Rachel Starr Thomson

I have a confession to make: I am a Friendship Focus failure.

Friendship Focus is a time in my church’s Sunday morning services when we extend the traditional “good morning” and a handshake to 15 full minutes of getting tea or coffee, saying hello to the people around us, and, ideally, introducing ourselves to new people and getting to know them.

I am great at the getting tea or coffee part. The chatting it up with the entire congregation, not so much. Sometimes I try. Sometimes I just take a really long time at the tea table so it will all be over and I can go sit down.

The above confession might lead you to believe that I’m shy. I’m not. I enjoy people and getting to know them. I have no problem with sharing my thoughts and opinions, even controversial ones, and in Bible studies I spend a lot of time biting my tongue so other people will have a chance to answer questions. I perform poetry and narrative with Soli Deo Gloria Ballet several times a year, as well as acting as our spokesperson, and I don’t even get butterflies in my stomach when it comes to standing in front of a room full of people and speaking. And ever since I was a kid, I’ve been the one who went to great lengths to make sure new people were greeted and made comfortable.

I’m not shy. What I am is introverted. And sometimes in church, that can be a problem.

Read the rest of the article here: http://www.boundless.org/2005/articles/a0002329.cfm

My most recent article on Boundless.org is a reminder to us all to love our countries — and a tribute of sorts to mine:

I saw something in Vancouver that I don’t often see in this northern nation of ours. Patriotism. People bursting with pride in being Canadian, faces painted red and white, waving hockey sticks with Canadian flags on the end. After I’d returned home, I was driving down the freeway and listening to commentators on the CBC (the Canadian Broadcasting Company) asking whether this event, this upswell of Canadian identity and pride, had changed us forever.

Maybe it had, they thought.

Certainly the Olympics helped bolster my own sense of identity as a Canadian. My patriotic journey has been an unusual one. My grandmother was born and raised in Iowa, and though she moved after her marriage to the border city in Canada where my grandfather lived, she remained passionately American all her life. Her eight children were all born in Canada, but obtained dual citizenship early on, and they too developed a strong sense of American identity.

(Read the rest of “Loving My Country” here: http://www.boundless.org/2005/articles/a0002322.cfm .)

After the article posted, I got this lovely e-mail from fellow Boundless writer Elisabeth Adams:

Hi Rachel,

Just wanted to let you know that I enjoyed your latest article on Boundless — both because it’s an excellent articulation of the subject, and because I lived in Canada for a year, and prayed for her alongside my Canadian friends. I still feel a tug on my heart when I hear “we stand on guard for thee.”  I did grow up with a Canadian uncle and later went to school with a Canadian, who hated the igloo jokes and clued me in to the fact that it can be Very Annoying to have such a large and loud neighbor nation soaking up so much of the attention.

But oh, was I an innocent when I went up there! I figured Canada was just like America, only further north. Not so much. :O) I saw Loyalist cemeteries. (That was a shock!) Heard a much less pugnacious attitude towards politics. Felt the gentle, Old World spirit and experienced over-the-top hospitality. Celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving. Drank tea! Enjoyed seeing British spellings. Got used to seeing French everywhere.  Enjoyed a bit of my Scottish heritage, including kilts, Gaelic, and fiddles.  Lived so far from town that the stars were brighter than I’ve ever seen them before or since, and by woods so thick, it was easy to imagine Indians stepping out of them. Saw my first bald eagles in the wild (ironic, that). Bought milk in bags, and actually had both milkman and bookmobile come my house. Got lost in Quebec, and watched my non-French-speaking dad try to get directions from a very non-English-speaking hunter. (Lots of arm waving involved).

When I’m abroad, people of numerous nationalities hear my accent and guess that I’m Canadian. And it makes me smile. I love being American, but I’m glad I’ve gotten to know our sister nation just a wee bit more.

Thanks for reminding me of so many good memories!
Elisabeth

Here’s to both our countries today!

Raised in an actively Christian home, I have always heard that we’re supposed to give our lives — every aspect of our lives — to God. The call has always been clear to me, and not as some mystical vocation to which only ministers and anchorites can attain. Ephesians 2:9-10 declares that God has prepared specific works for all of us:

“For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”

Believing this, from childhood I have been “giving my life to God.” But I don’t always believe He’s accepted it.

