Painting at the Artists' Retreat

The artist retreat was a wonderful time to sit down and paint. Though I was sketching what I saw in the outdoors, I find I often use my sketches (in combination with journaling) as a sort of interactive prayer, and this weekend was particularly inspiring, for a number of reasons.

First, I had to go through all my art supplies. I've done some loose sketching outdoors before, but I've (and I'm somewhat surprised to say this) never really painted outdoors. I was inspired by a few blog posts I found, including this outdoor painting tutorial and this entry by James Gurney. (I highly recommend his blog by the way.)

So I distilled my art supplies into a surprisingly small bag, and started my first endeavor into outdoor painting/drawing. (I actually chose to use a mixture of ink pens, ink wash, and watercolor, so I'm not sure if it's better described as painting or drawing. I'll use the two terms interchangeably until further advised.)

[My drawings.]

[Photo's of what I was painting from.]

I'll quote from my journal here to explain what I was thinking about as I drew these:

In the morning I felt the need to climb something. Somehow my drawing required something more, something difficult. I ascended a steep hill. I walked past many things worthy of being drawn. I asked myself "at what point is it time to stop? Which scene will I paint?"

I kept moving. Something drove me on. A destination perhaps? Would fatigue stop me? I am not sure. It's as if I needed to earn or prove something. At last I settled upon a spot, a downward spiraling path. The painting went better than i would have hoped.

On the way back I thought it strange to walk uphill so much to paint a downhill scene. I thought how hard it was to ascend, but how easy it is to descend....I began thinking about how normally we think it hard to ascend up to God, how much work it is to "get to heaven", or "see God", or "be good", etc. I'm reminded of the painting "The Heavenly Ladder of Saint John Climacus" with pious souls climbing the ladder to God and flying demons knocking them off.

[The Heavenly Ladder of Saint John Climacus, 12th Century]

Even Christian from the Pilgrim's Progress is reminiscent of this mountain climbing theme. But ascension is not where I am at. Like Dante, I am descending. And descent is hard. It's hard to see myself as I am, and it's hard to receive love as I am. Perhaps this mirror's Christ's pattern, his "descent" from Gethsemane to the Cross to the Belly of the Earth was hard. Clearly. But his ascent to glory at the Father's side was, in a sense, easy. Descent and death are hard. Ascent and glory are easy. I tried to paint these things, but instead only struggled with ascending. As if work ascending might make descending easier, or more meaningful, or less painful.

What I'm saying is I found this amusing flip: ascending is difficult if it's a physical mountain, but easy if it is spiritual glory. Descending is easy while hiking, but descending into the soul is perhaps the hardest work we could ever do. It amazes me how often I try to ascend on my own under my own power to try and earn acceptance and love. Or how often I sit around and pray and wait for God to raise me up with his power so I can be accepted and loved by others. But the reality is, I need to go down. I need to descend.

The funny thing is, I don't see God at the top of a ladder. I don't see God in the heavens or standing upon a mountain. I see Him in my heart, in the deep waters, and it is to these deep waters that I hear Him inviting me. It is while I descend that I have my closest most meaningful moments with God. It is as I descend that I am most terrified. I've been throwing things into the basement of my soul for a long time, and it's become somewhat of a garbage pit. I really don't know what I'm going to find down there anymore. Except, as I mentioned, a God who is waiting for me.

(A proviso: when I say "deep waters" I am referring to the more hidden portions of our hearts, as described in Proverbs 20:5, not some sort of "deep thinking" or intellectual high-ground. I say this rather sloppily, but the strict rational mind has proven to me to be quite perilous when dealing with the deep waters, which are filled with emotions and feelings and beliefs and desires and a great many things that do not necessarily follow rhyme or reason.)

Artists' Retreat 11/16-18/07

Through a series of somewhat random events I found myself googling around about Catalina Island. Catalina is an island off the coast of Southern California, and through the course of my web surfing came across an InterVarsity Camp that was hosting an Artists' Retreat. We made arrangements to attend, and became very excited about it.

