we're dancing the glowstick dance!
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Saturday, May 26, 2007
transportation and commerce...
Jocelyn and Elizabeth are here visiting from Portland, so it's been a day for crazy girl time, borrowing various fun vehicles, lunch on the town, and shopping!
If you think our hair looks nice now...you should have seen it later!
Peachtree City is full of golf cart paths. The whole town gets around on them!
Who wouldn't want to shop with us!
[all photo credit to jocelyn]
If you think our hair looks nice now...you should have seen it later!
Peachtree City is full of golf cart paths. The whole town gets around on them!
Who wouldn't want to shop with us!
[all photo credit to jocelyn]
Saturday, May 19, 2007
sweet pirate summer...
I'm in Georgia this summer living with the Mounts and learning about the life of the modern missionary. Tonight we went to a pirate cookout, complete with a battle on the high seas!
Silas, Maddie, Clara, cousin Abby, and Kristin
Boys vs. Girls water fight!
Me with the the marvelous Mounts: Silas, Clara, Caleb, Maddie, and Kristin
Silas, Maddie, Clara, cousin Abby, and Kristin
Boys vs. Girls water fight!
Me with the the marvelous Mounts: Silas, Clara, Caleb, Maddie, and Kristin
Sunday, May 06, 2007
so sad that it's funny...
And the Lord sayeth to Emily, "Thou shalt know it is thy Finals Week when thou ist struck by the plague of plagues."
Seriously. I have become ill every finals week in college except for last semester, when I spent a week in bed with the flu [starting the day after i got home].
I currently can't hear out of my left ear and the right one isn't so hot either. I'd like to stay in bed for a long time, but I still have three finals and a project left.
Honestly, I probably get the same amount or more of sleep during finals.
Oh, well. Bring it on!
Seriously. I have become ill every finals week in college except for last semester, when I spent a week in bed with the flu [starting the day after i got home].
I currently can't hear out of my left ear and the right one isn't so hot either. I'd like to stay in bed for a long time, but I still have three finals and a project left.
Honestly, I probably get the same amount or more of sleep during finals.
Oh, well. Bring it on!
Friday, May 04, 2007
mid-finals thoughts...
[tripping out on Italian coffee, King Lear, Bacon's Of Studies, Robinson's Gilead, and some Flannery O'Connor]
I love that the Jesus I love, the God who made me, is big enough to explore.
He infused us with His passion for life [he is life and love, we experience life and love]. We love because we are loved. We long for something greater because we have the capacity for more. We are complete in Christ, we have arrived, but we are also chasing the difficult journey and the prize to come. We are pursuing because we are pursued.
God gave us a variety of ways to experience Himself: through our senses and the natural world, through His Word, through the story of history and redemption, through our hearts, through silence, through shouts of praise, through the arts, through the development of our minds. We can pursue this world and love this world because He is inseparable from the excitement of a new baby's wrinkled little face and the works of Shakespeare.
You for sure can't learn it all in high school, despite how much your parents pour into your education. I'm four exams from being done with my Junior year, and I'm pretty certain that I can't learn it all in college, either. Graduate school doesn't really look all that full of answers either. But the people I've learned with and from are irreplaceable. To live, to suffer, to learn, to laugh, to be human...a thousand catchy phrases or billboards can't explain the depth of these "to do's."
Right now I'm obviously pretty excited about this whole studying thing, but I need to temper my passions with the knowledge that my God who is big enough for this is also big enough to have different plans for other people. I think that college is an experience most people should have. Imagine what you've learned in high school [spiritually, socially, and mentally], and then multiply that by a kajillion. Education should never be reduced to something that will get you a good job. Study a lot of what you love, enough of what you don't love to keep you humble, but mostly, enjoy the experience of being. No matter what you're doing with your life, there's no better way to pursue Him than listening and reading and studying and living.
To be a human created in the image of God is the most weighty and exciting thing in the world.
I love that the Jesus I love, the God who made me, is big enough to explore.
He infused us with His passion for life [he is life and love, we experience life and love]. We love because we are loved. We long for something greater because we have the capacity for more. We are complete in Christ, we have arrived, but we are also chasing the difficult journey and the prize to come. We are pursuing because we are pursued.
