The Last Illusion August 27, 2009

I’ve been thinking about love lately – mostly about God’s immense love for me (and everyone) and the pathetically small amount of love I have for others.  Even the love I do have is darkly stained with selfishness.  I’m aware of how opportunistic I am in relationships – I play the game of affection, of support, so that I can get the same.  Is there an ounce of disinterested love in my heart?  I’m not sure. 

Sometimes I become more aware of my selfish love (which, I suppose, is an oxymoron if you’re going by true 1 Cor. 13 terms) when I start pitying myself.  I feel sad that I haven’t had anyone to talk to lately, that I feel like my friends are too busy for me or not interested enough to take initiative in our relationship.  It seems like I can go for a while, like a day or something, loving and not asking for anything in return. But once again that desire wells up and gnaws at me, wanting to be stroked and pitied like an ugly bulgy-eyed dog. 

I need to realize that this is part of human nature…and I’m not above it.  At one point in The Great Divorce a character says this about earthly love: “[...] what we called love down there was mostly the craving to be loved.  In the main I loved you for my own sake: because I needed you.”  Tough words to swallow, but true all the same.  The amazing part is, that same character,  made whole in Heaven, no longer needs anyone.  She says that she is truly in love; in Love Himself and finds herself full and needing nothing.  Oh, how I want that! 

The Switchfoot song “Let That Be Enough” comes up on one of my Pandora stations often, and the first verse always gets me: “I wish I had what I needed/ to be on my own/ ’cause I feel so defeated/ and I’m feeling alone.” 

But I also wonder…does this desire to be free from a need for love come from a desire to be so filled with the Love of God, or is it actually fueled by my American craving for utter autonomy?  Brennan Manning quoted a poet in The Ragamuffin Gospel as saying, “The desire to feel loved is the last illusion: let it go and you will be free.”  I want that so much…but what would happen if one did not need love?  I guess I don’t trust myself.  If one was able to let go of his need for love and was not at the same moment filled with love from an overflowing Source, he might become free to be an absolute terror.  A cold, unfeeling, opportunistic person.  He doesn’t need anybody, so he doesn’t help them or love them.  Disturbingly similar to a socio/psychopath, he does what he wants with no regard for pending relational consequences.  The ultimate American cowboy, if you will: free to ride out West with nothing to tie him down – not even a desire to be loved.

But, if one is free from this desire and at the same time filled with love for others from the True Source of all love…that’s when things can get interesting.  That person, in forgetting himself, would constantly pour himself out for others.  I imagine those who came in contact with his love would feel valued more than ever before, and would go away changed and with an increased capacity to love. 

In The Great Divorce, every ghost trying to enter heaven must forget himself and give up his rights: the right to love or be loved, the right to his talents and intellect, the right to be right.  It’s the idea that only the poor in spirit, those carrying absolutely nothing, can fit through the door of the Kingdom and enter into true Joy.  Could it be that the desire to be loved is the last right that we lay down before we can truly say that we are poor, and thus run barefoot and free through the grass and the open doors to the Kingdom of God?  Is it really the last illusion, the last trick mirror that we must shatter and step through to the wide open world we always dreamed of?

The Great Divorce: Read It. August 26, 2009

I just finished reading The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis.  I feel like such a ridiculous cliche raving about how much I love C.S. Lewis, but there it is.  (And at least I’m not so ridiculous as to call him “Jack” – who does that?)  I remember that the first time I read the book, it was just after I graduated high school.  Hmm.  I only remembered snippets, and mostly those that are oft-quoted elsewhere.  So I was pleasantly surprised when, on my second reading, I was blown away by this book.  I seriously was writing down like page-long quotes.  The Great Divorce stirs the intellect, the imagination, and the soul – please read it, and know that it’s best read in a couple of large chunks.  Don’t worry if you have to re-read some of the weighty paragraphs…everyone does.  If they say they don’t, they’re either lying or not actually understanding the information.  Or they’ve got some Good Will Hunting thing going on.

Shall I leave you with a sampling?

For the intellect, a conversation between the narrator and the Spirit of George MacDonald on the impending death of Pity:

“What some people say on Earth is that the final loss of one soul gives the lie to all the joy of those who are saved.”

“Ye see it does not.”

“I feel in a way that it ought to.”

“That sounds very merciful: but see what lurks behind it.”

