Me, I Like the Crust

For baking brownies with extra edges

There's more than one way to make a sandwich. It was in northern Morocco that I first saw someone hollow out a baguette, throwing away the soft part to make room for more filling. The crust, not the middle, was highly prized. In the same way, if you buy a torta on the streets of Mexico your carne comes in a tasty, crusty roll. Yet take high tea with the British or American upper crust (sic) and you'll get your sandwiches with nothing crunchier than the cucumbers.

I like crusts. What about you? 

In the same way, the edges of my day seem the most valuable. I realized a couple years ago that I do my best work before 10 am or (especially) after 4 pm. Unfortunately my job was based on 8-5 office hours, with the first hour given to meetings. So I seldom felt as productive as I might be. In order to deliver what I thought of as my best work I ended up spending a lot of evenings and weekends at the office. While I enjoyed those Saturday afternoons and Friday or Sunday nights on my own, I knew I wasn't getting enough down time and resented working so much overtime, even as I'd chosen it myself.  

Nowadays I'm enjoying my work more. I work less and accomplish more working at home and on my own schedule. I often reach for my computer first thing and put it away last thing, but in the middle, I give myself more margin to goof off, run errands, do chores. It's like a day with extra crust.

Similarly, I find Mondays and Fridays are the days I most want to work. It's in the middle of the week that I lose my way. So I go with it: I make Wednesdays my lighter day, sometimes even running my week on a "four tens" schedule (working M-Tu, Th-F). It's like having two Mondays and two Fridays.

The biggest problem - since the how-do-I-get-my-people-time one is working out fine - is that my preferred schedule doesn't necessarily jive with the way the rest of the world (my world) operates. I'm ready to make those phone calls or send those emails on Friday afternoon, but plenty of people have already checked out and don't want to receive them. Similarly, my East Coast colleagues don't want to interact after I get my second wind 4:00 pm my time. 

>> Have you found a way to match your schedule with you most natural personal rhythms? How do the people around you respond?

P.S.: Here's one bonus instance of "extra edges." Friends of mine live on Lake Tapps, a body of water that, though less than five square miles in area, boasts 45 miles of shoreline. That's a lot of waterfront property, eh?

How to Get Things Done

Ever have a bunch of things on your plate and don't know where to start? Do you really do the hardest or most important things first (as gurus advise), or try to get the easy ones out of the way to clear the space for them, or baby yourself with the fun and distracting things because it's too painful to face anything else? Or maybe you approach life as Alison confesses she does:

“For me, the answer to the question ‘When do you write?’ is easy: I write when I’m avoiding some other important task. For example, this essay is being written on April 23, and my taxes are not yet done. I also write when the bathroom needs cleaning, when the garden needs weeding, or when I’m skipping an important meeting...

“The best place to write, I’ve discovered, is parking lots. The parking lot of the gym is exceptionally good. I can avoid working out and begin a poem at the same time.” (Alison Luterman, “The Secret of My Success,” The Sun, Nov. 2003)

Ah yes, that sounds familiar. My January newsletter is done, 10 days before I intend to send it. Email, Facebook, Twitter, and even this blog seem to get attention that my scary research project of the moment may not receive, especially if it involves unrequited phone calls.

Real and meaningful deadlines and the sense that people are watching help a great deal. But often I don't have that kind of support. Missions Catalyst, with its weekly pub date and waiting audience, always always gets done; I think we've missed two issues in the last five years and only because of tech problems.

What about you? What helps you get things done?

Mission Headline News

The publication I manage (re-)published 150 news stories in 2010, so I considered taking a stab at a top-ten news story list. But what criteria to use? In our news coverage, we're not really trying to cover all the top stories. We also tend to aim for balance more than bigness, skipping stories well-covered elsewhere. On the other hand, in doing so, the news sleuth and I both like to think that we’re giving readers a taste of Heaven’s Headlines. I'm pleased with this approach and don't expect to change it.

Some other sources covering the missions-and-religion beat, using various filters different from ours, did make year-in-review lists. Maybe you'd be interested. Here are three of them.

