So, I've been here in the city for three weeks today. It's fantastic.... it's funny how I keep having the urge to chase the pigeouns when I come across them though.
Also, I will be frank: the beginning of this week hit me with the gut realization that, "I live an hour plus away from friends and my church family, and my family. It's going to be a long time before I will see most of them again." Overall, though? I would say I'm holding up pretty well but it's been rough not feeling settled into a church, yet. I'm hungry for community, and although I'd been attending Liberti for a while now and I love it there, I haven't settled into community. What I'm going to end up doing, then, is moving on from Liberti's church service and checking out some other churches. I just started going to a Liberti homegroup, and I plan to continue to attend because I need some kind of stable community as I go through this. At least, that's what my thought process is. Prayerfully, God will have me settled somewhere soon. I really should've started doing this by now.
At any rate, there are so many things that I would LOVE-LOVE-LOVE to rattle on about. Things like going through Psalms with Scott; or Art and how a lot of "Christian art" is just plain bad art; or the unique and strange passion to go into a place where I know my Jesus is hated; or even the frustrations I have with Christians who don't respect the world God has created.
I wouldn't even know where to start. I've been engaged in so many beautiful discussions that I could just explode. (in a good way) I suppose the best thing for me to do is to do brief little servings of each mentioned topic, although more certainly abound in this little noggin of mine.
Reading Psalms with Scott has been such a blessing to me. See, Scott and I typically talk on the phone every night. I don't know why we talk on the phone ever night, besides the fact that we're in a relationship and I enjoy carrying a conversation with him for hours. Anyway. As a result of our lengthy conversations, we decided it would be good to read a Psalm and talk about it before ending the call. You know what's awesome? It's awesome to be able to see and hear of the goodness of God; how great He is and how little we are; and how amazing it is to be able to express a full range of emotion to Him. I've gone through Psalms before, but there's something extraordinary about being able to discuss the Word and the goodness of God with another human being whose heartbeat is for the Lord. Because it is in my thoughts on a daily basis, it encourages me to share that goodness with other people and causes my heart to yearn more compassionately for those who do not know Christ.
Christian art, for those who don't know, has this way about it to come across as bad art. While I am sure that kitsche and decorative art has it's place in the world (much to my chagrin), too much of "Christian art" is of its variety. Paintings of cottages or lighthouses with Scripture scrawled across the bottom, Precious Moments dolls, or other such things are the end product of a desire for an unattainable utopia. Or it has a overtly Christian message that basically tells you how to look at the art. Or there's overused symbology of crosses and icthuses (the 'Jesus Fish'). Christian art has the reputation for giving off warm-fuzzies, and it's those warm-fuzzies that just rub me the wrong way. I suppose that this is equally true of non-Christian art of the same nature that create a sense of 'all is well in the world, everything is beautiful all the time.' Fact of the matter is that the world is not beautiful all the time. There are downright awful things in the world, from physical events to psychology, and to ignore such is to live in world washed in falsehood. Not only that, but to have a blatant message or agenda is to destroy the mystery that can be so characterstic of much of art today. You have it there, but it's a matter of figuring out how to put it there without making it too easy to find. Kind of like a Where's Waldo? book. Waldo's there, but there are so many other characters to discover in the process of looking for Waldo. If Waldo's too easy to find, it gets boring real quick.
I like to think that God is all for mystery, too. There's something mysterious about our relationship to Him and being indwelt by the Holy Spirit... And, there's always something to discover and learn.
But as for the beautiful... To appreciate beauty, real honest to goodness beauty, I think you have to learn to appreciate and recognize that which is not beautiful. Sometimes, as a creative person, you have to expose that non-beauty. However, as a Christian creative person, I think it's also important to weave in expressions of hope and beauty into that non-beauty and despair. There's a message of hope and that the world can be beautiful, but it's not blatant. Hope and beauty often times comes up in the most unlikely of places: think, for instance, of the Cross. Christ is the hope out of despair, and the One that brings beauty into life; and yet His suffering and death -- which was completely necessary for our salvation -- was not exactly what you would call a beautiful thing. The Jews had been looking for their Messiah as a man of great standing and as a majestic early King... Jesus came in a lowly state, humility, and recieved a criminal's death penalty. Of course, He was resurrected into glory and splendor.. But beauty and hope came from the least likely of places.
... I suppose that's enough for me to write about for now. The other two things I could rattle on about I can get to another day. I'll leave you with that to chew on.
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