this one’s for the birds.

I went running this morning, not a thing that happens very often, because I’m just

really not the “runner” type. You know, strong lung capacity, ipod armband…

Anyway, I like to run occasionally, but when I FEEL like it, not on a strict schedule, like people who actually run for their health.  What I’m trying to say is that if this were “Friends” I’d be a Phoebe runner. Ok, moving on though, this post was not really supposed to be about running…so I’m starting over.

I went running this morning on the Augusta Canal towpath, which is a marvelous running path, kind of like

an entry into another world, really.

Its guarded on one side by the Augusta canal and on the other by the majestic Savannah river. Its beautiful. As I was running I saw a bright white spot in a tree in the distance and this is what I thought:

“Usually if you see something that bright white somewhere outside you can almost guarantee its a trash bag, but I KNOW that that’s a bird.”

(I knew cause I’ve seen them there before, big white, majestic swamp birds.)

And it really was a bird. So I just thought I’d share that with you, cause it was really wonderful to know.

Things aren’t always trash bags.

Sometimes they’re birds.

Filed under: Life, Moral/Spiritual, Uncategorized , birds, friends, hope, running, trashbags

Choose Yes? Skip To Page 34.

Growing up is not at all like I thought it would be when I was a kid. The thing is, growing up is not about knowledge, or respect  or even independence(necessarily) but about choices. This phrase has been running

around my head like a merry-go-round horse lately “is this a wise choice? Is this a wise choice?”

My dad sent me a text message recently that went something like this “you’re more grown up then you think. You’re making your own decisions now…”

Decisions like staying home from a party to rest, when you’re sick. Or calling a ride, to avoid putting miles on a car with a check engine light on, or not studying for a big test til the night before (I’ll give you a hint, this one was NOT wise!) There are more complicated decisions too, about how to balance investing in people and investing in school (because which one of these is God’s priority? people, right? but school is my job right now…something to hash out another time), about the wisdom of saying something, or not, about what advice to give and what advice to take.

All in all, decisions are tricky things and no one’s going around teaching a class on how to make them. We ask God to guide us in our decisions, or sometimes, we ask Him to make them for us. But He doesn’t, at least not most of the time.

He gives us…more choices?

He gives us guidance in His word, our consciences, His example, other people, but

he doesn’t make our choices for us. That’s our job.

I had a friend who took a survey recently that asked him to rate how grown up he was on a scale of 1-10. I would pose this test to you:

want to know how grown up you are? look at your choices.

The more wise choices you are making, the more grown up you are.

To put it another way, remember when you would

ALWAYS choose dessert over dinner?

You were a kid then (most of you, at least), now you might only choose dessert over dinner once a month, or on special occasions.

We’ve had it drilled into us since we were little, “make wise choices.” But when we were little most of the choices weren’t really ours anyway. We had a fall back, a safety net of parents or authorities, that saved us from making awful decisions, and that was as it should be.

But now, those decisions are our own. Yours, mine, his, hers….they are ultimately OUR decisions.

So the question we have to ask is “are we making wise choices?”

Filed under: Uncategorized

A Passage to India

Summary:

This is a book dealing mainly with the stresses between Indian and British cultures while the British were in control of India. The actual plot involves the main character, a young Indian doctor, being falsely accused of raping a young British woman. It follows the story from the beginning-the “rape” the trial and the aftermath.

My Thoughts:

The plot in this book seems like a subtext to the ideas and tensions the author is trying to portray. I enjoyed parts of it, but got so bogged down in most of it that it lost much of my interest. One of my favorite parts of the story, however, and a part that did hold my interest until the end was the one British professor who sympathized and sided with the Indians. This character was easy to like and associate with and his friendships with the Indians and the tensions between him and the rest of the culture (both Indian and British) were intriguing and non-stereotypical.

Rating:

♦♦◊◊

Blurb:

“The sun was returning to his kingdom with power but without beauty–that was the sinister feature.  If only there had been beauty! His cruelty would have been tolerable then.  Through excess of light, he failed to triumph, he also; in his yellowy-white overflow not only matter, but brightness itself lay drowned.  He was not the unattainable friend, either of men or birds or other suns, he was not the eternal promise, the never-with-drawn suggestion that haunts our consciousness; he was merely a creature, like the rest, and so debarred from glory.”

Filed under: Book Reviews, Uncategorized , A Passage to India, Book Reviews, E.M. Forster, India

The Reason for the Season?

So here’s a story from a book I just read

“A man fell into a dark, dirty slimy pit…and he tried to climb out of the pit but he couldn’t. Confucious came along.  He saw the man in the pit and he said, ‘poor fellow, if he’d listened to me he never would have got there,’ and [he] went on. Buddha came along. And he saw the man in the pit and he said, “Poor fellow, if he’ll come up here, I’ll help him.’ And he too went on. Then Jesus Christ came.  And he said, “Poor fellow!” and he jumped down in the pit and helped him out.”

Now, maybe you’ve heard this story or something similar before.

Maybe you, like me, have been raised in the “church culture” and the whole idea of this doesn’t phase you at first glance.

But take a minute and remember that this is what we’re celebrating on Christmas.

I saw a TV show recently that portrayed Christians at Christmas as being all forced smiles and happiness and just plain outright cheesiness.

But this is a desperate holiday, too.

(Although it has its cheesy, funny, cliche parts.) Desperate is a strange word to associate with Christmas, I know (unless you’re talking about the hordes of serious shoppers out there!), but let me explain. I feel like what we are really honoring and proclaiming with this holiday is that

when we were sunk in that pit,

as far down and DESPERATE as we could be…

when all we could do was cry out “Help!’ or sometimes just groan..

