We've Moved!

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This Life, This Day

I don't know what your high school experience was like, but mine was awesome. Seriously, it was fantastic. My parents gave my siblings and myself the loving gift of sending us to a small private school in Nashville that was known for being 'different'. Many of our competing schools referred to it as 'Camp CPA' because of its unusually wholesome and easy going feel.

Our teachers were the finest, they could have easily taught at bigger, more expensive schools but they saw the worth in such an institution and invested in it whole heartedly. About two months ago, I had a half dozen or so of them over for dinner along with some of our alumni. It was a very precious night. What a treat to let these teachers know how much they meant to us and to get to spend an evening laughing, talking, listening and just fellowshipping together. We stayed up until the next morning giggling over childish jokes with our biology teacher (and there was even a legendary 'that's what she said' joke uttered by an English man...) and I think all of us were a little sad that our days at CPA were so far gone.

Today I was reminded why I remember that community so fondly.

Part of the mystique that surrounds CPA is how the community continues on even after you have left the halls. One, two, five, seven, eight years after graduating, I still respond sharply to the things that affect that family. Their triumphs bring me pride, their good tidings bring me joy and their trials carry in my heart.

A member of their family, Michael Daniel, a sophomore, passed away yesterday afternoon following a traumatic accident. I did not know Michael Daniel, I do not know the Daniel family, they are multiple generations younger in this academic genealogy than myself. But when I heard about his admission to the hospital, I followed the updates constantly-praying that one of the posts would bring good news.

And in a way, it did bring good news. Even in his death, the Daniel family still proclaimed God's goodness. What a testament of faith the following words are:

"Precious son.  Precious brother.  Precious uncle.  Precious friend.  Today we say goodbye to our Precious Michael.

A little after 6 PM Michael's earthly journey came to an end.  Though the original plan was to assess his condition tomorrow morning, his body had had enough.  And truly, it was Michael's way to do things on his own terms.  

Michael, we know, has gone home.  He is made new -- perfect and full of peace.  And in this we find peace too.

Over the past few days, there have been many prayers for a miracle.  God answered that prayer 17 years ago when he made Michael.  There have been many prayers for healing.  God answered this prayer by taking him home.

More to come this evening.  For now, we thank God for Michael, our miracle, and continue to pray for strength and faith."


Reading that reminded me of Soren Kierkegaard's work Fear And Trembling.  In Fear And Trembling, Kierkegaard uses Abraham's trip up the mountain with Isaac as an examination of faith and Abraham's belief in the promise God made to him. It's the same promise God has made to all of us: to love and protect us and never leave us. Such a hard promise to remember during hard circumstances. Kierkegaard elaborates:


"Yet Abraham believed, and believed for this life. Yea, if his faith had been only for a future life, he surely would have cast everything away in order to hasten out of this world to which he did not belong...But Abraham believed precisely for this life, that he was to grow old in the land, honored by the people, blessed by his generation, remembered forever in Isaac, his dearest thing in life, whom he embraced with a love for which it would be a poor expression to say that he loyally fulfilled the father's duty of loving the son, as indeed is evinced in the words of the summons, ''the son whom thou lovest.'' Jacob has twelve sons, and one of them he loved; Abraham had only one, the son whom he loved. Yet Abraham believed and did not doubt, he believed the preposterous."


Here's to living today and recognizing that His promises of hope, peace and blessing are applicable not for the future but for this life, for this day. 


My heart goes out to the Daniel family and thanks them for being an example of embracing God's goodness today.


Blessings,


KB 
  

Friends Hospital

"It was on this day in 1817 that the Asylum for the Relief of Persons Deprived of the Use of Their Reason was founded in Philadelphia. It was the first private mental health hospital in the United States. The Asylum was founded by a group of Quakers, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Friends, who built the institution on a 52-acre farm. It is still around today, but goes by the name Friends Hospital.
At the time that Friends Hospital was founded, mental illness was widely misunderstood, and treated as criminal behavior. Mentally ill people were tied up, put in chains, isolated, or beaten. The Quakers wanted to model a new type of care. They wrote out their philosophy in a mission statement for the hospital: "To provide for the suitable accommodation of persons who are or may be deprived of the use of their reason, and the maintenance of an asylum for their reception, which is intended to furnish, besides requisite medical aid, such tender, sympathetic attention as may soothe their agitated minds, and under the Divine Blessing, facilitate their recovery."
The group purchased the 52-acre farm for less than $7,000, and tried to create a beautiful place with gardens and lots of outdoor space. These days, the hospital occupies 100 acres, which include flower gardens and about 200 varieties of trees. Much of this was the work of one man who started out at the hospital as a bookkeeper in 1875 and ended up working there and managing the grounds until his death in 1947. One day, he found an azalea that a family member had brought for a patient and tossed out. He tended it in the greenhouse until it was healthy again, took cuttings, and planted those, and from that one plant more than 20 acres of the Friends Hospital are now planted in azaleas." The Writer's Almanac

What a need example of how a person's unique vision can bless so many lives. I particularly like the part about a discarded azaleas growing into 20 acres of azaleas.

