Brit (while watching The BBC’s Nativity series, one of the Magi looked like Doc from Back to the Future):  He looks like ‘Doc.’

JM: stares blankly.

Brit: Don’t you think he looks like Doc?  He does!  Doesn’t he?

JM: stares again. Duck?

Brit: No, Doc!

JM: Dark?

Brit: No, DOC LIKE FROM BACK TO THE FUTURE!

JM: stares again.

Brit: D-O-C.  DOC!  DOC!

JM:  Ooooh!  Doc.  Yeah.  laughs uncontrollably.

I really hope our baby understands me.

Spelling word was WIDE:

We don’t call fat people fat, we call them wide. (He was trying to be PC)

Spelling word was HIGH:

When it was my dad’s birthday we took him out for a surprise.  He got very high… (I think she meant ‘excited’)

Spelling word was BIG:

My sisters are BIG because they ate a lot of pies.  (He was not trying to be PC)

Marking spelling sentences=best part of my week.

Did he REALLY write that???

I volunteered in this school while I was a Youth Director, so of course all of the children know me as ‘Brittney.’  Now that I’m on staff they have to call me, ‘Mrs. Strange’ and it has to be said, they are doing an abysmal job.  At Playtime they even shout, ‘Brit(t)ney Spears!!’ in a mocking voice as I pass.  The husband says I need to come up with some retort.  I suggested, ‘How about I SPEAR you in the head?’  He suggested that may be taking it a bit far.

So, how do you get 200+ children to stop calling you by, what they consider is, a very cool American name and get them to start calling you by a more formal (and substantially less cool)  name?   Telling them off everytime they do it would take up about half of my day.    Plus, maybe somewhere deep down I don’t to tell them off because it means I’ve finally got to resign myself to the fact that I AM called, ‘Mrs. Strange.’  Pretty unfortunate!  (Don’t worry, my husband TOTALLY understands.)

he's the miggity miggity miggity miggity mack daddy

A signed photo of herself and Philip.

Doesn’t she give something similar to people who have lived to 100?  I also heard that she’s sending cards to people who have celebrated their 60th wedding anniversaries, since she and Philip celebrated theirs in 2007.

Johnny and I have decided this is the thing about the Queen.  She is the Queen and quite frankly, everyone else is….well….everyone else.

President of America?  So what?

Leader of the free world?  Big deal.

Master of the Universe?  Psssh…whatever.

She’s the QUEEN and if you fall into the category of  ‘Not the Queen’ any interaction you have with her will be as follows:

‘Oh yes.  So you’re the President of America/Leader of the free world/Master of the universe.  Lovely.  Take this photo of me and run along now…’

No one touches her...she's the Queen

John-Mark has asked if he can blog on here too.  I love that!  A husband/wife blogging team.   I like to think it’s a little bit like we’re a crime-fighting duo, but not.  We don’t have any super powers, but we DO have the power of persuasion through our influential musings.   Anyhow, this is why I’ve changed the title of the blog, for those who may have noticed.

Onto what I’d like to talk about today.  Yesterday I was skimming a popular magazine website and saw an article about Stacy Ferguson ‘Fergie’ from the Black Eyed Peas.   It was a simple article about how she was starting a new footwear line and it briefly mentioned that she is now a brunette, not a blonde.  For whatever reason, this website decided to allow readers to comment on this article.  Let me first start by saying that I despise reader comments and let me tell you why…it’s usually the strongly opinionated people of the world who choose to comment and by ‘strongly opinionated’ what I actually mean is those who are either cruel or crazy or both.  Has anyone else noticed this?

Now I know that this website was inviting people to comment on what they thought of Fergie’s new look, but what people had to say was out of line.  No, it was so far past the line that they would have to ride a camel 3 days non-stop towards the line to get their first glimpse of where the line ACTUALLY was.  In a countless number of ‘oh so sophiscated’ ways, they were referring to her as a very unattractive woman.

Magazine readers criticised her for being too unattractive

The other thing I want to talk about before I get to the heart of what I’m trying to say here is that you may have noticed that in the current season of Desperate Housewives, there was a flash forward.  Five years had passed since the season before and the Housewives’ lives were different in a number of ways.  Lynette’s boys were grown and in trouble.  Susan’s marriage to Mike fell apart.  A secretive family situation backfired on Bree, and Gabby, played by Eva Longoria, had lost her looks after having two children.   Her children were also overweight and the writers used both Gabby’s fading looks and the children’s figures as fuel for ‘funny’ quips.  Now halfway through the season Gabby is back to her old, glamourous self–did we ever expect that they would allow Gabby to look a bit more like an average woman on Desperate Housewives long-term?   No way.

