La rana que quería ser una rana auténtica

escrito por Augusto Monterroso. (página web)


Había una vez una rana que quería ser una Rana auténtica, y todos los días se esforzaba en ello.
Al principio se compró un espejo en el que se miraba largamente buscando su ansiada autenticidad. Unas veces parecía encontrarla y otras no, según el humor de ese día o de la hora, hasta que se cansó de esto y guardó el espejo en un baúl.

Por fin pensó que la única forma de conocer su propio valor estaba en la opinión de la gente, y comenzó a peinarse y a vestirse y a desvestirse (cuando no le quedaba otro recurso) para saber si los demás la aprobaban y reconocían que era una Rana auténtica.

Un día observó que lo que más admiraban de ella era su cuerpo, especialmente sus piernas, de manera que se dedicó a hacer sentadillas y a saltar para tener unas ancas cada vez mejores, y sentía que todos la aplaudían.

Y así seguía haciendo esfuerzos hasta que, dispuesta a cualquier cosa para lograr que la consideraran una Rana auténtica, se dejaba arrancar las ancas, y los otros se las comían, y ella todavía alcanzaba a oír con amargura cuando decían que qué buena rana, que parecía pollo.

quote by CS Lewis

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We read so that we might know we are not alone.
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anti-cafeina

Para los que sepan de la ley anti-tobaco aquí en España... Este video resultará interesante y quizás un poco gracioso.

prayer

I feel like I don't know what you are up to. So often insecure, unstable and a little bit alone.
I cannot deny how you have changed me, shaped me, formed me and loved me, though I always seem to have questions running through my mind. I wonder who I am. And who I will be. I know you don't stop working.

I have said it before and I will say it again- that I am yours, before I am my own. You have the right to my innermost and my outermost. To withhold is to rob you on the one thing you ask.

My prayer is that my lack of seeing, of understanding, of capacity will not affect you in me. That you take me despite my constant double mindedness and weakness. Make me, shake me, I am yours.
And when I cry out in weakness, in lack of understanding- remember my words spoken into eternity- perhaps in ignorance but from within. And complete your work in me.

Only remember that I am small and frail and it will be only by your grace that I will be able to withstand- you in me.

change.

I am changing the name of my blog. So if you see various titles floating around in the air know that I am in the process of processing a good title.

blue fence

Must comment on this blog that I found through my friend Katrina's blog (which by the way is excellent, see Standing on the Edge). This blog is called Blue Fence and well, this girl (Shannon) explains it better than I could. So see for yourself...


click here: BLUE FENCE

Wishful Thinking... Buechner

Was reading through this book again by Buechner and came across this about grace. For what it's worth...




GRACE:

...After centuries of handling and mishandling, most religious words become so shopworn nobody's much interested anymore. Not so with grace, for some reason. Mysteriously, even derivatives like gracious and graceful still have some of the bloom left.
...Grace is something you can never get but can only be given. There's no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or earn good looks or bring about your own birth.
...A good sleep is grace and so are good dreams. Most tears are grace. The smell of rain is grace. Somebody loving you is grace. Loving somebody is grace. Have you ever tried to love somebody?
...A crucial eccentricity of the Christian faith is the assertion that people are saved by grace. There's nothing you have to do. There's nothing you have to do. There's nothing you have to do.
...The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It's for you I created the universe. I love you.
...There's only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you'll reach out and take it.
...Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too.

Pt. III

Been a while since I posted from The Shaping of Things to Come. Here is a bit of a summary of recent reading:


Expanding on the INCARNATIONAL approach.

2 Cor 5:19 ...God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself...
Those who seek God will now find him in Jesus the man.

Couple of thoughts now on evangelism (p 44): Jesus commented to his disciples that he would make them fishers of men. Not only was he using words and concepts that the disciples understood but he was hinting at the missional community which was to come.
Fishing rods versus nets. We think of it as going out, casting out our line and with the right bait, the right words, the right church program, the right lingo, the right moment, someone will bite the hook. Its a one on one affair. "If everyone does their bit and gets a couple of friends saved and then into the church, we will be fulfilling Jesus' mandate."
In turn, Jesus wasn't referring to poles and bait but rather nets. They fished with nets, they went out, dragged their net about and then went back to shore, taking with them whatever had been caught in the net. The real key then was not studying the currents, tides and all the other technical details (though it is not unhelpful) but the strength of the nets! If the nets were strong and clean, their would be a catch. Note, they spent more time mending and cleaning their nets than actually out on the water.
Frost sees this image relating to us today in that "instead of adopting a stance that requires a Christian to leave a sacred zone to go and fish for an individual to return with him to that zone (church building), it releases the church to see its 'fishing' as a more relational exercise. If the disciples spent so much time on their nets to ensure a catch, what might those nets be for us today? We propose that the web of relationships, friendships, and acquaintances that Christians normally have makes up the net into which not-yet Christians will swim. This means that the missional-incarnational church will spend more time on building friendships than it will on developing religious programs."

