emmanuel.

Every warrior's boot used in battle
and every garment rolled in blood
will be destined for burning,
will be fuel for the fire.

For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given,
and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

Of the increase of his government and peace
there will be no end.
He will reign on David's throne
and over his kingdom,
establishing and upholding it
with justice and righteousness
from that time on and forever.
The zeal of the LORD Almighty
will accomplish this.

Isaiah 9:5-7

Merry Christmas, everyone!!!

________________________________

On a related note:

Got leftover Christmas cards this year? Check out this article and make some holiday mischief.

oh how quickly we forget

He was in the world,
and thought the world was made through him,
the world did not recognize him.
He came to that which was his own,
but his own did not receive him.
Yet to all who received him,
to those who believed in him name,
he gave the right to be called Children of God--
children born not of natural descent,
nor of human decision or a husband's will,
but born of God.

John 1:10-13

We read this passage at Olive Branch tonight during the Christmas Eve service, and although John 1 has always held a sort of mystic fascination for me--all that Word was God and the Word was with God craziness--this time I was struck by something very specific in the text:

The world did not recognize Him.

I've been reading Donald Miller's Searching For God Knows What lately, and he spends the majority of his time in that book trying to get the reader to grasp this concept of a relational God. Not relative (as in postmodern relative truth), but relational in the sense that the Christian God is a Person (and became, literally, a person) who has created us not to be some kind of entertaining ant farm or an army of minions, but merely to enjoy communion with Himself. A relationship, if you will, although even that simple word has been dragged through the mud of Evangelical Christianese. He tries to explain that all the "stuff" that normally comes to mind when we think of God--church, morals, spiritual disciplines, etc.--is completely trumped by and totally meaningless without a dynamic, loving relationship with our Bridegroom and Beloved, Jesus.

A lot of the time I have trouble getting past that notion of a stoic, detached God who's just sort of lazily watching history unfold the way a magician watches as he shuffles a deck of cards. But this time I think I understood for a moment the pain contained in these verses: "though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him." And as much as I hate to admit it, it reminded me of The Notebook.

The most touching part of this otherwise throwaway movie occurs when Allie, an elderly woman with Alzheimers, briefly has her memory return to her and is able to remember her devoted husband, who has written down their love story and reads it over and over to her on a regular basis. The couple embraces, but all too quickly they are pulled back to reality. Allie asks Noah how long it will be until she forgets him again, and he answers that if varies every time. The best they can do is make the most of the time that they have, and when Allie does forget, Noah goes right back to reading her the story and pursuing her with the memory of his love.

I can't help but think that God must have felt very much like Noah. Here He has created us in His likeness and given us this beautiful planet to enjoy together, and we turn our backs on Him. Then, when He has given us the ultimate demonstration of His love, when He has contained His infinite glory in human flesh in order to repair the bridge between our hearts and His, we don't even recognize Him. The love, the intimacy, the joy that we felt with Him in the Garden of Eden has slowly faded from our collective memory. We are Allie with Alzheimers, a wife unable to remember her husband. And our husband, knowing full well the seriousness of the disease, must decide whether he will remain devoted to a woman who may or may not ever return his love again, or whether he will slip out the back door and leave her alone in the nursing home in the fog of her mind.

But of course, where true love is concerned, it's no choice at all.

As for me, I am all too aware of my own spiritual Alzheimers. Those fleeting moments of recognition, of beholding the face of God and truly knowing Him, are precious and rare. Inevitably, I ask the bittersweet question: "How long until I forget again?"

Merry Christmas, everyone. I pray we all have a memory flash.

my side of the wilderness.

It all started with NIMBY. I was stumbled across this website the other day when I was researching, of all things, steampunk art. NIMBY is a "DIY industrial art space" in Oakland, CA that caters especially to large-scale artistic and engineering projects. But the thing that caught my eye wasn't the giant robotic spider or the 30-foot-tall illuminated clown face; it was the organization's slogan: "Refuse to live vicariously."

And that's what did it.

We all have bugs in our system. Dreams--some feasible, some nearly impossible--that we hide in the soft, fleshy folds of our hearts and rarely let see the light of day. Some want to climb Mt. Everest. Some want to open their own restaurant. Some want to hurtle themselves at the ground from the top of a cliff with only a rubber cord standing between them and eternity.

