Karin Kaufman's Blog, page 7

Guest Blogger Amy Maddox

[image error] I'm happy to welcome my friend Amy Maddox as guest blogger today. Amy is a talented writer who is working on her first novel while raising a husband and three children. You can read more of Amy's thoughts—and see photos of her artwork—on her own blog, Something Deep and Witty . Without further ado, here's Amy.For the record, writing is art.
Of course, a lot of other things are also art: music, photography, painting, movies, sewing, gardening, cooking, crafts. The list goes on and on. And when I'm in the middle of making a lampshade (more on this later), it's easy for me to understand that I am creating art. After all, I have glue and scissors. Aren't glue and scissors prerequisite tools for art?
But writing? When I'm in the middle of it, I forget that it's art. I read other people's writing and can see the connection clearly. But when I'm doing it, I doubt. I struggle to find the words. I type, I delete, I stare into space. But just so we're all clear, writing—even your writing, even mine—is art.

But back to the lampshade. I recently made one for my office. It was a long, sometimes tedious project, but I am very proud of the results. I'm proud of how nice the shade looks, for the money I saved, for the incredible blessing of having an office to decorate after months of unemployment. But I'm also proud of the expression of myself that is in the shade. In the process of reflecting on the project, I found myself wondering if I love the lampshade.

I don't actually love the lampshade. It is, after all, an inanimate object with no soul. But there is also something of the eternal in this lampshade because I made it. There is something of the eternal God in me, both because I am created in his image and because he has redeemed my brokenness, and so because of the great care and time I put in making the lampshade, and because it is an expression of the art that is in me—art that is ultimately from God—there is something good and eternal in this shade, this art I have created. And so I guess it's more accurate to say that I love God, but part of my love for God is reflected in the lampshade. He and I created it together. His expression of beauty and art, and more, his patience and care and grace, are all built into this silly little shade. So if I say I love the lampshade, really what I'm saying is that I love the art that God has created in my life.

I feel much the same way about writing—the writing that is, after all, art. In the same ways I used fabric and glue and thread to create art for my office, I use pen and paper (or, more likely, keyboard and screen) to create art. The lampshade is so much more than the sum of its parts, and so writing is so much more than just the words on the page. It is passion, aspiration, faith, doubt—the sum of the human experience can be expressed and understood in writing just as it is expressed in other types of art.

And ultimately, art is good and speaks to our souls because it expresses something of the eternal. This is the power of writing, of singing, of things we create that words cannot express. We are made in his image, all of us, and something of Elohim, the Creator God, lingers in us. But we who are redeemed—and whose art is redeemed—have a special privilege, a special responsibility. As God created, so we create. As he penetrates the soul with the word, so can our words be used by him. Writing is an act of faith-ing, of speaking, of yielding, of wielding. Our art can show life and light to the world.

And so, God—whether we actually use his name or not—uses art as a revolutionary force. A friend of mine recently said on her blog, "The heart can be a wall. But if you put hinges on a wall, it becomes a door. And culture [or art] is the hinge. What a revelation to me, the culture-lover! No wonder I am so in love with culture–it has opened up my heart to God."

When I was young, I enjoyed the hymn "How Great Thou Art." The words stirred my young soul, and my mind gave image to the timeless words:

O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder,Consider all the worlds Thy Hands have made;I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,Thy power throughout the universe displayed.Then sings my soul, My Savior God, to Thee,How great Thou art, How great Thou art . . .
The problem was, I didn't understand archaic English at that age. When I sang "How great Thou art," I thought we were telling God how great his art was. Look at the worlds he'd made! Look at the stars! Hear the thunder! That's some impressive artwork! It wasn't until later that the truth hit me like the aforementioned thunder. "How great Thou art" really meant "How great you are!" I felt so silly and childish.
But, oh, isn't it the deepest truths that sometimes come from little children? In the intervening years, I've returned to that original understanding and come to appreciate it, and God, and my own creativity, in new ways. And so when I sing, however infrequently, that old hymn, I choose to think, How great your art is, God.
And how great our art can be, too.
For more on creating art with our words and our lives, see Emily Freeman's blog, Chatting at the Sky. She has been writing about art all this year.
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A Christmas Card in April

[image error] I like to take my two dogs for a walk in the cemetery near my house. If I get there early enough, I can let them run off leash for a while, and they love that. A month ago, while Sophie and Cooper were chasing squirrels and leaping over headstones, I found a creased and red-stained Christmas card in the grass. There were no headstones in the immediate area, no indication of where the card had come from. I opened it. The words inside were heartbreaking: "Merry Christmas in heaven. I'll love you forever. I miss you so much." It was addressed to a man and signed by a woman (I'll call her Margaret).

