Wow - I let the holidays get between me and my blog. That's probably a good thing...

Some random things since my last post:

- Holidays were good for us. We tried to simplify Christmas, and I think were successful for the most part. One of the best indicators of this is that this year we have less new junk occupying space in the house after Christmas.

- Came across this really good interview with a life hero of mine: Frederick Buechner.

- Been absorbed lately with the news of violence in Nairobi, Kenya. If you haven't heard, their recent election set off a wave of violence in and around the slums (over 300 reported dead, including children). Some of the violence is happening in the Mathare slum, which is the area we visited and where we'll be working in future years. It's strange, because usually those kinds of news stories take about a minute and are sandwiched somewhere between the latest sports scores and a commercial about $.99 double cheeseburgers - and the human tragedy just becomes a part of the constant din of noise that makes up the background of your life. But when you've been someplace, and you've smelled the smell and you know some of the people who live there... Suddenly that one minute spot becomes very arresting and the rest of the noise fades in importance. Makes me wonder what else I've breezed over in my channel changing...

- I've got a show at the end of this month. My friend Kate Holterhoff and I are co-exhibiting at a gallery downtown called DesignSmith Gallery. The show will be up for two months. It opens January 25th.

Beasts of No Nation
a novel by Uzodinma Iweala

Just finished reading this little book. You should read it. First-person fictional narrative of a boy-soldier in Africa. Rough to digest, makes you sick at points, but deeply moving.

The sequel: Dramatic Prairie Dog vs. Kung Fu Baby!

Pretty exciting day today. I was in a major car accident.

New fallen snow, combined with rain to make slush... Light weight pickup truck... all bad ingredients. I was headed to the gallery today and as I approached a red light at an intersection in Walnut Hills, I began to slide. Tires wouldn't catch at all and I quickly realized I wasn't going to be able to stop before sliding into the intersection.

I thought: maybe I'll get lucky and the cross-traffic won't be bad. That's when I saw the city Metro bus coming into the intersection from the right, at full speed. It slammed into the side of my truck, hitting the back bed of the truck on the passenger side. This threw my truck into a spin that quickly stopped as the other side of my truck smashed into an electrical pole. In the end, the back half of my pickup is in an hourglass shape, crushed in on both sides.

I'm OK - I hit my head pretty good on what I think was the interior door frame. If I had hit the window, at that force, I'm sure my head would have gone through the window. I'm aching and my head is still pounding - but I think I'm fine. Everyone on the bus was fine - the driver said it felt like a "little jolt" to them. All I did was some damage to the bike rack on the front of the bus.

Truck is totaled. Not worth trying to fix. This, after having just spent $1600 on new brakes, tires and ball joints.

So - not the best day... But:

Had the truck been one half second slower into the intersection, the bus would have hit the cab, crushing ME against the electrical pole. Considering the damage the pole caused to the truck bed - if that were me instead - I'd be either laid up in a hospital or dead. For the briefest of moments, as I braced for the impending impact, I thought: "Is this it? Is this how I go out?"

Glad to be alive and well, but needless to say: not too thrilled about the Winter Wonderland out there right now...

The holidays always bring up economic issues. Not just "How will we afford..." but lately, "What should we try to afford... And what should we intentionally not afford?" Where should we cut back? How should we be teaching/modeling for our children about Kingdom economics? Flora is much more clear on the issue - I'm addicted to stocking stuffers.

Read a good interview with Walter Brueggemann not too long ago in Image. When asked his perspective on whether church parking lots full of SUVs squares with the kind of Christian community that shares its goods equally as described in the book of Acts, he responded:


"It's the overriding issue among us. Those cars are a measure of the way we have all been encapsulated in the narrative of commodity. It doesn't do any good to scold people; the work, which isn't easy, is to help people see that if we ever really practiced good relational life, commodities would lose their attraction for us."

