Categotry Archives: food for thought

So this morning, Donald Miller’s blog featured a “Sunday Morning Sermon”–a short video in which author Anne Lamott talks about how she got sober. Her story isn’t so incredibly dramatic, but I find the words she uses to express herself to be captivating. Take a look below, and then I’ve got a question for you to think about with me:

So toward the end of the video clip, Anne Lamott mentions that she is a very “bad” Christian. For some reason, this statement stuck with me, and I began to mull it over in my mind. I began to wonder: what actually constitutes a “bad” Christian? What makes one person a good Christian, and one person a bad one? And why does Lamott think of herself as a bad Christian? What is the criteria?

I’m an artist. But I’m not an artist in the visual sense. I’ve never been able to draw well, and I was never big on art class in school because the stuff I made was all horrible compared to the people sitting next to me.

Like almost all kids, crayons and coloring books were a staple of my entertainment–the thing I did when I was supposed to be “quiet.” I’m not gonna say I didn’t enjoy coloring a little bit–I was especially proud of my gillion-color special super-duper Crayola set with names of colors I was too young to pronounce–but there was a problem.

Read part 1 here, and part 2 here…

As you know, I’ve been processing the role of time in our spiritual walk over the past couple of weeks. I’ve talked about how it can be a point of frustration for us when we are trying to understand the timing of God in our walk of faith. In the last post, I shared a bit of my own story, and how my own faulty theology about the timing of God and waiting on the Lord may have cost me some key opportunities. To conclude this series of posts, I’d like to talk a little about the ways in which time actually serves as our friend.

I’m pondering this morning something I’ve come to know about God–something that actually gives me comfort, even when it sometimes frustrates me.

God does not always respond the way we want Him to, or the way we would respond were we in His shoes. He always responds as the situation demands.

I know I must have written about this before, because this isn’t the first time I’ve caught myself doing this–but I’m noticing that it’s one of those times where I’ve been so bogged down in my day-to-day activities that I have to purposely come up for air. To stop and take an inventory of what is around me.

I mentioned  a couple of posts ago that as my stack of questions gets bigger and my stack of answers gets smaller, my blog gets less focused on opinion and more focused on reflection and observation. That’s not to say I won’t ever utter an opinion again (you should be so lucky)–just that I hold my own opinions more loosely than I used to, so things come out more as observation.

Over the past couple of months, the Denver Art Museum hosted a rare exhibit of the work of Vincent Van Gogh–a visual chronological journey of his development as an artist. Since The Wild One is pursuing her dream of becoming a serious artist, we simply couldn’t let the opportunity pass us by.

As we walked through the exhibit of rare drawings and paintings, we both found ways in which we related to Van Gogh–not the mental illness/cutting-off-one’s-ear part, but more along the lines of his deep passion, his being largely self-taught, his propensity for pushing the boundaries, and his need to create. (I related in a couple of other ways, too, which I’ll mention presently.)

The other day, I was watching NBC’s The Voice, and a scene unfolded that really spoke to me at the heart level.

Nicholas David, a bearded, long-haired, mountain-man-looking guy with an incredibly soulful voice, performed an excellent rendition of “Lean On Me”, accompanied by a gospel choir. After the performance, his coach Cee Lo Green began sharing his feedback, and he stopped and began to tear up. “My parents were both ministers, so the gospel is very close to me,” he told David. “I felt like I a child in the presence of my Maker, in the presence of the same Maker that made you.”