Arriving at the island required no small effort, and the camp itself is only accessible by boat. We drove to the docks, parked, and then boarded a ferry that transported us to the island's main city Avalon. From there we switched from the larger ferry to a smaller motorboat, which took us to the camp. It was night by the time we approached, the boat bouncing rather strongly in the waves as we traveled around the island. The darkness, the cold salty air, the turbulent boat ride, this last leg of the journey served to strip away the city from which we came and reset our senses for the duration of our stay. It was, perhaps, the best part. When we arrived, we had already been transformed.

[On the ferry, waiting to travel to Catalina Island.]


[On the motorboat.]

[Long Beach, where we parked our car.]

[The island, as seen in the sunlight, the next day.]

This "transformation" is perhaps best described by the fact that each morning we got up to watch the sunrise. This really surprised me, and for all you who know me, this should surprise you too. I am not known for being a morning person, but I couldn't keep myself away. Before I knew what had happened I was up watching the waves and the sunrise and these crazy birds dive into the water.

[Despite getting up early both mornings, the sunrises were actually pretty gray and foggy.]

We were placed in a lovely cabin beside the ocean. We had an ocean-view window. We could hear the waves at night. It was marvelous.

[We stayed on the beach.]

The retreat itself was beautifully structured. We arrived Friday evening. We met for a while on Friday so we could all introduce ourselves to each other. There were about 20 or so of us in total. Saturday we met after breakfast for a short while, then had the entire day to paint or draw. In the evening we met to share what we had created. Sunday morning we met after breakfast to conclude the retreat. The free-time-to-meeting-time ratio was not something I've ever experience on any Christian retreat before. It was a wonderful way to have an artists' retreat. I'll post my sketches separately.

[Normally around this time of year I would be deer hunting with my Dad and brothers. They did quite well this year without me, and as I was hiking around I saw this guy a few times.]

Reflections: Year One

Here's a snapshot of the last year: getting married, moving across the country while simultaneously separating from my family for the first time (with parents who were not yet prepared to release me); a desperate job search and it's subsequent victory; adjusting to a new and foriegn culture; emotionally supporting a wife in a very intensive grad program; trying to connect with a whole new set of friends and find a support network while trying to maintain at least some ties from the old; dealing with some health issues that are fairly intrusive into not only my quality of life but now also my wife's...Here's a cartoon I found that pretty much sums up a lot of life over the past year.



Things are starting to settle down though.

I'm currently working at the Doheny Eye Institute. I'm currently helping to develop algorithms to help interpret retinal images. The job can be pretty fun, and if we're successful, we will end up helping to save quite a lot of people from losing their vision.

Married life can also be pretty fun. We've gone on a number of adventures around LA. There is so much to do here. This weekend we went to see "The Taming of the Shrew" in park. We had a picnic while we watched the performance. It was peaceful and grand. We are starting to have a lot of fun at the beach. We've tried surfing on longboards, and bodysurfing--both of which are a blast. We have a lot of fun together. I like being married to Desiree. We are a good match, and life is so promising together. I am a better person for it.

When we were dating we took a "pre-marriage" class our church offered. We had extensive pre-marriage counseling. We read books and talked to others so we were not unprepared when our marriage was strained with our rather intense number of substantial transitions. Calling marriage hard seems cliche and not exactly accurate. More to the point, transitions are hard. Poor health is hard. Actually seeing someone, and being in a state to see them when they need to be seen, is hard. Asking for what you want is hard. Confrontation is hard. Being present to someone is hard. The articulation of feelings and the "deep waters" of my heart is hard. Looking at the painful things I am so much better at hiding and ignoring is hard. Looking at the painful things in my wife's life is hard. But in the end, it was our ability to see and connect with one another on such a deep level that led us together, so there is a certain joy in all this hardness, which makes married life so good.

