the blessedness of the ordinary

listening: joss stone's introducing joss stone

reading: the rest of God by mark buchanan

i started reading my utmost for his highest again for my devotions. it's been a couple of years since i've been through it, and i have no idea how he did it, but somehow oswald chambers has done it again.

one paragraph in today's reading says:

"'I will never . . . forsake you.' Sometimes it is not the difficulty of life but the drudgery of it that makes me think God will forsake me. When there is no major difficulty to overcome, no vision from God, nothing wonderful or beautiful— just the everyday activities of life— do I hear God’s assurance even in these?"

seriously.

i have such a difficult time with the ordinary. the everyday. the incessant dailyness that makes up the majority of life. the necessary yet banal. if i am going to feel forgotten or alone, chances are it won't be during a G180 school presentation. it won't be while i'm walking in the rodin garden. it won't be while i am playing with meg & nick. it will be during the ordinary-ness of life. the time that i too often tend to think of as filler, rather than actually life.

it seems like i have always struggled with this. i have always been looking forward to something...a trip to disneyworld or paris or poland, a visit from angie, visiting the family...always something. something to help me get through the boring, ordinary-ness en route to something exciting.

yet i know that i cannot climb the arc de triomphe or walk through the silence of the concentration camp at auschwitz every day. even my G180 role might get old if i did it every day (i said 'might'). i suppose if all the extraordinary things of life happened all the time that they too would become the ordinary.

so tonight, i will forget what is to come. i won't focus on all the somewheres i would rather be. tonight i will remember that there is blessedness in this ordinary wednesday night, and i will trust that even though there is nothing spectacular happening in this moment, that God is here with me, and as the prophet Zechariah put it, in chapter 3, verse 17,

the Lord your God is with you,

he is mighty to save.

he will take great delight in you,

he will quiet you with his love,

he will rejoice over you with singing.

i don't know about you, but that seems pretty extraordinary to me. :-)

reunion...

it's summer again...and on the weekend i was reminded (by dear, sweet joash) that it was almost a year ago when we 'kicked' the boys out of our small group. so, during our reminiscing, joash came up with the reunion idea...and i think that it is a brilliant one. 

then i got to thinking about what a great and amazing group of people that our small group, past and present is. the girls all know how much i love them... they see me every week. but it's true, i do miss you guys! 

i will forever see you, joash, running around my kitchen in circles for what amounted to no reason whatsoever. i love your sweet spirit, your willingness to allow God to use you, no matter what. i am a better person for knowing you.

and chris martin's, "45...50...55...ANGER!" and who can forget the 'sweet, sweet hands of fate"?! (was that chris or james?!)

i miss chris (drummond)'s 18-part questions that always challenged me more than i wanted to be at that moment (and sometimes more than i wanted to admit), and that you never let any of us off the hook with simple answers. i also miss that great look you would get on your face when you would be the only guy, and one of the girls would say something a little too "girlish"...and how you would look at me as if to say, 'fix it'...and all i did was laugh. :-)

kyle, my mississauga 'brother', when you got home from bible college after your first year, it was so amazing to see how you'd grown...i miss the deep conversations. we are too far apart this year. (too bad taco bell isn't very conducive to theological discussions! maybe we should change that!) and speaking of TB...we need a date soon!

and james... what can i say about you, my friend? no one on the planet has proposed to me so many times, makes me laugh so much, 'hugs' me so long, and whose conversations i always so look forward to. come home soon, i miss you!

in my heart, you all are still part of the group. and when james returns from his 'God Rocks' tour, we are so having a reunion!

music

given the fact that i have been listening to the 'les miserables' soundtrack for a few days in a row now, it is only natural that i've once again got the desire to read the book. that being said, since i do not have it to read, i found a quote by victor hugo online, and it made my heart smile.

"music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent."

i am not an envious person, but i do envy those who can make music. those who can take an instrument and make some beautiful sound emerge from it...who can read and understand music... who can take music and words and weave them into something with such great power and emotion that it makes your heart beat faster, and helps you to see your life in a different way.

and...because everything in life either has a 'friends' quote or rilke poem attached to it, here is another of my favorite of rilke's writings, entitled, to music: 

Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps:
silence of paintings. You language where all language
ends. You time
standing vertically on the motion of motal hearts.

Feelings for whom? O you the transformation
of feelings into what? --: into audible landscape.
You stranger: music. You heart-space
grown out of us. The deepest space in us,
which, rising above us, forces its way out,--
holy departure:
when the innermost point in us stands
outside, as the most practiced distance, as the other
side of the air:
pure,
boundless,
no longer habitable.

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.