We don't drive an SUV. We do have a mini-van, but it's paid for and the handles have both been ripped off by our kids (somehow that eases my guilt). But I did have a pretty revealing conversation last night with my wife. We were digesting some of the things I saw in last month's trip to Kenya - specifically a five-month-old baby who is left alone each day while his mother goes off to find work. We were feeling the overwhelming of "what to do" - and thinking about the people who live and work there and how their perspective is one person at a time... Until the end of time.

As we were discussing this dilemma, my mind suddenly pulled an American channel change: I said, "Hey, do you like the new toilet seat I installed? Do you like the brushed nickel hinges? Only cost 5 bucks more, but looks pretty good, huh?"

That pretty much killed the conversation... I have so far to go.

I had a chance to hang out for a bit today with my true, good friend Russ. I'm sorting through some life-decision stuff right now and it was really great to have a buddy who knows me well and can speak well to me. He knows the good and the bad of who I am and I realized today what a good, good thing it is that I have someone I can ask straight out: What's your gut on this? What do you think I should do? And I can know that what he says is for my good.

An absolute comrade for life. Thanks bro.

Michael Frost (author of Exiles and The Shaping of Things to Come) on Missional Church:

Tim Parsley
It Will Be OK (2006)
8.5x11" piece of paper, elevator

I was sorting through some old files and came across this sculpture/installation I made while in school. At the time I was pondering the idea of "messages from above."

Because I need to be more consistent with my study of Scripture...

Hapiru Readings

As we have been settled into our suburban home since around last May, I've been trying to reconcile with my environment. I say "reconcile" because I've had mixed feelings about the suburbs for a while now. One side of me struggles with the suburban values of safety and comfort, upward-mobility and domestic consumerism. The other side of me has kids, wants good schools for those kids, loves front porches and backyard BBQs. I try to make myself feel better (look better) by pointing out that we found an old house (76 years) on an old street with sidewalks and lots of character. We just happened to be surrounded by sprawling McMansions and one-stop shopping complexes...

Anyway, I've included a link on the sidebar to this site - but I came across a pretty interesting article about how to "interpret" your neighborhood as "one of the primary texts of daily life - one through which God speaks." Check it out if you like:

Exploring Your Neighbourhood: An Exegetical Walk

I've also been reading (slowly) this: Justice in the Burbs. The authors begin by admitting that they now live in the city - where justice issues are more readily apparent - and that when they used to live in the suburbs, they did not pursue justice in any significant way. So now they've written a book about what they should have done when they lived in the burbs. Hindsight is 20/20, I guess. This is tough because it seems to confirm that it's harder to be justice-minded when you live in an environment that has a veneer that covers over the injustices of society - as seems to be the case in the suburbs. Still, I want to believe that walking in the way of the Kingdom and being justice-minded shouldn't be limited to the urban centers - but that even in the suburbs and rural areas it is possible.

This weekend was a big missions emphasis weekend in our church community and in the city. Cincinnati hosted the annual National Missionary Convention and our congregation helped volunteer in various ways. We had some guest speakers today from the Ukraine who our church supports.

I have to admit I've been a bit deficient in my understanding and involvement in world missions up to this point in my life. It's really good to be a part of a congregation that is so involved in so many areas of the world. I have a lot to learn. I feel like things are starting to make connections for me in some surprising ways. For several years now I've best understood American culture and the role of the church through a "missionary lens." Through the teachings of missiologists who have applied their understandings of foreign mission work to current Western culture, I've discovered a new faith vocabulary and framework for understanding theology. This has been a welcome change for me as I have for quite awhile felt uneasy about the western, expansionist vocabulary and "strategery" so often associated with traditional evangelism.

As I said, I have a lot to learn - but as I'm growing in my knowledge and relationships with more globally connected and engaged Jesus-followers, here are some things I'm picking up:

>> The missionary mindset does not bemoan the marginal status of the church. Rather than trying to fight for a central voice in culture (something they likely have never had to begin with) the missionary mindset recognizes it's challenges (and threats), but seeks to find creative ways to live out the gospel in a limited situation.

