unspoilery harry potter review
As I had intended, I stayed up all night Saturday night reading the final Harry Potter book.
Wow. I’m not going to spoil any plot stuff here, just want to comment on the overall quality of the book and some general, non-spoilery stuff (added–I do mention whether good or evil eventually wins later, so if you truly consider that a spoiler, read no further.) The dialogue was excellent as always, and the pacing was a bit better than the last installment. The resolution was handled particularly well, I thought.
Too often in a “good versus evil” tale, the writer spends 99% of the story setting up how invincible the villain is, and then spends 1% of the story letting the hero or heroine defeat the villain. And often, you feel cheated because it turns out that this villain’s mortal weakness is lemon juice, and the hero just happens to have a glass of sweet tea handy, and boom, one squirt and it’s over. I’m a huge fan of Anne Rice, but I agree with Chris that she spent far too much of Queen of the Damned setting up an invincible villain in Akasha, to then kill her off with an accident, essentially, and one that was disappointingly prosaic.
That is not the case with this book. Read more
shocking hair-related news and a ponder on bravery
Chris returned from his latest haircut with shocking news.
Miss Kate, official trimmer of the family tresses, is leaving Hair Affair and Palmyra, apparently due to irreconcilable differences with another stylist. This is a stunning blow to our family’s collective grooming routine. Miss Kate is responsible for Madeline’s extremely cute and comment-worthy bob.
In other, non related news, Read more
bring on the day
This could’ve been a really bad day. Overslept, someone who shall remain nameless set the alarm but forgot to reset the alarm time to the weekday wakeup time, and got to work late because right now, I-64 is not a forgiving route.
But I kept on working with my attention, bringing it around to focus on what needed to be done. Fortunately, there was a lot that needed to be done. It was a good productive day, and I ended it with a much better attitude than I started it with.
it was in the last place i looked
Last night I went to a Women’s Event at Sojourn. It was, as most things are these days, really good, really troubling, really uncomfortable and really encouraging. I met the co-leader for the southern Indiana community group, and she was incredibly sweet, funny and friendly. Met a LOT of pregnant women. Holy cow, there are a lot of pregnant women at our church. Out of about 75 women present, nine were expecting and two or three had babies less than two months old. (Note to self: don’t drink the water at church…)
On a somewhat related note, I think the spiritual hair clog is finally loose and on its way out of my system. Things are still a bit … gunky. My capacity to love is still at a lower-than-it-oughta-be level, but it’s improving. The living water is starting to run clearer. 
I’ve been a little frustrated about something specific lately, for a good while actually, and I think I’ve kind of worked it out over the last day or two.
We all look for our identity in the wrong places. We will always find it in Christ, but that’s always the last place we look. We like to joke about “finding things in the last place I looked” because it’s an easy punchline and setup. You’d be kind of stupid to keep looking other places once you found it. Except, for Christians, most of us do keep looking for our identity after we’ve found it.
Initially, when we become followers of Christ, we find our identity in Him. But usually, I think, we take up the search again. Because it seems like it can’t be that simple. So we look for our identity in the same places other people look for it, but we try to “Christianize” the search. We look for it in our relationship roles, but we call it “trying to be a Christian wife/husband/parent” or “trying to be a Proverbs 31 woman.”
I did that–can’t tell you how marvelously trying to find my sense of self in my marriage worked out. Yes, that was a statement THICK with sarcasm.
Once that failed spectacularly, I moved on to the other place that people try to find their identity: work. I’ve just now understand my frustration with myself each time I get fired up about doing something other than whatever it is I’m currently doing.
Your work is your work. It’s important for the same reason that your relationships are important: because it shows the world something about the glory of God. God is relational. So as His image-bearers, we’re relational. God is a worker (as anyone whose even gotten as far as the first chapter of Genesis can tell you). So as His image-bearers, we’re workers. But neither of those things define our identity.
