Pirate Corin

"Hey, me parties!" (That's his version of "Ahoy, me hearties!")

Colossians

We started discussing Colossians in our c.group last night, continuing our approach of reading a whole epistle in a sitting. I now can't imagine approaching Scripture in any other way, as it's really easy to misinterpret verses outside of the whole.

Colossians is, essentially, a manual on how to exist as a church body. It's addressed to the plural "you" (or y'all, as Amanda pointed out) not to the singular "you" that we often focus on as individualists in an individualist society. There's a whole passage about getting rid of anger, rage, maliciousness, greed, slander, etc. (3:5-9) that's just ripe for reading as a personal self-discipline list. But it comes right after a passage (2:16-23) about not getting sucked into rule-oriented behavior that puffs up by requiring devotion and rigid discipline. Paul's point is not personal piety. Rather, it is providing a simple statement about how social groups work: you (y'all) must set aside all that foments disruption by drawing attention to onself, and instead replace it with mutual submission to one another (3:10-25). That's the core of the book. It's not pushing a personal code of conduct, but is describing what does and doesn't work in successful corporate life together.

"Make allowance for each other's faults," Paul says in 3:13. Why don't we see that on a bumper sticker? Does anyone even know that's in the Bible, let alone the central tenet of Colossians? "Let peace rule." "Teach and counsel each other." "Clothe yourselves in humility." "Let your conversation be gracious." "Always be thankful."

You don't do this stuff to earn brownie points or gold stars or gain status, you do it because it's practical in achieving a loving community. If it seems like Paul is full of too many rules and regulations it's because he likes to say the same thing a hundred different ways until it sinks in. There is simply one main point here: since you love Christ, contribute to the healthy life of the church body, which is his family. Make allowance for each other's faults — Paul's just telling it like it is.

Mamma Mia

We attended our first West Seattle outdoor movie last night, which was great fun. I haven't been to a movie outdoors since, I believe, Indiana, where we enjoyed the last two years of the only drive-in theater I've ever been to, before it shut down. (Actually, enjoy is a strong word, considering the car roasted unless you had the windows down, but then you got feasted on by mosquitoes.)

The first thing I want to make clear — this is for any random internet searcher who happens to be looking for a start time for these things, which they do not advertise well — is that we got there at 6:45 or so (after finding a blog post from two years ago that mentioned a start time of 7 p.m.) and the lot was already quite full. We had to wedge our two chairs into a little spot where two other rows kind of diverged. We probably could have fit in around the edges more easily, but then you're more in the way of foot traffic, and boy was there foot traffic. See, the movie didn't actually start until 9:30. I know! Crazy! And we'd brought a 3-year-old. (To be fair, they say the movie starts at dusk, but I somehow imagined they meant "just dusk" not "full dusk.")

Amanda walked Corin around the Junction for a while to kill time while I guarded the seats, but by 8 most of the stores were closed. There was free popcorn and ice cream and cotton candy (which I believe is not usual, but they were celebrating the 100th anniversary of the building on which we were projecting the film, so they pulled out the stops), as well as handing out free toothbrushes and oral care kits, which fortunately kept Corin entertained for a while. There was some dancing, sponsor plugs, a raffle, a short film. (A really odd choice for a short film — Trip to the Dentist, with W.C. Fields — considering that it makes dentists out to be sadistic self-absorbed pain-inflicters, when the event was partly sponsored by two dentists in the building. Corin was a little freaked out by the short, especially all the fake screaming from the dentist chair, when we're actually trying to get him used to the idea of the dentist as being not scary before he goes in next month. Also, the short was incredibly racist, sexist, and classist — maybe a product of its time, but I'm not quite sure that it warranted public viewing without a disclaimer or some sort.)

Fortunately Corin was being cute and energetic rather than, say, whiny and rambunctious, and lasted not only the whole preamble but the whole movie as well. I was sure we'd have to leave by midpoint (and we probably should have, considering how we threw his bedtime off), but the boy loves "Mamma Mia." He watched it with us on DVD maybe nine months or a year ago and loved it then, and we occasionally launch into a hodge-podge rendition of singing its songs even now. He loves the music video on Youtube of Amanda Seyfried and clips from the movie.

And I'm with him. Before seeing "Mamma Mia" the first time I was an ABBA virgin, and I had enjoyed the songs and therefore the movie quite a bit. But I wasn't prepared for how highly unshakable their songs are. How they worm their way into your brain. How they feel insidiously familiar, as if the universe was born with these tunes hard-wired into its circuitry. Of any band, they're the one I'm most concerned sold themselves to the devil to make universally addictive tunes. This second time around I was surprised at how re-hearing so many of the songs were like visiting old friends. And how exquisitely romantic the filming was, now that my processor-brain was freed up for focus on it. It was all deeply disturbing and delicious.

Actual conversation

"Let's put the bacon back in the freezer; we don't want it to go bad."

"What's 'go bad'?"

"It means we don't want it to get rotten."

