Over the Rhine Saturday - New and old

Ah it's finally a free Saturday in spring. What better way to enjoy the day then to listen to some new and old tunes by one of my favorite bands, Over the Rhine.

Here's a video and lyrics for an Over the Rhine song that is new to me, "Desperate for Love". The claymation in the video is clever I think. Unfortunately, I was not able to find a video for "Everyman's Daughter." One of my favorites. But here is the link to OTR's website. Check them out if you get the chance. Lovely, thoughtful music indeed!

Desperate For Love

Are you feelin’
A little desperate
Get on your knees
And confess it
Honey please
Don’t second guess it
You’re desperate
For love

Is this just
A little fling
Or is it about
A little bling bling
Either way
You feel the sting sting
You’re desperate
For love

It might only take a kiss
For the plot to take a twist
That you hadn’t counted on

Just a tiny little minute
But eternity will be in it
If you turn me on

Red wine on my lips
Got this black silk slip on my hips
The kitchen faucet just drips and drips
You’re desperate for love

EVERYMAN'S DAUGHTER

Look inside for the elusive goldmine.
Broken glass and a little cheap
wine is all that I can find.
And bundles of contradictions,
my heart full of loose connections,
hands across my eyes.
I cannot disguise I'm everyman's daughter.


It's always the same old question.
Who am I and whose invention?
This armour's full of dust.
There's so much of us in each other.
If I hate you you're my best reminder of all I wish I was.

I hate you just because I'm everyman's daughter.


Who do you think that I am?
It don't matter long as we can understand.
I am hurting someone.
I am hurting someone just like, just like you.


Insulting the wounds of others, my sisters, my brothers, my vision's way too good.
I carry the inward aching.
Like you, I too am naked.
I don't look that good, but this is flesh and blood. I'm everyman's daughter.


Look at all the blood we've spilt.
I can't deal with all this fundamental guilt.
I am hurting someone.
I am hurting someone just like, just like you.

I am. I am. I am everyman's daughter.

Hard Hearted?

Joseph Fee Sculpture

Jeremiah 31: 33-34
33 "This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel
after that time," declares the LORD.
"I will put my law in their minds
and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
and they will be my people.

34 No longer will a man teach his neighbor,
or a man his brother, saying, 'Know the LORD,'
because they will all know me,
from the least of them to the greatest,"
declares the LORD.
"For I will forgive their wickedness
and will remember their sins no more."

Imagine for a moment a world where no one would have to say the words: Know the Lord. These words would not longer necessary not due to them being made numb by the insistence, but by the heart-deep restoration of humanities relationship with God. In some ways, this world wide reconciliation reminds me of the words of the Lord's prayer - "Thy kingdom come, they will be done on earth as it is in heaven."

On planning my children's message for this coming Sunday, I was impressed with this image of a heart tender and mold able by a reconciled relationship with God. If my heart was so flexible to the movement of God through his word and the Holy Spirit, what would my world be? Would I be content with things as they were, or would I be more proactive to the needs of my neighborhood and community as they came to the surface.

According to some research, I rediscovered some insights on Jeremiah's text in it's original context:

"Heart" in our culture has many associations it didn't in the biblical world. There, the heart was not understood to be the "the opposite of the head," nor the center of emotion (that was the intestines), and not even of "love"; rather, the heart was thought to be the center of intellect and values — the bottom line of the approach to God, the world, and everyone and everything in it that drives all our actions and decisions. From this instruction comes these questions (perhaps on a screen): "What's really in my heart?" "Do I want to be where Jesus goes?" "How can my heart become like yours, Lord?"

(Planning helps)

Here are some additional thoughts on the new covenant being made in the heart of humankind:

A new covenant, not in stone, but in flesh, in the hearts of the people . . . So Jeremiah envisions God's new initiative to deliver the exiles in Babylon, not just from captivity, but from their own waywardness. A covenant simply "external," on stone, has been too easy to break. God wants to cut this new covenant elsewhere: in their hearts.

(Planning helps)

What God is working in the hearts of humanity is an overarching shift of heart and relationship with him. The change God requires is no longer satisfied by a stone memorial. God desires a changing and living faith that is ultimately full filled in the sacrifice, death and resurrection of Jesus. The impact is both human and divine. When God is working in our hearts, there should be a holistic connection: mind, body, heart, and spirit. All aspects of our lives should be impacted by God's sculpting hands.

Prayer:

God, be the potter of my human clay. Mold and make the change you need to see. Make the alterations you need to see, made your picture of beauty and living breathing work of art for you and the world to benefit from and see.

Lord you need a heart alive to see and love a life unique to your influence;
one that is different than what I usually am content to be.

Robert Frost said it.

"To be a poet is a condition, not a profession."
— Robert Frost

This explains SOOOOOOOOOOO much! I wish I could have met him. I think we'd have a lot to chat about.

"A poem . . .
begins as a lump in the throat,
a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. . . .
It finds the thought
and the thought finds the words."

Robert Lee Frost (March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963) was an American poet. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech.[1] His work frequently employed themes from the early 1900s rural life in New England, using the setting to examine complex social and philosophical themes. A popular and often-quoted poet, Frost was honored frequently during his lifetime, receiving four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry.

