It’s a beautiful Saturday morning, and I’m getting a nice, slow start by blogging while I drink my latte. Everyone else wants breakfast, but I want to enjoy my coffee first, and I have a lot on my mind that needs to be purged before I can go about my day with a clear head. Craig accused me of just trying to delay breakfast until it can be officially classified as brunch, or even lunch, so I only have to cook twice today. I wholeheartedly admitted it was true, but not the only reason, and I’m not one bit ashamed of it. It’s Saturday!
This week was a strange one, as Wednesday felt a lot like Saturday, probably for all of us, so the week’s flow wasn’t just right. Today still feels like Saturday, though, so that’s what counts. My dad and I made a day trip to Dallas and back for the funeral of a very sweet lady. A first experience for me, we also got to attend a baptism following the funeral, of one of the deceased’s grandsons. Could there be a greater testimony to the life of a Christian, than for her grandson to be led to Christ by her example? The legacy she left, of a life of patience, sacrifice (she did a lot of that), unwavering faith and devotion, will be a guiding force to her family for generations to come, and an inspiration to those of us who hope for the same. I always cry at baptisms, with joy, as I know that the angels in heaven rejoice at a sinner who comes to repentance (Luke 15:10), but this one was especially moving because the young man was baptized by his older brother, who was very humbled and moved himself by being part of it, and by his brother’s entrance into the church. It was a beautiful experience, and a memorial I will never forget.
About three-quarters of the way to Dallas, I started looking for my phone, or my ‘life support,’ as Craig calls it, and after searching the vehicle, found that it was not there. Craig, who was home with the boys, searched the driveway, but we finally located it at McDonald’s in Lampasas, where we had stopped earlier in the morning. It’s sad, but you always have a sense of insecurity when you don’t have your phone. We had Dad’s, but I couldn’t get online, no texts, missing phone calls… it was nerve wracking. It’s a shame, but that’s just how our lives are today – connected. I was very happy to get it back when we passed through on the way home, and sanitized it straight away when we got back in the car. In the bathroom, of all places! It must have fallen out of my purse when I was using the hand dryer and couldn’t hear it, because I would just NEVER lay it down in a public restroom… the thought is ghastly!
Jake has been having ‘issues’ with piano lately. He’s been working on pieces that have been very difficult for him, and it has made practicing a chore, to say the least. When I tell him to go practice, there is a lot of moaning and slouching involved, which is completely unacceptable, I know. I have nagged him enough, and threatened to stop the lessons, which is NOT what he wants, but we weren’t making much progress. His teacher is a master pianist, who plays as beautifully as anyone I’ve ever heard, but he’s not very patient with Jake, and I think his teaching style is contributing a lot to the unhappiness. Jake has come a long way, though, and in another year or two, I think he’ll be able to play anything you put in front of him, so I don’t want to change. We called a good friend of ours who is a middle school orchestra teacher and a musician himself, and he had a good talk with Jake, encouraging him and helping him figure out why he’s frustrated, and how we can work to fix it. We are going to start supplementing with more theory and see how that works out, because I really want him to enjoy it. The other night, when I could tell he was getting vexed by the particularly hard song on which he was working, I went and sat on the bench with him, and asked if I could help with anything. Lately, he’s needed a lot of ‘Mom hugs’ and affection, in turn with being very argumentative and stubborn, so I can tell he’s starting into the difficult years of being a mini-man. I had a long talk with him about how much he’s learned and improved in just one year, and how happy he’ll be in a couple more, when he can play whatever he wants. By taking it a little at a time on the difficult ones, I assured him that he CAN do it, and he WILL get it down. His ‘pie in the sky’ right now is the Moonlight Sonata, and he keeps the sheet music on the piano, though he can’t yet play it. He managed to get through the first line, then he would make up his own music to follow it, which is very pretty, but he REALLY wants to play the whole thing. I encouraged him to work on just one measure a week, if that’s what it takes, until he can play it, and in the week since that talk, he’s played the first two pages! It’s amazing, too, the feeling with which he plays it, that is completely absent in the songs he’s assigned to learn. It’s just beautiful. He did have to label the notes, as his reading isn’t as advanced as that piece, but it will get there. I have no doubt, though, that he’ll have this one memorized, because he loves it so much. We are very happy with his progress.