Dez's program has really helped make sense of a lot of the messy stuff that has been in our lives for quite some time. Her program is "Spiritual Formation & Soul Care", which, on the outset, sounds perhaps a little fluffy. The program was developed by a guy named John Coe, who spent 18 some years in graduate education, and earned numerous degrees in philosophy and theology, and then spent a number of years teaching at a school of psychology. All this is to say, he's created a very fascinating program that seems very historically and theologically grounded in a topic all but forgotten by the evangelical world I was birthed from.

This idea of spiritual formation, then, is taking a closer look at how exactly a believer grows and develops over time. At First Free, my old church, this was a very simple model...You are saved...you learn the staples of reading your bible, worship and prayer...you learn a lot of theology...you serve the church. And that, really, is the end of the line. Anything after is either more service or more theology. The "deer panting for water" and the subsequent "living streams" are just sort of circumstantially magical feelings we are to embrace when present and stoically endure when absent. The result of such--what I'll call isolated spirituality--is the unfortunate stereotypical Christian that has so much knowledge yet remains so immature--not only in a spiritual sense but in a holistic sense. One of the talks I've heard Coe give is entitled "Why do we sin when we know so much?", and it is a fascinating look at the mechanisms that cause us to behave in certain ways despite our best efforts. These mechanisms live in what Coe calls the "hidden heart", and his basic premise is that the extent to which we don't know our hidden hearts is the extent to which we have no control over our undesired behaviors.

Spiritual formation, then, looks more carefully at this process, with the aim of helping people open up to the way the Spirit would grow and mature us--not in theology or service alone, but as whole people--as messy as we can be. And, not unlike many things in nature, there are certain growth patterns that can be observed and studied. But perhaps the most fundamental concept is a very old idea summed up by John Calvin..."There is no knowledge of God without knowledge of self...there is no knowledge of self without knowledge of God". The basic journey then is the Holy Spirit leading us into the parts of ourselves we'd rather not see--and yet when we are able to look, God is there, waiting for us.

We talk a lot about having "a relationship with Jesus", but I feel I am only now discovering just what exactly relationship is. Marriage is a good teacher. Having found safety in my wife, it is easier to accept the safety offered by God. Having begun to accept the truths about myself reflected back to me by my wife (who serves so often as a mirror), I have allowed God to enter parts of my soul previously dormant. The program has given us both language to describe some of the process, which has been especially helpful for me since I am so fearful of it.

The largest realization I have had since moving out here is perhaps the awe of how dreadfully small my world has been, at every edge and corner. There is a certain directionless though substantial anger at this felt imprisonment, along with a certain lostness at the size of my new world. But there is life, too, as the long oppressed explorer is unshackled. Like the Israelites upon their release from Egypt, a part of me wishes to return to the old world I know so well--it is perhaps easier than standing straight when my back is so used to my defeated slouch. One of the larger questions on my mind is how to relate to that old world. Then, perhaps it was never the world that changed at all...only me. And perhaps when I say world I mean the old shoes I used to wear, as opposed to the new shoes I wear as man, husband, and lover. Maybe I mean both. I do not know yet.

Another big development in life lately is my health. Some of you may recall my difficulties sleeping. It has put a large burden on our marriage. My wife was a very good sleeper till I came around. Once we had health insurance I went to see a doctor about it, who referred me to a specialist. The saga has gone on all summer, but at last it seems to have come to a point--I have been diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnea. The current solution is very effective I'm told, and involves sleeping with a mask over my face connected to a CPAP machine. Like, perhaps, Darth Vader. I'm not terribly excited about that. Then again--the thought of sleeping through the night is profoundly joyous.

The time I have to myself I spend writing and drawing in my sketchbook. I journal. I am designing and building a somewhat elaborate board game to humor projectless hands. Poetry visits from time to time as I try to articulate various irrationalities and feelings. (Sample my latest below.) But it is difficult to think I have something to offer at this junction in the way of art or writing. When one's world is small it is easy to become master of it, and once a master it is easy enough to write about it. But now...I feel as if I know nothing. And if I wrote about anything it would surely be obsolete in a months time. Rest assured the urge is there and ever present for large grandious projects, but currently such fruit is awaiting thicker branches to grow upon. My immediate plan is to write and create as needed to grow into this new and larger world.


