goodbye and white

This afternoon I signed my name a few times, and so did Dean, and we are no longer home owners. This morning one of my close friends, who had been staying with us for a week as she was between places, left to journey back to her family in B.C. She is leaving her life in Montreal, not sure whether she will return or not. It has been a day of goodbyes, goodbyes that leave one hanging, as none of us know quite where we will land next. This place can be unsettling or it can help me focus - my choice.

Tonight I have 3 more house guests coming. Tomorrow I have an event where I am acting as producer/set-up person/refreshment coordinator/public relations/host. Saturday we look at some condos downtown, then head away for a quick meeting and a bit of a getaway at our friends' cottage up north. Next week I will start sorting and packing. Life is clumping up again, as it tends to do when change is imminent. Like labour pains, there usually seems to be increased activity and stress just before the birth of something new in our lives. It is a pattern I readily recognise by now and even embrace. The increased pressure makes me stop and ask God for help, it reminds me that only a few things are truly important, and it offers me the opportunity to mature in many areas, specifically grace (oh, how I hate being a whiner and complainer and fault-finder at times like these) and trust (relax, this really is out of your hands to a large extent and either you mean what you say when you talk about God providing for you or you don't).

I had a dream last week in which I was working with some young and energetic creative souls on an ad campaign. They presented an idea for an all-white ad and I immediately understood what they were trying to accomplish and thought the idea was brilliant. Not every one was convinced, so I explained it to the people who were hesitant, namely the bosses. The concept was simple. Everything in the ad, whether it was a photo or video or any other visual, was white, totally white. The thing we were trying to sell was then placed in the all-white setting and naturally, every eye was drawn toward it, no matter how small it was in the picture or how much in the background it served. The idea was not to make the product appear bigger and better than it was (like so many ads do), but to place the object in a natural setting, removing all the distractions so that the focus was on it alone. Like I said, brilliant!

I need a giant white paintbrush in my life. Not to attempt to erase any of its parts, but to tone down all those bits that take more attention than they merit and blur my vision with busyness. I need all those distractions to fade into the background so that I can truly focus on the beauty and simplicity and awesome, sometimes small but always bright, nature of this life I have been given.

What do I want my life to point to? What do I want others to see first when they glance at me and my situation? Everything else must become white.

This is the view from my backyard...for now.

comedic timing

Comic by Joel Micah Harris at xkcd.com One of my favourite jokes goes like this: Knock, knock. Who's there? Interrupting cow Interrupting cow w--- Moooooooo!! Timing is important in both drama and comedy. A well-paced story draws the audience in and helps it invest in the characters, while a tale too hastily told or too long drawn out will fail to engage anyone. Surprise - something which interrupts the expected - is a creative use of timing and integral to any good story. If someone is reading a novel and everything unfolds in a predictable manner, they will probably wonder why they bothered reading the book. And so it is in life. Having life be predictable all of the time is not as calming as it sounds. We love surprises, especially good surprises like birthday parties, gifts, marriage proposals, and finding something that we thought was lost. Surprises are an important part of humour. A good joke is funny because it goes to a place you didn't expect it to go. Sim

soul refrigerator

I went grocery shopping yesterday and came home with three bags of food. After I unpacked them all, this is what my fridge looked like: really empty. How does that happen? How can I feel so full and ready for any food emergency one moment, and after one quick glance, realise that I have nothing, really? Today is one of those days in my soul as well. I woke up with gratitude and fullness in my heart, ready to take on this day and all the wonderful opportunities that it presented. Then I caught a brief glance of some emptiness in my life and bam - my buoyancy was compromised. For the past few hours I have been treading water, trying to keep my head in a positive space, bobbing in and out of disappointment, and catching myself whining with pathetic indignity at the cement blocks of other people's stupidity that are tangled around my ankles. When I am staring at the empty refrigerator of my soul, these are my thoughts. Where do I go from here? Perhaps I should slam that refrigerator

Names of God

The Hebrew word "YHWH" (read from right to left) This past Sunday I gave a talk on the Names of God, the beginning of a series on this topic. This first talk was to be a gentle introduction so I thought it wouldn't take too many hours of preparation. Well, I quickly discovered that the research is almost bottomless; every time I thought I had a somewhat definitive list of names, I found another source which added a few more or gave a different twist on some of the names I had already come across. After several hours I was getting overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data (and that was only looking at the Hebrew Bible). I wondered how I could present this to people in an orderly and accessible fashion and within a reasonable time frame. Not everyone is up for a 3-hour lecture crammed full of detail on a Sunday morning. So I took a break and spent a bit of time meditating on this problem and asking the Spirit for guidance. And then I thought that being overwhelmed by Go

outWORD by Matte Downey

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