In Which She Muses about Imposter Syndrome...

Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi

 Unrelated sunset post for Facebook thumbnail

Tonight I took part in an online chat for an online artistic community that I kind of follow.  I had difficulties getting my computer to talk to Zoom for some reason and I was a couple of minutes late...and kind of quickly got asked to share about my current wins/struggles/ inspiration/ etc.  Didn't really have time to come up with something eloquent, so I just went with my gut and confessed to dealing with imposter syndrome...like, I am here hanging out with creatives to try and convince myself that I really am one.

Now, I do have some objective evidence that at least a few people appreciate my creativity, but I always kinda brush it off as 'yeah, well they're friends/ family so it doesn't really count' (Hi, Mom...).  A number of my closest friends/ family are NOT fans of my creative efforts, so that kinda cancels it out, right?  I mean, folks in the online community I was chatting with have artwork in shows, are published authors/ songwriters/ have actually gotten formal education in their area of talent and I'm...just out here winging it.  And often getting shot down.  Which makes me think, hey, maybe what I'm creating just really isn't that good.  I mean, it's a possibility, right?

But when I confessed to Imposter Syndrome tonight, the chat moderator offered his thoughts... remember, we are accepted in the beloved. It's not about how my art/ creativity compares to any one else, or even if it gets a big audience.  It may just hit one person and inspire them in some way, and ...that's worth it.

And suddenly I remembered a moment at a women's conference back in 2008...the very conference that gave me the impetus to start this blog, now that I think about it...at which Wellington Boone himself gave me a prophetic word, with the central theme that I was 'Accepted in the Beloved'.  I hadn't thought about that moment in a long, long time.

There are some challenges coming in the next couple of months...I'll talk about them when I have to...but it's good to remember that whether or not the end product gets published or performed or even recognized, it's still creativity, it's still my voice...and we all know from reading Dr Seuss that even the tiniest 'Yop' makes a difference, right?.

So...for anyone who happens to stumble on this post who may be struggling with creativity or whatever is in your heart, and you are starting to think that you don't measure up...just remember, if it's your way of sharing what God stirs in you, it's not fake or cheap or bad.  He hears; He sees; He smiles.  

Because you, too, are Accepted in the Beloved.  Whether you have any kind of audience or not.  

You are not an Imposter.  Just a different sort of The Real Thing.

Ten Years at Beer Lahai Roi

Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi

For some oddball reason I was reading old blog posts over the weekend and I had a bit of a revelation...ten years ago TODAY was the first Beer Lahai Roi post.

So I thought I needed to do some kind of commemorative post.

Some of those old posts are really lame.  I mean, really lame.

But some of them are good.  Like, I don't actually remember writing them so it's like reading someone else's  work.  And I get smacked upside the head, figuratively speaking, all over again with a revelation that I still haven't implemented.

Ten years...lotsa room to grow yet.

Just for grins...here's the first image I posted:

Which was from the first Bible study-ish post, on using a four color pen marking system.

Hard to believe it's been ten years.

Tell you what, if I get 10 comments on this post, I'll do a giveaway.  Cause, you know, I have to have enough to make drawing worthwhile. 

Dunno what that will be...maybe a book, maybe something else.  We'll see what strikes my fancy.

If you've been around with me from the beginning...or if you just found the blog recently...thanks so much for stopping by!

Ten years.  Wow.

#Celebrate2300

Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi


I looked and looked through online albums and actual books of pictures, trying to decide what the FIRST photo I took at our current (for another 9 days) church location.

As near as I can tell, the first photos I took were for the sewing blog in 2004, documenting the costuming for our inaugural production of  'The Gospel According to Scrooge':

We actually began attending church at The Rock Family Worship Center in spring of 2001.  The building they were meeting in then was a former Sheraton Inn...a very nice hotel in the early 80's, but it had been sold and split up and re-sold and...the previous occupant was Joe's House of Entertainment.  But the church was just renting the space, and in spring of 2003 the owner sold the building.

Through a series of amazing events, we ended up purchasing a building at 2300 Memorial Parkway that had housed a genetics company...but prior to that, it had been as shopping center that featured a Service Merchandise.

We actually have stuff in our house that was purchased from that Service Merchandise back in the 80's.

We moved into the 2300 Memorial Parkway in July of 2003, literally right before we had to be out of the previous location, squeezing ourselves into a small auditorium they had, with a stage that was probably no more than 8 feet deep.