Following that up he quotes:
"But no thought is given to establish what church members are already doing in their neighborhood and places of work. No attempt is made, for example, to identify the medical practitioner who has changed the approach to patients by providing counseling and practical support rather than just curative care. No attempt is made to identify the local (public official) in the congregation who is tackling certain important quality of life and social issues in the community. No attempt is made to support the lady who is conducting an informal neighborhood bible study group. No attempt is made to support prayerfully the teacher who has just started work in an inner-city school with many pupils from broken families. And no attempt is made to see ones family's care for their disabled child as a ministry worthy of the church's support and prayers."
More than that, we don't see businessmen, students, youth workers, lecturers, plumbers, electricians, and homemakers as having missional roles in their worlds... We don't see the strong creation of friendships that parents make through the local school as being anything to do with mission (unless they're inviting them to church). We can't see the regular gathering of *whatever group* as part of the net that catches people into the kingdom of God.



*all thoughts taken from The Shaping of Things to Come*

october in Badajoz

mainly posting this post because i like the how the title follows my previous posting. surely that should be reason enough for a post. sometimes one thinks of a thrown-in title for something profound they have written. and other times the content might just be throw-in for a profound title.

Cáceres in September

I spent a month in Cáceres, a beautiful city in the north of Extremadura. The month of September to further define it. I was doing a months intensive Spanish course. I realized a couple of things during that month. One was that I enjoy studying things that I enjoy. Like Spanish. The other is that I kinda dig living alone. I spent two months this summer living alone (for the first time really as I've always lived with a family ((mine or a borrowed one)) or friends). There are advantages to each one, but this past month I appreciated what it is to live alone.

I am doing a Spanish exam in November so this course was preparing me if you will. Currently I am going through a prep book I bought for this exam. Needless to say if I didn't like Spanish this would be as fun as watching grass grow, but like I mentioned before, studying something I enjoy isn't all that bad. So the month was good, I met some great people from all over the world: Palestine, Leictenstein/Pakistan, Granada, Cáceres, England, Argentina, etc, ate some great food, ie torta del casar (good strong cheese if its your thing), lentils from Palestine, secreto iberico, as well as some other stuff whose names I can't remember!

Anyways, I am back in Badajoz now and the course is finished (as is the lack of internet access which I very much learned to appreciate). Teaching has kicked off and is now in high gear. An income is usually a good thing. Not to much on the cooker for the next month or so, just studying for the DELE exam and teaching the english.

FYI, in the fotos are my friends Jared and Mau with the old lady when they came to visit me in Cáceres. Good times in a nice city. Recommend it on your tour of Spain.

contrast

if the below post is maybe what church should be about, than the above picture is maybe what church shouldn't be.

nicked from the website of small boat big sea.

Pt. II

Expanding on the three flaws of the current church: ATTRACTIONAL, DUALISTIC, AND HIERARCHICAL.

The current mindset in the church is that it has to get it "right" and people will come flooding in to be changed by the gospel. That we have to "attract" people. If the teaching is interesting enough, if the music is good enough, if the children's program is quality and the lighting is perfect then the community will come flocking into the services. It as if everything has to do with the service itself, as if people are looking for a service to attend on Sunday morning, just that they haven't found the one that is perfect yet. This is the problem with attractional. It is a COME-TO-US attitude instead of a GO-TO-THEM mentality which is clearly the more biblical of the two.

Dualism is the act of separating the sacred from the profane, the holy from the unholy, and unfortunately what has become "religious and secular". It produces a gap between belief and everyday life. We talk about the "world out there" and "us in here". Clearly a Christ-like way of seeing it. (sarcasm there if you missed it).

Heirarchical leadership is dominant. What about Paul's radical dissolution of the traditional distinctions between priests and laity, between officials and ordinary members, between holy men and common people? "The first Christians radically reshaped the language of "priesthood" and "sacrifice." In one sense all are priests; believers are their own priests for all have immediacy of access to God's grace in Christ. What priests have performed for others before, believers can now do for themselves. In another sense, none can be appointed priests in the Christian church, for Christ has fulfilled the priestly role once for all." To say it clearly, there needs to be a recognition that the common layman has as equally important, and needs to be equipped for such as much as any "pastor" or "minister." It is a recognition of the ministry of a daily life. This is not doing away with leadership, for that is biblical, but rather a shift needs to take place in the understanding that we all have ministries, we all are priests, we all are "sent-ones" and there is no such thing as a high-calling to the pastorate or the mission field. Check Ephesians 4 and the concept of a body with Christ as the head, heirarchical or apostolic leadership? Quite clearly it is the latter and as the church we have gravitated to a top-down model with someone other than Christ as the head.




