Rave Reviews!
Opening night of our show went pretty well. The actors were a little shaky--nervous, self-conscious, but all in all it was a pretty satisfying little show. It actually ran short--an hour and a half with intermission. For theatre, that's very short! Here are some reviews of the show that I'm sure you would like to read:
"I'm coming back tomorrow night and again on Saturday!"
--Clint, Father of one of the actresses
"I laughed several times!"
--Trevor, theatre student
"I didn't fall asleep!"
--Jesse, student
As you can see, this show is amazing! Come and see it!
Friday & Saturday, January 27 & 28, 7 pm
$4 for students, $6 for adults
Courtship: A discussion
In my senior year at ACU, I received some teaching on courtship as a new approach to romantic relationships, and it clarified a lot of things that were giving me fits about dating. One, we're not meant to pursue dating relationships as recreation or just to fill up our lonliness. Two, we should assume friendship and respect with any person instead of just seeing them as a potential date. Three, you should seek the will of God and the opinions (however harsh) of friends and neighbors about whether or not this relationship could work. There's also the part about postponing the physical part of the relationship. It's a mutually respectful bond, and if it does not end in marriage, the two people would still be able to maintain a Godly friendship with one another. There are more aspects of courtship, but these are the ones that I needed to learn to walk in, and still try to. But there are some realities of living in this belief that I find it impossible to reconcile myself to. One, and most importantly, I'd have to be blind and devoid of thoughts and emotions to never see anyone as a potential date. Before I think about it, before I can blink twice, that light flashes on, "Ooh...I like
him!" Two, if I did end up in a courtship with a guy that I really cared about and it ended, I think that we could still be friends, but not in the same way. A room in my heart will have to be locked up because I still like this guy, and to get as close as we once did would lead me down the wrong path. My friend Lindsey is living the courtship lifestyle, and I admire her faith and perseverance. She has always shared this verse with me,
"...and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ". 2 cor. 10:5
This verse comes out of a passage about spiritual warfare. I guess, in a way, we're at war with our flesh. The difficult part is knowing which human desires are fleshly and which are Godly. (My own motives are very muddled most of the time.)
The problem I have is that I have heard from several people who believe in courtship that one should be satisfied with their relationship with God and not ever spend time thinking about marriage or how much you'd like to be married. It teaches that a relationship with God is the ultimate romance (Which it is) and that you have to be whole, a complete unit, before God will ever bring that person into your life. It gives me the feeling that I'm spiritually weak whenever I think, "Man, I hate being single." And if I hate being single, then I must not be whole, complete with God. But is that necesssarily true? This "wholeness" approach has its merits, because we all know you shouldn't expect your future spouse to fulfill all of your needs and desires. However, I'm going to have those days where I hate being single--those days are weddings, opening nights for my plays, concerts, movies, dinner parties with people who are all married, and everytime I come home to my darkened apartment. Just because I have that desire to be married does not mean that I'm weak, or that I'm not satisfied. And truthfully, marriage was meant to bring us closer to God than we could be alone. Lots of Christians think that "aloneness" is the ultimate communion with God. If I were to recount my greatest encounters with God, they were most often in the company of other believers.
Thre are so many different ways of looking at it! Praise God that we're allowed to disagree and try to look at things from different angles.
What are your thoughts? There' s an interesting article on boundless:
http://www.boundless.org/2005/articles/a0001199.cfm
Answer Me This...
Tonight I received an e-mail from one of my theatre professors at ACU. Apparently, a former student, Kari Firestone Heil, died. She graduated before I ever got to ACU, but because our theatre department is like a close-knit family, I knew the name. I read her husband's blog and right now he has at least 90 promises of prayer. I also saw this questionnaire on the blog from an earlier post, and it really blessed me. It caused me to think in ways I hadn't in a long time. What I ask is for you to take these questions, write them down somewhere, and answer them when you have time.
The questions:
What is your deepest dream?
How much passion do I experience in my daily life?
What do I want my epitaph to say?
How much am I growing these days?
What do I do in my everyday life that requires a power greater than my own?
If I had to name "one true thing" that I am here to do, what would it be?
