Roughly two weeks before Mother’s Day 2008. Sale flyers proclaim Mother’s Day specials. Mushy cards are lining the shelves. Commercials for jewelry stores try to convince us that we need to drop $100 or more on diamonds to show our moms how much we love them.

I’m standing in a small showroom with my Dad trying to decide what her headstone should look like.

It will be flat. Her name will be etched into the stone along with the date of her birth and the date of her death. Thirty-seven characters in all.

Thirty-seven.

Thirty-seven characters to capture a life.

Thirty-seven characters to remind us of the way she mangled the language from time to time. Just a few weeks before she died, she going past one of those immaculate homes. Shrubs were trimmed just so. Christmas lights were hung perfectly straight. Mom’s comment? “That’s nice, but it’s too pedicured for me.”

Thirty-seven characters that can’t begin to tell the story of one of our greatest adventures — a 1998 trip to Israel during which Mom asked what was being served at every single meal and ate around anything that remained suspiciously unfamiliar.

Thirty-seven characters can’t come close to describing how important her family was and the length to which she was prepared to go to stand up for them, from threatening to quit a job when a supervisor tried to make her work beyond the late afternoon on Christmas Eve (that’s time with the kids, she said) to running errands for her elderly mother in recent years (you took care of me, so I’ll take care of you, she said).

I suppose I could go on and on.

Thirty-seven characters. Sixty years. Neither were enough for me.

Yet, it was perfect for God. On this Mother’s Day, without her here to celebrate it, there’s one thing for which I will be forever grateful beyond the gifts we’ve exchanged, beyond the stories we shared, beyond the games we played, beyond anything that’s bound to this earth.

She always believed in — and taught me to believe in — the sovereignty of God. Of course, she never put it in such large words. Her version was more to the effect of, “Hey, that’s way God wanted it.”

So now Mother’s Day approaches. As hard as it is to understand, she is where she is supposed to be and I am where I am supposed to be. One day, thanks to the faith she passed along to me, we’ll be together again on Mother’s Day.

But, I suspect, on that day all attention will be on the Father.

Choosing any photo is more difficult than following the usual theme. The reason is that I don’t want to use anything that might come in handy later. So, I chose this picture of something growing out of the moss that I took during a hike this spring. If I don’t know what it is, it won’t be too useful later on!

Technorati Tag: PhotoHunt

Yep. Totally lazy blogger today. I found this video on Fee’s blog. The end cracked me up!

Click here for today’s thoughts on Matthew 6:27-29.

Shakespeare once famously asked through the voice of a star-crossed, love-smitten teen, “What’s in a name?”

Ask the same of my little blog experiment.

When I started blogging in August 2005, I named the blog “Becoming.” The title came from Jeremiah 29:11 in a roundabout sort of way. God knows the plans he has for me. The blog was a place to chronicle my journey to becoming what he planned, even though I really am not sure what that might be.

Then, I switched to WordPress.com in February 2007. With the change in platform came a change in the name. Not that I had become what God intends — that’s a journey that won’t be completed this side of heaven — but that I had found a new focus in how I live out that journey. This time it came from the words of Micah 6:8, which gave way to the mysterious moniker of 33:6:8 (thirty-third book, sixth chapter, eighth verse).

Recently, I have started to think that the title doesn’t accurately reflect what the blog is about — if I can even make the claim that this blog is about anything. It’s still about a journey into becoming what God intends me to be. It’s still a blog about learning to love mercy, act justly and walk humbly with God. But, it has also become a blog about books and music and photography and road trips and youth ministry and life in my little corner of the world.

Even among all those varied topics there is a common element — finding God in the fabric of everyday life.

And so, a new name … everyday images.

It’s a name with two shades of meaning.

First, starting tomorrow, if you click on the link in the sidebar (or the tab at the top of the page), you will be taken to a photoblog. These pages feature my photography (unless otherwise noted) coupled with a passage of Scripture and a thought or two. The vision for this section of the blog grew out of the realization that Scripture uses many, many metaphors and Christ himself referred to elements in the world around him to illustrate spiritual topics.

everyday images is also an apt description of who we are. Genesis tells us that we are created in the image of God. Those who follow Christ become the image of Christ to the world. Unfortunately, we’ve also shattered the image. We don’t reflect him perfectly. In this sense, the main part of the blog remains what it has always been — one Christ-following, book-reading, music-loving, cycling volunteer youth worker who is doing her best to reflect Christ to the world through all the cracks and broken pieces of life.

