Easter Bonnets and Bowties

It was a busy and eventful weekend, starting with Thursday night, when the halls of South Christian High School were filled with The Sound of Music. Katie played Sister Bertha (she calls her the "crabby nun") and participated in a great rendition of "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?". This was her last performance in an SCHS production since she's graduating in May, so it was bittersweet. But I think it was her best (she's been in every play/musical since her freshman year), so she's going out on a high note (no pun intended).

And Friday and Saturday, Henry and I attended the Philadephia Conference on Reformed Theology, the third one we've attended together. The topic for consideration was justification, and the speakers, as always, gave us so much to think about, so many good insights on this amazing doctrine, and an ever deepening appreciation for the Reformed faith. The highlight for me was hearing and meeting one of my favorite author/theologians, Dr. Michael Horton.

So you'd think with all of that, this post would be filled with thought-provoking, inspiring content. But the other event of the weekend was a head cold, which has left me, on Monday, just trying to work my way through what has to be done, with not much energy left for creativity.

The Easter season is upon us (two weeks away!), and so hopefully this picture of two of my favorite little Easter bunnies (probably from around 1995) will accomplish for you what it did for me:

1. give you a smile
2. remind you that spring really will be here soon

Heaven on My Mind

I've been thinking a lot about heaven this week--not in a morbid, wish-for-death kind of way, but certainly with a sense of (what I would consider) healthy longing. One special friend's little boy was born with Down syndrome and heart defects, and complications he's suffered since his birth make it questionable how much he will be capable of doing on his own during his life here on earth. I couldn't help but think this week how amazing it will be for his parents--and the parents of other kids like him--to one day eat with him, see him run, talk with him, hear him say, "I love you, Mommy and Daddy"--in heaven. I hope I get to witness one of these scenes.

A co-worker's little son is dying. The little guy has had cancer for a long time (probably going on two years, I'm guessing), and he and his family have fought nobly and hard to find a cure. While many people have been praying for this little boy to be healed here on earth, it looks like our prayers will be answered only in heaven. In heaven, this family will get to see their little guy completely healed.

I was reminded of a book that I edited last year, A Better Country, by Dan Schaeffer. A passage from his book assures me that I'm not selfish for wishing that the first little boy could walk and play with his older brothers and for wishing the second little boy could grow up with his family, go to school, and do all of the things most of us with a natural lifespan get to do. Here's Dan's explanation:

"There is a part of us, an important part, that longs for and dreams of life on earth as it could be. The desire for what we can't have on earth here has led many Christians to feel a bit guilty when they are feeling less than fulfilled in their current status. We are often led to believe that we should be totally fulfilled here on earth, and if we're not, something's wrong with us. We must not be spiritual enough.

"If we are constantly seeking to have more comforts and luxuries and grow envious of those who have more than we do, our lack of contentment is curable. We need a change of heart and mind--and mostly a change of perspective. On the other hand, there is a lingering discontentment (that will ebb and flow over our lifespan) with living in a fallen sinful world that is not only to be expected but is completely understandable and valid. Many Scriptures echo and affirm that these feelings aren't wrong; they are simply the righteous longing for the better country we were designed for. You aren't the only one who has felt them; in fact, you are in very good company . . .

"The desire [for heaven] is real, and nothing else in this life can satisfy it. That is both comforting and invigorating."

The Great One in Three

Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!
How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!
Who has known the mind of the Lord?
Or who has been his counselor?
Who has ever given to God,
that God should repay him?
For from him and through him and to him are all things.
To him be the glory forever! Amen.
~Romans 11:33-36

Throughout history, Christians have had to defend themselves against the charge that they have three Gods in their worship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Many creeds have been written to exposit a correct understanding of this beautiful doctrine, which often comes under attack and is frequently misunderstood and distorted.

Our pastor's catechism sermon yesterday afternoon (on Lord's Day 8--"Since there is but one God, why do you speak of three?") was an encouraging reminder of just how precious this biblical doctrine is. He emphasized several times that this is not just an academic doctrine. In his words, understanding the Trinity enables us to "drink from the wells of salvation." Indeed.

At Lord's Day 8, the catechism begins a study of the Apostle's Creed, which our congregation recites every afternoon service. Each morning service, our pastor reads the law and then gives us an assurance of our pardon. Pastor V reminded us of the importance of these practices. They are incredibly relevant, and we don't hear the law and recite the creed each week out of tradition or as some sort of prideful badge of our conservatism. We hear the law each week because we need to be mindful of our sin, and we confess the creed, a summary of the gospel, to remind us that God saves us sinners and that salvation is of God. These are the things God's people most need to hear when they gather on the Lord's Day, and we should never find law and gospel irrelevant or cease this practice because we think those in attendance may be put off by it.

