Jesus as Pack Leader

Our family has been renting video recordings of the TV show “The Dog Whisperer.” Cesar Milan trains dog owners to be the pack leader, with the result that formerly high-strung animals become calm and happy, secure in the knowledge that they have a strong leader.

Isn’t there a parallel with humans? Once we accept Jesus as our pack leader, we no longer have to be nervous and angry, because we’re freed from having to depend on ourselves to control everything in our lives. Once we trust that Jesus is concerned about our safety and happiness, we can relax and enjoy this life.

Photo: Santas on motorcycles in Orange, California

Climb Your Mountain

Someone once came up to me to ask for writing advice. Or at least I thought that’s what the person was asking for. I was flattered to be considered an expert, and threw myself into an encouraging lecture about bravery and technique. I was like a mountain climber, explaining how it’s possible to transform yourself from a couch potato to an outdoorsman.

After feeling that I’d shared many pearls of wisdom, empowering the aspiring writer to draft her book about foster parenting, she ended the conversation with, “I think you should write this book.”

I was flabbergasted. She hadn’t wanted me to point the way up the mountain. She’d been trying to hand me her backpack.

Here’s my advice to myself and others who sometimes am tempted to hand our hiking gear to others and ask them to make the trek through life for us: If you spend your life trying to get out of work, you spend almost as much energy as you would if you did the work, and you end up with nothing to show for that energy.

When I’m feeling lazy or discouraged, I remind myself that the journey isn’t supposed to be easy:

• John the Baptist devoted his whole life to being God’s spokesman, only to languish in prison and then be brought out and beheaded.
• Joseph resisted the Pharaoh’s wife’s advances, but his reward was to be thrown into prison for years and years. Even after he translated the baker’s dream and the baker promised to get him out of prison, the baker forgot to help him.
• Abraham was told that his descendants would number the stars, and then his wife was barren for years and years.

Do NOT wait for someone to rescue you. Do NOT try to hire sherpas to do your climbing for you. Do NOT sit in your tent only a few feet from base camp, bemoaning the fact that no one gives you any praise for making it part way up the hill. If you’ve chosen to climb mountains, then CLIMB.

Photo: Panda at the Beijing Zoo, China, July 2006

Trying the Impossible

At work, I was asked to take a photo to accompany an article. Later, my boss asked me how it went, and it was only then, after I'd already successfully and uneventfully taken the photo, that I realized my boss had expected the subject to strongly object to the photo taking, and that's why I'd been given the job.

Something similar happened years ago when I was an exchange student in Finland, and my host-family sister and her friends went to a neighbor's house to ride a horse. The girls-who all knew so much more about horses than I did and only brought me along because my host-family mother had insisted that they invite me-suddenly became very generous to me. They asked me if I'd like the honor of going into the stall and putting the halter on the horse. I was flattered and quickly agreed. I didn't know what I was doing, and the stall was really dark, and the horse was big, but somehow, after several false starts, and with encouragement from the other girls who stood firmly outside the walls of the stall, I got the halter on and led the horse out of the stall. That's when the girls took over. Only later did I find out that they'd allowed me to put on the halter because they were scared to be in the stall with the horse: It was bad-tempered and usually bit whoever tried to work near its head. My incompetence had apparently distracted the horse from its normal bad behavior.

My point: Good things can happen when you're too naïve to know the task is impossible.

Photo: A local man in the Guogeli section of Harbin, China, July 2006.

Growing Up

At La Jolla cove, near the university in San Diego where my older son attended college, I once saw a mother harbor seal nudge her pup into the waves. I'd thought that seals took naturally to the ocean, but that little cream-colored pup, only 24 hours old, screamed as the cold salt water hit his body.

Now that my older son has graduated from college and moved to Europe, I've been thinking about the process of "launching" children into the wide world. Although this son, born of a European father and American mother, was born to swim in international waters, and he threw himself into the deep long before I had a chance to nudge him, I suspect the cold and the salt and the penetrating wet are sometimes a shock.

Photo: Harbor seals at La Jolla, California, in June 2006.

Juggling Personal Ambition and the Needs of Others

A couple of years ago, I attended a lecture delivered by a successful corporate woman turned corporate consultant. Afterwards, I was haunted by her talk, not because it had inspired me to advance my corporate career, as the speaker had intended, but because it had seemed to me a cautionary tale. She'd told about her climb up the corporate ladder, reaching the level of director before age 35, while giving birth to two children (her husband raised them) and traveling the globe. She'd explained the networking that she'd had to do in order to climb the corporate ladder, including going out drinking with the guys. And when someone in the audience suggested that being mentored by men in the office might lead to sexual tension or misunderstandings, she completely dismissed the question: "We're all professionals." At that point, I began to suspect that she was not completely honest about her life, and about the price that she'd paid for her personal success.

