Faith Indiana Jones Style

I'm struggling - currently, though it's always an ongoing struggle for me - with trusting God. I feel that he's calling me to do something, but instead of being still and quiet and humble and a willing servant, I don't want to do it, and I'm trying to rationalize or justify going ahead with my own plan.

There are moments when I say I will obey, but I'm astounded to realize that I'm still not trusting, even in those moments of surrender. I'm not quiet or still or humble. I'm rearranging my plans in my head, trying to think how it will work, what I have to do. I still want to be in control. I say I will obey God, but I don't want to trust him completely.

Indiana Jones was able to garner enough faith/courage/desperation to step out onto the invisible plank over the deep abyss, but once he got to the other side, he threw dust and pebbles over it so he would be able to see it when he came back that way. The irony of that moment has never left me, and I think of it sometimes in relation to myself. Maybe I'll take a little first step, but after that I'm sprinkling dust and pebbles so that I'll be sure to know my path, to plan my path.

MLK Jr.

I read a two-part article today in the online edition of First Things.

Here are the links:

Obama's Niebuhrian Moment Part I,

Obama's Niebuhrian Moment Part II.

The articles begin with a comparison of President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech and the political theology of Reinhold Niebuhr. It concludes, however, with an analysis of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Peace Prize speech and the suggestion that this may be a better pattern for us to follow than that of Niebuhr.

I recommend reading it.

Also, today is King's birthday. I think it's important to remember great men and women.

fear

I'm flying back to Mexico today after a nice Christmas vacation at home. At times, I've been experiencing high levels of worry and stress as I think about things like flying back, making the right decisions about next year, relationships. Last night, I didn't sleep very well, and worried all through my dreams.

But perfect love casts out fear, and God loves me. I can trust him because he is good. He is good in the little things and in the large things.

Sometimes life seems so long.

I'm loosing my mind - letting it loose.

Many people, close friends, well-educated, and well-meaning, use lose and loose incorrectly. More specifically, they spell loose when they mean to use lose.

Loose means, as an adjective, that something is not tight. Or, as a verb, to let something go.

Lose, on the other hand, is a verb which means to be deprived of something.

Loose rhymes with goose. It does not rhyme with choose.

Lose rhymes with bruise and with choose. It does not rhyme with nose, nor with chose.

This is all said in the best of intentions.

journal

I finished a journal today. It doesn't matter how long I have had a particular journal; it always feels like I am saying goodbye to an old friend.

I wasn't expecting it to end - I thought I had a few more pages. It was a little too sudden for me today.

It's rather full of angst and confusion; but it was with me through some difficult times. I feel very grateful momentarily.

Pictures

I bought a new computer recently and it comes with fancy photography software. I am jealous of the pictures I see on there. The smiling people with the beautiful lighting. Mine never turn out so well. Eyes half closed, faces only partly in the picture: things like this occur frequently in my pictures. 

I suppose that I could practice more with my camera, read a few photo-taking tips online. I do not like always pulling out my camera. I am also suspicious of how a picture seems to verify facts. "I have the picture that I was at Mount Rushmore, therefore I was."  Some moments can't be captured, they can only be experienced. 

I'm also pretty lazy at uploading them to my computer, let alone sites like Facebook or Picasa. 

But if you are interested, Most of my uploaded pictures are stored at Picasa. 

Re-enchanting the world.

While I do not consider myself to be a literary critic or snob or anything of the sort, I must admit that I rarely find a book that truly delights me. I read a lot of books that I find "interesting" or "thought-provoking" but little that stirs something inside of me. However, today I did finish one that quite delighted me.

I took a class my senior year at Wheaton called Modern Mythology with Alan Jacobs. We read The Lord of the Rings and The Princess and Curdie and a crazy book by Charles Williams called All Hallow's Eve. One book we didn't read, but which was recommended to us, was Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. Dr. Jacobs said that this book was a cross between Jane Austen and Harry Potter. I'm not a Harry Potter fan (and I found that if most of your HP knowledge comes from Wikipedia, don't mention this to a room full of people discussing the end of the seventh book.) but I do enjoy Jane Austen to a high degree. I probably would have forgotten about the book had I not found a used copy for $1. Hence I bought it and brought it along with me to Mexico.

I can't remember when I started reading the book - probably in November, but I finished it this morning. The paperback is a 1006 pages of closely set type and several pages have digressive footnotes that can take up half the room on the page. The story, which wasn't at all dull to begin with, began to pick up steam halfway through as numerous different story threads started to weave together. I thought it was quite addictive and read the last 500 pages or so just this week. At the end I wished it continued, to keep me in the world.

The basic plot is of two English magicians, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. The story begins in the early part of the 19th century and covers a time of about 10 years. It interweaves true British history with an additional, magical past. An extremely powerful English Magician, known mainly as the Raven King, ruled a kingdom in Northern England for 300 years but in the past half millennium English magic had slowly fallen asleep. Norrell and Strange wish to wake it up.

Clarke creates a host of characters, Englishmen, Fairies, day-to-day and enchanted, and the story darts back and forth among them. Plotting her novel in the midst of one winter after another (skipping summers) gives the magic a cold feeling, and the tone is quite matter-of-fact, tongue-in-cheek at some points. this, I think, succeeds in keeping the novel from being a little over the top.

One of the things that fantasy novels do for us is re-enchant the world. When I was a young girl I played Fairies with my sister every season - like the Fantasia fairies that brown the leaves and skate frost upon pond. We had a huge, tree-covered yard and when I went to college I realize how enchanting my childhood had been. Overgrown woods full of unexplored haunts and mystical vistas. Scope for the imagination and room to believe that the world is more than scientifically-explainable processes. I think many of us lose this as we grow, but fantasy brings it back. It reminds us that the world is a big, beautiful, hard place and returns a sense of wonder to us.

Jonathan Strange has brought a sense of that wonder back - visions of stones speaking to water and trees greeting a returning king. A world in which much is possible and mundane things may in fact have an incredibly important significance.

Actually, I missed some stuff because it seemed so mundane at the time. However, because the book was so large I had trouble going back and finding it so that I could read it again. I do not know if the book will end up being a long-time favorite, but, whether it was the story or the world or the ideas that drew me, I can truly say that I have not enjoyed a book like this in quite a long time.