the end

well we finally finished the deathstar.   it took about 2 months less than i thought and about 28 days longer than orion thought.  it was great to see the dedication he put into it.  now we just need to harness the power of his work on the deathstar to solve world hunger.   I’ll let the pictures tell the story.

the first week of the “peace” star

So Orion’s newest grandparent’s and Uncle Caleb and Jaimee went in together on making Orion’s wildest dreams come true.  After hauling the huge box up to our apartment we proceeded to open an absurd amount of little bags with legos in them.  We now have four large boxes full of different sized legos waiting to take their place in that iconic symbol of destruction, the death star.  I hope to update our progress regularly.  Here is how far we have gotten so far.

no job

Have you ever been told you had a job then been completely forgotten about by the person who hired you?

I thought I had a job, but now it has been confirmed that I definitely do not have a job.  Very frustrating.

But at least I am getting good experience writing and rewriting cover letters and resumes.  We’ll see how this turns into a blessing in disguise…cause it always does.

sabbath on the beach

We decided this week to take a trip to Florence, OR for Sabbath.  We slept in a little too late for church.  So we leisurely got out of bed and had a little church service of our own.  A little reading from Orion’s Children Bible and the morning reading from the Psalter.  The day was then ours.  I wanted to go the beach.

On our last trip we discovered a beautiful secluded beach called Hobbit Beach.  The trail to the beach explains the name.  Its about a half mile journey through large trees and low lying shrubs that somehow seem as old as the trees that dwarf them.  Their needles are small but they make the trail feel like a cave that travelers have had to continually dig out of the underbrush for hundreds of years.  The trail descends to the beach that you can only hear faintly through the thick vegetation.  You only know you are close when, still in the woods you are walking in soft sand.  Then you are there and the ocean roars in the eternal rock concert of waves beating the shore into submission.

The wind was blowing, so the sand was constantly shifting and beating against our legs and getting into our stuff.  After some skim boarding and running away from waves we decided to build a little wind shelter.  The night before I haphazardly made a pizza before sundown which didn’t quite cook all the way.  So we brought a large tupperware of not-quite-done pizza, some chips and some good Oregon brew.

The day was beautiful.  Here is a bit of a song I wrote a while ago expressing the eternal metaphor of the ocean and the Creator.

you are the ocean tide

I am the stone you cover

like a faithful lover

every night and every morn’in

you return to break me down again

only you know these grains of sand

starting small…very small

Our first kitchen garden….

I know some of you had hopes of me becoming a full fledged farmer, overalls and all.  Well I live in an apartment now so this is what I can muster.  A few carrots, some radishes, spinach, kale, some sort of broccoli that I am not really sure is broccoli, and garlic.   Its pretty late in the year to be starting a garden so we’ll see what actually comes out of the ground and produces fruit.  But it was fun to play in the dirt for a while.  Orion and the neighbor kids helped me.  Ilyana the Chilean girl next door was a big help and she let me try and speak Spanish to her.

job

I got one.  I didn’t really think I would be able to get a job this soon but everything has worked out quite perfectly.  A good friend back in B’ham set me up with her extended family in Eugene who own’s the Smith Family Bookstore.  With a letter of introduction that apparently mentioned something about hiring me without asking any questions I got a phone call a couple weeks later.  I have always wanted to work in a bookstore…or just to spend my day looking at books, helping people find books, learning about new books.  But I am a little scared I am going to turn out to be like Jack Black in High Fidelity.  Cursing and mocking those whose literary tastes don’t deserve the air it takes to tell them how angry i am that trees were cut down so we could print the keyboard vomit that is too many books today.  I hope I am not like him because I am so thankful to have this job.

My new boss is a wonderful and flexible woman who has allowed me to basically pick any schedule i desire to fit my schedule with Orion.  I couldn’t have asked for more.  If I want to work full time I am merely to say so and it will likely happen.  All this is beyond my expectations and yet very necessary since our bank account is quickly deteriorating.  Praise be to God.

As I have said before my life has been a seemingly endless set of tasks and goals that are simply placed before me by our Creator.  I don’t spend a lot of time thinking consciously about them.  They simply just work out…and once I am in the middle of it I have moments where I am overwhelmed with thanksgiving for having a new adventure of which I am in the middle of that seems fun, challenging and life changing.

Sabbath

I know I am skipping a lot about our move to Eugene etc. but this is what I wanted to write a quick note about.

This last weekend, the last weekend before Andrea started law school(we are now into our second day), we decided that a day of rest was going to be essential in the coming months.  In the same way that I pray more when I need something I don’t like that we invoke discipline only at our time of need. But we are in need so what else should we do? So, saturday night after sunset Andrea prepared our store bought challah and some potato leak soup.  Our only true knowledge of Sabbath comes from Andrea’s brief experience with a Jewish community and my knowledge almost completely acquired from Fiddler on the Roof, which I only saw recently for the first time(excellent!).  After about 30 seconds of trying to figure out how to incorporate scripture into our evening we decided to read the Daily Office for that day.  It turns out I had the wrong year and wrong collect….but the readings seemed to speak to us nonetheless.  We opened our meal with Psalm 146 and finished the readings following the meal.  Orion closed us out with Psalm 147.   We did have a brief mishap when I had mixed up my chapters and verses and told Andrea to read the wrong passage from Revelation…a mistake that I won’t make again.  Orion, should he have been listening closer, was nearly plagued with some awfully strange and horrifying nightmares.  We prayed and Sabbath was on.

