Don’t flay the sheep.

Well this makes it more interesting

I’ve seen a few articles like this one about the birth of octuplets in my Dad’s hometown this week.

Here’s what I find interesting: the suggestion that is coming up seems to be that doctors have an ethical repsonisibility not only to the parents, but to the offspring as well when making decisions about IVF.

This opens a huge can of worms in a country where we are barely able to discuss reproduction in a civil or logical manner anymore. I’m not trying to be pro-life or pro-choice here (and if you decide to post something that that is uncivil or illogical or simply vitriolic I will delete the comment…). But I think that this whole question brings up some of the inconsistencies in the way we discuss reproduction in this country. So, for example:

• If offspring have rights in infertility cases, what about abortion?
• If offspring have rights, what about people who society deems unfit parents?
• Who defines what is a good enough, well-provided for life for a child?

Either this adds to the debate and moves us toward discussion that makes sense. Or (and unfortunately, this might be the likelier scenario) these questions will add to the strange logical maneuvers of either side.

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10 on Tuesday since I’m putting off worship planning

1. The name “Naaman” sounds like how being congested feels. So, I guess it’s a good thing I’m preaching on Naaman this coming Sunday. Because I am congested.
2. After dinking around on facebook for the last half hour, concentrating on catching up on classmates from New York, I’m convinced that facebook is going to take all the fun out of class reunions. No surprises.
3. I’m going on vacation next week. Because I need it, and also as a service to the youth group so that they can use my office for storage space during the silent auction.
4. I could not be happier that my sister in law’s wedding now appears to be happening near the beach. Because it means I get some beach time in August.
5. I think I’m still tired from my weekend with 5 high schoolers and Zora. The story about that woman who had octuplets is making me tired. I’m starting to wonder if I’m getting too old to be the crazy person who carts multiple teenagers and a 2 year old across state lines. Probably not…I just need to take more chaperones along than just myself, I think.
6. On the flip side of# 5, I’m really thankful, humbled, and joyful about the great kids I get to work with. It was incredibly fun to watch them listen to sermons and get excited about jazz music in the church and just be regular happy goofy teenagers.
7. Tomorrow night, Erik and I are getting together with the youth pastor from another area church and her husband to plan a worship thing-y for our youth groups. I’m excited about doing it and nervous about doing a good job. Sometimes, I jsut don;t know what the kids actualy want out of worship.
8. I just got a CD of global children’s music from GIA. I intend to get Zora addicted to is for long car rides.
9. I might be getting sick of winter. But I think I’m still enjoying the coziness of it.
10.  And, it’s my brother’s birthday today. We celebrated on Sunday, and I’m assuming he’s doing something today. We are glad to have him around, sicne my sisters seem incapable of staying in the U.S. for more than a week or two. It makes me feel connected!

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Zora in church

Now here’s an interesting conundrum about my life:

I’m the pastor at my church who is supposed to be the “expert” on children in church. But I rarely worship with my own child because on Sundays I am up front and she is in the back with daddy.

So I really don’t know much about worshiping with kids. Take everything I say with a grain of salt.

On Saturday night, I had a rare opportunity to drag her along to the closing worship service at a conference I was attending with 5 of my youth groupers. A few highlights and things I learned:

1. Kids dance in worship. In fact, it might keep them going a little longer if you encourage it. In the aisles, too, because when else are you going to get away with that if you’re not a pentecostal?
2. Zora likes the singing. So we played that up. Sing along, watch other people sing, color in the worship order, follow the notes with your finger, feel mama’s face while she sings
3. How to get her to listen and not sing along with the choir? Tell her to imitate the director. She’s well on her way to a fine musical career.
4. To the gentleman sitting in front of us: I’m really sorry she kept touching your hair. I hope you were OK with that. I’m going to go with the assumption that you were. I like it when she does that to me, so I’m guessing it wasn’t an awful experience.
5. At a very young age, it is possible to register theological protests during the service. The denomination that was hosting this event is in the midst of a debate about children at the table (made humorous to me by their use of a child at the table to assist the pastor by asking questions about the Supper ala the Passover tradition). Zora saw the bread being broken from the back, and yelled “I want bread.” Seriously, was I going to not let her have it? Have you ever denied a toddler something you were eating?
6. In retrospect, though, perhaps I should have given her the half of my bread chunk that was not soaked in wine. Because I’ve recently been in churches that push grape juice, I forgot and Zora got a good chunk of wine-y bread. This may have contributed to the chugging of 4 juice boxes when we got back to our seats. (And, when I say “chug” I mean it…she removes the straw, throws her head back, and does away with the box in a few gulps.)

