Shall We Dance – Perichoresis v. Hierarchy
Jun 30th, 2008 by Sonja

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One of the places I follow along loosely is Porpoise Diving Life.  The editor is Bill Dahl.  He’s a very interesting guy with a neat purpose for the site.  But he needed to take this year off and do some writing, reading and growing.  So he asked around for some help to keep things going.  I think it’s been a great success.  Each month a different person has stepped forward to take the helm and organize the content.  The result has been startling, refreshing and riveting.  Like the difference between cold clear mountain spring water and fizzy sassy mineral water.  Both taste wonderful and slake your thirst, but they have a remarkably different feel in your mouth.

Patrick Oden (of Dual Ravens) and I decided that we’d handle the wheel for month of August.  Patrick is also the author of  It’s A Dance, a wonderful conversation about perichoresis … the dance of relationship between the Trinity and us.  I fell in love with the book.  Then I read The Shack and we had visions of doing something that would cross-pollinate the two books.  But that never took off.  So we’re focusing, instead, on the differences between perichoresis and hierarchy.  And best of all … we need you.  Yep.  You.  You with the great ideas, poems, photos, stories, articles, etc.

You see it’s like this:

The Trinity is hard to understand.  It’s far too complex to have been made up, and no where do we have it explained to us with any kind of absolute understanding. We’re faced with the fact there’s one God, and yet there is the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  They’re all different.  But there’s only one God.  Unity and Diversity.  Three in One.  How does this work?  Well, there have been a lot of suggestions over the centuries.  The latest prevailing attitude has been to see the Trinity as a hierarchy. The Father, then the Son, then the Spirit.  But that’s not quite right, because there’s a lot of discussion in Scripture that doesn’t make it all that neat.  The Father gives all his authority to the Son, who sends the Spirit, who had already sent the Son.  It’s unusual.

Add to this the fact it’s not the kind of relationship we’re used to dealing with in organizations. They love each other. It’s the love and the relationship that is the bond. God is love. There’s no intimidation or manipulation or ambition or dissension. There’s just relationship.  And this kind of relationship has been given a name. Perichoresis.  Basically this is a big word to say something not that hard to understand, but almost impossible to live.  Instead of being a hierarchy, the persons in the Trinity are continually circling around each other, interwoven, interdependent, interpenetrating. Or to put it more simply… the relationship is kinda like a dance.

When the idea of hierarchy really was getting attention it was thought that churches should be modeled on this.  So, churches became about authority. From Father to Jesus to Apostles to Pope to Bishops to Priests to the People.  Some churches are still like this either explicitly or implicitly.

Notice who is left out. The Holy Spirit.  Paul tells us the Holy Spirit works in all of us, and makes a very interesting metaphor.  We’re not a hierarchy.  We’re a body.  Yes, Jesus is the head. But we, the Church, are to be a body. Gathered together in unity, expressing the diversity of the Spirit who works through all of us in different ways.  We too are a unity and diversity.   However, we still aren’t comfortable with that. The Trinity doesn’t have sin or ambition.  We do.  In our gathered communities we still tend to manipulate or seek authority or otherwise intimidate others and try to prove we’re somehow better. This seems worth considering.  Not leadership or organization topics. Rather ‘dance’ versus ‘power and manipulation’.  Perichoresis versus hierarchy and power.  This isn’t only something for those high in the hierarchy to consider.  We all face this.  We all use the tools at our disposal to gain an advantage, stand out, and sometimes push others down and aside.

When we use the tools at our disposal to engage in power and manipulation to subdue others in our presence … by whatever means, we are negating the power of the Gospel in the very space that the Gospel is to be transcendent.   So … how should we dress, act, engage? Well … that’s up to you and your particular dance with the Holy Spirit. See, none of us is the same. The rules are all the same, yet they’re all different. All we can do is ask questions of each other … where do you live? How do your neighbors dress?  What is your context?  What are the local standards? What is welcoming amongst them? How do you create a welcoming environment in your space, where you are free to proclaim the Good News to people so they will hear it from you?”

Please consider writing, musing, considering music, church liturgy, and other forms of God’s call in our lives that has been distorted by grabbing power rather than dancing with the Trinity.  We’d love to have articles, poems, stories, videos, paintings, photos,  … anything that you create that speaks about the Dance.

If you feel that that tug on your sleeve calling you to join us, please let me know in the comments and I’ll get in contact with you with more details about the whole process.