How clear is it to me?
Crock Pot Victory!
That's right. I have outsmarted the crock pot...by reading the user's manual. No more puppy vomit! I have decided that I am going to use my crock pot to make every kind of food imaginable so that I will no longer fear its capabilities. I will one day replace Rachel Ray and have my own show entitled, "30-minute Crock-pot meals". Wait...that's not possible. I'll call it, "18 hour crock pot meals" you know, for people like me who stay gone all day. You'll watch it. I know you will.
Funny Quote
"You right now, being dreamy, that doesn't help."
--Meredith on
Gray's Anatomy
Beauty
I've been thinking about beauty. We'd all say it doesn't matter. But think about how much money we spend on the outsides of our bodies. I heard a preacher once call our bodies "our dirt", because that's what they are--dirt.
My favorite monologue is from
Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov. The character Sonya is gushing about the man she loves, how she wonders if he notices her and if she is overanalyzing his actions and then it hits her. He does not love her! The monologue ends with her saying, "Oh Lord, how could you make me so plain?" It's heartbreaking!
Isaiah 53 says Jesus had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, and we had no esteem for him. I like that about Jesus. He understands what it feels like not to be pretty.
The girls in my classes just can't be pretty enough. Some of them have got blinders on so that they no longer know that they truly are pretty and they base their worth on which guys will date them. Many of them have given up on the idea of outer beauty and it starts eating away at their insides.
It goes deeper than acne and stringy hair. Beauty is like survival for a person, isn't it? If a person feels they have no beauty inside
or out they feel overlooked and devalued. Beauty is more than skin deep, then.
Bethany Dillon has a song that says,
I want to be beautiful, to make you stand in aweso you'd look inside my heart and be amazed.
I want to hear you say
who I am is quite enough.
Just want to be worthy of love
and beautiful.
I'm not really sure how I happened to want to write about this subject. It' s not something I think about that often beause I've told myself for so long that beauty didn't matter, and if it did, then I was being vain. But I caught myself looking last night. I was brushing my teeth in front of the mirror and I thought, "Wow, my face is shaped all wrong. And my teeth stick out too much." I tried smiling a certain way so that my teeth would look normal. I tried combing my hair down over my forehead just so. I tried to console myself that if I wore enough eye makeup, maybe that would draw attention to my eyes, which are "fine". I took a stage makeup course in college, so I know all about camouflaging features for different roles you play. It's so wrong! In the back of our minds, beauty is survival. A lot of it has to do with, well, procreation, and the way we're programmed. But not entirely! I think I've always been attracted to guys who were a little offbeat. Cute, but not perfect. And I'm sure if they did a survey on the menfolk, women would find out we don't have to be nearly as put-together as we are. A lot of our beauty rituals are just so we can compete with other women.
"Man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart." Then why is attraction so important? I think I'd be pretty happy as long as my husband thought I was hot.
Amaya says:
"Every woman is beautiful. Especially me!"
Overstimulated
I think it's time that I tell you that I might not be living here this time next year. My school district has decided that cuts are in order, that is, they need to save money and they want to cut teachers. And I'm at the top of the list. I'll state the obvious and get it out of the way:
{HERE I HAD TO DELETE SOME OF WHAT I'M SAYING BECAUSE IT SAID SOMETHING NEGATIVE ABOUT MY PLACE OF WORK} But the way I see it is that if they don't cut me, that means they cut somebody else, and I don't see any subject in this school where there are too many teachers. We're all working very hard and have classes filled to the brim. It might as well be me, right?
The fact is, God has always taken care of me and he always will. No question. I just wanted to share with you what I've known for almost two months now. If you didn't already know, well, now you do.
