a resounding resevoir

This is one of the most beautiful depictions of worship that I have encountered. It is from a Ravi Zacharias talk entitled, "Why Don't I Feel My Faith."

"I say to you that music comes into your life and builds a resevoir so that in the moments where you are down and the moments where you are dark inside, a song, a hymn, or a chorus, or whatever it is, will come back to lighten your path and lessen your load. There is a Reader's Digest article that says that when we are alone we dance. I don't know if that's true, but I do know that when we are alone we sing. I will tell you what, the great hymns, the great songs that you sing in the car, sing alone at home, or listen to by way of record or a tape, when the church gives us that gift, it gives us the sentiments that can lift us in darker moments. I saw this demonstrated. My father-in-law suffered a heart attack and we were living in the fear of not knowing if he was going to make it. We were in church that morning, while he was at home resting, battling this through, really emotionally struggling, and I was sitting in the balcony with my wife and our children and downstairs was my mother-in-law sitting next to her friends. I watched her through the whole service and she had a very sad countanence the whole time. The preacher was done, the testimonies were done, everything was done. Then the closing hymn began and the tears could not longer be repressed. This was the hymn that was sung, and the tears just flowed. It put it all together for her.

Be still, my soul; the Lord is on your side;
Bear patiently the cross of grief or pain;
Leave to your God to order and provide;
In every change he faithful will remain.
Be still, my soul; your best, your heavenly Friend
Through thorny ways leads to a joyful end.

Be still, my soul; the hour is hastening on
When we shall be forever with the Lord,
When disappointment, grief, and fear are gone,
Sorrow forgot, love’s purest joys restored.
Be still, my soul; when change and tears are past,
All safe and blessed we shall meet at last.

I watched her cry and I thought that was good, it was therapeutic, everything had come together. The word of God to came to her. The language reminding herself of the truths, the language of friends seated around her, the language of obedience, a life that had served him over all these years, and now the language of the church as a song was ministering to her heart and lifted her above the dark lonliness and possible heartache around the corner."

feminism and food

This is an excerpt from the novel that I am currently reading, The Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. It struck a chord so I am sharing it with you. Read and respond if you would like.

I understand that most US citizens don't have room in their lives to grow food or even see it growing. But I have trouble accepting the next step in our journey toward obligate symbiosis with the package meal and takeout. Cooking is a dying art in our culture. Why is a good question, and an uneasy one, because I find myself politically and socioeconomically entangled in the answer. I belong to a generation of women who took as our youthful rallying cry: Allow us a good education so we won't have to slave in the kitchen. We recoiled from the proposition that keeping a husband presentable and fed should be our highest intellectual aspiration. We fought for entry as equal partners into every quarter of the labor force. We went to school, sweated those exams, earned our professional stripes, and we beg therefore to be excused from manual labour. Or else our full time job is manual labor, we are carpenters or steelworkes, or we stand at a cash register all day. At the end of a shift we deserve to go home and put our feet up. Somehow, though, history came around and bit us in the backside: now most women have jobs and still find themselves largely in charge of the housework. Cooking at the end of a long day is a burden we could live without.

It's a reasonable position. But it got twisted into a pathological food culture. When my generation of women walked away from the kitchen we were escorted down that path by a profiteering industry that knew a tired, vunerable marketing taget when they saw it. "Hey, ladies," it said to us, "go ahead, get liberated. We'll take care of dinner." They threw open the door and we walked into a nutrtional crisis and genuinely toxic food supply. If you think toxic is an exaggeration, read the package directions for handling raw chicken from a CAFO. We came a long way, baby, into bad eating habits and collarterally impaired family dynamics. No matter what else we do or believe, food remains at the center of every culture. Ours now runs on empty calories.

When we traded homemaking for careers, we were implicity promised economic independance and worldly influence. But a devil of a bargain it has turned out to be in terms of daily life. We gave up the aroma of warm bread rising, the measured pace of nurturing routines, the creative task of molding our families' tastes and zest for life; we recieved in exchange the minivan and the Lunchable. (Or worse, convience-mart hot dogs and latchkey kids.) I consider it the great hoodwink of my generation (126-127).

amen.

Thank-you Lord for a Dad who demonstrates aspects of Your faithfullness and love.

international clothesline week

Do you remember as a kid seeing your mother hang the clothes on the clothesline and a few hours later helping her to take them down and smelling the freshness of each piece? Even in the winter you'd be pulling in frozen pieces of clothes that would stand on their own. Now most people ONLY use dryers ... lots of dryers!

Over 80% of our households have a clothes dryer drawing huge amounts of energy! If every household participated for even one day hanging their clothes to dry it would save us a huge amount of energy and a huge dollar savings. More importantly that translates into less charcoal pollutants and thus less health consequences associated with coal driven electricity. As a global community, if we could all hang our clothes to dry, it will mean healthier mentalities, healthier relationships and a healthier earth. And that's just one day; how about a week, a year, a lifetime?