Here’s our seed list for this year, purchased from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.  If you have a chance, order one of their catalogs and just look around.  It will make you want to buy seeds upon seeds of potential deliciousness:

Glory of Enkhuizen Cabbage
De Bourbonne Cucumber
Genovese Basil
Cilantro
Dill Bouquet
Giant Of Italy Parsley
Wild Zaatar Oregano
Serrano Tampequino Pepper
Anaheim Pepper
Five Color Silverbeet Chard
Tomatillo Verde
Arkansas Traveler Tomato
German Red Strawberry Tomato
Tonadose des Conores Tomato
Big Month Tomato
Orange Banana Tomato
Black Krim Tomato

We also have some Moreton and Ramapo Tomato seeds left over from last year.  They were unaffected by the blight last year, so they are keepers!

Share your favorite heirloom in the comments!

Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Waiting for the Barbarians or Foe by J.M. Coetzee
The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis

I chose Farenheit 451 because its a dysutopian novel that doesn’t always get the credit it deserves and can be overshadowed by Brave New World or 1984.

I chose Jayber Crow because anyone worth their salt must read Wendell Berry.

I chose Pride and Prejudice because I must confess that it is a great story, it’s funny, and it’s romantic in the best way possible.  The movie versions can get sappy and gushy but the book is realistic and frustrating: just like real love.  One of my male students wrote back that he had picked up a copy and was laughing out loud as he read.

I wanted to have a post-colonial novel in the mix so I said read Coetzee, either Waiting for the Barbarians or Foe.  It might have been a safe play to go with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness here but I wanted to spice things up.

And lastly, The Great Divorce is an overshadowed C.S. Lewis novel that is quite brilliant.  It has the best qualities of the Space Trilogy in its theological allegory but shows greater literary strength in its allusions to the Divine Comedy.

For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness, love. For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. (NIV) (emphasis added)

This passage flips our usual understanding of spiritual growth and discipleship on it’s head.  This is not about obtaining these virtues, gaining levels until you reach the top.  We want discipleship to be like going through school as a child and graduating from grade to grade.  There aren’t any levels in this passage though.

What is important is “increasing measure.”  There aren’t any levels, graduation ceremonies, or completion.  You don’t suddenly find yourself a card carrying, baptized member of the Christian club who is certified as 100% Christian.  No, instead, the emphasis on who a true disciple is falls on the evidence of “increase.”

What this does is level the playing field for disciples.  We are all in this together, and a good disciple is not someone who possesses a certain amount of these virtues but the disciple who is always increasing in these virtues, whether they’ve been a Christian for six months or six years or sixty years.  The disciple is not certified, she is dynamic and always increasing.

I love chicken fried steak.  Whether you call it chicken fried or country fried I really don’t care.  I have it maybe once a year now because we only eat free-range, organic meat (want to know why? Email me or send a tweet to @everydayliturgy). Unfortunately, my wife hates the appearance of a perfectly good steak breaded and smothered in gravy.  She is repulsed by chicken fried steak.  She conveniently reminded me of a time in college that the cafeteria had chicken fried steak for dinner.  I apparently went nuts, took three chicken fried steaks and proceeded to make a chicken fried steak sandwich, a chicken fried steak salad, and had the other as an entree.  I do have somewhat of an excuse: our college cafeteria was awful and I usually ate salad twice a day.  So a good meal was a rare treat.  But that doesn’t excuse my my lack of moderation when it comes to breaded and fried foodstuffs.  I showed a lack of moderation, something my wife must have seen as a glint in my eye after that commercial (case in point: I did look up a recipe for chicken fried steak later).

Lent is about fasting.  What fasting has taught me consistently over the past few years is that I need to grow my habit of fasting at different times into a year long habit of moderation.  If I can go 40 days without something do I really need to gorge myself the other 325?  Or in other words, do I really need three chicken fried steaks?

I don’t.  None of us do.  We can make it through the fasting.  And when we have, we don’t need to overdo it.

Creativity is an expanse.  It fills in the holes left out of intentional or unintentional loss.  This is why so much art is produced out of pain and suffering.  To create we must give something up or give something away.

Creation, in essence, is a gift.  The great expanse of the world is a gift to us.  In turn, we continue to give up our time, our possessions, our habits, and our pretenses in order to create.

There is a danger to our creative arc, and that is if we give something up and fill it with overindulgence: if we set aside time and fill it with watching TV, or set aside a night for a special dinner and fill it with Stouffers pre-made lasagna we have missed something.  Just giving up something is not enough—we must let something grow and flourish out of our selflessness.  If we fill selflessness with laziness or overindulgence, how far have we really gone in our creativity?

Lent is not a “bad” season, a time we just want to get out of as soon as possible.  I find Lent to be a time of contentment, when I can focus on how little I really need in life, something I have been realizing about creativity.

In recent years there has been an arms race toward creative technology.  We can do so much at once and so quickly all with the usefulness of the latest technological advance.  But I’ve become weary of it.  It makes creativity “easier” but not always better.  Technological discernment must be facilitated during the creative process, something I have been thinking about recently.  I like to call it black and white movie creativity.