Babbling On
Jun 26th, 2008 by Sonja

There are some blogs I simply read.  I don’t have the words to engage there, so I just read.  The other day I read the following:

In passing it is worth noting that one important reason why we should be suspicious of hierarchical top-down notion of leadership is because we know from history and from human nature that institutional systems confer social power and concentrates it at the top. The problem is precisely because of human nature that we should be very wary of such power in human hands. It almost always corrupts and damages the relational fabric that constitutes the church.

Alan Hirsch wrote those words on his post “field of dreams, part iv.”  The whole post is about nature of power and hierarchy within church structures.  As is usual with Alan, it’s quite good.  He’s published books and all, so of course, it’s good.

As I read those words, and as I continue to read them, I keep getting this picture in my head:

Tower of BabelThe Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9)

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech.  As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar  and settled there.

They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building.  The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.  Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

  So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel —because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

So, I was talking to my friend, Doug, on the phone the other day and mentioned this to him.  Because I think that Babel is (among many things) a metaphor for how we ought not to be concentrating power in tiny little hierarchies in churches.  Sometimes when I get odd ideas like this I run them past Doug because he’ll tell me when I’m nuts.  He is kind and gracious about it, but he’ll tell me the truth.  He’s smart too, so I can’t slip very much past him.

He got excited, in a very “doug” kind of way.  And we talked about the first four sins of the Bible.  There was the rupture of relationship between humans and God (in the Garden).  There was the rupture of relationship between humans and humans (Cain and Abel).  There was the rupture of relationship between humans and creation (the Flood).  And last there was this rupture of relationship between humans and the systems they love.

So all of that is to say, I think I’m going to study these and look the metaphors more deeply in the coming weeks and how they play out for us today.  I might even write about them here.  But I’m not promising anything.  Every time I promise something that looks like a series, I get overwhelmed and run away from myself.  This creates all sorts of havoc with my cellular structure.  I wanted to write this much so that I’d remember and see what happens from here.

Book Review – Porn Nation
Jun 25th, 2008 by Sonja

Porn Nation - the bookI received Porn Nation:  Conquering America’s #1 Addiction, by Michael Leahy a couple of months ago in stack of books from The Ooze.  I’ve become an OozeSelect blogger.  It was the first book I read in the stack and I’ve been struggling with how to review it.

It’s a well written and poignant account of one man’s struggle with a harmful addiction to pornography.   Michael Leahy lost a lot of his life to porn.  It was difficult reading in places, because it didn’t appear that he left anything out.  I venture to guess that he was harder on himeself than he might have been on someone else.

Yet …

I’m struggling with this review.  I find I cannot say to everyone that it’s a must read.  Or even a need to read.  I’m struggling with some of the themes that Michael presented.  Most of all I find that I don’t agree with the pervasive sense of fear that is engendered by reading this book.

Is pornography America’s number one addiction?  I don’t know. It’s very likely.  I do know that it is an enormous stumbling block to making things right for women in my generation.  We will never have equality as long as large groups of men see women as sexual objects; toys for them to get their jollies on with.  In that regard, pornography is a sin.  It degrades God’s creation and abuses others.   The entire industry creates abuse … of the women, of the men of everyone associated with it.

In many ways sexual addictions are like food addiction.  If one is addicted to drugs or alcohol, one has the option of quitting cold turkey … never to face that temptation again.  However, if one has become addicted to looking at a woman’s body (for example) how does one go about quitting that?  Michael recounts his struggles with overcoming the addiction and how he broke it’s claim on his life very clearly.  He is at his best when he is telling about the personal cost of pornographic addiction.  There is much to be learned here and his private pain is worth the read.  But if I were a betting woman (and I’m not … my addiction is to caffeine), I would say that given Michael’s family of origin, he was vulnerable to an addiction of some sort from an early age.  It was his bad luck (?) that some dirty photos came his way.

The problem is, however, I don’t agree that everyone is vulnerable to pornography.  This seemed to be an underlying theme to the book.  When I finished the book, I felt vaguely unclean and as if I needed to follow my children around to obssess over their every internet move.  This is unnecessary.  We have established sane protocols with our children and I trust them.  We have good relationships.  They come to us with questions on a regular basis.  So I resented this seed of fear that got planted, and ripped it out summarily.