I get frustrated because I’d like to be able to put my identity on a business card and not have to think about it anymore. “Okay, God, that’s who I am,” and just focus on fulfilling the obligations of that business card identity. But my real identity is so much simpler and more all-encompassing than that. My identity is to live out the life of Christ wherever I am and whatever I’m doing.
Paul worked as a tent-maker the entire time he was an apostle. What was his identity? It wasn’t a tent-maker, and it actually wasn’t an apostle, either. He was a sinner saved by grace to new life in Christ. That’s an identity that requires infinite flexibility and creativity and confidence and grace and a whole host of traits and abilities that just won’t fit neatly onto a resume.
Whatever work God lays before me, the work itself isn’t the important thing. I think as long as I can keep that in mind, my perspective will allow me to accept with grace whatever curve balls get thrown at me.
a short post for potterity… i mean posterity
Well, it’s a mere one day till the fifth Harry Potter movie comes out and a mere 10 days till the final book lands in bookstores. As a lifelong fan of all things literary, epic and archetypal, it’s a safe bet that I will be catching both the celluloid and pulp items ASAP once they’re available.
In fact, Chris has suggested a date night to go see it at the Great Escape.
Unlike the season finale of LOST, I’ve done rather admirably at not seeking out spoilers for either. Not that there is spoilage to be found, at least in regards to Deathly Hallows. Lindelof and Cuse need to take some notes from Scholastic in how to prevent major plot details from escaping into the wild a tad early. But I digress.
Although it’s not a spoiler, I read a columnists’ theory regarding the ending of Hallows. And loathe as I am to admit it, it’s a solid theory that reminded me of another favorite epic story of mine, the Dark Phoenix Saga from X-Men comics. Actually, it doesn’t remind me of how the Dark Phoenix saga played out, but rather, one of the ways it almost played out. Comic ubergeek that I am, I have a copy of “Phoenix: The Untold Story” that features the original, canned-by-the-editors version of the saga, wherein Jean/Phoenix didn’t die on the moon. It also featured the transcription of an interview with the creative and editorial teams where they discussed, among other things, where the story would have gone had they gone with the original, non-fatal ending. Don’t read on if you’re avoiding even speculation on book 7.
Basically, the columnist thinks that to kill Voldemort, Harry won’t have to die. He’ll have to sacrifice his magical ability.
There’s something quite lovely and full-circle about that idea. In the beginning, Harry was completely ordinary, until he found out he was a wizard. How cool would it be for Harry to realize that what really makes him uncommon is his human capacity to sacrifice the life that has meant everything to him all these years. To voluntarily be reduced to a mere ordinary Muggle again.
How ironic would it be if the greatest power Harry has over Voldemort is his ability to give up his powers? And before you think that’s not a huge sacrifice, think about the first chapters of all the books. What is Harry’s all-encompassing desire? To get back to Hogwarts and the wizarding world. Which do you think would be harder to do? Be a valiant, sacrificial martyr in the heat of battle, or humbly give up your place as a magical hero to be an ordinary Joe?
It’s probably not a likely ending, but it’s definitely an interesting theory.
spiritual plumbers
Phillipians 1: 9-11 (The Message, emphasis mine)
So this is my prayer: that your love will flourish and that you will not only love much but well. Learn to love appropriately. You need to use your head and test your feelings so that your love is sincere and intelligent, not sentimental gush. Live a lover’s life, circumspect and exemplary, a life Jesus will be proud of: bountiful in fruits from the soul, making Jesus Christ attractive to all, getting everyone involved in the glory and praise of God.
Sometimes I think I love too much, and sometimes I think I barely love at all. Mostly, I think this scripture hits the nail on the head: I need to learn to love appropriately. As redeemed people, I think we have hearts that are being redeemed. They are filled with good impulses, urges to love others, but loving others gets tangled up on the way to “as we love ourselves” with “so they will love us back.” Love gets complicated and sticky and messy.
