that C.S. Lewis, man...

"Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods 'where they get off,' you can never be even a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith." -C.S. Lewis

a fictional book I'm reading right now

SOOOO good!

more NT Wright

"If evolutionary optimism is squelched by, among other things, the sober estimates of the scientists that the universe as we know it today is running out of steam and cannot last forever, the gospel of Jesus Christ announces that what God did for Jesus at easter he will do not only for all those who are 'in Christ' but also for the entire cosmos. It will be an act of new creation, parallel to and derived from the act of new creation when God raise Jesus from the dead."

favourite quote (at least one of them)

“One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever. One knows it sometimes when one gets up at the tender solemn dawn-time and goes out and stands alone and throws one’s head far back and looks up and up and watches the pale sky slowly changing and flushing and marvelous unknown things happening until the East almost makes one cry out and one’s heart stands still at the strange unchanging majesty of the rising of the sun – which has been happening every morning for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. One knows it then for a moment or so. And one knows it sometimes when one stands by oneself in a wood at sunset and the mysterious deep gold stillness slanting through and under the branches seems to be saying slowly again and again something one cannot quite hear, however much one tries. Then sometimes the immense quiet of the dark blue at night with millions of stars waiting and watching makes one sure; and sometimes a sound of far-off music makes it true; and sometimes a look in some one’s eyes.”
- the Secret Garden

NT Wright rocks my socks

"Death is the last weapon of the tyrant, and the point of the resurrection, despite much misunderstanding, is that death has been defeated. Resurrection is not the redescription of death; it is its overthrow and, with that, the overthrow of those whose power depends on it. Despite the sneers and slurs of some contemporary scholars, it was those who believed in the bodily resurrection who were burned at the stake and thrown to the lions. Resurrection was never a way of settling down and becoming respectable; the Pharisees could have told you that."

"It was time for the evil which had dogged Jesus's footsteps throughout his career - the shrieking maniacs, the conspiring Herodians, the carping Pharisees, the plotting chief priests, the betrayer among his own disciples, the whispering voices within his own soul - to gather into one great tidal wave of evil that would crash with full force over his head.

So he spoke of the Passover bread as his own body that would be given on behalf of his friends, as he went out to take on himself the weight of evil so that they wouldn't have to bear it themselves. He spoke of the Passover cup as containing his own blood. Like the sacrificial blood in the Temple, it would be poured out to establish the covenant - but this time the new covenant spoken of by the prophet Jeremiah. The time had now come when, at last, God would rescue his people, and the whole world, not from mere political enemies, but from evil itself, from the sin which had enslaved them. His death would do what the Temple, with its sacrificial system, had pointed toward but had never actually accomplished. In meeting the fate which was rushing toward him, he would be the place where heaven and earth met, as he hung suspended between the two. He would be the place where God's future arrived in the present, with the kingdom of God celebrating its triumph over the kingdoms of the world by refusing to join in their spiral of violence. He would love his enemies, turn the other cheek, go the second mile. He would act out, finally, his own interpretation of the ancient prophecies which spoke to him of a suffering Messiah."

camp nostalgia, man.

In the grown-up world of paying the bills, saving for tuition, and buying my own toothpaste, I feel a sense of pride in my growing up - some of the time. But more often than not I miss not having to worry about money. I miss CAMP. And not just the place - I miss family camp as an institution, and being on staff as a way of life. I miss:

-greeting everyone at the terminal at the beginning of the summer and marveling at how pasty we have all become over the year
-sitting and planning for hours at a time during orientation, then spending the evenings drinking hot chocolate concoctions & watching fashion shows and waterfront skits and the like
-Saturday afternoons: playing on the pier, eating strawberry popsicles, laying on the beach, and taking a "real shower" in the bath pavilion
-the first week of family camp, where everything is dicey and plans are frantically revised
-afternoons/evenings in the lounge, with someone always playing a guitar, someone always sleeping, and someone always eating the ever-present communal junk food
-Saturday evenings: Christmas parties, coffee houses, bunco, scavenger hunts, and watching "adult movies" like Princess Bride and Man from Snowy River
-writing letters
-Tuesday-afternoon babysitting
-dance nights
-wacky cake
-endless hikes to the cross with children of all ages, after which I am always winded and the children don't even break a sweat
-singing (sometimes endless) rounds of "I'm in the Lord's army"
-saying the memory verse at every meal
-birthday skits, mostly planned at the VERY last second
-hiking scar, jumping in the ocean, taking a beach shower, then rushing up canyon to get dressed and serve dinner
-Sunday morning church - everyone in staff shirts and in various states of exhaustion
-never wearing makeup & never needing it
-wearing makeup on banquet night and being surprisingly insecure about your appearance, then having all the boys notice how pretty we all look :)
-ABALONE
-watching the same movie for 6 consecutive friday nights but never seeing the whole thing straight through
-sleeping on the beach
-stashing away a cinnamon roll for after the hike but eating oatmeal before the hike
-grugs
-sneaking in to watch "Sex Has a Price Tag" with the high schoolers
-freeze dance
-blowing all the campers away when the staff demonstrates the rain dance
-Paul Friesen cookies
-hanging out with kids in the afternoon
-the bear hunts growing more and more elaborate as the summer goes on
-the dreaded mid-summer cold epidemic, characterized by all staffers pumping airborne
-ponytails, cutoffs, rainbows, t-shirts, and hoodies
-singing "the Butterfly Song" about a thousand times and still loving every fuzzy-wuzzy bear and bird in the sky
-the din of various musical acts practicing for the talent show on Wednesday afternoons
-brown bread day
-making several banners and several of each of your kids' crafts for the summer
-staff small groups, always featuring candy
-eating large quantities of tater tots during the kids' banquet
-jamming to Disney music while mopping the main deck
-getting more and more creative with s'mores
-Paul Friesen-isms
-the excitement of Sunday evenings
-being completely exhausted & marveling at God's faithfulness
-under-dogs: just as terrifying to you as they are to the kid
-learning to love having dirty feet
-the inner quietness that comes after a month with no internet or TV
-the glory of Big Olaf's on Wednesdays
-the anxiety and stress of packing up a summer's worth of possessions that have accumulated over the summer and finally paying one's snack shop bill
-consuming large quantities of the glorious kids' banquet appetizer mix
-looking forward to doing laundry
-the inevitable game of limbo and/or freeze dance during the kids' banquet
-taking your kids to the bathroom at the outhouse and worrying that they'll fall in
-worship at the cross with the high schoolers on Friday nights
-cheering your kids on during the swim test
-finding the rocks on the beach surprisingly comfortable after a few weeks
-having your clothes always smell like campfire
-the increasingly-um...creative - kid's skits during the morning session
-leftover desserts in the staff fridge
-finally mastering "I know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly"
-owning every piece of camp merchandise in the store
-the variety of books that are in the staff lounge library
-making bracelets
-pushing a kid on the swings until your arms go numb
-swinging until your legs go numb
-not missing your cell phone
-knowing that once you're a CBS staffer, you'll always be a CBS staffer

Frederick Buechner.

I can't believe I just discovered him. I just read Telling the Truth: the Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy & Fairy Tale and while I want to type the entire book into a blog entry, I'll have to settle for my favourite parts.

"Truth itself cannot be stated. Truth simply is, and is what is, the good with the bad, the joy with the despair, the presence and absence of God, the swollen eye, the bird pecking the cobbles for crumbs. Before it is a word, the Gospel that is truth is silence, a pregnant silence in its ninth month, and in answer to Pilate's question, Jesus keeps silent, even with his hands tied behind him manages somehow to hold silence out like a terrible gift."

"Pilate asks Jesus what is truth...and what Jesus hits Pilate over the head with is Pilate himself. Jesus just stands there in silence in a way that throws Pilate back on his own silence, the truth of himself. What Jesus lets his silence say is that truth is what words can't tell but only tell about, what images can only point to. The weight of these sad times is the weight of their eloquent silence, and even when you turn the sound back on again and Eric Sevareid or Shakespeare or Billy Graham starts putting words to things, behind the words the silence of the stones cries out like thunder."

