Morning News, July 23

-

Conspiracy stories rampant! We have three choices: laugh at them (and thus add to our cynicism), immerse ourselves in them (and thus add to our anger), or consider them distractions and wait for the truth to come out over time.  The 24/7 news cycle has to be fed; as I've often said, in the absence of information (and the information people want), things get made up or at least embellished wildly. 

For some of us, we just wait for the next thing to stoke our need for distraction.  

Traveling friend and I drove two hours to Murphy, NC, to visit an amazing place, the John C. Campbell Folk School.  I want to read about it some more before I post anything of depth, but I will say this: the folks that work there were hospitable and kind and excited about what they do, and that means a great deal. I interviewed some of them for my podcast.  Shout out! Also drove through beautiful north Georgia and Western North Carolina, stopped for peaches at Mercier's Orchard in Blue Ridge (second shout out!) and today I am exhausted. 

I often pray for the church in the U.S. to repent of its love of money, sex, and power: i.e., its materialism (which leads to lack of generosity for the truly poor), its emotional and sometimes physical dalliances with sexual immorality, and its idolatry of politics and political figures.  As important as that is, there has to be the balance. We repent so we can love, love correctly, love fully.  I've been only half right. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Kallman's Syndrome: The Secret Best Kept

-
I went to my cardiologist yesterday.   Every year I have to wear a Holter monitor for a day because of a heart ablation I had in 2007.   If you don’t know what a Holter monitor is, it’s a 24-hour mobile, wires-hanging-off-your-body EKG.   The nurse practitioner saw me, (not the doctor, which is ok because his voice puts me to sleep).   She was very sweet.   She asked me if I was still taking Estradiol and Progesterin.   “No,” I said. “I’ve totally gone off those.   I was on them for a very long time and I wanted to be sure to stop.” What I didn’t tell her is how long I actually had taken those hormones.   37 years.   I started with HRT when I was 17 because I have Kallman’s Syndrome.   You may never meet a person who has this condition.   It only affects 1 in 10,000 people (or 1 in 86,000, according to one source) so that’s quite a range and far more males have it than females (as do most negative things).   So, being female, I am quite an oddit
Read more

Annie Dillard on Writing Advice and Some Observations

-
  https://getpocket.com/explore/item/write-as-if-you-were-dying-read-annie-dillard-s-greatest-writing-advice?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us I frequently listen to a podcast called THE HABIT. Its host is Jonathan Rogers, who for the most part interviews writers with a Christian focus. He is a better interviewer than I, and he runs a community of writers. I recommend him. I do have to say that the podcast makes me feel very shallow as a writer.  One reason is that Jonathan Rogers has a signature question, Who are the writers that make you want to write? If I ever land on his program (a dream), I will need an answer to that one, and right now I don't have one. Sure, there are writers I like, lots of them, but reading them doesn't send me to my computer to get cracking. They are more likely to make me think, you've got no business doing this writing gig.  Actually, bad or mediocre writers motivate me more although I am not exactly proud of that. And the fact that what I want to
Read more