Why did a genetics company have an auditorium?  Who knows?  We had three services a weekend there to get everyone in while they gutted a series of labs/clean rooms and converted them into the current sanctuary.

We got the Certificate of Occupation from the Fire Marshall for the sanctuary the day before our annual Women's conference.  The fumes from the carpet glue, which had been laid that week, were so strong that one of our speakers had a serious respiratory reaction and almost ended up in the hospital.   She did end up spending one of the sessions doing breathing treatments in her hotel room.
There's an amazing testimony from that...we stopped the service and had special prayer for her, and literally at that time something shifted and she found herself able to breathe.

The sanctuary seemed huge.  It seated about 1000 folks, had three cameras running and amazing lighting.  I remember walking in and having to remind myself that this was my church...not a special conference event somewhere.

And the church grew. 

We outgrew that huge space at least 3 times.  We converted large spaces into smaller offices, moved the main doors, added windows, refurbished and updated, cramming classrooms and offices wherever and however we could.

We launched satellite campuses to hold overflow.  We added services back...once more, we're doing three services a weekend to accommodate everyone.

So many memories.  So many adventures.  So many encounters. We did The Gospel According to Scrooge twice, we did several Bible-based costumed Easter productions.

We're being encouraged to post photos and memories, with the hashtag Celebrate 2300 to link them all together.

I commented that I could go through the photos in my Facebook Albums and hashtag Celebrate 2300 to about 2/3 of the pictures.  But I don't have pictures that really document the history of our sojourn there.

We've been in that building nearly 15 years.  I can't begin to list the significant moments, the wonderful people, the blessings.  I've been on staff since 2009; I can tell you that it ain't a perfect church.  But it is a church that loves God and loves people and is making a difference in our city.

We have one more Sunday set of services there...and we'll be boxing up stuff the rest of that Sunday.  The last moving trucks will pull up on 1/29 and 1/30 to haul the remaining goods to the 'new' building...a retired high school.  2300 has already been sold to another church...who has already started some renovations in the areas that we moved out of in December.

We'll stilll be holding three services a weekend in the theater to accommodate the folks while the gymnasium is converted into a sanctuary that will seat somewhere around 1,600.  It should be done late in the spring.

I need to take more pictures.  Someday we may want to review what it looked like back in 2018 when we moved in to the work in progress...

A Time to Breathe

 Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi

Sometimes...it's good to just take a break.

The Princess, the Flute Player and I headed back to the farm in Indiana for a few days...I had a little connection to make while I was there, but, mostly, we went to see family and soak up the quiet.

'Cause there's no quiet like a farm quiet.

Occasional cars on the state highway or the county road...or maybe a piece of farm equipment moving from one field to the other, the dog barking at deer crossing the field, the wind in the pine trees, the mourning doves and red-winged blackbirds.  A walk back to the 'crick', past the grain bins and the no-till beans peaking through last year's corn residue.


 



































Sunsets...

And, thanks to daylight savings time, the sunrise is late enough to catch it, too....









And, finally, a photo with the Indiana Master Farmer and his wife...my dad and mom.  Retired, but still hard-working.

It was a treat that I get too seldom...

Remembering...

Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi

There are some news images that, having seen them the day they happened, I cannot look at them again.

The  flaming towers of 9/11 is one image...the crazy Y of the Challenger demise is another.

It's been thirty years since 'Go for throttle up' has taken on such a chilling overtone.

I wasn't even watching the launch.  As I recall, it had been scrubbed and rescheduled more than once, and I'd lost track of when it was actually to launch.  And I had a newborn baby ...a fussy newborn baby...and I just wasn't paying much attention to the outside world.

But thirty years ago I had literally JUST managed to get her down for a morning nap and  was tiptoeing away from her crib when the phone rang.

It was one of my friends, and her question as soon as I picked up the phone was, 'What does [your husband] think?'

Of course, I had absolutely no idea why on earth she would ask me that.   She was surprised I didn't have the TV on.  'The space shuttle just blew up, ' she said.

I hung up the phone and turned on the TV and there, against that beautiful blue sky, was the image that would be shown over and over and over as folks tried to make sense of the tragedy....the one that I've hidden several times today on my facebook feed. 

