Forgive us Lord, this transgression

We of little imagination

Lost in the night of pace

Alone in the market place

Permit us to see the fire

In the desert a pillar

To free our creativity

From industrial captivity

The first born were not enough

Confused, their very lives are snuffed

Standing on the other side

Watching our captors, swallowed alive

O glorious day

We do celebrate

But how soon we forget the task at hand

Is a journey to the Promised Land

Categories: Creativity, Poetry
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I met Gloria a few years ago, and I immediately knew she was special. My first instinct was to work an angle to capture her on film somehow, thankfully that pursuit proved impossible and I had to settle for something much better. I don’t even feel quite right about trying to describe her at all anymore.

Some have discovered her art and poetry, but only a few will have the privilege to walk in her garden.

• www.gloriavalentic.com

Categories: Mentors, Poetry, Neighbors, Art
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The record of technology as a science–relieving human beings of specific burdens and diseases–is splendid. The record of technology as a metaphor for being human is disastrous. When technology is used to win wars it becomes the atomic bomb. When it is used to control human sexuality, it becomes the destruction of millions of unborn lives and, in contraception, all too often fosters the disengagement of fruitfulness from love.

The biggest cultural mistake we can indulge in is to yearn for technological “solutions” to our deepest cultural “problems.”

~Andy Crouch, Culture Making

• 
  Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling
  Author: Andy Crouch

Categories: Culture, Technology, Books
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There are those who regard specialization as one of the great empowering virtues of our culture. After all, many of our most splendid achievements are the fruit of the hard-won specialized knowledge of highly focused experts, not of interdisciplinary dilettantes. But while great accomplishment can certainly be credited to the best sort of narrow-mindedness, it must also be acknowledged that many of our culture’s worst intellectual, practical, and spiritual failures are likewise consequences (and not all of them unintended) of attending to the details of life (especially the physical details) while neglecting the Big Picture–indeed, in many cases while denying the possibility of there even being a Big Picture.

I am convinced that the Church and her neighbors are in dire need of well-educated generalists–men and women whose intellects and lives offer an alternative to the destructive tendencies of our age’s habit of hyperspecialization.

~Ken Myers, Mars Hill Audio June Letter

I think this is a pretty accurate call to holistic thinking in a modern atmosphere of atomized thought lives. At first glance I couldn’t help but to balk at this apparent about face from the last few interviews of the MHA journal focusing on focus and the need for attentiveness. But the more I think about it, the more I see the higher calling that is presented here.


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Categories: Professionalism, Mars Hill Audio
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Dear friend,

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

~Rainer Maria Rilke

Delivered by a neighborhood friend at just the right time.

Categories: Advice, Poetry, Neighbors
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Discovery of the West

My father describes

An adventurous time

Just before the credit line

Rescued from the draft by childhood infirmity

1965 built a damn for California’s prosperity

Simple stories of work and wonder

A feeling of jealousy

My inquiries do uncover

Like a time traveler

With a busted machine

I’m stranded in a scene

From the future obscene

A small world of facts and figures

At 32 I have far too many answers

Categories: Poetry, Family
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I ran away

To her secret garden

Pine needles and leafy cover

Potted plants and nurtured ground

A place soaked by love found

Attention and care of a mother

Conversations for sure

But a wounded spirit better still

Vulgar words that heal

One place that is real

Most are ready not to receive

Nothing forced will be perceived

Only wind, water, and sun will allow it to grow

The perfect pleasure of being known

Respect for age for sure

But the art of life mediates pure

You only can take a little at a time

Surprise is the messenger of sublime

Categories: Poetry, Neighbors
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Or are you so well satisfied with what you are, that you have never sought eternal life, never hungered and thirsted after the righteousness of God, the perfection of your being? If this latter be your condition, then be comforted; the Master does not require of you to sell what you have and give to the poor. You follow Him! You go with Him to preach good tidings!–you who care not for righteousness! You are not one whose company is desirable to the Master. Be comforted, I say: He does not want you; he will not ask you to open your purse for Him; you may give or withhold: it is nothing to Him…. Go and keep the commandments. It is not come to your money yet. The commandments are enough for you. You are not yet a child in the kingdom. You do not care for the arms of your Father; you value only the shelter of His roof. As to your money, let the commandments direct you how to use it. It is in you but pitiable presumption to wonder whether it is required of you to sell all that you have… for the Young Man to have sold all and followed Him would have been to accept God’s patent of peerage: to you it is not offered.

~George MacDonald; Carrion Comfort

• 
  George MacDonald
  Author: C. S. Lewis

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Categories: Money, George MacDonald, Quotes, Bible Study, Books
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The essence of childhood is innocence. The essence of youth is awareness. The essence of adulthood is responsibility. This book is for people and a Christian community on the threshold of cultural responsibility.