"...in addition to particular truths, the prophets spoke truth, too, and that was when they were most truly prophetic...They put words to things until their teeth rattled, but beneath the words they put, or deep within their words, something rings out which is new because it is timeless, the silence rings out, the truth that is unutterable, that is mystery, that is the way things are, and the reason it rings out seems to be that the language the prophets use is essentially the language of poetry, which more than polemics or philosophy, logic or theology, is the language of truth."

"[The prophets] put words to both the wonder and the horror of the world, and the words can be looked up in the dictionary or the biblical commentary and can be interpreted, passed on, understood, but because these words are poetry, are image and symbol as well as meaning, are sound and rhythm, maybe above all are passion, they set echoes going the way a choir in a great cathedral does, only it is we who become the cathedral and in us that the words echo."

"To see [Jesus] weep is not a comely sight, especially this man whom we want to be stronger and braver than a man, and the impulse is to turn from him as we turn from anybody who weeps because the sight of real tears, painful and disfiguring, forces us to look to their source where we do not choose to look because where his tears come from, our tears also come from."

"The absence of God is just that which is not livable."

"Jesus shares with us the darkness of what it is to be without God as well as showing forth the glory of what it is to be with God. He speaks about it, and perhaps that is much of why, although we have not followed him very well these past two thousand years or so, we have never quite been able to stop listening to him."

"The tragic is the inevitable. The comic is the unforeseeable...Bored to death by his comforters and scratching his boils and facing the undertaker's unpaid bill for the multiple funeral of his children and entire household staff, how could Job possibly foresee that his bloodshot eyes would indeed behold, and by no means as a stranger, the one who laid the foundations of the earth and at whose work the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?"

"The comedy of grace as what needn't happen and can't possibly happen because it can only impossibly happen and happens in the dark that only just barely fails to swallow it up."

"The folly of preaching Christ crucified, preaching the king who looks like a tramp, the prince of peace who looks like the prince of fools, the lamb of God who ends like something hung up at the butcher's."

"It was not the great public issues that Jesus traded in but the great private issues, not the struggles of the world without but the struggles of the world within."

"It is the all-or-nothing ones who are held up as shining examples of what it is to have faith, to have life, to have courage or whatever it is it takes, and the better-be-safe-than-be-sorry one who gets it in the neck for taking the faith or life or courage or whatever it is he's been given and tucking it under his tail and sitting on it like an old grad on a hot water bottle at the fifty-yard line on a chilly October Saturday."

"People are prepared for everything except for the fact that beyond the darkness of their blindness there is a great light. They are prepared to go on breaking their backs plowing the same old field until the cows come home without seeing, until they stub their toes on it, that there is a treasure buried in that field rich enough to buy Texas. They are prepared for a God who strikes hard bargains but not for a God who gives as much for an hour's work as for a day's. They are prepared for a mustard-seed kingdom of God no bigger than the eye of a newt but not for the great banyan it becomes with birds in its branches singing Mozart. They are prepared for the potluck supper at First Presbyterian but not for the marriage supper of the lamb, and when the bridegroom finally arrives at midnight with vineleaves in his hair, they turn up with their lamps to light him on his way all right only they have forgotten the oil to light them with and stand there with their big, bare, virginal feet glimmering faintly in the dark."

"The good news breaks into a world where the news has been so bad for so long that when it is good nobody hears it much except for a few. And who are the few that hear it? They are the ones who labor and are heavy-laden like everybody else but who, unlike everybody else, know that they labor and are heavy-laden."

"Rich or poor, successes or failure as the world counts it, they are the ones who are willing to believe in miracles because they know it will take a miracle to fill the empty place inside them where grace and peace belong with grace and peace."

"That is the Gospel, this meeting of darkness and light and the final victory of light. That is the fairy tale of the Gospel with, of course, the one crucial difference from all other fairy tales, which is that claim made for it is that it is true, that it not only happened once upon a time but has kept on happening ever since and is happening still. To preach the Gospel in its original power and mystery is to claim in whatever way the preacher finds it possible to claim it that once upon a time is this time, now, and here is the dark wood that the light gleams at the heart of like a jewel, and the ones who are to live happily ever after are...all who labor and are heavy laden, the poor naked wretches wheresoever they be."

ALWAYS inspiring.