When we love to get loved back, we set ourselves up to be disappointed, because the love that returns to us can’t be sufficient–it’s starting out instantly in our debt (after all, we paid for it up front). As long as love is a currency of exchange, it’s not loving appropriately. In Christ, love and grace are grafted together from the root. Love is given out of a surplus of grace, without regard to relative merit or odds of compensation, or it’s not love.
When thought about this way, it becomes clear (or it should) that we cannot love. At least, we cannot love under our own power. We can’t give what we don’t have. In order to give love as if you’ll never run out, you have to have an endless and certain supply. When I’m not loving appropriately, regardless of whether it feels like I’m “overloving” (giving too much out of my own needyness in hopes of payback) or “underloving” (being stingy and trying to “conserve” my supplies of wellbeing) if you trace the problem to its source, I think it has to lead to a place in ourselves where we’re blocking receiving God’s love.
There are a million reasons and ways to do that. This is not about those specifics.
It’s about the fact that when you find that hair clog in the pipes of your soul, you’re looking at a mess equivalent to what that metaphor brings to mind. Yuck. I’m not speaking in theories and conjectures here. That’s pretty much my present, gritty and unpleasant reality. Getting that clog cleared out is not fun stuff. And while you’re doing it, everything gets muddied and kind of gross. But even through that, you can see that things are moving in places of your heart that had gotten stagnant. A stirred-up mess is the price of restoring the flow of grace and love into your heart (and thus, back out into the world that needs it.)
Prayers of peace and grace to those who stand over their own messy souls right now, plunger in one hand and pipe snake in the other, prepared to make things a little worse now so they’ll get better after.
ten minutes
i have ten minutes to post, because I started a post, and then got three paragraphs in, and realized that I didn’t want to post about that, after all.
So now I have ten minutes to post before it’s time to wake up Chris and turn the computer over to him, because he needs to do his homework.
Ten minutes is not a lot of time. There are six of them in an hour, and we all know how fast an hour can fly by.
Ten minutes is how I get most of my housework done. I tell myself that I’m only going to do whatever I can get done in ten minutes. Sometimes I don’t quit after ten minutes. Sometimes I do. But ten minutes gets me started, and I’ve gotten a lot of necessary-but-not-incredibly-fun crap done in ten minute increments.
Julia Cameron says that one way she manages to stick with her daily writing routine (not discipline, because discipline is a dirty word to Julia) is to do the same thing: when she’s not in the mood, she just agrees with herself to write for ten minutes, mood or no. And usually ten minutes is long enough to get a nice taste of how much she enjoys writing. Far too much to stop after ten minutes.
The clock on the computer is a handy thing. It says I have six minutes left till it’s time to wake Chris up. I can actually type over 80 words per minute, if I’m taking a timed typing test and someone gives me the words to write. On a good day, I can write my own words pretty darn fast, too.
I did not finish ScriptFrenzy in June, because we had no air conditioning in June, and the computer desk is quantifiably the hottest spot in the house. So I am planning on finishing the script in July, because doggone it, it was a good story and it wants to be told, and it’s not the story’s fault that our central air unit decided to die during the hottest weather of the year. Oh, and I can’t remember if I posted this before, but I figured out how to break the gypsy curse, and the solution was so lovely, I did a little happy dance when it came to me. Of course, I was lying in bed at the time, so it was a very small amount of actual movement for a happy dance. It was really more like a happy wiggle. But you get the idea–it was an idea that was so exciting, it inspired kinetic expression.
I have two minutes left, according to the little clock on the computer.
I now miss LOST. I didn’t miss it for the first six weeks, because the last six weeks of LOST completely took over my brain and my life and refused to release them back to my control till the end of “Through the Looking Glass” so the first six weeks of the eight month hiatus, I just celebrated having full use of my brain again. But now it is over six weeks later, and I am bored with my brain and I miss LOST.
One minute left.
Daryn makes some lovely cakes. They are so lovely, and she has possibly the longest FAQ I have ever read for a dessert-related website. She and Craig are wonderfully thorough people. I love that about them. I am a sketchy person. I sketch in my notebook like I sketch my way through life–sans a lot of details.