Blessings,

KB

P.S. Andrew Combs is just marvelous. Reminds me of a young Guy Clark.

Winston Churchill

'‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.’ We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land, and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival. Let that be realized; no survival for the British Empire, no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for, no survival for the urge and impulse of the ages, that mankind will move forward towards its goal. But I take up my task with buoyancy and hope. I feel sure that our cause will not be suffered to fail among men. At this time I feel entitled to claim the aid of all, and I say, ‘Come then, let us go forward together with our united strength.’"

Winston Churchill,  13 May 1940

IRM Update

"Indian Rescue Mission successfully rescued one minor girl aged 15 yrs from forced prostitution in Pune red light area on May 10, 2011 at around 20.18 hrs. She lost her mother at a very young age and she was trafficked from another state to Pune city on a false promise of job. Thank you each one of you who have prayed, supported and made this possible. And THANKS to God who helped us for this rescue. Brothel Keeper is arrested."

Before I Die...

"Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans." 

-John Lennon

Last night I was perusing through one of my favorite websites, Good.Is and ran across this article about an artist named Candy Chang who converted an abandoned warehouse in New Orleans into a public bucket list. The side of the building has a chalkboard surface where people are encouraged to fill in the blank "before I die I want to...."write a book, travel, get married, save the world, etc. Such a neat use of space. 

I've never really made a 'bucket list' before. Honestly I had never heard the term until the movie "The Bucket List" was released a few years ago. Never saw, and no regrets. Seeing "The Bucket List" will not be on my 'bucket list'-pun intended. Apparently the concept of making a to-do list before you die is a pretty popular idea-there's even a website dedicated to people sharing their wish lists on Bucketlist.org. 

Obviously there is an immense opportunity to delve into the idea of something like a bucket list and I'm sure at some point I will but for now I will leave you with the words of  Brian Friel, one of the greatest playwrights from Ireland known most famously for Dancing at Lughnasa, who was notorious for his privacy. This was one of his rare answers in an interview and I think it's appropriate-just the facts of his life and goals that aren't overly heroic:

''I am married, have five children, live in the country, smoke too much, fish a bit, read a lot, worry a lot, get involved in sporadic causes and invariably regret the involvement, and hope that between now and my death I will have acquired a religion, a philosophy, a sense of life that will make the end less frightening than it appears to me at this moment."

Blessings,

KB

P.S. Listening to Ryan Adams' "Gold" as summer creeps into Tennessee

7 Marks of a Right Heart.

Good reminder from the resurgence.com.

Divine Elevator

So neat. Courtesy of A Cup Of Jo. 

All Dogs Go To Heaven.

Having grown up around border collies, this made me laugh out loud. A lot.

Happy Mother's Day!

Blessings,

KB

P.S. Griffin House spinning in the car.

New Logo!

We FINALLY have a proper logo. Thanks to the wonderful people at 323 Design we are now the proud owners of the new logo seen above and we just love it. Hope y'all like it too!

Blessings,

KB

P.S. Spoon's "The Underdog" is my favorite song today. No contest.

The Numbers

''Globally, some 600,000 to 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year, according to a 2007 report from the U.S. State Department. Of that number, more than 70% are female and half are children. However, a 2009 United Nations report stated that around 20% of all trafficking victims are children.'' CNN's Project Freedom, 4th May 2011

Tornado: Part I

"We're not in Tennessee anymore..."

Last week my sister, my cousin and I decided to slip down south to catch some sun in Gulf Shores, Alabama. More specifically, last Wednesday, the 27th of April 2011, we decided to journey from one end of Alabama to the other. Unbeknownst to us, Alabama was on the verge of looking like this:

Red is bad.

From Nashville to Spring Hill we saw nothing more than a few isolated showers and dirty looking clouds. My aunt phoned and advised us to turn back because there were horrific storms on the way for Alabama. Being reliant on the weather we saw in front of us and being stubbornly determined to get tan, we disregarded her guidance and pushed through to northern Alabama (of note, you should listen to mothers, aunts, grandmothers, sisters and any other motherly figure that has your best interest at heart when it comes to weather...). We pulled off to fill up and grab dinner just south of the Tennessee border, officially entering Alabama Tornado territory. Sitting in the all too familiar Sonic Drive In, we sipped on fountain drinks and listened to the weather updates on the radio. Tornado landing in this town, and that town, tornado warning here and there...out of curiosity we pulled up a map on the GPS and to our horror discovered that we were surrounded by either an actual tornado or a tornado warning on all sides. We weighed our options and decided to order a hot fudge sundae and wait it out.



