I had a car full o’kids today. We were running errands. For a time I was able to listen to their music, but after a while I cried, “Uncle,” and put my music on. I have my own playlist on the car iPod and I switched it over. The volume gets turned down because nobody likes my music except, oh, me! But nobody is listening to it anyway. So they were all chattering away and I was listening to my music as we ran our errands. The last of which was to pass through Chick-fil-a for lunch. I turned the music off to take orders and then give the order to the name-less, face-less screen at the drive through.

I passed out drinks, took the bag of chicken and fries from the kind lady at the window and drove away. Then I turned the music back on. As the song hit their ears, I heard LightBoy say, “This sounds like a song from Bible school.” So I listened in to the conversation that ensued.  The players were the FlamingLambs1, 2 and 3, LightBoy and LightGirl.  The song is entitled “Call Him Good” by Sandra McCracken.  It’s heavy on the chorus which is sung “Call Him good my soul” in harmony.  It’s really beautiful and vaguely Celtic, which is probably why it sings into my soul so deeply.  But the conversation around the song was interesting.  The kids weren’t buying it.

To them it sounded like a garden variety “church” song.  They’ve become cynical.  It was for “Bible” camp.  “We went to one of those one time.”  “Yeah, we go to that when we visit my Grammy,” replied one FlamingLamb.  The highlight seemed to be the candy.  They definitely associated the Bible and the education involved with church and rules … but the weird thing was that God and Jesus never entered the conversation.  Huh?  Now we’ve all been out of church proper for several months, and out of the institutional church for a couple of years, but they’d all done some serious time in Children’s Church and Sunday School before we left.  So this omission surprised me.  Despite all the good teaching and heartfelt teachers, they’d missed the main point.

Which begs the question, just what good is all that children’s ministry anyway?  I think I prefer the simplicity of the formula given by Deuteronomy 6 …

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.   Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.  These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts.  Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.

Fairly early on in my blogging career (such as it is), I stumbled across this little known blog called Present Matters. No one else that I knew followed this blog. I had a hard time finding the name of the person writing it. And for quite a long time I was convinced the author was a crusty old man. He sure sounded like it from his writing. He wrote dense, long posts about long dead monks and dusty old books that fascinated me for some reason. I would trudge through the posts which were always well written but sometimes I wondered why they were written. Certainly only a crusty old man would read such dusty old books alone as he was in the mountains of Southern California.

Then the author began to also post some photographs of his beautiful surroundings. I was further hooked. And I also began to post some comments here and there as I began to understand more and more of what he was posting about. I loved the photography and some of you may know that LightHusband is also a photographer (who supplies me with the photographs for this blog :D).

Pretty soon, though, I discovered that the author was NOT a crusty old man, but a lively young guy and younger than me! At first I was embarrassed. But then I realized that no one knew what I had been thinking all that time (until now of course). I was by this time really enjoying his writing and discovered that he was an author for real and not just a blog author. I tried to lure him out by linking to him in a couple of memes, but he was determined to remain quiet and in the backwater. I wanted more people to know about him and his writing because it is winsome and good, and above all I’ve learned so much from reading him.

Patrick draws from such a variety of sources when he writes that it is always refreshing and new. He uses modern (and by that I am referring to the era, not the method of thinking) writers, Reformation writers, Medieval writers and early Christian writers and he’ll use them all in the same piece. He is unafraid of history which makes for very holistic pieces.

So when Patrick announced that he had a book coming out this fall, I was thrilled. I was excited for him personally. After all, now I actually *know* an author. Someone who has a book which is published. That is thrilling in and of itself. I was excited for him because I know that it’s something he’s been working on. But I was selfishly glad for me too. A whole “Patrick Oden” book to read.

Here’s the thing … I know we’re not “supposed” to do this, but it seems that Patrick is drawn to many of the same spiritual streams that I am drawn to … Celtic Christianity, finding God in nature, reading about Him throughout history and the like. This is likely why I find Dual Ravens (as his blog is now known) so compelling. So when Patrick announced, “It’s A Dance: Moving With The Holy Spirit.” I was pretty thrilled and thought, “Dang. November 1 is a long way away.”

Then he invited me to read a pre-publication copy of the book. So I am one of the lucky few to be able to read this book *before* November 1. And, it is everything I hoped it would be. Tomorrow … a review of It’s A Dance, by Patrick Oden.

I don’t know.

