conspiring…

unplug.

here’s to a weekend with friends, nature, wearing sweat pants, and being unplugged.

love it.

random sidenote/question:
are you a praying person? if so, do you ever pray for people you’ve never met?
i do… all the time.
if you’re in a praying mood here are some incredible people with incredible challenges- and even more beautiful spirits.

David Wenzel
Nienie
Nat

don’t we all need a little more of this?

via

hell house

I was walking to work this morning, coffee in hand, listening to my favourite podcast (yes, i have a favourite podcast, and it’s not grammar girl thank you very much…that’s my 2nd favourite.

Back to my walk..so there I am, walking on a crisp, beautiful fall morning. The TAL episode is called “devil on my shoulder”- I think that it could be interesting…and it was.

In  a VERY BAD way.

[warning: I'm going to rant about Christians again...like i did here, here, and here]

Ok, so the episode guide for ‘Devil on my Shoulder” is here. It was the first segment that was SO disturbing…It’s about a church in Texas that creates a “Hell House” every year…except this isn’t your typical haunted house. The “hell house” is meant to “save” souls and includes scenes such as a bloody abortion, a gay man dying from AIDS, the columbine shooting (the first Hell House debuted only two months after the real shooting), domestic violence and suicide. Yeah, it’s that bad.

I’m technologically inept today and can’t figure out how to link the trailer for the documentary… click here to watch the trailer for a documentary about this MESSED up “outreach”.

Here are some addition facts that I learned from the podcast:

1. Apparently loads of the youth group kids “audition” for roles in Hell House…the most popular are the abortions, the suicides and the shooters. No one wants to be the saintly characters…apparently they have to hunt for someone to play Jesus.

2. After the “show” there are Oscar type awards for the actors “best shooter” “best raver” “best abortion”

3. After a group tours Hell House they are taken into a room where they have SIX SECONDS to decide if they want to follow Jesus and go to heaven or if they want to burn in Hell. SIX SECONDS. And, of course, there are people to pray with those who want to give their hearts to Jesus. There are a lot of tears at this point.

4. This church created a kit so that other churches (and some secular groups!) could save souls too. How entrepreneurial of them.

What makes me so upset about this, is that these people claim to follow the God of Peace…the Jesus who loved the lowly, the poor, the sinners. Jesus who never hurt or shamed anyone. I cannot comprehend how any Christian can think this is ok….that these scare tactics do any good…that they are bringing God’s kingdom to earth. In fact what they are doing is adding hatred, fear and anxiety. They are isolating and shaming, hating and  mocking.

I am going to write them a letter to tell them that I think what they are doing is wrong and hateful.

If you’re interested here is the contact info

It’s atrocious.

beauty

amanda posted this recently and I thought it was heartbreakingly beautiful..and wise and true and oh-so-hard to remember when things are dark..

“As the rain hides the stars, as the autumn mist hides the hills, as the clouds veil the blue of the sky, so the dark happenings of my lot hide the shining of your face from me.  Yet, if I may hold your hand in the darkness, it is enough, since I know that, though I may stumble in my going, you do not fall.” —-Celtic prayer

A terrible, horrible, no good, VERY bad day

Yesterday, Sunday, started off as a lovely day– and had the potential to be one of those perfect Sundays, the rare mix of pleasure and rest.

However, it did NOT turn out as planned…here is a list of things that went wrong yesterday…

1. I dropped a contact down the drain

2. The first few minutes of our ultimate game were REALLY bad

3. Then Matt tried to catch a really high disc and landed funny on his ankle

4. After some swearing and getting helped off of the field, Matt’s ankle swelled A LOT …really fast. It looked bad.

5. Then we drove to the ER for x-rays.

[side note] Let me tell you HOW very bad the ER was….we’re not stupid, we knew that going to an emergency room during the stupid H1N1 outbreak was not going to be a walk in the park…but I think we were both surprised at HOW VERY BAD IT WAS.

There were people everywhere wearing surgical masks. We had to a take a number JUST to see a triage nurse…that took maybe 45 minutes. There were some tears (of other people) in the triage room…a very sick looking pregnant lady and a very ill-looking older man were probably the worst. The when we finally saw the triage nurse, she told us that if we didn’t have H1N1 yet, we likely would as almost ALL of the people in the waiting room had it.

awesome.

THEN we waited for 6 hours in a larger waiting room for the doctor to READ the x-ray. SIX HOURS. There were people crying and there were other people who looked like death…actually. It was AWFUL. Luckily for Matt, they had a football game on the tv…so that was “good”.

I went grocery shopping around 6 (Matt was still waiting to see a doctor).

Back to the list of bad things…

6. After racing through the grocery store, there were police cars blocking off all access to our street…more than 6 cops cars and union gas trucks. Awesome.

I finally found a way to get to the co-op and the schelped all of the groceries up stairs.

7. The Matt said he was ready to come home so I drove back to get him, but plans and changed and he wasn’t ready to get picked up right yet, so I decided to find street parking (we’d already paid $20) –Number 7 was my BAD parking job..it’s really hard to park a buick. I think I almost cried as I adjusted my wheels 6000 times.