While I object to the pornography industry (deeply, sincerely, even bitterly).  While I also sympathize with the pain of Mr. Leahy’s addiction and recovery.  I find I can’t give this book an unqualified great review.  I felt too much fear emanating from it’s pages.  I am sensitive to fear.  Fear will lock us up and throw away the key if given the chance.  We must resist her siren song on all fronts.  There are many reasons to resist pornograpy and many, many reasons to help it’s victims, all of them … but fear is not one of them.

To Give Hope (The Missional Synchroblog)
Jun 23rd, 2008 by Sonja

So … here it is.  Today’s the day.  The day of the big synchroblog.  The big hitters are writing about this.  Fifty of us are writing to define the word “missional.”  When Rick sent out his call for this by blog and by e-mail (thank you, Rick), I thought, “Yeah … I do have something to say.”  In the intervening weeks though, my scattered thoughts have not gathered themselves.

I am no theologian.  I am not trained in exegesis or any of the other long scary unknowable words that people use to make themselves seem smart.  I am, at the end of the day, a teacher.  And a quilter (I love color)  And a story-teller.  So I will tell a story and teach a lesson about how I and my family are missional in the suburbs.  In our house missional means lawncare … among other things.

It all began with a door to nowhere.  Or more precisely, a door to our backyard with a 5 foot drop for a first step.  We lived in our house for 3 years with a french door that we could not use because, well, “Watch out for the first step, it’s a lou-lou.”  So we had a deck built.

Two guys built it.  I think they spoke about 10 words of English between the two of them.  Just enough to ask for the bathroom and water when they needed it.  We’d go out and admire their workmanship occasionally; they’d smile and nod.

During this time I was caring for a friend’s four children once a week while she and her husband went to marriage counseling.  It was the tradition for she and her kids to have dinner with us when the counseling was done.  One evening, it happened that the deck makers were also there.  We invited them to have dinner with us in the back yard.  We’d have eaten in the house, but we had no way to get the grilled meat into the house because of the construction.  We set up a plastic banquet table and paper plates. BlazingEwe and her FlamingLambs were here too.  The kids ate all over the yard and the grown ups ate together at the table.  I remembered about as much Spanish from highschool as they knew English.  So we were able to communicate over sticky drumsticks and gooey potato salad.  We all ate and smiled until our stomachs and faces were full.  It was one of the happiest meals I remember.

We’ve carried on the tradition since then.  Whenever people come to work on or around our home, we bring them water or share a meal with them depending on the circumstances.  This year, we’ve finally broken down and hired a lawncare service.  This has turned out to be a Hispanic man and his sons.  We don’t do lawn care with any regularity and our lawn has always been the po’white trash lawn on the block … a certain disgrace to a particular neighbor of ours.  It is the elder son who does the talking and negotiating with us.  He must be about LightGirl’s age, but sober and sturdy.  Responsible, quick and dependable.  They come whenever to mow our lawn, if we’re here we pay them, otherwise, they come another time for payment.  If we’re here, we take them water.  One evening the father was taking a little too long with his part and the sons played joyfully on our trampoline.  LightBoy joined them.  And the joy was exponential.  Our lawn has become beautiful in their capable hands, but more importantly we are slowly building a friendship with them.  Our goal is to invite them to a meal soon.  To share our hospitality with them.

You see, to me, missional is about giving hope in a world of gray.  It’s about smiling at people who routinely wear frowns.  I may never have the chance to speak the words of the Gospel to them in my outloud voice.  But I can say to my (agnostic) friend when her sense of being gets too tied up in her website, “You are more than that.  You are not your website.  You are beautiful and created for much more than that.”  Help her move beyond despair and into grace.

Missional is about loving my neighbor and that can be expressed in thousands of ways, but the thought that came into my head this morning and will not leave is the verse from Jeremiah that most people use in very different circumstances.  Jeremiah 29:11 … “1 For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”  Plans to give hope and a future.   You see that’s so often lacking in our world today.  Hope … AND a future.

So I speak hope into the lives of the people I know and the people I meet.  I try to know them and find the hope that is there.  Find the light that leads to the future and together we will walk towards God.