Christ came down.

And that is indeed a desperate and beautiful thing.

Filed under: Life, Moral/Spiritual , christmas, desperate, Jesus Christ, the reason for the season

Selling Things

On the weekends I work at a-clothing-retail-store-which-shall-remain-unnamed. Part of my job there requires me to convince customers to open a credit card with the store, giving them all kinds of perks and insuring that they become a frequenter of the line.

Well it just so happens that I am awful at this part of my job and I hate it.

I dread it, actually to the point that I dream about it sometimes. I haven’t “opened a card” for almost two months now, which is abysmal, and I’m beginning to fear for my job. This is how my conversations go:

Hayley: “Do you happen to have a (name of retailer) card?”

Customer (with trepidation): “nooo”

Hayley: “Well you know you get this that and the other if you open one.”

Customer: “Ok, thanks for letting me know.”

Or “I’m not interested right now.” or “No thanks” OR “my accountant told me recently if you even open a card like that and then close it that it affects your credit score!!” (don’t know if that last one is true or not, but there it is.)

Anyway, in conclusion I don’t get the card and I end up feeling like a pushy person.

Now when I think of myself as a person I would like to be like mountain tops and a wide sky.

In prose that means I would like to be a person that gives people space to breathe and move and be what they want.

Mountain tops don’t sell credit cards.

Sometimes I get the same feeling that I get when I think about selling a card, when I hear people talk about sharing their Christianity. I feel like its something I’m supposed to be doing, it’s part of my job, but I’m awful at it.

I confess that I have never once talked someone through the gospel from start to finish. Not once. And I’ve been a Christian for at least 16 years.

And that is a very painful thing for me to confess because I feel guilty about it and I’m afraid you might think less of me. Part of the problem is that I feel that here in the south if someone really wants to know the gospel its not difficult for them to find out about it. In fact, I feel like everyone I know has heard it multiple times. Perhaps they don’t understand it, but they’ve heard it. So why tell them again? they’re clearly not interested. (That is if you can find someone who is willing to acknowledge that they are NOT a christian, a rare feat in the overchurched, bible-belt south.) I don’t know what this means. I hope you don’t think it means I have a poor faith because I don’t want to share it. Its not that. I love God and He has never failed me. My relationship with Him is the most important thing in my life but here’s the thing:

I don’t want to share my faith with people who don’t want it.

Filed under: Life, Moral/Spiritual , christianity, clothing retailers, credit cards, evangelism, sales, selling

Thanksgiving

I was thinking the other day that Thanksgiving is a holiday that GAINs significance as you get older. As opposed to Halloween or your birthday which both lose significance.

Thanksgiving is about food and family.  I get the warm fuzzies just thinking about all those american families gathered over turkey and cranberry sauce and just enjoying each other. Family is one thing you can never appreciate enough.

Filed under: Life, Uncategorized , family, holidays, thanksgiving, turkey

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Filed under: Life, Nursing school, Uncategorized , clinicals, Nursing, Nursing school, nursing student, surgery, total hip replacement

A little Sneak Peak

So here’s a sneak peak of (hopefully) my next book review. I loved this excerpt.

“Of the company , only Hamidullah had any comprehension of poetry.  The minds of the others were inferior and rough.  Yet they listened with pleasure, because literature had not been divorced from their civilization.  The police inspector, for instance, did not feel that Aziz had degraded himself by reciting, nor break into the cheery guffaw with which an Englishman averts the infection of beauty.  He just sat with his mind empty, and when his thoughts, which were mainly ignoble, flowed back into it they had a pleasant freshness.

(OK THIS IS THE REALLY GOOD PART, SO LISTEN UP)

The poem had done no “good” to anyone, but it was a passing reminder, a breath from the divine lips of beauty, a nitingale betwen two worlds of dust.”

-A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

This is just a sneak peak because I had to return it to the library–I’m leaving RIGHT now-or pay a fine…so hopefully I’ll check it out again soon and finish it, but for now that’s all I’ve got!

Filed under: Book Reviews, Poems, Uncategorized , A Passage to India, book list, Book Reviews, books, E.M. Forster, India, Poems

Happy

I realized the other day that happiness has become my idol. The deepest desire of my heart was to be happy rather than to praise my Lord and Savior. Still I haven’t been very happy lately. So what’s going on here? I don’t know but praise God that I can cry to Him for help without knowing what’s going on.

Filed under: Life, Moral/Spiritual, Uncategorized , desires, God, happiness, idols, praise, spiritual

A Few Quick Book Reviews

I haven’t read any books from my book list recently but here are some quick reviews of other books I have read recently:

The African Queen: A missionary’s sister and a steamboat mechanic make a treacherous voyage down a river in Africa. A good book, but a better movie (Katherine Hepburn and Humphery Bogart). The characters in the book come off a little different then those in the movie but otherwise the two are very similar.

Nickel Mountain: Follows the twists and turns of life for an overweight diner owner in the catskill mountains. Wonderfully written with unusual and lovable characters but confusing emotionally and spiritually. I definitely recommend reading it. I will probably have to read it again to understand it fully.

Julie: This is probably my favorite of the above three. Written by Catherine Marshall author of Christy. This is the story of a girl growing into womanhood in a small town in Pennsylvania. This story has it all, romance, adventure, suspense.

Filed under: Uncategorized