Teaching children how to do something creative w/o telling them what to create is difficult. Kids are used to concrete tasks, used to following the dotted line.
Of course, for some things, this is how it has to be, but when it comes to acts of creative expression, freedom must win the day.
Freedom is a wild thing, and so glue will be spilt and markers left uncapped. But the work?
Masterpieces made by tiny hands.
This is part of my Public Domain Derivation Series.
Communication has come a long way in the past few decades. It’s truly amazing how easy it is to communicate with others, even when miles apart.
Despite all of this communication—true sharing of the self with another and receiving [the same in return]—is more difficult. We have more ways to share and less to say. And if we we’re not careful, we get so wrapped up in ourselves that we communicate a lack of care.
Nothing could be worse than to tell someone you don’t care without even realizing it.
This is part of my Public Domain Derivation Series.
“We have to be wary of the influence of culture.”
That’s what I heard an older gentleman say the other day in a conversation about how the Church should conduct its business. Culture, as he saw it, was a mental contagion that was poised to infect the Church and kill her from the inside.
Let me be clear that I’m not writing this to criticize this person. In fact, I’ve waited nearly four weeks to start writing about this experience and won’t be posting this for several more weeks. No, this isn’t about that particular person. It’s about the narrow view of culture that he expressed so clearly that I’ve heard others express as well, though less explicitly. And so, let’s discuss his perspective without judgement of his character.
Implicit in his assessment of culture as a threat to the Church was his belief that culture was an entirely worldly creation and was not already an aspect of his own Christian experience.
Culture is a false enemy. People often use “culture” as a stand-in for the ideology of their political or religious rivals. Combined with a flawed view of what is secular and what is sacred, we arrive at a perspective of culture as an evil force desperately trying to influence, infiltrate, or in anyway incapacitate the Church.
There is no such thing as a “secular” or “sacred.” All things belong to God, and so nothing, in that sense, is secular. However, some things are sacred in that we use them for God or to worship God and other things are “common,” which is to say that we use them as part of our everyday lives.
“Profane,” however, is what we call the treating of sacred things as common. When we take the name of the LORD and use it as an expletive, a word uttered to express anger or pain, we profane the Name. However, that doesn’t mean the we cannot use words to express our suffering, but rather, we should reserve some words, like the Name, for when we call out for an end to suffering.
The problem in that scenario wasn’t the language, but it’s use. The enemy isn’t culture; it’s the way it’s used, expressed, warped toward the common away from the sacred. Human beings are sacred creatures, and the culture we create out to reflect that. To the extent it doesn’t, we and our culture are profane. But that doesn’t mean culture is the enemy, and it doesn’t mean that culture is a foe or force banging on the door of your church, trying to force its way in.
Culture is already inside the church because it is part of every single one of us.
The fact that this individual in this meeting was debating an issue in English is an example of his culture.
The fact that we were meeting to discuss and debate is an example of culture.
Culture is an indispensable part of who we are, and like everything else, reflects our fallen nature while simultaneously being slowly redeemed.
In Revelation 21:10, the Apostle John had a vision of a heavenly city, a “New Jerusalem,” descending to the earth. This would be the capital of God’s eternal kingdom, Heaven on Earth.
But why wasn’t it a garden? In Genesis, when all of this began, God planted a garden and placed humanity in it as the crown jewel of all that He had made. The first cities were made by men, men descended from Cain. In fact, for most of the Old Testament, cities were places that represented the heights (or rather depths?) of humanity depravity.
And yet, at the close of this world and the opening of the next, God was founding a city, not planting a garden. Why?
Because Jesus died to redeem humanity along with the rest of creation, including what we have created. God has redeemed us, and one day, He will redeem our culture.
Being awake and unable to speak, unable to communicate has to be one of the worst ways to live.