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This is part of a synchroblog that has been organized by Blind Beggar (Rick Meigs) that is hoping to clarify and define the term “missional.”  I have more than likely just muddied the waters with my craziness here.  But these other folks will have done a much better job than I, so please read them:

Alan Hirsch
Alan Knox
Andrew Jones
Barb Peters
Bill Kinnon
Brad Brisco
Brad Grinnen
Brad Sargent
Brother Maynard
Bryan Riley
Chad Brooks
Chris Wignall
Cobus Van Wyngaard
Dave DeVries
David Best
David Fitch
David Wierzbicki
DoSi
Doug Jones
Duncan McFadzean
Erika Haub
Grace
Jamie Arpin-Ricci
Jeff McQuilkin
John Smulo
Jonathan Brink
JR Rozko
Kathy Escobar
Kent Leslie
Len Hjalmarson
Makeesha Fisher
Malcolm Lanham
Mark Berry
Mark Petersen
Mark Priddy
Michael Crane
Michael Stewart
Nick Loyd
Patrick Oden
Peggy Brown
Phil Wyman
Richard Pool
Rick Meigs
Rob Robinson
Ron Cole
Scott Marshall
Stephen Shields
Steve Hayes
Tim Thompson
Thom Turner

Little Green Men (June Synchroblog)
Jun 19th, 2008 by Sonja

Green men It’s the latest fashion craze …

With the price of gas, now it’s financially wise …

And after years of eschewing the environment Christians are now flocking to the so-called green movement in droves.

Can I say this in my outloud voice?  I’m just a little bit cynical.

No, make that a lot cynical.  Cynical to the point of illness.  You see, I’ve been an environmentalist literally all my life.  I could just say, “I grew up in Vermont,” and most of you would understand.  But it was more than that.  I grew up understanding the devastating effects of pollution.  I’ve been cutting the plastic rings that encircle beer/soda cans since they came out … to protect water birds.  I cleaned road sides as a child and now as an adult I look at the trash on our roads and remember the animals who live in what has become a toilet.

We are a wasteful society and trash culture.  When we look at ourselves in the mirror, our culture of efficiency and productivity on one side of the coin, has created waste, trash and selfishness on the other side.  We cannot have low prices without using people and resources in ways that are abusive in the end.

We have had the technology for smarter cars and using less gas for thirty years.  Yet for the last ten years we have driven larger, and larger cars.  Look in any church parking lot, what do you see?  SUVs and minivans … an armada of them.

Look inside any church, what do you see?  An ocean of cheap plastic clothing.  Polyester, nylon … both derivatives of petroleum.  Made cheaply and at the expense of someone’s life in another country.   But here in the US?  We have been “good stewards” of our individual budgets.  Each family member has far too many clothes bought cheaply at the local deep-discount store.

I read on the wall of a Mennonite grocery store, “The cost of something is that amount of life which must be exchanged for it.”

Too often we have looked at our individual budgets, incomes and outgos and thought we were being “good stewards” of our money.  But have we been good stewards of our lives and of the lives of others?  Have we measured the cost of things in terms of the life that has been expended on it?  We look at cost in terms of dollars.  What if we began looking in terms of life exchanged?

What is that call on our lives?  Then perhaps, Christians truly would be little green men.

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There is small handful of us posting a SynchroBlog on Green Spirituality. The posts may not be up and running until Thursday afternoon:

Is it All About the Green? by Phil Wyman
Rediscovering Humanity’s Primal Commission by Adam Gonnerman
Turn or Burn? A New Liberal Hell? by Cobus van Wyngaard
Little Green Men by Sonja Andrews
Bashing SUV’s for Jesus by David Fisher
Saints and Animals by Steve Hayes
When Christians Weasel Out of Their Environmental Responsibilities by K.W. Leslie
Green Christian Manifesto by Matt Stone
God So Loved, by Sally Coleman

Girls’ Got Game
Jun 15th, 2008 by Sonja

Happy Father’s Day.

It’s one that will surely survive in our collective memory as a family.

It began early; as in 5:30 a.m. One last early rink time for the season. We all went. LightBoy’s game was on one sheet at 7:20; LightGirl’s on the other at 7:30. I ran through the golden arches for a delicious, nutritious breakfast. Yum. LightBoy lost. LightGirl tied. But none of that is memorable.

LightGirl has had a crush on a teammate for a while now. About a week ago she got some intel which suggested that he was more LightBoy’s age. This was completely embarassing. Humiliating. Horrifying. In her words, she felt like a pedophile. Ewweth. This morning before the game I discovered she had bad intel. Her crush was her age. I passed this information along after the game.

So what do you think she did? Well, what would you do? Given that you definitely wouldn’t be seeing the guy again til September and maybe not very much even then.

Has she ever been on a date? No.

Has she ever had a boyfriend? No.

