Slips of Paper, Bits of Creativity

Lindsay Crandall
Artful Kids
I’m dumbfounded. My preliterate preschooler is turning into a little journalist, and I have no idea why. When she sees me with scraps of paper, it is more often to make a grocery list than anything else, which she’s at least mildly aware of since I always start my list by asking, “Lily, what should we get from the grocery store?” To which she replies something like, “Cereal, strawberries, and chocolate.” I’d like to think that it’s the writer in me that has somehow projected the importance of literacy to my child and she’s absorbing my love of the written word, but I don’t think that’s it.

The Prophetic Imagination of Bruce Springsteen

Stephen Lamb
Bookish, Justice, Music
“We do not have to live as if we are alone.” One would not be hard pressed to interpret a large percentage of Bruce Springsteen’s extensive catalogue of songs over the last thirty-something years as attempts to communicate the same message. The role of an artist in our world today surely includes, among other things, the task of expanding our moral imagination . . .
Why We Gather

Why We Gather

Andi Ashworth
Feast, Hospitality

Now, after so many years in Nashville, my journals and photograph albums are full of the stories of these gatherings. I’ve come to see them as part of the significant work of my life. I have no guarantee they will ultimately have the effect I want them to. But what I suspect, and what I hope, is that the scents, flavors, often-used recipes, family chitchat, friends catching up, and the familiar stamp of the way things are done will seep in, helping to create a family identity and leave a heritage of belonging.

Called to the Table

Laura Lynn Brown
Feast, Hospitality
The seating arrangement will be tricky, because some of these people are shy and will not be comfortable talking to strangers. They might feel uncertain about proper table manners or what to wear. They probably don’t get asked out much. But none of that matters. At this fantasy dinner party, every one of them will arrive with any fear in their hearts replaced with hope.

Doxology and Desire: Making Small Things New

Sandra McCracken
Creation Care
It is a small but real thing that each of us can enter into this practice of conservation believing that we can be part of tangible renewal. For some, it might take the shape of educating or gardening. For others it might look like banking or engineering, a public office or scientific research. It takes all kinds to accomplish the greater good. And it matters for us to practice renewal. It matters because God loves what He made, and when you love someone, you are drawn to love what they love.
April in Paris

April in Paris

Mary Van Denend
Music, Truth

My mother adored Daddy, as she called him, but she swooned for Ravel. Family legend has it that a recording of Ravel’s best known piece, Bolero, which somehow turned up in my mother’s possessions when in high school, was promptly destroyed, being deemed far too sensuous for the impressionable oldest daughter of a Swedish Baptist preacher. And she could painfully recall not being able to attend a friend’s birthday party as a child in Pasadena, because the planned activity for the group was to see a movie — a novel, rare treat in 1930. The first time I saw the film Babette’s Feast, I had some inkling of the dilemma my mother’s upbringing must have wrought in her blossoming creative life, as it would later in mine.

Harm into Healing

Dyana Herron
Bookish, Truth
You have been betrayed by your body, when you had gone around all this time thinking you and your body were one thing, inseparable, a winning team. And although the doctor’s approach you with their sterile, shining instruments and unfailing clinical cool, still you panic, and inside you feel hurt.

Because you are hurt.

And although doctors now have treatments for most maladies, what comes after that — the healing — is something one must do alone.

Means of Grace

Kate Harris
Truth
The remarkable thing about the non-celebrity crush, then, is what it says about the crush-er, so to speak. The unsuspecting object of your enthusiastic esteem serves as an indicator of something you yourselves aspire to do. Just as the celebrity culture feeds on those who long to attach their identity to an admired other, the object of your own great admiration tells you quite a bit about your own loves and longings. It tells you a little bit more about how you aspire to contribute to your world.

New Creations: A Bookbinder’s Passion

Lanier Ivester
Bookish, Crafty
I had this notion of a swallow, the image of love and sacrifice, winging through a little arched door, such as might give on to The Secret Garden or Wonderland or perhaps even the forgotten rose bed in Burnt Norton. I thought immediately of Jean “Davy” Vanuaken, my real-life heroine of A Severe Mercy, and her chosen “low door” of obscurity and service for the love of Christ. I thought of all the beauty that has ever gone unlauded by the world, and the love that breathes life into it and the joy that rises from it like the incense of a thank offering — and I knew not only what I wanted to do, but why. 

