Make Someone's Wish Come True!

Hi friends! It's almost the Merriest Time of the Year! I am so happy to be sponsoring Haven Hills this year! They've been working for over 33 years providing safety for victims of domestic abuse.  Please check them out at http://www.havenhills.org/. We have asked them to give us a list of items they need and below is the list they gave us. My office will be specifically getting gifts for:  ages 8-10, Girls 5-7, make- up, pans, toaster and adult female pajamas. If you are interested in being part of this great project please see list below and get whatever you like. Last day to turn in the items to me is December 9th. Individual drop off appointments are available by calling Refugio Sanchez of Haven Hill 818-887-7481 or email rsanchez@havenhills.org.  All I ask is that the items  are NEW and unwrapped so we can check off the stuff on the list accordingly.

With Love,
El

The Reason God Hasn't Fixed You Yet

Excerpt from A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

Donald Miller

Chapter 29 “The Reason Why God Hasn’t Fixed You Yet” has to be my favorite chapter from the book. He is so poetic with his writing. I couldn’t have said it any better.

I’m convinced that the most fantastical moment in story, the point when all the tension is finally relieved, doesn’t actually happen in real life. And I mean that seriously. I’ve thought about it fifty different ways, but I can’t figure out how a human life actually climaxes so that everything on the other side of a particular moment is made to be okay. It happens all the time in movies and books, but it won’t happen to me- and I’m sorry to say, it won’t happen.

Maybe the reason we like stories so much is because they deliver wish fulfillment. Maybe we sit in the dark and shovel sugar into our mouths because in so many stories everything is made right, and we secretly long for that ourselves.

Regardless how passionate the utopianists are, I simply don’t believe utopia is going to happen. I don’t believe we are going to be rescued. I don’t believe an act of man will make things on earth perfect, and I don’t believe God will intervene before I die, or for that matter before you die. I believe, indeed we will go on longing for a resolution that will not come, not within life we know it, anyway.

If you think about it, an enormous amount of damage is created by the myth of utopia. There is an intrinsic feeling in nearly every person that your life could be perfect if you only had such-and-such a car or such-and-such a spouse or such-and-such a job. We believe we will be made whole by our accomplishments, our possessions, or our social status. It’s written in the fabric of our DNA that life used to be beautiful and now it isn’t, and if only this and if only that, it would be beautiful again.

All of this may sound depressing to you, but I don’t mean it to be. I’ve lived some good stories that have improved the quality of my life. But I’ve also let go of the idea things will ever be perfect, at least while I’m walking around on this planet. I’m trying to be more Danish, I guess. When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are. And when you stop expecting material possessions to complete you, you’d be surprised at how much pleasure you get in material possessions. And when you stop expecting God to end all your troubles, you’d be surprised how much you like spending time with God.

What I love about the true gospel of Jesus, though, is that it offers hope. Paul has hope that our souls will be made complete. It will happen in heaven, where there will be a wedding and a feast. I wonder if that’s why so many happy stories end in weddings and feasts. Paul says Jesus is the hope that will not disappoint. I find that comforting.

A Father's Love

I love Reading Donald Miller's Blog because his writings are so heart felt along with the other writings he shares.


"I would have given anything for my father’s love to not be a secret. Anything. A boy needs a father to show him how to be in the world. He needs to be given swagger, taught how to read a map so that he can recognize the roads that lead to life and the paths that lead to death, how to know what love requires, and where to find steel in the heart when life makes demands on us that are greater than we think we can endure. A young boy needs a father who tells him that life is a loaner, who helps him discover why God sent him to this troubled earth so he doesn’t die without having tried to make it better.


He may not know it, but from the moment he first glimpses his baby boy’s head crowning in the delivery room, a father makes a vow that with stumbling determination, he will try to get a few of these things right. Boys with fathers who keep their love undisclosed, go through life banging from guardrail to guardrail, trying to determine why our fathers kept their love nameless, as if ashamed."

To read rest of the excerpt visit:  http://donmilleris.com/2011/11/09/excerpt-from-jesus-my-father-the-cia-and-me-a-memoir-of-sorts-by-ian-morgan-cron/ 

Pain is What Binds Us

 Adapted from A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

Donald Miller

So much of our lives are spent trying to avoid conflict. Half the commercials on TV are trying to sell us something that will make our life easier.  Part of me wonders if our stories aren’t being stolen by the easy life.

Pain and conflict is what binds us.  Any sort of conflict and any sort of common purpose being arrived at through a tough middle that brings people together.

After a tragedy, I think God gives us a period of numbing as kind of grace. Perhaps he knows our small minds, given to easily to false hope, couldn’t handle the full brunt of reality.

Life, even amid the absurdity of human suffering, still has meaning. Suffering as absurd as it seems, points to a greater story in which, if one would only construe himself as a character within, he could find fulfillment in his tragic role, knowing the plot was heading toward redemption.