Last night, Craig and I settled in for a movie in bed, with a bowl of peach cobbler and homemade ice cream, and the whole night turned out to be quite a disappointment. First off, it took about two bites to realize there was something terribly wrong with the cobbler, and after some hard thinking, I found that I didn’t remember ever putting the sugar in the batter. Well, that’ll do it! It was terrible. That’s what happens when you try to talk to someone while following a recipe.
Secondly, we were not just disappointed by the movie, but appalled. I rented the movie without checking it out first, because I never imagined it would be as bad as it was. I always check the questionable movies, or anything for the kids, on pluggedinonline.com. They give a very thorough review, including spiritual content, positive and negative elements, language, sexual and drug references, all from a Bible-believer’s point of view. It’s VERY helpful, and has steered us away from many movies we would otherwise have seen and regretted. I didn’t check on this one, The Invention of Lying, as it is PG-13, and has Ricky Gervais and Jennifer Garner, who are both funny and seemingly-safe. I did expect that it would make lying out to be helpful and an important part of life, but never thought that it would mock and ridicule Christianity in such unabashed transparency. There are plenty of movies from Hollywood that send a covert message that religion is a bigoted, simple-minded farse, no doubt. But this one was completely in-your-face, nothing-to-hide, “religion is nothing but a lie to make people feel better,” and it was sickening. We watched the whole thing, hoping for some resolution or redemption in the end that would somehow discount the irreverence, maybe coming around in the end, but there was none. We were both left with a sick, sad feeling that wouldn’t normally follow a comedy. And it was funny… the parts that weren’t openly blasphemous. Gervais is a very funny actor, and Jennifer Garner is so cute, and that just makes it all worse. Lest you think I’m being overly conservative, I’ll explain what, exactly, was so horrible.
The whole premise of the movie is that lying serves a purpose, and is essential to a society with any happiness, excitement, and compassion. The world in the movie is just like our current one, in present-day, except that everything is true. The people have no ability to lie, so there is no fiction, in books, plays, advertising, anything. Movies are just readers retelling history, which is all completely accurate. Not only do they tell the truth, they tell everything they are thinking (which is really a totally different thing than just telling the truth, because they say everything that pops into their heads at any moment), including very hurtful things, like how much of a loser you are, or that they hate you, or that you’re ugly. The main character needs to make a withdrawal of everything in his account, but the bank’s computers are down, so he tells the teller he has $800 in his account, which is just enough to keep him from getting evicted. Nobody has ever considered the possibility of telling a lie, and the word isn’t even in their vocabulary. The teller hands him the money and when the system comes back up and says he has only $300, she apologizes to him for the error in the system. Nobody ever finds out, his problems are solved, and he begins lying to make people’s lives better. Or, so he thinks. So, as his mother lay dying in the hospital, scared of ‘an eternity of nothingness,’ he tells her that she is going to a beautiful place where there is nothing but happiness, all the people she loves will be there, and everyone gets a mansion, and she dies happy. Others in the hospital hear him, and since everything is true in this world, he soon has the whole world waiting to hear these ‘things’ he knows that will change everything for them. In a pinch, he tells them that there is a ‘man in the sky’ that controls everything, is responsible for all the good and bad things in the world, and if they are good, they can go to the good place. There is a three-strike rule, so they have three opportunities to do ‘bad’ things, like murder, or anything that hurts someone else on purpose (lying is not one of the bad things), and if they go over, they go to the ‘bad place.’ While he’s telling them these things, some of the people yell out blasphemous things, like “@!%& the man in the sky” and “let’s get rid of that $@#^%*.” It was horrible. We read the pluggedin review AFTER the movie, and found out that Gervais is an atheist, which explains a lot, but I’m still amazed that this movie could have found it’s way into my house without any hint of it’s atrocities from the description on the box. Smooth marketing. It’s also rated PG-13, but I would argue that it needs an R for language and sexual references. So, that’s it. That’s my very long-winded review.
Craig is outside pouring a sidewalk, the boys are waiting on me to help them collect rocks and get out the clay, while bringing in worms to show me, and we’re all hungry, so my ‘book’ must come to an end. Hoping for a better movie tonight…
If there are errors, please forgive them, because Craig says blog time is up NOW. :)
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