“What?”

“The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven.”

“I don’t know what I want, Sir.”

“Son, son, it must be one way or the other. Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it: or else for ever and ever the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves. I know it has a grand sound to say ye’ll accept no salvation which leaves even one creature in the dark outside. But watch that sophistry or ye’ll make a Dog in a Manger the tyrant of the universe.”

For the soul:

The Happy Trinity is her home: nothing can trouble her joy./ She is the bird that evades every net: the wild deer that leaps every pitfall./ Like the mother bird to its chickens or a shield to the arm’d knight: so is the Lord to her mind, in His unchanging lucidity./ […] He fills her brim-full with immensity of life: he leads her to see the world’s desire.

For the imagination:

For a moment there was silence under the cedar trees and then – pad, pad, pad – it was broken.  Two velvet-footed lions came bouncing into the open space, their eyes fixed upon each other, and started playing some solemn romp.  Their manes looked as though they had just been dipped in the river whose noise I could hear close at hand, though the tree hid it.  Not greatly liking my company, I moved away to find that river, and after passing some thick flowering bushes, I succeed.

Quotable Friday Vol. 32 (Monday Edition) August 24, 2009

Ask for the Morning Star and take (thrown in)

your earthy love…

C.S. Lewis, “Five Sonnets”

Oh man, how much does that one line make you want to read C.S. Lewis’s book of poetry (aptly titled Poems)?  I’m re-reading The Great Divorce right now.  The last time I read it I was fresh out of high school…I’m interested to see how I react to it this time around, being 7 years older and with much more life experience to speak of.

It’s weird: as much as I love C.S. Lewis, I kind of can’t stand the thought of books written about his work.  I mean, yawnsville, right?  Case in point: The Way Into Narnia, A Reader’s Guide.  Seriously?  I think that robs the reader the experience of discovering the land of Narnia on her own; it’s like writing a book on how to enjoy your birthday or something.  I’d so much rather figure it out alonethan have someone spoonfeed me his opinions of what C.S. Lewis meant in the third paragraph of the fourth chapter of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, you know?

Treasure of Bread and Seeds August 20, 2009

“People are prepared for everything except for the fact that beyond the darkness of their blindness there is a great light.  They are prepared to go on breaking their backs plowing the same old field until the cows come home without seeing, until they stub their toes on it, that there is a treasure buried in that field rich enough to buy Texas.  They are prepared for a God who strikes hard bargains but not for a God who gives as much for an hour’s work as for a day’s.  They are prepared for a mustard-seed kingdom of God no bigger than the eye of a newt but not for the great banyan it becomes with birds in its branches singing Mozart…”

Frederick Buechner

I’ve been thinking about the kingdom of God a lot in the past few months.  I was thinking about it yesterday while I was in the prayer room here on base, looking out the window at three tall pine trees, each with a bird perched on top.  I thought about the small ways I’ve let God in my life and how He’s taken those tiny openings and led me into something huge.  How it’s like Narnia’s wardrobe: it’s bigger on the inside than it looks from the outside.  

 The further I go on this journey with Jesus, the more astounded I am by His character and by His kingdom.  What is His kingdom, really?  That was such an abstract concept for me until this year, when I finally started to ask myself that question.  I began to open my Bible and speak to it like a magic mirror: Show me the kingdom of God!  It wasn’t hard to find once I started looking.  I knew it was important because Jesus said that THIS is the good news…that the Kingdom of God is near.  That is the Gospel.

I never stopped to think about that until my year in Norway, when someone pointed out that the Scriptures record Jesus preaching the Gospel.  But isn’t the Gospel that Jesus died for your sins and rose again? Apparently not.  The Gospel, the Good News, is that the Kingdom of God is near!  Then what is the Kingdom of God?  I went to the passages I remembered, like the ones in Luke – the Kingdom of God is like a treasure in a field, the Kingdom of God is like a pearl of great price, it’s like a mustard seed growing into a huge tree, it’s like yeast making bread rise.

 Er…what?  Okay, so it’s valuable?  So it’s powerful?  So it’s unassuming?  But what is it?  I’ll confess – I still don’t know.  But this is the closest I’ve come to understanding it, and it might sound a little too simple: the kingdom of God is the character of God animating our thoughts and actions and words.  I like that.  Because I know that God is compassionate, faithful, loving, powerful, and always good.  He’s all about justice and peace and freedom and healing.  He likes to take care of those who can’t care for themselves, like the orphans and widows and strangers wandering through foreign lands, pale and homesick.  He lifts up people who fall and gives food to the hungry.  He loves without asking for anything in return.  He forgives a thousand times a thousand times.  