Maybe I’m waiting for a cataclysmic acceptance speech. I say “Here I am, send me,” and then I wait for fire and glory and seraphim crying “Holy, holy, holy.” But to wait for God to accept my life is to fail to believe what He tells me: that He has already accepted me. He has already prepared good works for me. I’ve said, “Take my life,” and He’s taken it.

Read all of “The Best-Laid Plans” on Boundless here.

Holidays. I think about the word as I mouth the lyrics to “O Come Emmanuel,” a 900-year-old Christmas carol I’m listening to today because I’m already scripting a Christmas program for the performing arts group I co-direct.

Holidays. High points. Holy days. Life swirls around them like a river around jutting pinnacles of rock. They direct the ebb and flow of our lives. They are collectives of memories and teachings; they are an intensity of significance that defines spirituality and semester alike.

Christmas gets most of the attention, at least if your background is secular or Protestant. Easter, it could be argued, has the greater significance. God could have been born into the world and then just left, and we’d not be any better off. It’s the drama of the Passion Week that has really changed things. So it’s good that we note these days. That we celebrate them. That we decorate our homes, change our diets, and attend special church services to remember the high points that promise to transform our lives.

But what about life between the holidays?

Can the everyday, the Monday afternoon or Wednesday morning or Friday dusk that does not mark the incarnation of God or the death of sin or the resurrection of the King of Kings — can that day be significant too?

I wonder about this as the familiar strains of the carol fill the warm spring air. Holidays are inspiring, like the high points in my own life — weddings and births and even, in a strange way, funerals. But what about life between the holidays, between the high points? What about everyday, run-of-the-mill, uninspiring work days in which we just raise children or clack keyboards or dig fence posts or fight off the flu? Where’s the sacrament, the holiness, in that life?

Read “Life Between the Holidays” on Boundless here.

The story has been familiar since I was a child: Max, a small boy in a wolf suit, rampages through his house until his parents call him “Wild Thing!” and send him to his room without any supper.

There, his imagination sails him away to a faraway island populated by enormous wild things, who declare Max their king. “We’ll eat you up — we love you so!” they pronounce, and Max, wearing a golden crown and carrying a scepter, leads the wild things in a rumpus all over the island until he gets lonely for someone who “loves him best” — who presumably won’t eat him up — and sails home again.

His parents have left a hot bowl of soup in his room in what is either an example of grace or of too-permissive modern parenting. Or both.

Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are has been a wildly popular children’s book since its initial publication in 1963. It fascinated me as a child, though I was never the rumpusing sort; the monsters were at once frightening and sympathetic. (Sendak himself said they were based on his Polish relatives, who were somewhat overwhelming to a small boy.) And the language is beautiful.

Spike Jonze’s 2009 film version explored the story on a much deeper level. In the movie, Max’s rampaging isn’t just the behavior of a small boy who’s feeling cooped up; it’s the latent anger, fear, and insecurity of a child who’s trying to deal with life that isn’t going the way it should. His father is gone, his mother is stressed, his sister doesn’t seem to care about him. Dysfunction is all around, not least of all in himself. Max is scared and overflowing with emotion, so he bites his mother — and horrified at his own reaction, he runs away.

When he reaches his imaginary island, Jonze’s Max meets wild things that mirror different aspects of his own heart. There’s the part of him nobody listens to, the part of him that wants to run away, the part of him that covers up rejection with bitterness; and especially there’s Karol, the angry, violent, scared-to-death-of-losing-what-he-loves-most part of him.

The irony is that Karol does what Max does: In his fear, he tries to control or lashes out. And the result, for both of them, is that everything gets worse. They drive away those they love instead of drawing them closer.

I doubt that Maurice Sendak saw deep spiritual truths in his frightening Polish relatives, but I see them in his story. In both book and movie, Max styles himself King of the Wild Things — but he isn’t really, and by the end he knows that. He’s lonely and just wants someone to love him, so he sails home to his parents and soup, narrowly avoiding being eaten. But I doubt he ever entirely escapes the wild things on the inside, any more than I can escape — or rule — the wild things in me.

