Sunday, November 28

My first stint in the nursery in quite some time…

I just got home from church. I taught my Sunday School ladies class and then went cheerfully and happily into the nursery. If you are a faithful reader of my blog you will note that for a long time, a very long time, I had declared myself a non-baby person. In fact, I barely knew where the nursery was in our church. But now that I have these two baby grandkids and another on the way, I’m suddenly this baby person again. And I’m all over the babies in the church. So…. A few months ago I went to the young woman in charge of the nursery and volunteered my services. If you ever need any help, and if the choir or my praise team isn't involved that Sunday... (I'm in both of those.)

Last night I got a call – could I be in the nursery tomorrow? SURE. For one whole hour I sat with an adorable bruiser of a five month old on my lap, while a four month older slept in her car seat and another year older crawled around and smiled. It was wonderful and joyous. So no, my blog today isn’t filled with profound words of wisdom and wonderful insight about life and ministry and writing. It’s merely about holding a smiling, chubby baby on my lap for an hour.

My own grandchildren live at a distance from me. My fifteen month old grandson (and his parents) are a thousand kms away and my seven month old granddaughter (and her parents) are clear on the other side of the country. So sometimes this is hard for me.

Tuesday, November 23, 2004

A Woman of a Certain Age…

Each New Year’s I decide to consciously develop one character trait. Two years ago it was kindness. I wanted to work on becoming kinder. This past year I’ve been working on wisdom. I’m a 'woman of a certain age,' and those of us in this esteemed age bracket are just naturally supposed to be wise. We’ve been taught that. It’s in the Bible – your elders are wise. Since I am now a woman of a certain age and soon to be an ‘elder’ I decided I need to work on wisdom.

So I asked God to give this to me and then I turned to God’s book of Wisdom, and this year I’ve been slowly, slowly, slowly working my way through the book of Proverbs, like one a day. To tell you how slow I am, it’s already December and I’m only in Chapter eleven. What I do is take one Proverb a day, write it out in my journal, and then think about that one for the day.

There’s a lot in there about holding one’s tongue and thinking before one speaks and living in community with others.

Examples include: Evil words destroy one’s friends, wise discernment rescues the godly,

and how about: It is foolish to belittle a neighbor, a person with good sense remains silent.

Oh, here’s a good one for today’s violent world: Upright citizens bless a city and make it prosper, but the talk of the wicked tears it apart.

That got me thinking, have I ever blessed my city? Have I ever even prayed for my city? I think of the cities of the world; Toronto, New York, Baghdad, Jerusalem. Should I be praying for these cities? Apparently.

I'm not sure if I'm getting any wiser, and I don't know if when I'm an elder I'll be a fountain of good words for people, but I'm working on it. And asking. And reading the words of the wisest man who ever lived, Solomon.

Tomorrow I'm taking part in Proclamation 2004 which is an annual event of the audible reading of God's word. Most of the churches in the city are involved in this two-week long proclamation of Scriptures.

Tuesday, November 16, 2004

Praying to be unfamous…

My computer’s back! Yesterday I picked up my sweet iBook, completely remade and refitted. I spent yesterday afternoon getting to know this friend of mine again. Do I sound weird? I’m a writer, I live on my computer. It’s my desktop, my file cabinet, my news reading material, my date book, my radio, and of course, it keeps the words of my stories and novels safely stored. So, it's back, and all of this means, too, that I’ll be back to blogging on a more or less regular basis.

I have to share the last sentence, the final word in Michael Card’s Scribbling in the Sand. His concluding advice to writers is, ‘Never cease praying that you will not become a star or celebrity.” Huh? I’m a writer, and I’m supposed to pray that I never get famous? In the business I’m in there are stars and celebrities coming out the woodwork. Everywhere you turn a new star is being made. And every writer in the world dreams of the New York Times bestseller list and television interviews and the book tours and the fancy hotels. Of course I would like to be famous. Wouldn't you? And yet he dares to suggest that I pray that I never get to be a star?

Yet this is what Michael Card prays for, and interestingly enough, it's also how Jesus lived. He never wanted to be a star. He took the back roads. He retreated. He left the crowds, he didn't stand there signing autographs with a huge white-teeth smile. And even the things he taught go against our modern fifteen-minutes-of fame culture. He said, 'The first shall be last and the last shall be first.' Huh? This is hard stuff for me. And at this point in my imperfect life all I can pray for is that God would instill within me the desire to pray to be unfamous. But at least I'm thinking about it.

On another subject - Last June I spoke at the Write Canada conference in Toronto. Since that time I’ve had a number of requests for that series of three addresses on Writing with Passion and Integrity. So, what I’ve decided to do is to turn those addresses into bite sized pieces and put them on this blog starting January. More about that in my upcoming newsletter...

Wednesday, November 10, 2004

My computer woes (or I want my Mac back)!

I have been without my computer for three weeks. Let me write that again so that it sinks in. I have been without my computer for three weeks. My three year old iBook went in for a little problem of the screen fading in and out three weeks ago, and is still in the computer hospital undergoing a transplant of its mother board, inverter and power supply, and yes, I'm getting a new screen, too.

A week ago my husband came home and said he had good news and bad news. The bad news was that it would be a few more weeks, and the good news was that I was getting the equivalent of a brand new machine without having to pay a penny. It goes off its warranty in a month, so I was able to squeeze in under the deadline.