Wow.  I want to be a part of that kingdom!  Jesus told a story about what the kingdom of God is like: one day, a man wanders into a field and finds a treasure beyond his wildest dreams.  He sells everything he has to buy that field. When you start to try to figure out the kingdom of God, and you unearth the truth little by little, it becomes as irresistible as the greatest treasure you could dream of.

But it’s still abstract.  How can I make this more concrete, how can I grasp it?  One way that has helped me is comparing the Kingdom of God with the way things work in this world.  It is so different.  And the more I compare, the more I realize that you can’t have one leg in each kingdom.  It’s not like standing on the equator line with one foot in each hemisphere, or that place in the U.S. where you can be in four states all at once.  No, it’s more like trying to be a monkey and an apple at the same time; or at the bottom of the ocean and the top of Mount Everest.  You just can’t stretch that far.  

But even if you decide to strike out for the Kingdom, the world doesn’t want to give you up.  It’s greedy; it likes to stack up its pawns just to say it owns them.  The world still owns me in many ways, and I’m not proud of that.  I was born here, and all my life I’ve believed I’m a citizen of this kingdom.  I’ve lived by its values and been shaped by its culture.  I want what it wants, I’m ashamed when it tells me to be, I’m proud when it says to be.  My life path has been mapped out for me by the world.  So now that I’m deviating, everything is on red alert.  I can’t go too far without something in the back of my mind saying, Are you crazy!?  You can’t do that!  I’m slowly learning to say, Says who?

The other day I felt discouraged about how far I still was from being totally “sold out” for the Kingdom of God.  I’m like the man who found treasure in the field, and yet even as I sell all my possessions to buy the field, I doubt the treasure’s existence.  And as I part with some of my most cherished items, I feel the pain of loss and think, if I really believed that treasure was there, would I feel such pain in parting with these dusty trinkets?

However, I found encouragement in Jesus’ cryptic words about the Kingdom being like a mustard seed.  I thought about how He planted a tiny seed in my heart last year, a small desire for His Kingdom.  And if it goes like He says it will, that seed will grow into something larger than I could have imagined, bearing fruit and giving shade and beauty.  He put a small amount of yeast in me, and He won’t stop until I’m fresh and fragrant bread, broken to nourish and comfort others.  I love this line from one of Brennan Manning’s prayers: “When all I can do is want to want you, take my crumb of faith and break it like bread to feed thousands, beginning, by your mercy, with me.”

What is the Kingdom of God?  Ask, and you will receive…

By the way, I started this piece back in Norway, and it’s been on my mind all summer.  Finally finished it enough to put it up.  Even though I wrote it in pieces, hopefully it’s not too disconnected!  Do you have any thoughts about what the Kingdom of God is like?  Share!  Discuss!

Motion Sickness August 17, 2009

That’s pretty much how I feel.  I moved last weekend…for the third time in less than 4 months.  I guess I didn’t have to move so many times…I didn’t have to move to Pasadena at the beginning of the summer, but I’m still glad I did.  Subletting my friend’s apartment was a good move because that way I’ve been able to get used to living in a new city before I have to get used to being back in school and working a new job. 

I like my change in degrees. 

However, despite my efforts to lessen the pressure of change this summer, my life has been in constant motion since being back from Norway.  Or constant limbo.  Hanging out at my grandparents’ for a month, then at the apartment on Madison for two months, and now my on-campus Fuller apartment. 

Guys, it’s embarrassing how difficult all of this is for me.  I haven’t been able to get my balance this summer, and I almost wish I could just get my sea legs instead.  Just go with it, right? 

Two feelings keep coming to the surface during these days (well, especially during this move): helplessness and loneliness.  I just feel like I NEED so many things: things that cost money, or things that take skills I don’t have to set up or install, or time or emotional energy I just can’t manage to scrape up. 