> 2010 Religion Stories of the Year (Religion Newswriters Association)
> The Year in Review: Top Spiritual Trends of 2010 (J. Lee Grady, Charisma)

> Top 10 News Stories of 2010 (Christianity Today)

Never Heard of Him. You?

Shoot, this is the stuff that makes all of us look bad. The popular Christian music group Sonicflood worked with the Southern Baptist's International Mission Board to record a music video used with the annual Lottie Moon Christmas offering - an offering which will fund much of the Board's excellent work around the world in the year to come. It was filmed in and around Damascus, Syria, including the road where Saul had the remarkable conversion some 2000 years ago that did so much to further God's mission to the Gentiles. Yes, people like you and me.

But whoever produced the video threw in some bumper-sticker mission motivators that just don't stand up to what we know about the world. I don't want to single them out unduly. You see statistics abused and used to misinform in lots of places. But how sad to see the Board educate their congregations with misleading information.

"There are 6,426 unreached people groups who have never heard the name of Jesus Christ" it proclaimed. And yes, with the nature of the medium, they said it without any source information or explanation of that statistic. "We know who these people groups are, what they are called, their dominant faith, their culture," it continued.

Too bad they didn't "know" that - even and maybe especially in the places around the Middle East where this video was shot - it's quite difficult to find people, much less whole "peoples," who have not heard the name of Jesus.

What is it about that phrase "never heard the name of Jesus" that evangelical preachers and mission mobilizers cannot resist? The fact is, Jesus has very high name recognition. Many who are part of these unreached groups have not only heard about the name of Jesus, but also know more about Jesus and those who follow him than most of us know about them. That doesn't mean what they've heard is accurate, that they know Jesus, or that they even have personal relationships with Christians - in most cases they do not. Yet most have heard the name and probably hear it often.

"Are We There Yet?" raises a missiological question. I guess four minutes isn't long enough to unpack it. But there's a world of difference between knowing the name of Jesus and knowing him.

Another missiological question for the Baptists - and all of us who believe that human beings were made to know God and make him known - might be, "do we care yet?"


Note: Yes, readers, I know that several of you wouldn't agree with me about the uniqueness of Jesus or the claim that human beings were made to know God and make him known... If you'd like to talk about that, let me know. But I think this probably isn't the best forum for that conversation.

Crazy about You

Ever feel like the Twitter fail whale?

"Dear whomever may be reading this. Even though you may not believe me, somebody out there is crazy about you." So says Twitter. This was one of the most popular tweets recently.

Twitter does rather lend itself toward bumper-sticker statements, doesn't it? So, do we believe it? Should we? Is it true? Seems more wishful than reasonable. Surely not everyone - even everyone reading this - has someone who is crazy about them. But I suppose that many of us, though well loved, fail to receive from that love the strength and joy that might be ours. We choose instead to look on the dark side of things and live in bitterness rather than gratitude.  

"And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it." (John 1:5)

Does "crazy about you" imply romance? Can't say I have such a person in my life: a mate who delight in me being me, who love my heart and the way my mind works. Sometimes, the possibility that such a relationship could come together seems impossible to me.

But as an experiment, I started a mental list. A list of people who are crazy about me (I think). Pretty encouraging. Unless I actually am crazy and/or mistaken, it's a pretty long list. I am rich in friends. (Among other things this gives me hope of someday making a match.)

Either way, I am deeply blessed. Especially with the Creator and Sustainer of the universe topping my fan list. Amazing!

Got 20 minutes to think about what holds you back from giving and receiving love? Check out this great TED talk. As I listened to it I realized that while I feel I still have a long way to go, by God's grace I've experienced a lot of what it means to be what Brene calls "wholehearted."

See also my post on Counseling (10/29/10).

Longing for Home

Home. What does that word bring to mind, first? A place of origin. An ultimate destination. And those places in between but especially when you were a child or raised children where you feel or felt you belonged and which in some sense belonged to you.

That's what Fredrick Buechner says in his book The Longing for Home. "I suspect that those who as children never had such a place in actuality had instead some kind of dream of such a home, which for them played an equally crucial part."