What is most needed in our time are Christians who are deeply serious about cultivating and creating but who wear that seriousness lightly—who are not desperately trying to change the world but who also wake up every morning eager to create.

I hope friends will read this book and begin to envision their friendships not just as the companionship of compatible individuals but as potentially transformative partnerships in the places where they live, study, work and play.

~Andy Crouch, Culture Making

• 
  Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling
  Author: Andy Crouch

I am looking forward to having a good many conversations shaped by this reading. Very thankful for the voices helping the boy and the cynic find a place where we can both play fair.

Categories: Culture, Creativity, Encouragement, Art, Books
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Our Nonage

The number of fools not yet acknowledging the first condition of manhood nowise alters the fact that he who has begun to recognize duty and acknowledge the facts of his being, is but a tottering child on the path of life. He is on the path: he is as wise as at the time he can be; the Father’s arms are stretched out to receive him; but he is not therefore a wonderful being; not therefore a model of wisdom; not at all the admirable creature his largely remaining folly would, in his worst moments (that is, when he feels best) persuade him to think himself; he is just one of God’s poor creatures.

~ George MacDonald

• 
  George MacDonald
  Author: C. S. Lewis

I think I am going to be spending a lot of time with this wise old Scottish Christian full of hard truth, tender guidance, and humorous observations.

Categories: George MacDonald, Mentors, Poetry, Quotes, Books
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Today we listen to stories told by strangers from New York, Nashville, and Los Angeles and we tell our stories to the police and psychiatrists.

~Wendell Berry, The Work of Local Culture

• 
  What Are People For?: Essays
  Author: Wendell Berry

Over the past 6 years I have had the good fortune of living in the same suburban neighborhood of Livonia Michigan; some call it Clements Circle, others “the hood”, and to a few its known as “the SuperHood”.

Looking back its hard to measure the value of living in a neighborhood where you can know your neighbors. I am especially fortunate seeing as a good handful of my neighborhood relationships trace their roots back to college, almost 10 years ago now.

Getting to know people takes time. The pace of today’s scattered life activity hardly encourages the slow process of becoming known and knowing your neighbors. Fortunately I have some very hospitable neighbors, and a dog that likes to get around the neighborhood… so I have been able to meet a few over the past 5 years.

Joe Chapp helped me (I watched mostly, note the difference in shirt soiling above) pull out a couple of especially stubborn bushes back in 2005 and since then I have been invited out to a regular evening bonfire complete with pizza and box wine. In these evenings of casual neighborhood discussion and story telling I have learned much about the Chapp family history, struggles, and whimsical life enjoyments. There is a strange sort of comfort that comes from this activity of simply sharing, life just makes a lot of sense when presented in this context.

And aside from the general feelings of comfortableness there are specific encouragements and challenges. I learned that the Chapp family prays for the neighborhood regularly, including the success of my business; what a humbling honor. I also learned that the bus comes at 7:50 and it would mean a lot to the Chapps’ if I would look out for their daughter and make sure she makes it onto the bus without incident. Talk about tangible community responsibility and a reason to get up on time.

People used to practice what they called “sitting till bedtime”, where neighbors used to walk across the fields to sit in someone else’s home until dark and then go home and they would tell stories about themselves and people who had died and the children would hear the stories.

~Ken Myers on “The Work of Local Culture”

• Mars Hill Audio Journal

Categories: Community, Encouragement, Prayer, Relationships, Compliments
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Thanks to a friend of mine’s nimble ticket purchasing mouse clicks myself and several of my best friends were able to take in a show of the “Flight of the Choncords“, if you have never heard of them, just know they are the 4th best band in New Zealand. The humor is understated, self deprecating, and occasionally a bit vulgar… but in more moments than not it slays me.

I laughed, cried, and hit the seat of the poor guy in front of me for the duration of the two hour show. My friends were amused at my enjoyment, and for a moment I paused to consider if I should have laughed at everything that night. Most likely not, but in that moment I was consoled by a reminder of the immediate value of anything that allows us to whimsically forget ourselves and enjoy life.

Could God be more pleased by 5 minutes of our selfless enjoyment of the most trivial activity than 1000 hours of begrudged self conscious community service?

Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s ground. I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is His invention, not ours. He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden. Hence we always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that in which it is least natural, least redolent of its Maker, and least pleasurable.

~The ScrewTape Letters, Chapter 9

• 
  The Screwtape Letters
  Author: C. S. Lewis

Categories: Humor, Music
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