photograph
In case you missed it...
In an OpEd titled, "What the Costumes Reveal," New York Times columnist Joe Nocera wrote about a Halloween office party thrown by the N.Y. law firm of Steven J. Baum, an outfit that specializes in real estate foreclosures -- a "foreclosure mill," if you will -- where, apparently, employees came costumed as homeless and foreclosed-upon families.
Each moment is pregnant with new possibilities waiting to be born, alive with new beginnings, God's secrets not yet heard, God's dreams not yet fulfilled. These were the thoughts that lodged in my mind as I meditated on Isaiah 48:6-8 this morning. So many good Christian people I talk to are afraid that their prayer life will become stale, their spiritual disciplines empty rituals. Some make this an excuse for their lack of discipline in prayer. And prayer does become stale and meaningless if we don't know how to stir our imaginations and awaken our creativity to new thoughts, new patterns and new possibilities for prayer.
Tools for prayer are creative opportunities not formulae for success
One of my greatest fears as I continue to share these tools for prayers is that some of my readers will see them as another formula that will make them more successful and more prayerful. Of course that is possible, but what I hope is that we will all see these as tools as ways to stir our imaginations and open our minds to new ways to express the prayers God has placed in our hearts, stimuli that awaken our creativity to the brand new possibilities of ways that God can speak to us, in us, and through us.
We had a very hot ride in the police van, but the Park Police processed us very quickly. We were released from custody and greeted outside with water, granola bars, and hugs. What could be better?
But the point was not to get arrested. The point was to make of our lives a living witness. To make it clear that climate change has gone too far and we are no longer going to stand idly by while our sisters, brothers, and home planet are torn apart by oil companies. Here are a handful of photos from the event yesterday:
We first published this reflection by Jim Wallis in 2002. It has since become our Christmas tradition, kind of our own Charlie Brown Christmas special, if you will. With the ongoing conflicts raging during each passing year, it remains tragically relevant, particularly this year as we think about Afghanistan.
Hackers. Slow Motion. Snow. Here’s a little round up of links from around the web you may have missed this week:
- Random Hacks of Kindness: a two-day competition of more than 1,000 software engineers solving problems that arise during humanitarian crises.
- Marvel at some of the entries to National Geographic’s photography contest.
- Restaurateur Jean-Gorges Vongerichten’s half-Korean wife, Maria Vongerichten, has a new PBS show called “The Kimchi Chronicles,” in which she eats her way through South Korea.
- What happens when you put a slow-motion camera on a fast moving train? Watch.
- What did people google search in 2010? (Also, in list form.)
- Have you had your first snow of the year yet?
- Jim Wallis says it best: DREAMS should not be illegal.
Thirty turkeys per minute. Airport scanners. Hogwarts. Here’s a little round up of links from around the web you may have missed this week:
- Workers in turkey plants handle as many as 30 turkeys per minute.
- How to make the perfect pie crust.
- This Thanksgiving, remember the hands that feed you.
- Opposed to the new airport scanners and aggressive patdowns? So is Captain Sully.
- A photographer turns his aging and depressed grandmother into a superhero.
- Fast Company asks, “Who are the CEOs of Hogwarts?”
- Speaking of Hogwarts, did you read Julie Clawson’s blog about Harry Potter and Social Justice?
- A reluctant uncle witnesses the home birth of his nephew.
[Editors' Note: Former state trooper James Bonard Fowler plead guilty this week to a misdemeanor manslaughter charge in the 1965 shooting of Jimmie Lee Jackson in Alabama.