TCB December 20, 2007

I had an English teacher in the 8^th grade that used to give us TCB days….”Taking Care of Business.”  We’d just have the day to get caught up on anything in her class that we needed to get caught up on.  I really loved those days because I’m a big fan of scheduling a block of time to have nothing else to worry about other than catching up on life.  One of my favorite lines from Scrubs happens when Elliot has been cut off financially by her dad and she’s a good mess….she asks Dr. Cox what she should do and he tells her, “Get your life in order.”  (And if you’re a fan of the show you know I censored that, for those of my readers that don’t care for the use of the “D” word).  

 Nonetheless, that’s what this post will be all about.  Taking Care of Business.  First I would like to take a moment and give a brief life update for those that I don’t see on a very regular basis.  Here goes: 

1)      I am officially done with my undergraduate career.  I went and bought a “Purdue Alumni” shirt yesterday and wore it to church as my way of announcing the fact that I pulled my finals out of my rear and passed everything.  I was going to post a picture on here of me wearing it, but since I update this thing at work, I think I might look a little suspicious if I plugged my camera into the computer here.  It was going to be me in the alumni shirt, with my typical goofy face and thumbs up sign.  So, if you happen to be a photoshop fan, just get on facebook, choose any photo of me (bc they basically all look the same) and pen, “Purdue Alumni” on the front of my shirt.  That should do it.

2)      I am still currently “unemployed.”  I use quotation marks there because I am still working my temp job at Fairfield and to my knowledge I will be here until I either find a job elsewhere, or they hire me (hopefully to do something besides compile paperwork for customers).  I feel a certain sense of job security (if there ever really is such a thing) but yet I’m a little frantic about getting a “career” job.  But, Fairfield does seem to be pretty fond of me, and supposedly “they” are trying to find me a position. 

3)      Maybe this topic is totally inappropriate for a blog, but in general, I tend toward being an inappropriate person, so here goes.  Have you ever heard a guy talk about the bathroom rule?  I think it’s something a little like, if there is a guy standing at a urinal you skip a urinal and use the next one.  And maybe the same thing for the stall?  And I’ve also heard it discussed that some guys are “pee shy” and can’t go if someone is too close to them.  Well, I’m pretty sure I’m pee shy too.  Because I can’t go if there’s someone else in the bathroom with me here at work.  Just in the bathroom…not even in the stall next to me.  They may be at the sink washing their hands, but if I know someone can here me, it just makes me so uncomfortable I just about stop mid-stream.  Wow, that is definitely from the too-much-information desk.

 And here’s the other thing that’s been on my mind.  I’ve been so busy for so long, and I thought college being over would cure it, but it hasn’t.  And maybe it’s just the holiday season that’s causing this massive amount of busyness right now, and if so, that’s great.  But I just want some time to recharge and I feel like that day is nowhere in the horizon.  Jesus was so good about “slipping away” for awhile and recharging…and I’m sure He had a lot more on his plate than I ever will.  But how did He do that?  How do you get out of responsibilities without letting people down?  And I’ve been accused of taking too much on before, but there are certain things that have me feeling like if I don’t do them, they just won’t get done.  Like the 2 and 3 year old class that I’m going to be teaching now…I know I don’t HAVE to teach it; they would have just rotated and had a different teacher every week.  But that can’t be good for the kids to not have any structure in their class at this age.  Plus, with Elmwood not providing material of any kind, how do we know that we aren’t all just teaching the same thing every week?  For all I know, they may be hearing the story of Noah every single Wednesday night.  What do you all do to “recharge?”  Do you have an escape where you know you can go and be alone for awhile?  With things like cell phones and the internet, I feel like we’re so bombarded with the need to be in constant contact with other people, that if you don’t answer your cell phone for a couple of hours people may start to wonder if you’re dead.  (PS…just a side rant here…I HATE cell phones.  Not in the sense that I don’t want mine, but in the sense that I can’t stand when people let the thing run their lives.  I’m just pleading with you…if we’re out at dinner, please turn the thing off for a little while.  Eating with others is a very important time for me and if it gets plagued with phone calls, I tend to get irritated very quickly.  A certain campus minister that I know used to be on his perpetually…and I used to fantasize about throwing it in the toilet.  I have anger issues, I know.)