Me? I just want to get lost.

Call it what you will--a transcendentalist fantasy, a danger complex, a death wish. I have always had an obsession with stories of survival. Two of my favorite books as a kid were My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George and Hatchet by Gary Paulsen, both stories about kids who find themselves alone in the woods and must learn to survive. When I got a little older, probably in conjunction with my OCD fear of global nuclear war, I became interested in the post-apocalyptic and zombie genres (both of which center around an individual or group surviving after the collapse of modern civilization). I devoured books and movies such as Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank, The Postman, the "Of The Dead" series, 28 Days Later, and Waterworld.

Finally, all that merged with: an inherent distaste for the alienation and detachment that results from much of the technology we use, a stubbornly independent spirit, and a deep, abiding love for manual labor and its fruits. (My favorite part of the Chi Alpha mission trip to Mexico was hand-mixing cement and digging ditches.)

Put it all together and you have a very deep yearning in my soul to pitch a tent in the woods and start working on a fishing pole. I don't want to live vicariously anymore.

I remember having a conversation once with a friend where we were talking about what we would do in a post-apocalyptic scenario. It went something like this:

ME: "But...don't you think it might be kind of, I don't know, cool in a way if all our modern luxuries were stripped away and we had to start over living in cabin and growing our own food and stuff?"

FRIEND: "Umm...no, not really."

So maybe I'm a little bit alone on this, but my reasons are simple enough. I want to learn about and be connected to the natural world. I want to see the exact source of the food that I eat and prepare it with my own hands. I want to live, even for just a little while, without the distraction of a single electronic device. And when the zombie pandemic strikes and America is riddled with atomic bombs, I want to be able to escape to the middle of a Canadian forest and know that I can survive.

So that's the plan, essentially. I'm going to spend a lot of time this spring preparing: taking a first-aid course, training Lucy, researching all aspects of wilderness survival, and learning from my friend Liz who did this exact thing the summer after she graduated high school. And then in June I'm going to take my dog and load up my car and drive somewhere--maybe Tennessee, maybe Colorado--find a national park, and set up camp for about a month. I'm not sure yet exactly how much I'm going to bring in the way of supplies, but I do know that I want to only eat off the land. So that means fishing, hunting, gathering, and probably some weight loss while I learn through trial and error. I'm also going to bring a spiral notebook and my Bible (along with some plant identification books and the Army Field Survival Manual) and keep a daily log of the journey, which I will hopefully turn into a long work of nonfiction over the rest of the summer.

(don't worry, I won't be nakey...at least not most of the time.)

So, am I crazy? Maybe.
Is this a really extreme way to go about fulfilling a pipe dream? Probably.
Is it completely and absolutely necessary for me to do this? You betcha.

The funny side note to all this is that a few months back, my brother Danny had a prophetic dream about me that involved me looking out at the world and Jesus telling me "This will all look different in June." I had totally forgotten about the dream and had already scheduled this trip in my mind for June when he reminded me of it on the phone tonight.

So don't worry. God's got my back on this one. Just pray that my parents don't have instant coronaries when I tell them.

dinner roulette

Nicole

haha sure

hey you know what i was thinking about this morning?

11:22amJaclyn

what were you thinking about this morning?

11:22amNicole

remember in high school, we used to go to all those sketchy chinese buffet places like the one in elmwood and the one out in chateau?

we never do that anymore

we should do that one day

11:23amJaclyn

when i get off work tonight?

11:23amNicole

it's kind of like dinner roulette

haha...you're on

we could try the "ho ho buffet" on labarre!

11:23amJaclyn

:D

yay!!!!!

_______________

I love my roommate. =)

isaiah 61

1 The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me,
because the LORD has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim freedom for the captives
and release from darkness for the prisoners,

2 to proclaim the year of the LORD's favor
and the day of vengeance of our God,
to comfort all who mourn,

3 and provide for those who grieve in Zion—
to bestow on them a crown of beauty
instead of ashes,
the oil of gladness
instead of mourning,
and a garment of praise
instead of a spirit of despair.
They will be called oaks of righteousness,
a planting of the LORD
for the display of his splendor.

