eating and buying locally required intentionality and contemplation. The Christian life should require intentional choices for every aspect of life. The end goal is that these God-honoring choices become second nature. But for Craig at this point in the book, he still has to think hard about nearly every decision he makes. In an attempt to honor God with my time, I think hard about how to spend my time after work. However, unlike Craig, whose thinking inspires him to action, I often respond to the choices of how to spend my time with paralyzed non-action, hence the dualism between what I want to accomplish and what I actually do accomplish.

And ironically, this dualism gives way to the very dualism that Craig struggles with. (And here I thought I had escaped it.) What is a better way to spend one's time? It depends, of course. There's a place for both the material tasks and spiritual tasks, and God can be glorified in both. But when it comes to the nitty gritty details of how I spend my time, I get mired in the material at the expense of the spiritual. Though both are good, is it possible that one is still better? (I'm thinking of Mary v. Martha.)

I continue to wrestle with this issue and really don't have a good answer to give. How do you see the material v. spiritual playing out in your life? Is there tension between the two? How do you deal with the tension? I'd love to hear from you in the comments. (Maybe you can help me sort this all out!)

Year of Plenty Part 1: Proper Complexity

**This series is rooted in my weekly Sunday School class at Colbert Presbyterian Church in which we are studying the book A Year of Plenty: One Suburban Family, Four Rules, and 365 Days of Homegrown Adventure in the Pursuit of Christian Living. Our classes have been rich with discussion, so I wanted to continue some of the discussion here in order that we might all think more deeply about how our spending and eating choices affect both our spiritual and temporal lives.**



I was partially leading discussion yesterday, so I admit that I wasn't listening as well as normal. I was often focused on how to formulate my next question and when I should move the discussion along instead of attending to the discussion at hand. But I did glean some that I'd like to share.

First, a little back story. Craig Goodwin, the author, is a Spokane-area pastor. One Christmas, he and his wife Nancy realized how exhausted they were from the consumerist rush of the holidays. In a rock-bottom moment, Craig and Nancy decided that the year 2008 would be an experimental year in living locally. The Goodwin family was guided by four rules for the year: everything they bought had to be local, used, homegrown, or homemade. Local is defined as roughly the Eastern Washington and North Idaho area. As pastors, Craig and Nancy are also very interested in how all this applies to the Christian life. As you can see, it's a perfect book to be discussing in our particular location (and at this time of year). It's also a topic that's close to my heart.

My classmates are varied, thus it's quickly become apparent that no one person is going to approach this issue from the same background or come out with the same resolutions. We have avid canners and gardeners rubbing shoulders with those who shop mostly at Costco. The question I posed to my classmates yesterday arose from a chapter in which Craig creates a homemade pinata for his daughter's eighth birthday. After the experience, Craig writes: "We were discovering the importance of proper complexity."

My question is what is proper complexity?

It's more complex for me to make and can 14 quarts of applesauce. It took a considerable amount of time to pick the apples, chop and core them, fill jars, and process them in the canner. Each jar of homemade applesauce came to $2. It would take maybe 20 minutes max for me to drive to Fred Meyer to buy a jar of applesauce. Which is better? I think the answer is "It depends."

Which is why I think it's really important to ask this follow-up question: What is gained and what is lost by ____ (fill in the blank)?

In my example, what is gained by making my own applesauce? One easy answer: relationships. I purchased the apples from farmers who attend my church. While making the applesauce, I spent time by myself, praying and thinking and being present to the task and the process. With the extra applesauce, I fed my co-workers. With six of the jars, I'm able to share with my parents.

What was lost in making applesauce? Money and time I could have spent doing other things.

To be attentive to the two great commandments that Jesus reiterates in Mark 12:28-31 means the answers to many questions may never be the same two times in a row. It's more important to have the love of God and people as our overarching rules than to follow Craig and Nancy's local, used, homegrown, and homemade guidelines. However, it's very possible that to love God, the world he's created, and the people who bear his image, following Craig and Nancy's rules may provide an excellent framework for a proper and rooted-in-love complexity. Whether or not we like it, the world is complex, and we face choices every day that demand tough-love decisions from we who embody both the brokenness of this world and the beauty of the Kingdom to come.

