so day 3 of thirty days of creativity is about conflict. we’ve created monsters and heros and everyone knows that with these two people types in the same universe eventually their will be conflict. so tell us about it, what happens, where does it happen, how, why, when. now don’t create a battle, just a conflict, because battles are still to come….
create a hero…. October 24, 2008
so day two of the thirty days of creativity is an assignment in relation to the one last night. you have successfully created a monster, so now the only natural thing to do is to….. “Create a Superhero”, and one that is capable of combating your scary monster from the beginning of the story.
give your superhero the appropriate powers necessary for a battle of the century if these two creatures were to ever collide. give your superhero a weakness, just to make the story interesting, and of course give him/her a fancy name or a long name or a simple name, or some way to be identified.
enjoy….
See September 28, 2008
by: kim klein, kate-lynne logan, josh martin
Do you see me?
Or through me?
Am I just scenery?
A piece of machinery?
A blur of greenery as you race on by?
Am I the sum of my parts or part of a sum?
A job to be done?
Someone to shun?
A past you can’t outrun?
Do I displease you? Annoy you? Affirm you? Frustrate you?
Do you see me for who I could be? As your friend? As a fool? As a
pretty dress or ugly shoes? As a burden? A lost cause?
Can you see what I’m afraid of?
Ashamed of?
The things I am proud of?
As a person, I am invisible;
Like a fool, expendable;
A friend, replaceable;
A worker, usable;
A child, moldable;
A face forgettable;
A mistake regrettable.
Is this really what I am?
Because, you see, this is how I’ve felt my whole life.
Like I’m here but not worth noting.
Like I’m being really seen but not really known.
Never really known.
And never really valued.
Sometimes all I want is to know that am worth something, sometimes what would bring healing to my soul is for someone to tell me I have value.
Sometimes, when I’m honest, all I want to know is that I am not an accident, that I’m not a cosmic joke of some sort.
Because you see, most days I struggle with believing in a God.
Because, most days what I see and hear from God followers doesn’t seem to be worth believing in.
I guess what I’m saying is, I’m interested, you know, in God, in the person of Jesus.
But, this interest if full of questions. Questions of my worth.
What I need to know most is if He cares for me.
I need to know if He sees me, does he really see and know me.
Because I want to share with him the deepest hopes and fears of my heart.
And I want to know that He finds me unique, irreplaceable, of immeasurable worth.
I really want this God to know me.
And, truth be told, I want God to know that I want to know him.
the wonder of story September 19, 2008
by: Josh Martin
sometimes i wonder. just on occasion something happens inside of me that makes me question the system, the story, the process, the boundaries.
it’s only in moments when no one is looking of course, and it is only legal when the noise level of the world is to such a volume that no one can hear me. because wonder brings about wonder at why a certain person would ever choose to wonder.
wonder assumes that there are some things that i can’t wrap my mind around and may never be able to, some things that are out of my reach, out of my league. wonder is looking upon something with an understanding that is surely incomplete but surely substantive. when wondering there seems to be a desire somewhere within, that says understanding would be nice, but it is certainly not the goal.
in these moments, gazing will suffice. mystery is somehow enough.
sometimes i wonder. just on occasion though, and it’s not for very long of course, because wonder is a childish pastime that surely is to pass with time. this verb must soon become a phase of the past, a short lived temperament at most; that seems to be what my mind tells me. stop wondering and start doing something else, i’m not sure what else, but surely there is something out there far more productive then wondering.
regarding God, in respect to Jesus, it seems wonder has become off limits. it seems somehow we have lost our wonder.
the sky is just the sky these days, blue, purple, red, whatever. things are things, beautiful, sure, but also explainable. nothing goes without being explained, that much we are persistent of. but i wonder, is there another story out there, an inspiring story that when told well would make harlots, priests, politicians, and the stock brokers alike draw near to hear; a story that is right, and good, and just, and worth telling, but not just telling……….. actually telling well, really, really well.
because who cares what the story is, if it is not told well.
everyone knows that even the most inspiring, compelling tale can be sold out by the narrator. and even the best joke can be betrayed by the joke teller. you see stories are built around a personality, a conflict, a dilemma, a decision, a moral, a truth, a lie, a betrayal, a plot, a mystery, a revealing, and it is to be certain that the best stories are those of redemption, those of second chances, of reconciliation, and those of promise.
you see, there’s this story being played out in my life, this story of continual struggle and change and process and learning and advancing and retreating and failing and succeeding and blowing the punch line. it’s a mystery sometimes even to me, what is going to happen next in my own story, as i read along i’m not certain what is lurking on the other side of this page. my story has yet to resolve.
sometimes i wonder if there are great storytellers out there, ones who capable of captivating a golf club, but they are stuck with lame stories. i wonder sometimes if God were asked to tell my story how he would respond; being a master story teller and all. when it comes to my life, in story form, would there be substance enough for the best story teller to bring a crowd to their feet, or in the end would my script be so self centered and flat lining that even the storyteller looked bad.
seems we play in both roles in both contexts. we are storytellers, and we ourselves are a story, and one to be told. our lives are living, breathing, moving, testimony of something, of someone.