Recently, the local youth worker network asked what it could do or become to be of more use to volunteer youth workers. For the majority of the span of my “career” as a volunteer youth worker, I was able to work with a co-leader who planned many of the events for the group, allowing me to stick to my niche of teaching. All the same, thinking back on those years, I came up with a list of items that would have been of use to me then. Maybe they can be of use to anyone involved in a youth ministry network who is looking to reach out to the volunteer leaders in the area.

There’s one caveat, however … maybe two. First, to take a cue from Thomas Friedman, the world is flat. I can get ideas for games, illustrations and more at any number of sites on the Internet. Truthfully, there are a handful of youth ministry blogs that I read frequently and provide a virtual quasi-network. (I just noticed they are all men. Where are you, ladies? Speak up!) I need the local youth network to be just that … local. Help me to do ministry in our context.

Second, given that I generally come out of left field with my thoughts, I may be way off base to what the average volunteer youth worker is thinking. All the same, here’s what I would have liked (and still might) if I were the only volunteer youth worker at my church:

1. Meetings that are only about planning stuff.
I would rather have meetings that are casual, coffee shop-type things for support and prayer with lots of room for questions and/or training. Maybe we read through books on church leadership or culture or some other broad topic applicable to an expanded definition of youth ministry.

The volunteer who is a solo leader (or even one who has a co-leader) can feel very alone. You may be thanked for your work, but more often you’ll hear some variation of “I don’t know how you put up with teen-agers!” We don’t “put up” with them. Volunteer or vocational, most youth workers aren’t there because no one else would do it … at least I hope that is the case. They are called to minister to teens. They need to know there are other people out there who, like them, have a passion to walk alongside teens as they discover Christ and grow in their faith in him.

2a. A directory of some sort to the contact youth workers at area churches.
When I was planning events, there were times that it might have been cool - or just plain necessary - to connect with another church for a cooperative effort. Say I want to take youth to a week-long event (DCLA, Creation, etc.), but I am a female youth worker and (for whatever reason) can’t find a male chaperone in my congregation. If I knew who to contact at other churches, I would be far more likely to make the call than if I were to have to make a blind call to a secretary who may or may not be full-time and may or may not work out of the church office. In the end, the cooperative effort might yield the right number of chaperones.

Or maybe I just need a someone to share the hotel expenses for the National Youth Workers Convention (which I am probably funding completely out of my own pocket).

Besides, we’d all be able to save money by banding together to get group discounts on tickets to events. Small churches have a hard time meeting the minimum requirements for group discounts.

2b. In the context of the directory, let me know any special training you might have.
Maybe you have a degree in counseling and I have a student with I problem I am not equipped to handle. Maybe I have a background in writing and you can’t write a press release to save your life. Maybe you are passionate about the Hebraic roots of Christianity and would be thrilled to come to my group as a guest teacher. Better yet, maybe we can do a series of lessons and meet at your church one week and mine the next. We can all work more out of our gifting to the benefit of the church universal.

3. An e-mail newsletter describing what local churches are doing.
It wouldn’t have to be spectacular. Just a little note that Joe from This Church or That just started a 12-week series on the minor prophets and that Susie from The Other Church is taking students on a mission trip to Antarctica.

We can get in a rut with our activities and lessons, especially if you are holding down a full-time job outside of your ministry. It’s easier (and cheaper, if you are on a limited budget) for you to re-use materials and turn back to the same activities than it is to dream up new ones. Speaking for myself as a volunteer, I don’t want the network to do it for me. This is very important! I want to be able to get ideas from what you are doing, maybe ask questions and adapt it to my group.

This also connects with #2 … as can best be demonstrated with an illustration. Rewind back to 2003-2004 when I was planning the first week-long mission trip. Our church had never done such a thing so there was no institutional wisdom from which to draw. If I had known that another church in the area had recently taken a trip, I could have pulled out my directory, called up that youth worker and just pestered them with questions about how to go about planning.

Last thing … I would want the network to help me do the things I can’t do myself. There’s a zillion resources for lessons, but there are activities that lend themselves to a larger group. Alone I can’t put together a special evening of worship with a well-known artist and/or speaker, but pooling our resources would grow the budget and allow us to do something that might not otherwise happen in our town (understanding, of course, that Crowder may be forever out of reach).