The grand living room project won’t get finished. It made me angry at about the sixth coat of red. And I got tired. So now it’s waiting for the trim to be painted. I need to finish it.

The whole house is in shambles. It feels as though the monsters got out from under the beds and had a rumpus like the one in Where The Wild Things Are.

LightHusband’s parents, siblings and families are coming for Thanksgiving (40 some odd days from now). And the house is in shambles … rumpused, as it were.

Worse than that, I am rumpused. I am torn and lost and tattered by the events of the past year. Grief continues to assail me at the worst possible times. Smaug is generally quiet. I can do all the things a functioning adult is supposed to do. But I am sad and tired.

Every so often the thought of sneaking into the back of a church for a service crosses one of our minds. It would be good to be amongst the faithful again for a little while. But I cannot bear the rape of my soul that goes along with it.

So the droughth continues.

… or how Christians have gotten it wrong lately.

I was tagged by Julie (who was tagged by the eminent Bro. M.) in a new meme, based upon the book, unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity… and Why It Matters. For some good thinking on the book and the meme, you should go to Bro.M’s post … he’s very thorough. Much more so than I.

Here is the gist of it … as few as 10 years ago Christianity had a good name. Now, not so much. For the meme we are to list three negatives of the Christian religion that is all too prevalent and then 1 positive of the faith that we wish were more abundant.

Negatives …

Christians are cherry-pickers. They pick and choose which parts of the Bible they’re going to pay attention to on any given day of the week. Ferinstance, they’re all for the right to life. When it’s in the womb. Once you’re out and breathing though, by god, you’d better take care of yourself. Welfare is for slackers and lie-a-beds. You want to kill all the killers too. Nuke the towelheads. The death penalty is our God-given right. There are consequences to sin and you’d better be prepared to pay ’em in this life and in the next.

Christians are always right and Right. Jesus is a Republican. Or he would be if were here today. Your salvation is in question if you vote Democrat. No lie. Christians should be involved in politics as long as those politics are conservative … make that reactionary. And you should always have an answer that is right, as in correct. Be able to answer every question, even those that are never asked. When you’re always right, no one can ever question you. Nice place to be, yeah? No conversation there …

Christians like to live in ivory towers, closeted away from the stains of the world. They listen to “Godly” music. They raise “Godly” children. They have “Godly” chatchkes. They have “Godly” friends. Their children marry “Godly” spouses. Can someone tell me what that means? Everything is carefully controlled and contrived. They have Harvest parties so their children won’t be tainted by Halloween … but it all looks the same, it just has a different name. We’re just fooling ourselves.

Here’s what I think … I think the three things I mentioned above stem from one thing. Fear. And Jesus came to set us free from fear. So here’s what I wish I would see in the Christian faith more abundantly … freedom.

I would love to see Christians living freely. Giving freely. Living with open hands in a closed fisted world. I would love to see those of us follow Jesus living in His freedom … smiling, laughing, dancing, giving, loving, and living openly, honestly. Being who we are without masks. Being Jesus to a frightened world. Imagine that for a moment. What a wonderful world it would be …

I’d love to hear the thoughts of Bill Kinnon, Erin Word, David Fisher, and Kay Paris on this subject.

Yesterday was hockey, hockey and more hockey.

Lightboy had practice from 7:20 to 8:50 a.m. at our home rink. Meanwhile LightGirl had a game that she needed to be at by 9:40 that was almost 2 hours away. Her team was playing a team that was 2 years older, but they had alluded to the fact that they would bench their older players and play some younger developmental players for this game.

I may have mentioned here that CoachWonderWoman is about the only woman coach that we face, she is certainly the only woman coach in our club. Her coaching style is different from the teams which we face each week. I’m never certain if this is her personal style or if it is in part based upon her gender. Yesterday, I discovered that at least some of the difference is gender.

I may have mentioned that this year I am the team manager for LightGirl’s hockey team. I’m enjoying this role thus far. It doesn’t require too much of me and I get to do some different things that I sorta like. One thing that I’m ambivalent about is that I see more e-mail traffic about scheduling games than the average parent. I don’t know that I need to see this traffic, but I do. In the case of the game we played this past Sunday, it was alluded to by the opposing coach that he would pull back his older, more experienced players for this (non-league) game. It would be a chance for both teams to get some competitive experience without the pressure of league play. All was good.

