Of Secretaries and 7-Eleven

The secretaries at Grace are pretty awesome. I walk into the office today to make copies of the first movement of Beethoven's Sonata in C minor... which has absolutely no relevance to anything.

"Hey you almost college girl."
"Hi Heidi."
"Hey, I see you have a new printer."
"Yeah, sure do, when do you leave for college?"
"Oh, August sometime."
"How long are you staying?"
"Eh, three years-ish. I've got 40 credits out of the way already."
"Wow. Why didn't they have that kind of deal when I was young??"
"Have you ever heard that song (hums the tune to old quartet song)"
"I would have complained about the college credits to someone for you, but I wasn't alive. And yeah, my grandparents used to have a CD of that..."
"Grandparents?!? ...I'm not THAT old yet."
"Oh...sorry. Why is the printer beeping at me?"
"It wants you to take the paper out of it."
"Um. That's kind of ironic. Isn't it's entire reality built around being useful with paper?"
"Well yes, but this is quite the snobbish printer."
"Ah...so printers are developing personalities now, eh? Pretty soon we'll be paying for them to have therapy sessions."
(Secretaries giggle...Heidi leaves office.)

(In the hall...hilarious 7th grader)
"I didn't know you had glasses."
"I don't. Technically."
"Why are you wearing them then?"
"Only for headaches and mega-reading."
"That's cool. It's almost like a fashion accessory...the glasses I mean. Those are cute pants."
"Oh, thanks..."
"Did you get them at the mall? I think all cute things come from the mall."
"I'd disagree..."
"Well most things then! We should go shopping together again!! Anyway, got to go. Bye!"

(On the way home, stop at 7-Eleven...at the counter, follow conversation occurs.)
"That'll be $1.69"
(Hands little old man at the cash register money)
"Out of $1.75... Say, that's Pina Colada and Cherry, right?"
"Yup, sure is."
"Oh, those are the best kind of Slurpees."
"I completely agree."
"You know what makes them even better though?"
"What?"
"A shot of rum!"
"Oh...well..."
"What? You don't believe me? You should try it."
"I'm only 17. It'd be illegal."
"Oh, that doesn't matter. Back when I was a boy we didn't worry about laws like that, and I'm still alive."
"Maybe so, but I don't need alcohol..."
"Why not?"
"Well, a friend of mine once told me, 'Heidi, you're not missing anything by not drinking. Boring people drink to act the way you do all the time!"
(Silence)
"$0.06 is your change. Have a nice day."
"Thank you sir."
"But I'm telling you! If you ever get yourself some rum, you should try it! It'll change the way you think."
(Walks out of 7-Eleven)

(Laughs and thinks..."Yeah, I bet it'd change the way I think...")

And this is life. Little stuff like that makes it all the more amazing. That is all.

Spring Time Chit-Chat

Okay…I need to be writing a research paper. My mind won’t hold still, so I’ve rather been amusing myself with old pictures and stories.

Something kinda-ish jumped out at me today, and it made me chuckle. I was reading in 2 Corinthians where Paul is talking about how if he must boast, he chooses to boast in his weakness because then it’s pretty obvious that success comes not from his own power, but rather from the power given to him from Christ.

This’ll make more sense in a minute, but doesn’t God have such a great sense of humor? He takes our biggest fears and insecurities, and those are the things he uses to grow us. I find that so ironic and hilarious. Happy little story from childhood…

If we go back to my elementary years, guess what my biggest fear was...? Piano. I’m serious. It was my enemy. In Kindergarten, my mom used to bribe me with M&Ms to practice. By second grade I demanded money. That request didn’t work out so well…

I freaked out whenever people asked me to play in public. Third grade recital, I pretended I was sick all day. Even did the whole “thermometer under the heat lamp” thing. Only problem; it was a mercury thermometer, and I got it too hot, so it broke, and there was mercury all over.

Yeah. I got in trouble for that one and still had to play at the recital.

Oh dear. Anyway, I hated playing in front of people. I would force my whole family into the basement whenever I practiced so they couldn’t watch me. I was a weird little kid.

Second story. We need to go back to the early debate days. My worst fear in Jr. high and the beginning of high school? Talking in front of people. My parents decided to remedy this with debate. I cried every week for a month on the way home from class. (Siblings can testify to that.) I tried to convince my parents that debaters were all mean and cruel nerds that were at least partially insane. They didn’t buy it.

So…I was thrown into this mob of people who thought it was “fun” to talk about stuff like taxes and politics. Yuck. (Somewhere in the last three years I was nerdified myself. And now somehow get tricked into doing all the public rep stuff whether it be for classes, organizations, events... Oh well.)

