something for nothing (everything)

a few weeks ago, we went to a "free" travel club seminar in order to receive a "free gift" (we ended up with a short vacation which will be fun in the future). i was reminded, though, of a podcast entitled "something for nothing" where they make the case that we always pay. no matter what.

i felt that we paid by being exposed to incredibly blatant, and latent, lies.

i have been previewing a book that i will be using this fall with my high school small group girls. i have learned so much from it about myself as a christian and as a woman.

there are so many lies that i tend to believe.

i am prone to judging myself as a woman based on so many cultural standards. at the travel club presentation, they made it seem like it was a woman's right to be "spoiled" by her husband and that men needed to lavish their wives at all times and give them what they want.

lie.

i am constantly assessing my femininity based on magazines, even ones like real simple and oprah.

it is a lie that you must always get the newest gadgets, organizing systems, clothes and makeup colors every season to be a successful, honorable, and respectable, beautiful woman.

it's hard, though, for me not to believe those things. it's like, as john piper put so clearly in a sermon i heard this weekend: "we step into a circus hall of mirrors...in one mirror, you're short and fat, in another, tall and skinny...in one mirror you're upside down..."

the travel club experience was a hall of mirrors that really took some time and effort for me to shake out of my head to see the crystal clear reflection of Christ that is my Self.

so, i continue to seek how to see myself in purity and in truth. it sounds cliche to say that the world's standards of beauty are not God's standards. but it's true.

its part what the Gospel is about, why it is such Good News.

we have to keep preaching it to each other because we forget so easily, everyday.

Who(se) Am I?

An old friend reconnected with me on Facebook and told me she had looked at my blog. She had such words of encouragement that I thought I would start this up again.

Everything has changed since my last post.

I am now the mother of the exquisite Josiah Rippee Germer and nothing else matters.

That's not true, entirely.

What is true, though, is how I see everything through the Parent lens now. I feel the weight and glory of God's analogy of the Father-Child relationship so much more poignantly than I ever thought I could.

I would die for this little boy.

I've never really been able to say that with confidence, but I would in fact hand over my life if it would mean that his would be spared.

My love for him is fiercely protective, fluidly in rhythm with my heartbeat and my blood pumping. We are inextricably connected for all of our lives and I have never been happier about the loss of independence.

This new chapter, though, has had me thinking about my life as a follower of Jesus in a new old way. I have found a refreshing newness with the advent of a C-group of my own. I have had only two meetings with three particular 15-year-old girls, but those few hours have been so precious to me and have influenced me in ways I did not anticipate.

Teaching them has helped me see how far off track I had gotten in my attempt at assimilating to Central Texas culture. With the forced loss of my nose ring last fall, I felt a forced loss of much more of my identity as a consumer of goods and services, and a follower of Jesus' Way.

I feel that I was swept up in things simply because they were branded a certain way, falling prey to greenwashing and doing and purchasing things that made me feel superior to others who lacked information or "didn't care".

In my quest to save, I think I alienated myself and others.

Yes, eating real and healthy food is important, but what good does it do to eat alone instead of joyously, entertaining angels? Pregancy does weird things to our bodies, and a craving for meat did me in as a vegetarian. And honestly, I feel better about it. I feel less snooty and more open to sharing meals with people at the top of a holy list of sinners. Being a vegetarian, for me, in Texas, became more of a class and economic issue and less of a healthy "shalom" of restoring God's people to abundance again. Perhaps it will get there for me (again? for the first time?) in the future. For now, though, I am okay with the chicken breast in my fridge and sharing barbeque in the sweaty local joints with joyful Jesus lovers and those starting to catch the Good News.

To tie this back in to the title, I have begun thinking about who or what I belong to.

In some ways, it used to be food and Jesus, maybe in that order.

I guess I am rethinking who I am and whose I am.

new celebrations

this picture was taken during the wall street jubilee held a few years ago by brothers and sisters at the simple way. they took something liek $20,000 and redistributed it in small bills to the people of new york by way of a celebration on wall street. they called it a jubilee because they were declaring a cancellation of debts and a redistribution of money to the poor, something God calls the Israelites and the Christians to do.

we are here in seattle right now and thursday night, our friend ben brought up a great question about holidays and celebrations. we started talking about how the "christian" celebrations we uphold in the US are so much more cultural than they are christian. we talked about why we don't celebrate passover and how easter isn't even biblical.

it made us excited to think of the types of conversations we could have with these friends and the Real community that exists in part right now, not to mention the future.

we started to joke about commune '09 , then kirsten preferred community '09 which makes more sense. :) we shall see where God leads us, but for now we are thinking and thinking...

circle of hope

The church’s task is neither to destroy nor to maintain ethnic identities
but to replace them with a new identity in Christ
that is more foundational than earthly identities.
- Manny Ortiz


