My most recent "extra-curricular" activity (in the vast supply of my free time living in an internet-less apartment) has been designing a photobook on Shutterfly to recap my summer studies and travels in Italy, Greece and Switzerland last year. Sure, the website was designed for people like me to feel swanky and creative. Nevertheless it was a moment of self-discovery for me: I LOVE designing. After working for a campus ministry and a quarterly publication in college, I knew I enjoyed graphics, but the thought of it being a side production post-college hit me for the first time yesterday.  What's better than electronic washi tape?!

When you buy a photobook on Shutterfly, and post about it on your blog, they send you a $10 gift card for future use!

So if you want to check out my new "skeels" then flip through a few of the pages below. Or better, yet, let (pay) me to design yours!

Click here to view this photo book larger

Photo books are the perfect gift for any occasion.

Passion Week

Palm Sunday is a 24-hour-ago event of the past. The branches that sweeped through the center aisles of traditional churches are bagged and tossed. "Hosanna" likewise is finished being uttered on the lips of Christ's preparatory children and people for this week before the coming crucifixion. It is a week of mourning; the week when dawns brought not yet joy. In fact, dawn brought the commencement of disobedience, betrayal and suffering. Christ's strength tried in this dread act of crucifixion and now victory remains with love. What a joy we see peeping up over the horizon, under a week away with the risen Paschal lamb. Praise be to God!

For as the Old Testament ended in a curse the New begins with an inherited blessing. An eight-part harmony of blessing pronounced on a mount. Aware of what He would make the Jews remember, the mounts where from the law rattled off the implied blessing and certain cursings on Ebal and Gerizim, Jesus shifts the paradigm. Now as He expresses beatus - for we read "he came into the world to bless us" -  the Gospel is a dispensation of life whereas the law an administration of death. This new promise allures us to Christ. From the hand of the One who cures to the gracious words that precede out of His mouth, indeed we can say "This must be our sweet and loving Savior!"

From now until Easter Monday there is a beatitude to rest in. This week I plan to highlight one or two a day for meditation. As we light daily incense of prayer before God's throne of grace, we see the success of His mercy ministry on His people as responsive to our pleading. Nothing passes between God-all-hearing and fallen man but through His hand.

The beauty of these blessings and their divine revelation is that we see what God expects from us, the meek impoverished spirits that we are, and what we may expect from Him. The covenant is an enjoyable communion. The agreement between God and man is settled and summed.

Is not faith then but a conformity to these characters and a dependence on these promises? For each of these joy-ushering blessings we see a present blessing pronounced and a future blessing promised. This week, the Holy week - each day one Moriah step closer to the cross - we demarcate this exchange of the law for the cup when we acknowledge for what Christ came "as the great High Priest of our profession in whom all the families of the earth should be blessed."

May we be attitudinally bound to this pronouncement of our new identity, given to rectify the mistakes of a blind and carnal world, removing discouragement from we who are weak and poor, and inviting souls to Christ, making a way for His law in our hearts!

*Any wisdom that seems too good to come from my lips most likely comes from Matthew Henry's Commentaries.

Fence Building

Why are boundaries so hard to keep? Because people get flustered when you do. As if there has been no precedent or forethought that setting one may be the more appropriate action to take. What is worse, I get flustered when I try to erect them. Having to put up a fence on your own land is never what you want to spend time doing, nor does it uphold the vision of free-ranging expanse. Just let me be. But it is a protective measure, because vulnerability could be the death of me. Ah-ha! Now we've pinned it.

Vulnerability is double-faced. On one hand, as someone who believes in Someone, I have to be open, honest and staking out my claim to truth. Boring holes, displacing dirt, drilling posts, stringing chicken wire. On the other hand, I am to take refuge, reject self-sufficiency, lean not on the understanding that comes from me, myself and I.