***

How do you see this idea of proper complexity playing out in your own life? What decisions are easy to make? What decisions do you struggle with?

To Nourish My Beloved

I don't know what the deal is, but I've been on a food high recently. Maybe it's from preserving the apples, plums, and tomatoes of mid-September. Maybe it's having all these delicious fruits and veg (as the British say) on hand, the tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, onions, corn, peaches, plums, and apples of Green Bluff bounty. Whatever it is, I just LOVE food. My parents wonder who in the world Elizabeth Brink really is...did my mom really give birth to this crazy foodie?

But really, at the heart of my love for food is something intrinsically related to how God loves us. Food can be bland and stingy and unexciting. But the kind of food I'm trying to prepare, the kind of food I watch being prepared on the British TV show River Cottage, the kind of food I read about on various food blogs is incredibly like God's character. It bursts with generosity and goodness and hospitality. It's rooted in love. Love of the earth, sure, but most of all a deep love of the people who carry the Imago Dei.

Here's a quote I found thought-provoking. It was at the front of the cookbook The Sprouted Kitchen by Sara Forte.

"I still think that one of the pleasantest of all emotions is to know that I, I with my brain and my hands, have nourished my beloved few, that I have concocted a stew or a story, a rarity or a plain dish, to sustain them truly against the hungers of the world."    ~M.K. Fisher

There are a number of things I love about this quote. But I'll start first with where it falls short. Mary Fisher mentions the brain and the hands creating meals to nourish, but she doesn't mention the heart. To me, cooking, and the rest of her quote, hinges on the heart. It's the love from our hearts that we pour into making food and giving it away, not just the cerebral knowledge or the muscle memory. That said, the rest of the quote is fabulous. We nourish people not just with a concocted stew, but with stories. Human beings are nourished by relationships, which happen over food and through stories.

The next part of the quote that I find so great is this: we nourish not just with rarities like perfectly cooked steaks and New York cheesecake, but also with plain dishes...with Kraft Mac and Cheese and home-canned peaches, after-a-long-day-of-work scrambled eggs and hasty blueberry muffins. We are nourished by the ordinary, every day stuff through which our lives of faith are built. Consistent and sacrificial decisions to be generous and to open the blocked caves of our hearts to the light and life of God's love that drives us to love our neighbors like we love ourselves.

So I invite you to join this wild ride called faith and let every deed you do rise up as a prayer of love to the God who is the giver of all good gifts.

And enjoy your next meal with gusto.

To Love Is To Be

Two of my housemates moved out this week and another will move out on Sunday. They're all moving far away: Los Angeles, Princeton, New Jersey, Denver. It seemed appropriate that I stumbled across this quote on a friend's blog:

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one...Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”

C.S. Lewis' insights are always astute, even poignant.

Astute observations are also why I appreciate my pastor. He preached on Ephesians 3:14-21 this past Sunday where Paul prays that the Ephesians may be filled with "all the fullness of God" (19). I imagine Paul knew a thing or two about saying goodbye to people. He spent at least two years in Ephesus and writes beautiful prayers on behalf of the Ephesians. Paul wants them to fully comprehend the "love of Christ that surpasses knowledge."

In his sermon, my pastor explored what the fullness of God might look like. He said he had always assumed that God's fullness meant blessings and good and prosperity. But if we look at the life of Christ, there is also hardship and betrayal and anger and grief. Since Christ embodied the fullness of God in human form, my pastor concluded that for our lives to overflow with the fullness of God we must also embrace "every emotion on the continuum of the human experience," joy, sorrow and everything in between.

I just noticed in the verse that the fullness of God is fundamentally rooted in love. Paul prays that we will "know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that we may be filled with all the fullness of God." We won't be filled with the fullness of God until we know the love of Christ.

And, ironically, love invites brokenness. The love of Christ ended in death.

Brokenness hardly ever seems like fullness. I'm always surprised when love ends in grief, in separation, in sacrifice. I expect love to be easy, to fix all the problems. But human love will never do that. And yet somehow, even as humans, we experience the fullness of God when we embrace love-giving-way-to-brokenness.

And ultimately, this is the only way we can know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge. This is the only way we will be filled with all the fullness of God.

Because someday brokenness will give way to love.

And we will meet the Source of Love himself.