September 2009
9 posts
Incredible
Helen Parr (to her son): "Everyone's special, Dash."
Dash: "Which is another way of saying no one is."
Watched The Incredibles last night with London. What a good movie.
I especially appreciated the blatant call to greatness. With so many people embracing, even praising, mediocrity, I'm happy to expose my daughter to something bigger.
I love that the movie celebrates being fully oneself--not hiding talents or abilities to fit in. That it encourages parents and society as a whole not to hold our children back--or ourselves.
Maybe it's a stretch, but I feel this way about Christians. I feel like we're too often encouraged (if not explicitly then certainly by example) to tone down the God-talk when out in the world. New Christians with big dreams of service and sacrifice find those dreams minimized as naivete or childishness. We sometimes even ridicule another's faith for being too big. And it's not because we don't love one another. It's because we do, and we want to spare one another the troubles of being different.
We're Christians who don't understand the super power that comes from living a God-filled life. We want normal, and we're sacrificing incredible to get it.
While we could be out saving the world, we're trying instead to fit our potential into a tiny cubicle.
“If you watched a movie about a guy who wanted a Volvo and worked for years to...”
– Donald Miller’s new book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years
This is the first page, and already I’m hooked.
Edwina: The Dinosaur Who Didn't Know She Was...
Yes, again with the weird Mo Willems books. Today it’s Edwina: The Dinosaur Who Didn’t Know She Was Extinct, a book about faith.The faith part isn’t on the cover or anything, but if you read this book and you miss that part you probably didn’t actually read the book.
Edwina is a dinosaur who does good things for people. She bakes cookies. She does favors. “Everyone...
Noah
I started talking about Noah in Bible class tonight and I almost couldn’t stop. He has always been, for me, bigger than life. Not just because he listened to God and built a boat—a very big boat—and probably looked insane as a result. Not just because he was the only person in the world who had faith in God. For me, Noah is a hero because he was faithful and because he was...
Comic Timing
I just ran into a friend whose husband lost his job several months ago. I hadn’t seen her since I heard, so I was pretty surprised to see she was expecting. She and her husband had wanted a baby for ten years but hadn’t been able to conceive. Just weeks after the firing, they found out about the baby. And all they could do was laugh and laugh and laugh.
Her husband has since found a...
Ditches
It seems like when I fast one of two attitudes plagues me. Either, (1) I hear this voice saying, “It’s no big deal. God didn’t specifically ask for you to do this. You can quit whenever you want. Eat something!” Or (2) I feel tremendously guilty when I do things I’m not fasting from. I’ll turn on the TV and think, “Oh, I’m not supposed to be doing...
“The difficult thing about days is that they must be repeated.”
– Kathleen Norris in Acedia and Me
Lately, I’ve been struggling with repetition. In particular, cleaning the highchair. Before London was born I chose all sorts of baby gear items: a crib, a stroller, a highchair. But I had no idea what I needed. So I picked a highchair without a removable...
Mary
Thinking this morning about Mary, Jesus’ mother. I’ve been trying to decide whether it would have been really easy for Mary to believe in Jesus or really hard.
At first I thought it might be easy. Every mother believes in her child; we can’t help it. Even mothers with rotten kids think they’re angels. Surely Jesus was an exceptional kid. Why not have faith in him? It seems...
Run Away
Watching London play this morning I noticed how terrible she is at fighting temptation. Here’s her technique:
1. Get as close as she can to the temptation. Sometimes she will put her face just inches away from the thing that’s off limits (What? She’s not touching it.)
2. Get friendly with the temptation. She smiles at it, waves to it, and otherwise communicates,...
