live. move. be.

I really wish there were mass outdoor celebrations on every warm sunny day. If I could make a career of dancing in the grass, I would do it.

I'm in a Contact Impovisation class this semester. We do a bunch of crazy stuff....if you've never heard of it, the basic principle revolves around two or more people dancing together while never losing physical contact. In our class, this also often involves some cool-looking flips and acrobatic balances and such. Our professor decided we should have class outside at the big Earth Day festival/celebration in the park on campus. There were tons of people and several band playing live music, and we just added to the scene by having our dance class right out there in the middle of things!

We quickly drew a small crowd of friends, fascinated onlookers, and picture-takers, including a TV news camera and a newspaper reporter (who knows, maybe I was on TV again). Occasionally a bystander would even jump in and try to partcipate in what we were doing. We just had a blast dancing around out in the grass and sun!

On Sunday, my pastor started a new series on the Theology of Heaven. I'm really excited about it, and I think it's just what my heart/mind/soul needed at the end of last week. I wish I could just type up everything he said, but I can't capture it(go to http://sgccgreensboro.org/index.php if you ever want to hear some amazing past sermons if you ever feel like it).

But this I do want to share. One thing I like about Greg (my pastor) is that he'll sometimes just read long book passages in his sermon, and 9 times out of 10 they happen to come out of my favorite books. This Sunday was no exception...so this an excerpt that he read from C.S. Lewis' essay "Transposition":

"Let us construct a fable. Let us picture a woman thrown into a dungeon. There she bears and rears a son. He grows up seeing nothing but the dungeon walls, the straw on the floor, and a little patch of the sky seen through the grating, which is too high up to show anything except sky. This unfortunate woman was an artist, and when they imprisoned her she managed to bring with her a drawing pad and a box of pencils. As she never loses the hope of deliverance, she is constantly teaching her son about that outer world which he has never seen. She does it largely by drawing him pictures. With her pencil she attempts to show him what fields, rivers, mountains, cities, and waves on a beach are like. He is a dutiful boy and he does his best to believe her when she tells him that that outer world is far more interesting and glorious than anything in the dungeon. At times he succeeds. On the whole he gets on tolerably well until, one day, he says something that gives his mother pause. For a minute or two they are at cross-purposes. Finally it dawns on her that he has, all these years, lived under a misconception. "But," she gasps, "you didn't think that the real world was full of lines drawn in lead pencil?" "What?" says the boy. "No pencil marks there?" And instantly his whole notion of the outer world becomes a blank. For the lines, by which alone he was imagining it, have now been denied of it. He has no idea of that which will exclude and dispense with the lines, that of which the lines were merely a transposition--the waving treetops, the light dancing on the weir, the coloured three-dimensional realities which are not enclosed in lines but define their own shapes at every moment with a delicacy and multiplicity which no drawing could ever achieve. The child will get the idea that the real world is somehow less visible than his mother's pictures. In reality it lacks lines because it is incomparably more visible.

So with us. "We know not what we shall be" [1 John 3:2]; but we may be sure we shall be more, not less, than we were on earth. Our natural experiences (sensory, emotional, imaginative) are only like the drawing, like pencilled lines on flat paper. If they vanish in the risen life, they will vanish only as pencil lines vanish from the real landscape, not as candle flame that is put out but as a candle flame which becomes invisible because someone has pulled up the blind, thrown open the shutters, and let in the blaze of the risen sun."
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Favorite songs these days: "What Do I Know?" by Sarah Groves and "Early In the Morning" by Andrew Osenga. I can't seem to get these two artists off my iPod, and I'm pretty happy about that.

It's definitely in my "Top 5 Books on Christianity" list, and it completely changed the way I think about Christ's resurrection and eternity. Very thought provoking.

And if I could only listen to one song every Easter it would be this beautiful classic:

Keith Green- "Easter Song"

It just makes me want to dance...

I just had a delightful weekend. You can't plan these things, sometimes they just surprise you.