Pride and Play

Jennifer Strange
Music
I hate that I don’t play the violin regularly anymore, but I know I will pick it up again. Sooner rather than later if our son will start his scratching at the same age when I started mine. But my joy in the listening has increased during my sabbatical. At some point, without my noticing a shift, patronizing the local symphony orchestra became a privilege rather than a presumption, much to my glad surprise.

Beauty in the Blend

Erica Crotts
Truth, Vocation
Something within us — though we seek to give an impression of total control — wants an adventure. I’m beginning to understand that this adventure we end up experiencing is different from the one we seek in childhood or in our youth as twenty-somethings. It is not solely world travel, fame, or even the chase of seemingly impossible dreams. The adventure is in community, in sharing life together, and in the natural chaos it brings.

Lenten Reflections

Alice Smith
Artful Kids, Truth
Just behind me, all of the sprouts for our garden lean towards the sunlight and serve as yet another reminder of new life. Surrounded by gifts of life, light, growth, beauty, feast, story, and love, I sit down. I pause. I wait and I color these tiny Lenten pictures. When I steal away for a few minutes to color, I feel myself wanting to savor the project, and I work with a purposeful slowness, hoping the exercise will be one that lasts much longer than I know it will.

Eating the Easter Bunny

Margie Haack
Feast, Truth
Americans have moved so far away from the process of butchering and a lot of us have sworn off eating meat due to health reasons, or for the sake of morality, that we can’t bear to trap the mice living in the couch or the spider making a web behind the toilet. Most of us are removed so far from the family farm and rural life that we have lost even secondhand experience of the cost of blood and butchering. If we buy meat at all, it is sealed in plastic and perched on a white tray with a diaper underneath to absorb offensive liquid.

Art House North: The Goodness in the Gathering

Judith Hougen
Hospitality, Place, Truth
So we enter the swim of people, words, laughter, a table laden with desserts, the dusky scent of coffee steaming from the cup in my hand as familiar faces sift through the crowd. And amid the lovely clamor, I’m reminded that what we’re experiencing is something artists desperately need — this coming together, this connection. All art is a conversation. The artist of faith negotiates a rich and multifaceted dialogue with God, the work, and community.

Books

Kate Harris
Bookish
If indeed “the medium is the message” there is something lacking, something too sterile and quick about holding hard plastic instead of bending a dog ear, penciling a note, or marking a beautiful scene or character to trace as my daughter likes to do. Indeed, a well-worn storybook is perhaps the most compelling evidence that our best reading — our best learning — is not primarily compelled by will but by love.

The Love that Calls Us

Allison Backous Troy
Vocation
If I am compelled to teach because I long to see my students transfigured, then the act of teaching itself will also, in some way, transfigure me. This vocation, if I follow it, will burn out the impurities of heart and soul so that I may, however faintly, carry glory.

Death by Neti Pot

Towles Kintz
Truth
On the other side of anxiety, I always feel a mixture of amusement and renewed lucidity, secured by a corrected sense of what is and is not reality, grateful that I can see the truth plainly. Unlike my husband, who gives me incredible grace in this area, I regard the part of my brain that believes in the anxious and ridiculous with impatience and disdain. As a writer, I am grateful for my imagination, but when my anxiety is at its worst, I wish for the rational, calculating mind of an accountant or a doctor.
Commonplace Cathedrals: the Architecture of Hospitality

Commonplace Cathedrals: the Architecture of Hospitality

Meredith Schultz
Hospitality, Truth

Extravagant meals are neither possible nor advisable every single day. But there is a way to weave an everyday extravagance into our spaces; it depends not on expensive food and furniture but on sacrificial care. In a culture of perpetual indulgence and breakneck busyness, the less tangible resources, like time spent, convey the most meaning. A loaf of homemade bread. A simple centerpiece cut from local flora. A guest bed with turned-down sheets and freshly washed towels.

Hopes are Shy Birds

Eric Peters
Bookish, Truth, Visual Art, Vocation
There is never a simple answer to the question I am frequently asked: “What do you do with your time when not touring or playing music?” Perhaps the better question is, Why do you do what you do? Why cull together (more like cobble) a mishmash income year-in and year-out — each year the same, each one different, each one in hindsight a miracle? The years carry with them the same struggle, the same burden, only clothed in different hides. Some years are grimier, more pungent than others.

That word: struggle.
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