Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

365 Project–Christmas Goose and Epiphany Turkey

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Christmas Goose

Epiphany Turkey
So, I continue my 365 Project, attempting to document my life with a picture or two a day.
Well, the first picture shows our Christmas goose, lovingly roasted and stuffed by Roy. 
We had turkey today. When he visited Tesco on Boxing Day, with our fitness conscious 12 year old, who oddly wanted to snap up discounted boxes of chocolates with her Christmas money, he found a happy collection of men and women of every race and colour standing by the turkeys, their carts filled with as many as 15 turkeys! Rumour had it that they were going to be marked down at 5.50 p.m. just before closing. So Roy and the girls chose this little turkey, and waited, till the lady arrived, and marked down each turkey to £1.90. 
We froze it, and had it today, just for fun, with stuffing, roast potatoes, giblet, onion and mushroom gravy, and roast butternut squash, which is incidentally, very good. Now I guess we are duty bound to do a second Boxing Day long walk tomorrow. 

365 Project: Failures are the Stepping Stones to Success, or You can only steer a moving car

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I can’t resist speed-reading even as I sort!!
As I wrote, I had a second-hand books business from May 2006 until July 2007,and then, with decreasing intensity, concurrently with my publishing business for another couple of years.
It gave me the idea for publishing, and lots of hands-on experience with books and selling, and lots of subliminal knowledge of book publishing successes and failures, and so it wasn’t entirely wasted, so though I thought so at the time.
Well, we live in a rambling old property in the country, which includes a writing cottage, our main house and a horse barn, which became a book barn. We’ve decided to convert it to a games room for the girls and their friends, and so I’ve decided to take time to sort through the books, keep the ones I can’t quite bring myself to part with yet, and get rid of the rest.
And here are some pictures of a closed chapter of my life. You were tiring, my first-born business, but you taught me much!
Farewell!

Ten Blessings from One of the Hardest and Most Difficult Periods of my Life

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A corner of my study. As you can see, I have kept too many books!!

I have enjoyed Ann Voskamp’s  One Thousand Gifts which examines how giving thanks in everything changes one’s perspective and mental state.

 Many events in our past which we view as tragedies or failures are, in fact, just seeds. They may look inert, unpromising and dead, but can still blossom into goodness.
I was thinking today about a stretch in my life which I viewed as wasted. In 2006, I both bought my dream house and put my daughters in an excellent private school, Oxford High School, neither of which I could afford. At all!
And so, without any business experience, I started a business to pay for this. Ouch!
I had always thought that if I ever needed money, I could sell second-hand books. And so, since no better idea presented itself, I did.
I believe that one should wait to hear from God before doing things. However, if we have not heard, and there are pressing needs, like money, then we need to make the best choice we can, considering our energy, interests, and resources.
* * *
I sold second-hand books on Amazon mainly, but also on ABE, eBay, etc. from May 2006, intensively until we started our publishing company in July 2007–and then with tapering intensity until our publishing company went into profit in late October 2008. There was some desultory listing and selling until April 2010 when I began blogging, and realised I was wasting my time on my used book business.
Wasting my time. Gosh, how resonant and dread-ful that phrase is for me.
* * *
I remember walking down St. Giles past Balliol and St. Johns as an undergraduate late one evening in Oxford (not a Christian then) and thinking, “The world is full of beautiful books to read, and things to learn. I will read and think and write all my life. I will only work if I need money, never from greed for money.”
I’ve pretty much kept that resolution. I’ve worked for brief periods teaching English and Creative Writing, but mostly have read, and dreamed, and thought… I married Roy, a professor, while in graduate school, and we happily lived on his salary…
Except for that four period when I sacrificed myself because my children needed an education, a period I usually view as wasted.
  * * *
We decided to clean out our garage and barn today of all the books. And believe it or not, there were 240 boxes of books.
As I sorted through them, I found lots of lovely books which I am keeping, lots to give to my friends, and my friends’ children.
And I realised that there was much to be thankful for in this experience which I then found so hard, so overwhelming, so exhausting, so sad-making and depressing, which made me lament because of  its sheer waste.
* * *
The slant blessings of this period:
 