I get so confused lately when I'm at work. I see so many kids everyday that I get overstimulated. Sometimes I get asked so many questions in a day that by the end of the day I don't know which way is up. It's always good when I can think straight. Today was a good day for making theatre. Today we had rehearsal from 8 until noon, and it was fun. I could think straight. The actors in the show I'm directing call me, "The Monster". Why? I'm not scary. Also today, we had a work call. For you non-thespians, that means, "Come to school on a Saturday". Usually, work calls leave me exhausted, but today, my co-teacher was with us all day. She helped me understand some things about theatrical lighting that I never knew before, like that you could put lights on the floor behind the cyclorama. A cyclorama (cyc) is a big white drop that we hang behind the set and project lights and images onto it...sorta like a big movie screen. But we're putting lights behind it instead. What does it loook like? Well, you'll just have to come to our show to find out! Yes, all in all it was a good day, even though I fell off a chair and twisted my ankle, dropped a wooden pylon on my big toe, and got hit in the teeth by a wrench as it fell off a ten-foot ladder. My teeth really are very resilient.
The show dates are January 26 - 28, 7 pm. You really oughta come. It would be a great date show, but kid-friendly, too.
Read the Box
Today I had my first escapade with the new Crockpot. It was a last-minute decision, about 10 minutes before I was supposed to leave for school and I hadn't yet finished getting ready yet. The thought of having dinner ready when I got home was more enticing than looking good, so I dumped the contents of a box of "Slow Cooker Helper" into the crockpot, plus the prescribed amount of water, and turned that puppy on. After doing all of this, I realized that the noodles were not supposed to be added until after the food had been cooked for 8-10 hours. "Oh Well!" I went to school, hair sort of pinned to my scalp in desperation.
When I finally made it home, eleven hours later, the smell greeted me. "Hmm...smells a lot like the school cafeteria." I went to check out the state of things. What I uncovered was truly horrifying. A mish-mash of dissolved noodles and meat, it looked a lot like puppy vomit. But never you mind. When you're a teacher, you've eaten almost anything. I was not deterred.
I should've been. I don't think I've ever tasted anything so nasty. Which brings me to wonder: Was this food ever destined to be good? They were the same basic ingredients, only cooked wrong. I'm sort of glad that I made it wrong because then my expectations were not too high to begin with. But is that any way to live your life--with low expectations? What if I married a guy who turned out to be a real stinker, but I was not too disappointed because when I went to that honky tonk I realized I wouldn't be getting a quality man anyway.
I bought an ipod today. Am I made of money? If so, where is it coming from? I think that buying so much at Christmas opened the floodgates. I usually don't make purchases like that. For that much money, I could buy
better food than what I had for dinner tonight.
In other more positive news, Lindsey came to stay with me last weekend. She even went to the New Years Eve Party with me with people from my church who she had never met before. I kind of mourn our friendship, though. It can never be exactly the same as it was. I pray that we still keep the common ground. And my relationship with God has taken a positive turn this week. I'm starting to realize that even if everything in my world seems to be going wrong, I can fight that with praise. I don't have to just sit there and take it. This is especially good because I know that there are probably some hard times ahead.
School...tomorrow!
This is a picture of my sister, Susan, and her daughter Lindy. They are just two of the lovely people I got to spend time with over my two-week haitus from teaching. (Also known as Christmas Break.) Don't you think my sister looks like Meredith Viera from
The View?
Now, everyone who isn't a teacher sometimes gets jealous because teachers not only get a Christmas break, but a three month break at summer. But I actually spent almost every hour thinking about school. Not on purpose. But whenever I see a teenager walk by with a shopping bag, I think about those giggly girls in my TAKS class who talk about Hollister all the time. Hollister! It was Abercrombie when I was in school, and Doc Martens. Am I ever glad that Doc Martens aren't popular anymore! I remember people wearing them with skirts. Ewww! I'm surprised they never came out with flip-flops.
I'm going to write more later. But for tonight, I really need to get some rest. I've got a full day of those li'l darlings tomorrow. Can't wait to see them and give 'em my mean face! Can't wait to take up their new ipods and cell phones and keep them in my desk! Can't wait to see what color the other teachers have dyed their hair. Most of all, I can't wait to go to musical rehearsal and see who forgot to memorize!
Oh! You guys need to come see our show! It's my high school directing debut. We don't know what we're charging yet. It's going to be a dessert theatre.
The dates are: January 26 - 28, 2006, 7 pm. Call or e-mail for more info.
