fools

out of all the corners in the world,

i really love england with both my necessarily rational heart

and my silly childlike heart.

these pictures are from carlisle. mid-march, i think....this is laura neal. aubri and i stayed with her family up in north england and saw a bit of the lake district.

this is the carlisle cathedral on the left, where laura sang in a choir as a little girl. in the pic, aubri is lighting a candle and my camera happened to catch the moment of fire transition right in front of laura. (i think the Holy Spirit is in this picture too.)

hello paris. i am on top of the eiffel tower with the arc de triomphe still glowing in the background. (just thinking...the eiffel tower really isn't a whole lot more beautiful than the fragments of jumbled foreign conversations that went on around me and jessie while we laughed in line to get to the top...or the fact that jessie--my nash housemate from last fall--and i were together in france...or the fact that in one month, i will eat steak in the backyard with my family...just saying.)

left: jessie and i went to a performance of the mozart requiem in saint germaine, the oldest church in paris. this is why i think people can be so close to God without even knowing it--because every voice in that choir, every chair in the chamber orchestra, in fact, was. (below: some parisian graffiti.)

leg two of the france adventure: angers. here, in front of IT'S cathedral, the evening of my arrival when devon and i went traipsing about beneath the sunset. (i may be wrong, but i think a town only is one if it has a cathedral of some sort. marked a center for life activity once upon a time.)

below: transatlantic gigs in london! bottom right is a pic of us recording "out of eden" in a guest room at tom's parent's house.

and THIS, my friends, is ireland.

i remember that i had to stand someplace so beautiful in order to take the picture, so it can't just be a daydream.

patrick and josh are leaving on wednesday. i do not know how to put half of a lid on this semester...beginning the goodbyes, but not actually preparing to leave myself for another 20 days following. i will cry. the house will feel a little empty and i'll look at my english friends a little more closely because i am vicariously experiencing the boys' plane flight home. and i'll have to figure out where to store the emotions that belong to my england life, because i may be back here someday, but it'll be a different adventure than the one i'm on now.

praise God with me that He doesn't change. if nothing else in my life is ever consistent, His love is. and if it were easy, why, i'm pretty sure the tools wouldn't be sharp enough to fashion me into the holy person He wants me to be.

my time here isn't up. please pray hard with me for God to have His way this final month through me. and here are some brilliant words from frederick buechner:

"Inspection stickers used to have printed on the back, 'Drive carefully--the life you save may be your own.' That is worldly wisdom in a nutshell.

What God says, on the other hand, is 'The life you save may be the life you lose.' In other words, the life you clutch, hoard, guard, and play safe with is in the end a life worth little to anybody, including yourself, and only a life given away for love's sake is a life worth living, To bring his point home, God shows us a man who gave his life away to the extent of dying a national disgrace without a penny in the bank or a friend to his name. In terms of human wisdom, he was a Perfect Fool. And if you think you can follow him without making something like the same kind of a fool of yourself, you are laboring under not a cross but a delusion,

There are two kinds of fools in the world: damned fools, and what Saint Paul calls 'fools for Christ's sake' (1 Cor. 4:10)."

may i be counted such a fool for You.