Friends Blog Too! September 8, 2009

Just added a couple of friends’ blogs to the ol’ blogroll and wanted to give them a proper introduction on Eeper.  Peter Verdell is a new friend this summer; we like to talk about books and theology, he was responsible for my inaugural viewing of The Royal Tenenbaums, he’s a great singer/songwriter musician type of guy, and he owns a cat that I actually like.  Peter’s blog is called “Hi, Everything’s Great!”  He doesn’t post too often but I still enjoy it, especially his ”Open letter to the tall, thin girl @ 24 hour fitness.”  Peter doesn’t have many pictures of himself on his blog, but I like this one because it shows Peter (in the red shirt on the right) in his standard uniform and doing something he loves: picnic and a movie at Hollywood Forever cemetery (and amazingly, I have not once been able to make it out there this summer!)

The other site I added to my blogroll, anna matilda josefin,  belongs to my dear friend Matilda Blomgren, who I staffed with in Norway, along with her then-fiance Rickard.  Matilda is a unique, beautiful, intelligent girl and has a dizzying array of talents and abilities.  I think one of my favorite things about Matilda is how she has perfected the blend of tomboy and girly-girl.  How does she do it?  I don’t know how I could have gotten through my time in Norway without her, and I love that her Swedish blog now has a translation option so I can read about what’s going on instead of just trying to guess from the pictures.  The translator is a bit funky, so you just have to go with it.  Oh, and Matilda is a brilliant photographer, and really beautiful, so even if you don’t read the posts it’s nice just to have a look.  Here’s our Swedish friend in her Swedish glory:

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.

Revisiting Stuff White People Like July 2, 2009

About a year ago, I was totally into this site for like 5 minutes and then I got bored. 

Today I stumbled on it again and there were some pretty hilarious posts just on the first page.  If you’re looking for a leg up out of your ethnocentrism (if you’re white), and want a quick and cheap laugh (mostly at yourself) hit up Stuff White People Like.  The Vespa, Hating People Who Wear Ed Hardy, and Taking a Year Off posts were my faves.

Animate June 17, 2009

I keep a little list in my mobile phone of books I want to read.  For almost a year, I had on that list “Greg Boyd – Woodland Hills.”  Andreas, my leader in Norway, raved about Greg Boyd all the time.  He was his disciple in the same way I follow Erwin McManus, reading his books and podcasts and quoting him in conversation.

When I came home to California and started working a job that allowed me to listen to my iPod 7 hours a day, I realized I needed to add a few more podcasts to my repertoire (which basically consisted of Erwin McManus).  So I finally downloaded a bunch of Greg Boyd’s podcasts, and lucky for me, he had just started a series called “Animate.”

You guys, this series was unbelievable.  I’m blogging about it because honestly I want every single person I know to listen to this series.  It’s all about using our imagination in our walk with God.  You know how you can go years believing certain truths about God, but then one day you actually believe it, and everything changes?  Some people say that knowledge went from your head to your heart.  For me, I always “knew” that God was my Father.  But, starting in Australia, God took me on a journey over a year and a half until I finally believed that He really is my Father…and a good Father, at that!

Greg says the reason for this head-heart disconnection is that these amazing truths about God and His Kingdom don’t actually feel real to people.  The car wash and the grocery list list, the broken heart they are nursing, the strained relationship with their mom, the flailing economy – these things feel real to people because they experience them.  People who genuinely love Jesus and want to follow Him find themselves trying to believe His truth while everything inside of them and around them says that it’s not real.  They’re sucked into selling out to the values of the culture, even though they are contrary to the values of the kingdom, because that feels real to them while Jesus and the Scriptures and an eternal Kingdom just feel like a set of beliefs.  Greg, in what could be his thesis statement for the series, says,

“You can’t fight concrete, vivid, experiential images in the mind with abstract truths and a list of oughts and shoulds.  It’s time that we recover a flesh and blood theology.” 

His goal in “Animate” is to teach people how to make the abstract concrete, so that we can actually be shaped by it.  He does this by using the imagination.  Richard Foster says that “to believe that God can sanctify and utilize the imagination is simply to take seriously the Christian idea of incarnation.”

Maybe it sounds a bit New Age, a bit mystical?  I don’t know.  If you’ve ever felt that tension I just mentioned, when you want to believe in this Kingdom that starts as a tiny seed, as a pinch of leaven, and ends as something bigger than you dreamed, but you see it (consciously or otherwise) as totally separate from true reality, then give this series a try.  Download it free from iTunes.  Start from the beginning, ride it out till the end.  Try the exercises Greg suggests and leads you through.  Let me know how it goes.

There’s More to the Internet Than Facebook February 1, 2009

So you know how I’ve quoted Anne Lamott like, a hundred times on this site?  I didn’t bring any of her books with me on this trip, because when you can only bring two pieces of baggage for 8 months, you have to be a little selective about the reading material you bring.  So anyway, lately I’ve been craving Anne Lamott’s writing (as well as a quick jaunt into Narnia) and yesterday I made a fabulous discovery: on a whim, I typed “Anne Lamott online” into Google, and I found this.  An archive of essays she wrote for Salon Magazine.  Yessss.  If I didn’t have an important date with my journal, my Bible, and a cafe I would have sat there for hours reading all of the essays in one gulp.  