Voyage's Dawn
by Brandon Weaver
7.7.07

Songs and tales and gestured faces
Ships and swords and preparations

Sails and seas and unseen shores
Sun and stars and sturdy oars

Storms and waves and splintered wood
Snakes and squids and siren's 'hood

Spears and knives and wounded breast
Sweat and blood and hunger's test

Gold and gems and journey's quest
Life and death and questions wrest

Seed and hull and shedding skin
Soul and sprout and to begin

Surfing.

We got the opportunity to go surfing a weekend or two ago. It was pretty much the coolest thing ever. I couldn't help but giggle at all the people that have since asked "did you get up?" Yes, I "got it up."

If I haven't scared you off with innuendo's, I have a picture.



Now, the story goes something like this. After some initial attempts, I realized that just sitting out there in the water on the board is harder than it looks. Balancing on water is very different. After learning to balance (well enough that is) one has to learn how to catch waves. I have a lot to learn about this yet. After you catch a wave, you must learn to ride it. To stand up and walk. This, I thought, was simultaneously the easiest and most fun aspect of surfing. Once you have some balance and have caught a good wave, standing up is just sort of standing up.

In the above picture, a friend and classmate of Dez's was surfing next to me, and she fell off and her board collided into mine. If you look closely at the picture, you can see her board on top of my own.

I look like I'm going to fall in the picture, but I didn't. I rode the wave out. It was at that moment, for the first time that day, that I allowed myself to believe I was actually surfing. Now I'm pretty much sold on the idea, and hope to surf more before the summer is through.

Dez had fun too--she rode some waves in. We had fun swimming together. It's the first time we've been swimming in the ocean since we've been out here. Unfortunately, our sunscreen didn't hold itself up to the task, and we both get burnt, despite reapplications and such. We've since done some research and switched to another brand.

Disneyland

One day, Dez got an email from one of her classmates. Through a chain of human generosity this classmate of Dez’s was able to offer us free passes to Disneyland. We have been meaning to go there for a while, but have not yet had the means to do so. Suddenly, however, that changed. But, the passes were for a weekday--could I get off of work to join Dez? As it happens, yes, my employers are also quite generous, and I was allowed to work on Saturday in place of the Thursday we would travel to Disneyland. With our sunglasses, camera, good spirits and friends we set off on a journey into the emotionally engineered, fabricated experience that comprises the realized imagination of Disneyland!

Dun na naaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! Gong!

So, we arrive early. We are in a good position in line. We are allowed to enter into the narrow gates of admission and proceed into the great lobby of the land, Main St. USA. But there is more to this park then the lobby, and we wish to proceed further. We press ourselves forwards and find that no one is allowed further into the park! There is a crowd gathered, and we all press and inch our way forwards, awaiting the opening of the rest of the park.

Finally, the judge steps forth and says “Welcome, all you sheep! The goats have been sent to their hellish work, but you, my sheep, are welcome! Come further in and further up!” With that (I took some poetic liberty on that last part by the way) the last boundary was removed and we were released into our man-made heaven for a day.

We split up almost immediately. The four of us went to go jump in line at the Matterhorn, and the fifth of our quintet ran for Space Mountain, to get these clever little things called FastPasses. As we waited in line for the Matterhorn, there was a guy standing a ways behind us that looked strikingly like Billy Boyd (who played Pippen from the Lord of the Rings.) But that happens a lot out here in the desert of Los Angeles—you think you see all sorts of things. Mirages I tell you! Mirages! And yet…. Anyways, after the group was reunited we rode, and were, more or less, disappointed. The Matterhorn is a very bumpy (and not a pleasant sort of bumpy) ride through some somewhat uninteresting terrain, especially compared to many of the other rides we experienced that day. The Matterhorn is much more pleasant to look upon than ride I’m afraid. We moved on.



Next we did Star Tours. Now this is a ride I remember from some childhood adventures in Disneyworld. I was less impressed by the ride than I remembered, but the flood of fond memories it brought back made me somewhat gooey inside.