So what am I to do? Lean so heavily that I fall, find myself prostrate, face down. Let my Defender do his job. And then what? Utter in order to adopt the fact that I have been set free to live in freedom. Upon persistence, a second dinner invitation, I can fence myself in with confidence. This is my pre-paid liberty. It's a trickily tight rope to walk across. I was shaky, delivered it poorly, hardly held on, but I made it to the other side. Respect, though it has dissolved and fizzled out of human relation, is something I choose to cling to. Therefore, just as I was declared respectable enough by the Craftsman to be made into something new while I was still splintery (I have written all about these splinters before), so too do His other creations deserve to be utilized similarly. It is a labor of love.

Can I then see this conversation as ground breaking? It is so easy to yell my gossip to eager ears, "NEWS, NEWS, read all about it!"Or in my language community, "Guess what he/she did!!!" Instead, this beat-down principle, respect, that underlies the greatest display of it in all human history, the Cross, perhaps penetrated that disgruntled response of his. I do not expect astonishment. I shut him down, I told him no, I am taken, claimed, accounted for, loved. The first time I saw the Great Gesture truly defended, it was no eye-catching moment for me either. It too came to me in the form of rejection; and quite a bit more devastating, I might add (take a look back at 2009).

But I can pause and recall this little victory dance we call "assurance." It, this snippet of a conversation, this claim to the way of Christ, was not in vain.

"Help me to see

that it is faith stirred by grace that does the deed,

that faith brings a man nearer to thee, 

raising him above mere man."

Ours

Charted territory began to cause problems. So, as the equally-yoked wife of a farmer that my mother was, she bundled her babies, buckled our bodies in the car seats – mine one-size bigger for the almost one-year older that I am – and in the direction of the Monroe, NC, courthouse we proceeded.

Our land was in deed ours, but the government still and always will own the particulars. So knowing, via extensive paper trail, more about the plot than we did ourselves, the topography maps storeroom in the basement of that corinthian-columned building was our destination.

The irony, you see, is kinesthetic. A map is not a territory, but in our 4-year-old bodies, the 3-dimensionality confused our developing senses: our fingers, a kibitzer to the eyes.

Momma borrowed the county’s version of our farm to take home for water table research, buckled us into place, and we faded out of the city and its brown, tactile knowledge into the real land where dirt was dirt. 

Purloined

"Not altogether a fool," said G., "but then he's a poet, which I take to be only one remove from a fool."

E.A. Poe pokes fun at himself, at fellow artisans, at his trade. This little insider's jab struck my fancy. Like an embedded meta-pun. 

Pioneer of the short story, designer of the literary template, Poe and his contemporaries like Hawthorne, Melville, James...lobbied for parable-like levels of pensive provocation. A short story can and should be "read at one sitting." 

Fragmentation was thought to be a fatal blow to experience. But is not the short story a fragment embodied? 

From start to finish, tunnel your vision, stop the dog-earing and commit until the final full stop. 

Become a poet. "Make a place to sit down. / Sit down. Be quiet." 

Become a fool.

Happy Menocal watercolors are happy indeed. 

Mendelssohnian

Tapping into the idea of dislocation, put a quartet in a Brooklyn book store and we quickly wade knee deep into the lapping tides of esoteric relationships. Now, please don't go google "esoteric." Instead, assume it to be the spider web of knowledge that so slightly and iridescently can be detected in the right light. And yet, without proper alertness, you'd run smack into it and only later feel the filmy residue of something unexamined.

For the less ambiguous-minded, more scientific, think of it as the supernatural traces that can be detected in the details of certain experiences, occurring distinct from overt divinity. Déjàvu in its obscurity gives us a name for that phenomenon which esoterically connects muddled memories to your present taste or smell or movement or location.

Walter Benjamin warded off homesickness when he was away at college by scribbling his childhood memories. In the process of transferring memory to thought to writing, he found a rather accurate compass for the esoteric charting. He connected the color red to blurred recollections of market streets, the sounds of carpet being beaten to releasing clinging dust particles, the shadow plays he would create betwixt linen sheets to his year of bed-ridden fever. His memoir was his poetic melody. And for this reason, the senses, all en"compass"ing smell, taste, hearing, touch, and seeing became his detective work to best unearth the knowledge that was buried beneath surfaces.