My Sweet Babboo would spend the next two and a half years working on the SRB redesign team.  NASA hauled a small fleet of office trailers to Marshall Space Flight Center, which is on the local army base,  where the redesign team worked.   Back in the day,  when security wasn't such an issue,  with the contractor sticker on the car, I could pick up Chik-fil-A sandwiches and take our daughter out to the picnic area by the trailers and meet him for lunch.  That wouldn't be possible now. And sometimes he'll talk about someone he ran into somewhere and comment, 'He was in the trailers.'

But that day,  all my plans to accomplish stuff...I don't even remember what I was planning to do...during the precious nap time totally evaporated as I , along with the rest of the country, watched the replays over and over, trying to see something that might've caused the disaster.


The investigation did find the culprit, and the engineers came up with a new design to prevent the same failure from happening again.  We returned to space ...for a season...until the years caught up to the shuttles and  we mourned again, doubly, for that investigation found that the weaknesses could not be engineered away. Each subsequent launch was one more counting down to the end of the space shuttle program.  The remaining shuttles all went to museums.  The space shuttle Atlantis is displayed at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida; the Endeavour, at the California Science Center in Los Angeles; the Discovery, at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia; and the test shuttle, Enterprise, at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York.  Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston has one of the 747's that was modified to carry the shuttles.  Huntsville has the Pathfinder vehicle, which predated Enterprise and was used for testing transportation vehicles and assembly cranes.  Americans going to space do so on Russian rockets now.  The first test launch of the next generation space vehicle is still nearly three years away.

I'm aware this is a rather rambly post;  I don't have a nice little summation to draw from it.  Other than humans are fallible...we have failed before, we will fail again...but we can't let failure be the determiner of the future.    The only way to  truly fail is to give up and quit.

"Never never never never give up, '- Winston Churchill

Hello again!

Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi

Just a quick little blurb.  As I supposed you noticed, I've kinda suspended the New Beginnings study; I'm going to pick back up with that in January.  I'm going to do a little Advent Exploration that occurred to me, in honor of the season, and I'll be doing that on Sundays.

We are very, very slowly getting things moved around. There's just too much that needs doing and not enough hours in a day.  I am absolutely loving our new space, but there's still a lot of 'What are we going to do with this?' left in the rooms that we had to move everything in to.  We are not traveling for Christmas this year;  My Sweet Babboo doesn't have enough vacation days left, so we're going to get a fresh Christmas tree, which means we've got another week before we put it up.  But I"ve still got to get on with the internal moving party...

I've already put our little trees up in the new rooms...this is the first year to put up the vintage aluminum tree that found its way to my house a few years back.  It's glittering away in the sunroom and makes me smile every time I see it from the kitchen window. My grandmother had a similar...although I remember it being much nicer...tree.

Thought it would be fun to take the annual Christmas Card photo around it.  Ha ha and ha.  There are goofy people in the family who just didn't get the whole sentimental retro cool vibe.   Sigh.    We did eventually get a usable one...

I've laughed at the number of folks who've left comments on FB and the sewing blog along the lines of 'Love that tree!  My grandma had one!'

Makes me wonder if they only sold the trees to grandmas...lol...

So have a blessed Advent and I'll try to get by here a little more often now! :-)

Goin' Old Skool

Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi

For some strange reason, I had a hankerin' for some Old Skool Christian rock...and the likes of the Allies and Whiteheart are in the CD changer.

'Freedom' is probably one of my favorite discs ever.  Just sayin'.

Back in the day, I actually made an effort to do low-impact aerobics at the little church we were attending.  Sometimes I'd have 3 ladies come, sometimes it was just me and a friend.  Workin' up a sweat to pretty much the same playlist...on a cassette tape in  my boom box...every week.

Those songs will get IN your head when you do that.

To this day, I have a heard time not doing the knee-kick knee-kick routine to the title cut from that Freedom CD.


But as the songs have cycled through the disc changer, I've been hearing the lyrics again, fresh.

It's been a while.

break out of the dark land you live in
set the bridge on fire
cross over the deep troubled water
set the bridge on fire
stand up for the truth you believe in 
it is a higher power
strike back with the bright torch of freedom
set the bridge on fire....

('Set the Bridge on Fire' - Whiteheart, 'Freedom' - 1989)


And WAAAYYY before Elsa started throwing ice fractals around...

it's like after the storm
there's a ray of gold
that's how it feels 
to let it go
it's like heaven has come
and opened the gates of your soul
it's a journey back into innocence
you feel the touch of tenderness
your heart turns to gold
when you let it go
let it go

('Let It Go' - Whiteheart, 'Freedom' - 1989)

Yeah.  Sometimes it's good to go Old Skool.  Sometimes I need reminding.