With the above Romans passage as his text, Pastor V then demonstrated how the doctrine of the Trinity is contained in verse 36. When Paul says that "from him . . . are all things," he is referring to God the Father, who created all things and sustains them. "Through him" is a reference to Jesus Christ, God's Son, who has provided our deliverance in salvation. "To him" alludes to the Holy Spirit, who applies Christ's benefits to the elect, that we might live to the glory of God.

Although Scripture never uses the word Trinity, the doctrine is apparent throughout Scripture. We see it first in Genesis 1: v. 1--the Father created; v. 2--the Spirit hovers over the face of the waters; v. 3--the Son is the word through which creation occurs.

How amazing is this doctrine that often is written off as incomprehensible and too difficult for us to grasp! God the Father thought of us before Genesis 1, before the creation of the world. God the Son humbled himself, came to this world in human form, and suffered and died to save us. And God the Holy Spirit has made us his temple. "God in three persons--blessed Trinity!"

Exciting New Blog

Media personalities have begun to talk about our president's seeming dependence on his teleprompter--even when he speaks at parties. In fact, a teleprompter gaffe on St. Patrick's Day has led to some embarrassment for both Mr. Obama and the Irish PM.

Not one to let our president's bizarre behavior go unnoticed, Rush Limbaugh has made much of the teleprompter addiction, and it appears that now TOTUS, teleprompter of the United States, has its own blog.

Funny stuff!

Craving La Crave

Even though Henry and I are an old married couple of eight months now, I'm happy to report that the romance is still very much alive. One of the things that we have carried over from our courtin' days--which I recommend highly to you all--is Friday date night. This is a tradition that goes back to the beginning of us. Every Friday night (for the most part) Henry would take me to a restaurant of his choosing. Even now, my co-workers will ask me on Friday where we are going for dinner. Most of the time, I answer, "I don't know. Henry didn't tell me yet." And honestly, this makes things more exciting for me. And I would say that about 99 percent of the time, he has chosen something good.

We would spend our evening enjoying great food and lively conversation. Over time, we have developed our list of favorite restaurants, but we like to try new things. We're rather adventurous with our food, and it's this sense of romance and adventure that has brought us to our most recent discovery: La Crave Restaurant.

(I will pause here to apologize to my nonlocal readers. What follows is an unabashed commercial for a wonderful local restaurant. I am going to beg my local readers to try this restaurant because Henry and I love it, and we don't want it to die. And you never know--you may find yourself vacationing in Grand Rapids someday because it is, of course, a tried and true vacation hot spot. Or maybe you'll end up here on business. So read on, because if you do, you will most certainly want to visit La Crave.)

Back to La Crave. For those of you familiar with Grand Rapids geography, it is located in a strip mall on 28th Street just west of the entrance to Woodland Mall on the north side of the street. La Crave features Mediterranean and Lebanese cuisine, and a visit there makes you think you've entered one of the tales of the Arabian nights. Thick, colorful tablecloths with Arabic patterns cover the tables, and the walls are decorated with paintings featuring scenes from the Middle East. You'll find yourself expecting camels, a genie in a bottle, or belly dancers to appear at your table at any moment. When we were there last Friday, Henry and I were casting our gorgeous Jordanian waitress, Ruba, in a biblical role like Ruth or maybe Esther.

But the best part is the food . For those of you unfamiliar with the cuisine of the Mediterranean, the menu features lots of fresh vegetables, chicken, beef, lamb, and rice with lots of interesting spices and lots of garlic. You'll learn a whole new food vocabulary of things like Fattuch, Tabbouli, Baba Ghanouge, Hommous, Shawarma, and Falafel. And for all of my Muslim readers (because I'm sure I have Muslim readers), the food is Halal, which means it is prepared in a way that allows Muslims to eat it (I think kind of like kosher is to Jews).

Since February, when Henry and I first discovered this magic kingdom of garlic delight, I have been there three times, and each time has been just as delicious as the last. One of my visits was with the women co-workers on my team, and most of them have been back, have sent a loved one, or are planning another visit very soon. It's that good! In the interest of small businesses everywhere, of ethnic diversity, and of the best hands-down hommous I have ever had, please go. The prices are reasonable, and they even have silliness like cheeseburgers on the menu so you can take your kids or that picky eater who is afraid to try new things.

You can visit the Website here. If you want to give it a try and there's no one courageous enough to go with you, you can contact Henry and/or me. One or both of us will be happy to accompany you to one of our favorite new restaurants. Give it a try. I promise you will not be sorry!