To locate these graven bones, we actually must dislocate ourselves. What catches your attention? When something is disruptive, perhaps? A piece of chicken makes its way onto a waffle with a lacing drizzle of honey. Metallic crystalline infrastructures cupping cardboard bird feeders go up in a public walkway imbuing garden significance onto what was once purely transitional. How about this: a quartet of Mendelssohn sawing musicians engaging in the rhythmic chaos next to genre-organized book shelves.

When anything puts a filibuster on what has until now only ever been routine, we literally and figuratively come to a screeching halt. And if we are lucky enough to be breakable, we will be redirected off our walk-the-plank interstates and taken down back roads to observe what dwells in the solitudes.

This takes me to a Biblical threshold that I must cross. When we make the "un"believable our mode of inquiry, we see Christ as the crazy man He was. The vampirish suggestion that paved a perpendicular intersection to Jewish credence and culture saying, "For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink," displaced even the disciples well beyond their understanding and comfort: "'This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?'"

This bread and wine Jesus was saying would be the new standard for meal sharing meant that the conditional followers of His ministry could no longer beg for the gift like the pattern of manna-hungry Jewish wanderers in the Old Testament. Putting Himself between the Giver and the gift as if to say, "This is your second chance to get the manna thing right," He refused to let the people spoil their appetites. Making Himself the bread, a peace offering, the meal now is a place of repentance and acceptance. Meals where either plant or animals must die before the partaking meant Jesus was to be on the altar. The cross was before Him, a bloody, flesh tearing feast. And one from which we must eat to be vertically (God) and horizontally (man) reconciled.

This bread is the ipecac of humanity, the thing we eat initially and vomit up, incompatible with our sin corpuses and simply hard to swallow in a world that posits it as poison. Yet "we are what we eat,"so the more we nibble on the bread of Christ, we taste and derive from its sustenance the ability to do crazy things, good things, holy things, sacrificial things, that are surprising to us as the doers.

We come full circle. We have been dislocated. Our initial appetite for this thing we thought was bread now becomes the world's decaying flesh that tricks the eye and leaves the soul's stomach growling, and Christ's flesh becomes this incarnated tangible bread of Heaven.

"Oh the ravel of sleeve of care." -Macbeth 

Piper Shake

A little wiki digging will tell you where this whole Harlem Shake thing supposedly came from. The origin of all origins is the Ethiopian "Eskista" dance...

Which was then taken up in the 1980s and 90s and turned into this...

And then has recently gone viral in millions of forms, normally performed with your group or club association of choice, such as this swim team...

And then brilliant people take this general concept and clip together shots of some of our favorite people, namely John Piper, doing what is now called the "Harlem Shake"...

If you were as clueless about this whole shake thing as I was as of two days ago, hopefully this was enlightening. So next time you are on the dance floor and this little ditty comes on, think Ethiopia and John Piper. Surely, somewhere between those two ends of the spectrum, you will find the well-balanced shake.

Happy Wednesday! 

Milk

The venerable Franz Kafka has been a sort of heralded voice in one of my classes this semester. Our professor, a man of astounding insight, both borrowed and original, who self-referentially enforces his affinity to be called "Tyson," employs Kafka often as our compass for the unnavigable territory of esoteric knowledge.

So to precede a typical Kafkian or Kafkaesque (if you will) posting, here's the runoff of my rainy day thoughts:

Parable and parabola are two things that look in a mirror and gesture each other. They are caught in a game of shadows. The literary and the literal shape a relationship that is simultaneously bilateral and unilateral like following a pre-drawn line on a light pad to transfer an image onto the new, clean paper.  Using an image like this to in some way embody all the little images and the grander ones that a parable itself will enliven is an effective illustration tool, I think... Now, look into a mirror, take the tuft of hair closest to the center of your forehead, turn it into a curlicue and then say aloud a sentence-long history about it. Isn't that a parable and parabola all in one?

And now for the milk man himself...(drum roll)...

Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.

And now for my attempt at a response; titled ever-appropriately, "Kafka's Leopards' Exit" 

The leopards leave their playground, lolloping through the foyer, purple-tongued and proud; the temple can now be lit, mopped and decorated for the other play to begin. Encore! 