About thirty feet from the card, I found an envelope, also stained red. The front of the envelope read "To My Dear Husband." I imagine the stain came from a Christmas wreath with a red bow—such wreaths were everywhere in the cemetery, even in early April. Snow and rain had leached color from the bow onto the card. Someone had torn open the envelope, removed the card, and tossed them both to the wind. And for some reason I found them. I've been praying for Margaret ever since.

So why did I find the card? If you had asked me ten years ago, I would have said it was coincidence. Forget the fact that if I had arrived in the cemetery just one minute later, the wind, which was wild that day, would have blown the card far from the path I always walked. No, like any sensible twenty-first-century woman, I would have invoked coincidence.

But ten years have passed, and I've learned something: To believe in coincidence is to deny God's infinite creativity. Coincidence is the product of a withered imagination. It reduces God to something more manageable in our minds.

Imagine a God who, on a windy day in April, would send a tattered Christmas card blowing my way. Who would allow one of His children the privilege of praying for another of His children and thereby have her take part in the Great Dance. Who would bless my simple walk in the cemetery. It boggles the mind, doesn't it?

Still, some people prefer chance to a wily, artistic God. There's safety in coincidence. For one thing, coincidence absolves us of responsibility. If coincidence sent the card my way, there's no reason I should pray for Margaret. For another, coincidence turns God into a cosmic couch potato with little interest in His creation and no stake in how events play out. We hardly need bother with a God like that. He has no claim on us—and sometimes that's just the way we like it.

Was God surprised that I took the card as a sign to pray for Margaret? How could he be? Did Margaret need prayer? Yes, I think so. And knowing how I think, the God who controls the wind sent the card my way. Only the unimaginative would call that coincidence.

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Cloud of Witnesses

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Hebrews 12:1

Those who make up this biblical cloud of witnesses—Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Rahab—are impressive figures, but most of the time, to me at least, they seem distant and untouchable. Almost not real. And because of that, they're not quite the examples they're meant to be.

But I have my own cloud of witnesses. I'll bet you do too. Here are a few of the people who inhabit mine:

C.S. Lewis. Novelist, scholar of medieval and Renaissance literature, and Christian apologist (1898–1963). How many people can trace their conversion, at least in part, to a C.S. Lewis book or essay? Millions, I'm sure, including millions of children who learned to love the lion Aslan before they knew who Jesus was.

[image error] Thérèse of Lisieux. French Carmelite nun (1873–1897). Although Thérèse wanted to remain unknown, she also aspired to greatness—in God's sight. Being "small" in her own eyes, her path to greatness was her "little way" of small (but costly) sacrifices. Her autobiography Story of a Soul, as it was later titled, written at the request of the prioress of Lisieux and published a year after her death, is one of the most moving and thought-provoking works in Christian literature.

Rich Mullins. Songwriter, singer, musician, and author (1955–1997). In the 1970s Rich Mullins was a youth pastor and music director at his Kentucky church. In the early 1980s he moved to Nashville and started a successful career in Christian music. And in the late 1980s he gave it all up. He went back to school, got a degree in music education, and moved to New Mexico to teach music to kids on the Navajo reservation. Rich probably earned millions of dollars in his lifetime, but he insisted on being paid each year no more than what the average salary in the U.S. was. He gave the rest to charity.

[image error] Keith Green. Songwriter, singer, and musician (1953–1982). Keith Green is the first contemporary Christian music artist I remember hearing, though I have to admit I'm not that fond of his music now. (It's, well, very 1970s CCM.) It's his life that interests me. Before he became a Christian, he delved into Eastern mysticism and drugs, fighting Jesus all the way. After he became a Christian, he opened his house to homeless kids and prostitutes. When he was released from his last record contract in 1979, he never again charged money for his albums or concerts. People gave only what they could, and the profits went to Keith's Last Days Ministries. When I read articles and books about Keith, the same word keeps popping up: "radical."

Corrie ten Boom. Dutch Holocaust survivor and author (1892–1983). Ten Boom was arrested, along with her entire family, for helping to hide Jews and resistance fighters from the Nazis. She was imprisoned at Ravensbrück concentration camp. Her father and sister died in the camps. Corrie survived and went on to write her memoir, The Hiding Place, among other works. After forty years, The Hiding Place is still in print.

What about you? Who is in your cloud of witnesses?