My husband has graciously loaned me his Thinkpad –which I've been using with varying degrees of frustration. If you work on your computer daily, you know what I'm talking about. I have my computer set up the exact way I like it, with the internet radio station that I like at my fingertips, along with my email program (this web mail is for the birds), along with my addresses. But most of all my Word is set up just the way I like it. I have the ‘autocorrect’function set up with hundreds and hundreds of shortcuts. I can type very, very quickly, and when I'm typing along on my husband's computer I'm surprised when crc doesn’it automatically become ‘'church' on my documents, and dcm doesn't automatically become the word document. I have hundreds of others, like the word ‘'others'. That would be 'otrs.' And ‘'would' would be ‘'wd.'’It's a system sort of devised from Forkner shorthand which I learned many years ago when I was studying to be a journalist.

So, writing becomes tedious. And long. And I can't find my internet radio. And my calendar.

Plus, there's the little matter of sharing. Normally I spend the day writing in my office. In the evening I unplug the iBook from my monitor and head out to the living room where I lounge on the couch and answer email and blog and do ‘busy’work while I watch TV. (We have a wireless internet connection.) But then my husband wants to check his email.

So, please commiserate with me.

 Tuesday, November 9, 2004

Dreaming for a living….

I have a great job. I get to daydream for a living and then I get to write down those daydreams and get paid for it. Way back in the far reaches of history when I was a school kid I remember there were teachers said that I daydreamed too much. ‘If Linda would stop daydreaming so much her work would improve.’ I think that is a direct quote from an old report card. I used to sit at my desk and gaze outside – dreaming, thinking, making up stories, which in those days usually involved me saving the school by my heroic actions from some certain disaster.

This quote isn’t original with me but it’s one that I identify with – I have the only job ‘where I get to stay in my jammies all day and play with my imaginary friends.’

As for what I did today, I spent most of the afternoon at Starbucks working on my novel. I’m up to around chapter two. Not very far – and I’ve a long way to go, but I’m excited about ‘getting to know’ the new characters. I wake up at night and think about them and work through story lines. I think about them when I’m driving. I think about them when I'm cooking and cleaning and when I'm on my daily walk.

Rik, my husband, is home sick today. So, I brought him home a coffee. Tonight choir practice at church and tomorrow I'll dig into chapter three.

Lament Groups…

(1 comment)

I was reading something in Michael Card's Scribbling in the Sand this morning, an entry by Christian artist and author, Calvin Seerveld. I am trying to come up with part of the quote so I can make this shorter, but feel I must write the entire thing:

‘Because respectable- looking church-goers often have terrible problems in the hidden recess of their lives, I think we need ‘lament teams’ along with the trend for ‘praise choruses.’ Artists need to serve their neighbor who is hurting with more than escape, and must weep in art with those who are weeping (Romans 12:14-14) To write elegies, memorials and sad songs that are authentic, we as artists will need to crawl compassionately inside the very skin of those who are starving, displaced, depressed, victimized, fanatic with hatred, so the grace we artistically bring is not cheap.’

There are some writers who write so that readers can ‘escape’, even for a moment. That this is not what I write. I realized after reading this this morning that to lament is what I’ve been called to do.

When I was working on Sadie’s Song, a book about a Christian woman who is abused emotionally, physically and spiritually by her upstanding on-the-board Christian husband, it was a dark place for me to be every day. There were days when I prayed, “I don’t want to do this, God, it’s too painful. I can’t cry like this every day.” And it was as if God said, ‘This is your life, this is your calling. To cry, so that others can heal.’

It was gratifying to me to read Seerveld’s comments this morning. They lend legitimacy to what I do.

Posted: 6:58 AST, 2004-11-02

Oh, Linda. You put me into words! As one who can be funny, but tends to write dark and tragic, I have racked my brain as to why this is. I even laughed to a friend that I've coined a new genre, romantic tragedy. LOL I also loved your post about everything being a ministry, not just our writing. Thanks for all your insights.  

Monday, November 1,2004

Maternal Instinct 2 (The Sequel)

I had my babies, two of them, when I was in my twenties. When I was 25 I had a baby girl and when I was 29 I had a baby boy. At that time I hung around with mothers with babies. I noticed pregnant women and we swapped stories about morning sickness and due dates. I held friend’s babies over morning coffee, and we talked about diapers and diaper rash and colic and toys. Then my kids grew up. And I forgot about babies. In fact, for a whole lot of years I told people, “I’m sorry, I'm just not a baby person.”

Baby showers were fun, but I never offered to hold the babies and rather rolled my eyes at all the cooing that went on. And volunteer to help in the church nursery? That just wasn’t me. I’m just not a baby person, after all.

But this amazing thing happened fourteen months ago. My first grandchild was born, a baby boy, born to my son and his wife. Then seven months later my daughter and sil presented me with another grandbaby, a daughter. Now, suddenly, I’m a baby person again. And this funny thing happened. Plus, it ’s not just my own grandbabies that I’m cooing and ahhing and making a complete fool of myself over. I find myself walking up to complete strangers in the mall and telling them how adorable their little ones are. I notice pregnant woman and ask how they’re feeling. I show people the pictures in my wallet of Kira and Joshua until I’m sure they’re rolling their eyes.

And a couple of weeks ago I talked with the nursery coordinator of our church, volunteering to ‘help out’ occasionally on a Sunday morning.

The reason I’m writing about this now is that last night my husband and I got back from a flight out west where we visited our baby granddaughter Kira (and her parents, too, of course!). And in a week we drive to visit our grandson. Both of our grandchildren live at a distance from us, and so we rely on internet pictures and phone calls and visits. And meanwhile I’ll hug the babies in the nursery.

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