O, God! May we live into that Reality!

the foundry

a new coffee shop just opened up last week near our house. it is run by the 'methadome', a huuuuuuge methodist church in alamo heights. the interesting thing about it, though, is that it is run entirely by volunteers and the money is used in the local community. i dont know what it's being used for, but i think they are on the right track. it's exciting. david is thinking about volunteering there sometimes, and while i was in there today, they had me come behind the counter and make my own macchiato because they couldn't remember how to make one. it made me wish there were more weeks left in the summer so i could come and help out more.

they even bring in tacos from our favorite place, taco taco, fresh everyday. can it be any better suited for us at this point?

i was thinking, though, about how they can be even more practical to the community. coffeehouses are awesome, but what about the people who are not used to frequenting coffee shops? what about those who need something a little more sustainable? i heard that they are hoping to be seen in the community as a place for conversation and help, but i can't help but think that there might be something even more practical and peaceable that could be done. like growing fresh vegetables or having a sliding scale pay system...

economics of abundance

To be convinced of the sanctity of the world, and to be mindful of a human vocation to responsible membership in such a world, must always have been a burden. But it is a burden that falls with greatest weight on us humans of the industrial age who have been and are, by any measure, the humans most guilty of desecrating the world and of destroying creation. And we ought to be a little terrified to realize that, for the most part and at least for the time being, we are helplessly guilty. It seems as though industrial humanity has brought about phase two of original sin. We all are now complicit in the murder of creation. We certainly do know how to apply better measures to our conduct and our work. We know how to do far better than we are doing. But we don’t know how to extricate ourselves from our complicity very surely or very soon.

How could we live without degrading our souls, slaughtering our forests, polluting our streams, poisoning the air and the rain? How could we live without the ozone hole and the hypoxic zones? How could we live without endangering species, including our own? How could we live without the war economy and the holocaust of the fossil fuels?

To the offer of more abundant life, we have chosen to respond with the economics of extinction.

If we take the Gospels seriously, we are left, in our dire predicament, facing an utterly humbling question: How must we live and work so as not to be estranged for God’s presence in His wok and in all His creatures? The answer, we may say, is given in Jesus’s teaching about love. But that answer raises another question that plunges us into the abyss of our ignorance, which is both human and peculiarly modern: How are we to make of that love in economic practice?

That question calls for many answers, and we don’t know most of them. It is a question that those humans who want to answer will be living and working for a long time—if they are allowed a long time. Meanwhile, may Heaven guard us from those who think they already have the answers.

-Wendell Berry

4:30

My friend, Jason, asked the other day if I was “turning old early” because I have this problem lately where I simply cannot fall asleep. Monday I stayed up until 4:30 one night and tonight I am now pre-blogging at 4:30 (writing things that I will copy and paste when I go somewhere with the Internets, probably when I break down and go to Starbuck’s to get us morning coffee etc.). I thought I’d write the blog entry where I talk about some of the those timid steps I’m taking toward living in the Way with Jesus.

I have been trying several different ways of pulling out of the system that is not Love.

I am everyday choosing and refusing to believe that exploitation is necessary. I don’t accept “We’re all going to die of some kind of cancer anyway, so might as well enjoy life”, or “It doesn’t matter what you do, you’re going to have to contribute to the broken system.” Even the popular Christian ideas of “just passing through” will not cut it for me anymore. Jesus is explicit in teaching global citizenship, responsible stewardship, peaceableness and enemy love.

I have been trying not to wear makeup and have been taking care of my skin by 100% natural means, keeping it clean, figuring out foods that trigger acne, exercising, drinking more water and using coconut oil(thanks, Kate & Meghan!). I’ve been having great results that are not only healthier for my body but at this point, a way of decreasing my dependence on products that try to “fix” my “problems”.

David and I have gone through our apartment, the first time of many, placing stickers on the things we will get rid of. We plan to try and sell as much as possible and give the money away. So far, we’ve given some of our things away to friends who have need or who would take stuff we were pretty sure other people wouldn’t want like half used lotions and pomade. ☺ We are going to slowly pare things down so that we have what we need: a sweet simplicity of utility and art.

David and I have been dreaming big together lately, dreaming of our future family and the life we want to be living. The community garden we helped start in Spokane was the beginning of a love affair with the Earth and part of the reason we thought about moving to Texas was the promise of a longer growing season (virtually year-round). Then we moved into a hip apartment in an historic district. We grow aloe vera inside, which is only semi-useful. We definitely can’t eat it, or at least, we wouldn’t want to.

But we’ve been dreaming big dreams lately, dreams that conjure up a new community, an entirely different way of living where everything is shared more freely and Life is truly abundant. We had a taste of that life in Spokane and we are itching for more.