Time; why you punish me? December 18, 2007

This may end up being the first of several posts on the subject of time.  Or it may be the only one I ever do.  I haven’t figured that out yet 1) because I don’t know how much time I will have left here on this earth (slightly morbid thought) and 2) because I’m just not sure how inspired I am to talk about such a sticky topic.  But as of recent I’ve been reading (nay, rereading) a book called Einstein’s Dreams.  It’s a great read, particularly if you find yourself as excited about metaphysical concepts as I do.  And if you don’t, and have no idea what metaphysics is….well, it’s probably still going to be an intriguing read for you, because time is interesting in and of itself.  That’s my book recommendation for today.  Anywho…

 

The reason I love this book is because I’m fascinated by the idea of other worlds.  And let me clarify…I’m not really talking about life on Mars or anything…I’m more talking about fatalism vs. non-fatalism.  Are things predetermined and there’s nothing we can do about them, or do we have some say in the way life plays out?  And the reason I have a hard time with this is because God is the Alpha and Omega…but how can He be the end if the end hasn’t happened yet.  Or has it?  And if the end has happened, what’s the point of good-or-bad decision making for us?  And how do these ideas come in to play when I’m working out my own theology?  (Maybe I’m “dumbing down” some tough questions and asking them in an elementary way…and if I am, I apologize for boring you and showing my lack of intellect.)

 

But back to fate and time…I remember the first time I realized that a situation could have more than one outcome (or so I assume).  I was about 4 and I was watching good old Bob Barker on The Price is Right.  You know the game…don’t deny your love for watching old ladies jump up and down and attack Bob with bright red lipstick on either cheek.  But remember the end…when there are two showcases (the second one is ALWAYS better than the first!!)?  Well, in my little four year old mind it suddenly hit me…what would happen if instead of passing up the first showcase, they bid on it?  Would the winner still have been the winner?  And how would life be different if instead of winning a “brand new car” they won the Broyhill bedroom set?  Needless to say, I was perplexed. 

 

Possibly during the commercial break of that same episode of Price, there was an advertisement that claimed you add seven minutes to your life every time you pet a cat.  Well, we all know this can’t be true (except for maybe in the case of Methuselah), because the “Cat Lady” down the street would live much longer than the average age of most women.  And there would be people that would never die.  It would just be ridiculous.  But how do we know that my grandmother who died of cancer when I was 5 wouldn’t have just died in a car accident at the same age if she hadn’t had cancer.  Is there a possibility of a “world” where Granny lived to see me graduate from high school?  Or was she destined to die when she did?  What about Christ?  What if God had let the cup pass from him?  Is there a possible “world” where we didn’t get saved by his death?

 

And notice I judged Granny’s death according to her age.  Which brings me full circle back to time.  What is time anyway?  A social construction we’ve invented to describe the chronology of events?  Or is it something true, with its own intrinsic values and characteristics?  And what is it that we love about time, that we’ve kept the idea around for so long?

 

Probably my favorite part of the book is a chapter which describes a world in which the future can be seen.  Those that have gotten their glimpse make their decisions based on what they have seen…after all, what is the point of wasting your time with school when you know you’re going to become a housewife or a garbage man?  These people take no risks because there is nothing to risk when you already know the outcome.  The other people in the town that have not yet gotten their glimpse of the future mostly lie around in bed until they do.  They take no risks because they wait patiently to find out what the end will be.  But then there is a third type of person in this town.  These are the people that have seen the future and do everything in their power to prevent it from happening.  A woman that sees the man she will marry makes herself fall in love with a different man instead.  But in the end of the chapter it is revealed that they still end up with the same future.  

 

Time is so intriguing to me; as the seconds of my life tick by I can’t help but wonder what a second is to God.  What my lifetime is to Him for that matter?  I’m sitting here at work thinking, “elch…I have an hour and a half yet to kill.”  And that hour and a half seems like forever to me right now.  But when I’m studying for an exam it’s at the hour and a half point that I start to get really nervous, because time is seemingly speeding up and I am wishing I had more time to learn.  

 

My brain kinda hurts from thinking about this.  Maybe more later.

For your entertainment…. December 14, 2007

And this is why I love working at Fairfield…

chips-note.pdf 

A few life lessons. December 13, 2007

So I’m going to once again deviate from the religious/faith/Jesus theme of this blog  to share with you a few life lessons that I just happened to learn all last night.  Here goes, in no particular order:

1.)    Pay attention at the grocery store.  Just because the first two cans of soup in the row say “Cream of Chicken” doesn’t mean the two behind it don’t say, “Cream of Celery.”  And when you get home and are making the tortilla soup at 10 PM that night, you’re not going to care enough to take it back to the store and get the two you need.  So hopefully, tonight’s lesson will not be that cream of celery soup makes tortilla soup taste disgusting.  Because if it does, dinner will not be fun for the 6 people you are preparing it for.

2.)    If you pick out a grocery cart, and it has a squeaky wheel, it’s worth your sanity to take it back and get another one.  The reason “the squeaky wheel gets the oil” is because the squeaky wheel is annoying.