Okay, the point of this post: read some of these essays.  You will laugh, you might cry, you might shake your fist, you might be moved, and you might want to burn Anne Lamott at the stake for heresy.  That’s totally up to you.  But I know I’m not leaving you with much new content lately (dude, I’m on outreach)…so just take the time you would normally use for our dear lil Eeper and head on over here.  That will get you started.  Let me know your thoughts.

Bitten January 17, 2009

We had a day off today and I went to the cinema here in Berlin with Anne-Mai.  (Fun fact: They sell wine and beer at the concession stand!)  I really wanted to see Valkyrie, cause how cool would that be to see in Berlin?  I could almost justify spending money on it, then, because it’s more of a cultural experience and not just a movie.  Right?

But Valkyrie hasn’t been released yet here in Germany, so we saw Twilight instead.

I am so embarrassed about how much I liked that movie.  I mean, I really liked it!  Despite the reservations I had while watching it, the biggest of which was why the heck would this girl be attracted to a vampire lifestyle?  You can never eat or sleep again.  Those are two of the greatest pleasures in life!  Also, when she’s all cuddled up to Edward?  I mean, wouldn’t that suck, considering it would be like snuggling with an ice sculpture?  I’m just saying.

Okay, but seriously, I’m not so embarrassed that I liked the movie.  But I AM embarrassed at how swoony I felt over Robert Pattinson’s character, Edward!  I feel like they made him in a factory by pushing the button “Teen Dream Heart Throb.”  If I was 14 I would totally be covering my walls with collages made from Tiger Beat magazine right now.

But come on, can you blame me?  With his sculpted features, creamy skin, and wild, modern-day-James-Dean hair…sigh.  In my defense, I did also love him as Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter.  Take a look at him and try NOT to swoon:

Pop Christmas December 14, 2008

I don’t usually start listening to Christmas music until the day after Thanksgiving.  That’s fair, right?  I’m not the kind of person who’s super into it, but I definitely listen to it like 75% of the time for the month of December.  But my love for holiday music is not an unconditional love.  Far from it.  There’s certain Christmas songs that make me want to dance and kiss someone under the mistletoe and give rosy-cheeked children mugs of hot cocoa with candy cane straws.  But then there’s Christmas music that literally makes me turn off the radio and cringe.  I’m not talking about carols here…I definitely have my favorites of those (We Three Kings; Joy to the World, ahem, NOT because of my name, thank you) and the ones that I feel guilty for hating so much (Silent Night, What Child Is This?).  But for the sake of a simplified list, here are my best and worst of holiday pop music:

Shallow Materialism at Its Funniest September 27, 2008

I stumbled across Mindy Kaling’s blog, Things I Bought That I Love, about a year and a half ago.  At the time, I thought she was just an L.A.-based fashionista with a clever wit disguised as the ravings of a valley girl.  As it turns out, Mindy Kaling is a co-producer and writer of The Office (maybe you’ve heard of it?) and plays Kelly Kapoor on the show.  

After reading a few posts on her blog, I was hooked.  How did she turn a blog that’s supposedly about her favorite recent purchases into a hilarious commentary on life as a single woman in Los Angeles?  I immediately wanted to be her best friend.  Dude, this girl went to Dartmouth…she’s totally smart and funny and has the cutest fashion sense and she’s a bit of a foodie (like me!) AND she wrote the episode of The Office where Michael burns his foot on a George Foreman grill!  Come ON!  I feel so inferior.

Anyway, Mindy has not posted anything new on TIBTIL since April, which totally sucks and I’ve pretty much given up hope that she has even remembered that she has a blog…I’m sure she has better things to do, like write episodes for Emmy-award winning TV shows that everyone talks about the next day at work.  But today I went to her blog to look up a certain post, and I ended up getting lost there for a while, even laughing out loud (like, really loud) a few times.

So, even though I can’t promise there will ever again be any new content, if you like The Office, or funny writing, or pretty things, go to Things I Bought That I Love and wander through her archives for a while.

*Bonus* Here’s a link to a great article she wrote for Marie Claire…

**Rejoice!  The other day, I found out that Mindy just took a few months off and then moved her blog to HERE.  It will take me forever to catch up on all her posts…not that I mind!

Surprised By Joy September 21, 2008

I just finished the book Surprised By Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, by C.S. Lewis.  I’ve been chewing on that thing for a month now.  So you have a better idea of what it’s about, the tag line on the back cover is “The intensely intimate and sincere autobiography of a man who thought his way to God.”  

I’ve pretty much been beating myself up over how long it’s taken me to finish this book, but now that I think about it, I don’t really care that much.  Because I HAVE been super busy, you know, like moving to another country and adjusting and preparing for the DTS and all that.  But even more than that, this book is just not a quick read.  It’s not chick lit, friends.  I could read one page and then digest it for the rest of the day.