The Gratitude of a Photograph

Lindsay Crandall
Visual Art
Because my life is filled with ordinary moments, ordinary things are often the subjects of my photos. A table setting, the unmade bed, flowers in the garden, my little one scooting across the floor: these were the things that filled my life and comprised my days. This was the stuff my photography was made of. It was a challenge to find beauty in my daily life, but I searched continually. It multiplied my gratitude. I recorded my days and gave thanks.

Tell Me a Story

Jennifer Strange
Bookish, Creation Care, Truth
We learned after a few days how to keep moving and enjoy the scene at the same time, how to discern which pictures we needed to take and which we could do without, and how to tell stories from home while enjoying alien country. But why did we feel the need amid all that natural beauty to request personal anecdotes or stories about family members back home? Were we merely searching for distraction from blisters, muscle aches, and wheezing lungs? 

Restoration

Towles Kintz
Bookish, Visual Art, Vocation
Reading was an escape, but not an unhealthy one. It didn’t enable me to deny my grief or the strain our family was under. It didn’t distract me from my children or make me wish for another life.

In fact, the simple act of allowing myself the luxury of literature served to inspire my days with my children. I was a better thinker — more happy, more energized, and more full. Reading served as a wholly reparative act, something that offered renewal at a time when everything felt out of sorts.

The Liturgy of a Neighborhood

Jenni Simmons
Bookish, Place, Truth
The liturgy suits people like me and Johnny, and many in the congregation — the artful-minded, craving visuals and symbols. We walk in the door to dip our fingertips in cold, holy water; trace a cross from our forehead to our chest; light a candle cupped in red glass to symbolize prayers weighing heavy on our hearts. I take a wooden pew under the St. Catherine of Alexandria stained glass. There is a still, sweet reverence under the wooden nave which looks like an upturned ark, drying out from a tragic flood. As we do “the people’s work” in peaceful repetition — kneeling, bowing, crossing — we embed Scripture and worship into our souls and movements.

People Don’t Boo Nobodies

Russ Ramsey
Truth

Being booed is a recognition of ability and value. To whom much is given, much will be required.

And what is required? In baseball, only four things — hitting, throwing, running, and catching. That’s it. Pretty simple. But it is in the combinations of these four things and in the accuracy with which you do them where the problems are born. You must catch what someone else hits or throws. You must run faster than the opposition’s combination of a catch, a throw, and another catch. You must hit what is thrown, and most of the time it’s coming at you fast — sometimes at your head. Simple? Yes. Nerve-wracking? You bet.

Small Things

Barbara Lane
Feast, Hospitality, Music, Truth
Small things. Sweet tea and warm cookies. An Americano, fresh and local. Simple gifts with a profoundly Eucharistic quality. They are the work of another person’s hands; acts of attentiveness in the creation of a personal and communal experience. Simple gifts, but rich and nourishing.

On Becoming

Allison Gaskins
Creation Care, Truth
I’m wearing autumn on my heart this year. I empathize with the trees. I walk the neighborhood as I walk my life, looking for clues. I am uncertain. I notice the leaves that are still emerald, and others whose tips are already dipped in warm and bright colors. I witness a slow fade of vermilion and nod yes, me too. Change is coming, but what will the end resemble?

The Hopefulness of Beauty

Luci Shaw
Truth
The arrival of a new idea or image for a poem propels me into such a fervor that my body feels exalted along with my mind. So much is wrong with the world, but so much of it is right, particularly the parts that seem to have spilled directly from the Creator’s hand! What are the chances that when I was born I would turn out to be me, to have the astonishing chances and choices I’ve had? Beauty, in any form or color, makes me sing and have hope. Can I ever be thankful enough?

Recipe Box

Laura Lynn Brown
Feast
I had wanted a cast iron skillet for a while, partly because I’d tried several recipes lately calling for a heavy skillet, and partly out of an atavistic longing, perhaps to return to or recreate some home-and-hearth security from the past. I also wanted one for the ability to make a breakfast specialty of the cook I used to share a kitchen with, a puffed wonder of eggs, milk, and flour that our cookbook called a German pancake.

There and Back Again

Sarah Braud
Justice, Place
When we moved away from Franklin, I said we’d never be able to return to such a small town with its small thoughts, but that was before I was so tired. I still wrestle with feeling like I sold out. I still don't know exactly how to live out the Isaiah 55 call in a small-town context. It's not as clear. The real dramatic, tension-filled moments of triumph or defeat are not as visible. Here, the beauty and affluence shadow the brokenness.

Why I Read Young Adult Literature

Dyana Herron
Bookish
Wait — a book? All this — the tears, the sure-to-come-lecture from my mom, the imagined corpses — over a book? I was so relieved I laughed out loud.

