Why I love Sesame Street

Ok, so I was a latchkey kid, in a pretty cold home, with borderline abusive punishment, and no exposure to the wide world around. Enter Sesame Street into my life. In fact, enter PBS in general. From Sesame Street I learned to count to ten in Spanish, learned what c-o-o-p-e-r-a-t-i-o-n was, saw hundreds of jobs, Captain Vegetable, and learned that I was valuable and lovable. Sometimes Mr. Rogers was literally the only adult in my life who said "It's YOU I like-not the clothes you wear, or the color of your hair, But YOU I like." He was just a phenomenal human being, as was the incredible Jim Henson. It may sound silly, but I was one of those kids who it really mattered to, changing who I thought I could be, what the possibilities were for my life.

On This American Life, a great radio program from NPR, this grown man talked about how when he and his brother were young, their mother, who was blind and often ill, had a hard time caring for them. They wrote a letter to Mr. Rogers telling him about it. He invited the boy's entire family to his beach house for this long vacation with his family. The boys had no dad, and Mr. Rogers played and horsed around with them, something they were missing so much. The man remembered all the puppets being there, from the land of make believe, but Mr. Rogers corrected him (they have a sweet phone call during the program), saying he never did keep the puppets at the beach house, he just acted out the voices.
The powerful part of this whole story is that Mr. Rogers didn't remember this family. You see, he did this all the time. He felt it was his ministry in the world, and he loved it and soaked up every second.

I stand humbled by his generosity and child like spirit. I watched him roller skate for the first time on his show in his seventies. That is a hero!

We watched the highlights of the early seasons of Sesame Street from Netflix, and one highlight stands out. A very young Jesse Jackson is standing in front of a huge crowd of children, doing this call and response. He would say, "I am somebody" and the children would call it back.
So repeat after me.
" I am somebody."
"I may be poor."
"I may be young."
I may be on welfare."
"But I am somebody."
"I am God's child."
I will close with this quote from Jim Henson, but be sure to scroll down and read the little Kermit poem as well.
"Life is meant to be fun, and joyous, and fulfilling. May each of yours be that-having each of you as a child of mine has certainly been one of the good things in my life. Know that I've always loved each of you with an eternal, bottomless love. A love that has nothing to do with each other, for I feel my love for each of you is total and all encompassing.
Please watch out for each other and love and forgive everybody. It's a good life, enjoy it."

What I Wish I Said

Yesterday my mouth opened before my brain could catch up when talking about how God has been working in my life over the last year and through my church, Vintage Fellowship. I just was never able to throw my whole self into being a Christian, at least not since some heady youth group days. What I feel at Vintage is what I hoped for all along my journey-true community. We hit our speed bumps, but I am not ridiculed for dancing to my own drum, or chastised for my political party, although honest, family style discussions and gentle debates are par for the course, I think.

Robb, one of my preachers and friends, said that the best definition of Shalom is restoration of the world "when everything is as it is supposed to be." or intended to be, or was in the beginning. I have tasted that in deep conversations about loss and the Holy Spirit-or singing with the worship team, or hearing my friends husband tell the whole church he wants to be a better husband, or watching my husband decide to plunge right in, to be baptized into a faith he had only experienced in a very narrow way-I like these glimpses.

So thanks for the love Vintage! I love you right back!

OK so HERE is my fave!

"Love doesen't just sit there like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new."
-Ursula K LeGuin

What is your definition?

LOVE IS....

"the principle of existence and its only end." "a trembling happiness"
-Benjamin Disraeli -Kahlil Gibran

"the emblem of eternity: it confounds all notion of time: effaces all memory of abeginning, all fear of an end."
-Madame de Stael

"the dawn of civility and grace."
-Ralph waldo Emerson

" to the moral nature what the sun is to the earth."
-Balzac
Love seems elusive - I know I feel it, but for me it seems so hard to define, so tied into my faith and the love Christ showed, but by no means do I think I have pegged it down. I see love in such broken people and it is like a brief ray of sun between the clouds-like all the possibilities for that person shine through in that microscopic moment. My greatest hope is love. I place all my bets with love, and very little with law, and rules. My reasoning is that, in the beginning, God loved us into existence. We write rules and try to find a way to empower ourselves with them-and that is good and in a way, how it should be. But if those rules are rooted in anything but love, they will fall. So, for me, law is fine, when practiced with love, but sure to miss the mark, when practiced with fear-of the unknown, the new, the pioneering territory.

What do y'all think?

What is your definition?