I just find it highly amusing that the two things I hated and feared the most (performing music and speaking in public) are now two of the things I do the most. And are also two of the things I’ll be studying in college.

It never ceases to amaze me how God takes our biggest insecurities and turns them into strengths so that when we succeed, there ain’t nothing we can do but give all the praise back to him. So let me continue to boast in my weakness, for God’s grace is made all the more wonderful when I, in and of myself, can do nothing but freak out and fail. That was Heidi’s thought of the day.

Well, that, and that canned mandarin oranges are better than canned pineapple...

He was assigned a grave...

"...with the wicked, and with the rich in his death, though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth."

Sometimes it's when we're weakest, when we fail the most, when tears are far more fitting than smiles, and rain is greater than sunshine that God becomes most evident. It's when I'm at my worst that God's grace seems so much stronger and his kindness surpasses the few words held in my vocabulary.

It's when my heart breaks for my own selfish hypocrisy and pride, for my failure to love other people that my Father comes to me and...he. still. loves. me. ... me.

Why? I've spent days and nights in sorrowful solitude wondering that. Why should this girl so full of greed and hatred stand in the name of a perfect man and be called righteous? What right do I have to accept grace that I can never repay?

When my helpless state glares at me, I cannot help but tremble at the thought of mercy, of forgiveness... of love. I recoil at the thought of my stupidity and imperfection... but even through all this, my heavenly Father still offers me grace through the death of his own son.

Dear God, why? Why love? Why grace? Why forgiveness? Why mercy? Let me endure forever with unquenchable thirst, incomparable anguish, unremitting evil... it's what I deserve.

But no. I am loved by God and so I am offered hope.

I try to understand. I can't. No one can fully understand and grasp the expanse of God's love. I my not know why, but I'm thankful. How can I say thank you? All I have is so menial. I give my life, for it's the most I have, but even that wanes in comparison.

It's times like this one when I cannot help but fall to my knees with tears streaming down my face crying "Abba." Speechless again I fall in the presence of God's love.

"Surely he took up our infirmities
and carried our sorrows,
yet we considered him stricken by God,
smitten by him, and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed." ~Isaiah 53:4-5

Guido

White. Glossy. Large… and completely invading my life.

Let me introduce you to Guido. Guido started his life as a tree: A tree that used to sit happily on a hillside. No pain. No worries. Only sunshine, light rains and cool breezes. He was a happy fellow at the time, but in life, things always change. Little did the world know that Guido would soon become the demon that possessed my entire reality…

It all started last night around 8:30pm. Laura, David, and Josh were almost home. So, I was cleaning my room…again. Rooms are a pain like that. I’m convinced they would always stay clean if we never lived in them. But we do. So they must be cleaned.

I love my room. It’s full of all my hand picked furniture from all over the country, and the world. A chest from an old friend of mine, a vanity from a family member in Colorado, curtains from a friend in Romania, and a daybed I made from the headboards my mom and sister used when they were little girls. I’m an antique nut, what can I say? There are only two drawbacks to my room. One, I’m kind of semi-locked in the basement. And two, it’s pretty much non-existent in the size category.

Anyway, back to the story. I’m cleaning my room, and out of no where, my mom and dad walk in carrying this….thing. It’s a thing alright. Looks like a giant refrigerator rejected from the 70’s. It’s in a giant cardboard box with a rhino on the front. And I’m thinking to myself, “What kind of box has a rhino on it?”

Regardless, my mother announces that my closet and under-the-bed space are too small to hold all of my clothes, so she’s going to bless me with this…thing…that someone thinks is a dresser. I protest. Strongly protest. My mother smiles and sets it in the smack dead middle of my room. I glare at the thing. It glares back. We do this for about five minutes. Then I name the thing. I name it Hugo Chavez. It reminds me a communist dictator with its bold white head completely shattering the aura of the rest of the room.

Then I decide Hugo Chavez is too powerful a name for such a miserly thing. I name it Guido instead. Guido the refrigerator dresser. My mom yells from another room, laughing, “You can take it college next year if you want, Heidi…”

Oh help my crazed mind. To make matters worse, I’ve now found the handles to this thing. They’re made of opaque white something. But I can’t really tell what it is. Probably plastic. No, definitely plastic.

Dilemma plagues me yet again. Where am I going to put this giant white refrigerator? I think about just leaving it where it is… and then decide I would be mentally damaged if I had to look at it everyday. The closet. Yes. That’s the next bright idea. By this time, my mom is back and giving me a speech about how starving children in some foreign country would be ecstatic to get a dresser. I very happily tell her she may give it to the children.

