What’s the most underrated movie you’ve ever watched?
Like national boundaries, racial identifiers and DSM categories subtitles are social constructs experienced as barriers that can be deconstructed. This French film is about perception and how it can inhibit or free us to inhabit each moment in community or isolation.
How did The Sense of Wonder perform at the box office? According to Wikipedia: “The 2015 French romance film The Sense of Wonder (Le Goût des merveilles) grossed $4.1 millionworldwide against a production budget of $6.2 million. [1]”
I find myself at a crossroads between patterns and the prophetic. As a 1st Year student at Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry, I’m responding to the Life Application section in an early chapter of Kris Vallotton’s Basic Training [Manual] for the Prophetic Ministry. Bristling with something akin to frustration that’s more likely stretch marks, I consider the mounting “evidence” in the case for modern day miracles and in the portion of the prayer I sent up verbally after I stopped writing the prayer down.
Revelation being what it is, I’d been warned – hahaha – yesterday having received a word I didn’t realize was prophetic until this writing. The word, rather phrase received was “out of ink”. At the time, I’d chalked it up to my literal pen – Ooly fountain – needing a cartridge. But then the classmate next to me got to the end of her pencil’s last lead refill and the campus bookstore was out of pens! Oui, cetatit un peut de trop, but who pays attention to such things? Now, like Moses taking off his shoes before the burning bush, I’m beginning to. After all, do you think it coincidental that I just remembered how to say, “yes, I thought it was a bit much” in French from a distance the better part of 40 years?
Woosh! That wasn’t the sound of angels’ wings but the deadline crossing the notfinished line. So, I’m pausing here to get a wiggle on there.
If you’d like to read more about the case for “miracles” I’m building and come along on this journey you can do so by subscribing to this blog in resurrection; donating any amount to my mission trip to Portland, Oregon in March or buy me a cup of Kofi and I’ll email or snail mail you updates to a post office box each month – whichever you prefer to share.
So I’m in a web-class listening to someone I trust having ‘met’ him online two days ago. I trust him because his online “elevator pitch” is not only the shortest one I’ve seen, but perfectly timed to launch my dream (and yours) right now. I’ve attended other training courses on many topics before. During the pandemic, I’ve attended many more. But after 30 years of teaching and knowing the emperor has no clothes, it’s time to share the truth that will re-introduce people to their own minds, best thinking, and launch them into their dreams for a fraction of the cost of a college course – with no additional technology fees, lengthy applications, or placement tests. What’s my dream? Stay tuned.
So is my life’s work “getting to the point” after teaching others to do so for three decades? This question alone took more than 15 minutes to get to and itself was interrupted by, “No!!! Don’t drag your butt across the carpet!”
This is perhaps all our work – not getting lost in the details while navigating our stories within The Story which it would appear to be, this morning in particular, irrefutably, The Story of Real Love – in all its messy, but uninterrupted and unstoppable Glory. And that, my friends, is at the beating core of the gospel’s mission-critical message – forgiveness.
Now this may not seem to be news but it struck me this morning so inescapably that I couldn’t sleep on it once it was revealed. In fact, it seemed to be my draft / daft card so here I am, enlisting in the holiest of all Holy Wars, yet again though now intentionally, and inviting you to join me in the inch by inch battle against the enemy within.
If there is no enemy within, the enemy without
can do you no harm.
Nigerian Proverb
In a search for the origin of the above proverb which I have embraced and shared through the duration of my academic career, I am introduced to this blogger, Doyin Owoniyi, who asks, “could there be passions which we harbor which spin us around into a contention with ourselves?”
And it is this question that brings me to the painful awareness that it has taken me one hour, 58 minutes, and a lifetime to write this blogpost after getting out of bed before dawn on a holiday only to write a thank you note to Tyler Perry and realized I was up in time for the Proverbs 31’s online bible study I signed up for five weeks ago only to be interrupted first, by a sleepy five year old and then two loyals who, once our little girl was afoot, would not remain silent in their kennel for jealousy’s sake.