And dude, there is nothing like moving by yourself to make you feel alone in the world.  Going into your new, empty apartment alone.  Sleeping in it that first night alone.  This isn’t a single girl’s desperate cry, it’s just fact.  I mean, it would be cool just to have a friend around.  Thankfully my sister and brother-in-law helped me a bit on Saturday, and that alleviated the solitary-rowboat-floating-in-an-endless-sea feeling. 

Also I’m an external processor, so I always need to talk about what I’m going through, whether good or bad.  It helps me heaps.  So lately I’ve been missing living on the third floor at Grimerud and pouring out my heart to one of the precious girls who lived there.  (Thanks, Miuky, Matilda, Nina, Dina, Synnove, and Annis for all those times). 

Anyway, I’m just trying to hold onto truth right now and not wallow in self-pity.  Today on his blog Donald Miller posted an essay about self-pity.  How timely!  It wasn’t really anything new but I need to be reminded of those basics. 

I know that this is just a season…a crazy, turbulent season of uncertainty and it, too, will pass.  I’m on a journey, and that means I’m not staying in one place too long.  Hopefully soon I will post this picture, and that will be our little sign that things are looking up.

Wayfarers All August 6, 2009

 

Sometimes I wish I had days, literally days, to just think and to lose myself in my imagination.  In Surprised By Joy C.S. Lewis speaks of his weekends in school, when he would lose himself in his books and get taken up with the wild lands of the far North.  When I read the chapter “Wayfarers All” from The Wind In The Willows, I feel like my imagination, and my heart, have enough to sink into for hours.  The Sea Rat’s final monologue touches deep places in my heart and leaves me stirred and yearning and frustrated with my insatiable greed for life.  In this scene a little homebody Rat meets a wanderlust Rat, and the traveler tries to entice the homebody with colorful tales of his wanderings and adventures:

 

And you, you will come too, young brother; for the days pass, and never return, and the South still waits for you.  Take the adventure, heed the call, now ere the irrevocable moment passes!  ‘Tis but a banging of the door behind you, a blithesome step forward, and you are out of the old life and into the new!  Then some day, some day long hence, jog home here if you will, when the cup has been drained and the play has been played, and sit down by your quiet river with a store of goodly memories for company.  You can easily overtake me on the road, for you are young, and I am ageing and go softly.  I will linger, and look back; and at last I will surely see you coming, with all the South in your face!

 

What is it about that banging of the door behind me?  It’s as if I’m addicted to it: the passing out of the old life and into the new.  Sometimes I see it as a little weed sprouting out of my sin nature: wanting to get away from the demands and the drudgery of familiar day-to-day life.  Other times I wonder if these longings can be seen as glimmers of spiritual longing; I’m longing for the new because I worship the God who makes all things new, the God who promises rebirth and a new and glorious body one day.  As is often the case, I’m sure it’s a muddy mixture of both.

 

Donald Miller shares the sentiment of the wayfaring Sea Rat in his yet-to-be published book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years.  He says that maybe our purpose in life is to just be here, in the story God is writing around us, to “take the adventure and heed the call” and to enjoy it with Him and relish it together for eternity afterward. He writes:

 

I wonder if that’s what we’ll do with God when we are through with all this, if He’ll show us around heaven, all the beauty and light coming in through windows a thousand miles away, all the fields sweeping down to a couple of chairs under a tree, and we’ll sit and tell Him our stories and He’ll smile and tell us what they mean.

 

But some people, like Oswald Chambers, like to talk about drudgery.  They like to talk about living as a disciple in the day to day, when you’ve come down from the mountain and it’s not fun anymore but somebody’s got to do it.  I think about half of the entries in My Utmost For His Highest are about the drudgery of the life of a disciple.  Now, this is a bit of a comfort for me because instead of wanting to shoot myself every day I sit in an air-conditioned, fluorescent lit office I only want to shoot myself every other day.  Once in a while Chambers alludes to the pure, raw adventure and ecstasy of oneness with Christ, but it’s rare. 

 

I wonder if Chambers, in his curmudgeonly way, has got it right while the pagan author of The Wind in the Willows and postmodern, sentimental Donald Miller are off base.  Miller talks of heaven as a place where we rehash our experiences with God and receive insight about them, perhaps turning that into a deeper knowledge of the Author of our story and hence a deeper sense of gratitude and richer worship of Him.  Grahame mentions sitting by a quiet river with a stock of fantastic memories to keep us company. But Chambers says that the adventure isn’t now – that it starts when we get to heaven.  There are definitely a lot of material from the Scriptures to back up this idea…the first to come to mind is the passage in Hebrews about the heroes of the faith,

 

“ 13 All these people died still believing what God had promised them. They did not receive what was promised, but they saw it all from a distance and welcomed it. They agreed that they were foreigners and nomads here on earth. 14 Obviously people who say such things are looking forward to a country they can call their own. […] 16 But they were looking for a better place, a heavenly homeland. That is why God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.”