Mending Wall

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'

Pictures of a road trip

Image found at Autos Canada.

Driving into a sunrise of pastel pop art,
school buses putter along foggy fields and
are followed by cartoon green pick-up trucks.

Groundhogs scurry through grassy dew-coated yards.
Mailboxes are filled with daily news papers
of black, white and lots of gray.

Tires spit rain drops onto the road and across the
body of the road ready but smudgy car.

Paper bags filled with breakfast sandwiches, home fries,
napkins and stir sticks. Why so many?
The car is filled with the
familiar smell of road trip food,
shuffled ipod music and our meandering conversation.

Coffee is strong, and the day is open to possibility and potential.
Just like us.
The day, our day, is only beginning.

T.L. Eastman 09'

What is your favorite way to travel? Have you ever taken a road trip? What did the trip entail? Would you travel this way again? What was the best/worst thing about traveling this way?

Which way?

Image found at Words of P

Some days the steps seem so set and stayed,
and others the direction seems surrounded in haze.

Which way to proceed, to the left or the right?
What to do when the destination seems so far out of sight.

Like a path to an invisible bridge,
that only is visible to the foot reaching out in faith -
and landing securely on solid ground.

Landing, docking, settling, being sure of the steps yet to come.
Left, right, left, right, left, right
and another left.

For the path less traveled is my road,
on my journey,
on my pilgrimage
out of Egypt.

T.L. Eastman 09

Sleeping with bread: downs and ups

My Monday morning is going to be a busy one. So for the sake of following through with Sleeping with Bread today I think I will use a list format. Hope you don't mind. After all, bread is bread right?

Downs:

Household chores are running away with the house. I find myself wishing I had one of those robot vacuum cleaners to meander around while I was working.

My friend and co-worker had a seizure yesterday and was hospitalized. Sunday was a blur.

When people don't share the sharpies.

Cliques.

Seeing people I care for worried or upset and not knowing how to help.

Time seems to escape me lately.

Telemarketing calls.

Frosty mornings in March almost April! Sometimes spring seems so far away.

Ups:

Saturday was a road trip with my boys. It was book store and outlet rummaging for most of the afternoon. We finally had our Indian dinner at the REAL Indian restaurant. My birthday dinner we'd planned in January had been snowed out, so it was wonderful to have the time this weekend.

Meeting Facebook friends in real time and space, and finding they are wonderful people. Just wish you lived closer!

Praying via IM with far-away friends.

Pockets of afternoon sun that almost seem summer like.

My lovely family all together for my daughter's 16th birthday breakfast. Waffle, scrambled eggs, strawberries, coffee and orange juice. YUM!

Making a birthday shirt with my daughter.

Driving with the windows down and the stereo very loud!

Did I mention, my baby girl is 16 today! WOW!

Ahh - and Love. Love is the biggest slice of bread there ever was - the most challenging - but the best!

Rilke -
"People look for easy solutions, for the easiest way to the easy...
but everything in nature grows and fights to grow and struggles at every cost and against all resistance to remain complete in itself and true to its fundamental nature...
It is also good to love - love being difficult. Love is perhaps the most difficult task given us, the most extreme, the final proof and test, the work for which all other work is only preparation."

Listening to Last Tuesday really loud in my car

Today was really long and tiring. At the end of the day my daughter and I made a Walmart run for some upcoming birthday items (she turns 16 at 7:41 am on the 23!)to unwind. On the way there and home we listened to Last Tuesday very loudly in the car. Last Tuesday came into our lives when she was 11 or 12. They came to a small town south of us for a show and amazed us with their performance at an indoor skate park. They jumped off amps, swing their guitars and yet were musically and technically impressive. That was the beginning of my daughter's love of Last Tuesday. Not only were they great performers, they were wonderful human beings. They came and played in a 1/2 gym full of teenagers for very little money several times over in that small town where I worked at the time. They even went to visit folks at a nursing home with us. Not your typical rock stars eh?

Four years later, Heath and I still love to listen to the Cd's. The band is no longer together as life's drumbeat has a way of moving all of us in different directions: work, marriage and ministry call us all to unique spaces and places. But their is a lasting impression that LT has left in my own heart and was best expressed by my daughter tonight in regard to my work weary heart and mind:
"Hey Mom, you know what they'd say to you...no more of that now, stop it, we love you and Jesus does too!"

Thanks LT for being sincere in you love for people and for God. You're music made a great impression, but your hearts made a greater one. Blessings on the current and future adventures. We love you too.

Number one on the
list I made
Is how a fear can
manipulate
Anyone to
Fall in love with you
Cant be what you ever
Had in mind
An iron fist
To judge our time
And I don't understand
Why we are the first
Ones to push them away
With lists they must obey

So tell me
I want to know,
How we should deal
how we can deal with it

I know the answer
Can't be found in me
But if we talk about the
Things we see

We might be on the way
We might be on the way
We'll write it down so we
won't step back
to save our spot and to
not lose track
of what we understand,
what we may never under
stand while we are here
let's stand while we are here

This conversation
It makes it easier
To understand that
I know I'm not alone