the twenty first formica friday

It's that time again, another Formica Friday, a treasure trove of hodgepodge, random tidbits, and a bit of this and that. In particular, it is the place where I can celebrate the best posts I read this past week and want to share with you. What exactly is Formica Friday, you ask? Check out the tongue-in-cheek, I got away with this?, definition from the first post.

An announcement:

The time has come! On Sunday I board a plane to head to the UK for just under three weeks. While I'm gone, I will get the joy of sharing several beautiful guest posts with you. I'm quite excited. I may post tomorrow, but not sure yet. Regardless, blessings to you all and see you again come 23 August.

A quote:

I love; therefore, I am vulnerable.

-- Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

A list:

• crashing on couches, driving in the wee hours, staying up too late, and feeling the freedom in my bones to run
• conversations with my Father
• an antique milk carrier and jugs
• getting to hug Andie Redwine
• a National Endowment for the Humanities grant
• the lens my Mother sees the world though, in which everything is garbed in hope and expected to be redeemed
• Max and Lauren are getting married and their story is amazing. God paints better love stories. You can support them by making a donation on their wedding page or buying their amazing art.

Posts, websites, trinkets, and the Internet week in review revue (after the jump):

• I've mentioned before that you should be reading Tamra, but for those of you close to me or readers here who know the up and down I have had with finding my place in church these past few years, her words were echoes of redeeming grace. "I’ve grown in two significant ways: Closer to the people of my church, and farther from its denominational doctrines. And divergent growth is painful."

• Stop. Go read Stephanie and follow her on Twitter right now. This week, she wrote a post about why we need stories. She related it to the Bible. The fact that I'm hurling this post at you without exploding in the process should amaze you. I mean, come on. If you've spent some time here, this will be familiar. She also quotes L'Engle's Walking on Water. Come. On. And she weaves her words. "Maybe because stories bring out the child-like awe in us, sharpening our senses to better understand the world. Maybe because, as Jesus once amazingly said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children” (Matthew 11:25)."

• Alise has a brilliant sense of comedic air coupled with astute observation. Her take on baby dedications and christenings, while quite funny, is a little food for thought. "Bi-winning: The mother schedules a water birth in the church baptismal during the service."

• I wish I were better at being a thick-skinned hamster. Thanks, Chris Gibson.

• Usually, when people write that God is love, a lot gets lost in the process. Holiness slips out, passive realities that demand nothing of hands and feet slips in. So often enough, the idea that God is love, which I believe, is mistaken to be trite. Kristin wrote that God is love, but a Love that is peacefully violent as it rolls in, a Love whose robe hem she clings to and will not let go.

• "I did not see sexual intercourse as a gift from God or a wonderful way to gain intimacy with my husband. Instead sex signified a loss." There's a lot we need to fix in the church, in ourselves, when it comes to how we speak about sex.

• Hilary cares about the words. I don't know a better way to describe it. She cares about what happens to the words she uses and, accordingly, she writes better than most people I know. She's also incredibly brave. I don't know that I could have written this, but I'm sure glad I read it. "But I have been asked a few times this week if I'm dating anyone. And when I smile, and I shake my head, and I say, 'No,' and they ask, 'Have you?' and I say, 'No, never,' the conversation moves on but I don't. Does it make any difference that my answer is 'no, never'? In that small moment, when they say, 'Oh, really?' and I can't tell if it's sympathy, or bewilderment, or a nonchalant remark designed to move the conversation on - what's happening in the crawl space between my head and my heart?"

• My good friend Elizabeth, without meaning to, gives the perfect explanation of why as Protestants we should better embrace the idea of confession. "I go to Confession because I know I can’t keep myself honest on my own. Trying to keep myself honest by myself is like standing in front of a spiritual circus mirror: I see a distorted version of myself."

• I have been following Father Christian's writing of the icon of St. George and the dragon and I strongly encourage you too as well. He teaches through quiet things, subtle honesty, and we would all be so fortunate to know such a priest in our lives. In this, I resonate: the veil is torn.

And, as always, an old post from me:

• understand

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Have a post from the week you'd like to share? What was your best post this week? Or did you read someone else you just have to let us know about? Leave me a note in the comments below!

my body is headed to austin, my heart is headed to bolivia

Today marks day two of my twenty five days of travel. In just about an hour, I will get in my car and drive up to Austin, Tx to see for a second time the sensational movie Paradise Recovered. Paradise is the story of a young woman who is cast out from her cult and must journey to find a stable faith and life in a world she has never known. The film is stunning and if you want my full explanation why, you can check out the review I wrote for team Paradise last January. But while I make my merry way up to Austin to see this wonderful film and then to hug the neck of Andie Redwine, who wrote this masterpiece and whom I have never before met outside of the electronic world, a few of my good friends and a few bloggers I read regularly are headed off to Bolivia with World Vision.