Has she ever been in any kind of relationship of any sort other than friends with a boy? No.

Has she ever spoken more than say fifteen words in a row to this kid? Uhhh … no.

So, of course, it goes without saying … ask him out. Ask him, where? Just … you know … out. On a date. Sometimes the mom is stoo-pid.

It’s helpful too, to have a friend by your side who will act as your voice when you and the guy stand there staring at each other. So, her friend did the actual, you know, asking. She said, “So … LightGirl wants to know if you’d go to the movies or something?” He said, “Sure.” and they both stood there and looked at each other … stunned. So GirlFriend spoke up again and said, “Now it would be good if you exchanged phone numbers.” So they did that too.

Then she came flying around the corner to tell me all about it. Grinning from ear to ear.

She spent the next half an hour texting him. Now she is firmly, giddily ensconced on the phone and computer with her peeps giggling and reliving the event. Imagining what will come next. And ad finitum. It is quintessential adolescence.

And just like that LightHusband and I have crossed a rubicon. It came upon us and we were across it before we even realized that it was there. I never even heard the echo of my feet on wood as the footsteps bounced back from water.

We are lucky, I suppose. She’s very confident. The young man in question is kind, upright, and a decent hockey player. We now have decisions of heavy consequence to make. Where should they go? What should they do? Now that the question has been asked and answered, will the “date” actually even take place?

On another hand, our fortunes run much deeper than that. Our definition of what is quintessentially adolescent is light and air. It involves words like, “giddy” and “peeps.” She will (Lord willin’ an’ the creek don’t rise) complete her secondary education and go on to get a college level education of some sort. There are many, many parents in the 2/3’s world who never even begin to think these words, never mind associate them with children in their family. Yet most families in our world … our 1/3 world, that is the industrialized, civilized, mechanized, and importantly educated, world do have the opportunity to associate words like, “giddy” and “adolescence” and “grin” and “date” and “secondary education” and “college education” with our daughters. Not only do we have that opportunity, we make the assumption that it is the right and natural course of things.

Maslow's Hierarchy of NeedsAccording to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs being secure in our bodily needs allows us to become more secure with our friendships, family and relational intimacy. This in turn builds self-esteem, confidence, etc. It makes sense in a way. One cannot build relational intimacy, when one is deeply hungry for days and months on end. Or living in a place where the water is not reliable. It is simply not feasible. So most Westerner’s (we of the 1/3’s world) would tend to think of education as necessary yet expendable. After all, an education will not build security. It will not fill stomachs or healthily hydrate starving bodies. It will not keep peace among warring neighbors.

Or … will it?

What we are coming to find now is that the key to world peace might just be …

… our daughters. Our collective daughters. The brown ones, and tan ones and yellow ones and pink ones. It’s not that they need to rule the world. Far from it. They just need an education. It is having an education that gives them self-esteem and self-esteem begets relational intimacy which then allows for safety and security and then they can help their families fill their stomachs and hydrate their bodies. It seems that Maslow works for us, but it may just be upside down in other parts of the world.

Give these girls some time … time to be giddy and grow up. Time to learn. Time to be girls, then time to be women. Time to read. Time to calculate. Time to have a date or maybe two. Time to giggle. Time to achieve. Time to gain confidence in their righteous state as children of the Creator. Time to earn respect. Time to bestow respect. They need our time, so that they may have a little more time. And in so doing it is our collective daughters who may just change the world … one village at a time.

Missonal Synchroblog
Jun 14th, 2008 by Sonja

Blind Beggar (Rick Meigs) has put out a call for a synchroblog on Monday, June 23 to discuss the idea, the topic, the notion of missional. The word is losing it’s boundaries and becoming a catch-all word that people use because they think it’s the latest cool ministry word to throw around.

I’m going to add to his invitation here because he just posted the list of potential bloggers. As of now, there are 18 (eighteen). Seventeen men and me. Ladies, I’m feeling very lonely and sort of overwhelmed. Now, you know most of the men are going to post treatises that are wonderful (but long and, ahem, boring 😉 ) on definitions and complaints and they will “fix the problem.” We need to bring some balance to this mix. Some of our wonderful right-brain thinking. How do women view the concept of missional? It is a highly relational term. Hello!! This is our ballpark, jump in and write your thoughts on that concept. If you want to use poetry, or story or have a video … all the sweeter.