So then, these trends must be reversed and what emerges is a missional church, which by its very nature will be an anti-clone of the existing traditional model. Rather than being attractional, it will be incarnational. It will leave its own religious zones and live comfortably with non-church-goers, seeping into the host culture like salt and light. It will be an infiltrating, transformational community. Second, rather than being dualistic, it will embrace a messianic spirituality. That is, a spirituality of engagement with culture and the world in the same mode as the Messiah himself. And third, the missional church will develop an apostolic form of leadership rather than the traditional hierarchical model.


(Again, these are quotes and thoughts taken from The Shaping of Things to Come.)

Currently

Currently without internet access in all other places except the library.

Currently I am also spending the month in Cáceres.

Later I will post what I am up to, what life is like here, and some more thoughts from Things to Come.

Pt. I continued- All quotes.

"The missional church represents God in the encounter between God and human culture. It exists not because of human goals or desires, but as a result of God's creating and saving work in the world. It is a visible manifestation of how the Good News of Jesus Christ is present in human life and transforms human culture to reflect more faithfully God's intentions for creation. It is a community that visibly and effectively participates in God's activity, just as Jesus indicated when he referred to it in metaphorical language as salt, yeast, and light in the world."

Three overarching principles...

1. The missional church is incarnational, not attractional, in its ecclesiology. By incarnational we mean it does not create sanctified spaces into which unbelievers must come to encounter the gospel. Rather, the missional church disassembles itself and seeps into the cracks and crevices of a society in order to be Christ to those who don't yet know him.

2. The missional church is messianic, not dualistic, in its spirituality. That is, it adopts the worldview of Jesus the Messiah, rather than that of the Greco-Roman empire. Instead of seeing the world as divided between the sacred (religious) and profane (nonreligious), like Christ it sees the world and God's place in it as more holistic and integrated.

3. The missional church adopts an apostolic, rather than a hierarchical, mode of leadership. By apostolic we mean a mode of leadership that recognizes the fivefold model detailed by Paul in Ephesians 4. It abandons the triangular hierarchies of the traditional church and embraces a biblical, flat-leadership community that unleashes the gifts of evangelism, apostleship, and prophecy, as well as the currently popular pastoral and teaching gifts.


-the emerging missional church must see itself as being able to interact meaningfully with culture without eve being beguiled by it.

-to see itself as a missionary movement rather than as an institution.




The above were all quoted from chapter 1, The Shaping of Things to Come.

Thoughts from The Shaping of Things to Come. Pt. I

I am currently reading the book: The Shaping of Things to Come by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch. It's kinda thick, kinda heavy, and it takes a bit of wading to get through. All of that because it is full of ideas and insight into culture, church and the world we live in. So to help process my own thoughts, I am going to spew out some of what I am processing, some of what sticks out and whatever else deems itself worthy of being spelled out. Note: most of the following will be extracts taken from the book or their thoughts in my words, with my occasional thoughts thrown in. I will try to mention when it is me thinking out loud.

Part I

There is a phenomenal shift taking place in our Western World, a spiritual awakening happening and everyday the institutionalized church is becoming less and less relevant. Perhaps the description of a festival that takes place in the Black Rock Desert in the Western United States can describe this awakening, this hunger that is being felt by humanity.

The festival is called Burning Man.

"Each year thousands of artists, musicians, bohemians punks, taggers, rappers and other artistes or simply interested bystanders journey into the 107-degree heat of the desert for a festival like no other. It is a temporary community of people committed to generosity environmentalism, celebration, spirituality, and above all, art. Burning Man has been so successful over the past five years that it has come to represent those trends that pose the greatest challenges to the Christian church. It dares offer acceptance, community, an experience of god, redemption, and atonement. In short, it resembles everything the church is supposed to offer. But many people are finding the transformative power of Burning Man to be far and away more effective than anything they experience in church."

What is it that is attractive and so real and so true? There are six key elements:

BELONGING: (says the official website) "You belong here and you participate. You´re not the weirdest kid in the classroom- there's always somebody there who's thought up something you never even considered. You're there to breathe art... You're here to to build a community that needs you and relies on you."