But I shouldn’t have. Because in less than a week, I’d find myself up even later, again in my bedroom, having finished the book myself. And I’d be crying too, and I’d be holding the phone, though unable to bring myself to place a call, because I felt, as teenagers often do, interminably alone.

Making a Living

Jon Foreman
Music, Vocation

A good teacher is creative. A good computer programmer is creative. A good mom is creative. A good lawyer looks creatively beyond the contingencies of injustice and works to bring a more virtuous existence into being.

In fact, the argument could be made that a human being is most God-like when she is most creative, ingeniously crafting the true and the beautiful out of the confines of the present tense. Remixing tomorrow out of the raw materials of today. Re-appropriating a dream into reality.

Manna on the Stoop

Anna Broadway
Crafty, Creation Care, Feast
As I walked past the line of garbage cans that always posted sentry duty on Sunday nights, I scanned idly for any interesting abandonments — books or furniture whose owner had left them out for neighborhood salvagers to claim. I had learned in my last two years in New York that while the city might be stingy with space, its residents were a bit more laissez-faire with belongings they could no longer use. (In fact, I once heard a five-minute presentation on the best times of the month and neighborhoods to go looking for things.)
Fun Facts About Art House America

Fun Facts About Art House America

Charlie Peacock

. . . Sent co-founders Andi Ashworth and Charlie Peacock all over America for twenty years to speak on the core ideas behind an imaginative, creative life to Art House America advocates.

Heard U2 frontman Bono sing three verses of “They Will Know We Are Christians by Our Love” while sitting at the fireplace in 2002, after he encouraged a room full of artists to engage with the AIDS community and the extreme poverty emergency in Africa. . . .

A World Short on Masters

Russ Ramsey
Visual Art, Vocation
Rembrandt was no dummy. He knew he was a great artist, no question. But he also knew he wasn’t limitless. And one of his apparent limits was his inability to satisfy what people sometimes wanted him to be. This must have been very frustrating at times. Surely there must have been days when he would’ve loved more than anything else in the world to be for another person exactly who they wanted him to be.
Perseverance, Anxiety, and the Greatness of Small Things

Perseverance, Anxiety, and the Greatness of Small Things

Andi Ashworth
Bookish, Truth, Vocation

So, after twenty plus years of an open door, we declared a sabbatical.

It was the start of something good. In the press of always taking care of others, we hadn't been taking care of ourselves. Without extra people to feed, we could eat smaller and healthier meals. We also returned to something we love — ending many of our days with a vigorous walk in the trails of a nearby wooded park.

Daily Bread

Emily Bryan
Hospitality, Place, Vocation
We had to be honest or risk sitting in awkward silence over tea or the next meal, or, God forbid, be reduced to mere small talk while cleaning bathrooms together. Because of these interpersonal hurdles that could only be cleared with grace and mercy, I felt a quiet confidence growing in me, and my ability to listen and tend to the needs of others broke away from my need to have control or be independent. This, we found in the end, is the real bread and butter of communal life — forced honesty and a corporate desire to do more than merely share space and chores kept gossip at bay and challenged us to speak truth in love.

A Month of Autumn

Kierstin Casella
Truth
At home, I sifted through condolence cards and made half-hearted attempts to focus on good things. I wrote and I cooked; I brought flowers into the house. On seventy-degree days, I wandered around our Nashville neighborhood like someone’s lost pet, trying to convince my skin to absorb the beauty of my favorite season. I bought smooth white pumpkins and sugar-dusted loaves of banana bread, anything to bring my senses back to life. For weeks, all I could seem to see was the horrible beige of those hospital walls.

Art House Local: Searching for Wildflowers

Heather A. Goodman
Bookish, Hospitality, Truth

In essence, this was why we met that day in my living room: because beauty matters to God and because, as the body of Christ, we testify to one another that God sees us, that our work matters.

There was some venting, yes; there was philosophy; but above all, there was connection. In the sprawling Dallas metroplex lined with suburban brick homes, school zones, and shopping centers, visual artists, musicians, and writers assembled. We peeked into the crevices of our landscaped society and found wildflowers.

Brunch and Foolishness

Alissa Wilkinson
Feast, Hospitality

Nobody seems to know where the foolish word came from — a portmanteau of breakfast and lunch, obviously, but we don’t say lupper or dunch. Someone claims a reporter for the New York Morning Sun coined it in the early twentieth century as a way to describe the way a morning newspaper man ate: frenzied, I suppose, too busy to eat breakfast.

I gave up breakfast a long time ago, when I realized it just makes me hungry for lunch hours too early, but I think that portmanteau-inventing reporter and I, teaching college freshmen to wrangle words in the early mornings, are kindred souls.

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