Our team is significantly smaller (in terms of numbers) than the other team. We had 10 or 11 players there and they had at least 15. This means that we only had 2 full lines and they had at least three. They were able to rotate more players on the ice than we could. I saw a bunch of their players before hand. Now … remember I’ve spent significant years in youth ministry. I know how girls faces and bodies mature. Many of these girls were not under 14. There were at least 5 of them who were nearly capable of driving themselves to the rink.

But … their coach was restrained. For the first two periods. He mixed things up and kept his less mature players on the ice with the more mature players. He did this for a long time. Until it became apparent that doing this might cost him the game.

Then.

All bets were off. He put his best players on a line together and kept them out on the ice for a good long while. His rastafarian hat that one of his players had dared him to wear, came off. He paced the bench. Things looked bleak for our team. But, CoachWonderWoman and AssistantCoachSuperMan never shifted gears. They continued in the same vein and told our girls to keep their wits about them and do their best. It turned out that their best was indeed good enough. They won the game!! 8 to 7. And one of those goals belonged to LightGirl.

It got me thinking, though, about the differences between men and women. Men and women process these sorts of things very differently. They *see* the playing field differently. Men have a deep-seated need to win … at all costs. To women it’s more important to play the game well and fairly AND win. How we play the game is at least as important as winning. Men seem to find winning the sole factor in the game.

I pulled back a little further and now I’m thinking about how this plays out in our culture and more importantly in church. In our male dominated culture and especially the male dominated church, where gamesmanship and winning become the goal of an institution (even when it’s unstated and underground) I think that is how we have come to have these huge megachurches and ministries that “win” more souls than the church around the corner each week.

This is why it’s so important to have both men and women equally involved in leadership … in church and in life.  It’s not just winning.  It’s how you play the game.

… in which I attempt to function on 13 hours of sleep spread over 3 nights.
Breakfast – LightGirl had a sleepover Saturday night.  I don’t know what LightHusband and LightBoy had.  I was too heartsick to eat.

Lunch – frozen stuff that had been reheated

Dinner – McDonalds … see above and LightHusband was well-drugged because of some back problems.  Between the lack of sleep (me) and the drugs (him) we can’t think straight today.

BlazingEwe came over and hung out with me.  We took a therapeutic shopping trip to my/our favorite quilting store.  We’re taking a class in February and I “needed” fabric.  Well, I actually did need fabric … I just needed more today.  I breathed in deeply of the fabric endorphins and found some solace there.

The LightHusband’s parents are visiting. Very often these visits are fraught with tension and ill-will. This visit has been quite pleasant thus far … filled with laughter and camaraderie. Perhaps it is because I no longer care what they think of me that I am now free to think of them.

In any case, with their visit comes additional television viewing. We rarely watch television. Mostly in the evening after the LightChildren have gone to bed. We watch during the day on very rare occasions … when someone in the house is too sick to do anything else. Or when GrandpaLightHusband is visiting. He loves to watch tv. Correction. He loves to walk into a room. Turn on the television. Watch it for a few seconds. Then leave the room … with the television still on. He may or may not return to the room. So when they visit the television is on … all. the. time. He also likes to watch sports. If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time you may have come to some conclusions about me. I’ll bet it will come as little surprise to anyone that sports is quite low on my list of television watching priorities. I especially do not care to watch it or have it on in the house at very loud decibels. This is usually a trial for me. I very quickly reach a place of sensory overload when there are a lot of people in the house and a lot of noise. So … yeah.

This morning GrandpaLightHusband came in from their RV and promptly … turned on the television.  Well, Sunday morning programming is not so terrible.  We watched CBS’s Sunday Morning program.  They gave us the trifecta of funerals; President Ford’s, James Brown’s and Sadaam Hussein’s.  There was a portion of the program devoted to all the famous people who died in 2006.  I could hear echos of the morbid scene from “The Holy Grail” …. “Bring out your dead… bring out your dead ….” There are many different perspectives to give a year just finished.  This seemed odd to me.