The 'Letting herself go' version of Gabby

Fergie and the fictional character Gabby have reminded me that something really disturbing is going on in the hearts of people, and unfortunately most of us are oblivious, most of the time.  You see, on some level we watch TV or follow celebrities to escape from our own reality and so when we see any celebrity who we feel has faired less than the score of 12 on a 1-10 scale of looks we react by criticising, complaining, and even becoming cruel.  My theory….we see ourselves in them.  We don’t like seeing imperfect skin, or a bit of a tummy, or less than perfect hair, or fill in the blank because it reminds us of what we don’t like about ourselves.  We don’t want to watch these unrealistic worlds on our tv’s and see a mirror turned back on us. It’s not just that we don’t like seeing our imperfections in celebrities and fictional characters, but it begins to transform our way of thinking.  We begin to value what we see on TV, rather than what is real, and we comment on Fergie, a real person, and become cruel (and they did) by picking apart her weight, her chin, and even the way she parts her hair.

The 'regular' version of Gabby

The more complex level to this whole scenario is not only that we watch TV to escape from what we don’t like about ourselves or our worlds, but that we use celebrities and fictional worlds as a compass for what our worlds SHOULD be.  How crazy is this?  We model our lives after fiction, after something that is MEANT to be an exaggerated, over-the-top characterization of the world and the people in it.  Because we model our lives after it it also becomes our gauge for judging and criticising ourselves and others.   It makes me wonder.  What will TV be like in 20 years?  When we catch up to what the fictional world of television now is, what will we have to model our lives after?  It scares me.

Should we not back up from this world of unreality??  We can enjoy a witty, funny TV show like Desperate Housewives, but let’s not use the world of celebrity, fictional characters, and fictional worlds as a milemarker for what we should look like or how our lives should be and let’s certainly not use this on those around us!  After all, it’s not real.

So the opportunity to show off his newly developed skill presented itself last week.  After a particulary muddy walk we locked him in the kitchen until he dried off a bit.  Our front door to our house is in the kitchen, so it’s very easy to pop him in there and the linoleum flooring makes for an easy clean-up.  Well, lo and behold!  Minutes later I heard a clunk against the door and turn around to see a brown blur bolting through the lounge.  I’m sure his little puppy heart was racing and for a split second as he was flying past I think I could see a glint of that joyous feeling of freedom in his eyes.

Days later, I came home from some work activities and went to let him out of his cage only to find it was empty, no sign of Ernie.  What I did see though didn’t thrill me.  Lying on our speckled carpet was a torn up shoe (thankfully, that JM never wears), hung laundry strewn across the top of the steps, scraps of paper, and socks…socks everywhere.   Yet still, no sign of Ernie.   John-Mark had worked from home that morning and left after I did so I wondered if Ernie had been in a particularly bad mood which led Johnny to dump our dear old dog on his dear old parents, but had a feeling that this wasn’t right.  I instead decide to call out his name, ‘Eeeeernie!  Where are ya, buddy?’  Our dog doesn’t bark or whine really so all I heard was a thumping noise, kind of like the sound of a bass drum.  I open the bathroom door to find he had locked himself in there.  He just looked up at me innocently wagging his tail, as it beat against our bathtub.  Obviously, I was praying that he hadn’t learned to open his cage, as well, and so far no more great escapes.

His booty after his cage escaping excursion

He’s sounding pretty bad to the bone, yeah?  Well today, I’m working on the computer again in the dining room and hear some weird noises coming from the lounge.  I’ve learned his ‘bad boy’ noises when he’s  terrorising shoes and cushions in the house and so I didn’t really check it out because it sounded like he was being good, just moving around loads.  I was right…

Hanging out on the window sill.

And I have to say…it seems like my LIFE is new beginnings.  From high school to uni, from uni to Liverpool, from Liverpool to Somerset, from the single life to the married life and now my latest new beginning will be life outside of paid Christian ministry.  That’s right, last Sunday morning I announced that I’ll be leaving my post here as Youth Director when my contract ends sometime between August and October.