The Power of Heirloom Seed

Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi

One of our associate pastors, Pastor Scott, brought the message on Memorial Day Sunday...which also happened to be Pentecost.    His word challenged me on several areas and he said a thing during the second service that was paradigm shifting for me...a paradigm that I needed shifting.

But, as a good message does, it also sparked  creative connections in my spirit.  He talked a little bit about heirloom seed at one point...and connections started firing off.

My grandmother, whose 110th birthday would also have been that Sunday, was a farm wife from the depression generation who never wasted ANYTHING.  Most of her food was produced on her farm.

Although as she grew older they discontinued the livestock (hogs, chickens, a milk cow), she maintained her magnificent vegetable gardens and flower beds up until the last year of her life.  There were vegetables in that garden that were planted from her own heirloom seed.  

I remember the seed from green beans and tomatoes; there may have been others.  In between services, I shared a story with Pastor Scott about Grandma's tomato seed...

In the late 60's and 70's, Grandma was an active participant in the Indiana State Fair.  One of the things she entered was a plate of her cherry tomatoes...raised from her own seed, they were very small, very red, perfectly round and quite tasty.  They won awards at the Fair.

The year after she died, My Sweet Babboo, the Princess (who was about a year and half old at the time) and I managed to get to Indiana during the State Fair, and we went with my folks.  At one point, Dad commented that we needed to go to the Horticulture Building to see if any of Grandma's tomatoes were there.  I couldn't understand how Grandma's tomatoes could be there, but he told us that every year that Grandma won prizes for her tomatoes, by the end of the fair there were no tomatoes left on her exhibit plate.  All of them...20 or so...had been pinched and carried off by other folks.  And, as the years went on, the number of other entries of very small, very round, very red cherry tomatoes steadily increased.  Sure enough, when we went by the exhibit, there were several plates of those very tomatoes.  Grandma's seed was still producing fruit, even though she was gone.

Y'see, that's what heirloom seed does.  It is not a hybrid; its DNA does not change from one generation to the next.  But seed must be saved from each generation; if all the produce from one generation is consumed, there will be none left to plant the next generation.

This requires diligent and intentional action;  saving seed doesn't happen unless a deliberate decision is made to collect and process the fruit for seed.  Then the seed has to be carefully stored until the next growing season...protected from moisture, rodents and insects, and calamity (such as a fire).  Such valuable seed is only planted in ground that has been carefully prepared to receive it;  it is never thrown helter-skelter out in the wild to see if it will take root and grow.

Now, consider all this in the light of Luke 8:11...The seed is the Word of God.

It does not change from one generation to the next.
It must be intentionally sown into each generation and  preserved for the next.
It continues to bring fruit generation after generation.

What am I doing in my own life to cultivate and preserve the heirloom seed?  How am I sowing that seed into the next generation?

Thoughts on the Day of Chocolate and Roses

(posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi)

..and, if the advertising is to be believed, iPads and flat screen TVs and if you're very, very special, maybe a new car.

Really.

I remember Valentine's day being special because it was a party after Christmas...something to look forward to after the tree was discarded and the lights packed away and the presents relegated to the bottomless Toy Box.

 I remember having a tiered red dress when I was about in 2nd grade...a hand me down from an older cousin...that I wanted to wear on Valentine's day.  But it was a lightweight, warm-weather dress and the chances of the weather being fit to wear such a thing in central Indiana in the middle of February were truly non-existent.

I thought if the groundhog could manage not to see his shadow, spring would be early and I could wear the pretty red dress for the Valentine's party at school. 

The groundhog let me down.  I think by the time it was warm enough to wear the dress, it was too little.

I remember making special receptacles  for the Valentine's exchange every year; always one of my favorite crafts.

And I remember the year that I noticed that I did not have as many Valentines in my decorated shoe box as a number of my classmates...when I went home and actually looked at the signatures on the back and found that a number of the names were missing.

'Singles Awareness Day' is what the Actor is fond of calling the day;  for me, in fourth and fifth grade, it was an unawareness day...the day I was relegated to second class citizen, not even worthy of a cheap paper smile.