All in all, a good evening. She was still talking about it the next night, but we think she had the event a bit confused with a trip to the circus a few months ago. After recalling that there was a singing, and a choir, and bread, she said, “And the clown came out of the piano.”

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High Expectations

Wow. This is a very well stated articulation of how being a pastor means you get held to higher standards. Especially a really “big” name in ministry. The last few paragraphs are incredibly powerful so stick with it!

And honestly, after reading it, I feel like it’s probably OK that we get held to higher standards. Comes with the job territory, comes with the whole idea that ministry is incarnational.

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Bookish

3 recent books, and all ministry related:

1. Sensual Orthodoxy, Debbie Blue: I’m over halfway through this book of sermons and I’m thinking about rationing it because I love it so much. My colleague Bart calls her “the Sarah Vowell of preaching”. This woman can take a Bible passage and pick it apart and then put it back together again. She can own up to all the weirdness and oddity of the Bible and still love it to pieces. She can find something lovely that others might discard, blow off the dust, and make it relevant. Wow. I can only I hope I preach like this once in a while.
2. Postmodern Children’s Ministry, Ivy Beckwith: Given that I am not a huge reader of youth & childrens ministry “technique” and “zeitgeist” books, but it seems like there’s a lot more out there about about teenagers and post-modernism. But children? Well, the younger they are, the more likely they are to be post-modernists. (Honestly, I have kids in my youth group who are less post modern than I am.) Plus, Beckwith has no hesitation to use this as a platform to remind the church that we have to be counter-cultural in the way we work with kids. (For example, remidners that church is not about entertainment, but balanced with remarkable ideas like pulling pews out of the sanctuary to create an area where kids can play, color, do what they need to do to be engaged with a worship service, or to just tune it out when their 3 year old attention span can’t take it anymore…note: she wants kids in worship, period.)
3. Mission Trips that Matter, Don Richter: The book I wish I’d read last year. I’m halfway through the thing, and it is a fabulous combination of practical and theological. By practical, I do not mean the stuff about how to organize the trip and make sure the details like schedule and work sites and meal planning and transportation works. But, without neglecting those aspects of the trip, Richter weaves into them theological thought about what the entire trip means and how to plan so that the whole group benefits from theological reflection about the trip without even realizing they are engaged in theology. Plus, every chapter ends with discussion questions and ideas for preparing the group. Love it! AND I found out that Rick Steves, who is honestly one of my absolute favorite semi-famous people, might very well be a Lutheran. (I have a thing for Lutheran men, I guess.)

I plan to direct my reading back toward mystery novels for a while: Erik just heard about a spate of modern Scandinavian writers who are publishing mystery novels in English, and so we came home from the library with a  stack of books by people with un-pronounceable names.

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Local mother, driven to depseration, breaks into house

It all started when lambie went missing.

Zora’s lambie is her “thing” (Lambie is a hybrid blankie/stuffed animal…basically, sort of the baby version of those animal skin rugs with a head, but this one being a small lamb.) She’s not completely obsessive about her “thing”–she has an alternative thing at my mom’s house, this one a spotted pink elephant version of lambie, which, for complicated reasons that I won’t get into here, she calls “pink puppy”. And, if need be, she can nap without either lambie or pink puppy, but life is easier and naps happen better when she has them.

After her last trip to Grandma’s, pink puppy came home with us, and this has caused some confusion about who is where.

So, we come to naptime, and look in Zora’s crib. There’s pink puppy. There’s her pillow. There’s a blanket. But where’s lambie?

“Zora, where’s lambie?” I say (because Zora is actually pretty good at remembering where things are).

“I took him to Miss Dee’s house.” (Miss Dee is her daycare person. Lambie goes along to Miss Dee’s house, but I know lambie came home with us.)

“Really?”

“Yeah. I took him outside.”

“Show me.”