1 After 14 exhausting months of second-hand book-selling, I founded a publishing company. God blessed it. After working part-time in our company for three years, Roy took early retirement from academia aged 47, and now works full time in our family business. We’ve hired help with the company beginning in autumn 2009, have 12 on our payroll now, and so I no longer need to work in business. Phew!!
However, without the hands-on experience with books, I may would not have thought of a publishing company. I might not known enough about business, marketing, customer service, or books (as a product rather than an experience) to make a success of it. The best way to run a business is to be familiar with every aspect of it, all its nuts and bolts.
We gained a subliminal sense of successful book covers through sorting through thousands of books, and also a subliminal sense of the physical tactile sensory aspects of books—paper thickness, paper colour, fonts, typeface, blank space. All this was useful in our self-taught publishing company
1 B) I gained a solid understanding of business from the process of starting a business with an outlay of £250 and converting it to one with a healthy turnover, and several part-time and full-time workers.
2) Zoe helped us with the sorting, stacking, packing when she was 11, 12, 13 until her 14th birthday, and so learned a lot of practical things, and developed character, concentration on boring tasks, perseverance in them and a work ethic.  This will be very useful in life in which character, more than education or intellect ultimately determines success. Also, the money she earned is proving useful at University.
3) I myself learned concentration, perseverance and stick-to-itiveness from the long hours of listing and repricing.
4) I learned a lot about books and authors I had never heard of from turning over thousands of books.
 4b) I developed new interests and areas of knowledge from the books I skim-read or kept for myself while sorting and listing.
 4c) I kept the best of the books which washed up in our house, and now have a super amazing library of art, poetry, gardening, children’s and Christian books
5) Having a book-selling business and dealing with customers were good for my character and knowledge of human nature.
I developed the ability to gauge character from emails—who was lying (about a not-received book; who was a hard-to-please misery, better not to mess with; who needed help from his psychiatrist, not me). I learnt to act with my head, not emotions, to consider the outcome I wanted to see before reacting with gut and emotions to a heated email. (Well, to some extent 🙂
6) At first, I had lots of fun buying books from charity stores and Hay-on-Wye and bulk eBay lots.
After the first few months, I tried the experiment of putting both girls through private school (about £2600 a month) without putting any money into the business. I picked up free lots of books on Freecycle, and from a local high production-value printer (overstocks and samples for a range of publishers) and unsold books from house-clearers, some which turned out to be very valuable. Living in Oxford, I soon acquired more books than I had time to list. So after the first four months, running the business cost me nothing, and was almost sheer profit. This fascinating experience in micro-finance has taught me to think outside the box, and has given me the experience to advise friends who interested in setting up their own businesses.
6 b) God provided. It was actually fun. Such as the time I offered a houseclearer in Oxford £40 for a large room stacked with books, about 5000 of them, and he accepted. He cleared houses after people died, many of them academics; he cared nothing for books.
Many of these were very valuable, indeed antiques; I have kept many of them.
We once got first picks of a dead poet’s house on Freecycle—thousands of valuable poetry and literature books for free, some of them 18th and 19th century first editions. (Guess who’s saved many of them?).
 The girls enjoyed the excitement of those emails promising us a car-load of free books.
7) My girls saw an example of positive and creative thinking, free enterprise and hard work. Perhaps, they will run creative businesses, on the side or full-time. Owning a small business, and knowing how to run one is a useful skill in a very expensive country like the UK.
8) My confidence greatly grew as I saw through an idea from fuzzy dream to successful reality, with, first, the second-hand books, and then the publishing.
I learned to “see” the whole process from dream to reality in my head. So much so that if I cannot “see” something, and how it will work, I will no longer embark on it.
I have gained confidence in practical thinking, in sensing whether an idea had the practical undergirdings which would make it work, or whether it wouldn’t work for now, because there were too many fuzzy nuts and bolts.
I now have more patience with the process of seeing something through from an idea to a successful project—for instance, with my still-growing blog.
9) I am far more sympathetic to other people’s financial struggles, and far more able to offer practical advice which might help them.
10) When the business became overwhelming, and my predominant prayer was, “Let my life be less hard,” I began to pray, seriously, desperately, and God gave me the idea for the publishing business. My difficulties taught me to pray. They increased my faith in prayer.
Though I don’t believe in steering a car unless you know where you going, sometimes desperation forces you to steer towards the best bet. I was encouraged by how God used the experience I gained through mistakes and errors!
So there you are, ten blessings at least from a very hard period of my life, which I then viewed as “wasted.”