This goo, however, was promptly removed with centrifugal force. The line for Space Mountain was nil. We rode it twice. This ride was re-done from what I remembered, with a new soundtrack that really worked stunningly well. I was not just sufficiently but rather quite over-abundantly entertained. In no small part because Dez liked it so much, which really stunned us both. She is not known for her Roller-Coastering, but this ride took her by surprise. I have since used this ride as an excuse to rent more Sci-Fi movies. However, this is not entirely easy nor satisfying because nobody seems to be making any movies with Samurai and Robots. This boggles me, but I digress.

We ate lunch at a pizza/cafe type place. I have much to say and opinions galore on this particular event, however, at this juncture I’ll keep them all rather painfully to myself.

The Buzz Lightyear ride was very extremely excitingly fun. So great, that it should really have a few more adjectives, like “tremendously”, and “enormously”, and maybe I’ll throw in “vastly” and “a great deal” just for good measure. The ride is simple, your sit in a little car, with a Space Ray in your hand, and you shoot things. They take your picture, and they let you email it to yourself. We rode this twice. Our trigger fingers bled.



Life was a bit of a blur for me after that funness, until I found myself outside the door of the Indiana Jones ride. This was great. Pretty much all the fun coolness of the rides before, only, it spoke deeply to my childhood picture of manhood. I was raised on Star Wars, Robin Hood (1938), Captain Blood (1935), and of course, Indiana Jones. Harrison Ford and Errol Flynn were my pictures of what it meant to be a man. Now that I’m older, I realize those characters I so admired are perhaps better pictures of what it means to be a boy. But that is really too deep a statement to be making at a juncture like this, and too new a thought for me to discuss intellegently anyway. On top of all that, I'd hate to get all the John Eldredge fans of the world mad at me for calling all their manly hero's "boys". (Not, at least, withouth proper justifaction that is.) Still, the point is, even mention Indiana Jones and that marvelous goo promptly returns to my insides.

The Indiana Jones ride was indescribably great. You feel, just for a few moments, the adventure you love so much in the film. I really can’t do a written description of this ride in justice, you’ll just have to ask my about it. I can get very excited. Beware of flailing arms.

I was pretty content at this point, and took what would be in effect a gluttons nap; meaning, I walked around in even more of a daze than I was in before. We went on a few other “lesser” rides that I don’t remember all that well, and eventually wandered over to Disneyland’s other land, “California Adventure”. Personally, I think “California Adventure” is a really unexciting less-than-inspired name, but I didn’t let that ruin anybodies day.

Moving right along, we found ourselves in line for the rollercoaster “California Screamin”. Dez had to be talked into going on this ride. But she trusts me, and it paid of well for her. Because, as it turns out, she really enjoyed it; even, perhaps, more than I. It is a really exciting rollercoaster that blasts music that matches the curves you travel along as it shoots you through the air at very high speeds. It really plays around with acceleration. You start at the bottom at a dead stop. Then, before you can blink, you realize you have been pushed to the back of your seat as the car is rocketed straight to the top. Then, you go down. And down, and back up, and loop around and music is blasting and running and after all the adrenaline is pumped out of wherever adrenaline comes from, the ride slams on the brakes and your body crashes forwards and it’s over. Just like that. Dez loved it. I loved it. We ended up riding this one twice as well.

We went to a few other things, Muppets 3D, Tower of Terror (which was a lot more fun than I remembered it being), and some other exhibit type things. By the way, it turns out my personality is most like the Disney character “Jiminy Cricket,” according to the little Disney computer that is. Just a little nod to all you Myers-Briggs fans out there.

We ate dinner somewhere in Adventureland, and upon leaving the park we stopped in Downtown Disney, a free admission shopping mall just outside of the park. We stopped in at the LEGO store. This is a bad metaphor, of course, but if one could die in heaven and proceed to another heaven after that, such a thing would sum up my experience that day in the LEGO store. I bought some more LEGO’s to use at work (as a visualization tool—I seriously have pretty much the greatest job a guy like me could have), and just had a grand ole time looking over everything. The store wasn’t as cool as the LEGO store in the Mall of America, however, so if you can only go to one, of those two, I’d recommend Minnesota.