8. The hospital had no air casts for Matt (soft tissue damage, no break) – so we drove to two shoppers drug marts, which of course didn’t have what we needed.

9. The we got home and had THREE large loads of laundry to fold- ANDDDD a bunch of my clothes turned pink after we washed a tie-died sheet in with our “colours” – Matt lost ONE SOCK to the pink monster…I lost a LOT more than that. Again, awesome.

10. I lost a contact. Again. Except this time it might be in my eye still. Sigh. I have no idea. I went to take it out and it simply wasn’t there. I am hoping it fell out a some point.

Needless to say, those 10 things made for a pretty brutal Sunday. We missed church and our game and spending time with our friends. Matt isn’t allowed to run or play any sports for 6 weeks and he has to see a physiotherapist.

But..it could be worse. We could have been mother, who was all by herself, with her very sick little girl and very bored (but well-behaved son) who sat in the waiting room longer than us. Or we could have been the very sick woman who kept crying and later was getting pumped with morphine. Or we could have been the younger woman who was there all alone was barely holding it together.

or…we could come down with H1N1 in the next week after sitting in a room with 40+ sick people.

Here’s hoping we have strong immune systems…because I’m not sure I can handle adding number 11 to the list.

*

The future is not a place to which we are going, it is a place we are creating. The paths to the future are not found, but made, and the activity of them changes both the maker and the destination

~Martha Cleary

on beauty

Sometimes the idea of beauty (personal beauty, particularly women’s beauty, bothers me. I, like all people (not just women!) want to be considered “attractive, desirable, beautiful, pretty”. I know that a lot of people feel awful about the way they look. The media and dominant culture tells us that “thin is in” and that a woman’s worth is no more than the sum of her objectified parts. Every part of a woman has been targeted by marketers as being “fixable” – lips, breasts, stretch marks, skin, hair, eyes, nails…everything.

I was shocked when I recently saw an ad on t.v with Brooke Shields promoting a new eyelash growth drug recently approved by the FDA. Apparently this drug (made by the makers of Botox) can help people (read: the ad was clearly targeted at women) who have hypotrichosis, a condition in which no hair grows on the eyelid. Another possible market for this new drug is people who have undergone chemotherapy and have not had their eyelashes go back.

And while those two reason might be good and well, I couldn’t help but think, having short eyelashes myself, that this drug was just another giant reminder about the objectification and microscopic criticism that women face every day. As if cankles month wasn’t bad enough, now we’re being told that our eyelashes need even MORE attention than the  hundreds of dollars of eye makeup products that many women purchase to make their eyes look “sexier”.

Sigh. Imagine if rather than thinking about ways to use drugs to grow eyelashes that only rich women will be able to afford, the brilliant scientists channeled more energy in finding cures for cancer or HIV/AIDS.

In order to resist  the forces of culture a lot of well meaning people have begun a “beauty” movement. Operation Beautiful is a blog (and soon to be a book) that encourages people to post random post-it notes with positive comments on them in places that people might need a little encouragement to feel good about themselves (i.e. on diet shakes, change rooms, at the gym, on diet pills).

At first I thought this was a great idea. Yes, there is a WHOLE lot more to beauty than what traditional media presents to us. Beauty can look like a 6 billion different people. I wholeheartedly agree that it is a good idea to stretch the definition of beauty and challenge traditional norms.

However, the more I think about it, the more I feel like we’re cheapening the worth of people (and in particular, women- to whom this campaign is targeted).

Like I said above, I want to feel beautiful (and I bet you do too) but I wonder, perhaps we place too much emphasis on the quality of beauty (or by using random,vague, generic notes to tell women that they’re beautiful) we’re in fact reinforcing the idea that to be worthy, women need to be beautiful. I don’t want to be a hater- I think that OB has been a true encouragement for some women and girls- but I just want to explore potential negative aspects of campaigns like this.

I wonder what it would do for our self-esteem if we started praising women for their courage, for their sense of humour, their kind heart, their adventurous life, their intelligence and wit. We risk envisioning women as one-dimensional if we only focus on beauty.

If we are going to head down the “beauty road” be need to operationalize and expand the definition of beauty.  The creator  of Operation Beautiful happens to be a straight, caucasian, thin (and in my opinion “traditionally” attractive) young woman. If we want to change women’s perceptions of themselves and to ensure that each woman knows that she is immeasurably valuable and worthy, we need to start giving the definition of beauty some depth and nuance, rather than generically labeling all women as “beautiful” (without defining what that is). We need to say to each other

fat is beautiful

racialized women are beautiful

disAbled women are beautiful

the LGBTQ community is beautiful

mental health survivors are beautiful

and so on…

I saw a blog today that I deepened my understanding of beauty. I think you should check it out; it’s called the Belly Project.

