new york grid system bw

Not Giving Allegiance To The Grid

- - Life With God, Uncategorized

You should see The Cruise. It’s a documentary about Timothy “Speed” Levitch, a completely not normal seeming guy, who’s a double-decker tour bus guide in Manhattan. There’s a great scene where he’s recalling a conversation he had with one of his tourists. He’d been talking to her about “the grid plan,” the layout of avenues and streets in square blocks all over Manhattan. Talking about how the grid plan emanates from a lie and how he’d really like to blow it up and rewrite the streets to be (as he puts it): “much more a self portraiture of our personal struggles rather than some real estate broker’s wet dream from 1807.”

timothy levitch picture bw

Apparently the tourist is a little taken aback. She says, “I never even thought of that. I can’t even imagine that. Everyone likes the grid plan. How could you not like the grid plan? It’s so functional. Everyone likes the grid plan.”

As he’s recalling this conversation in the film Levitch is really… Read More

bees

You Swirling Tornado of a Human Being

- - Life With God, Uncategorized

note: picture above is from the field at the end of my favorite walking/running trail near my home – the trail ends in a wide-open field – the stacks of wooden boxes are bee hives, and they are from Yakima, WA – some 137 miles away from Maple Valley.

*     *     *     *

The following is a poem entitled “We Are The People” by Naomi Shihab Nye…

*     *     *     *

We are the people

always going somewhere else. What is this peculiar attribute of our households, our days, our nation? We will not be here long enough to get tired of it. Does this make us less responsible? It’s that relationship you have with a towel when the towel belongs to a hotel.

If we can’t go anywhere else, are we more encouraged to enhance and protect the place where we are?

Hmmmmmm. Bzzzzzzzz.

We should do all we can to stay out of jail, but now and then it is quite uplifting to… Read More

aunt bethany jesus i pledge

When We Are As Confused As Aunt Bethany

- - Life With God, Uncategorized

I do realize the statement I’m about to make is a divisive one – some will cheer me on while others will boo, hiss, or even call into question my salvation. What is this bold claim?

National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation is a great film.

In fact, I have so many “favorite scenes” in this movie, to describe them all to you would end up being me paraphrasing the whole thing from start to finish. I trust you’ll do what’s right and watch it yourself.

But I will share just one of my favorite scenes with you…

It’s where the big-crazy-extended-family is… Read More

neighbor fiction

Commit The Neighbor = Me Fiction Until…

- - Life With God, Uncategorized

One of our greatest human traits is compassion, which means, literally, “to suffer with another.” But this high art is seldom born in an instant as a response to watching the TV “news,” or even in response to firsthand experience.

More often compassion’s seeds are sewn via a preliminary magic known as empathy.

And empathy begins with a fictive act:

What would it be like to be that black girl four rows in front of me?  a little white girl wonders in school one morning.

Her imagination sets to work, creating unwritten fiction. In her mind she becomes the black girl, dons her clothes, accent, skin, joins her friends after school, goes home to her family, lives that life. No firsthand experience is taking place. Nothing “newsworthy” is happening. Yet a white-girl-turned-fictitiously-black is linking skin hue to… Read More

sunday shout outs 2015

Availability, Vulnerability, & The Fragility of Presence

- - Guest Posts, Life With God, Uncategorized

On Sundays, I like to give a few shout-outs – sharing with you what I enjoyed online this past week. Here are two excellent posts worth your time:

nathan foster post

1. This Post: Practicing Availability & Vulnerability by Nathan Foster. Here’s my favorite line(s): A quote from my friend Robert speaks so strongly and deeply to my predicament:

“Busyness is greed.”

By filling my life with events, activities, and responsibilities that far exceed the boundaries God has set for humans to function well, I am being greedy. Greedy for… Read More

anthropologists

Are You Prepared To Be A Kingdom Anthropologist?

- - Life With God, Uncategorized

I see that all are carrying the weight of their own histories—an entire world riding piggy on each back. They’re all fighting their own battles, wearing their own scars, bleeding from their own wounds, pushing through their own struggles.

We’ve all got chains and walls and masks and metals. We’re all haunted by devils and ghosts and lies and losses.

I see that you and you and all of you are bent with your own heaviness, just like I’m doubled over with mine. I see humanity has seven billion different molecular codes informing their responses and reactions, comebacks, knee jerks, wisecracks—persuading the spectrum of their emotions and decisions.

I see the guy who seems whole on the outside—his features are symmetrical and his clothes are pressed just so and his teeth are advertisement white—but his soul limps half-cocked like a zombie, diseased and mostly dead.

I see the one in the dark-alley shadows who perpetuates unspeakable evil, and I look at him extra long, taking the time to trace his life backward in my imagination with the hope of understanding what… Read More

whole world

So The Whole World Falls In

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Evangelism as embodied by Jesus… implies the all-embracing love evident in Mother Teresa’s prayer:

May God break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in.

Not just her fellow nuns, Catholics, Calcuttans, potential converts. The whole world.

It gives me pause to realize that, were such a prayer said by me and answered by God, I would afterward possess a heart so open that even hate-driven zealots would fall inside. There is a self-righteous knot in me that finds zealotry so repugnant it wants to… Read More

malchus

Why Did Jesus Tell Them To Buy Swords?

- - Life With God, Uncategorized

A friend recently asked me the following question:

My reading this morning is in the latter chapters of Luke. The Last Supper is finished, they’re heading for the garden and what Jesus knows is His arrest and murder. He tells the disciples to bring swords. They say they have two, and He says “It’ll do.” Off they go.

Yet, in John, when stuff starts to go down and Peter actually uses one of those swords, Jesus tells him to put it away, because answering violence with violence is not the answer. Then He fixes the damage that Peter did.

So here’s the conundrum:

Why did Jesus tell them to bring swords in the first place?

If He didn’t want anybody using them, why did He… Read More