Nine-thirty. Gotta go.
listen to your villagers
I reached a point today where my head was saying it was full, and my tummy was saying that it was empty. Which, I’ve found, is an excellent indicator that it’s time for lunch. It’s always great when the various parts of me communicate that clearly and when their various needs aren’t in competition with each other.
When I first got counseling several years ago, I had heard of “the inner child” but I was pretty skeptical about its existence or value. Now, I can say after about six years of working with all my inner “peeps,” including the inner child, that she does indeed exist and that in many cases, she can be a key to lasting positive change.
Really, it’s not that odd to realize that you have within you different parts, each with different impulses, agendas and voices. (No, not necessarily those kinds of voices. That’s abnormal psych. Whole ‘nother topic.) It’s just like my lunchtime prompting. My brain was overstimulated and needed a break. My stomach was empty and uncomfortable. Two different needs, two different sets of input from my “parts,” but the same solution.
Just like your body has different parts that have different needs and demands, your personality (or ego) has different parts with different needs and demands. Much of the time, the communication and interplay between these parts is subtle and unconscious. Some of the time, it’s quite obvious.
With practice you can learn to observe and listen to these different parts. You can get to know them, just as you would other people, and learn what they need and want. The benefit of this is that you can figure out when and how to appropriately provide for those needs, in a conscious way. Because if you don’t, very often they will find sneaky ways to get what they want in unconscious ways.
How many times do you find yourself, like Paul, doing the very thing that you don’t want to do and not doing the thing that you do want to do? Partly, this is attributable to our sin nature, but it’s also partly attributable to the fact that we often ignore legitimate needs until they express themselves in unconsciously motivated behaviors. Often, those unconsciously motivated behaviors are unhealthy and hurtful to us, and thus sinful (because we belong to God, our bodies and minds are not ours to abuse).
One could make the argument that according to Matthew 22:34-40, all sin breaks down into breaking God’s heart, hurting others, and hurting ourselves. So our dysfunctional behavior and our sin nature are closely linked, and possibly functionally-speaking, the same thing. Because of this, I personally view becoming a healthier and more functional person to be an element of discipleship. If discipleship is being formed in Christ‘s likeness, then becoming more like Him automatically entails becoming a whole, healthy person (unless you’d like to make the argument that Christ had dysfunctional hangups. If so, please allow me a moment to step to a safe distance before the lighting strike hits you. But I digress.)
I will probably continue this line of thought in my next post, but I have run out of time today to write it. Comment (or not) as ye please.
slum lord no more?
Well, we’ve got news on the housing front here in scenic downtown Pal.
First, with the passing of my Gigee, her house here in town goes to my Uncle Larry, aka Gonzo. Given the fact that he’s an ex Navy Seal, Vietnam vet, and current Baptist minister running a homeless mission, I have no qualms about letting him deal with any issues that come up. Frankly, if the contract buyers cause trouble and have him to deal with, may God have mercy on their souls. So I don’t feel like I have to monitor that situation like I did before.
Second, the homemade posters and Craigs List ad may have paid off. We had three solid interested parties, and last night Chris showed the blue house to two of them. One is seriously interested, and the other made an offer. His offer isn’t quite what the payoff of the loan is, but it’s close enough we could probably cover it with a small (very small) home equity loan on our house. So I’m going back to the other interested party and telling him if he’ll offer what we owe the bank, it’s his, otherwise we’re selling it to the other guy.
If this works out, we will be down to just one house to be responsible for. As awesome a blessing as that is, it’s not without some mixed feelings. There are some specific things that I’ve been in prayer about for the last few months, and this turn of events makes some things possible that I didn’t think would be possible for a much longer time. So if you get a few moments and feel like adding me to your prayer list, I could use a little clarity and discernment. :) Much obliged.
Oh, and lest I count my chickens before they’re hatched, please pray that at least one of these leads turns into a bona fide sale.
-
Sponsor a Child