365 Project : 68 Semi-precious Stones in Gorgeous Pietre Dure

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I am taking part in the 365 Project this year, and trying to post a picture a day. 
Here’s one of my favourite possessions, a beautiful chest made of inlaid semi-precious stones we bought one hot summer’s day in Florence, in a beautiful workshop in Ghirlandaio’s studio.
It’s edged in black Belgian marble and inlaid with sixty semiprecious stones in the Medici tradition of pietre dure, their names like a magical chant out of Revelation–malachite, rhodocrosyte, chalcedony, lapis lazuli, jasper, jade, onyx, moonstone, tiger eye, falcon eye.

Roy and I love it!

The Ragamuffin Gospel by Brennan Manning

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Brennan Manning
Guest post by Roy Mathias
(In case you were wondering, the late Rich Mullins’ group “ A Ragamuffin Band” is named after the book, and Mullins wrote the introduction. )
 “The Ragamuffin Gospel” is unusual in that it spends 174 pages giving example upon example, from the gospels and life,  of
  1. how great  God’s love for us is,
  2. the all sufficiency of Grace, and how little, if anything we need to do to  receive His grace, and
  3. how little we appreciate and appropriate  the above and how little we are changed by it
(No, don’t worry, I don’t have a 3 point sermon for you.)
Another reviewer dismissed the book with “Manning is a storyteller.  This book is full of hundreds of stories, but I cannot remember a single one.”   There is indeed no “new information”  in this book .     Its contribution is that it challenges us to accept God’s immense and love and be changed by it:  
“Since the day Jesus first appeared, we have developed vast theological systems, organised world-wide churches, filled libraries with brilliant Christological scholarship, engaged in earth shaking controversies, and embarked on crusades, reforms and renewals.  Yet there are few of us who make the mad exchange for everything for Christ  … only a minority of us who stagger about with the delirious joy of the man who found the buried treasure.”  Or in the words of Paul to the Galatians, “Where is all your joy?” 
Here are a few notes and quotes. 
Commensality.  In the Middle East in Jesus time, shared fellowship at a meal may well have involved physical contact as the diners reclined at a table, and was an act of friendship.    This meaning was not lost on the Pharisees who were outraged  and enraged that Jesus entertained sinners—he accepted them as friends.  God accepted as friends, those who were sinners in their own eyes and in the eyes of their peers.
The sinners who Jesus accepted were real sinners; their sin was not just the failure to say grace before dinner.  They were the outcasts of society – prostitutes  and tax collectors.  
Grace:  Manning says
“Grace means that in the middle of our struggles the referee blows the whistle.  We are declared the winners.  It is all over for huffing and puffing piety to earn God’s favour.  It’s the end of competitive pushing and shoving to get ahead of others in the game.  We may as well head to the showers and champagne.”
How little we need to do to receive grace:  1. The prodigal son had, at best, mixed motives in returning to a reception that far exceeded his expectations.  2.  Jesus did not ask the woman caught in adultery whether she intended to reform her ways before sending  her off without condemnation, but with an order to sin no more.  3. Zaccheus had only to climb a tree in order to see Jesus to be called by Him.
Jesus acceptance of sinners allows them to freely accept their sinful state and change (e.g. Zaccheus)
God is our Father.   Manning observes that just as  three year old’s picture is never unacceptable to her father,  the prayer, no matter how poor,  of a Christian, whom comes to God as Father, is always acceptable.  He has many other useful analogies.  There are several  ministries (including the highly theological PCA organisation Sonship, and several charismatic ministries Catch the Fire, Father’s House Trust,  Father’s Love) that promote this life changing  truth.    
In this book, written well before “The Passion of the Christ”, Manning meditates on the physical suffering of Jesus, and imagines the corresponding inner suffering.  This is a demonstration of how great God’s love is.  Manning tells of someone at a retreat whose personality was completely changed by meditating on “while we still sinners Christ died for us.”
Manning challenges us “We are in awe at the immensity of His power, and His absolute holiness, but we refuse to think how great His love is, despite demonstrations in the gospels and descriptions in the epistles.”   Think about it – how many sermons have you heard on the immensity of God’s love?  God’s extravagant love is rarely mentioned in a gospel presentation, where as God’s untouchable holiness and demand for moral perfection is generally a basic point.
Freedom from fear.   Fear of God, fear of the future, fear of others-what they may do or think.  Our anxiety can completely cloud our world view.  Manning gives the example of a high powered business woman,  suffering from stress and anxiety, who was prescribed tranquilizers.  Two weeks later the doctor asked her if she was feeling any better.  Her answer, “No, but everyone else seems a lot calmer.”
This is a rather sketchy review.  There are other books on the all sufficiency of grace.  However, they tend to explain the facts, perhaps with careful attention to detail,  but leave it at that.  “The Ragamuffin Gospel”  is an extended meditation on the immensity of God’s love and the truly radical nature of grace,  and an encouragement to respond. 
Brennan Manning concludes with
“Francis Schaeffer said ‘True spirituality consists in living moment to moment by the grace of Jesus Christ.’   This book lays no claim to originality ; it is simply a commentary on Schaeffer’s statement.  As C. S. Lewis is fond of saying: People need more to be reminded than to be  instructed.”
This book is such a reminder.  Definitely worth reading.  
Here is a link to Brennan Manning’s page.  He has written many other books, but he is best know for this one from 1990.