To sum up, I’ve really suggested two main ideas. If we want to tell each other that we’re all beautiful, we need to expand our notion of beauty and make sure that we’re not just watering down the mainstream “thin ideal” or renaming it (saying it’s about health, fitness, life balance).

Perhaps more importantly, we need to recognize that women are so much more than their physical skin. Seeing women as only flesh makes it a lot easier to objectify the body, dehumanizing the spirit and soul of personhood. Objectification, we know, can lead to violence, as it makes women just parts…not people. It’s a lot easier to dehumanize or hurt legs, breasts and vaginas than it is a woman or a human.

I think a lot of people say that they “care about the poor” – but not very many people actually know any poor people. And so it goes with true beauty. Yes, I might come across a post-it note that says “you’re beautiful” – but unless the writer of the note really knows me, sees me, and sees both the inner and the outer beauty, the message is cheapened.

Let’s commit to remind one another of our kindness, our creativity, passion, joy, perseverance, faith, intelligence, potential, goodness, wit, peacefulness, diligence and steadfastness…true beauty is borne of these things.

lost

no, not the t.v show (although i am a big fan!)

but lost.

you know, in general.

Lately, it seems like everyone I talk to is experiencing some sort of “lost-ness”

One friend described it to me like this ” it’s like a million doors are in front of me, but none of them are open”

Doesn’t that just say it so perfectly.

I’ve been thinking a lot about being lost and found lately too. I’ve written about patience and being in suspense recently. I’ve been thinking about the world outside and the world inside me.

Today I had a small revelation that really, you never know. Each day when you wake up is a brand new opportunity for things to go incredibly-wonderful-amazing or painfully, agonizingly awful. You just never know.

Matt told me over dinner that he thinks the “lost” feeling is generational: the result of being raised to think that you’ll have numerous careers, thus never fulling committing to anything. I’m not so sure I agree. I imagine our  ”lost-ness” has more to do with a lost of identity– a removal from the very things that once made us us.

Growing our own food, touching the earth, soil-covered hands, reckless abandon, the feeling of not being tied to anything, silence, nature, simply being with…our creator, each other, ourselves.

I wonder how much of our current anxiety, our need to achieve, progress, get better, make more, have more, do more, be more is tied to our capitalist, patriarchal, consumerist society. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think working for corporation ‘x”making product “y” (which most likely involve some sort of environmental degradation and precarious labour in the majority world) is going to make us feel anything but a hamster on a wheel.

you know?

For me, finding my way is about returning to who I am–and remembering what I am; its reaffirming our worth as people..not for any particular reason, but simply because each human being had inalienable worth. We might forget this simple truth, and while we might feel lost…it’s impossible to lose our worth.

[photo]

Festivus for the rest of us- POLL…PARTICIPATE

I am typically not that crazy about Christmas…I generally hate listening to Christmas carols even 1 day before December 1st, but for some reason this year I am excited for all that Christmas brings with it…the baking, the family stuff (maybe not alllllllll of the family events), the rosy cheeks, hot chocolate, decorations and general merriment.

I struggle with the capitalist underpinnings of the holiday and have spent a lot of time stressed out thinking about how to make Christmas everything it’s supposed to be.

In my opinion it’s pretty easy to come up with a list of things that Christmas in NOT meant to be:

- a time to go to the mall

- a time to go into debt

- a time to buy more junk

- a time to experience stress, chaos and last minute gift buying

- a time to further separate the rich and the poor

In light of these things, I have tried really hard to make Christmas about love, grace, giving and receiving and about creativity.

I don’t NEED ANY MORE STUFF. Last year I told my mom that I under NO CIRCUMSTANCES wanted her to buy me any gifts.

Do you know what happened… (of course not, you weren’t there…so I will tell you).

She CRIED. Not because she was soo happy that her anti-consumerism-when-it-suits-me daughter finally got it but rather, because I was robbing her of the JOY of blessing me.

It’s complicated, eh?

So, this year there will be more wading through family traditions and continuing some great ones (matt and i always make each other gifts– matt’s gifts to me  turn out magical, my homemade gifts either a. FAIL or b. are completed by grandma).

One thing I know for sure, is that myself, my friends and my family aren’t the ones who are in need this Christmas…ironically, we will all (I’m sure) recieve a lot of material gifts despite the fact that we already have too much stuff.

Last lent a few of us participated in Water Challenge and it was hard and good and such a learning experience (don’t worry, this year I will be drinking coffee EVERY DAY during lent). What made water challenge SO MUCH better was that I didn’t do it alone. People joined me…and it was such a privilege to be able to participate in a challenge like that with people I love and respect.

So, for Christmas this year I thought a few people might be interested in joining together to give to those in need this Christmas. I made a quick poll but would LOVE LOVE to hear other suggestions. Let’s not make this Christmas about us- let’s be really generous. I love Rob Bell’s saying “when I honour the image of God in others, I protect the image of God in myself.” Let’s give because it’s right and just and in doing so, I think we’ll be given more than we give…if you know what I mean.

So– FILL OUT THE POLL.

Please.