Any other ideas? What does your network do?

The basement’s a mess. It’s the place in which all the household gear that we don’t know what to do with are unceremoniously dumped with nary a word or a thought to the many years of useful service these devices have rendered. There’s a ripped-open VCR — deliberately discombobulated by my mom when it chose to devour my videotape of the first week of the 2006 Tour de France. There are a couple of old 13-inch TVs. If you brush away the dust, you can find an old microwave that’s roughly the size of a SmartCar. Oh, and don’t forget the toaster-sized cell phone!

They’ve been lingering down there because one of us had read somewhere or another that there was something or another in these devices that made them hazardous to just toss into the trash bin. Later research proved the case. According to the Environmental Protection Agency web site, electronics may contain lead, mercury, cadmium and flame retardants.

Knowing that the county periodically held electronics recycling events, I thought we would keep the items until one rolled around again. Again is the key word. Usually, I found out about the event when the evening news on some beautiful spring Saturday would feature a story about the amount of aged PCs dropped off.

This year, by some fluke, I actually found out about e-recycling the day BEFORE the event. I whirled through the basement digging out old, abandoned items. I stuffed them in my car on Friday night so I could be at the recycling site as close to when it opened as possible. The theory was that I could be in and out before the rest of the county woke up.

Wrong.

Apparently the rest of the county had messy basements as well.

I followed the signs to the recycling site only to discover that probably 40 other cars were already in line only minutes after the event started. I thought the day would be shot to pieces and was quite happy that I brought Francis Chan’s Crazy Love along to read while I waited.

Turns out that the recycling operation was slicker than I thought. The line moved quickly. When it was my turn, I pulled the car up between a couple of cones, popped the trunk and stayed in the car as instructed by the friendly fire policeman. A swarm of guys started pulling the gear out of the trunk and backseat. In less than 90 seconds, they had cleared it all out.

I was free.

The old electronics were on their way to safe disposal. I had done my part to cut back on an ever-increasing part of the solid waste stream.

All the same, I wonder … and as I am not gifted with any sort of brains for such inventions … could our electronics be made out of something that isn’t hazardous? Can they be made of recycled materials?

After all, the professor on Gilligan’s Island could make anything out of a coconut shell …

“Faith,” Blair said, “answers to the basic, irrepressible, irresistible human wish for spiritual betterment, to do good, to think and act beyond the limitations of selfish human desires.

“Faith is not something separate from our reason, still less from society around us, but integral to it, giving the use of reason a purpose and society a soul, and human beings a sense of the divine,” he said.

“This is the life purpose that cannot be found in constitutions, speeches, stirring art or rhetoric. It is a purpose uniquely centered around kneeling before God.”

- Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair in a Los Angeles Times article.

It’s

going

to

take

a

long

time

to

read

all

of

these

books!

Technorati Tag: PhotoHunt

The drumbeat of the funeral procession wakens Matt Rogers from sleep, reminding him once more of the horror that had unfolded on the Virginia Tech campus just days earlier and sending him on a journey to find answers to the age-old question, “Why?”

Thankfully, Rogers, the copastor of New Life Christian Fellowship at Virginia Tech,  has invited us along on the journey.

It’s a journey of three parts. The first is raw and emotional, highlighted by Rogers’ interviews with a Tech survivor and with a couple who had lost six children in an explosion. The first part of the journey sets the stage, showing the reader, in Rogers’ terms, “the world that is.”

The second leg of the journey takes a walk through “the world that was.” Recalling encounters with creation and with key mentors in the months that followed the tragedy, Rogers reminds us that the world in which we live is not the world God created. It is a world marked by the Fall, but it is not the end of the story nor is it the end of the journey. The final leg of Rogers’ journey gives us encouragement as we go through our own struggles and a glimpse of the world to come — a world of hope and resurrection.

Are there answers? Yes. We’ve all heard them and understand them on an intellectual level. Rogers helps us to bridge the divide between these intellectual answers and the heart-wrenching, emotional questions that we can’t still ask. His flowing, poetic style is compelling, often reminiscent of the Bible’s wisdom literature in its freedom to question, doubt and even lament. It takes us beyond the simplistic superficial phrases that often serve as answers to life’s toughest questions to a deeper understanding of a faith that sees the light emerging in the world’s darkness.