Category: Uncategorized

Cheeky Chick-fil-A Art Print

How cute is this Chick-fil-A Art Print by Josh LaFayette featuring the iconic Chick-fil-A cup!?! It stopped me dead in my tracks as I scrolled through the prints on Society6 recently looking for fun art to decorate the half-bath under the stairs in my new home. Something about the tiny nature of a half-bath makes me more excited to decorate it than any other room in the house! It’s certainly not a room in which I’ll be doing any entertaining, and some guests may never even see it, but as the main bathroom for visitors, the half-bath seems like the perfect place to display some playful personality!

Did you decorate your half-bath, or is it a purely functional space in your home? I’d love to hear!

On Blessings

Opening your heart to receive blessings means OPENING your heart. You can’t be open and selective at the same time. If you try to confine God’s work to the blessings that are on your list, you’re confining God. Which is not only the antithesis of being open, but also a completely absurd thing to consider.  

Think for a second about confining God. Who is everywhere and nowhere and tiny and huge and made the whole universe and makes up the universe and dwells inside each of us. And then you absentmindedly undermine His power to make the divine and miraculous come to pass by having a preconceived notion of what you think the blessings you stand to receive should look and feel like. That’s you telling God to sit down and be quiet and that you know better than He does what you need. And there’s hardly anything open about that. 

Which is not where this was headed when I started writing. What I was planning to say was that the part of being open that people get uncomfortable with is the fact that being open allows things to also slip through. You’ll let go of things you held tightly for a long time. Some of those things are meant to be and will stay even without a firm grip. Those are the things you need to cherish. The rest will be lost, some things you won’t even miss. Others you’ll want to fight for and hold onto. But try to resist the urge to fight. Fighting to cling tightly to something you thought you wanted makes it impossible to be open to what God knows you need. 

But I guess those two thoughts converge on the fact that you have to let go of the you you thought you’d be. Let her slip away without a fight and see who God has in store for you to be next.

Such a Perfect Quote

 

img_0356I happened to stumble across this delightful quote from Insomniac City while poking around Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings recently:

I’ve suddenly realized what you mean to me: you create the need which you fulfill, the hunger you sate. Like Jesus. And Kierkegaard. And smoked trout. . .

-Oliver Sacks to Bill Hayes, Insomniac City 

 

Which made me suddenly realize I have to get my hands on this book as soon as possible. And I am also looking forward to reading Gratitude by Oliver Sacks even more than ever, now that I know this is the kind of thought he’d think. I find that the more context you have on an author, the more you’re able to benefit from his or her work. Context contributes to understanding which is then able to lead us to meaning (although not along a nice and neat linear path, but that’ll be a story for another day).

 

The War of Art

In yesterday’s post, Jemima Kirke talks about ego and resistance stopping her from creating the art she knows she needs to create. As she said the words, my immediate thoughts were simultaneously “SAME” and “Steven Pressfield.” Which if you’ve spent any time at all poking around in the world of the creative you’ve surely heard his book The War of Art recommended at least a million times. If you haven’t read it yet, go ahead and grab a copy. It’s a quick read that will give you the wake up call (and by wake up call I mean kick in the ass) you need. For extra credit, you can also read ahead to Do The Work and Turning Pro. While there’s a little overlap among the books, the content is the kind of thing most of us probably need to have reinforced on a daily basis, so a little repetition won’t hurt. Honestly, the format of the books would make them perfect to add to a daily devotional style line up. Each chapter is only a paragraph to a page or two long, which makes them just the right length to read one a day as a part of your morning routine.