I'm a little late in the game on this, but I have been wanting to do a blog series on some of the prophecies about Jesus in honor of Advent and Christmas. So far, this is the one that has struck me the most - Isaiah 61. When I first read it, a single word jumped out at me and stuck in my brain: brokenhearted. For an entire day afterwards, I couldn't get that word out of my head. Brokenhearted. What's the deal?

It occurred to me that it isn't a word that often appears in the Bible; I mean, it certainly isn't in the canon of Biblical words, like "love," "sin," "oxen," "ploughshares," and everyone's favorite, "verily." It's more like a word you'd hear in a country song or some of my 8th grade poetry.

bro.ken.heart.ed - burdened with great sorrow, grief, or disappointment

To be brokenhearted is to feel pain on an intense emotional level. It is, symbolically, the destruction of our most vital organ. The tearing of our flesh. A broken heart. I thought about it, and the little hamster wheel in my brain began to turn. The word stuck out to me because not only because I'm not used to associating it with the Bible, but because I'm not used to associating this concept of "great sorrow, grief, or disappointment" with the story of Jesus' birth and the promise of salvation.

The story of Jesus was taught to me as a child in a very formulaic way:

the wages of sin = death

the gift of God = eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 6:23)

I sin, so I need Jesus in order to not go to hell. The end.

While there's nothing technically wrong with that theology, there's certainly something implicitly wrong with it. It reduces Jesus down to a mathematical formula. Salvation becomes merely the better of two options, and the Christian life becomes nothing more than fire insurance.

But Isaiah isn't talking about the pros and cons here. The word "sin" (which we've already established is a Bible canon word) doesn't even appear in passage at all. Instead, the Messiah that Isaiah talks about is one who comes to:

bind up the brokenhearted

proclaim freedom for the captives

release prisoners from darkness

comfort those who mourn

provide for those who grieve

We have sinned, yes, and we need a Savior. But we don't just need him to wipe our slate clean. The tally marks against you are the least of your problems when you're trapped in the carnage of your shredded, bleeding, broken heart. The Church has failed to understand this. We tell someone, "Go and sin no more," and we do nothing whatsoever about the aching hearts and unmet needs that caused them to sin in the first place. Isaiah says differently. He prophesies a Savior whose absolute first priority is to heal the hurting souls of His people and set them free from their chains.

In my opinion, Jesus fulfills this prophecy when he meets the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4. Jesus doesn't condemn this woman (who, by the way, he legally shouldn't even be talking to in the first place) for committing adultery. He doesn't break out his hand-printed evangelism scroll and start showing her the salvation equation. Instead he offers her something rather cryptic: "living water."

"Everyone who drinks this water," he explains, "will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life."

For Jesus, it was never about the sin tally marks or the fire insurance. It was about the broken heart, the wound that only Isaiah's Messiah could bind up and make whole.

snow x2 - photos

Been trying to get better at my novice photography skills (mostly portraits, mostly through trial and error). Here are a few of my favorites that I took yesterday:

this was at the very end of the shoot...I think she was tired of smiling, but I think it turned out cute.

on the porch in front of the house

snow on our sad little tree in the backyard!

looking @ the sleet...I mean snow.

here's looking (up) at you, kid.

snowage.

snow.

"New Orleans is one of the two most ingrown, self-obsessed little cities in the United States. (The other is San Francisco)" - Nora Ephron

It's true. We are. I find that, far more than most places that exhibit some sort of civic or regional pride, New Orleans really and truly loves being New Orleans. We wrap our sweaty, bead-draped arms around ourselves and hang on for dear life. We memorialize every single bit of our culture, never content to let even the smallest things fall out of our collective memory. I had this conversation with someone a while ago about the local cult fascination with K&B, (for proof, click here) a New Orleans-based drug store chain that went out of business in the 90's.

ME: "Why do people always talk about K&B like it was this great, amazing thing?"
OTHER NEW ORLEANIAN: "What are you talking about? It's K&B!"
ME: "Yeah, but it was just a drug store. There was nothing inherently special about it, it was just a New Orleans business."
OTHER NEW ORLEANIAN: "Yeah, but...it's K&B!"

