If you haven’t yet discovered this, Facebook gives you the option of including what language you’d like your page displayed in, including US “Pirate.” Simply go to the bottom of your page, select the language hyperlink (US), and there you will see the aforementioned Pirate option.
Enjoy!
Continue Reading
This short film by Canadian Norman McLaren was released in 1952 and won an Oscar for Best Documentary Short Subject in 1953. Truly amazing art, story, and springboard for dialogue and action on the essence of mission and “the other”.
Continue Reading
NT Wright weighs in on the pixelverse, with its burgeoning population of tweets, texts and posts and reminds me of an interview with Eugene Peterson in the latest installment of Image Journal. This summer I am reading Albert Borgmann’s Technology And The Character Of Contemporary Life and Power Failure: Christianity In The Culture Of Technology, as this issue interests me on many levels.
How do we utilize tools and technology without dehumanizing ourselves and one another?
How do we know when we’ve traded the incarnational way for one of expedience, or worse yet, empire building?
What if the landscape of text has numbed us to the potential and power of words, particularly words found in the context of face to face conversation?
I pose these questions and am looking into this cultural construction not out of disdain, for I am typically an early adopter and enjoy so many angles that these tools bring into focus. However, I sense the need for a healthy tension here, as Wright mentions. So, I’m heading to the woods for a few days with 50 or so people that I love to engage in conversation, play, rest, and all of the mess that accompanies.
Continue Reading
Losing My Religion Over Equality
Eugene Cho’s post on Jimmy Carter’s leaving the SBC over gender equality
Nation Of Heat, Joe Pug
The latest offering to arrive in my inbox via Past Magazine. The opening track, Hymn #101 is an instant immersion into Pug’s writing and musical narrative.
Business As Mission
Alan Hirsch’s book review of Business As Mission: The Power Of Business In The Kingdom Of God, by Michael Baer. I just started through this one and anticipate a fall group engagement of it with some friends.
Why Multi-Tasking Doesn’t Work
Found this via a tweet from @gtdguy. And the timing was perfect, as I called H soon afterward and asked “what’s up?”, to which she replied, “trying to multi-task, but it’s not working very well.” @superdave0 also weighed in with “tried to read it but was doing too much.”
University Of Memphis Hoops on Twitter
Coach Pastner and all, tweeting at all hours as they pursue recruits for Memphis’ upcoming title run…
Quotable: @blondeboybrian
“Vision without action is just a hallucination.”
Continue Reading
For the last several months I’ve watched, at various times of day and night, the development of a Valley Girl. Running. Biking. Swimming. Early. Late. Hot. Cold. Rain. Clear. Regardless of weather conditions, the day’s full schedule or the call of the latest Netflix shipment to arrive at our house, I’ve witnessed Hannah’s focused training regiment, which will come to fruition in tomorrow’s Valley Girl Triathlon (a sprint triathlon). And so today finds Ethan, Noah and I preparing to cheer, admire and witness her journey from start to finish, from lake to bike to run. And it also finds us proud to live with a Valley Girl.
Continue Reading
The End In The Beginning
Posted on 18. Jul, 2009 by justinbryeans.
May what I’ve written here
In sleepless grief and dread
Live in my children’s ears
To warn them of their need
And ask them to forbear
In time when I am deadSo they may look and see
Wendell Berry, from A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997
For past and future’s sake
The terms of victory
They cannot win or take
Except by charity
Toward what they cannot make.
Wendell Berry is one of my favorite American authors, and I could go on for some time as to why this is the case. But for the sake of this first post I’d like to center on just one. As is captured in the imagery of the poem above, Berry reminds me over and over again, in his short stories, novels, essays and the little glimpses into his life that I’ve come across, about the presence of the invisible in the visible. The eternal in the temporal. The end in the beginning.
On some level his words quoted here may seem stark and absent from the joy embodied during these warm and open days of summer. Yet, they also capture the tension, honesty, beauty and ache that I find myself, at times, living in and desiring to live in. Why would I desire these, tension and ache? Honesty and beauty pose no problem, at least in desiring them, but these others?
As I immerse myself in the Jesus way all of these are present and primary characters in the unfolding story. On some days, they are characters that I dislike, ignore, and re-create with features a bit less pronounced and a bit more quiet. Obviously, this serves my shadow, and his desire for consumption and power, well. But thankfully these faithful characters persist, fighting through the static of these days, and I join them for late night conversations, stop light lessons and many other adventures in the ordinary.
And so, may this first post serve as a trajectory for posts, days, conversations, friendships, experiences and work that is to come. May Berry’s words above remind me to live, and to embody the end in the beginning of everything I set out to be and do. For, again, “the terms of victory (we) cannot win or take, except by charity toward what (we) cannot make.”