3.)    If you don’t have time to wash out the dishes from baking banana bread and pumpkin bread for Thanksgiving before the end of finals, you probably just don’t need to make the food to begin with.  Neither of these two batters keeps well while sitting in bowls in the sink for more than two weeks.  

4.)    A sub lesson of #3…the instant gratification of not washing the dishes because you hate washing dishes is not, in any way, worth the delayed no-gratification-at-all-whatsoever you will have when inevitably the dishes do get washed. 

5.)    Bleach removes anything.  Period.  It is a wonderful thing.

6.)    Make it a habit to check and make sure you turned on the correct burner when cooking.  Otherwise, your ten o’clock hopes of bed go right out the window.

7.)    Jim Croche is way fun to listen to while cooking/cleaning dishes.

8.)    Plenty of Tupperware is a most convenient thing to have.  Buy some.  Soon.

 

In other news, once again the 2 and 3 year olds were going to be passed from teacher to teacher on Wednesday nights, and no curriculum was purchased for this class.  I have decided that I am going to be the teacher and this will give me a good opportunity to start coming up with a working plan for my someday-to-be-created children’s curriculum that I will try and get published by 21^st Century Christian.  My master plan is to wait until I have experienced raising small children of my own to get a more direct feel for what is important for each age to be learning and when, but I can at least get some experimentation in on what works and what doesn’t for the time being.  I haven’t taught 2 and 3 year olds for awhile…I think about 4 years or so.  But when I first started teaching classes at church when I was 14 that was the age group I had.  Baptism by fire for a 14 year old, most definitely.  All I remember from that fist class is Brayden Edwards flinging a plastic plate across the room at my head and yelling, “FRISBEE!!”  It should be fun. 

Tales from a Sunday School Classroom. December 10, 2007

So, an enormous can of worms got opened up Sunday in my 1^st and 2^nd grade class, thanks to Joshua, who is probably one of my brightest students.  

“Miss. Courtney?” he asked.  “How do we know that God exists?”

And since I’m pretty convicted that with very few exceptions you should be up front with children of this age, I responded, “That is a very good question Joshua and the most honest and true answer I feel that I can give you, is that we don’t; we do not physically see God, but we see Him through His creation and His inner-workings here on earth, and we have to find faith in our hearts that tells us the He does exist.”  (And I backed those statements up with direct examples that I think I 1^st or 2^nd grader would understand on a more personal level.)  Hopefully the parents are not going to hate me for that answer.  But I just don’t believe in apologetics either…trying to force the existence of God through scientific proof and data seems to take away from the faith factor.  I think it takes away from the meaning of encountering God on a daily basis through prayer and meditation on His Word, His creation, and His [written] word.  But conveying these sentiments to a group of 1^st and 2^nd graders is difficult, so I did my best. 

Audrey was the most intrigued by this conversation and I get the feeling it’s not the first time she’s thought about these things.  After I had tried to explain that God is the Alpha and Omega (at which point I think I lost the interest of most of the class), she continued to fire questions my way.  “But why would God create the earth?  (To which Joshua replied, “maybe He was lonely”) “But if He was lonely, and God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit were all together, why didn’t He just talk to them?  Or the angels?  What about Jesus…how was He God…and if He was, why did He have to go back to heaven after He came back to earth.  And don’t we have the Holy Spirit in us?  How does God live in all of us at the same time?  If you can’t see God, then what did Moses see, and why did he have to cover his eyes?  Where is heaven, and who created it, and who created God?  How could God have been there forever?”

And the thing is, I don’t know if you can answer these questions.  If we could, everyone would be a Christian.  And I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that these kids are thinking this way.  I know when I was Audrey’s age I was asking the same questions….except when I did it my Bible school teacher told me I had blasphemed by questioning the existence of God and I spent the better half of my late adolescence believing that I had committed the unforgivable.  (And yes, I have worked out the real definitions now…no worries.)  But that’s the thing…I didn’t want to just say, “God exists, that’s all you need to know,” because I don’t want them thinking back on me as the narrow-minded teacher, afraid to tell the truth, the teacher that didn’t want them to develop their own faith, I just wanted to them to inherit mine and their parents.  

I want them to find God in their own way, because I know He is out there.  I’ve discovered Him in the glory of the creation…I experience His love every time I get to choose whether or not I will serve Him with the decisions I make, and I encounter His mercy when I’m forgiven for making the wrong one.  I see His image in the people I encounter and watch happily as I see humanity playing out in the Kingdom all around me.  I don’t want these children to grow up and believe in God because it’s logical; I want them to believe in Him because they have encountered Him.