Zora goes to our front door, I open it, and there, on floor in the hallway (we live in a 9 unit buiding, 3 floors), is a plasitc shopping bag with a dirty diaper in it.  I figure Zora must have grabbed diaper I forgot to send down the hatch of the diaper champ, bagged it up, and put it in the hall, just like at Grandma’s. (Further explanation: my parents also live in a condo unit, but their elevator lobby only opens onto 2 apartments and the utility landing. Diapers go in a plastic bag and down the garbage chute. Zora often helps.)

And if she managed to do that without me noticing, maybe she also decided to pretend that lambie was going to Miss Dee’s house.

So I hoist Zora onto my hip, and step out into the hall to look for lambie. I’m a little frazzled at this point because it’s 1:00pm, Zora’s late getting dwn for her nap, I need her to take one so that I can shower because I’m still in my pjs and bathrobe, barefoot. She’s dressed, so I figure we don’t look completely trashy, and probably none of the neighbors are home anyway because it’s the middle of the day on Friday.

We check the first, second, and third floor hallways of the building. No lambie. So we’re back to searching the apartment.

Except that I forgot to check that the door was unlocked when I stepped out into the hall.

Reminder: it’s 1:00pm. There’s no one else in the building. I’m in my bathrobe (oh, dang, and it’s my shortie bathrobe, too), barefoot, no socks, tired toddler on hand. No keys, no phone, husband 40 miles away. No one has a spare key, but how would I get there anyway?

Zora seems to understand what’s going on, but she is impressively calm.

“Somebody has a key. Daddy has a key. He will come home.” She says.

We find a small wire on the floor. I try to pick the lock. No luck. Zora tries to pick the lock. Nope.

The car is in the parking lot, not the garage (the garage being used as a staging ground for the painting project in my bathroom…oh, yeah, I’m just a little covered in paint, too, and since it’s shades of brown, it kind of looks like a skin disease from far away), and there’s a garage door opener in the car. Maybe, just maybe I forgot to lock the car last night.

I prop the front door of the building open, and walk, barefoot, with toddler on hip, across the parking lot to my car. Just in case you are ever in this situation, road salt is really painful to your bare feet.

The car is locked.

Zora’s bedroom windows look out onto the parking lot. They appear to be locked.

I say a prayer that no one comes and moves the container that is propping the front door open, and we walk around the building to the very public, major thoroughfare, street side, and I walk through the 6 inches of snow to check if our bedroom windows are unlocked (toddler still on hip). I’m not sure they are,  and I can’t quite figure out how to remove a screen without breaking it a little.

We go back to the front door, and it’s still open.

I start ringing bells of other units. There’s someone home! I think it’s the nice little old lady! We talk over the intercom.

“Hi, I’m Erica from unit x. My daughter and I are locked out of our unit.”

“Oh, dear. I’ve been there too!”

She buzzes us into the building (which we don’t need because the door is still propped open). I walk upstairs to her unit. The door is closed. I knock, no answer, knock again, no answer, but I hear a TV on loudly. Then I hear a toilet flush. Then I hear the shower start up.

I start thinking through the options:

1. Find a utility closet in the building and sit there until Erik comes home…Oh, wait, Erik’s expecting us to pick him up at the train.
2. Walk the two miles to church, perhaps sticking to the undergrowth on the side of the road so that no one sees us and reports me to DCFS.
3. Break a window on the car so that I can get to the garage door opener.
4. Run into the middle of the street and just go with the whole crazy-woman motif, because at least they will take us somewhere warm.
5. Prop the front door again and hope against all hope that there’s another window that’s unlocked and, if not, that the front door remains unpropped so that we can get back inside.

5 sounds closest to sane at this point. I prop the door, grab Zora, and head for the windows.

Except for Zora’s bedroom, every room in our place is ground-level along a sidewalk (with 4 feet of landscaping between the sidewalk and the building) on a major street, at a major intersection, in the middle of town. There’s a stoplight. Which means there will likely be a line-up of cars who get to watch me for stop-light-entertainment while I try to break into my own home in my shortie bathrobe with no shoes or socks, and a 2 year old on my hip. I look like crap. At least Zora is dressed. And, to my credit, I’m not in tears or hysterical yet.

Into the snow. I figure I might lose a toe, but at least we’ll get back into the house. And I can use my cell phone to call 911 if I need something amputated.

The very last window (of course) is open. With a full audience of stopped cars, I thank God for the architect and developer who put nice big windows in our place. I lower Zora into the living room. I step into the living room (In the process, I’m sure, giving the car-audience quite a show).