 

In his recent podcast, “Embracing the Pain,” Greg Boyd shared this view when he reminded his listeners that this life ain’t a vacation, so stop expecting it to be!  Instead of the oft-used pilgrim analogy, he used the war metaphor…we are rebels living behind enemy lines, trying to tell as many people as we can about the Good King and the future He promises before He comes riding in and establishes His Kingdom again.  So then, while we ought not to expect comforts, luxury, and leisure in this life, I suppose we can still expect adventures – the raw kind that come with war, like secret night missions and recapturing hostages and blowing up enemy bridges. 

 

Again I find myself turning to C.S. Lewis.  You know the end of the last book in the Chronicles of Narnia, The Last Battle?  The children finally get to Aslan’s country, or heaven, if you will.  And C.S. Lewis wraps it up as only he can,

 

But for them it was only the beginning of the real story.  All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read:  which goes on for ever:  in which every chapter is better than the one before.

 

So life here in the Shadowlands – is it more about biding our time in the brokenness until the real adventure starts? Should we insist on a beautiful life here and now, so we can laugh and raise our glasses in a toast to it at the Wedding Feast of the Lamb?  Should we as pilgrims seek adventure in this foreign land or is merely residing here adventure enough…in its own way?

 

I throw one last thought in there.  Despite his eloquence depicting the adventuresome life, later in that same chapter of The Wind in the Willows Grahame shows us another side of the same coin, highlighting the wonder of the day-to-day.  When Mole tries to shake Rat out of his bewitched wanderlust state, he tries to talk about the magic of where they are rather than where they could be — the slow but sure change of the seasons and the domestic delights around every corner of normal life.

 

[Rat] seemed to have lost all interest for the time in things that went to make up his daily life, as well as in all pleasant forecastings of the altered days and doings that the changing season was surely bringing.  Casually, then, and with seeming indifference, the Mole turned his talk to the harvest that was being gathered in, the towering wagons and their straining teams, the growing ricks, and the large moon rising over bare acres dotted with sheaves.  He talked of the reddening apples around, of the browning nuts, of jams and preserves and the distilling of cordials; till by easy stages such as these he reached mid-winter, its hearty joys and home life, and then he became simply lyrical.

 

So can we have our cake and eat it too?  I think it’s possible.  As a stranger in a strange land, one can still exult in the majesty of a sunrise, can still become intoxicated with the fragrance of wild jasmine, can still savor the taste of a ripe strawberry.  A soldier wandering behind enemy lines can still wonder at the exquisite detail of a wildflower and revel in the refreshment of a cool stream.  I like the idea of having something to look forward to, though.  Because if you’re sitting in Donald Miller’s chairs talking over your story with God, or at the banks of the Sea Rat’s river with a “store of goodly memories for company” you’ll eventually run out of things to say, and those memories will fade a little too much.  And that’s when Aslan might twitch His tail and call out, “Further up and further in, children!  A new adventure awaits!”

 

I apologize for this uber long, stream of consciousness post.  But if Donald Miller can do it, can’t I?  I might end up cleaning up the typos and awkward bits and adding links…we’ll see.  Until then, deal and Google.

 

It would be great if you wanted to discuss these matters…ahem…leave comments.  But if not, just let the ideas roll around and bump into each other in your head and see what you come up with!

