February 2004 Archives

oh, the madness! i know that the messes i get myself into are mostly due to poor planning on my part in not seeking the help of others before i actually need it, but am i allowed to be bitter anyway?

this saturday will be (potentially the first annual) A Chocolate Affair, an event to redeem Valentine's Day with awareness of fair trade chocolate and thoughtfulness about the farmers on the other end of our dark indulgences. we'll be having a cookie-decorating and Valentine making for kids, free fair trade coffee and tea, a bake sale featuring fair trade baked goods, and a bake-off--oh, the bake-off! i nearly ended up on my knees begging people at church yesterday to please-please-please enter the bake-off (apparently the chance to win a $50 gift certificate to World Fare is not incentive enough). happily, i got two more entries and we're up to seven, though five of them are from our church and i was hoping to get more people from the community involved. it seems as though people here are more than willing to support community events only when they're a tried-and-true three years old (past bore-risk stage).

but enough complaining. perhaps what i'm most excited about is the fact that my sister, breanne, will be entering the bake-off. she and her husband will make the two-hour drive out on Friday night and by Saturday morning, she'll be hard at work perfecting her famous Chocolate Mousse Cake. this will be the second weekend they've come out in a month, due to his broken thumb that's keeping him from work for six weeks--a broken bone can be a blessing.

i've never really felt that close to breanne. odd timing maybe. i was quite a merciless selfish brat as a child and she, a second child searching desperately for her identity. i left for college while i was too absorbed in my personal problems and afraid of her often overt hatred of me to develop a real relationship with her. we're only three years apart, but due to cut-offs, never had the opportunity of driving to school together or being one another's anchor in the tumultuous halls of high school.

and so, unfortunately, here we are at 24 and 21 years old, and still partially a mystery to one another. her husband has been much easier to get to know, once she stopped shielding him from our family (or the other way around?) long enough for his own personality to emerge, rather than the one we manufactured in its absence (the smoker who doesn't want to have anything to do with us). and discovering how wonderful he is has been a window allowing me to see how wonderful she really is and realize how much i've been missing her.

i can't wait until Saturday.

even though i should really be working on the insane amount of homework i have to finish by tomorrow morning, i just posted some new pictures on the World Fare web site.

more great stuff from volf, whom i mentioned a few entries ago, this time specifically regarding a Christian approach to culture (how appropriate!):

"Our coziness with the surrounding culture has made us so blind to many of its evils that instead of calling them into question, we offer our own versions of them--in God's name and with a good conscience."

and this . . .

"The proper distance from a culture does not take Christians out of that culture. Christians are not the insiders who have taken flight to the new 'Christian culture' and become outsiders to their own culture; rather when they have responded to the call of the Gospel they have stepped, as it were, with one foot outside their own culture while with the other remaining firmly planted in it."

this book is really good.

in addition to further talk about a fair trade coffee shop in Three Rivers and community living opportunities, this month will see two new issues of catapult, the first major World Fare-sponsored event, trips to Illinois and Pennsylvania, an article for Comment--perched at the top of the month, overlooking the vast 29 (now 27) days ahead, i feel somewhat overwhelmed. how will i reach the horizon of March and successfully hit all of the necessary stops along the way?

all of our various tasks and activities are very exciting and i have the sense of moving in the right direction, but i also constantly sense my inadequacy. my mind seems weak, my prayer life insufficient, my meditation random, and my work less than excellent. the struggle for balance is rewarded with blank spaces barely long enough for me to catch my breath.

our constant desire and prayer is for more help in this work, for the growth of this community of Kingdom visionaries. the ideas are there; the time and money are not. and as much as we long for these things so we can move forward, we are aware of a thousand reasons they are not given.

it's just that, sometimes, i'm so tired.

we just got a high-speed internet connection at home and we're hoping this convenience will allow us to post more on the blog and on the *cino discussion board.

woohoo for whiz bang gadgetry!