be inspired

I’ve thought about this a lot, especially with my church and the feeling that I am not “involved” enough with church. But as one of my friends said once, “you join a small group so you can feel ‘connected,’ but then you end up having this obligation to hang out with people you maybe don’t even like that much instead of with the people who are truly your friends.” So true! You start going once a week, and sometimes you really click and sometimes you don’t, but if you don’t, you end up turning down dinner parties and impromptu frisbee outings because, “oh, sorry, I can’t…I have small group tonight.” Which is great if you love your small group, but not so great if you don’t.

So last night we had this semi-friend (friend of a friend, whom I’ve met previously) come over and tell us about his work in south africa…and it was just so refreshing. He was telling us that their fundraising plan is only to meet with people they know, people they are cool having dinner with, instead of just dropping into random bible studies and small groups and trying to get money from strangers. As he explained it, their whole ministry is about building relationships, not “doing this and this because you should,” so it only made sense that they would raise their funds in the same way.

It was just very inspiring…I loved that he was thinking about it in that way…it made me feel really good about not being more “involved” with church. I do have dinner with friends from church, close friends I made in a previous small group, and i would take more of those encounters any day over signing up for something just because I feel I should. And I am 1,000 times happier supporting our friend knowing that he is being conscious about this part of his ministry.

So I wrote that entry about the car emergency kit and the funny cat book (under “declutter my life). I cried a little. Kind of a lot. (this person who died tragically was a family friend I had known since I was a baby…an unmarried bachelor who was like the most fun uncle you could ever imagine). And I thought about this other story, where he and my parents were cutting wood when I was a little kid, and I was sitting in the truck cutting out pictures of food from magazines pretending that I was grocery shopping. And he came in and wanted to see what I was doing, and I showed him this big red apple I had cut out of good housekeeping or whatever. And he looked at this picture of an apple, plucked it out of my hand, crumpled it up, threw it in his mouth, and chewed it! I about died, it was the funniest thing I had ever seen. Then he spit it out into the ash tray and got out of the truck. And I remembered this one random night in college, and I wrote it up all eloquently and ended the page with “he had only come to see me smile” (which was not something overly romanticized…that’s really the feeling I get when I think about that). And I printed it out and sent it to his mom, to let her know that I had this great memory of him.

Doing a spotlight search on my computer, I’m not finding the piece I wrote (but of course I’m going to keep looking)...but I could recreate it pretty easily. anyway, I though about sharing that with her, and I thought, “you know, the people who knew Rick would think that those two items pretty crazily describe the kind of person he was.” So I just typed up my other entry (more poetically) and I’m going to mail it to my parents, his mom, and a brother and sister, because I think they would find it very funny…it’s important to me to know that people still think of him, and I think it’s probably important to them too.

She is an amazing person and an inspiration in many ways. But tonight at coffee, at the very end when she was dropping me off, she mentioned that she had made an appointment with her grandmother to learn how to make ravioli because her grandparents used to run an italian restaurant. I found that to be such an example of being intentional about learning about your family’s heritage, as well as spending time with them to learn something they know how to do.

My husband and I just stumbled across a Dateline special about the two college girls who were mistaken after a car accident…one family thought their daughter was live but in a coma for five weeks whereas another family thought their daughter was dead, and they realized after five weeks that they had SWITCHED the girls at the scene of the accident. I just had goosebumps the whole time watching it. I couldn’t imagine anything worse…thinking your daughter was alive, and finding out that really she was not, giving back all the euphoria you had felt, and then having to deal with it all doubley. But what was so unbelievable was the unshakable faith of both families, that they embraced each other without bitterness, that they respected each other and have presented a united front instead of going against each other. I don’t know, it’s hard to explain, but I’ve watched a lot of Dateline and can not think of an episode that has made me react quite like this one. Their message of love and dependence on God was just amazing to me.

My husband is phenomenally good at just doing stuff. He decides he’s going to quit smoking, and he quits smoking. Cold turkey, decides he’s going to drink bottled water instead of smoking. No excuses, no relapses, just quitting. He still only drinks water, juice, tea, and coffee. Another example: he decides he’s going to cut out wheat and dairy to improve his health, and he just does. I show up at his house one day and he gives me all the stuff he can’t eat anymore, and he’s never gone back. He just can DO this stuff without over thinking or making excuses or anything. He just decides he’s going to do something and he does it. I love it about him.

I went to a work happy hour the other night, and a coworker told me about her dog, which does not live with her. I knew she had an apartment so I asked her to explain more about this situation to me. Apparently she had contact with this dog is some shape or form…the dog was not happy, the owner was not happy, it was apparent to everyone. So she took this dog, knowing that it could not stay with her, hoping that the dropping it off at the humane society would be a last ditch resort. The dog stayed with friends for awhile, but then they couldn’t keep it any more, so she asked a family member with kids if they could take care of the dog. The family member indicated that they really did not have the funds to care for the dog (having 4 or 5 kids) so she pays all the expenses for the dog to live with this family. I just remember feeling like that was such a good example of empowerment and “charity begins at home.” Instead of seeing the bad situation and then feeling guilty and giving money to the humane society in an abstract way to aleviate guilt, she put her money towards an immediate solution. That really made me think more about immediate charity…doing good things when we see the opportunity in an immediate and tangible way. If we all did more of that, we would probably lessen the need for larger organizations to try and “fix” large scale problems.

Probably of 10 to 15 things that happen that really inspire me to something.

The first happened this weekend. My friend Chris told me about a hallucinagenic episode over coffee, thinking about what he did with his life, what he wish he would have done, if he had anything that he could do for hours on end without even realizing that time had gone by. He found out that for his wife, it was playing piano, and so they found a piano that they are in the process of moving to their house. He’s still looking for his own, but has dabbled in beer making and guitar playing to find that thing. The fact that he’s in his late 20s and has begun to think about that, I thought, was pretty awesome.