So, my girl friends, please either visit Rick’s blog to sign up and let him know you are participating or let me know in the comments and I will keep a list here for him.

The Clothes Make The (Wo)Man
Jun 9th, 2008 by Sonja

This photo is from the on-line gallery of Phillip Toledano (thanks to fellow Scriber, Ben).
Fashion

Sit with that photo for a minute. Allow your emotions to bubble up and give them names. Let them have their own stories just for a moment or so. See what those stories might be, if you don’t just shove the emotions down or wave them aside or tell them what to do.

Now, think for a moment about how intimidated you feel when standing in the presence of someone who is dressed “to the nines.” How intimidated you feel when you walk into a room or space and suddenly you realize … you are not dressed the same as everyone else there. You’ll never be able to dress like everyone else there.

Now you have the sense of modesty that Paul was trying to instill in Timothy when he wrote, “I also want women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety, not with braided hair or gold or pearls or expensive clothes, but with good deeds, appropriate for women who profess to worship God.” His concern was not for sexual purity, but that the women would set a tone of hospitality and welcoming.

Our clothes tell people something about us. They tell a story about who we are before people ever get to know us. When we use those clothes to engage in power and manipulation to subdue others in our presence … by whatever means, we are negating the power of the Gospel in the very space that the Gospel is to be transcendent.

So … how should we dress? Well … that’s up to you and your particular dance with the Holy Spirit. See, none of us is the same. The rules are all the same, yet they’re all different. All we can do is ask questions of each other … where do you live? How do your neighbors dress? What are the local standards? What is welcoming amongst them? How do you create a welcoming environment in your space, where you are free to proclaim the Good News to people so they will hear it from you?

Friends Are The Family You Choose
Jun 7th, 2008 by Sonja

amber & iToday marked a milestone of sorts.

One day about 14 years ago I signed up to take a meal to a woman who’d just had some sort of surgery. She had two small children and her husband worked alot of hours. The family were members of our church and it was the beneficent thing to do. The children were about 4 and 1 (at the time) and LightGirl was around 6 months old. I figured I’d drop the meal off, say a few words and leave. It was around LightGirl’s naptime afterall. I think I left about 3 hours later.

The way I figure it I think we’ve spent the equivalent of a year of our lives on the phone together. Most of that laughing. I spent the wee hours of the morning with her oldest two when child number three joined them, and then child four and then finally, child number five (who is now five).

Child number 2 and number 3 are LightGirl and LightBoy’s ages … they have grown up together.

The oldest, a girl, graduated from highschool yesterday. A milestone of sorts. My first friend to have a child graduating from highschool. More than that though … I’ve known this girl virtually her whole life. I remember more about the funny things these children said when they were little, than my blood nieces and nephews. We hid out together during tornado watches and cooked chicken feet one day. We’ve watched each other’s children for overnights and for vacations.

signing the quiltWe fell away from each other for a few years for no particular reason. We staying in sporadic contact, but falling off of a cliff in the middle of the mines of Moria made me a little difficult to reach for a while. So when we received the invitation to her graduation party, our whole family was delighted. Even better was LaughingEye’s reaction when she opened the door this afternoon. Her whole body radiated joy.

I made her an album quilt … a quilt with space for her friends and family to sign. She was thrilled. I am thrilled. And I sat, absorbed back into my friend’s family and realized that friends really are the family you choose.

amber and her quilt

On Watching A Dream Come True
Jun 5th, 2008 by Sonja

I woke up this morning with these words echoing around in my head:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

They were spoken in a voice that is different from my voice. A rich deep baritone that is familiar to all of us. This clip is familiar to many of us. I have fuzzy, crackly memories of those words when they were first spoken, crackly and fuzzy on the radio in our house in Kansas. I was two and something. Those words were repeated over and over throughout my childhood.

Twenty years later when I was 22 and something I stood down on the Mall and listened as those words and that speech was re-enacted. I looked around at the poverty and disparity and dispaired of the words ever having truth.

Forty years later when I was 42 and something I listened to those words each year with my children and we talked about what they mean, and who this man was.

Now I’m 47. I woke up this morning and realized I’m watching this dream come true. On August 28, 2008 … 45 years to the day later, Barack Obama will accept the nomination for the Democratic Party.

This year. This election. We’re choosing hope. We’re looking at the content of someone’s character and not the color of their skin. Yes, Amen and all good things, we’re choosing hope. Let justice roll down like a mighty river and may grace abound …

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