heaven or hell...

while reading, God still loves the french, i came across this saying,

heaven is where the welcoming committee is english; the cook is french; the poets italian; the mechanics german and the police swiss. on the contrary, in hell, the welcoming committee is french; the cook british; the mechanics italian; the poets swiss; and the police german.

how brilliant is that?!

it's happened again...

quite unexpectedly, at some point this weekend, it happened again. i should be surprised that it's taken so long, but then again, a lot has gone on in my life in the past 39 days. but right now, for this moment all is quiet in the world.

what is it, you might wonder...?

i want to go back to paris.

now, before you roll your eyes & say 'what else is new?', let me say that for a while, i was happy to let last month's trip live contentedly in my memory. i was so tired and so sick while i was there, and i had no desire to return to feeling that drained and icky. but now that the illness has passed, now that i've gone to calgary to visit the family, now that the cruel reality of summer is right around the corner, NOW i want to go back to my ultimate Happy Place.

but here i am. so NOT in paris, but home nonetheless.

contentedness is such a tricky thing.

more Paris pics...

from a bridge over the seine

the Rodin museum
(how often do you get to sit in a room full of torsos?!)

i don't remember who this is,
but it's right across the street from the Sorbonne.

a Parisian street close to the Seine

the area behind the musee de l'Orangerie
(why do Parisian park benches look so darn appealing?)

inside the Rodin museum
(the sculpture reflected in the mirror)

in the Luxembourg garden

more Luxembourg garden...this time including the palace

Notre Dame & the Seine

in the courtyard of the Louvre

in the jardin de Tuileries looking toward the Louvre

the Louvre...

Ctrl + Z

as we were walking into the mall yesterday during our lunch hour, some of the girls and i were talking about the ways in which our online, computerized work life has infiltrated our daily lives. one friend mentioned how there are times when she is talking to someone face to face and they say something funny, and her reaction (in her head, of course) is 'LOL'. :-)

for me, probably my most used function is the undo command, control + Z. whatever bad, wrong, stupid thing i have done, all i need to do is hit these two magical keys, and all my bad disappears.

how i wish i had a control + Z function for my life.

for those words said in haste. those actions that i did not think all the way through before embarking on. days that i wasted worrying or being critical, or bitter...or simply chose not to be joyful.

i used to wonder why God didn't give us the opportunity to magically undo, erase our mistakes. but i think i understand now. when i'm working on a Photoshop file i have room to play with it, to try to come up with the best possible image, by doing the best combination of actions to that file. what matters is the outcome.

not so with our lives. God is not so concerned with our outcome as he is with the process, how we live out the moments of our lives. what we do with those words we should not have said. whether we choose bitterness or worry, or whether we choose joy and trust.

obviously, i am still greatly interested in exploring the control + z function for life. i am far too consistently clumsy a person to not wish to undo the salsa that i spilled on a white shirt with a wave of hands over a keyboard. but for the rest of life, i will continue to embrace the process, the journey, living mindfully that there are no erasable moments in life, and along the way, i will become more like Jesus.