I Know--I Promised . . .

I think that at some point I may have promised to feature nothing more on Facebook on this blog. I had completely determined to leave the subject, completely secure in my decision not to become one of the 1.5 million users. And I still am. And yet so many have been coming out of the closet with their contempt for Facebook, that I'm feeling like my anti-establishment stance is becoming . . . establishment. What a quandary!

I know, Facebook users, that this article is something you can laugh at because it was a Facebook user who drew my attention to it. This excerpt is from The Weekly Standard , and once you read these couple of paragraphs, you'll want to read the rest of this hilarious piece by Matt Labash.

So I'm not inflexible. But there is one promise I've made to myself. And that is that no matter how long I live, no matter how much pressure is exerted, no matter how socially isolated I become, I will never, ever join Facebook, the omnipresent online social-networking site that like so many things that have menaced our country (the Unabomber, Love Story, David Gergen) came to us from Harvard but has now worked its insidious hooks into every crevice of society.

For the five or six Amish shut-ins who may not yet have heard of this scourge (your tenacious ignorance is to be admired, and I'd immediately friend you if I was into Facebook and you had electricity), Facebook is an online community where colleagues, friends, long-lost acquaintances, friends of friends or long-lost acquaintances, and perfect strangers find and "friend" each other based on their real or perceived affinity. They then have access to each other's web pages, and consequently to each other's lives, quirks, photos, jottings, oversharings, and mental disorders, as well as to those of the ever-expanding universe of their friends' circles, thus increasing the likelihood that you will either embarrass yourself or be embarrassed by someone whose life would never otherwise intersect with yours. (Right about now, a Facetard is ginning up an angry letter to the editor saying this would not be the case if you know how to control your privacy settings. Save the geek speech for your Facebook friends, Facetard, I already got my eight hours sleep.)"

You have to admit--Facebook is an easy target!

Curse Breakers

I've had the opportunity recently to watch a charming movie and re-read one of my favorite novels, and while on the surface they seem very different (and they are), they deal with a similar problem but come to opposite conclusions.

Penelope is a sweet fairytale-ish movie that has been in release for some time. In this story with a contemporary setting, the daughter of a wealthy family has been placed under a terrible curse: She is born with a literal pig face, complete with snout and pointy ears. As in most fairytales, the curse can be broken when she finds true love "with one of her own kind." Penelope spends most of her early years trapped inside the family mansion with her overbearing mother and clueless father, protected from gawkers. But as she reaches marriageable age, her mother begins an all-out search among the world's wealthiest bachelors (those who are of Penelope's own kind)to find true love for Penelope and break the curse.

While I'm being intentionally vague here, trying not to spoil the ending for those of you who want to see this movie, the curse (of course) is broken--but not in the way you would expect. Penelope's character develops through the course of the movie as she decides she'd rather live her life with stares and giggles than hiding away in a dark old mansion, never having lived life at all. She becomes a teacher, and in the final scene of the movie, she is telling her story to her students. One of the children asks what the story means. Several children offer up their hysterical theories, based on what they just heard. But the last, wise child offers this up as the moral to the story: "It's not the power of the curse; it's the power you give to the curse." With self-love and determination, Penelope has saved herself. In the end, she was dependent on no one or nothing for her "salvation."

In Till We Have Faces, perhaps C. S. Lewis's least known but most critically acclaimed novel, a heroine named Orual suffers a fate similar to Penelope's: She has an ugly face, and all who see her agree. Lewis has given us a "myth retold" rather than a fairy tale in this story, and his setting is the ancient country of Glome, a barbaric, pre-Christian culture. Although Orual begins life as a princess (and eventually becomes a powerful queen), she is very angry with the gods, who--she believes--have robbed her of everything beautiful in life. In the first 250 pages of this novel, Orual angrily and bitterly makes her case against the gods, telling the story of her life and tracing the injustices that have been thrust upon her. Indeed, she lives under a terrible curse, and her ugliness is only a small part of it.

In part 2, Orual, now an old woman, receives the gods' answer, and here I marvel at the genius of Lewis, who sets his story in a pagan culture, using mythic gods, but gives us a story that can be understood only as the Christian story of sin and salvation. Through a series of revelations, the gods show Orual herself--in all of her selfishness and ugliness--inner ugliness. As the gods do their work on her soul, they show her that they are, in fact, beautiful. And as Orual truly sees herself and realizes that she has received mercy, not justice, she views her reflection in the water and sees herself--now beautiful as well.

Unlike Penelope, Orual learns to despise her selfish ways and hate her bitterness. And it's then that the gods can break the curse. Orual acknowledges, "Why should [the gods] hear the babble that we think we mean. How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?" The curse is broken because the gods have given Orual a face--with eyes--that allow her to see.