Few of us have the same home from beginning to end. We stretch the boundaries of the word when, like me, we go "home" for Christmas to different houses in different cities to an ever-shifting group of people - grandparents gone, and maybe parents; family members divorced, remarried, bringing in someone new. Maybe, at least in some setting, you the newcomer - hoping to be accepted and to feel that you belong in this place or with these people. Is this home? Is this family?

And even those we know more or less from the beginning of life until its end are apt to change into something unfamiliar, as we ourselves change.

Ideas like home and family may become something of a polite fiction - words we use to describe things that are too complicated for such short syllables.

In all his peripatetic childhood, the one house that of all others felt like home to Buechner was his grandparents' large, clapboard house in a suburb of Pittsburgh. Something about the place - and especially about his grandmother, who more than anyone else "inhabited" the house - suggested timelessness and permanence, beauty, serenity and love.

I love Buechner's essays. He captures and is honest about nostalgia and longing in a way that helps me accept both the ways life satisfies and the ways it doesn't. That you cannot go "back home" but it's okay that you still wish you could, that something in you needs this.

"All of this makes me wonder about the home that my wife and I created for ourselves and our three daughters, both of us coming from the homes of our childhood and consciously or unconsciously drawing on those memories as we went about making a new home for the family we were becoming."

"It was the little world we created to be as safe as we knew how to make it for ourselves and for our children from the great world outside which I more than my wife was afraid of especially for our children's sake because I remembered so vividly the dark and dangerous times of my own childhood, which were very much part of me still and continue to be.

"In that Vermont house I found refuge from the dark, as I always had, mainly in books, which, unlike people, can always be depended upon to tell the same stories in the same way and are always there when you need them and can always be set aside when you need them no longer.

"What my wife brought to the home we were creating was entirely different. The chief delight of her childhood in New Jersey had been not indoor things, as with me, but outdoor things. She had loved horses and animals of all kinds and growing things in gardens and almost by nature knew as much about trees and birds and flowers as most people have to learn from books and then struggle to remember.

"She planted a fifty-by-hundred-foot vegetable garden and flowers all over the place. She saw to it that each of our children had not only horses to ride but other animals to love and take care of - for Sharmy, Aracana chickens, who laid eggs of three different colors; for Dinah, a pig who grew to the size of a large refrigerator and didn't suffer fools gladly; and for Katherine, some fawn-colored Toggenberg goats who skittered around the barnyard dropping their berries and gazing out at the hills through the inscrutable slits of their eyes."

"...Like everybody else, what we furnished our home with was ourselves."

>> Think about what makes a place feel like home for you. Where or with whom do you feel that sense of belonging and that the place or people belong to you? Where or how do you find or try to create what Buechner calls "refuge from the dark"? Are the strategies different for others in your family?

Favorite Spots in S. Puget Sound

 

My trip home was feeling long - I hadn't planned enough things to do, not wanting to be stressed out trying to make arrangements and accomplish them. But boredom sets in too easily, and then I wish I had something to do. Thursday I had no plans. It was a crisp, sunny day - a perfect time to go visit two favorite spots: one a five-minute drive northeast of my mom's place, the other ten minutes southeast. 

At Redondo Beach I put on my headphones and got in a two-mile run. The boardwalk was a bit icy and the tide was high, the wind whipping the waves violently against the piers and sometimes coming up through the planks of the boardwalk.

I love that kind of energy.

The second spot, the Hybelos Wetlands, was also cold but pretty quiet. Unmelted hailstones from a storm the day before covered the trail with a snow-like blanket of white. I was amazed how much green I saw. They call Colorado - where I live now - "Colorful Colorado," but it has nothing on Washington. Green doesn't grow in the winter. But in Washington the wild things keep on coming - I saw moss, ferns, brambles, and hardy little plants sharing space with dark pools and the gray, brown, and red of all kinds of trees and undergrowth. 

I was not the only one who went there for a walk that day. It's a pretty shadowy place, though, and everyone was well bundled up.