Our friends car was parked the largest parking structure I’ve ever seen. Rightly so, as I was told it was the second (or so) largest parking structure in the world. It had a 5-story escalator. We decided it would be fun to travel up and then back down the 5-story escalator. That was a ride. I’d title it “The Escalator to Heaven”, not that there was anything up there at the top, but it took so long getting there that it promoted an akin experience. If nothing else, it was fun to be zany. There’s not enough zaniness in the world these days. Gosh, I talk like I’m old enough to have seen the world and then see it change. How zany an assumption is that? (Speaking of zany...why didn't I take a picture of a 5-story escalator? The view was interesting, but getting vertigo on an escalator was something else entirely. You could fall forever and keep going up.)

Well, I guess that about sums up the adventure. I suppose some of you may be still wondering about some of my allusions--about just what exactly a Christian can and can't say, or what my true feelings on Disney really are. If you remain unclear, I guess I expressed my own befuddlement on such subjects well enough. So to both conclude and change the subject, if you would be so kind as to hum the Indiana Jones theme to yourself, I'm going to go relish in some more boyhood memories of manhood.

Thanksgiving

It's high time I sat down and wrote our Thanksgiving adventure. It's been high time for a while, and I'm glad to finally be writing it. Some pretty fantastic things happened, and I have pictures to prove it.

This year was the first year that both Dez and I were away from our families on Thanksgiving. We were together though, and as we start a new family, I think it was good to experience alternative ways of celebration before we settle in on particular traditions.

Now, on with the adventure....Desiree has a professor who has a husband who operates a retreat center up in the mountains. This professor, along with her husband, invited all the students that were unable to return home for the holiday to the retreat center to celebrate Thanksgiving together.

We were quite excited about this invitation; and, along with a car full of new student-type friends, (who, I might add, were quite entertaining on the 2+ hour trip) traveled high into the mountains. We traveled up from sea level to over 6000 feet if the road signs were to be trusted. Our ears played games with us, but our lungs leaped at the presence of the fresh air.

It was dark upon our arrival Wednesday night. We ate a late dinner of fantastic gourmet pizza, and proceeded to have a very encouraging conversation with the other students. To be more accurate, there was one man, the husband of one of the students, who was telling his story, and the rest of us were listening. There were maybe a dozen of us or so. Though I shan't do his story justice attempting it's retelling, I will try to summarize it:

His story was about how God called him to become honest with his life, and to go on a deeper journey with God using that honesty as a starting point, and his heart as a destination. I shall write about two things that stood out to me, though there were more. 1) How much faith we can have that God will finish his work in us, and how this faith overrules all our fruitless efforts at self-improvement. 2) How often (and how much) the church (specifically, the evangelical church) gets in the way of our growth process. With it's spiritually guised message of self-improvement and it's confusion and lack of experience with the actions of the Holy Spirit in our hearts, the church cannot help but hinder our spiritual formation. Of these two things, the first I found very encouraging, and the second very validating.

After the large group discussion broke for the night, we sat in the hot tub for a while. The water was a little too cold and the seats were a little too high, such that your chest was well above water. The mountain air was clear and clean, but chilled, and the effect of the hot tub was a blend of relaxation gone askew into frustration. What indeed is worse than a good thing gone slightly afoul? But I digress with exaggeration, perhaps, for it was not so unpleasant that we boycotted its pleasures.



Our room for the night contained two twin-sized beds. Me and Dez tried sleeping together in the same bed cuddled very closely together, but it was not working as well as we would have liked. We switched to separate beds, but after an hour or two we missed each other such that we couldn't sleep and we climbed back together in the same bed again. Then once more we would grow crowded, and separate, but then come together again, and so on and so on throughout the night. We didn't sleep as soundly as we had hoped for, but our antics amused us such that it didn't bother us as much as one would think.