now lets say the table were turned and it was i who was given the assignment to tell the story of God. this is quite the endeavor, God knows, but for fun, lets say someone asked me about the story of God, they asked me to share it with them, but not with words and not in five minutes or even thirty minutes. lets say they had time, lets even say they had lots of time. lets say they asked me to tell this story over 20-30-40-50 years or however long I live, and in that time i would paint pictures with my words, but lay concrete with my life.
lets say they would only enjoy the painting if the story was something that could be built on, that could be trusted, and backed by the character of the storyteller. lets say they wanted to see the painting only if they knew the concrete wouldn’t crack.
maybe they give me all this time because they want to know the long version, because somewhere along the way they got sick of the short one. the short one doesn’t tell very well they say. the short one seems impersonal, persistent, bottom-line-ish, and extremely assuming and filled with agenda. the short one makes me feel like a project not a person, and honestly it leaves out a lot, and not one time has the teller of the short story called the next day to invite me to coffee. i want the long story this time, they say, the life story if you will, and i want it told well, could you please tell it well.
because who cares about the story if it is not told well.
you see the world is full of story tellers, of painters, who all paint and who are all being painted. but we in the world also chose what we paint and we chose which brush we would like to be painted with. and we chose what we write about, speak about, and tell about. the stories we tell are the ones dearest to us and the ones that tell best are not second hand, they are experienced, lived, and believed in by the teller.
if the story of God is to continue to be told it must be told with truth, yes, but with wonder and beauty just as well, because there is so much that we just don’t understand. and there is so much mystery to God, about God, and so much otherness in his character that explaining it away is not only impossible, it’s fruitless. there are truths, God knows, even dare and must we say absolutes, but these mean nothing when bubble wrapped in bad story, bad art, and bad activism.
i know there are times when the story of me could use a proof read, a re-write, and an editor screaming would you please liven this up a bit, i’m bored to tears. and that same truth can be told for the way our lives tell the story of what we believe, what we long for, and what we place our trust in.
let us be re-written, in all our flagrant attempts to be entitled, may we be re-written, so that the one who’s story we are telling gets told well. because it makes me nervous that the story that has been give to tell came with a name already engraved on it’s cover. the name is “good news” and if we can’t tell a story called “good news” well, then maybe it’s not the stories fault. maybe it’s the teller. and the trouble with this story is that it has come off the pages and moved into our being, and it only becomes relevant when embodied by the one communicating. and when those communicating truly embody the story, then the story comes to life, the story becomes life, and the news of its goodness permeates, and the long version all the sudden doesn’t feel so long.
it feels natural, feels like home.
words and The Word September 9, 2008
by: Dorothy Worden
“When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all the time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?” ~ C. S. Lewis
When I read these words for the first time, I felt like something had been dug out of me. But it wasn’t a word. It was great, ragged-edged gap — a place where there should have been a word, but wasn’t. Or maybe I was just out of breath from the railroad tie of beauty and astonishment that had just hammered into my chest. Words can have that effect on me.
I love words. Predictable of me, I know. An English teacher with a passion for language. How original. Cliché or not, it’s true. I love the way they sound. I love the way people’s faces look when they are so wrapped up in what they are trying to communicate that they forget everything else. I love word’s subtle shades of meaning — how there are no true synonyms. I love learning about the history and genealogy of words — how ‘mellifluous’ (pleasant to the ear) comes from the Latin words mellis (honey) and fluer (to flow) while ‘melody’ comes from the Greek word melos (song). I love how we are part of that genealogy. I love that language is always changing as it is used. It’s the world’s longest standing group project and we make it up everyday. I love the mystery of how we learn language, how we use it to broadcast our identities, how we turn it into art, how we use it to spur others to action. I love that words connect us.
But I know that’s not the whole story.
I picture Hitler’s campaign speeches. I picture the shades of meaning between “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” that let the world tarry while people were dying in Darfur. I picture the look on her face when, in anger, I told her the brutal truth I can never take back.
Words can deceive. They can hurt. They can kill. They are slippery and treacherous. What I meant as love, you heard as pity. What he meant as honesty, she heard as blame. What you meant as peace, I heard as indifference.The poet, Jack Gilbert, says it like this: “How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite.”
I think that sums it up. I am astonished by the beauty of language. I am terrified by its limitations.
I don’t think I’m the only one who has the suspicion that there is a perfect word out there. It’s the one that eludes us when we are at a loss for words. It’s the one on the tip of our tongues that we can never quite figure out how to say. We don’t know what it is, but we do know, somehow, that to hear it would fill us. To say it would give our lives meaning.
In the Bible, one of Jesus’ disciples, a guy named John, opens his account of Jesus’ life with a strange sentence. “In the beginning,” he tells us, “was the Word.” Not a word. The Word. That Word. John goes on to say that this Word was around before the beginning of the world. It was the Word that called the sun into existence and the Word that set all life living. In short, John writes, “The Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
John chapter 1. Read it. See if it leaves you gasping. It leaves me gasping because it tells me that the word that we all have been searching for, the word that Lewis says has lain unspoken at the center of our souls for all these years, the word that lets us see God face to face, is not a concept or a belief system or philosophy. It’s a name. It’s a man. It’s Jesus.
Try that word on for size.
~Dorothy