The following day we went to St. Mary’s Episcopal Church a short bike ride from our house.  We arrived too early so grabbed a needed cup of coffee across the street.  Entering the church made me miss the grandiose(by NW US standards) and historical nave of St. Paul’s in Bellingham.   Architecture seemed to lose touch with the divine for a decade or so in the 70’s and 80’s.   Nonetheless we were glad to see they had a very nice sunday school teacher.  The liturgy was a nice familiarity. (A quick aside: Last week we went to a Serbian Orthodox Church next to our friend’s coffee shop. It was a beautiful service with amazing singing and beautiful icons, smells, and people.  Yet somehow we felt like it wasn’t a community we could find a place in. Perhaps we’ll go back soon.  If only to strike up a 1 sided intellectual conversation with the U of O Russian Lit professor, Yulia, who goes there. We also went to better understand the tradition our good friend Dale has told us so much about.)  St. Mary’s has been going through transition and so the new Father is very young.  The sermon was delivered by what looked like a nervous yet intelligent parishioner.  What might have made us fall in love with this particular community was their incorporation of the children into the service and sacraments.  I have never seen Orion so attentive.

Following the service we met the pastor who we quickly found out was engaged to marry a 2L(second year law student) with a 7 year old daughter.  This was a strange and uncanny commonality.  I took it as a sign or just a small offering of comfort from God.  Needless to say, we enjoyed being at this church.

We came home knowing we were in the thick of rest…a beautiful feeling.  Orion and I played a very even sided and long game of chess(I won) and Andrea read a book not having anything to do with law school on the couch.  My childhood best friend’s parents live close to here and had invited us to a bbq that afternoon at their house about a 40 minute drive from here.  We debated whether driving was ok or not.  We decided it was as long as we were very intentional about it.  It was well worth it.

We finished the day with Psalm 146 again because we loved it so much the first time.  Our first family Sabbath was a wonderful experience.  But two days into law school it  is apparent that Sabbath is only going to be more imp0rtant and easier to forget about.

Boston?

I think I’ve probably seen goodwill hunting too many times.   Cause whenever I imagine myself in Boston, i am a janitor at one of the 1000 universities…accept without the being a supergenious part.

God has it that my future may involve a big move soon, along with some other big changes.  This is no anouncement of anything, other than its what is on my mind…moving to Boston that is.

I mean really what would I do there?  I have worked for a grassroots int’l NGO for 3 years now.  Boston has lots of NGO’s but they are all the suit and tye type, with million dollar budgets, and lobbyists.   I don’t want to wear a tye or report to my boss, who reports to a boss, who reports to a boss.   But I am certainly not feeling that my life in int’l development is over. But competing with the Harvard, MIT,  Cambridge, BU graduates doesn’t sound too appealing.   I am not one to sell myself.

I know, should I end up in Boston, I will be trying to be a goodrole model for an oddly independent 8 year old and  a good partner to an ambitious law student.   That alone sounds like a full time job to me.   Maybe I could write music and a book while I wait for them to get home.   That sounds nice too, but I don’t think I’ll make more than like a dollar doing that.

I’ve been trying to think of independent business ideas, to make some cash without being tied to any thing.

Boston is not for sure by any means.  But I am taking advice should anyone have any.

i voted for Obama cause he is black

I just want to address this out loud.

I have had a couple conversations with people about the recent election that went something like this.

me: “well how do you think the election went.”

other: “i am not too excited about it.  I think that people just voted based on race.”

me: (in my head or out loud) “of course they did…so did I”

Why are we so arrogant to think that race is no longer an issue in this country.  Perhaps its time the “minority” had someone in office who could actually understand the racism that still exists and how discrimination is still a fundamental part of the “American” system.  My “issue” if i had to have one is AIDS.  We may not think it but it is a race issue. HIV in America is on the rise among young black men.  And AIDS is a socio economic issue.  And AIDS is a race issue. And AIDS is a inequality issue. And AIDS is a political issue.   So yes I might just have voted on race alone.  Perhaps more people should have.  And I have HOPE in all the ways that Obama made cliche, because they are true.  I still don’t place my hope in the government. But I do place it in a culture that maybe one day will wake up and say, “what the fuck are we doing? Love looks completely different than this.”  And this I believe was one of those baby steps towards being awake to a world the Creator made to be good.

The Church in Joyous Obedience: Biblical Expositions

So I am playing catch up a little on here.

Last night I went to see Walter Breugemann one of the most prominent and widely read old testament theologians of today.  He is unique in his scholarship in many ways but perhaps most strikingly in his bold calls to action and justice.   Last night he spoke on the structure and poetic progression in Isaiah(emphasis on poetic).   I won’t outline it all here but his conclusion involved calling out the US gov’t on its continued arrogance and repeated acts of hubris(not his words).  In particular our economic policy and the damage it is causing and its impending collapse.  This was not a doomsday claim but a prophetic(in my opinion) call to the reality of our situation.  In response, and using Isaiah as a model we must grieve the loss of our stability and begin to rebuild in a new way that is just. (i.e. taking care of the poor, feeding the hungry, seeking peace between nations, and all of that other stuff we seem to always forget is in the bible)