emotions are not a bad thing

Thanks to Stott - yet again - for a great thought-starter...via today's Daily Thought email:

No warmth within:
Some preachers have a great horror of emotionalism. So have I, if this means the artificial stirring of the emotions by rhetorical tricks or other devices. But we should not fear genuine emotion. If we can preach Christ crucified and remain altogether unmoved, we must have a hard heart indeed. More to be feared than emotion is cold professionalism, the dry, detached utterance of a lecture which has neither heart nor soul in it. Do man's peril and Christ's salvation mean so little to us that we feel no warmth rise within us as we think about them?

From "The Preacher's Portrait" (London: Tyndale Press, 1961), p. 51.

I tend to distrust a highly emotional plea or sermon from anyone. And in my own comings and goings, I often want to discount emotions because of their seemingly 'unfounded' nature, but the truth is they are a very real part of how God created us, and clearly have their place.

And what's funny (read: strange, not haha) is that as much as I distrust the overly emotional...I equally distrust the complete lack thereof.

It's not at all what Stott is addressing, but I wonder what this means for the times when I have sat at a stoplight, inches from a homeless person begging for money, and sat in my car without making eye contact - but weeping because of the sadness of the situation and my sometimes cold or fearful or judgmental heart that is so paralyzed by indecision on how to respond in these moments that all I can do by way of response is weep for their heart and my own...

That sure does feel real to me. But if it's all I ever do...is it enough? I submit that it is not.

sign #78 proving that I am, in fact, a dork

There are two totally obscure 'national days' within a week of each other that both bring incredible amounts of joy to my heart.

1. September 19th was National Talk Like a Pirate Day. How fun is that?! I am, for the record, horrible at talking like a pirate (which any of you who follow my twitter feed probably noted), and I don't know any pirates. But I did love the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies (yeah, all of them), and I did buy a t-shirt that says "To err is human...to Arr is PIRATE". I wore it out to dinner on Saturday night, and got a few funny looks, but one "Ohhh...that's right...it's Talk Like a Pirate day comment". It made my night.
   
   
2. Today is National Punctuation Day. Oh, the corners of my heart that are lit by the celebration of all the little squiggles, dots, and dashes that - used correctly - help us communicate with each other. At least that's what the grammar nazi in me says.
   

See? Total dork.

baked beans

I have a can of Heinz Baked Beans that lives in my desk drawer along with all my work snacks and other such paraphernalia.

My English friend who was working here in Houston for a couple of months insisted on leaving it with me when he left...in February. Since I eat like a hobbit, I have seen it about 50 times (2 or 3 times a day, 5 times a week) since then.

Now, what my English friend apparently didn't know about me is that I think I can count the number of times I’ve eaten baked beans in my entire life on two hands – including the 3 years I lived in England, where they are a diet staple along the lines of our Mac & Cheese or PBJ sandwiches. [Aside: the beans section at every grocery in England is about as varied in selection as our cereal aisles. I'm not exaggerating.]

I’m not sure why it took me six months to share this random bit of life with you, my dear reader(s?), but it’s probably due to the fact that I don’t feel like I’ve got 2 working brain cells to rub together but am desperately trying to do some work in my currently jet-lagged state, and I just went rummaging for yet another snack to keep me going. And then I saw the beans...

So, what does one do with one random can of non-perishable food that will never be eaten? It would be weird to just drop the one can in a food bank barrel. Right?

the little things #37

One of the greatest joys of humanity is the pursuit of perfecting something.

Whether it's day after day of experimenting to find the exact best temperature for a cup of hot tea or variations on complementary ingredients to find the optimal blend for the perfect cream cheese icing for red velet cake...the joy is in the pursuit, I'm finding.

Getting it wrong time after time, but always increasing in quality and pleasure...even though each attempt is joyful, the process itself ends up bringing pleasure too.

I'm confident this applies to other realms of life, but let's be honest: I love good great food (and drink).

breakfast rant

I'm out of bread. So I had to buy breakfast at the deli in my work building.

My standard fare is at the deli is a bagel with peanut butter...but the nice lady who runs the deli stopped serving peanut butter a while back because of that scare or whatever it was. She's still not selling it.

So, I brought my own jar into the office a couple of weeks ago for mornings such as these.

