April 9, 2008
This past Saturday, Ellie Lofaro and Kathy Troccoli were at our church doing a women’s conference, and I was there as a member of the tech team, running lights and video for them. During one of the sessions, Ellie was talking about the realities of being a parent. She described a typical scene in her house—one which, based on the amount of laughter in the room, almost everyone there could relate to, including me.
Ellie explained that one moment she could be thoroughly annoyed with her kids, yelling and making a huge fuss. The scene was interrupted by the phone, however, and instantly she was transformed into the model of kindness, her voice dripping with more butter and sugar than a Paula Dean dessert.
It occured to me this morning that this phrase—”the kindness of strangers”—is a bit ironic. Why is it that we are kinder to people we’ve never met than we are to those who are closest to us?
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April 8, 2008
I’ve been pondering this subject of love for a while—and not really getting very far. I think I’m trying to over-complicate it. I keep reading 1 Corinthians 13 and thinking, “It can’t possibly be that simple. There has to be more, there has to be something I’m missing.” I think it’s my tenth grade English teacher’s fault.
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December 29, 2007
So I said I was going to work on figuring out how to explain love, and now, two and a half weeks later, you can see how far I’ve gotten.
I think part of my problem is that I want love to be neat, simple, and consistent. I want it to be something reliable and constant in my life—like God is supposed to be—and yet all I’m finding is this incredible roller coaster. There are so many complicated aspects to love, and so many parts to each of the aspects, and shades of understanding for each of the parts, that it becomes a mess just trying to keep track of it all.
It’s not worth it.
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December 11, 2007
The second-most complicated concept I have ever tried to understand, and one that still baffles me, is love. Something tells me that understanding love is going to be a lifetime process, and even then, one that I’m never quite going to bring to a satisfactory conclusion.
So obviously my purpose in writing today isn’t to present a neatly packaged bundle of insights that definitively pronounce what love is. Rather it’s to throw a handful of partially cooked spaghetti up against the wall and see if any of it sticks. Even for a moment.
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November 20, 2007
Last week in our small group, we did a study by John Ortberg called “God is Closer Than You Think.” In it, he talks about how we often think of God as being incredibly far away. I often feel as if God is so distant from me I’ll never be able to close the gap and find Him again.
Then he points to Michelangelo’s painting of the Creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Cistine Chapel. God is reaching out to Adam who is rather nonchalantly lounging with his hand lazily outstretched. What a picture of how I have tended to treat my relationship with God!
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