In a society that has been fractured by economic rationalism, globalization, racial disunity, ideological differences, fear, and violence, the Burning Man community claims to offer solace, welcome, and acceptance.

SURVIVAL: It is not for the faint-hearted. It involves venturing into the desert and surviving without restaurants, air conditioning, or shopping malls. With all the comforts of home stripped away, participants are forced to look deep within themselves, to discover who they truly are, and to summon up from within themselves the will and the power to survive- both in the desert and after they return to the world outside.

EMPOWERMENT: (says the official website) "You're here to create. Since nobody at Burning Man is a spectator, you're here to build your own new world..." Everyone is to participate, no one is deemed to be without talent.

SENSUALITY: Burning Man is a highly sensual, experiential community. "You're here to experience..."

CELEBRATION: The crescendo of the festival is the burning of the large human effigy in the middle of the camp. Participants have said that as the Burning Man goes up in flames, they experience a deeply spiritual sensation. Artists also cast their works into the flames. There is apparently a purging, a form of atonement, and a sense of liberation and joy.

LIMINALITY: The word liminal in Latin signifies an in-between time. A transition, temporary period of human transformation. The Burning Man community appears in August and takes over the seeming untouched playa (desert), then leaves in September leaving no trace it was ever there.

This festival, judge it how you will, is a cry from an emerging postmodern generation for a community of belonging, spirituality, sensuality, empowerment, and liberation. Of course the transformative power of the gospel of Jesus Christ is greater than anything offered at this festival, but is the church living out and expressing that? (excerpts from pages 3-5 occasionally in my own words)


Me thinking out loud-
What does the church currently have to say or offer? Is the church prepared to be a community that offers those (Biblical) characteristics in some form to people who will never cross the threshold of a church building? These needs, desires, and longings expressed by the artists at Burning Man are not so far off from most people's. There are real and they are legitimate. Surely Jesus has something to say to those feelings and states of being as much as the Burning Man festival. As the church, we find ourselves a long way off from being relevant to anybody willing to express the spiritual awakening which they are experiencing. There is something of those six elements in each of us, whether we have smothered them in the name of security and institution or not. There is something of truth being expressed in them. I believe Jesus has something to say to it and as his church we had better too.

lack of tiredness

aye aye aye. insomnia in august. early monday morning classes cancelled. all motivation to go to bed- out the window. perhaps i'll just have to stay up all night squeezing my brain for words. and this is all i manage to come up with for a post! maybe inspiration will come around 3.

Sonnet

The Chasm


Laughter or sarcasm. Sarcasm, laughter . . .

Contagious, infectious and likely to spread
into rushing flames. Be careful which you
choose.......(No matter- you'll probably lose.)

But lest you worry about choices and friends,
remember that fog turns quickly . . .
where rusty creeks run, and a tree ends up turning
into tiny debris. Water spigots and lost friends
have - not much in common.

..................................So avoid Radio Flyers
with small children in back, for what they may lack,
are those false things in the night.

But always make sure to embrace the knife that bridges
...the chasm
so oft created not from laughter- but sarcasm.

alone

This is the photo of someone sitting in an airport. Someone who has been there for a while, someone who no longer has a suitcase. Or perhaps someone who is about to lose it. Sitting in Madrid. Or was it Heathrow? Thinking about it now, coulda been Chicago. There was a foreboding sense that it was about to happen. It was nearly said out loud as they parted ways at the check-in. Go figure. It was as if the connection between suitcase and owner was tangible up till London and then all went blank. The changeover was way too fast, there was no way it could have made the switch... Something wasn't right.

Waiting in Madrid at the luggage belt watching bag after bag come out.

Waiting in Madrid at the luggage belt watching no bags come out. Alone.

Long walk to the lost baggage desk.

Walk out of the airport alone, with empty hands and nothing but the clothes on my back which were about to be worn for more hours straight than was ever meant.

That is what this photo is about.

into someone else's life.

Tonight I came across a blog by a guy I don't know and haven't ever met but we happen to have a friend or two in common. As I read through his thoughts on his life I was struck by the honest, open simplicity of the way he described various occurrences from the last while. No pretenses, just communication. It was refreshing actually. It was like he was writing for himself, yet aware that people like me would be looking in, and so he explains everything very neatly, almost like it was for a child. Although what he writes about is not remotely childish, perhaps it is as a child would view the world. I dig it.

It is one thing to read a friend's blog. It's great actually. But it's something entirely different to look into someone's life whom you have never met and wouldn't even recognize on the street- and finish feeling like you have been been for a two hour coffee with them for the third time that week...

I think we'll go for coffee again.