Ring of Fire August 5, 2009

…so I’ve been having some car problems this week.  It started on Sunday morning, when I was driving up to the very top of Lake Avenue to go hiking.  Suddenly, Ruby (my car) felt like she wasn’t going to make it up the hill.  Strange, I thought, with trepidation in my heart and dollar signs flashing in front of my eyes (the flashing dollar signs thing has been happening a lot lately…you know, with moving and starting grad school in the Fall).  Later that day, I was about a mile away from my house and it started happening again…this time I couldn’t get my car to go past 20 miles an hour.  I kept checking the emergency brake, because it felt like it was on.  By the time I got to my house (and after circling the block to find a parking spot, yay Pasadena!) there was smoke pouring out of my car next to the front passenger tire.  I called my stepdad and tried not to start sobbing as I explained what happened.  He promised to come out from Valencia and check it out that day.  Unfortunately, after I got off the phone I DID start sobbing…is everything I own falling to crap?  First my laptop (remember how it crashed?  and now it keeps acting like it’s about to crash again!) and now my car.  The two most valuable items I own besides my education.  What, is someone from LIFE going to call now and say my degree is a sham?  God forbid.  Anyway, I’m pitifully crying and wander into the bathroom, flip the light switch – the light goes on briefly, flickers, and dies.  That’s when I started laughing.  What’s next?  My pants split at the seam?  My arm falls out of its socket?

Anyway my stepdad Jeff came out to check out my car, and of course it drives completely normally for him.  I wanted to slap Ruby in the face.  What an ornery little car!  Jeff thought I was crazy, making up symptoms.  What’s that disorder where parents make up illnesses for their child in order to get attention?  Yeah, I think he figured I was doing that.  He said the car was perfectly safe to drive, even (at my prodding) on the 210 freeway where I always go through a hilly canyon that has no cell phone reception.  O-kay…

Cut to Tuesday after work.  Ruby has been driving fine until lunchtime, when she started lurching around again like an old lady complaining of aching bones.  Or like the emergency brake was on.  But it wasn’t, believe me, I checked a million times.  So I drive it to Jeff’s work and this time she can’t keep her act together and performs just as miserably for him.  He quickly figures out that the right brake is stuck.  (Dollar signs flash…brake problems are never cheap, are they?)  I noticed the right hubcap is gone and asked Jeff if I had one on Sunday.  When he confirmed that I did, and I confirmed that I had not hit any curbs in the past couple days, Jeff figured that driving with the stuck brake generated enough heat to melt my hubcap off.  Fun!  So Jeff advises that I “limp the car home” and let it cool down so he can look at it later. 

Cut to me “limping the car home.”  I’m at a busy intersection when huge columns of smoke start blowing out from under my car.  Yikes.  I call Jeff to see if I should keep limping or pull over.  As I’m waiting at the light and waiting for Jeff to pick up, in my rearview mirror I see a man jump out of his car and jog over to my passenger side door.  He leans down and says, “Your tire is on fire!”  I figured he’s just thinking, where there’s smoke, there’s fire, so I just said, “I know!”  I mean, what can I do but wait for the light to turn green so I can pull into the nearby parking lot?

So I get smoking little Ruby over to a parking lot and pull into the only space which was unfortunately next to a bunch of other cars.  A girl was sitting in her car with the door open and talking to someone standing outside her car.  At my approach, both jump up and start screaming, “Your tire is on fire!”  The girl tumbles into her car, and guns it across the parking lot into another spot.  Then everyone who was standing in the parking lot runs into the dry cleaner’s, saying something about the car blowing up.  I said, “It’s just smoking!” trying to be reassuring, but the girl (from a safe distance) says, “Ma’am, that’s not smoke…your tire is on fire.”  I go around to the right side of the car and sure enough, the wheel well is full of little leaping flames.  …shit.  After calling the fire department, I thought about all the times I had heard that cars rarely blow up…it’s not like the movies.  So I felt foolish dashing to my car to collect my belongings, but at the same time, what if?  So I tried to nonchalantly but quickly retrieve things from my car – oops, that’s my journal, don’t want to lose that!  Oh, a DVD from the library…don’t want to pay that fine – until I felt okay with standing across the parking lot and waiting for that embarrassing sound of the fire engine’s sirens.

Don’t worry, guys, I’m fine.  Ruby’s having an operation today…all new brakes.  There’s never a good time for that.  What is that I was learning lately about “Acceptance-with-joy”…?

Legolas Was Here August 3, 2009

Apparently, a lot of people have been finding my blog lately by typing “Legolas” into the Google Image search engine.  The picture I used for this one post is the first image result to pop up!  Weird.  If you’re reading this blog and feel upset that it’s not a fansite, may I offer you this consolation: the author of this blog is an Orlando Bloom lookalike.  With that comforting knowledge, feel free to wander the archives and comment if you like.  Doesn’t matter how you got here…the more the merrier!