I spent my weekend dogsitting for a family whose kids I often babysit. It was a really interesting experience to live in a different house for a weekend, to live in a neighborhood that's different from my own, and to have so much time entirely to myself. I discovered that I really enjoy dogwalking (or should I say, being walked by the dog). It makes me walk at a really fast pace I wouldn't normally enjoy, and I got to spend lots of time exploring the neighborhood in beautiful, sunny weather. I absolutely love looking at houses and architecture of all sorts (I suppose I should thank my dad for that!), so it was a real treat for me.

After church on Sunday, my friends and I headed downtown for a soup tasting. We had no idea what we were getting into, and we were so pleasently overwhelmed. We climbed some stairs and entered an enormous ballroom, filled with tables and waiters and TONS of food. Local gourmet restaurants and bakeries had provided fresh bread, salad, vegetables, cookies, muffins, and every type of soup imaginable. For ten dollars, you could have as much food as you wanted. We were given trays, which we carried around to various stations around the room to get little tasting cups of soup. By the time we were all done, I counted over fifty cups that my friends and I had tried, and that's after throwing away many empty ones through the course of the meal!

A smattering of flavors we sampled: Roasted Tomato Basil Tortellini, Creamy Potato Leek, Tom Yum Thai Chicken, Smoked Bacon and Plantain with Fish, Sweet Potato Ginger, Southwest Black Bean, Pasta e Fagoli, Shrimp/Corn/Potato Chowder, and my personal favorite of the day, Manhattan Clam Chowder. Yes, you can be jealous.

After a final dogwalk that afternoon (which was a bit more strenuous after being stuffed with food), I enjoyed a couple hours in the sun at a local park, laying on the grass and admiring the blooming daffodils. In addition to reading at the park (I'm trying to enjoy books more for fun these days), I also got to talk to Amy, one of my dear friends from my summer at camp who goes to school in Ohio (hence me not seeing her in over a year). It's remarkable how quickly you can lose touch with people you care about so much, and it's such a blessing to get to "catch up" again.

To top off my delightful weekend, I sat out in a grassy lawn on campus with my friends that evening as the sun set, listening to a couple of them play on the guitar and the pennywhistle as the sky grew dark. There's nothing more peaceful and happy then laying on the grass, looking up at the stars, and listening to good music.

Here's the other great thing: I couldn't find my camera all weekend (that lovely picture above is not mine, in case you're wondering). This was really frustrating, but turned out to be a strange blessing in disguise. I have this constant need to document things....to write, to take pictures, to preserve memories and ideas in any way possible. That can be a really good and beautiful thing, but it also sometimes prevents me from fully enjoying the present moment. A woman spoke at my church on Sunday about learning to fully "be where you are," which might sound hokey, but it's something I really have to work at constantly. I rarely allow myself to enjoy a moment without letting my mind wonder to the future or the past, without thinking about how much I want to remember it or how it compares with past experiences. By not having a camera, I was able to savor every simple pleasure God gave me just as it happened and see Him in every moment, from the savory aroma of soup to the sunlight dancing on a blade of grass.

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm pretty nuts about the show Lost. In addition to lots of stellar action, romance, and drama, the show continually raises new philisophical and ethical questions every week. This week brought us a very controversial moral dilemma that sparked a great deal of coversation between my friends.

Here it is: If you knew that an individual was going to commit unspeakable acts of violence and evil, and you had a chance to travel back to the past and kill him....would you do it? Would you do it even if that individual was a child at the time you traveled back to in order to kill him? Would it be unethical to kill an "innocent" child if you knew with certainty that you would be preventing many more murders in the future by killing him? (for example, would you execute a twelve year old Adolf Hitler in order to prevent the Holocaust? My friends and I felt pretty conflicted about this debate, and we all ended up falling on both sides, as did the characters on the show. It's clearly a pretty touchy, sensitive question, so I was somewhat amazed that the show's writers even dared to introduce it into the plot.