The next morning we ate a marvelous breakfast, and then proceeded to hike about out in the woods. We had forgotten the elevation we were at, with the air thinner and such, but our excitement was great being atop mountains and surrounded by trees and rocks and other such things. We saw a deer. We saw a little lizard. We saw many songbirds that, though similar to those in the Midwest, were still quite different. I won't tell of all our adventures in the woods, but one discovery simply cannot be silenced! The pine cones were enormous! As big as our heads! It was perhaps the most surprising thing I have seen in California thus far.



Upon our return from the hike we ate the Thanksgiving meal, and then proceeded to have a little service. We packed our things and said our goodbyes and began the journey home. It was our first Thanksgiving together, and it was a good one.

Happiness by an Unexpected Path

This is the face of a happy man. He is off to start his first day at work. Brandon can hardly contain his excitement at getting a job at the Doheny Eye Institute. You will have to get him to give you the details of his work there. Believe me, he will be more than happy to share it with you. Be sure to ask about the slide.

As excited as were are about this unbelievable opportunity for him. We have found ourselves filled with overwhelming gratitude for the Lord’s kindness to us over the last many months. We had something of a naïve idea coming out here that Brandon would get a job right away, and we thought we would be the generous ones with our neighbors and friends out here. But the Lord chose to take us by another path. If we hadn’t experienced the lack and the struggle of the last months we would not have experienced the Lord’s physical provision. Please don’t take this for a superficial “God is so good” though He is. Something has changed deep within us from these experiences. One of the most heartrending provisions was the anonymous payment of our rent for the month of November. We were blown away by God’s care for us. Someone saw us and our need and took it upon themselves to meet our need. We were utterly stunned. It changed how we look at our possessions and money. We have also been blessed by cards and letters from home that have happened to include money at just the right times. The fact that Brandon got any freelance work at all in this great big city is a miracle in of itself and another display of the Lord's great kindness.

We are also learning that God’s care and provision extend far beyond our physical bodies. God is working in us ALL OF THE TIME to open us to the truth ourselves in relationship with Him. He uses everyday circumstances to bring up the stuff in our hearts that we have tried hard to keep down. We are learning to open to the Lord in all things. This practice is teaching us how to attend to the Holy Spirit.

I, in particular, have a lot to learn about this. The prayer project I was given in one of my classes last week was to pray Psalm 139:23-24 every day, preferably in the morning, and ask the Lord to peel back the layers of my heart throughout the course of the day. By the end of the week, I realized how completely inattentive I can be to the Lord because I have not even invited Him into my conscious awareness. I believe Dr. Coe (one of my professors) when he says that you have to develop this habit of heart to pray without ceasing. It does not come naturally. I have been made very aware of that this week. I can go whole chunks of the day without even thinking about the Lord or attempting to connect with Him. I believe that He is working all of the time at showing me my heart, but I can be pretty oblivious and, at times, altogether uninterested. Another layer of my hidden heart exposed… my ambivalence toward the Lord. There are parts of me that this awareness pains deeply and other parts that say, “yep, that’s about right.”

dez

Psalm 139:23-24 (NASB)
Search me, O God, and know my heart;

Try me and know my anxious thoughts;
And see if there be any hurtful (literally “painful”) way in me,

And lead me in the everlasting way.

From the Beach to the Mountains to the Getty

Yesturday we got up and decided to have an adventure. We drove through city and traffic and heavier traffic until we got to even worse traffic, but finally we got to the pacific coast highway. We drove down that for a while and were quite amazed by the five or six story extreamly steep hill to our right, and the ocean to our left. On the thin strip of land that contained the highway was a number of beach homes and resturants. The houses were so narrow and shallow, but many of them looked as if they had three or four floors. As interesting as they were, they pretty much just annoyed us because they blocked our view of the ocean from the highway. It was so crowded there with such buildings.


Later we took a canyon road into the mountains. On our way up we were able to see the ocean from a much better viewpoint. We stopped to look at it for a while. I'm not sure either of us knows quite what to do with the ocean yet. We stare at it as awed visitors, not as close friends. We continued into the mountains.