God gave us a variety of ways to experience Himself: through our senses and the natural world, through His Word, through the story of history and redemption, through our hearts, through silence, through shouts of praise, through the arts, through the development of our minds. We can pursue this world and love this world because He is inseparable from the excitement of a new baby's wrinkled little face and the works of Shakespeare.
You for sure can't learn it all in high school, despite how much your parents pour into your education. I'm four exams from being done with my Junior year, and I'm pretty certain that I can't learn it all in college, either. Graduate school doesn't really look all that full of answers either. But the people I've learned with and from are irreplaceable. To live, to suffer, to learn, to laugh, to be human...a thousand catchy phrases or billboards can't explain the depth of these "to do's."
Right now I'm obviously pretty excited about this whole studying thing, but I need to temper my passions with the knowledge that my God who is big enough for this is also big enough to have different plans for other people. I think that college is an experience most people should have. Imagine what you've learned in high school [spiritually, socially, and mentally], and then multiply that by a kajillion. Education should never be reduced to something that will get you a good job. Study a lot of what you love, enough of what you don't love to keep you humble, but mostly, enjoy the experience of being. No matter what you're doing with your life, there's no better way to pursue Him than listening and reading and studying and living.
To be a human created in the image of God is the most weighty and exciting thing in the world.
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
over and over again...
Classes ended yesterday.
My finals are Friday, Monday, and Tuesday, which is probably one of the best schedules I've had in many a semester. I'll be sticking around for graduation on Saturday [congrats, joel, alisa, and all the rest of my favorite seniors] before leaving Sunday morning for Atlanta by way of Huntsville [which reminds me, i need a ride to the airport]. As soon as I'm done with finals, relatives [and relatives of friends] galore arrive, including Betsy on Friday morning. I'm holding out for a lot of free food.
Study day is always kind of strange. It feels like a Saturday: I went out to The Hunt Club last night to share stories with a bunch of awesome girls and then went on a midnight Wal-Mart run and sort of slept in this morning. Emily and I are headed to Ann Arbor today to study in Starbucks and see Josh and Michelle. I'm excited for coffee and conversation.
It's been a terrific semester and I'm kind of sad to see it go, but I am so excited for my six weeks in Georgia! I'll be working at Operation Mobilization, a global missions organization, and staying with the amazing Mount family. I'm excited to spend time with my southern lovelies [but not excited to sweat all the time] and learn more about the cool things Jesus is doing around the world. I'll be back in Portland on June 30, just in time for First Thursday.
The Office is the funniest thing on television, Arrested Development is still the funniest thing I wish was still on television, and this is still the funniest skit SNL has had in a long time.
There's your update...I'm headed to the city!
My finals are Friday, Monday, and Tuesday, which is probably one of the best schedules I've had in many a semester. I'll be sticking around for graduation on Saturday [congrats, joel, alisa, and all the rest of my favorite seniors] before leaving Sunday morning for Atlanta by way of Huntsville [which reminds me, i need a ride to the airport]. As soon as I'm done with finals, relatives [and relatives of friends] galore arrive, including Betsy on Friday morning. I'm holding out for a lot of free food.
Study day is always kind of strange. It feels like a Saturday: I went out to The Hunt Club last night to share stories with a bunch of awesome girls and then went on a midnight Wal-Mart run and sort of slept in this morning. Emily and I are headed to Ann Arbor today to study in Starbucks and see Josh and Michelle. I'm excited for coffee and conversation.
It's been a terrific semester and I'm kind of sad to see it go, but I am so excited for my six weeks in Georgia! I'll be working at Operation Mobilization, a global missions organization, and staying with the amazing Mount family. I'm excited to spend time with my southern lovelies [but not excited to sweat all the time] and learn more about the cool things Jesus is doing around the world. I'll be back in Portland on June 30, just in time for First Thursday.
The Office is the funniest thing on television, Arrested Development is still the funniest thing I wish was still on television, and this is still the funniest skit SNL has had in a long time.
There's your update...I'm headed to the city!
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
heritage...
Whenever I find a check out slip left carelessly into a library book, I notice the person and the date of checkout. I always wonder if they actually used it as a bookmark and only made it this far, or if perhaps the bit of paper was tucked inside pages which were never opened. I momentarily indulge in literary fantasy and wonder if they enjoyed these words as much as I do, and then replace the paper and return the book. Sometimes I leave my own check out slip in the pages. It almost feels like a good kind of graffiti.
Monday, April 23, 2007
book smart...
