[video]
I have a feeling these Haiti pictures are just going to keep coming.
I moved to an old place, took a new job, and came out with a rather typical result. Resignation.
I resigned from my job at Trinity United Methodist Church this past Monday after a short tenure of 5 months as the Media Director.
It would be easy to say that I really regret moving out of a great place with great friends and into something that ultimately didn’t work out, but there’s a silver lining to the cloud. I’ve been blessed with so many situations that I wouldn’t have been involved in had I not been lead and been (what I felt was) obedient to Louisiana.
When this realization hit me I began to wonder about all the things that I could regret. I don’t have a time machine, but decisions that I make now I think I can process differently.
I’m realizing that all these things I view as regrets would’ve never happened were it not for a singular season that I do regret. I regret not going to a large school, but had I not gone to Anderson my life would look completely different. I have a choice. I can regret or I can submit that every situation and circumstance is being redeemed. Call it careless. I’m going to call it faithful.
I just started in on the Haiti batch. It’s easy to take pictures when everything is this beautiful.
Sitting still for 2 hours isn’t something I usually budget for in my week, but right now I’m doing that somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico.
This time last Monday I was just walking into the church that I’m employed at ready for another week. It would be nothing more than that. I would do some design work, plan a few weeks out, attend some meetings, take long lunches, and then get ready for Sunday. We’re always getting ready for Sunday.
I woke up on Tuesday morning in an especially thankful mood, which is strange for me at 7:00 in the morning. The feeling, as I remember it, was a general feeling of gratitude of where I was and why the Lord had lead me to that place.
After a chicken salad sandwich from a Ruston deli, I got back to my office and immediately had visitors. It was the 2 youth ministers from my church. They wanted me to go to Haiti with them- on Monday. Five days to get ready to go serve and get video footage in a foreign country. I’m up for the challenge. Right?
Luckily I had my passport and most of my vaccinations were up to date (don’t tell my mom, I think I’m missing one or two). I made necessary trips to get the things I would need, I rented some camera gear, and I took my prescribed malaria medicine, but I didn’t feel prepared.
The past few months I’ve come to grips with lots of things. One of those is this: when presented with nothing but new things it’s really simple to throw your hands in the air, sigh, and exclaim, “I’m just too damn busy.” But it’s the illusion of busy-ness. I make time for lots of things during my week (most of those involve food and THINKING about exercising), and it seems I make time only for the things I hold as a high priority. Sabbath rest and “being” were not the things I viewed as having much consequence and weight. I defaulted to striving and doing. Abiding was a word I had lost meaning too.
So I’m scrambling around Northeast Louisiana trying to prepare for a trip for 10 days to a 3rd world country and I’m tired. I’m not- tired I’m weary.
Luckily, one of my great friends is a musician in one of my favorite worship leader, Aaron Keyes, band. They were scheduled to be in a town about 30 minutes from my own. I moved some things around and I went to hangout, knowing I left for Haiti only hours later and I wasn’t prepared.
Good friends and good conversation is rest for me, and God has made it a habit of filling me up through rest. Funny how that works. So I get to the venue where Aaron was leading worship that night, and sat through sound check and abetting with them. The band started the first set and I realized that it was the firs time I had been able to simple BE in a worship service and hangs no responsiblity in months and months. Rest.
During the set I prayed that God would prepare me and equip me to go, and it hit me. I had Bren packing bags, making arrangements and rushing around that I had completely neglected to just BE and be loved so that I could love other people. Ultimately thats the only thing I’m called to do while I’m in Haiti. Everything that I do while in Haiti should come out of an attitude of love for the people that live in the impoverished country. I struggled with what should be my correct response to seeing the poverty and how should I mentally prepare to see it. But looking at it all through the lens of being loved so that I can be loved I don’t know if I can be more prepared or equipped.
I just rembered, I did forget my chapstick though.
Evolution of music by format. Record labels still get 50%? Wow.
(via joemccready)
TONE HUNT!
There’s a lot to be said about working long hours, setting your hand to the plow, and pushing through. Ovid said, “What is without periods of rest will not endure.” I believe that, but I also believe that excellence isn’t only achieved from 9-5.
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit.” —
Ira Glass, on taste and creative work
Found on Kottke
(via jonathanmoore)(via ericmcclerren)
“
The arts are not a peripheral luxury for the elite few, but a central necessity, how a civilization is to be defined, and how our humanity is to be restored.
…If we do not teach our children and ourselves what we imagine and hope for, if we do not seek to define that elusive “world that ought to be,” then the culture of cynicism will define it for us. We are awash in apathy and terror. Thus to create in those waters, we must have more than an optimist’s escapism. Today, to create is to hope. To create is to live.
…The best of the arts, then, probe through our senses to the “memory and desire,” hovering between life and death, despair and hope. And yet, the best of the arts also point to, or even re-define, the World to come, causing us to rise up, like Lazarus, from the dark tomb of cynicism and despair.
…With all solid notions being washed away, as new fears of our days creep into our consciousness, we must insist on reminding people that there is a Stage behind the stage, a Reality behind the reality. But instead of reminding people of the cold earth, we need to awaken the deposit of what is to come. There is a banquet waiting for us beyond the veil.
…I am convinced that art and music, while not the Thing itself, contain the aroma, the actual aroma, of the New. Artists, whether cognizant of Christ or not, detect this aroma.
…That is how we must now love the world. Step into the receding (cultural) waters filled with poison, but do it with faith. Then the stench of death will be replaced by the aroma of the New. The Stage behind the stage will open up, and instead of being forced to surrender to the cold earth, we will dance upon the waters, hear new sounds, and create new colors.
” — Mako Fujimura (via walkr)