But I have this problem where I forget to pay attention to how much I'm paying for dinner, or a dress, etc. Enter building deli.

I just realized that I paid $1.29 for a plain toasted bagel...which, by the way, is the SAME PRICE I pay when she puts peanut butter on it. Even with that, it was already a complete rip-off!!

The best part? I only eat half of the bagel. So I essentially paid $1.29 for 1/2 a bagel. And toasted bagels don't "keep".

Isn't a package of SIX bagels something between $2.00 and $3.00 at the grocery?

How does this woman get away with these prices??? Because people like me keep paying them.

So annoyed right now.

here comes paddy

As St. Patrick's Day approaches, I thought it worth re-posting a blurb from around this same time last year, when I was fresh off the boat (well, plane) from spending a second Paddy's Day in Dublin.

So, as a recap, they would say either "St. Patrick's Day" OR "Paddy's Day", but never "St. Paddy's Day".

Also worth noting is that the Irish don't generally spell the shortened "Patrick" with a double T (at least not in this context). I know...it defies the grammarian's logic, but it's their saint, not mine.

So, any combination of the above that includes "...Patty..." is downright unthinkable.

Don't shoot the messenger. I'm just trying to be a blessing.

Slainte, y'all!!

this inquiring mind wants to know

Not that I was really working on it, but this morning I think I realized I know one of the first questions - if not THE first question - I want to ask God (after of course spending millions of years prostrate in worship) when I get to Heaven.

It's actually a two-part question:

1. What did he put in coffee that makes it so dang fabulous?
   
   
2. Did the person who thought it might be a good idea to grind up the beans, steep them in boiling water and then drink the juice love Jesus back? ...because I'm gonna want to hug that person for about a hundred years.

random Monday thoughts

I know I'm supposed to be in a montage (which I'm very much enjoying by the way), but I've already had some AHA! moments, which don't usually happen mid-montage. Yay!

I'm falling in love with my church. Double yay! I was already deeply in like with my church, for the record.

I never read To Kill a Mockingbird*, and I HATED Mockingbird: A portrait of Harper Lee. But there is one thing about Harper Lee's life that I absolutely am jealous of...and it's that someone gave her money to quit her job for a year so she could just write. That's amazing.

You can learn a lot from hanging out with 2-year olds.

Specialized and I are going to survive the hills to Austin.


And finally, the John Stott daily email hit another home run today:

A paradox of Christian living:
It is one of the great paradoxes of Christian living that the whole church is called (and every member of it) as much to involvement in the world as to separation from it, as much to 'worldliness' as to 'holiness'. Not to a worldliness which is unholy, nor to a holiness which is unworldly, but to 'holy worldliness', a true separation to God which is lived out in the world -- the world which he made and sent his Son to redeem.

--From "Christ the Controversialist"

*Don't freak out. I didn't read most of what I was supposed to in school. I'm also the girl who never saw Gone With the Wind or Casablanca, etc.

along came dovie

Have you seen "Along Came Polly" with Ben Stiller and Phillip Seymour Hoffman?

In the film, Phillip is a washed up child actor who hires a camera crew to follow him around and tells people that they are doing an "E! True Hollywood Story" about his life. Bless his heart.

I often find myself thinking about my own life as if someone were making a movie of it. I haven't yet pulled together funds to hire my own camera crew, though I'm sure - with the right advertising campaign - the ticket sales would be off the charts.

So, on this whole 'movie about my life thing'...I started to write a post about entering another music montage, and realized I've done that twice already, originally in 2006. But here I am again - nothing new under the sun and all - and looking forward to the next few weeks of music and seeing highlights reel someday.

If you can remember that they really are the stuff of life, montages can be so beautiful.

gutting news

This just in:

Almost all of my training rides for the MS150 conflict with local public showings of the Rugby 6 Nations matches.

Further, Comcast does not provide Setanta Sports in Houston (it's a luxury apparently provided only to their Bostonian customers), so I can’t even order the channel at home and DVR them for later viewing.

I’m positively gutted. Truly. I'm not even close to kidding.

So...if you:
1. Live in Houston
2. Have access to Setanta via Satellite (or some other such thing)
3. Love, like, or can even just tolerate rugby
4. Are looking for a new best friend

...I'm your girl. Call me.