"Think long and hard, my friends. Then read, write, revise." -Tyson 

A Binding Saga

Spiral bound things are the most aesthetically displeasing literary device you ever did see. Like a bundling nightmare. Yet the black plastic centipede gathers and lords over its leaves. And with unmatched efficacy, the halves meet their resting place, a full 180 degrees apart. Your head can fully nestle in that space. Your hands can evenly spread and reinforce such a division.

Contrarily, there is the pasted binding. When someone in their factory-made latex gloves paints on rubber cement to a pieced-together checklisted number of steps for assembly, they loathe the production. They defile its ease. And people like myself are forced to keep both hands on the wheel to engage in the reading.

Invention is forced upon us with atrocities like the book clip. But how aesthetically displeasing are those?! Can we just all read manuscripts? The novice has as much readership as the editor. I tussle with this living artifact like it’s a un-caress-able cat.

"Just lie still won’t you?" I say.

Shalom

Currently, my soul mate, sister and best friend is in the Holy Land studying things far beyond a single human's capacity (or any human for that matter) to process. So the email thread has lengthened after each reply. We are averaging 2400 words per week.

Opportunities to hear Zionist leaders, Protestant scholars, and the Palestinian perspectives all voiced with equally flagrant conviction, she is left in an intellectual quandary that seems to poke holes in her spiritual canteen. It's next to impossible for her to believe her American Presbyterian theology could hold water in such a desert climate of academic discourses, people groups' history and persecution, and the pursuits of freedom.

How do you stay strong? 

You ask yourself this question when your personal convictions seem filleted by German, Marxist philosophies, comparative textual criticisms and a myriad of other bombastic academic vantage points. Two years ago, I had the privilege to take a class with a distinguished professor and New Testament scholar, Bart Ehrman, which left me asking this question. My sister experienced this just recently after hearing Ronen Shoval, a Zionist leader and society founder, speak about the American spirit of capitalism, adopting a Weberian stance on the detriment of Protestant ethic.

So here's an excerpt of my electronic reflections. Do with them what you will.

"In regards to Shoval, what a challenge but privilege indeed it must have been to hear him speak with such conviction. For him to quote Weber seems like such a staunch and pessimistic stance to maintain alongside his Judaism. Sure, it provides him the perfect anti-Christian accusation, and Weber's argument for the Protestant Ethic is convincingly sociological, but wow! that is such a harsh conclusion to draw and orientate himself around permanently while leading a movement of people. I'm sure you see this a lot amidst the conflict there, though...I wonder how that effects his personal life - weird question, but seriously. I often wondered that same question with Ehrman...flaunt your peacockal (new adjective) academic feathers at me all day, but when you go home to your brazen combative conclusions validated by years of study and degree, do you lie on a bedrock of peace or turmoil? 

While the expanse of our own intellect is far less outstretching (seemingly) than someone like Shoval or Ehrman, we advance through life and philosophical venture with the foundation of God's Sovereign immutability that Lords over human brain power. And with that as our True North, per say, then sadly we see people ranking far above us who are 180 degrees south and pressing full steam ahead in their error. Problematically, the development of the institute of religion as a powerful sociological force that defends the slaughter of people groups and endorses persecution is one that will continue. And scholars will huddle around these historical watermarks, dissecting and analyzing motivators, tipping points and even pointing fingers at leadership and doctrine to attribute causality instead of seeking curability. And since we know the Great Healer that (simply put) desires nothing more of His children than surrender, the perpendicular nature of theirs versus our understandings is so clear. 

For me, venturing into the academic circles of debate discourse is where I see the need for Truth more than any other, that and the working world where Truth is being suppressed and contorted to endorse flagrant wrong pursuit of venture and capital...so we have to go there and mend the divide that is the sacred versus the secular. For you, there, right now, I can imagine this is a perplexing thing that will leave your heart reeling for a lifetime for these people. To approach someone like Shoval is to cast off inhibitions greater than your differences and to try and "play along" intellectually with confidence, knowing that you have been given "the mystery of God, namely Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge." (Col 2:2-3)"

Pictures she has posted in and around Jerusalem. 

Check out her blog.