We don't discriminate. We do this sort of thing not only with the cool stuff, but with the annoying/stupid/horrible things too. It's kind of like groupthink complaining. And it used to be that one of our favorite things to complain about was the fact that it never snows in New Orleans.

Enter Katrina. Then, by a miracle that may have made even the staunchest Nawlins atheist tilt their head, we got snow on Christmas Day of 2005. Angels sang. Trumpets sounded. People went crazy and made tiny 6-inch snowmen on the tops of their cars, the only place the snow would stick for more than a second. It was, by all accounts, the most grateful snow to ever fall.

But it was over in less than an hour, and the next two winters saw a return to the 70-degree norm that New Orleans was used to cursing over their Christmas ham. But hey, what did we expect? It was a miracle, after all. Let's not get greedy here.

But then, lo and behold, on the third year following the Post-Katrina Flurry of the Century, we get this craziness. Snow again! This time for over three hours, generating piles of wet, slushy fluff capable of producing snowmen that were at least as tall as a first grader. And for a little while, just a couple of hours, New Orleans got lost in the snow. For once, the city that is the self-analytical equivalent of an emo kid sitting alone in the back of the school bus forgot about itself. It indulged in a little escapism, a little costuming. It could have been the frozen Artic tundra outside for all we knew!

It's good to widen the scope every now and again. To rejoice in the unfamiliar and leave your problems to lie for a little bit underneath the snow bank. Merry Christmas indeed, New Orleans. You look good in white.

the [fun] is in the details.

Last weekend, I had a really interesting conversation with my new friend Katie while baking cookies. I asked her if she wouldn't mind greasing the pan with her hands, because I hated the greasy feeling of shortening. She said sure.

"Actually," she continued somewhat sheepishly, "it's weird, but I kind of like the feeling of food in my hands."

I pretty much love any sentence that begins with It's weird, but... so I was already enjoying this. Katie continued: "A while ago, I worked doing dishes for a soup kitchen. Everyone else would use a utensil or something to scoop out the excess food, but I always used my hands."

After hearing such an awesome, cool, self-assured woman admit to me her bizarre tactile fascination, I felt okay revealing one of my own: "You know what I like? Sticking my hands in a bag of dry rice, or coffee beans. There's something cool about that."

(By the way--yes, I am aware that this specific oddity is referenced in the French movie sensation Amelie, but I maintain that I felt this way long before seeing it.)

It was exhilarating for a minute there, just being able to connect with someone about such an innocent, weird little pleasure of life. And I couldn't stop thinking about it all that night. I kept mulling it over while I took Lucy on one of her near-midnight walks around the block.

It occurred to me that so often we get caught up in the "big" things of life that we really do neglect the thousand little wonders that God's creation has to offer. We've been oversexualized--we forget that an orgasm isn't the only pleasurable thing in the world. We've been overstimulated--we forget the joy of simplicity, of doing one thing at a time and giving it all your attention instead of multi-tasking 24/7. We've been overtasked--we forget that, in the midst of working towards these lofty goals that we have set for ourselves, the journey itself is beautiful and worthwhile.

It reminded me of a C.S. Lewis quote that I recently saw on Pam's blog, about the spirit of God dwelling in the mundane: "Our model is the Jesus, not only of Calvary, but of the workshop, the roads, the crowds, the clamorous demands and surly oppositions, the lack of all peace and privacy, the interruptions. For this, so strangely unlike anything we can attribute to the divine life in itself, is apparently not only like, but is, the divine life operating under human conditions."

I don't know about anyone else, but I feel a tremendous freedom when I remember that not only does God CARE about the number of hairs on my head and the lifespans of sparrows, he REJOICES in these little things as well. I feel like I have permission to take a breath. To laugh. To lift my head up from the drawing board and enjoy the glory all around me.

And it's silly, of course, that it took that amount of analysis to come to such a conclusion, since God practically falls all over Himself trying to spell it out for us in Scripture, but hey...we all know I'm not always the brightest crayon in the box. =)

I hope that encourages you if you feel like you are struggling with the big, hefty, weighty things of life today. Go stick your hand in some coffee beans and you'll feel better, trust me.

Just be sure to pay for them first.

not in the Bible.

hilarious.

Merry early Christmas, everyone!