21 Candles and a Menorah: Happy Birthday Linds

 Happy Birthday my sweet Lindsey. Today you turn 21.

Note: I haven't been on this blog for a while. I've actually been writing, but haven't felt just right about posting. I like what I've written, but maybe, I guess, they didn't resonate enough for me. This is different. I want to write this, whether or not it is re-posted or even read.

Candles are a pretty neat thing. We use them for all kinds of things. pleasant home scents, light, birthdays, and even funerals. They represent so many different feelings and attitudes that we get all the time. We light them to make us happy, to cover up smells, to shine, and to remember.

Today many of those feelings are with me. I even wanted to light a candle to mask the smell of my dog.

21 years ago today, a girl was born that would change the way I looked at the world in so many ways. Her smile, friendship, and laughter showed me what it means to really be a light in the world. And if i could do anything for her on her birthday, it would be to say thank you for all the meaning she put in my life. I would love to watch her blow out her candles, have her first legal drink, and celebrate life.

At funerals many times candles are lit as a way to remember the person that has passed on from this world into the next. These candles help us give a physical representation of their movement into a new life, and with it's extinguishing, their existence in this one.

There was a candle that never burned out though, and it held very special meaning in the Tabernacle. This was a menorah. Now, I'm sure your mind immediately went to Hanukkah which then leads you thinking of dreidels and food and... ah I've gotten off topic myself.

Literally the most basic menorah I could find. 

Someone needs to take a really cool artsy photo of one, Google images is really lacking.

Anyways, the menorah. God instructed the Israelites to construct a lamp made of pure gold to be used in the Tabernacle. This was also called "The Lamp of God." Three lamps would burn in the day, and three at night. Here's the cool part. The one in the center, always burned. Always. Even though they used the same amount of oil in all of the lamps. they considered this to be significant to God being present with them. Pretty neat.

So in light (no pun intended) of today's birthday celebration, it brings me back to thought about Lindsey. Her continuing light that burns bright in all of us is kind of like a giant birthday cake with a menorah for the candles....

...oh wait

She is never burning out, and it keeps us remembering in our struggles, pain, suffering, emotional breakdowns, physical exhaustion that God is present with us. He hasn't left us hanging on for dear life, he's here right now. I want to continue to shine the light that she gave me, as my gift to her. I love you Linds and we all miss you, may we all continue to burn bright.

Happy Birthday.





Come Lord Jesus soon. We need your resurrection.

Jellybeans and Crucifixes

I really love Easter time. Mostly because I absolutely love jellybeans. Yeah, getting to wear bright clothing and Easter egg hunts are all great, but there's always been something about jellybeans for me. Jelly Belly's are my favorite, with all of the weird and interesting flavors.

Top 5:

1. Juicy Pear

2. Watermelon

3. Coconut

4. Tangerine

5. Plum

I can count my favorites. There are 7. FYI.

It's always so great, you pick up your bag of Jelly Belly's and immediately start to pick through the flavors which you know. I always seem to end up with a bigger pile of flavors I don't like than I do, with stuff like "buttered popcorn" and "bubblegum" (which both make me shudder even thinking of them). I'm sure I'm not alone in that gesture, but it's never a good day when you accidentally eat a cinnamon flavored bean thinking that it was a strawberry daiquiri.

This week is Holy Week. Something that Christians around the world have been celebrating for over a thousand years. Some of our earliest views of some sort of celebration date back to the 3rd century. That's a really long time. Catholics and many more Catholic-tradition Protestant churches still celebrate the season of Lenten coming up to Holy Week, and the days along with it, but over the last couple centuries many Protestant groups have abandoned any type of celebration of this,  citing the "man-made" religious holiday reason. In my own faith tradition, the Churches of Christ, I wasn't absolutely aware of Holy Week's existence until I came to college. We always celebrated Easter, but there wasn't any type of reference to the rest of the week. I always just thought that Good Friday was a day I wasn't going to have to go to school and so I could just sleep in (maybe I still sleep in a little..). When I finally learned the significance of the week, it totally enveloped my mind in a new way of thinking of this week. This week is Jesus' journey to the cross, but I'll get back to that later.

