Grace

I may be preaching to the choir here, but just in case.....

As a friend of mine was busy painting in the basement of a house that is not hers, the woman working alongside her commented, "I can't believe Habitat is building this house for someone who is not an American citizen!"

"Why do you think she's not a citizen?" My friend asked.

"Well, she doesn't speak English," was the clear explanation.

"I don't think you have to be able to speak English to be a citizen," countered my friend, and the argument then turned into whether or not English is required for citizenship. (Actually I think it is, because the test is in English.)

As my angry friend recounted the tale, (Which I may have not gotten EXACTLY right.) it occurred to both of us that that shouldn't haven't been the argument at all! Who cares if this lady is a US citizen? She needs a house. Her two daughters need a house. Her two daughters, who, my husband pointed out later, are probably US citizens!

Where does this idea come from that some people deserve help and some don't? How is it that the only people who should be helped are those who are in trouble through absolutely no fault of their own? Are there really any such people anyhow? How do some members of the human race "deserve" to be served crap and some don't? That makes NO SENSE!

Now, to really up my friend's anger, this woman with the twisted notions goes to our church where we hear every Sunday that God cares for the poor and the oppressed. That God's grace is for everyone. Does she really think that she deserves God's grace more than this single mom who may or may not be a US citizen? What we want to know is how a fellow Christian can so let us down.

Let's be clear. My friend and I have both done dumb and wrong things in our lives, even things that we knew to be wrong as we were doing them. For reasons that escape us, we have not had to pay the price for those sins in any costly way. It doesn't seem right to us that we should get to judge whether or not anyone deserves our help.

I try really hard to follow what Jesus taught when he was here, and the people that he helped were prostitutes, adulterers, cheats, and the like. I guess if God's grace through Jesus covers all of them, it ought to cover anybody that I come across who needs help as well.

Heaven

Ah... I've just been to a little slice of heaven that I like to call The Scholastic Warehouse Sale. Fortunately for me, I went with only 40 minutes until closing. I just couldn't stop getting books. I easily bought twice as many as I need to cover the Christmas gifts on my list. I justified it by saying that they are for my classroom. My job share partner is going to be forced to bail on me some day soon and I'd better get some books.

Also on this very day I got a fat package of books that I had ordered from Abby's book order at school. What a beautiful day.

I bought several books that I had previously read on loan- The Lightning Thief, So B. It, Peter and the Star Catchers, but I also found some that I hadn't read, Olivia Helps with Christmas, Olive My Love (I believe that would be Olive from Olive the Other Reindeer), and Today I Will Fly (by Mo Willems, the Pigeon guy). I bought one book that is really just for me, Bound, by Donna Jo Napoli. If it turns out to be appropriate I'll put it in my classroom. It's about a Chinese girl in a VERY traditional family. It's historical fiction, which I love.

While I'm on the subject of books.... If you like science fiction/adventure, and you also like books that don't take a lot of effort, JD would like to recommend James Patterson's Maximum Ride trilogy. It's about kids who were experimented on so that they became human/avian hybrids and now they've escaped the lab and are on the run. We've both read the first two books in the trilogy.

And! Good news! Inkdeath, the final- or it at least it darn well better be- installment of Cornelia Funke's Inkheart trilogy is already out! Of course, it's in German. The English versions won't be out until next year, but hey, next year is only weeks away.

I love books. Have I mentioned that before?

No, Freakin' Way!

It's not just me! People's misuse of quotation marks in print and in the air drives me crazy! It's right up there with using adjectives and adverbs and neglecting noun/verb agreement. (Feel free to use ain't and ya'll as much as you like. I'm immune to those two.) Now, I've discovered, thanks to my friend Jo, that there is a whole blog devoted to the subject! It's so "freakin" awesome! And, it gets better; on that blog is a link to a blog devoted to bathroom graffiti! Seriously, does it get better than that? Below is the link to the quotation site.

Quotation Marks

Childlike

My friend Lara, the reading teacher, put me on to an interview with Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass, that was in the New Yorker, or some other magazine. This was actually three or four years ago. In his interview Mr. Pullman was taking issue with the value that people put on childlikeness. He felt that it devalued growing up, which is a good and essential thing. At first I disagreed with him partly because it was C.S. Lewis that he was particularly taking issue with. I also didn't think that lined up very well with Jesus' teaching that one must become like a child to enter the kingdom of God.

Then, over Thanksgiving I was talking with Josh about a similar topic. He mentioned that there's a difference between innocence and purity. Trying to retain one's innocence is impossible in this life. Moving through that loss of innocence and finding a new purity of soul is a great achievement and can only be achieved by grownups. Huh. I hadn't ever thought of that before. So, I spent some time thinking about it.

Now I think that that's probably true. I think Jesus would agree. I don't think he was necessarily saying "Don't grow up. Stay childlike in all ways." Maybe he was valuing the way children are so teachable. Maybe Jesus was valuing how much more unconditionally children love, compared to adults. I don't know for sure, but I don't think that Jesus was saying that your faith has to be unquestioned and unwavering like a child's might be. A faith that has been tested and wrestled with seems a lot stronger. A grownup's faith.

I'm not sure that I'm done thinking about this. More later.

Advent

Yesterday, not October 25 or when ever stores started to put out Christmas items, was the first Sunday of Advent. This is a big deal if you celebrate Christmas as the day of Christ's birth. If you don't celebrate that, then perhaps you're not that interested in Advent and I wish you happing shopping and all of that.

However, if you're looking to see some more Holy in the Holiday, here's a link to Mars Hill's Advent walk.
(Thanks Ginger for the good suggestion.) In addition you might want to listen to the Sunday teachings from Mars Hill for the Advent season. Chris Seay from Houston was last week's teacher, Rob Bell will be teaching the next two weeks and the last week will be a man named Dwight Pryor. Dwight is the founder of the Center for Judaic-Christian Studies. If this past week's message was any indication, prepare to do some rethinking of your Christmas celebrations. You can find these teachings both on itunes or at the Mars Hill
website.

I know that I've struggled mightily in the last year or more to be holy, to see holiness, to love holiness. Whether Jesus was actually born in December or not, a season commemorating the way he came to us, the beginning of his incarnation, seems like a good time to pray for and seek out new life in my own soul.