Porch Story :: June 2018

Intro

* Kristin Taylor offers an end of June what happened this month porch story; I'm doing likewise, talking about highlights of the month that ends today as I continue to remind myself insanity is expecting different results from the same behaviors, as I consider Eric Andersen's, "It's not the time but just the dreams that die." Song title? Rolling Home.

• During June Roxy Kitteh and I have been doing well in our new abode; I've been getting less design work than usual, but that's provided me some physical and emotional space to ask a very serious "now what?" Because it all remains unsustainable for longer than a nano-second.

• On to a mostly pictorial account.



• My header features blueberries because they were abundant and affordable all month long.

Southwest California Synod Assembly



• I had the high privilege of designing the logo for the middle judicatory's annual meeting, the crazy excitement of seeing my design splashed all over the place everywhere I looked during the assembly. Theme was "Love and Serve God, Neighbor & Creation." I loved getting two shoutouts from the stand during plenary session and you know I loved seeing so many people I knew and realizing I'd connected fairly well in Current City. Another joy was talking with pastor who'd served North Park Church in Former City. He's been in this synod ten years, so it had been a long time.



• Here's the Green Faith Team table; I designed captions and did the trifold display.



• The Great Blue Heron who belongs to one of our team/committee members had to be there.



• Natural beauty on the campus of California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks where we met.

Venice California and Venice Beach



• A friend and I spent a Sunday afternoon in the famous tourist and student town of Venice; here's Canal View 01.



• Venice Canal View 02



• We visited the town of Venice and Venice Beach (with palm trees).



• I did mention tourists; how about this shop display?



• If you lived there, you'd be home here.

Closer to Home



• Synod Assembly was Friday 01 June; Agnes and I sauntered over to Venice on Sunday 03 June—aside from a meeting in Glendale with no pictures for the first time ever, those were the only actual outings during June, but in my current City of Redondo Beach, I've enjoyed plenty of exquisitely scented star jasmine.



• Every day another moonflower / datura or two, three – or more – bursts into blossom in the back yard and fades by sundown. Monday morning 18 June there were five!



• Added over an hour later, even though the first thing I knew I'd include was the late in June full Strawberry Moon...

• It's not the time but just the dreams that die. I dream of the homecoming of contributing to world and church to an extent reasonably consonant with my ability. In one of her books, Kay Redfield Jamison wrote she'd aged so during a particular time in her life and added, "As well one must [age], with such loss of self, such proximity to death, such distance from shelter." I don't expect many people truly to get who I am and why I have the passions I do, but doesn't everyone need the shelter of homecoming? If I let my dreams die... I will die.

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Barry Pearman :: Broken to Built

Broken to Built: 31 Days of Rebuilding with Nehemiah by Barry Pearman on Amazon

For several years I've followed Pastor Barry Pearman's Turning the Page website and his twitter. I also belong to his related Facebook page and highly recommend all of them to you.

With a short chapter a day for a month of 31 days, mental health advocate and practitioner Barry Pearman anchors his reflective insights in the post-exilic Hebrew Bible book of Nehemiah. Although the book guides individuals as they move from being Broken to becoming (re)Built, Pearman reminds us of the necessity of having community alongside us and the necessity of constant connections with God, the only truly reliable One. The visually striking cover of the book photographically illustrates the idea of interaction and cooperation; in fact, the author crowd-sourced on his Facebook page to determine which one of four cover choices most appealed to people.

This book is for everyone! in his intro the author explains, "...we are in recovery mode. We are building and growing a life out of the rubble of what was left behind. In the choking dust of rubble we find that this is no fairy tale. The biblical Book of Nehemiah is a love story. God is in love with the people of Jerusalem and sees them broken, shamed and without dignity." And, "The big idea is that recovery/life takes place in a relational context."

Each chapter opens with a very short real-life vignette from people the author knows in real life; each chapter ends with a (1)Quote to consider, (2)Question to answer, and (3)A rock to build with. I'd suggest at first quickly glancing through the entire book to get a basic overview, then using each chapter as part of your daily devotions, and during the day remembering the end of chapter Quotes, Questions, and Rocks.

Hopefully everyone's life isn't completely in shambles and shards all the time, yet there's always some element that needs to be healed and helped back to wholeness. Maybe you've heard someone mention they started therapy or counseling because parts of their lives were going extremely well, while another aspect or two was in disastrous condition? Maybe that's been your experience? Despite being grounded in scripture Jews and Christians can relate to and affirm as having authority for their lives, this book is for everyone!

By the historical time period of Nehemiah's narrative, God's people had left their existence under Egyptian imperialism centuries earlier, returned to their home-land Jerusalem after exile under the Babylonian empire (though many deported to Babylon stayed there), and now they needed to deal with another empire. The post-[Babylonian] exilic book of Nehemiah describes life under that other empire—Persia. Scripture shows us how cleverly and effectively Jews – including Nehemiah – found ways to live well, grow healthy, and thrive in spite of far from ideal surroundings. Nehemiah even was employed by the Persian king! Often we simply cannot escape negative influences; for many reasons, we frequently need to stay in our current living situation or employment context, but must figure out work-arounds, as Nehemiah did.