World Vision "is a Christian relief, development and advocacy organization dedicated to working with children, families and communities to overcome poverty and injustice."

I am honored to know people who are willing to give up a week with their families to travel long and hard to foreign countries and blog about the poverty and struggle they find there in hopes of raising awareness and increasing the sponsorship of the children in dire need there. In particular, I am thrilled to have become friends over the past year with Elizabeth Esther, who through wit, snark, and guile tackles serious problems and through brokeness, humility, and vulnerability tackles herself. She is a good friend and a joy to talk to, whatever the circumstance.

My body is going to Austin, but pieces of my heart are headed to Bolivia. Pieces are with Elizabeth, Joy, Nish, Rachel, and MPT. What is there to really say about such talented and wonderful people? I suppose something along these lines:

When Jesus says in the Scriptures, "I am the way, the truth, and the life," we are often easily content with the first two propositions. But this idea of life, this abstract that does not have a finality to it but perpetuates through the cosmos, this is a hard thing. It means we have to empty our own lives in order to take up a cross. There is no splendor in this, no comfort. It is a hard thing to do. Jesus is life, but He is not easy life. When God almost sings, "Comfort, o comfort ye my people," it is because comfort is needed. To take up that cross is to empty the self and lift up a vessel to be used as a comforter so that the Comforter may enter into it and pour out again.

My friends who are headed to Bolivia, what they do is not easy for they are vessels of comfort. Pouring out comes at great price and pain. Faithfulness can be a terrible thing. But that is the mystery of faith: the terrible good of suffering redeemed.

Traveling mercies, my friends.

Follow them with me in prayer and considering sponsoring a child, too?

As for me, away I go. One more post tomorrow and then the guest post extravaganza begins. My itinerary for the next three and a half weeks, as of today: Conroe -> Austin -> Waco -> Conroe -> London -> St. Andrews -> London -> Soar Valley -> Hartlepool -> London -> Conroe -> Waco.

the thing about porn

My life is in upheaval, in a good way. Tomorrow I head up to Granbury to help my grandmother move and will return to Conroe on the same day. Thursday I'm off to Austin to see Andie Redwine and catch my second screening of the sensational Paradise Recovered. Friday, I'll be in Waco catching up with some amazing people and staying overnight until Saturday morning, when I will return home and pack my entire room for Baylor, because on Sunday I leave for the UK and don't return until 18 August, the day after which I will drive to Baylor before classes start the following Monday. I have yet to pack, I've spent too much money on clothes, I don't know where anything is, and the prospect of trying to situate wonderful guests post in a timely order for while I'm gone is about as daunting as writing something myself at this point. So I promised fiction today. It's not happening. I intended to treat this week as normal. It's not happening. So here's the week: today's post, Wednesday will not happen, Thursday may or may not happen, Friday will be the week in review and my farewell for now. All good? Right, then let's talk about porn for a second ... I sent Lauren Lankford, editor of the sensational Good Women Project, my first of two planned guest posts yesterday. I won't throw out too many of the details, but I will tell you that part of what it has to deal with is pornography and I want to tease out some of it here.

In planning that post for the past week and a half and scraping at the bottom of my soul to figure out what I wanted to say, I spent some time talking to a handful of women pretty frankly about pornography. I wanted to hear from them firsthand  what they understood porn to be, what they thought of when it came to men who viewed it, and what their reactions were  to the idea of it.

And I realized something I hadn't quite understood before. Women don't understand porn any more than the average guy does.

Why?

Because pornography isn't about lust.

If it were mere lust, than it would fade like all other sins that manifest for a season and then give way to something else. Porn sticks with a guy, gets under his skin, roots in his heart. And the reason isn't because it's about gratifying his flesh. The reason is that pornography is ultimate affirmation without any responsibility.

An image can't deny you, an image can't make you support it. She's always there, always available, always willing, and never says no. And she can be one or a thousand girls. All of them are, in turn, affirming you, making you feel powerful, making you believe that there's not one bad thing about you. That's the intoxication of pornography.

Porn's power is in its ability to play as a trickster savior, to stand in the place of Christ as being the validator of a man's soul.

So no woman can save a man from porn. She will never be pretty enough, she will never be sexy enough. It's not about that. Porn is about dissatisfaction in a man's heart and his desire to feel affirmed without the responsibility of being a man worth affirming.

Women, do the sisters a favor and stop betraying the sisterhood. When you willing compromise yourself in a relationship to try to hold onto a man who is more in love with his hand and a computer screen than you, you're winning no battles and you're not the only casualty in the crossfire. You deserve better. Don't presume you can be something more and that will bring his interest back.

It won't.

Porn has a power like few other sins do. It plants deep in a man's heart and festers and rots until it hardens the very flesh of his soul. It takes Christ in full force and power to break a man from that evil. And don't be fooled: it's evil.

Evil is going on. And that's the thing about porn.

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Update: You can check out more of what I have to say on this post on August 9th over at the GWP.