I figure I have about 10 minutes to get Zora down for her nap and get showered and dressed before the police arrive to check on the reports of a break-in.

All afternoon, whenever I hear sirens, I figure they’re coming for me.

And what about lambie? Oh, it turns out that lambie was all tangled up in the blanket, safe in Zora’s crib the whole time.

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I get all decorator-ish again…

As Erik puts it, when i get an idea in my head about a project, I just have to get it done.

I redid the master bath, which really had to be done since the paint was no where near bathroom-grade, and it was starting to peel.

I went with brown colors (they look kind of red here, but the shade is really very nutty…it’s Valspar, 2008-7C Cafe Miel and 2008-7A Natural Cork. We had some sort-of Asian red and gray stuff from the last time we actually decorated our bathroom, but that went with bold white and black tiling. This is much warmer.

The tough thing about this was the weird layout of the bathroom. The developers of our building were apparently operating under the assumption that every unit had to have a soaker tub, and they would fit it in no matter the bizarre layout. (I’m not complaining about the tub, by the way…) So, our bathroom has this strange little alcove where the tub and shower are. Honestly, it’s kind of like a cave. I’ve been thinking since we moved in about how to make this look decent, and I figured if it looks like a cave you might as well just play that up. So, that strange little alcove is painted in a much darker color than the “outer” bathroom.

The wall hanging is the “art project” (as Zora calls it) that she helped me with. We had three canvasses in our living room what were painted 3 shades of red, but we weren’t planning to hang them in this living room. I re-painted them in 3 shades of orange (I’m testing out some shades of orange for our bedroom, so I used 3 of the samples for the canvasses), with the red poking through. Then, we drew a circle on the bottom two, painted the circle with tacky glue, and layered origami paper, a textured red paper, tissue paper with red swirls, and text from 5 or 6 poems that I felt related to my feelings about my bathtub (“Morning Poem” by Mary Oliver; “Oda al limon” by Pablo Neruda; “Reading Myself to Sleep” by Billy Collins; “Nothing Gold Can Stay” by Robert Frost; “Morning Midday and Evening Sacrifice” by Gerard Manley Hopkins). Zora was particularly helpful with the tearing things up part of this process.

A coat of polyurethane over everything (I might add another coat) and there it is!

And then one other little project: there are too many light switches on one wall, and they were so white. I found some nicely shaped switch plates on sale and glued origami paper from the “art project” over them, polyurethane again (I am going to start covering everything in the house with polyurethane!), and arty light switches (there’s also an outlet below them that you can’t see in the picture.)

Today, I hope to pick up the rest of the house: we did this all over 2 and a half days when Erik was staying in the city overnight because of late work commitments. Usually, when he’s gone, I turn into an odd combination of a messy bachelor and frazzled mama (staying up too late, eating junk food, in my pajamas until 2:00pm). So I am proud to say that I managed to stay partially sane, paint the bathroom, and keep up with the dishes. Other than that, things are a little sketchy around here.

Oh, and in the middle of all of this, Zora and I had quite an adventure, which you’ll read about in the next post!

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Almost ordinary time

It’s almost ordinary time again, which means we are about done with that most extraordinary time of Advent/Christmas/Epiphany.

I’m always amazed by the way sacred and secular mix, by the way ld traditions stay with us or change, and by how contagious the whole idea of Christmas is.

Here are 30 amazing photos of these seasons around the world. There are pictures to make you cry, to make you laugh, to make you wonder. Take a few minutes to look at them, if not now, then later. Because if you don’t you’ll miss things like:

• The prevalance of swimming in many traditions. (Who knew?)
• Santa and Jesus running a 5k.
• The beautiful faces of devotion, from popes and patriarchs, from children and nuns, from people who are celebrating amidst plenty and amidst suffering.

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How cold is it?

It’s so cold in the Midwest that the movie “A Christmas Story” is coming true.

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The corner of our house that looks really nice

The chair (rescued from the trash outside my grandparents’ building…Erik’s sure someone died in it) is done after a month at the upholsterer. After 4 years of carting those pipes from apartment to apartment, we had a wall to hang them on and my Dad did the honors.

And if I just sit and look at this corner, I am pretty content with things. Now, on to the bedroom closet!

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