A life less comfortable

The other night we were driving to Sam's indoor soccer game in Harrisburg.  While driving through the cold and dark landscape, our lights illuminated snowy patches roadside and spindly tree branches pricked the night sky as we listened to This American Life on the old tinny radio.  The story, " Batman " was an intriguing narrative about how the collective thoughts of a culture can profoundly affect what the blind believe they are capable of doing day to day.  This story is one in a series of stories called "Invisibilia" Latin for "all the invisible things" thus, delving into "the intangible forces that shape human behavior – things like ideas, beliefs, assumptions and emotions." - npr.org They interviewed a blind man, Daniel Kish, who can get around quite well by clicking his tongue and using those clicks as a way to navigate, bat-style, through the world.  He was raised without normal blind intervention and climbed trees and rode bikes in ...

One of the best things of being in the states this year is getting to go to our home church, York Alliance.  We started out at YAC in 2000 with Steve on staff in youth ministry and it since has become home.  Just the other week I had a religious experience in the pew during the sermon.  Our good friend and pastor, Brian Kannel, is preaching on a series called, "The God of Promise", a study of Genesis 12-35.  He was preaching specifically on Gen 31:1-32:21, I won't recap the whole sermon here but just highlight the part that hit me with a bona fide religious experience.  Jacob was fleeing Laban and God told him to return to the land of his fathers and God promised to be with him.  Jacob was fleeing one bad situation to find himself in the midst of another.  The schemer was being schemed and forced to return to the place of his birth, a place he fled years before after swindling his brother, Esau, out of his birth right. Brian points out a disturbing p...

Last night my daughter Megan watched the t.v. show "Lost"with two friends, one in Colorado and another in New York.  Olivia, the one in Co. had never watched Lost before so Meg and another friend watched on their own laptops with her and group texted together.  Oh the highs and lows of Lost!  Our family started watching Lost when we moved to France for language study.  Oh how we could relate to feeling lost in a new world filled challenges and a foreign landscape with "the others."  I think it was some kind of bizarre coping skill we developed where once a week we would download Lost and have Lost lunches in our little apartment in Albertville.  Lunch breaks are really long in France.  It was a bit jarring coming from the states where everything is fast paced, especially meal time.  We had 2 and 1/2 hour lunches everyday.  All of us would meet at our apartment from our three different schools and I would make us lunch.  It became an oa...

Yesterday I went to the Harrisburg PA farm show complex with a couple of dear friends. We walked into the massive building and the organic odors of animals greeted us with a firm handshake.  We were there for the Christmas craft show.  We walked up and down crowded aisles filled with arts and crafts, both ordinary and remarkable.  There were twinkling lights and scarves and toys and treats and it went on and on and on.  I wanted so many things.  There was a lady there painting with needle and thread on silk.  The threaded art was truly amazing.  There were these guys selling spa stones that could file your nails and remove the very hair on your legs!!  Crazy! There was a man from Alabama selling the most remarkable knives that cut through squash like it was butter.  I know Christmas is a time to celebrate the birth of our savior but I found myself longing for the material things all around.  I found myself wrapped up in a delicious m...

Last evening our Life group (small group) gathered in another church's parking lot to go through the Compassion International experience tent.  Normally our life group members take turns every Monday evening hosting a time of worship and discussion of the Word hinged on the previous sunday's sermon during which the kids head to another room for their own time in the Word with some kind of activity.  However we decided to check out the Compassion Experience since a couple of families in our group sponsor Compassion kids.  It is a tented immersive event where you walk through a trailer made up into a series of rooms that represent someone's life somewhere in the world.  You put on headphones and carry an ipod preprogrammed with a story of a child's life that was profoundly changed by Compassion sponsorship.  It is brilliantly put together and packs up easily in an eighteen wheeler trailer that moves the experience from place to place. After all in our grou...

For the first time I saw a very venomous snake while I was out and about a week or so ago.  It was a green mamba, vibrant green sunning itself and stretched across the dirt path like a bad omen.  I gasped aloud and froze.  Thankfully it sensed my presence and made a startlingly rapid retreat into the nearby brush.  It seems with our surrounding neighbors burning off brush during the dry season it is causing snakes to take refuge at RFIS and our property.  Makes sense but a bit unnerving.  A long snake skin had been found not far from my sighting.  A cobra was seen near the chicken coop where my daughter, among others, cares for the chickens being raised for the agriculture science class.  Then just days later one of our beloved guard dogs Puma disappeared. Denise had been looking all over our property and next door at the school, to no avail.  Hours later the girls studying in our living room heard a pitiful wailing of a dog nearby.  S...

The other day Steve, Megan and I were hanging out in the kitchen.  Megan told me I needed to stop mentioning my up coming midlife crisis.  She then told Steve he needed to get over his laundry obsession with our 12 teens and their unclaimed, unmarked laundry that he has recently begun hiding.  Steve and I laughed at seeing ourselves through Megan's eyes.  Steve said if someone had told him a year ago that he would be hiding laundry from our house O teens he would laugh them out of the room.  Often reality proves to be stranger than fiction. The thing is I can't seem to get my mind around the fact that very soon our baby girl will be graduating from high school.  I've hardly recovered from Joe graduating and starting college.  You see we haven't lived full-time with our kids since they were in 8th grade for Sam, 9th grade for Meg and 10th grade for Joe.  We moved away from the states when they were 9, 11 and 13.  We placed them in French pub...