Claxton

Today is the day! I have promised for about 2 weeks now to post pictures of my new dog. The wait is over. Here he is, Claxton.

Oil, Kids, and more kids

Today hasn't been much of an exciting day, its been busy but not very exciting. I started my day off by arguing with a woman at a car dealership about an oil change. I had to get the church van's oil changed. My secretary was supposed to arrange everything and I was supposed to take the van's. Well I show up and the lady hands me a bill for $30. I told her it was supposed to be charged to the church and that should have been arrange by the secretary who made the appointment. She storms off, comes back huffing and puffing, then hands me a receipt and no thank you or anything and says a bill will be sent.

Then it was off to the Melting Pot. I talked with a woman there for about an hour. I see her at the coffee shop a lot but she would never talk to me. She had plenty to say today. She is a foster parent and I asked her what it was like to have them and what a person has to do to have foster kids. Its all really sad. She has been a foster parent for 9 months and has already had 19 different children live at her house. For the most part they stay for a couple days or weeks and then return to their homes but right now she has 2 girls that have been living with her for four months.

The sad part is some of these kids if they come from a home where the parents use Meth show up at her doorstep with nothing on but a hospital gown. Due to the chemicals used to make meth the kids are not allowed to take anything with them when they leave their house, they have to go to the hospital to be sterilized and then dropped of at the foster parents house. This lady told me on several occasions she had to go to wal-mart at 10 o'clock at night with a kid wearing only a long t-shirt. That's it, no shoes, no underwear, no socks, just a big t-shirt. Then the foster parent has to pay out of their own pocket for the clothes the kid needs. Most of the time they do not get reimbused and if they do it takes around 3 months to receive a check from the government.

I though it would be cool if the church did a gift card drive to wal-mart, or k-mart, or target so that if a foster parent gets a call in the middle of the night and a kid shows up in a hospital gown they could call the church and receive a $25 or $50 gift card for clothes. I'm not sure how to get it done but I'll be talking to some people around here and maybe get something going.

I also ended up at the elementary school in town today. A man in my church who is a conservation officer did a presentation on hurricane relief work that he was a part of to all the 6th graders at the school. I had a wonderful conversation with a group of kids after the presentation about how a person would go about hunting an alligator. One kid concluded, "I'd just get my grandpa's shotgun and blow his head off!" as all the other kids cracked up laughing.

I'm pretty sure he was serious though.

Pictures of my dog will be up hopefully tomorrow, sorry for the delay.

My New Dog...

I got a dog last night, and to be honest I'm terrified!!! He is about the cutest dog I have ever seen but I have a feeling he might stress me out. The lady I got him from found him running through a field at her house took him in and then shipped him off to my house. He is a black lab mixed with something else (I'm not sure what that something else is) he is all black except all four of his paws are white, he has a white spot on his nose, and some white on his chest. He is only three months old, so he is still pretty small. His name is Claxton.

I named him Claxton because that is what I wanted to name my first born son but I decided that any respectable woman would never let me name her first born son Claxton...So I named my dog that instead. There is a bluegrass bar in Nashville that I used to go to occasionally and on the wall they had a pencil etching of Roy Acuff's head stone. It turns out that Roy's middle name was Claxton, I liked the name and had been in search of something to name after him since that day. If you didn't know Roy Acuff is a famous bluegrass fiddler. (After a quick google search I discovered that there is a town in Georgia named Claxton and also a law firm somewhere named Claxton & Claxton I bet they are cool guys).

I have been reading up on how to train a puppy and discovered that most people recommend buying a training crate to keep your puppy in at night so he doesn't run all over, and apparently its easier to house train him that way. So I went out and bought one last night and Claxton was pretty calm when I put him in it so I went to bed. I thought it was odd that he didn't make a noise all night. I had a nightmare that I didn't close his crate and he broke out, destroyed my house, went to the bath room everywhere and then came in my room to kill me. Well when I woke up I discovered that my nightmare turned out to be true (except for the killing and destruction part)! He broke out of his cage somehow and when I looked for him I found him sleeping on the couch.

I'll post a picture of him soon. I have a feeling that my mother and my brother are not going to be to happy about my new addition. Oh well! I'm also extremely concerned about having to take care of him for a long time. I told Jennifer that this is my test to see if I should ever have children. I hope I pass.

My thoughts on Christmas

I have a friend that has been encouraging me to start a blog so I decided today would be the day. This is all a little weird to me but I guess I'll get over it. To start things off I'll post some thoughts I wrote out last night as I was researching and reading on Christmas. I have been reading The Liberation of Christmas by Richard Horsley. You should all [which is probably only one of you] go out and buy this book tonight. So here are my thoughts...

Christmas was once something beautiful, something real, something connected to the core of what it is to be human, what it means to hope, what it means to wait. Christmas was once a holiday for the forsaken, the oppressed, the despised, the peasant. Recently Christmas has been made into an event for the rich. The day after thanksgiving has almost become its own holiday of debt and injustice. The original story of Christmas was one of hope, liberation, release from domination, and one of revolution. The poet Thomas John Carlisle wrote about the song of Mary found in Luke,

At our eternal peril
we choose to ignore
the thunder and the tenor
of her song,
its revolutionary beat.

Revolution. There is now hardly any revolution associated with Christmas. We have turned Christmas into a new type of hope and liberation. The hope and liberation is now only real for places such as Wal-Mart, Target, Sears, Starbucks and the rest. They are liberated from debt, low summer sales, and "the Red". I read recently that 40% of all retail sales in the United States take place between the day after Thanksgiving and December 25. Christmas is no longer a story about revolution and liberation it has become a holiday of oppression. We are oppressed by credit card bills, expensive gifts, unhappy boyfriends & girlfriends and spoiled children. What was once a beautiful story of liberation and hope we have turned into a time of domination and oppression. Make it beautiful again. What can you do this Christmas season to make the story of hope and liberation real?