I especially appreciate how Barry emphasizes the critical need of having supportive people alongside us at the same time he keeps emphasizing connecting with God in prayer. Those other humans help a lot, but (aside from Jesus of Nazareth) there's not yet been a perfect, totally reliable person, so God must remain our ultimate recourse and rock.

Notice of material connection: I received a copy of this book from the author with no obligation to write a positive review. As always, my opinions are my own.

My Amazon review: Connecting with Scripture and Community

World Oceans Day 2018

WOD Theme for 2018: "Clean our Ocean!"
The annual World Oceans Day happened two Fridays ago, on June 8^th. Every year I blog for WOD! It runs in my mind I've been a day or two later than the 8^th once or twice, but not a couple weeks' worth. "In spite of," I created a new version of one of my previous WOD photographic banners pretty much on time and finally decided it was enough for a valid blog.

Holy Hustle :: Crystal Stine

Holy Hustle: Embracing a Work-Hard, Rest-Well Life by Crystal Stine on Amazon

Everyone in LA has multiple hustles. Because it costs so much to survive? More likely because the energy, ethnic and cultural diversity, and (probably) the anonymity of the second largest city in the USA attracts ambitious creatives. I routinely inform anyone who'll listen I have several hustles: I mainly hustle as a graphic artist-designer; theology's a not too far behind side hustle; I'd love to make my only very occasional music hustle more central. They're all freelance, so those hustles absolutely require my ongoing initiative and imagination—you can't expect gigs to fall out of the sky, though the best ones sometimes do.

Crystal writes about getting laid off or fired a couple of times; like Crystal and many others, I've had my share of jobs not continuing, maybe most significantly when I was working in industry as a designer and then – due to crashes of overall economy and housing markets coupled with internet expansion to third world countries – along with several thousand other North American designers, I found myself pushed hard into far more freelancing than I'd anticipated. In turn that pushed me into hustling harder than I otherwise might have done.

Chapter 5: Our holy hustle is not limited by our vocation or our location. [page 90]

What field has God given you to work in, in this season? [page 91]

The estimated 30%-35% of North Americans of both genders who work at least part-time in the freelance economy would benefit from reading Holy Hustle, though when Crystal Stine assembled her launch team, she particularly wanted as many women as possible to know how possible it is to embrace (to hug!) "a work-hard, rest-well life." Nothing in her short, scripture-grounded, highly reflective book wouldn't equally apply to most guys, but from my own experience and from observing other women, it's clear we have a stronger, more persistent inclination or leaning toward believing we need to try as hard as possible, produce more than imaginable. Maybe you've heard, "Women need to be twice as good at what they do in order to be considered half as good as men. Luckily, that is not difficult."

To hustle means to work quickly and energetically—doesn't imply anything about productivity. God commands us, "You shall be holy, for I your God am holy." We accurately can define holy as set apart from others by one's attributes or set apart for a purpose; however, more than anything, in Jesus of Nazareth we acknowledge as the ultimate revelation of the Holy God, we recognize holiness as life lived for others (for the neighbor, for all creation) in full communion with God. Crystal explains it perfectly on page 161: "Holy hustle means using your light to brighten the lives of others while shining the spotlight on God." The author sharing her own recent experiences and including hustle-and-rest vignettes from several others gives the book value it might not have if it had originated even during the end of the last century. The times they sure have changed!

Although with my attempts to reclaim a full life of service to others and participation in the world outside my immediate 'hood I already knew almost everything Crystal wrote, I'll still reread Holy Hustle every so often. It would be an excellent gift—not in the least because of the appealing cover design.

Remember, "Just as striving is the 'gone too far' side of serving [hustling], laziness is the 'gone too far' side of rest." [page 176] As recently as yesterday with the adult Sunday School class I lead, we again talked about our human need for times of Sabbath, literally "rest" in Hebrew. Because the Revised Common Lectionary that gives us the scripture texts we discuss most weeks already provided Deuteronomy 5:12-15, that's where we started:

¹²Observe the sabbath day and keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you. ¹⁵Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day.

The God who created us in the divine image knows we need work on many levels, knows even when we don't formally work for an expression of empire, we still inevitably have pressures to work well, to produce quality, to answer to our bosses, clients, The General Public. In any situation, everyone needs wholly holy rest.

Yesterday I also referenced Exodus 20:8-11:

⁸Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. ⁹Six days you shall labor and do all your work. ¹⁰But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. ¹¹For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.

As we labor faithfully to claim that imago dei, some of our work imitates divine creativity, almost all of everyone's work contributes to the realization of God's new creation. As Crystal makes clear, as we frequently discuss in Sunday School, sometimes our sabbath/rest needs to be at times other than the historical biblical Sabbath day of Saturday or the Lord's Day Sunday many Christians set apart as a day of worship and rest.

From chapter 5: "Our holy hustle is not limited by our vocation or our location." [page 90]

"What field has God given you to work in, in this season?" [page 91]

My amazon review: Working and Resting in God's Image

Notice of material connection: I received a pre-publication copy of this book from the author with no obligation to write a positive review. As always, my opinions are my own.