I am highly amused:
She bought a copy of the New York Review of Books and looked through the Personals. Brains, brains, everywhere... Among dozens of these condensed portraits Puttermesser could not recognize herself. ...As for the examined life - enough! She was sick of examining her own and hardly needed to hear an Eskimo expert examine his. It was all fiction anyhow - these columns and columns of ads. 'Vibrant, appealing, attractive, likable' - that meant divorced. Leftovers and mistakes. 'Unconventional, earthy, nurturing, fascinated by Zen, Sufism, music of the spheres' - a crackpot still in sandals. ...Every self-indulgent type in the book turned up in these ads.
Literature was no better. The great novels, rife with weirdos leading to misalliance - Isabel Archer entangled with the sinister Gilbert Osmond, Gwendolyn Harleth's troubles with Grandcourt. Anna Karenina. Worst of all, poor Dorothea Brooke and the deadly Mr. Casaubon. All these bad characters - the men in the case absolutely, and many of the women - were brainy. Think of Shaw, a logician, refusing to allow Professor Higgins to wed Eliza, in open dread of foreordained rotten consequences. And Jane Austen: with one hand she marries Elizabeth to Darcy, clever with clever, and with the other she goes and saddles Mr. Bennet with a silly wife. People get stuck. Brains are no guarantee. Hope is slim.
[the puttermesser papers - cynthia ozick]
She bought a copy of the New York Review of Books and looked through the Personals. Brains, brains, everywhere... Among dozens of these condensed portraits Puttermesser could not recognize herself. ...As for the examined life - enough! She was sick of examining her own and hardly needed to hear an Eskimo expert examine his. It was all fiction anyhow - these columns and columns of ads. 'Vibrant, appealing, attractive, likable' - that meant divorced. Leftovers and mistakes. 'Unconventional, earthy, nurturing, fascinated by Zen, Sufism, music of the spheres' - a crackpot still in sandals. ...Every self-indulgent type in the book turned up in these ads.
Literature was no better. The great novels, rife with weirdos leading to misalliance - Isabel Archer entangled with the sinister Gilbert Osmond, Gwendolyn Harleth's troubles with Grandcourt. Anna Karenina. Worst of all, poor Dorothea Brooke and the deadly Mr. Casaubon. All these bad characters - the men in the case absolutely, and many of the women - were brainy. Think of Shaw, a logician, refusing to allow Professor Higgins to wed Eliza, in open dread of foreordained rotten consequences. And Jane Austen: with one hand she marries Elizabeth to Darcy, clever with clever, and with the other she goes and saddles Mr. Bennet with a silly wife. People get stuck. Brains are no guarantee. Hope is slim.
[the puttermesser papers - cynthia ozick]
Saturday, April 21, 2007
gilead...
Allison has hopefully already persuaded you to read this beautiful crafted and moving book, but I'd like to add my own encouragement:
Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists of our behavior, and the reaction of God to us might be thought of as an aesthetic rather than morally judgemental in the ordinary sense. How well do we understand our role? With how much assurance do we perform it? ...I do like Calvin's image, though, because it suggests how God might actually enjoy us. I believe we think about that far too little. It would be a way into understanding essential things, since presumably the world exists for God's enjoyment, not in any simple sense, of course, but as you enjoy the being of a child when he is in every way a thorn in your heart.
[124-125]
It strikes me that your mother could not have said a more heartening word to me by any other means than she did by loving that unremarkable book so much that I noticed and read it, too. That was providence telling me what she could not have told me.
[133]
Seriously, how cool is that?! I want to encourage and challenge people through the books I read and recommend. Check off another point for the English Majors!
Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists of our behavior, and the reaction of God to us might be thought of as an aesthetic rather than morally judgemental in the ordinary sense. How well do we understand our role? With how much assurance do we perform it? ...I do like Calvin's image, though, because it suggests how God might actually enjoy us. I believe we think about that far too little. It would be a way into understanding essential things, since presumably the world exists for God's enjoyment, not in any simple sense, of course, but as you enjoy the being of a child when he is in every way a thorn in your heart.
[124-125]
It strikes me that your mother could not have said a more heartening word to me by any other means than she did by loving that unremarkable book so much that I noticed and read it, too. That was providence telling me what she could not have told me.
[133]
Seriously, how cool is that?! I want to encourage and challenge people through the books I read and recommend. Check off another point for the English Majors!
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