Apparently it was fitting to LightGirl.  We went walking in the Battlefield with the grandparents and a friend.  Later on as I was putting dinner together she came in and said, “Well, 2006 wasn’t a really great year, was it Mom?”  I asked her why she felt that way.  She responded, “It was the year Will died.”  My first response (which I never got to make) was that it was also the year that he was born too.  But GrandmaLightHusband wanted to know who he was and why he was so important to LightGirl.  So we explained his story to her.  She responded by telling us a story of a little boy in her church who is 11 with hypo-plastic left heart, “and he’s doing quite well.”  And suddenly I was so overcome with rage, I felt my knees buckle.  I felt myself step outside of me and observe what was happening.  I knew better than to speak, so I just nodded and listened.  I wasn’t angry with my mother-in-law.  I’m still not sure why or who I was angry with.

I’m just so god-damn sick of useless, pointless death.

It’s later in the morning than I usually awaken. +OneFriend has a cold and is struggling with quite a cough in the night, so LightHusband and I were up with him a good bit last night. It is one of the miracles of this place that I am able to sleep in a bit when necessary.

We probably should not have gone out for creemees (as softserve icecream is called up in these parts) last night. The ride home required that we have the windows open to air out the fumes from the gas can we had filled for the boat rides taken during the day (tubing in the afternoon and fishing after dinner). The cool pollen filled air started +OneFriend’s coughing jag and he just couldn’t get past it.

So it’s been later than usual for me to come out to the porch and sit with my coffee and cruller. The clouds are puffy as a fresh snowbank over the ridge across the bay and the boats are lolling in no particular direction, at ease awaiting their next orders from the currents and winds. Children and parents are playing at various camps around the cove, and LightBoy is fishing.

I’ve been musing about the various pillars which support human relationships this morning. Mostly I’ve been thinking about trust. I’ve been remembering how +OneFriend came in the dark of night, trusting that when I told him to awaken me if he needed to, I would respond. Of course I did. LightHusband and I sat with him for the hour it took to quieten his cough and relax and go back to sleep. For the most part, children trust very easily. They believe the things that they are told by adults. Their minds do not have the ability to question or challenge. They do not bother with the things that are beneath the surface. There are no icebergs. It is only when we become adults that we begin searching for hidden meanings, the lines between the lines, the hurts and betrayals.

There are two things that Jesus said that I’ve been musing about this morning. The first is that we (all of us … especially the adults) should come to Him with faith like children. The second is that we should be wise as serpents and gentle as doves. Now before you begin taking me to task for taking those verses out of context, I know I did that! Those are some fairly standard teachings of Jesus and I’m musing on my porch about trust and I don’t have my Bible/concordance/commentary open next to me. I merely think that in regards to trust issues, those two teachings put us in a place of tension. It is difficult to hold faith with child-like trust, yet be wise as a serpent. I think it requires that we overlook an awful lot of hurts done to us. Perhaps it even puts us in the place where we forgive others seventy times seven. I think it requires that we sometimes conciously not look for lines between lines or hidden meanings. I wonder, if, perhaps, that tension isn’t a most difficult aspect of my faith.

I took Sabbath today in an odd way. I did not rest and yet I feel refreshed in many parts of my spirit that I have not felt in years.

I worshipped with my father. We discussed weather forecasting and the fact that my old wive’s tales are correct a greater percentage of the time than the media professionals. We got warm in the sun on the edge of the lake and wondered about the state of a rope which had soaked itself for the summer and how long it would take to dry out sufficiently to be tied off and melted.

LightHusband and I did laundry at our traditional laundrymat. Usually we do laundry during the week up here. This year we did it on a Sunday. What a treat. There was laundry comedy and laundry philosophy. A lady came in who announced to us that she had some new jokes for us this week. Here is one:

What do Winnie the Pooh and John the Baptist have in common? (answer at the end)

She had some other jokes, but they were a little off-color. She wore a very large brimmed floppy hat. She said she told jokes because she hated doing laundry so much that this made it fun. I thought that was a very good coping strategy.

Another man came in with about 8 small laundry baskets full of laundry. He clearly had a complicated system. I wondered about his system. He asked, of no one in particular, “Why is it that today all the dryers are full, but the washers are empty? How did that happen?” Laundry mat philosophy at it’s finest.

Oh, you want the answer: They both have the middle name “the” … we cracked up!

Sign seen on a local church: Spiritual Progressivism. It made me wish I’d gone to that service.

We went grocery shopping while the clothes dried in the full dryers at a small local grocery store where the checkout clerk was fast and helpful, and she smiled at us while she checked our groceries (even tho she was a “sullen” teenager). And I made a blueberry pie when I came home.

In all, a good Sabbath rest. The clothes are clean, the larder is full and the week is ready to begin.