Once, in high school, I had to have surgery. When I woke up, I was nauseous, weak, and unable to speak. While in that state of post-anesthetic paralysis, all I could do was steam for help in my own head as a doctor behind a curtain ordered a pizza with what sounded to me like the most disgusting assortment of toppings imaginable.
Within a few minutes of standing up, I vomited.
I don’t think of that moment often, but today I did as I had a similar experience.
I was trying to get somewhere this morning when three of four different “domestic” issues—nothing serious at all—and I don’t know why but immediately my stress level skyrocketed.
For no good or even discernible reason.
But there I was, seething because my dear, sweet family dared to interact with me.
Not my proudest moment, but not really my focus here either.
No, my focus is my inability to articulate my emotions or to even speak when I get upset.
After all the benign issues were handled, I left to take my daughter to where she needed to go and, the whole way there, I couldn’t speak, couldn’t talk about what happened, couldn’t talk about the day, couldn’t ask her questions about her day which was going to be filled with lots of fun and exciting events.
I was locked in by my anger.
It’s happened so many times, and it’s paralyzing. I can’t tell people I’m trapped, and yet if they poke me hard enough, the bubble will burst and all of my anger and rage will pour on so poor, unsuspecting person.
Usually a loved one.
So, I’m writing this for those moments, when I’m locked in, when I can’t explain, can’t speak, but that I love them and will hopefully be back soon.
(Featured Image Modified from Original)
Has someone said that? I can’t remember. It’s true, in a way. God gave Adam and already flourishing garden and told him to steward and cultivate it.
To steward is to preserve. To cultivate is to change.
God has created us to be creators. We use His creation to make our own. We preserve order and goodness, while changing it to suite our creative vision. This is worship.
This is part of my Public Domain Derivation Series.
They say you can’t hear explosions in space,
But you can you see them?
Can you see the color?
Can you feel the rich purple,
Spread across the deep, ink of God’s first landscape?
God loves to finger paint,
To redecorate with the pieces and colors scattered about.
He works in oranges and yellows,
Painting against a star-speckled canvas,
Blowing up the darkness,
With glorious, color and light.
This is part of my “Inspired by Space” Series.
Title: Cygnus Loop Supernova Blast Wave
Full Description:
This is an image of a small portion of the Cygnus Loop supernova remnant, which marks the edge of a bubble-like, expanding blast wave from a colossal stellar explosion, occurring about 15,000 years ago. The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) image shows the structure behind the shock waves, allowing astronomers for the first time to directly compare the actual structure of the shock with theoretical model calculations. Besides supernova remnants, these shock models are important in understanding a wide range of astrophysical phenomena, from winds in newly-formed stars to cataclysmic stellar outbursts. The supernova blast is slamming into tenuous clouds of insterstellar gas. This collision heats and compresses the gas, causing it to glow. The shock thus acts as a searchlight revealing the structure of the interstellar medium. The detailed HST image shows the blast wave overrunning dense clumps of gas, which despite HST’s high resolution, cannot be resolved. This means that the clumps of gas must be small enough to fit inside our solar system, making them relatively small structures by interstellar standards.
A bluish ribbon of light stretching left to right across the picture might be a knot of gas ejected by the supernova; this interstellar “bullet” traveling over three million miles per hour (5 million kilometers per hour) is just catching up with the shock front, which has slowed down by ploughing into interstellar material. The Cygnus Loop appears as a faint ring of glowing gases about three degrees across (six times the diameter of the full Moon), located in the northern constellation, Cygnus the Swan. The supernova remnant is within the plane of our Milky Way galaxy and is 2,600 light-years away. The photo is a combination of separate images taken in three colors, oxygen atoms (blue) emit light at temperatures of 30,000 to 60,000 degrees Celsius (50,000 to 100,000 degrees Farenheit). Hydrogen atoms (green) arise throughout the region of shocked gas. Sulfur atoms (red) form when the gas cools to around 10,000 degrees Celsius (18,000 degrees Farenheit).
Image Number:PR93-01
Date: January 1, 1993