A Friend

I have to try to turn you on to one of my friends' artwork. Here (next to this post) is one of the paintings I like the best. I mean seriously, if he was not my friend, I think I would still love his work. It's stunning how great it is, so take a minute and look at it. You can find more of it here at http://jackbaumgartner.wordpress.com/. Once you're there, click on the pages at the right to look at the work. You don't see stuff like this everyday, especially here in middle-America. No one takes the time to do this sort of stuff anymore - puts this sort of heart, thought, effort, and detail into their work. In this age when we are inundated with fast-moving, quickly rendered digital graphics, it's nice to see the real deal. Enjoy.

Simplicity

It's hard to live a simple life in the middle of all this crap. Just try to be silent for like a few minutes and you'll see what I mean. Unless you're in the middle of nowhere, there's always something around making noise. And here in these United States, we have instant access to almost everything in the world. I mean, if I want to watch a killer whale jumping on a guy, I can. That's cool, but it also means that things start to lose their novelty pretty quick. If I can have anything I want, it all becomes fairly meaningless and I start looking for something that does hold some value.

Before I start sounding any more like Ecclesiastes, I want to say that there is some stuff worth living for. You just have to dig out from all the other stuff to find it. No, getting stuff and more stuff is not the meaning of life. The goal is to have some life-changing experiences with God and people. For that, you have to be quiet, get everything else quiet, and listen.

Slow and Steady

Transformation usually happens very subtly and slowly. If it's true that transformation should happen from the inside out, that makes sense. You could make a huge change in your thinking or the direction of your heart and your hair would look the same, you would still drive the same car, and you would probably still have the same amount of money. There wouldn't be any outward dividends for a while. But soon, hopefully you would start to do some things differently. Hopefully you would feel better and start to treat others better.

Two things I need to do differently because of this concept: 1. Be more patient with others - they could be transforming right before my eyes and the fruit could be coming later and not be visible yet. I don't want to kill it. And 2. I need to be quiet and still and wait for what God wants to change, subtly, in my life. I can look at others all I want. There's still a bunch of stuff about me that needs to change.