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Howls of Derisive Laughter


[image error] The "Laughing Angel" at Reims Cathedral.
Photo by Ad Meskens. I recently saw a video of a speech Christian musician Rich Mullins gave in 1986 to a Christian youth organization in which he said he'd given up watching Monty Python movies. "This was a hard one for me," he explained. "Because I love Monty Python movies, and I had to stop watching them, because I realized that they laugh at life and they scoff at life."

Here was a guy who dove into living, who railed against Christians who try to construct neat little lives insulated and isolated from the rest of the world. Give up Monty Python? That harmless comedy troupe? Why not talk about giving up smoking, drugs, Tarot cards?

Maybe because laughing and scoffing at life—cynicism, to put it in a word—devalues life in a way that Tarot cards and a host of other no-no's can't. Cynicism refuses to treat God and life as good and precious. It views human beings as self-serving hypocrites. It's too clever to fall for the "lie" that there is a God in heaven and meaning to life.

The cynic avoids natural sentiment because it makes him vulnerable. The Christian risks playing the fool. The cynic sees in Mother Teresa's struggles with faith a "gotcha" moment—score one for atheism. The Christian sees a woman who persevered in serving God despite her doubts—the very definition of faith.

What makes cynicism so dangerous is that it's too easy to be cynical in our culture. Beyond easy: you're rewarded for it. Cynicism is a mark of intelligence, of a willingness to face the world as it is. It's funny. It's the robust, grown-up way to look at things.

But cynicism is none of those things. It's gutless. It dislikes and distrusts beauty. It elevates ugliness simply because it is ugliness. It stands apart from the "unwashed masses," commenting from on high. It's passivity, not action. It's the lousy abstract painting that any monkey with a brush can paint (and then call art).

It's easy to mock life, to let loose with—as the Pythons say in one of their more famous sketches—"howls of derisive laughter." All you have to do is cave into the culture. Let your thoughts fall into and roll down that old bowling-alley gutter. It takes effort to keep the ball out of that gutter and treat life as precious.

And I think that's where giving up Monty Python comes in. We're told to keep our minds on what is true, noble, just, and lovely (Phil. 4:8), and while that doesn't mean we should spend our lives skipping through meadows and sipping drops of dew from flower petals, it does mean, I think, that we shouldn't deliberately fill our minds with things that crowd out the true and noble.

The strange thing is, when I gave up Monty Python—among many other things, since I had such a taste for snarky humor—I found I developed a different perspective on life. I was no longer "feeding the beast," so to speak, and a world of real, warm humor opened up to me. And Monty Python? They're just not that funny anymore.


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A Little Thing

[image error] Last week I was up and out of the house early to drop a couple pieces of mail in the mailbox a few blocks from my house. I was looking ahead to all I had to do that day—not much of it pleasant—and as a result I was already in a gloomy mood. I was steeling myself for the day.

I parked the car and walked to the mailbox, and as I dropped the mail through the slot, I heard a cheery "Good morning!" I turned—on the off chance this happy voice was addressing me—and saw a man, maybe in his late sixties, heading for the same mailbox. Mail in hand, arms swinging, he smiled broadly at me. I replied with my own "Good morning!" and headed back to my car. Grinning.

We didn't have a conversation at the mailbox, nothing more than a smile and a "Good morning" passed between us. But that man made my morning. And he got me thinking. Maybe if we realized that one smile or a couple of kind words could make such a difference in someone's day, we'd be more willing to sprinkle those smiles and words around.

There are times when we feel we have nothing to offer. We're drained ourselves and don't have a drop to spare, or maybe we're just in the kind of mood I was that morning and don't see why we should spare a drop. I wonder what kind of day that man was facing. It might not have been any better than mine. It might have been worse.

It was such a little thing, but here I am, days later, thinking and writing about it.

