I think the breakfast was a good idea- that and the orienteering adventure yesterday.  I think this is the first Sunday in several years that I haven’t cried or been close to crying in church on this day.  (Pause to firmly clamp down on "I’ve-arrived-and-will-never-be-emotional-again" ideas.)

But I would like to say, to those of you who are sad on Mother’s Day….

May you live this year without bitterness…

May the thing that you are going through refine you and draw you closer to Christ and, like Him, after the suffering of your soul, may you see the light of life and be satisfied.

Outside at school, hundreds of kids around, no point in calling attention to it.  A couple of us stood there watching and wondering what to do.  It was on the ground moving like it was trying to get up, but couldn’t.  I guess it was time, and finally the bird turned its head so that its bill was in the ground, and then it was still.  And still all that other life was swirling around.

But His eye is still on the catbirds, you know?

2)  Loud, happy laughter.  I’ve read that some French women get embarrassed by their American female friends because they are so loud.  My laugh is really loud.  It embarrasses me at the Alliance Français, because I figure I’m driving my teacher nuts.  But really, one of the best sounds in the world is being at school at the end of the day when all the kids are gone and hearing somebody’s laughter coming from a few doors down.  And laughing is therapeutic.  AND if we all laughed quietly refined upper class persons (like all French people must be) would not look as good in contrast.

I saw this great line in a YA book (which wasn’t good enough to finish, so I cheated and read the end only):  "Let love clasp grief lest both be drown’d."  Isn’t that beautiful?

I was thinking today about my happiness as a child.  I wonder if there wasn’t a smug element to it…or at least a vast ignorance of the fact that not everyone else was happy.  I wouldn’t want to go back to that.

And then I wonder if joy isn’t something a little beyond happiness.  I saw this video of a baby giraffe, galloping about for the sheer joy of being alive…

Questions are often raised about how one can trust that we have the original Biblical texts.  This is an unavoidable issue when you are dealing with something written on paper hundreds of years ago.  We have less than a dozen copies of Plato’s work, for example, and the oldest one is still dated 900 years later than Plato himself.  Fortunately the NT manuscripts are much more numerous (in the thousands) and there is a much smaller gap (say a hundred years or even less).

It is possible to exaggerate the problem of variations among texts.  Most are minor errors, easily identified.  Some errors are super-obvious…changing a single letter in the Greek changes "we were gentle among you" to "we were horses among you."  Some variants are changes in word order, acceptable in Greek, that do not impact meaning.  We can be confident that we have a high percentage (say, 99) of the original text.

And every so often, archeologists find things that support the Biblical accounts…like the seal of the guy that wrote Jeremiah’s stuff down for him.

None of this proves anything, really.  But it helps me to see evidence that Christians aren’t totally wacked out.

In contrast, I am also reading a major historical novel (Germinal by Émile Zola, in the original French, of course) in which every major teen character and most of the minors ones have (or will have had) pre-marital sex.  But it is not a central focus of the book and Zola is trying to make a point.  The overwhelming picture of the coal miners whose lives he describes is one of misery.  The people’s sexual behavior is more like animals than anything else.  The most horrifying thing so far is the way the rich react to the poor…can’t give them money, they’ll spend it on drink (and so a woman with seven children and no food in the house is given two coats for the kids and a little bread- fortunately she is able to get a loan from a company store after agreeing to send her oldest daughter to, uh, visit the owner).

Gratuitous, pointless immorality is annoying and offensive in a book, be it violence, language, or sex.  But when it makes a real point….I’m thinking of Hunger Games again.  So much violence, but with a real point (though don’t take that comparison too far…Suzanne Collins is no Zola!)

I heard a pastor tell about a woman who e-mailed him about how she wanted to share the gospel with a friend but was having so many issues herself.  How could she share the gospel when she was so broken.  The pastor replied that her state of brokenness was the ONLY state in which she could share the gospel.

I’m deceiving myself every time I think I’m pretty good.  Boastful, arrogant, and that’s only the stuff I’m admitting to here.  But because Christ is risen I have hope…

I try hard to get over this major misconception, but I read recently that nowhere in Great Britain is more than 75 miles from the sea.  Hard for me to grasp.  And around 60 million people.

I’ve been thinking about how the size of a country impacts the mentality of its inhabitants.  Are Americans so big on personal space because their country is so BIG?

Speaking of books, Katniss has enough sorrow.  She loses so much.  I’ve been reading a detective series that I bumped into in the library- Maisie Dobbs novels by Jaqueline Winspear, I think.  I think I’m reading them more for the atmosphere and setting than for the stories.  They are set starting in 1929.  Maisie is a sort of detective, but had been a nurse in France during World War I.  Coming from Winston Churchill’s very patriotic, lofty perspective on Britain and war, these books are a bit of a shock.  These books emphasize how much was lost and how much people struggled to recover emotionally.  How many British women lost their men to that war…Maisie didn’t completely lose her almost-fiance, though- but he spends the rest of his life in a long-term care facility, unable to recognize Maisie.  For many years she can’t even bear to visit him.  That’s sorrow for you.  After reading a few of these books in a short period of time I find the sorrow a bit overwhelming.  I need to be blogging about this, you know?  Pull the cover off the well…

Somebody mentioned Ecclesiastes in Sunday School last weekend.  I’d forgotten all about it.  The last verse of chapter one blows me away:  "For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge the more grief."  What?!

When the disciples are arguing about who will be the greatest, Jesus takes a little child in his arms- did Jesus ever hurt because he never got to marry and have children?  Could that be any part of being a man of sorrows?

The problem with being 36 and barren is you come face to face with the idea that this may actually be a permanent state.  Here I thought life was a fairy tale and it turns out to have been a tragedy.

Yes, that’s an exaggeration, on two different levels.  One, my life is not a tragedy.  Barrenness is just a tragedy that’s part of my life, which is different.  Tragedy might be even a little strong.  A sorrow that’s part of my life.  And then there’s Isaiah 53- "He will see his offspring and prolong his days…"  The eternal significance of Jesus’ life and death is infinitely bigger than the pain and loneliness he felt.  I can’t understand this, but my life is so infinitely small compared to eternity.  And the work that Christ does in a person using things like pain and sorrow…definitely worth it.

And I’m more or less there.  I just read L’Étranger by Albert Camus in French, my fourth novel in that language.  There are still lots of words I don’t know, but I get the sense of what I read.  I can watch French tv and at get the main idea, some supporting details, and lots of words.  Sometimes I get whole sentences, especially if it’s someone like Sarkozy who is intent on making sure all the voters understand him. I make lots of mistakes when I speak of course, but I can verbally meander a bit in the language- adding in comments in French class that go beyond the bare necessities.  And sometimes I write sentences that actually sound French.

I’m going to try the teacher certification test next month.  If I pass it this early that’s extremely cool (it is a pretty hard test- read or listen to dry passages in French and answer multiple choice questions, record one’s self in various speaking situations and complete a few writing questions) but if not I’ll try again.

Oh, and I’m planning on going to Québec City this summer for a couple of weeks- the goal is two weeks of English-free French.  And all this makes me want to study more Spanish- still more to learn there…and the do-ability of this makes the idea of learning Portuguese seem very reachable- maybe just at a slower pace.

Being 36 and still barren has been harder than I expected, so it is nice- so nice - I’m thankful - that I have a job that I really like and that leads to such interesting study at home.