Perhaps the detours and distractions ARE the journey. At this, my heart races. I take another sip of my now room temperature coffee, another bite of the fig bar I grabbed in lieu of breakfast, and another, finding my way back to forgiveness and the inescapable and interminable relay for which I have enlisted having been drafted before I was born.
And there it is. The Keymaker was a voluntary exile because he refused to go to The Source when he knew he would be deleted. Well. If the key fits, my friends…
“We tell them as we are.” I’d not heard this variation before. I’d always heard Anais Nin quoted thusly:
We don’t see the world as it is but as we are.
Anais Nin
And I’d treasured its inescapable truth as a compass through life’s trials. Until the pandemic. Rather until 10 months into a global pandemic during which I was quarantined with a four-year-old. My four-year-old. Until then I’d simply shrugged my shoulders in resignation and gotten on with each day to the best of my ability. But when this version slipped into my mailbox at the top of The Pause newsletter it stopped me in my sleep-deprived tracks. After all, I teach the unpacking of stories and forbid students’ use of Reader Response literary criticism precisely because I know how thick our personal lenses are. And yet, for all I know of the distortions of memory and the interference of the subconscious, I had not quite considered this truth as precisely as it appears in black and white above. What to do.
Better yet, how do I parent given the interference of my own experience of being parented with the present challenges of parenting without portfolio, owner’s manual, or childhood fantasies of what raising a child of my own might look and feel like? I’ve told myself countless times that I will read The Body Keeps The Score. I will read The Connected Child. I willnot scream. I will not be anxious. And I’ve failed time and time again hiding behind work, medical appointments, half-hearted attempts to de-clutter and reparent. Turns out I’m made of clay and need more help than I have been able to ask for or imagine. Yet, I know that faith without works is dead. Guess the inescapable truth remains. As my SFDM Kat said, “Guess it’s time to #double-up“.
A Crane Fly clings high on the wall in the great room at an angle from the garden window watching her babies circle and grow on the other side of the pane. She may have come in looking for food for them but now her strength is reserved for watching.
A Crane Fly clings high on the wall in the great room at an angle from the garden window watching her babies circle and grow on the other side of the pane. She may have come in looking for food for them but now her strength is reserved for watching.
A Seattle writers group offered simple guidelines to the Las Vegas InterNations membership – write 250 words or less using the phrase “look over my shoulder”.
One fist under the pillow, the other clutching the sheet above her head, Elle was not a member of the impartial mothers’ club as she clearly preferred the micro-massage of her Terrier Chihuahua’s paws along her back to the forced intimacy of the 60-lb Vizslador. She sighed knowing that working remotely as a member of the faculty and being a single mother to a preschooler within spitting distance of retirement barely qualified as first-world problems. To her mind, they were problems nonetheless. Yet even the passing Christian that she was knew enough to be grateful for another day above ground, global pandemic notwithstanding.
Casting caution and fur babies to the wind, she swung her legs over the side of the bed and made a mental note to unlock the gate for pest control. Breakfast would be a no-brainer. She’d made her first cheesecake in the Instant Pot the night before and given The Boss’s sugar addiction, would have no problem selling the idea. The day was already showing promise. The Boss was still asleep. She had time to nuke some turkey bacon but remembered she’d made the last batch two days earlier. She’d add it to her digital shopping cart. Opening the door, she heard something in the gravel but saw no commercial truck in the driveway. Do I go in and wake a sleeping child or do I continue toward the noise? With a look over her shoulder, she took a deep breath and closed the door.
Was it the relationship or clamoring masses that drove you to the wilderness and mountaintop to pray? I suspect it was either your hard-wiring or both. My urgency is cloaked in the distractions of ubiquitous clutter, a pre-schooler’s needs, and snarling dogs competing for my attention. To read a single chapter of the Bible I have to ignore the scratching at my bedroom door, endure the idiot bells in children’s media, and make do with room temperature coffee as no more than two consecutive sips are ever enjoyed without interruption. Even then, it is only by your grace that I notice the goings on outside my window.
a hummingbird
no more than three inches tall
in the mesquite tree
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