So I ask…did I do the right thing, or should I have just stuck with a simpler answer?  And if any of you know how to handle these questions when dealing with the minds of children, please, I would love to have your wisdom imparted on me.  

Kiddos. December 6, 2007

I have a lot of paperwork that’s going to be running on my computer today, which means if I run too many other programs it will take forever, and as result I’m going to have a lot of down time today, so I will post.  Evidently, I am not posting frequently enough because Craig has been pointing out to me when it’s time for an update.  

My new favorite quote of all time:

Me (to the 4 and 5 year olds I taught last night):  Knock knock?

Them: Who’s there?

Me: Banana.

Them: Banana who?

Me: Knock knock?

Them: Who’s there?

Me: Orange.

Them: Orange who?

Me: Orange you glad I didn’t say banana again?

But now time for the part I really like:

4-year-old Jack: Miss. Courtney!  Knock knock?

Me:  Who’s there?

Jack: Banana.

Me. Banana who?

Jack: Banana I’m gonna eat you!!

4-year-old Spencer chimes in: YOU’RE FIRED Miss Courtney!!!

 

And then they all proceeded to inform me that I was fired for the next five minutes until I chimed in with “Your Mom’s fired” to which they replied, “YOUR Mom’s fired.” And on and on with a vicious cycle that was only interrupted when I offered to read a story to them.  

When I was about ten I spent my first week at Spring Mill Bible Camp in good old Mitchell, IN.  I have so many fond memories of camp, probably the most fond being meeting the man I will someday assume the role of help meet for, but of course there’s those other things like midnight raids of the forbidden “boy’s side”, winning at knock out for the first time, and of course, all those spiritually renewing events that go along with a week spent at Bible camp.  

But it was also on that first week almost 13 years ago that I would be introduced to a concept via the camp t-shirt that year that would become a huge part of who I am as a Christian.  It was an ugly blue t-shirt with the silhouette of a young child and an adult that read, “Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”

I don’t know what it was about that scripture, but I remember, even at the age of ten, thinking, “Huh, that sounds like a good plan.”  

And so began my love for working with children, particularly in the church community.  

The Bible mentions children pretty frequently.  Christ lets the little one come to Him in the gospels, even though others are trying to keep them away.  James tells us that taking care of orphans (and widows) is true God-pleasing religion.  And we’re told to “be like” children. 

“Being like” children has several connotations in my mind.  One is to be excited and uninhibited about life and love.  Children haven’t yet faced some of the more harsh realities of living in the world, so they don’t walk around afraid to give and receive like many adults do.  

Reverting back to an SMBC story, once a week, we take the kids over to the state park across the street and let them play.  Some like to go to the pioneer village and play in the stream…but everyone knows the excitement of being 11 for the first time and being allowed to go to the cave!  A couple of years ago two little girls named Lauren and Jenna were sitting next to the steam waiting to go to the pioneer village. Lauren and Jenna were a part of a close knit group of friends that came from the same church and were always in my cabin.  We asked Lauren and Jenna why they weren’t going to the cave…it’s all they had talked about for the last three years.  “Well, Edie and Savannah are still ten, so we’re going to wait one more year so we can all go together for the first time.”  

These girls weren’t afraid of giving up something they really wanted for the betterment of the whole.  They loved the other girls and they were willing to wait so that they could all experience it together.  And let me point out the fact that one whole year of waiting is a long time for an eleven year old to wait.

One thing that really bothers me is when I hear other Christian’s say things like, “I hate children; they’re loud, they needy, etc.”  I understand if your passion is not in working with children…that’s ok.  I don’t like working with college age students, and probably never will.  But disliking the “neediness” of a child is like refusing to take care of a widow.  “Well, I know she’s 80 years old and has no husband, but can’t she just get a job like the rest of us?”  Children are no different.  They can’t help themselves; they need someone to provide for them, whether it is materially or spiritually.  They also need a lot of love…even the brats. 

How true this is for adults as well.  Why can’t we be more like children and admit that we need each other?  Why can’t we recognize when a brother or sister is being “bratty” that maybe they’re just starving for a little extra helping of love?  I walk around like I’m infallible all the time, when really, I have wounds like anyone else.  I need to be taken care of sometimes…and others, I need to be the one taking care of someone else.  

I feel as though I’ve been talking about this a lot here recently, and I’m sorry if you’re bored with me. But I just don’t think it can be said enough….we are the Body, and we need to be acting that way.  In a world where individualism is truth, where else but the Body of Christ can we turn to for healing and redemption?  I’ll get up from my philosopher’s armchair now.