And so in Lewis's myth we see the reflection of reality: We can never break our own curse by believing in ourselves, by loving ourselves, by recognizing our significance. The curse can be broken only when we recognize our complete dependence on the One who bore our curse for us. So Penelope, as fun as it is, remains a fairytale, and Lewis's myth becomes a beautiful allegory of death to self and new birth in Christ.

"And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit" (2 Corinthians 3:18).

Christless Christianity

The nonfiction title I'm reading right now is by one of my favorite (I know--I say that every time) theologians, Dr. Michael Horton. In Christless Christianity, Horton writes about his concern that the church today (Horton leaves no one out in his concern) has pushed aside Christ and a Christ-centered gospel, and as a result the church in America is headed toward a "Christless Christianity."

I've only finished one chapter so far, but nearly every paragraph is filled with thought-provoking ideas. This comes from chapter 1:

"Like the liberals of yesteryear, a growing number of evangelical leaders are fond of setting Jesus's teaching on the kingdom--especially the Sermon on the Mount--over against the more doctrinal emphasis found especially in Paul's epistles. Many celebrate this emphasis on Christ-as-example rather than Christ-as-Redeemer as the harbinger of a new kind of Christian, but is it really an old kind of moralist? Regardless of whether Christ's death is regarded as a vicarious sacrifice, discipleship--our cross-bearing--becomes the more interesting topic. Never mind the disciples are people who learn something before they set out to make a splash by their zealous activity . . . When the focus becomes 'What would Jesus do?' instead of 'What has Jesus done?' the labels no longer matter. Conservatives have been just as prone to focus on the former rather than the latter in recent decades" (pp. 25-26).

And the following is just a news item: you can read my first-ever published article at the Web site of Reformed Fellowship. It's actually a longer version of the book review I posted here last year on The Shack, a subject that I'm actually pretty tired of talking about. Nonetheless, it's nice to have a published article in the March issue of The Outlook.

Hair

"The hair is the richest ornament of women."
~Martin Luther

"I'm not offended by all the dumb-blonde jokes because I know that I'm not dumb. I also know I'm not blonde." ~Dolly Parton


Among womankind, there are certain topics of conversation that can almost always be counted on, given the situation. A group of married women can almost always sustain a rousing conversation about the idiosyncracies of their husbands. With groups of mothers, you can count on conversations regarding labor and delivery and childhood issues (orthodontia, childhood illnesses, discipline strategies).

Subjects that will take hold, however, with any group of women--of various ages--are accessories (shoes, purses, jewelry) and--best bet ever--hair. A case in point: Last week at Ladies' Bible Study, one woman walked into the room and complimented another's hair. The complimentee looked a little puzzled, and the complimenter said, "The color--it looks pretty. Don't worry, we all do it." And yes--J, sitting next to the complimentee, confessed that she had just paid her regular visit to the hairdresser earlier in the week, and I happily announced that I would be seeing my person the next day.

And nothing will draw a crowd of women around another like a new hairstyle with ensuing conversations about how one woman makes her hair do this particular thing, how we'd all love to have that hairstyle if only we were younger . . . our hair wasn't so thin . . . our hair wasn't so thick . . .

And so I began a personal reflection on the history of my own hairstyles. It's kind of boring. As I told a friend yesterday, there's a good reason I've never had long hair. My hair is so thick that it bushes out as it grows longer, and my face gets lost in this mass of hair that just plain takes over. And then it falls flat under the weight of itself. So the following is a pictorial history of my hair, starting at about age 2.



You can see here that the side part has pretty much always been with me, and, one way or another, I've kept the blonde. From my earliest years, I was being sent to bed in rollers or with bobby pins forming "spit curls" on the sides. This must have been during the years when I was still cooperative and didn't rip them out of my hair when the lights went out.



And here we see, visually demonstrated, why I am not a long-hair girl. This was probably about fourth grade, and this is the longest my hair has ever been. The only thing larger than the hair was the glasses, but that's a whole other fashion history. Note the bobby pin. And a conversation for another time, but I am wearing one of my first-ever pantsuits. (We weren't allowed to wear pants to school until third or fourth grade.)



Illustrated here is my college graduation picture, and note that by now the hairstyle has stabilized and has pretty much remained a variation of this form since my early high school years. Sometimes the part has changed sides (there was a brief regrettable period when I attempted a middle part), the back has gone up and down, the ears have been cut out at times, and there was a period of shame in Katie's early years when I actually had a perm, but by and large, this has been it.



"It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window."
~Raymond Chandler