But no, Guido has been entrusted to me, she says. So… I must deal with Guido. I spend the next hour rearranging my room to make Guido’s new home, the closet, more easily accessible. Joy. I’m still trying to figure out, “Why Guido?”

“Why can’t I just buy my own dresser?” I ask my mom after all the rearranging.
“Because you have Guido, and he needs a home.” (She’s seriously enjoying this way too much. She’s like a kid with a million dollars at Disney World. I’m starting to wonder if she’s chosen Heidi torture as her new hobby. Like the way she signed me up for sweepstakes when I was out of the country…)

If you’ve ever read “The Jacket” by Gary Soto, you know what I feel like right about now. And that’s all I have to say about this situation. Thus continues my love-hate relationship with the refrigerator named Guido. The End.

P. S. I am secretly putting Guido up for adoption as of this moment. If you are lonely, he would be the perfect companion or addition to any family. He might even become a famous poet in the future and make you millions of dollars so you never have to work again. I am not worthy of his grandeur. Please save me from this great responsibility. Thank you.

Farewell to the Half-Baked and Greasy...

I’ve become frustrated recently with ever greater removal of the truly artistic from the everyday world. But what is art? Who am I to define art? Really, I am no one. I’m not an expert, and don’t claim to be one. I’m just a teenager who thinks the perception of art in a large sense has degenerated into entertainment, money, and fame.

We see toddlers splat paint on a canvas and see that become internationally acclaimed art. We see singers with no real talent shooting to the top of charts because of studio editing. We see people throw a myriad of words on a piece of paper haphazardly, and suddenly we have a new innovation in poetry or prose that obviously must hold some deep meaning. We see films breaking box office records that really have nothing more to boast than a screenplay with some raunchy sarcasm and a one night stand.

And we call this art. We call the creators of this stuff…artists; musicians, painters, writers, actors. Why? Why has our culture numbed the idea of artistry down to whoever can find a semi-creative outlet to make a fast buck? Shouldn’t art stay elevated above this?

One of my professors was lecturing today on the idea that what is “right” is nothing more than a matter of personal conviction or interpretation. Therefore, one could never make an incorrect analysis of literature, for it’s all up to personal perception. Nice. My next essay will be 5 sheets of blank white paper. “But Dr. So and so… you can’t fail my paper…it was my interpretation, and therefore must be correct.” [/sarcasm]

And they call this a college education…ah well… I have a good time arguing with my postmodernist/secular humanist friendlies. Oh school…

I love writing. As I’ve said before, I write whenever I need an avenue to channel emotion. Whenever I don’t have enough energy to ponder many things all at once, paper plays my second brain, my removable hard drive if you will. But I don’t call myself a writer. No. I believe writing is art enough to leave the title of “writer” to those who devote their lives to the passion. Not those who do it for money, or recognition, but those who do it because they love it, and because they have to.

I’ve played the piano since before my feet could touch the ground. At any given moment, I could sit down and pound out some jazz or play compositions from Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Greig, Mendelssohn, Debussy, Chopin, Brahms, yada yada. But that doesn’t make me a musician, and I don’t call myself one. Again, I really feel that term should be reserved for those who are willing to devote their lives to the study, enjoyment, love, and pursuit of musical excellence.

Excellence. Maybe that’s what’s missing. Culture as a whole has contented itself with the half-baked greasy kind of art. The kind that doesn’t require skill, passion, work, time, and effort to create, but rather the kind of “art” that can be achieved by zapping a moment of instant stimulation into an audience, and not much else.

As Gene Edward Veith once said, “The “entertain me” mindset of pop culture now governs education, politics, morality, and the church. Teachers try to entertain their students rather than educate them. Politicians craft their image like movie stars. And pastors turn their worship into entertainment and downplay theology in favor of good feelings.”

Do you ever wonder what God thinks as he looks down on American culture? All the wonderful potential and ability he has placed within the lives of each person across the country, yet we largely ignore that true beauty to instead run head first in pursuit of cheap immediate pleasure.

Oh how often we sell ourselves short. How often we accept the less than great merely out of laziness. We have become satisfied with the unsatisfactory. We’re content to look out the one inch window rather than running out, throwing up our hands, and finally seeing the vast open expanse of sky...

So farewell to the cheap imitations, the wishful thinking, the empty but nice sounding words… let us run head first toward excellence: for that is what we have been called to pursue.