>> It understands the value of slow change. Seed change. My new friends working in the slums of Kenya are doing amazing work. However, when asked about how they define "results" - they emphasized the "one person at a time" result. This, in a slum that is home to over 800,000 residents. One at a time. And slowly. Through building trust. Through setbacks. Through dogged faithfulness even when you wonder if you're really making that much of a difference in the big picture. And when asked if they could see a point when they would be able to look back and say, "We did it!" They replied: "When Jesus comes back." The work never ends.

>> The missionary mindset understands the difficult challenge of an enculturated gospel. At their best, missionaries understand that the form of God's community will be most true when it takes on the indigineous particularities of a given context. Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach to faith and community development (most likely a western plan), missionaries understand that time spend learning the languages (verbal, visual, relational, political, etc.), establishing trust through shared life, and acting out the gospel in ways that make the preaching seem secondary (like the footnotes on the actions)... these are the moves that can bring about an authentic, indigineous expression of a Christ-community. Which means that it will look as different from other Christ-communities as the contexts themselves look different from each other.

>> Missionaries also know something about suffering. They have witnessed a depth of suffering most Americans can only have nightmares about. They themselves have often suffered greatly. I read an article a long time ago about a guy who works for the government investigating war crimes around the world. He goes into villages, after a raid of guerrilla fighters have come through and killed men, women, and children. He wades through their corpses (sometimes knee deep) trying to figure out what happened and who is to blame. I remember him mentioning in that article that we cannot fully know the God we pray to until we have also, like God, stood knee-deep in the suffering of his own children. Many missionaries have an understanding of the gospel that has grown up alongside an acute understanding of suffering. Therefore, their gospel is one that suffers even as it heals. This seems to me to be a radically important aspect of the gospel that is missing for most American Christians. What would it look like for our gospel understanding to have global suffering woven into it's content and therefore shaping the various ways the gospel is formed in society?

I know I have a lot to learn from these people - both home and abroad. Missionaries have always struck me as a bit quirky - a bit odd. To be completely transparent, in my younger (more immature) days, I wondered what they had to offer to those working in the American context. I couldn't see how what they were doing related to what we were doing. Of course, they could benefit from us - but not necessarily the other way around. I see now how ridiculously uninformed and arrogant that view was. It revealed the myth that says America is the fount of all good things - education, wealth, health, power... I'm embarrassed I ever thought that way. Thankfully that illusion burst for me years ago. For a few years now, and especially lately, I'm realizing how much we need to learn from those who were brave enough to hop the pond and discover what that gospel means in a context completely unlike their own. They have lessons to teach us about how to be Jesus-followers in our own context.

The question always seems to come up: "How can we help those people?" (and to be sure, we have some resources that ought to be used to actually help.) But I really feel like it's equally, if not more relevant to ask, "How can those people help us?"

Frederick Buechner on Truth:

"'I,' he said, 'I am the truth.' (Jn.14.6)

"Jesus did not say that religion was the truth, or that his own teachings were the truth, or that what people taught about him was the truth, or that the Bible was the truth, or the church, or any system of ethics or theological doctrine. There are individual truths in all of them, we hope and believe, but individual truths were not what Pilate was after, or what you and I are after either, unless I miss my guess. Truths about this or that are a dime a doszen, including religious truths. THE truth is what Pilate is after: the truth about who we are and who God is if there is a God, the truth about life, the truth about death, the truth about truth itself. That is the truth we are all of us after.

"It is a truth that can never be put into words becaues no words can contain it. It is a truth that can never be caught in any doctrine or creed including our own because it will never stay still long enough but is always moving and shifting like air. It is a truth that is always beckoning us in different ways and coming at us from different directions. And I think that is precisely why whenever Jesus tries to put that ultimate and inexpressible truth into words (instead of into silence as he did with Pilate), the form of words he uses is a form that itself moves and shifts and beckons us in different ways and comes at us from different directions. That is to say he tells stories."

- Frederick Buechner, "The Truth of Stories," in Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons

OK - it's finally up.

www.timparsley.com

I just swept the kitchen floor again. With three young children, that's something we have to do several times a day. As I pulled the crumbs of my family into a neat little pile ready to be scooped up, I noticed an orange crayon in the pile. For a moment I considered leaving in the pile, scooping it up and throwing it out with the rest of the dirt and trash. After all, my kids have crayons everywhere. Will the loss of one orange crayon really matter - or even be noticed?