This past Tuesday marked two months of losing one of my best-friends of my childhood, Lindsey Smith. It's one of those things, that I'm still coming to grips with as I write this blog. I've been pretty blessed in life. I've only lost one grandparent, I come from a middle-class family, and I go to a private Christian university. I'm doing OK. But up until 2 months ago, I had never had a foundation shattering experience quite like that. For the last couple months, I have been to hell and back in my heart, mind and spirit. In no way could I have ever imagined the amount of pain that one could feel in a 10 second phone call.

Miss you Linds

And so, here I am two months and two days later writing as a sort of therapy I guess. I've been trying to write this for just about the same amount of time. But I don't think that it's any coincidence that I decided to write today. Because today is the middle of the week, hump day as we like to call it, and I can't even begin to imagine what kind of day that was for Jesus 2000 years ago. I can see some kind of dialogue like this..

Peter: "Ugh, Wednesday's are so long Jesus! I can't wait for today to be OVER!"
John: "Yeah man, we've been walking all over Jerusalem all day. My feet are KILLING me."
James: "Yeah my sandals smell like DEATH. Can't you just wait for Passover Jesus?"
Jesus: "Yeah.. I can't"

Because Jesus had to get over that hump too, but on the other side wasn't some really awesome weekend where he could go out and have an "old wine" (10 points for the bible joke) at the bar with his disciples. It was the cross. Two pieces of wood and three nails. There's something about the cross that speaks to me in my pain though. Rob Bell in his book Drops Like Stars says it like this about the cross, "it speaks to our longing to know that we're not alone, that there's someone else "screaming alongside us."I like that. I like thinking, knowing that God has some existential understanding of my hurt and suffering. Isaiah prophesies that the Messiah, will be GOD WITH US, that God will get a taste of our medicine as humans. And he does, he takes it all on.

 Read this book!

So Friday is coming, the crucifixion, and that brings me back to Jelly Belly. Kinda a weird transition, but I think it's perfect. You see, I really love my favorite flavors, but I don't get to choose how many of those five perfect, savory flavors they put in the bag. I have to sort through the bad ones to get to the prize. Life is going to suck, like just as bad as "buttered popcorn" suck. Things aren't going to go right, but that's when you realize that things aren't the way they're supposed to be. That's Friday. This place is broken. Children are starving, people are in slavery, and best-friends die, but then it's like "Ahh, there's a watermelon.. mmm." And you realize that this place is being mended, slowly, but surely through God's sweet and delectable creation.

Now here's the beautiful part. As Tony Campolo so eloquently put it, "Sunday's a-comin." Easter. The day that I KNOW Jesus couldn't wait for. Death's finality was overturned and the tomb was cleared. Everything that "was, is, and is to come" was finally happening. Darkness had not overcome the light. Resurrection. That's like a whole bag of my favorite Jelly Belly flavors, never having to sort out any of them. All the Gospel's have great resurrection stories, but my favorite is in Mark 16:

When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus’ body. ² Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb ³ and they asked each other, “Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?” ⁴ But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away. ⁵ As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed.
⁶ “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. ⁷ But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.’”
⁸ Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.

That's it. Haha. I can laugh literally out loud about this story. "They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid." That's definitely not why it's my favorite one, but I love the fact that it just drops off. The story doesn't have a real ending. The resurrection has taken place, but it's going out into the world and it's up to us to write that story.


Losing Lindsey may have been the hardest thing I've ever gone through, but I take solace in the fact that Jesus understands where I come from and on Sunday, his resurrection brought life to my dear friend. It may not make me feel completely better right now, but there is hope that someday I will. And THAT is like there were never any bad Jelly Belly's ever created.

Wearing it everyday.