Days later, I was still obsessing about the decisions that this woman had made. And I kept imagining the regrets she must hide, about being so absent from the early years of her children's lives. There must be some reason that she'd decided to go into consulting, which gave her a more flexible schedule, instead of continuing in the corporate world - maybe now that she saw that her kids would soon leave the nest, she finally wanted to have a relationship with them. She'd made the same mistake that many corporate fathers make: She'd let her unbridled personal ambition rule her life, at the expense of her family's needs.

After hearing her talk, I wanted to leave the corporate world completely behind. But I finally calmed down and reminded myself that to avoid making the same cold-hearted decisions that this woman had made didn't mean that I had to swing completely in the other direction and become a fulltime homemaker. Maybe, instead, there was a middle road that would give me a balance between personal ambition and the needs of loved ones. Maybe corporate life could be part of my life without my having to turn into a woman willing to sacrifice my family in order to climb the corporate ladder.

I reminded myself that the corporate world isn't the only place where personal ambition can run amok. I could leave the corporate world behind and still not be a good mother, wife and community member. I know writers, living far from the corporate environment, whose personal ambition has so narrowed their lives, they live alone and isolated with only their books and a computer screen. I suspect that for me, balancing personal ambition with the needs of others will be a lifelong juggling act, even if I someday leave the corporate world behind.

(Photo taken July 6 in Harbin, China. Two little boys play outside a former Russian Orthodox Church near Gougeli street.)

Writing Despite a Full Life

I once watched a TV movie about Churchill's later years, right before he assumed leadership of England during WWII. He was a great writer who set a goal of 2,000 words every day. He usually met that goal despite a full life that didn't allow him to devote himself exclusively to writing. Shouldn't I be able to write a fraction of that amount on a regular basis?

Photo: Men along the Songhua River in Harbin, China, not far from my hotel room.

Pragmatism About Creative Writing

I think that I'm finally, finally, getting to a point in my own writing when I'm realizing that not everything I write is priceless. That whatever I write, no matter how "creative," isn't really worthwhile unless a reader can follow along. That of the many, many words that I'll write in this lifetime, only a fraction will reach an audience, and probably only a fraction should - just as we speak millions of words every year that are not interesting enough to repeat, so we writers write many, many words that are just not all that interesting.

What I'm trying to say is that I'm finally, finally becoming more pragmatic about the act of writing. Yes, wonderfully creative, divine moments happen during the writing process. But even the writing that results from those magical moments has to be edited into a format that is consumable by readers. Unless, of course, I just want all my writing to be journal entries to myself.

Photo: Harbin, China in July, outside the window of the hotel where my baby brother was married.

Family Ties Strengthened in China

My dad died two years ago of a sudden heart attack. I think he would have been proud of us during our summer vacation. Almost the entire extended family took a trip to Harbin, China, to attend the wedding of my youngest brother to a Russian girl. Everyday, all 20 of got on a bus and toured various parts of the city. My mother says that the best part of the trip for her was listening to all of us laugh and enjoy each other's company, far away from our daily responsibilities. Here's a picture from the bus, with some of my family, some of the bride's family and friends, some of the groom's friends, and the American pastor and his wife who spoke Russian and Chinese.

Imprinting the Culture, as God has Imprinted Himself on Us

I received yet another agent rejection on Friday. This agent said I'm a lovely writer and my prose is high quality...but she just didn't feel passionate enough about my novel Desert Medicine. I've received so many rejections for my completed novel (more than 65?), but I tell myself that this is only the second rejection of this most recent rewrite. After so much rejection, it's hard to find comfort in stories of perseverance. I keep writing, no longer out of a sense of faith in my talent or belief in hard work or trust in God's timing, but simply, as writer Leslie Leyland Fields says, "For me, writing is like breathing. If I don't write, I feel like I'll die."

Here's what Luci Shaw, poet, had to say about writing at the Festival of Faith & Writing in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on April 20:

• She really likes her new publisher, WordFarm.
• We should imprint the culture like God has imprinted Himself on us.
• Beauty is redemptive, and so surprising.
• An aesthetic sense is God-given.
• She admires other writers Annie Dillard and Mary Oliver.
• The arts give us a chance to notice things and seek truth.
• We need to continue to seek and find; need to trust the search.
• We are clay pots, per 2 Corinthians 4:7.
• Because we are just clay pots, we know that the light does not come from us.
• People of faith can imprint, impact, and influence their society.
• We are here to make a mark on our culture.
• We are the body of Christ.
• God uses imagery to teach us. One third of the Bible is poetry, with metaphor and simile.
• Our art may sometimes need to be harsh and startling.
• Do I bear the imprint of the Creator?
• She traveled to Romania, where she learned that the goal of artists of faith is to make an imprint on the culture with poetry, novels, and plays. In Romania, the people need to poetry of hope.
• What might God do with each one of us?
  

