Fearless Wonder

Will and I just finished reading "The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible." The amazon listing is here. If you have ever struggled with the Bible you should read this book. Jacobs is very funny, but the book is never insulting. He takes his project seriously and honestly engages the Bible. He also honestly engages with people from a multitude of religion backgrounds whom he meets while doing this project. I don't want to say too much and ruin the book for you, but it's worth reading. Will and I both couldn't put it down. Enjoy!

NOTE: I started this post Thanksgiving day, and didn't post it till several days later. Mitzvah is a term from Judaism meaning one the of the 613 commandments in the Torah, but is commonly used to refer to a good deed. At my former preschool we had a MItzvah tree where the kids could put up little paper MItzvah leaves with their good deeds written on them. Will and I did our little Thanksgiving mitzvah last night. We volunteered for a couple of hours for Hosea Feed the Hungry and Homeless which does a giant homeless feed for Thanksgiving (among many other things) We did the food preparation part at a jail. (I had to call my dad and tell him I'd been to jail) Will mainly hauled cans and I pulled Turkey meat off the bones. I guess today hundreds more volunteers will set up at a local stadium, serve the food and clean up. This is really a very huge effort. Our food prep at the jail was just one of many places people could go volunteer at. Most people at the jail signed up...

Ajahn Brahm says (big paraphrase here) that when you are single, always wishing for a mate, never happy to be alone, you have singles suffering. Then when you finally meet the love of your life, and getting married, well then, then you have married suffering. I have been disappointed with myself for sometime now. You see I used to be smart. I used to be the one who was going to be someone. I had amazing grades in school. I was a great, writer, poet, loved acting, pretty good at art and just destined...destined to be something amazing by 25... right? Well here I am at 29 working in childcare. (like my mother...the horror) I'm don't even have my own classroom like I did in Chattanooga. Thanks to the annoying Georgia residency requirements I won't be able to afford to start my Master's degree until May 2009. A lot of my friends are busy professionals doing what they went to school for. Some of my friends are really starting to "make it" But me, I am ju...

I was driving my van load of kids, eight total, from their preschool to our children's center. As per usual I was telling them to remember to use quiet voices. Then one of the kids piped up, "Hey let's play the quiet game." Now for those of you who don't know about the quiet games, it is a game invented by adults I'm sure, in which you have to see who can stay quiet the longest. It tends to be suggested when kids are getting really crazy so the adult can have a few moments of peace. Now this time a child had suggested it and the other kids seemed interested in playing, so I upped the stakes. "I'll give a sticker to anyone who can stay quiet all the way to H.H. (the children's center)" Well a couple of kids yelled out, "See how quiet I am being" I reminded them that this too was talking. Then they settled down and started to play in earnest. If you have ever played the quiet games with small children (these kids were ages 3 to ...

I can't ever believe in the God I once thought I knew. It was a God shaped by my own guilt complexes and conditioning. A God who claimed to offer grace but only gave out impossible rules to follow. But I am trying to see if a real God is out there. What would that God look like? How would I know if I found Him/Her? What role would that God serve in my life, and what role would I serve in that God's plans. I really have no answer to these questions right now. But I am keeping myself connected to God seeking communities and staying open. One of my biggest obstacles is that I am still clinging to resentment and fear. I am fearful of what my "Old God" will do to me for leaving him. I am resentful because of all the harmful ways of thinking I was taught and admittedly self-taught. If I am going to move forward I need to stop whining about my past. If you see me complaining about how unfair "God" is or how annoying Adventists are on this blog again I wa...