A Couple years ago I interviewed about twenty-five friends and asked them each five questions. 1. What did you think of God/Christians before you became a Christian? 2. When did you realize there was a dark or hard side to life? 3. When did you realize there was a dark or hard side to yourself? 4. What did it look like when God broke into your world? 5. What does your life look like now? I wasn’t sure exactly what we’d get when I did the interviews. I had a film crew in from South Africa, but only a week before they arrived, all our film options vanished. When they got to Portland, I had nothing for them to shoot. We sat around in my breakfast nook trying to figure out what we were going to do. And we came up with the interview idea. After that, we put together a little book that takes a similar journey, just processing the idea of Jesus from an outsiders perspective. The book is called “The Open Table” and so is the DVD. They are available separately, but I hope they end up being used to hand to folks who have questions about [...]
Jeremy Cowart and I will be attending the Presidential Inauguration together in Washington D.C. on January 20th. We’ll be amongst possibly 4-million people descending on the capital to see Barack Obama sworn in as the 44th President of the United States of America. Jeremy is a world-famous photographer, and so I’m bringing my camera and intend to challenge him to a one-on-one contest. And you get to vote. We will both come back with our five favorite photos and ask you to select which ones you like best. This is quite possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. I hung out with Jeremy for a weekend a couple years ago, shooting along the California coast. His pictures looked like four seasons in Tuscany and mine looked like twelve minutes in Kansas. Nothing against Kansas. There is plenty to do in Kansas. In addition, both of us will be twittering from inauguration. I’ll be speaking at Georgetown, then attending a ceremony at the Kennedy Center, then Inauguration, then the Mid-Atlantic Ball and finally the Presidential Prayer Breakfast, Obama’s first event as President of the United States. Jeremy and I will both be twittering the moments that interest us as we graze like [...]
One of my favorite stories was told to me by my friend Bob Goff. It’s a true story and it’s about a parade. Bob lives in San Diego, and when his three children were young they were sitting around on New Years Day, bored. And Bob thought it was a crime anybody should be bored on New Years Day. (Let’s face it, unless you are a football fan, there’s not a whole lot to do.) Bob asked the kids what they could do to honor the fact God gave them a day. And eventually Bob and his wife Maria, and their children, came up with the idea of a parade. So they set out to have a parade on their street. They went house to house telling their neighbors they were going to have a parade. And the neighbors must have indulged the children by saying they would watch. But the Goff’s had a better idea than just a parade people would watch. They decided nobody could watch the parade. They could only be in the parade. And so a few neighbors joined in. The small parade marched from the end of the street to the Goff house, where they [...]
A few pieces of art that have meant something to me this season are Brian Kershisnik’s “Nativity”, some lines from Hamlet I spent a bit of time considering, and Sara Groves Christmas album. If you click on Kershisnik’s painting, you’ll get a better look at the movement of the piece. The crowd of angels or saints are huddled in mass around Christ, those in front of Him pressing toward the child, but not to stop, but to move through and beyond toward something else. It’s an evocative statement. I think this is Kershisnik’s nod toward God in three persons, the crowd moving on to worship God, as though Christ came to point us toward the Father. In the painting, many of those who have moved past Christ are singing. And I like the expression on the face of Joseph, his hand over the eye closest to the crowd, yet uncovered toward his son. He seems human, and in dilemma for having been given a child, who was God, but who was also his child. I wonder in what way Joseph loved Jesus. The Child was not His own, biologically. And Joseph knew the child was from God. I think the [...]
It’s been snowing here in Portland. Supposedly the biggest snow storm in 40 years. Because of that, most of us have been holed up in our homes. We can take walks here and there, but driving doesn’t work so well. I couldn’t even get my truck away from the curb. So I’ve been holed up in the house, cleaning and looking after my new puppy, Lucy. The exciting news is that Lucy is about half housetrained. Right now she is convinced that if she poops outside, and goes to the side door, she will get a treat. But if she is in the back bedroom, the carpet feels too much like lawn and she goes there. She’s only ten days into training, so I am sure she will figure it out soon enough. The penned up energy of being in the house is being channeled toward finishing the new book. It’s due mid January. I’m enjoying the process, but in the pressure to get the book completed, I’ve been thinking about what it means to be human, to need to work, to want to accomplish and succeed, and what plays in those motives. I was sharing with a couple friends [...]