But then, I've never been able to throw away a perfectly good crayon. I thought about my kids - how if you give them one piece of paper and a single crayon, they are pulled in by the tractor-beam of a new work of art waiting to emerge from the blank whiteness of the page. Who knows what they could create with this one orange crayon? Houses, family portraits, dragons, monsters, favorite cartoon characters... I thought about my own history of mark-making - of how for as long as I can remember I've been unable to resist taking a crayon, pencil, pen, anything, and drawing whatever comes to mind. (Admission: At restaurants I draw with the kid crayons on the napkins as much as my kids do). So I retrieved the crayon from the pile and set it on the counter - ready and waiting for it's next creation.

It's true: Entire worlds exist in a single crayon.

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Listen to carrion -- put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

Wendell Berry

I'm hesitant to do this because in the past I've written several blogs that have sadly gone by the wayside. They are still online, however, rather than being the current pulse of my life, they have become like old notes found in the pocket of a pair of jeans that have been through the wash a few times and now the words are hard to dicipher because they were written for a different time...

So, I begin anew.

I'm titling this blog "Hapiru: Life on the Spiritual Margin" I first came across the term "hapiru" (Hah-PEE-roo, although it is sometimes pronounced with a silent "h", and sometimes it's translated "Habiru") in a book called The Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggemann. Here is what he says about the word:

"The term "hapiru" in various forms and with various linguistic congates appears in the Ancient Near East in the second millennium to refer to stateless people who live at the edges of society, threaten society, and are in turn threatened by it. It is widely thought that the biblical term "Hebrew" is linked to the term; if so, then the early references to what became Israel are linked to a border social movement of marginal, precarious peoples. Recent scholarship has indicated that the term is not ethnic but is sociological and refers to those at the edge of economic and political viability in many states in the region." - Walter Breuggemann, The Prophetic Imagination

A simpler version might be: Someone who feels they don't fit in the center. I relate to the term hapiru for a couple of reasons:

I have an hapiru experience of faith. My questions don't seem to match up to the answers. I often leave church services feeling less connected than before. That said, I am a follower of Jesus Christ. This alone places me in a certain marginal status in a post-christian culture. However, I am hesitant to accept the term "christian" as way of defining my faith. While I am engaged in trying to discover what Jesus termed the "Kingdom of God," I often feel disconnected from the traditional religious sphere better known as "the church." I attend a congregation regularly - and they are great people who give me some room to try and be a fellow-follower - however, I often feel a misfit with my questions, frustrations, and distractions. For 13 years I was a church pastor. However, I found it too difficult to lead from the center with a marginal bent. Now my spirtuality finds itself more comfortable out of the mainstream, on the fringe, able to breathe.

I also have an hapiru vocation. I am a working visual artist. I paint, draw and sculpt. Artists have historically found themselves on the margins of society, alongside poets, philosophers, and garbage collectors. We like to believe we see things differently and as a result we often have a view of things that is not understood by the broader culture. To be honest, I usually feel more spiritually "at home" among my artist friends (most of which do not have a regular faith practice) than among christians. I've been an artist all my life - though my art practice languished during those 13 years of church work mentioned above. Thankfully, my move to the margins professionally and spiritually has given my art new life.

I'm not really sure who this blog will be "for." People usually write blogs to be read by others - as a way for others to "keep up" with them or as a free forum to pontificate about whatever. I guess this blog will have those purposes as well. Hopefully, however, it will give me a personal space to "word out" my wonderings and wanderings. This means anyone who chooses to read this blog will have to stomach a lot of naval-gazing - which I realize is often arrogant and selfish - but it is also very cathartic, purgative and ultimately healthy (hopefully).

Well, that's enough of a "grand introduction." Let's see if this thing sticks now...

Ignore this image. It's here for something else. This: www.new-word-for-tim.blogspot.com