Stuff like that stays with you a long, long time.

Fortunately, after 5th grade, the parties went away and there were no more opportunities for me to be left off that particular list.  Valentine's Day moved down...way down...the list of important days.  Oh, I had a couple of 'boyfriends' in Junior Hi and High school; I remember getting a small box of candy from the first one.  I kept the heart shaped box until the glue gave out and it fell apart, but I really don't remember specific celebrations for most of my coming of age years.

But I do remember a cold, blustery,  sleety Valentine's Day in 1979. A local florist called the house about 8 PM to get directions out to the farm and, to everyone's surprise, about half an hour later delivered a box containing a dozen long-stemmed roses from a certain blond engineering student at Purdue.  That was the first time anyone had ever given me flowers on Valentine's Day.  In years to come, I would tell him he could buy me flowers any day BUT Feb. 14, as the prices were jacked up beyond belief on that day, but in 1979 my little heart that had counted the noticeably short number of cards in my fifth grade box was filled in a way I had not experienced before.

I married him about a year and a half later.

There have lots of Valentine's days since then; some have left very fond memories.  But tonight will make the highlight film - I stopped at the grocery store and got a large sirloin steak for grilling, a fresh store-made salad and a bag of onion rings; I made a decadent chocolate dessert, and two of the four-plus-one kids managed to have dinner with us.  I doubt it will go on their 'best Valentine memories' list...but this is exactly what makes my heart smile now. 

And I think St. Valentine, who was killed for uniting Christians in holy matrimony against the decrees of the Roman government, would approve.

What hill?

Where? When? I don't remember any hill...

My Sweet Baboo gave me a t-shirt with that sentiment upon it...ten years ago.

Since I've had some comments from folks who also share July 11th as a birthday, I thought I'd post about finding out someone else has a birthday on that day...

Ten years ago I spent my 40th birthday off on an Adventure. I left the Rocket City early on July 6, and drove down through Birmingham, past Tuscaloosa, through Mississippi and Louisiana and a good bit into Texas to spend a week at Teen Mania Headquarters, doing a week's worth of various odd jobs as a summer missions volunteer while teen missionaries came in, trained, left for their missions, and another group returned, debriefed and headed home.

So I was in Texas on my birthday.

And I found out something. The founder of Teen Mania, Ron Luce, has the same birthday I do (I am two years older than he is). I don't know if what happened on the night of my birthday had anything to do with the fact that Mr. Luce was also celebrating a birthday, but there was a surprise concert by the Newsboys for the kids who had arrived that day from their various mission trips.

And I got to go and rock out with the rest of the folks on campus that day. It was a cool way to turn 40....

Three days later I climbed back in the car and made the return trip. I had an amazing week, but I was sure glad to get back home to my Sweet Baboo and hot water in my shower... ;)

The Blizzard of '78

I'm still rooting for a 3" snow down here in the Rocket City; Linda's Post from the snowy Hoosierland made me all homesick for just one good Indiana snow. And, she happened to mention the Blizzard of '78, so I dug out an album and found a couple of photos from that memorable event.


I was a freshman at the University of Evansville at the time, and I well remember the thunderstorm we had that turned into snow with thunder that eventually left about a foot of snow on Indiana's toe (More in the rest of the state...). At that time, Evansville didn't handle a bunch of snow much better than it would get handled here in North Alabama, and the town shut down for a week; we missed at least a couple of days of school. I was one of a bunch of folks from the IVCF group on campus who went out in front of Morton Hall (my dorm) and built a snow sculpture; it was supposed to mean 'One Way'. Wouldn't you know, sometime that night some joker tried to move the finger from the first to the second knuckle, which failed utterly and just left a fist on the lawn until it melted. But our intentions were good.

Of course, there's only a vague suggestion that the blurry shapes in this 31-year-old 110-instamatic photo are even actual humans, but I am the one in the second row on the left with the white hat.

The snow was still around when we went on spring break a couple of weeks later, and you can see that the fence between my folk's back yard and the pasture behind the house was totally overwhelmed.

Incidentally, not only did I photograph phenomenal snowfall on that 'spring break', I visited my BFF at Purdue (they were not on spring break) and she introduced me to a tall blond engineering student from Elkhart who later became my husband.

Altogether a pivotal event. ;)

I'd take a picture of the weather outside my house now, but it's really boring. Clear sunset and 42 degrees F....