This is the type of creativity that comes from a good black and white movie: there are no special effects, no color, no car chases, no explosions, no quick cutting knife fights—yet the movie still holds your interest.  How is a movie like this creative?  How do I translate this type of long-lasting creativity into my own creative life?

It’s been through technological discernment.  I have begun writing letters on paper and posting them again.  I don’t type rough drafts, I use pen and paper.  I have colored pens to color in drawings now.  I sketch on paper before  outlining a poster or graphic design in software.  I slow down and stay in the analog before moving to the digital, and move to the digital only when necessary.

A rephrasing of Jesus’ words at his first temptation are apt for this day in age: “Man can not live on technology alone.”  We have to start taking a hard look at how we create in this world and how a world of unrelenting technology can affect our creativity.  And in light of the season, it may be a good time to take a few steps back and enter the black and white world for a while.

As I read my favorite passage on fasting this morning, Isaiah 58, I was soon struck by the incredible dissonance between the passage and how most people want to end  poverty.  According to the latest Barna poll, 39% of Americans think the federal government should take the lead to address poverty, 25% think it should be the state government, 18% say each individual citizen, 4% said churches,  4% said nonprofit organizations, and 3% chose businesses.

It’s sad that so few people believe that the church should take the lead to address poverty.  On this first day of fasting, we should heed the words of Isaiah:

Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?

Our Lenten fast reminds us of how much we have, and how little Christ was given as he was tempted.  We have been given all through Christ, so we must be the ones to take the lead with poverty and injustice.  When we fast we must do so as a sign of the Gospel, to be a light to those who are burdened and chained by poverty and injustice.

Heather talks to me about my favorite authors, what I look for in literature submissions, and how GENERATE Magazine started.

I encourage you to check out the whole January/February 2010 issue of Glimpses here.

It is evident that Julie has done extensive research and also transformed her life and habits to write with not only conviction but evidence from her own life that awareness can lead to the transformation of one’s economic life. She focuses on these items to bring her point across: coffee, chocolate, clothing, general food, gasoline, waste disposal, and debt. She uses these items as topics to segway into a conversation with the reader concerning how we view our consumptive habits and form our general ideas about manufacturing, domestic products, national debt, trade, international exchange, and personal desire. After reading the book you will find yourself, if nothing else, more aware the foundation of our global economy: as cheap a product as possible with complete disregard for the hands that created or harvested it. Being aware is the first step, and Julie leaves no room for excuses after reading this book.

The second step is application in your own life and Julie does a fabulous job providing links and a wealth of information that shows you how to make wise choices in our daily consumptive decisions. It is easy to think or say “my decisions mean nothing on a global scale?” I urge you to resist that temptation and walk with Julie through Everday Justice to find practical ways that you can transform your economic thinking from everyday desire to everyday justice.

Book Info:

Everyday Justice: The Global Impact of Our Daily Choices
Julie Clawson
InterVarsity Press
$10.88 (Amazon)

I read this book over the Christmas holiday and it seemed like no sooner did I turn on NPR on my daily drive to work on January 13 did the BBC have report on the massive and deadly earthquake in Haiti. I was shocked and devastated yelling out in the privacy of my car, “What!? Oh God please let it not be true!!” I turned up the radio ever louder as to not miss out on the reporter’s account. I learned that the night before there had been an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.1 that had literally rocked the capital city of Port-au-Price. Sitting at the wheel of my car I considered pulling over as panic washed over me “NO!” I thought “I wonder if Kent and Shelly and their family is safe? Oh God I cannot fathom the destruction and suffering.”

I found it so coincidental that I had just finished reading this book by Kent Annan  called Following Jesus Through the Eye of the Needle: Living Fully, Loving Dangerously about his decision and journey with his wife Shelly to do relief work in Haiti starting in December of 2003.  The book is written from Kent’s perspective but his wife Shelly has a very strong presence in the book.  In the book Kent is very raw and revealing about his and Shelly’s transition to the country, and their struggles to assimilate and learn what they could do on a daily basis to be agents of change.  The country of Haiti, as most now know, is the poorest county in the Western Hemisphere, and when Kent and Shelly arrived in Haiti the poverty and lack of basic needs were overwhelming and completely frustrating for them to comprehend and at times accept for themselves.  The urge to leave and go back home to the United States was great at times, but it is so evident that within the book that they fell in love with the people of Haiti. Though their voices might not carry international influence, they decided to do everything they could to describe the struggles of their brothers and sisters in Haiti to the readers.  During their time there they lived purposefully and determined learn to live through the eyes of others around them.  Kent and Shelly now live in Florida with their family but with their location allows them to continue their ministry.  With the Earthquake on January 12, 2010 their work not only became necessary but vital. Please read this book and learn their story, especially at this time when recovery is so crucial to the nation of Haiti.  Following Jesus through the eye of a needle can seem impossible, but with God’s mercy, love and grace we can learn what it means to follow him into places that seem terribly difficult.

Book Info:

Following Jesus Through the Eye of the Needle: Living Fully, Loving Dangerously
Kent Annan
InterVarsity Press
$10.88 (Amazon)