The mountains are a different story. We know them. They offer life to us, and we know how to accept their gift. The freshness of the air was amazing, and it awakened something in our souls.

We stopped and looked around. We took some pictures. We took a picture of ourselves. It was fun. We pressed on and began driving through some beautiful mountain country. The city was gone. The crowded, compressed, sardine-packaged beach culture gave way to a wide open vastness of foliage and stone. This visit was just a teaser though, an exploration to see just what exists out here in California. Our next visit will be longer, and more personal.

The mountains did not last forever. They soon gave way to ranches, farms, small communities, and then, before we knew it, we had descended back into city. We ate at Chipotle, Dez's favorite, and then proceeded towards our next destination: The Getty Center.

The Getty Center is a beautiful complex placed on the top of a mountain. You park at the bottom and take a tram to the top. At the top we were amazed with it's stone archetecture, it's artistic beauty not only as a container for art but as a peice of art in and of itself. The first hour we were there we spent admiring the building and it's gardens. We decided we could easily spend the day just resting in it's echoing comfort.

From it's mountain perch the Getty overlooks Los Angeles as heaven does the world. It felt like Mt. Olympus or an ancient monestary. We felt as pilgrims. I'm coming to realize that the expansion of the mind is fruitless and meaningless without the restoration of the soul. The Getty aims at both.



Soaking in the beauty of our surroundings we proceeded to look at many of their exihibits. The one that stood out to me the strongest was a collection of drawings by Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, Italian, 1591-1666). Mostly pen ink drawings with ink washes, I was moved by the energetic fast-moving lines that were still able to capture such accuracy and detail. Like an explosion that created instead of destroyed. From choatic fury emerged intentionality and purpose. I love it.

Many of his drawings can be seen here, and for more information on Guercino look here.

Overall, an amazing day at the Getty, an amazing day overall. We left happy. Here's one last picture we took of ourselves in the Garden of the Getty at Night.

GoPets is NoGoPets!

As mentioned, I accepted a job in October. The job was working for a computer game company called GoPets. (You can see their website at gopetslive.com). I was very excited about this position, as the man I would be working for was a very smart, educated person that firmly believed in a work/life balance. He was trying to implement many of the ideas found in the Jim Collins books, and had this genuine desire to take care of his employees. Unfortunately, last Wednesday I received an email that said:

Well, I have bad news. The rug was pulled out from underneath me; as a result promises that I made in good faith are going to be broken. I’m not going to have a job for you until January at the earliest and possibly not at all....while I hope to get the chance to work with you, your life would be better if you found something else before then.

Sad. So I'm back on the market for now. Though I still hope it works out somehow at GoPets.

Our Story: Summery

For those of you who know either myself (Brandon Weaver) or Desiree (formally Desiree Wohlert), let me begin by saying that this has been a very busy year for us. We have been running the gauntlet since January.

In summery, we realized we had a rare friendship, the soul level kind—the kind that great marriages are based on. So this past January we started "officially" dating. Neither of us is the type to take things lightly so about March we took the premarriage class at our church and began the counseling to really consider if we should take the next step toward marriage. In June Dez received a letter saying she had been accepted to the Masters of Spiritual Formation and Soul Care program at the Institute for Spiritual Formation at Biola University in Los Angeles.

We were faced with some very big decisions. We weighed our options and got a lot of counsel from many different people, and after much prayer and seeking of God we decided to get married and move to Los Angeles. Even harder than the decision was the execution, however, as we faced many trials along the way, not the least of which was the short amount of time between our decision and our wedding and the immediate cross-country move afterwards.

August was "crunch" month: we got married on the 13th, left for L.A. on the 17th, arrived on the 20th, and Dez started classes on the 24th. September was pretty much "crash" month. I accepted a job in October, and will start in November. In the meantime, I've been working on some freelance gigs I've picked up from Craig's List and else where.

We've spent a lot of time connecting with each other, with ourselves, and with God. We've spent some time exploring this massive city we now live in, and a lot of time just recovering from a very busy year.