And so it is, another new beginning, a step into the unknown.  But I guess that’s why I like the Semisonic lyric, it puts a positive spin on what can often be scary and overwhelming–new beginnings.  Being a Youth Director has been a GREAT new beginning and I have learned and continue to learn loads about myself, my heart, and my God.  If that’s what one new beginning brought–a new beginning where I felt out of my depth for months, I’m looking forward to a new beginning where I step out into the uncomfortable and unfamiliar again to see what I learn about myself, about the world around me, and most importantly about God’s heart.

It took me a minimum of 15 tries to even log on to this stinkin’ account (a forgotten username/password  was what led to the fall of my last blog, RIP BritMLen.blogspot.com)

Okay, this happened months ago, but I’ve wanted to blog about it ever since.  I help with a children’s event once a month for 7-11 year olds and each month we’ve been revisiting the theme ‘I am…’ based on Jesus’ 7 ‘I am…’ statements.

To kick it off the series one of the leaders asked the kids to describe themselves by finishing the sentence, ‘I am….’   The first child timidly raises their hand and slowly more hands start to pop up.  He calls on the first kid and she replies, ‘I am stupid.’  The next kid goes, ‘I am fat.’   This leads to a moment of realization for another youngster whose hand flies up and they shout, ‘I am chubby!’

I was on the floor actually rolling with laughter.  Seriously, other leaders were shooting me bewildered stares.  You see, to me, it was the perfect reflection of a culture that is SO self-deprecating.  In America, you would either have a bunch of big heads saying, ‘I am awesome at baseball.’  ‘I am very nice to my friends.’  ‘I am the smartest girl in my class,’ or you would have a silent class because they don’t want to sound like they’re bragging.

In England, the very first kid starts out with saying they’re stupid and it begins a wave of finding ways to showcase that British modesty that the country is oh so famous for!

I am chunky!

Anyway, there is something that is REALLY irking me.  I’m talking REALLY getting under my skin.   It’s controversial because it has to do with the very fabric and nature of the country from which I come.

It’s the American Dream.

Now don’t read this as a debate on the presidential election.  I assure you, it’s not.  It’s just my response to the types of conversations I’ve heard in the lead up to the election.

Here it is as I understand it: If all the American Dream means is work as hard as I can so I can  get a top-dollar education, own a really big house, luxury cars, the most fashionable designers brands, the showiest breed of dog, the 2nd holiday home near the ocean….and it goes on…

Then I don’t want anything to do with it.

It is making me really angry that people are SO convinced that their reward for working hard is to hoarde it for themselves, but if there is a man or woman or child who has had less opportunities, who has grown up in a neighborhood where it’s hard to get away from crime, who has had say 1 door where we have had 20, then in our eyes, they don’t deserve our “hard-earned money.”

This is callous.

And especially, ESPECIALLY if we love and follow Jesus–is this how he’d want us to use our money or think of others?   Well, you and I…we might be reading about different Jesus’, but the one I read about says care for the poor, feed the hungry, that loving our money more than we love God or others leads to evil, that our treasure is in heaven, that it’s not in everything we store up because we worked really hard to own it.  He’s the Jesus that challenges us with the question, “Who is YOUR neighbor?”

The guy next door…he’s your neighbor.  The guy down the street, he is your neighbor.  The guy that lives in the next subdivision, he is your neighbor.  And guess what?  The guy on the rough side of town, he is your neighbor.  The guy that lives on the streets, he is your neighbor.  The guy who has made a lot of mistakes, he is your neighbor.  And the guy who you think doesn’t deserve your help or hard-earned money, HE is your neighbor.

And Jesus says, “Love your neighbor, as yourself.”  So America, how are we doing with loving our neighbor?

Just to clarify, what I’m not saying is that we should sacrifice getting a decent education or a good job because others are down and out.  What I am saying is that we should be thinking about how we can responsibly use the great educational and financial opportunities we’ve been given to help others.  What I am saying is Love. Your. Neighbor.  I’ll say it again, and it may really get your goat, my friend, but your neighbor includes the people you don’t really want to help.

Even after living abroad for four years, I love being American.  I love our undying optimism and our patriotism.  I love that I was raised in a country that believes the best is possible.  Even so, maybe the American Dream needs to be redefined.  What if our country wasn’t defined by individuals who work really hard and so store up their money to buy a certain type of lifestyle for themselves, while others need medical treatment, clothes on their backs, and food in their stomachs.   What if the American dream was defined more by the fact that we, as a country, work hard so we can bless others?   Wouldn’t that be a country of which we’re all, rich and poor, proud to say that we are American?