New Life'n

Crammed with heaven

Earth's crammed with heaven;
    and every common bush afire with God;
        But only he who sees takes off his shoes,
            The rest sit around and pluck blackberries
                                --Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Seeing your parents in the mirror?

As I get older, my hands are reminding me of my dad's hands.  I don't like that.  He was very unhappy, angry and undisciplined.  I don't want that to be me.  When I see my hands that look like his, part of me thinks there must be a lot more of me that's like he was.  That scares me.

Oh, oh -- it just hit me my kids are looking in the mirror, and looking at their hands.  That scares me, too.

So let's look at this another way.  Your parents also had potential -- to be someone full of grace, or to be an achiever, or to be patient, or sober or loveable or caring or strong or whatever you wish they were.  Potential to be what God had in mind when he made them. 

Maybe you're fulfilling some of that potential -- and what you see in the mirror is a reminder that some of what you wish for them is coming true in you. 

I hope that's happening in me.  And I hope it's happening in my kids.

How to paint like Monet and be funny like Seinfeld

Well, you may never be like them, but they both had the same advice on how to get better at anything you do.

Keep doing it.  And do it a lot.

Seinfeld said the way to get better was to write jokes every day -- he made himself do it by putting a big red X on a giant wall calendar for every day he wrote.  After a few weeks he didn't want to break the chain of X's.  "Don't break the chain." 

Monet's advice for improvement was, "Advise them to paint as they can and as much as they can without being afraid of poor results...If their painting does not improve of its own accord, then nothing can be done... and I could alter nothing."

They're makin' fun of the Christian mom!

Grrrrrrr.  Our daughter Emily has been nominated for Best Small Blog in this year's Weblog Awards.  She's third as of now, but for awhile she was ahead.  Some of the other blogs and their supporters were sayin' how they can't let the Christian mom win, and how pathetic it would be to be beaten by the Jesus girl.  Her blog is Chatting at the Sky, but some of the competition have called it "chanting at the urn" -- competition really brings out the creative juices. 

Now it's getting even more fun and turning into the battle of the celebrity endorsements on their MySpace and Facebook pages.  Emily is working on getting Chris Daughtry -- now that would be cool -- he goes to her church in Greensboro.     

You can vote HERE and see who the competition is, but don't tell me if you vote for someone else.  And The Nester is giving you a chance to win what she calls "The House Bible" if you support Emily.  You can vote once a day thru next Tuesday. 

Meet the quarterback of the team the Panthers play

Kurt Warner -- The story's long, so here's 3 quickies in case you don't click:

Last summer he invited his new teammates and their families over for dinner and swimming.  Hardly anyone came.  They were afraid he'd preach to them.  

He was on Oprah a few years ago to help honor a golfer who's a Christian -- he purposefully mentioned the golfer's faith in the second of three sentences, believing there was no way the editors could cut out the middle sentence.  They did.

His family does the Drive thru Difference (sort of) -- every time they go out to eat, he has the kids pick another family in the restaurant to anonymously buy dinner for.  And when they have company at home, the kids have to be able to tell the eye color of who was there -- that way they're forced to make eye contact with their guests.

Pretty cool, eh?  But not cool enough to root for him -- go Panthers!

The change you just made

May be bigger than you think.  Maybe it's a commitment or a habit.  Or some kind of change of direction.  Whatever.

It doesn't feel like much now.  But that's how real change is. 

When you move and leave a house for the last time, you walk out the front door and step away from the house just like you always have.  Everything feels familiar.  But, even though it's the same as always, it's different because you're never going back.  For awhile the house is still right there behind you.  But with every footstep, it slowly moves farther away. 

If you keep stepping, the old house eventually disappears.  All that's left is what you remember.  Sometimes it ends up feeling like it never happened. 

But when you first start, it can be the same familiar feeling.

If you keep stepping, the old familiar will gradually morph to a new familiar.  Sometimes you don't even realize it's happened.  Until later.

Better than a finger poke in the chest

You could have told Ebenezer Scrooge over and over: You need to be kinder and gentler!  People matter!  It's not all about work!  How can you treat Bob Cratchit like that -- he's hurting!  His son's sick!  You're wasting your life!  All that was true.

But telling someone they should change hardly ever changes anything.

What Ebenezer does comes from something -- his inner scrooge, a view, a perspective, an expectation of life and what life is.  What he does makes perfect sense to him -- it fits his perspective, his expectation.  In a way, he can't do anything different; it's outside his realm of experience and comprehension.

Then one night he's confronted with a new perspective.  It's so radically different it's shocking, and he begs for it to stop.  His eyes are opened, and what he does, how he acts, the kind of person he is, changes.

If you want to influence someone, one way is to help them see things from a different point of view.  Don't make change the issue.

Google says perspective is "the ability to perceive things in their actual interrelationships of comparitive importance." 

Someone else said perspective is when little things are seen for what they really are.

How to know if you should do it

Is there something you should be doing?  How can you know if you have a calling or a project you should do or a purpose or direction you should follow?

It was very simple for the craftsmen who built the temple in the desert in Exodus 35-36:

1.  You have a skill and an intelligence to do something -- beyond your natural capacity, as if the Lord has put it there

2.  Your heart stirs you to do it, to apply your skill and intelligence to the calling or project

3.  You have the opportunity to do it

When that was the case, they were expected to get at it.

Generous selfishness

Here's another example (and in only 6 sentences) of how it takes the whole Bible to tell the whole truth:

May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face to shine upon us...-- Psalm 67

Stop!  There you go, thank you for that encouragement to ask for blessing!...oh, wait, there's five more sentences ...oh, and he says "us" not "me"...

Oh, and there are reasons why the writer wants God to be good to him (oops, them):

• so that God's ways would be known on earth

• so God's saving power would be known among all the nations of the earth

• so that God would receive what is owed him (praise) from the people he created

• so that nations -- not just me, not just my family, friends, church, not even just my country -- would be glad and sing for joy that there's a God who guides and who judges wrong (apparently guidance and justice are things worth rejoicing over).

There's a selfishness that ends up good for others.  My mentor told me to be selfish with him -- he wanted me to not hold back calling him and asking questions, so I might get more from him that would benefit me and eventually others.

...When our dad was sick, my sister found she had to regularly get away from him -- be selfish -- so she could gain energy to care for him.

...Some say one of my main benefits to people is an ability to think and discern -- but I'm an introvert, and if I don't get selfish and get off by myself to charge my introverted batteries, I can become a useless zombie.

...Lincoln supposedly said, "If I had 6 hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend 4 hours sharpening the axe."  If there's no sharp axe, there's no falling tree. 

It can be good to be selfish and want God's graciousness and blessing -- so that it would rebound onto people and so God would get what he deserves.