Christians Continue to Face Persecution


[image error] Shahbaz Bhatti, Pakistan's only Christiancabinet member, was assassinated onMarch 2, 2011, for opposing Pakistan'sblasphemy law, which is often usedagainst Christians. After reading about mob attacks on Christians in Egypt this month—largely ignored by the media—I thought I'd research the current state of Christian persecution in Africa, India, and the Far East. What follows is a tiny sample of the persecution Christians in these parts of the world have faced in the past three months.
On March 4, in the village of Soul, south of Cairo, a local imam issued a call to "kill all the Christians." The imam said Christians had no right to live in the village. Several hours after his call, a mob attacked the local church. They brought down its walls with sledgehammers and set fire to it, nearly killing the parish priest (some reports have it that the priest and three deacons were later killed).On March 5, also in the village of Soul, a mob of almost four thousand Muslim extremists attacked Coptic homes, setting fire to them. (There are an estimated twelve thousand Christians in Sol.) The mob prevented fire brigades from extinguishing the fires.I've written about Yang Caizhen before. She was arrested in November 2009, along with other church leaders, for holding a prayer rally the day after four hundred military police raided the church she and her husband pastor in Linfen, China. Last month, for the second time since her arrest, she was admitted to a hospital. This time her condition appears to be very serious.Pastor Vijay Purusu of Bethel Church in India's Orissa state says that Hindu extremists' persecution of Christians in the area "has become a daily occurrence." There have been at least fifteen serious attacks on Christians between December 2010 and February 2011, including an assault on Pastor Mark Markani, who was beaten in his home by a group of thirty-five Hindu extremists, and an attack on Christmas Day in which some two hundred Hindus beat worshipers in a church and destroyed ten houses belong to Christians.In February, Pastor Hari Shankar Ninama was stripped and beaten by Hindu extremists while he was praying in a home in Ambarunda for the recovery of an eight-year-old boy suffering from an illness. He'd been asked to pray by the boy's mother.For the ninth year in a row, North Korea is at the top of Open Doors' World Watch List, an annual list that ranks countries by the severity of their persecution of Christians. In North Korea, Christians face torture, life in a labor camp, or execution—simply for being a Christian. Out of a population of twenty-three million, there are an estimated four hundred thousand Christians in North Korea, fifty thousand of them in labor camps.If you want more information on the persecution of Christians, visit Persecution.org, Voice of the Martyrs, Open Doors, ChinaAid, and Help Linfen. All of these websites offer ways for you to write or email Christian prisoners.

Why I Love Christian Fiction

There's an interesting scene in the 1992 movie A Stranger Among Us, the story of Emily Eden, a tough New York City cop who briefly lives under cover in a community Hasidic Jews in order to solve the disappearance of a member of that community.

In this scene, Emily (Melanie Griffith) is introduced to the community's rebbe (Yiddish for "rabbi"). Rather than have the sense to meet the rebbe wearing modest clothing, Emily wears what she's used to: a short, tight skirt. Naturally, when she sits down to talk with the rebbe, her skirt rides up her thighs. In response, the rebbe's daughter, Leah (Mia Sara), gently and without reproach drapes a blanket across Emily's lap.

What I love about this scene, and what makes it remarkable, is that even though it occurs early in the movie, by the time the audience sees it, the tables have already been turned. It's Emily, the perfectly nice and normal cop, who's the outsider, not the "prudish" Leah. When Leah covers Emily's legs, it's not weird or intrusive—it's just plain common sense.

And this is what love about Christian fiction. There are no apologies for characters whose actions are guided by a profound relationship with God. There are no faintly embarrassed presentations of modesty, decency, or whispered prayers—because in their modesty and decency the characters are acting out of common sense.

Christian fiction is not about unreal worlds populated by unreal people, it's about the full reality of life, and that full reality includes millions of people who live their lives with God foremost in their thoughts. In secular fiction, just as in most movies, these people have to be explained. They're the outsiders, the strangers. Or the lunatics and villains.

Christian fiction turns the tables.

The Ebook Revolution

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Last month Amazon.com announced its fourth-quarter 2010 financial report, and for writers, myself included, who have decided to take the indie ebook plunge rather than go the traditional publishing route, it contains some exciting news.

First, Amazon is now selling more Kindle books than paperbacks. In 2010, for every 100 paperbacks Amazon sold, it sold 115 Kindle books. This statistic doesn't include free Kindle books, so the figure is actually higher.

Authors, especially indie authors, will frequently offer their ebooks for free, or at a greatly reduced price, for a limited period of time. Check Amazon's Kindle store and its Limited-Time Offers page for the latest, and if you're on Facebook and Twitter, watch for authors' announcements of free ebooks and ebook specials. You can also find free out-of-copyright books at the Kindle store, including classics like Pride and Prejudice and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

Second, Amazon sold "millions" of third-generation Kindles in the fourth quarter of 2010. That makes it the biggest selling product in Amazon's history, even bigger than the previous record-holder, J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I've got a first-generation Kindle, and I'm dying to get my hands on a Kindle 3.

Third, the U.S. Kindle store has more than 810,000 books, and that number is growing every day.

And fourth, Amazon has launched even more free Kindle apps, allowing ebooks to be read on devices other than the Kindle (including Android phones, iPhones, BlackBerries, and your PC or Mac).

Just a couple years ago the experts were saying that most people would never exchange an in-the-flesh book for an electronic one, but the Kindle (as well as the Nook and other e-readers) is proving them wrong. Publishing is undergoing a sea change. It's an exciting time to be a writer.