Loving Yourself

"And then the sentiment occurred.  I am certain it was the voice of God because it was accompanied by such a strong epiphany like a movement in a symphony or something.  The sentiment was simple: Love your neighbor as yourself.


"And I thought about that for a second and wondered why God would put that phrase so strongly in my mind...He was saying I would never talk to my neighbor the way I talked to myself, and that somehow I had come to believe it was wrong to kick other people around but it was okay to do it to myself.  It was as if God had put me in a plane and flown me over to myself so I could see how I was connected, all the neighborhoods that were falling apart because I would not let myself receive love from myself, from others, or from God.  And I wouldn't receive love because it felt so wrong.  It didn't feel humble, and I knew I was supposed to be humble.  But that was all crap, and it didn't make any sense.  If it is wrong for me to receive love, then it is also wrong for me to give it because by giving it I am causing somebody else to receive it, which I had presupposed was the wrong thing to do.  So I stopped.  And I mean that.  I stopped hating myself.  It no longer felt right...


"And so I have come to understand that strength, inner strength, comes from receiving love as much as it comes from giving it.  I think apart from the idea that I am a sinner and God forgives me, this is the greatest lesson I have ever learned.  When you get it, it changes you...God's love will never change us if we don't accept it."

Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz

A Few of the Thousand Words

I love how some pictures really do tell a story.

This picture is from a couple weeks ago when two other friends came to visit for the day.  Watching four kids 3yrs and under proved to be a good motivator to get me in bed early that night from pure exhaustion!

I was trying to get them all on the step to snap a group shot and the fact that I actually thought that would be any kind of doable is pretty funny now.  This is as close as I got.

I just adore this photo.  Connor is swiping a tomato (he kept calling them "apples") with one hand, but with the other still safely on his friend so he doesn't get too far away.  Aaron is re-chalking Caitlin's nose--her nose was already blue but he thought she needed more--right after this photo he put some on his nose too.  Caitlin is loving it, getting "dolled up" while in her blue tutu, her favorite piece of clothing right now.  And Marianna (the youngest of the bunch) is on her way out of the shot, she was done posing after a few short seconds!  She is determined, that girl!

This was the shot immediately before the one above, and I guess it does look a bit more organized, although not by much!

Do some of your pictures tell you a thousand words?

Sheer Panic

Back patio. 6pm. Hose draped over edge of kiddie pool, with sprayer set to "super, most powerfulfest* stream" to ensure fastest possible transfer of H2O so kids can play as soon as they're done supper.

Five minutes later

Pool is still filling, kids are done eating.  Kids come outside under strict instruction "not to touch the hose!"  They don't touch it.  They are doing very well at waiting...

I turned my back for a minute and suddenly the water spray sounded different.

Connor, waiting at the edge of the pool, suddenly had that "super, most powerfulfest stream" in his face from only two feet away. The hose had slipped of the edge of the pool, changing the water direction.  I mean, of ALL the directions it could have pointed-!

The look on his face was just as you'd imagine--total shock, sheer panic.  I'm sure that's what it looks like when someone is seeing his whole18 months of life flash before his eyes.

I rescued him in like 3.4 seconds flat.  Happy to say that as of this evening he is alive, well and dry.

As I'm sitting here visualizing his expression and the unbelievable coincidence that the water happened to hit him directly in the face, I can't help but chuckle to myself about it... which I'm sure that qualifies me for the worst mom of the year award...I mean, laughing at your kids' near death experiences?

Oh man.  But it was the best face.

(picture is from when he went under the water while playing last month on our trip to Oklahoma. another great face.)
*this word was inspired by this hilarious commercial

Is What the Bible Really Means Always So Obvious?

A fascinating comment on a blog post I was reading today, regarding how we read the Bible (emphasis mine):

I have lately seen the difficulty of reaching agreement on the "meaning of texts" with others who perhaps are not as familiar with the methods of historical-critical exegesis of the Bible. The norm for interpreting the Bible seems to be either 1)just opening it up and applying the words on the page to ourselves with no consideration of the context that God was addressing, or else 2)a flat harmonizing ("analogy of Scripture") that ignores the point that God was trying to make through the individual authors.

As Gordon Fee said, the culprit is historical exegesis, the demand that we understand what God was saying through the biblical authors to the people "there and then" before we then take it and transfer it to the "here and now." I think this is where we lose the people who accuse us of ignoring what the text "obviously means." It seems most Christians in America are taught that they are to just open the Bible and receive from it whatever they believe God is giving, without any mediation from the believing community, those who have been in the faith longer, or even those whom God has gifted with an understanding of the original languages and culture.

The response from the blogger:

...you are quite right about the endless belief that one can simply understand the Bible by reading some translation and thinking about it. This is seldom true when we are dealing with complex texts precisely because we bring too much of our modern assumptions to the reading of the text.