What's a blog entry without some microsoft paint action?

After dessert, we hit the road again-much to our mothers' dismay. We had high hopes and a glass that was half full until we reached Decatur, Alabama. A tenacious storm had welcomed us to Decatur, we fought through the visibility impairing rain and reached a clearing where we discovered that we were the only car on the road. Multiple cars and trucks were stopped under the bridge and the rest of the cars were parked on the exit. We followed suit and pulled off onto the exit where we found a police officer and asked what was going on. He looked at us like we had lobsters crawling out of our ears and answered, "a tornado just came through here, less than a minute ago. Y'all just missed it''. Our eyes adjusted to our surroundings and we saw for the first time that an 18 wheeler had been flipped on the median, trees were flattened and the billboard signs had been wadded up like paper and thrown on the ground. We had just been spared a horrific situation.

For whatever reason, this did not deter us and we continued to push on. I fully understand that many of you are thinking that we're idiots and you have my permission to mutter "idiots" or "morons" under your breath as you read this.

More rain, more dark clouds, more weather channel on the radio. As we entered Cullman County, the weather station announced that Cullman County was in the clear for the night, that Cullman could rest easy for the night. We sighed a big sigh of relief and were happy to be in Cullman.

You know the common joke that weather men have the only job where they're allowed to be wrong half the time and still get to keep their jobs? So not funny any more. The man announcing our good news of tornado free skies quickly changed his mind from ''sleep well'' to ''a tornado has landed in Cullman County. If you're in Cullman County, you have minutes to find shelter''. Seriously. This happened.

One of the many tornadoes that harmed Cullman County

We were so blessed to have been a few hundred yards away from an exit and pulled off quickly, green skies behind us. The town was completely black. No electricity anywhere. No street lights, no gas station lights, nothing but car head lights as far as the eye could see. In the darkness we saw a Comfort Suites and whipped under their awning and ran inside the hotel. The hail came crashing down and the flag out front wasn't flapping, it was standing straight out as if lined with wires. The tornado howled down the main drag of the town as a large group of good old country boys and small group of nurses watched in pure awe.



Thanks for the memories, Comfort Suites.

 As Cullman continued to get roughed up, the news reached us that I-65 was closed for the night, meaning that we were in need of shelter for the evening. Luckily, we were standing in a hotel that 'just by accident happened to have rooms available'.



Not to dog the Comfort Suite franchise, but I've paid less for hotel rooms in New York and Chicago. And those rooms had electricity. The whole scenario seemed like horror movie plot-and it's super scary wandering through the hotel with nothing more than your cell phone light or a oil lantern-which they had! And they were using them!

Way better than cable.

The room could have double for a sauna so my cousin and I used the Philips head screw driver in her emergency road side assistance kit to dismantle the safety hardware on the windows, popped those suckers open and let in a cool breeze. Since every single restaurant, drive through and gas station was without electricity they were closed and we were without food.



Anthropomorphism is so funny.

 Like little raccoons thieving a camp site, we slipped into the kitchen that night and took a half gallon of Breyer's Rocky Road ice cream, mountain dew, yogurt and fruit loop cereal up to our room. We laid on that queen size bed eating contraband rocky road ice cream and fruit loop cereal, listening to the rain sing its victory outside and laughed about our current situation: critical care nurses who needed a break from their stressful jobs were trapped in a town that had no electricity in Cullman, Alabama, in an insanely hot hotel that had no electricity, feasting on sugar and in one of the more stressful situations one could find themselves in-not the vacation we envisioned.

Exhausted from dodging tornadoes, we giggled ourselves to sleep-not knowing the devastation that awaited us the next day. Devastation that would be revealed by the light of day.

Blessings,

KB

P.S. Sufjan Steven's "Songs For Christmas" are lovely and never out of season.

My Sweet City's Hurt

A year ago yesterday, I posted this on my old blog in response to the flood that roughed up Nashville so bad. Can't believe how quickly I had forgotten the damage we saw a year ago:

"On Saturday, the 1st of May, our delayed April showers showed up in a fury delivering the worst flooding seen in Music City in 50 years. The Harpeth River that has so lovingly provided nostalgic summer recreation for us took on a nasty countenance as it rose 26 feet, flooding most of Kingston Springs Bellevue. Neighborhoods in Brentwood and Franklin were evacuated and Tennessee lost 11 lives this weekend.

Vanderbilt's orange alert was heightened when the emergency departments began to flood, resulting in patient care to be both hectic and shin deep in water.

The images continue to trickle in, leaving my heart heavy for the hurt my fellow Nashvillians are experiencing."

So thankful for God's provision and protection during such a time. So thankful to be reminded of His provision and protection during such a time.

Blessings,

KB

P.S. Listening to Mr. Ray Charles today. Love "Night Time Is the Right Time". Great song to dance around in the kitchen to.