"What's rotten?"

"Rotten is like when food ... goes ... bad."

"What's 'go bad,' Apa?"

"It's like when food sits out, and so it gets all moldy and gross."

"I wanna see gross, Apa! What's gross?"

At this point I actually started thinking through things in the fridge that probably had mold on them, before realizing that it probably wasn't a good idea to get him interested at all in exploring disgusting food.

Nice to meet you, octopus

Poke-eye

Corin was gifted a little plastic Toy Story horse several months back from the UPS pick-up window after he waited very patiently for our packages to be located. I couldn't quite remember what the character's name was, except that it wasn't Pokey, because that was Gumby's horse. Unfortunately, I murmured that to myself out loud.

Several months later, after we saw Toy Story 3, I found the horse again and brought it out to Corin. "Look, it's Bullseye!" I told him.

For going on two weeks now the horse's name is "Poke-eye." As in, with a sharp stick.

Ouch

I know tennis elbow is a thing, but how about toddler-swinging wrist?

Corin's had a turn on a swing for 45 minutes straight for three days in a row now, and I'm beginning to feel it.

Forever will it dominate your destiny

The Wallingford playground has three slides: a twisty slide, a tunnel slide, and a side-by-side hump-slide. Corin's favorite is the tunnel slide. But he can't pronounce the "l" very well.

So after a couple times down the cavernous tunnel slide, he exclaims, "More the dark side! I want to go down the dark side!"

Sharon and I burst out laughing, so he must have thought he wasn't being clear. "I want the dark one. The dark one is my favorite!"

Well on his way to being a Sith Lord.

Working backward

One thing in particular has stuck in my mind from the conversation I had the other day — this friend talked about approaching Scripture without his mind settled on what it all meant. In particular, he liked approaching the person of Jesus without superimposing the idea of "Son of God" on him beforehand; rather, he preferred to approach Jesus with the same sense of confusion that the people of the day had about him and then to tease out and work through the text to discover that he must be the Son of God. Rather than being handed the answers and conclusion in advance, he found it more beneficial in making it his own belief if he put the pieces together himself and was surprised by this Jesus anew. "Don't tell me Jesus is the Son of God and then present the Gospels to prove it," was something to the effect of what he said. Tell me about Jesus himself, and let me be drawn in by the question."

Science!

After Corin was in the bath for nearly an hour last night, I tried to convince him it was time to get out by showing him that our fingers were all wrinkly.

"What's frinkly, Apa?" he asked.

I showed him my fingertips and told him that when you've been in the water a long time they get all rough and bunched up.

"Apa frinkly; Corin not frinkly," he decided.

I showed him his hands and how they were wrinkled, too, so we should let the water drain.

But he had another course of action. "I wash off the frinkly for you," and turned the faucet back on to clean his hands of frinkles.

I love this city

I sat down at the library today to type up some notes on "Prayer and Temperament" and got into a two-hour conversation with a stranger about psychology, Jesus, home church, education, Paul, James, canonization, third-century food, American cities, love and marriage, divinity, loving one another, and the call of God on us. (Sorry, other library patrons.) It wasn't remotely weird or stilted, but rather substantive, challenging, refreshing. It's amazing, walking and weaving among people all day, to stop and to uncover the fullness and variety of a life of the person just one seat over.

Spent

I hate to pat my own back, but one of the songs I wrote has been going through my mind lately and it has become such a prayer for me that I couldn't help but share how much I liked it. It goes:

It is not our goal to remain unstained
like a chalice buffed and shined;
He has filled our cup with abundant love,
let us spill it down our sides

The gist of the idea is this: Too often I feel that we as Christians are pressured to live a kind of "pure" life with no sin, no mistakes, no tarnish. But the easiest way for us to do that is to remove ourselves from people who we don't like.

It's relatively easy to be kind, loving, thoughtful, generous, and peaceful among those who think and look and act like we do; as Jesus said, "If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them." Yet somehow we still imagine that what God wants from us is to be pure and untainted, removed from all temptation of anger and haughtiness and despising and overreaction.

What he asks of us, rather, is to love. And love is messy. We're going to bear the scars of it. We're going to make mistakes in relationship. We're going to hurt people's feelings and hurt our own in inviting people of all sorts to the banquet table with us. We won't come out the other side pristine. We'll be well worn, chipped, cracked, stained, with the marks of Christ.

I'm not stating this out of a place of success or achievement in this area; I am just terrible with lowering my defenses and spending energy on those who don't mutually reciprocate. I say it to myself as a hope and dream as much as a truth of faith.

Love requires that we jump into the thick of people's lives, even and especially those we don't like or love or understand or appreciate, and to treat them as Christ treats them, as God's beloved creations. That's what its all about. That's what Jesus did, that's what he's calling us toward, that's what he's giving us the power to do.

Our lives are like the talents of the parable: At the end of the story we shouldn't be pristinely perfect like the tucked away stash; we should be spent.