Read the whole article here, on Boundless.org.

My latest article on Boundless is called “Predestined”:

I thought a thing I feared was going to happen. I couldn’t do a blessed thing to stop it, and I looked bleakly into the future (“I knew you’d over-think this,” my friend said; “you always over-think things like this”) and thought, as I sometimes do, about fate.

Fate. Destiny. To use a much-debated term of Christian theology, predestination. How much of my life is determined by my choices, and how much is simply going to happen to me because God wills it — call it doom or glory; it may go either way.

I Googled “destiny” and found a wealth of opinion. There’s William Jennings Bryan, winner of the famous 1925 Scopes Trial, believing firmly in our own power to direct fate: “Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.”

And there’s Albert Einstein, looking at the universe through very different eyes. He declared, “Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect, as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.”

In my own fearful circumstance, I knew Bryan was wrong; there was nothing, either righteous or sinful, I could do to ward off fate. But Einstein’s Invisible Piper was hardly comforting. In fact, it’s Aldous Huxley who best phrased my feelings: “My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.”

With my future all uncertain, I lifted my noisy self in prayer, and between praying and morbid introspection I learned something about the future by looking into the past. In Scripture I can see the pattern of my fate, and so I can collaborate with it. In my own life I can see the hand of God bringing things together. Destiny is for me a real thing. The forces directing it have been active for a long, long time — I cannot see the Piper, perhaps, but I can certainly hear the tune.

Read the whole article here.

I wrote “Run With a Vision,” on the importance of vision to a homeschooling family, several years ago, but it’s just been published by Kerry Beck at her blog. You can read the whole article here. Although it’s written specifically for homeschoolers, the principles apply to anyone who’s trying to get anywhere in life!

Discouragement is no stranger to the homeschooled household. Homeschoolers are, after all, pioneers. The road less-traveled is always rocky. As a homeschool graduate, I can look back and see lots of things my parents did wrong, but the one wrong thing they didn’t do was give up. They had a vision for what they were doing that kept them going no matter how many obstacles they encountered.

In Bunyan’s beloved allegory Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian passes through a place called the Valley of the Shadow of Death. He is compassed about with danger—a bottomless pit on one side, a swamp on the other, and evil, taunting, blasphemous voices in his ears. He barely makes it through. Later, however, another band of pilgrims pass through the Valley without much trouble. What made the difference? The second band made their journey during the day, while Christian’s was made at night. They had vision, where he only had darkness.

No matter how many difficulties fill your path, if your vision is clear, you will make it through.

Behold the Child is no longer on tour. We finished our 22nd performance on Sunday night, Carolyn and I wrapped up company finances Monday morning, and I drove the four and a half hours back to my family home on Monday afternoon. I stepped onto our front porch to see half the family playing the dreidel game in the living room while the rest of the family drank tea from a 24-hour carafe in the kitchen and ate Christmas cookies.

It’s nice to be home. (That 24-hour carafe is a brilliant invention.) I’ve got many student papers to finish before Christmas Eve, e-mail to catch up on, family to hang out with, and possibly even a movie or two to see. And then of course, Christmas.

Christmas means a lot to me. My latest Boundless article, “I Remember Christmas,” went up last week and I didn’t get a chance to blog the link.

This year I am celebrating differently . . . but I remember Christmas as a child. No matter how my observances may change over the years, no matter how busy the season grows, the shadow of those Christmases is still at my elbow, hushed and fragrant.

Thanks for reading . Merry Christmas, one and all!

In John Bunyan’s classic allegory Pilgrim’s Progress, a major subplot features the character of Ignorance. Throughout the story, he follows Christian, doing things his own way, refusing counsel, deliberately turning a deaf ear to any truth that makes him uncomfortable. When he reaches the Celestial City, he fully expects to be allowed in — but he is turned away. Ignorance is pathetic, but we can’t excuse him on the grounds that he didn’t know. He chooses his own doom.

My latest Boundless article, “What We Don’t Know”–on the importance of becoming biblically literate, and practical ways we can all do so–is up here.

The popular question “WWJD?” used to frustrate me. “WDJD?” — What Did Jesus Do? — has had a far more profound effect on my life. Read the article on Boundless.org.