So, despite all the rejection, writing gives me an excuse to be a more acute observer, to cultivate a love of beauty, and to practice being an instrument of God. Amen.

Photo: Luci Shaw

Role Models Found at Festival of Faith & Writing

When attending writers' conferences, I'm looking for inspiration and publishers and agents. But I'm also looking for role models. And unfortunately, so many writers turn out to be just as flawed as the general population, and sometimes even more so: crankily antisocial or wide-hipped or militantly anti-attractive.
So, this year I was so pleased to find not just one pleasant, attractive, talented female writer, but four. These four are all intelligent, humorous, dark-haired, slender literary women writers who also happen to be Christian:

• Leslie Leyland Fields, raising five boys with a fisherman husband on an Alaskan
  island, writes nonfiction and memoir, such as her book about female commercial
  fishermen, "The Entangled Net."


• Lauren Winner, a recent convert from Judiasm to Christianity, wrote the memoir "Girl
  Meets God."


• Alice McDermott, a lapsed Catholic who returned to her faith, is author of the
  novel Charming Billy.


• Mary Karr, a recent convert to Catholicism, is a poet/memoirist known for her
  memoir The Liars' Club.

At reading from her most recent book, Surprise Child, which tells about her
emotional struggles when finding out that she was pregnant with her fifth son
at age 45, Leslie Leyland Fields says that the child was a surprise to her,
but not to God. "My pregnancy became a constant lesson in relinquishment."

What Lauren Winner misses most about Orthodox Judiasm, besides the people,
is the daily-life sense that we're living in a sacred universe. She recaptures
some of that sense by belonging to a church which reveres the sacrament of Holy
Communion.

Alice McDermott believes that the artist reveals how something in our nature
rebels against our destiny. We are hopeful despite impending death. In the face
of our suffering, there is the hope of redemption. Every creative act is an
act of faith.

Mary Karr was a literary community member-in-good-standing before she became
a Christian. When she converted to Catholicism, her literary friends acted like
she'd admitted to something kinkier than a perverted sex act.

How do Leslie, Lauren, Alice, and Mary integrate their spiritual and artistic
lives, in a culture that tends to separate the two? Alice sees her job as a
novelist to lead her characters to the point where they realize that they need
redemption, but doesn't try to wrap up their stories with tidy solutions.

Leslie, Lauren, Alice, and Mary all have a great sense of humor and are pragmatic
about hard work. "You have to be willing to fail," Mary says, noting
that even if God directs her to write a book, that doesn't mean that that particular
book will be successful. "Maybe God wants me to learn about failure and
perseverance."

Photo: Lesley Leyland Fields

Novelist Wannabe to Work for Food

I’ve arrived in Grand Rapids to attend the 2006 Festival of Faith & Writing at Calvin College. I almost didn’t attend, because I’m a failed novelist. There’s something a little sad about a woman who has never made a cent from her fiction writing still spending hundreds of dollars on writing conferences.

But, the biennial Festival of Faith & Writing is an inspirational event, even for writers who have to keep their day job. And that’s why I’ve returned, for the fifth time.

Fortunately, given the fact that attending yet another writing conference is in some ways a brutal reminder that I’ve never published a novel, my ego was saved by a last-minute invitation to host a lunch discussion. This fits my new mantra: If you can’t dazzle people, at least make yourself useful. I still don’t even know why I was invited to spearhead the discussion – Good, Bad, and Ugly Blogs – since I’m not a writing conference insider, and http://literarychristian.blogspot.com/ is my first-ever attempt at blogging. Therefore, any insights from more experienced bloggers are most welcome.

In the meantime, I’m happy to report that for playing hostess, I not only get bragging rights, but also a free box lunch. Maybe my writing IS feeding me!

(Photo: A view from my hotel window in Grand Rapids, Michigan. No leaves on the trees yet!)

Grand Rapids Tulips

I'm looking forward to seeing the tulips in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Passport Photo

I don't need a passport to attend the Festival of Faith & Writing in Grand Rapids, Michigan. But nevertheless, here's my passport photo.

Going to Festival of Faith & Writing

This is my first attempt to use a blog. I'm getting ready for my trip to Grand Rapids, for the 2006 Festival of Faith & Writing at Calvin College.