“I Said to the Man who Stood at the Gate of the Year” (From “The King’s Speech”)

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Image credit
I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year
‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’
And he replied,
‘Go into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God
That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way!’
                                               * * *
King George VI ended his famous 1939 Christmas message with these words. (Listen here.)
The words were written by an unknown poet called Minnie Haskell. She wasn’t credited.  “I read the quotation in a summary of the speech,” she told The Daily Telegraph the following day. “I thought the words sounded familiar and suddenly it dawned on me that they were out of my little book.”
She had published 3 books, none of which were well-known. Sadly, even the rest of this poem was not particularly good.
* * *
A lifetime of writing, and you are remembered for 4 lines.
Success or failure?
Success or failure?
* * *
Well, that is a good deal more than most people are remembered for 137 years after their birth.
But most writers, myself included, might consider that writing life to be a failure.
* * *
But, in fact, writers can’t choose. Writers can control their art and craft. They can network and hustle and get their work out there. But they cannot control whether their work touches people or not. They cannot control whether their work endures.
How much better then to leave such matters, to leave our entire writing lives, in the hands of God?
* * *
A writing life, three books, and all that survives are four lines, which no one knew you wrote:
Success or failure?
Failure, if you are the management, if you own your life.
* * *
But if you do not own your life?
If you have given yourself and your life and your talent into the hands of Christ, for him to shape as it pleases him.
That may sound grand, but, in fact, it is voluntarily acknowledging a fact.
Our lives and our careers and our work are in the hands of Christ, whether we preciously safeguard them, and polish them, and manoeuvre them, or fret about them.
We are in God’s hands, and everything comes from him, all our doing, gifting and having, and everything can be taken away by him. In an instant. In the twinkling of an eye.
* * *
So to come back to the question, if all that endured of a life is four lines, which no one knew you wrote: success or failure?
But that is not the question.
If you belong to Christ–success or failure, fame or obscurity, a million readers or none at all, your name unknown or a household word—that is his business.
You business is to ‘Go into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God
That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way!’
Your business is to dance with your Saviour, to do the best you can each day, and then deposit the day into his hands, with its successes and failures, the times you blew it, and the times you didn’t.
The fruitful days, and the wasted days. The fruitful years, and the “wasted” years.
The times you were mindful of Christ and loved and remembered him, and the times you failed to do so.
And then tomorrow is another day, and you will again dance with him, happily, giving thanks in everything.
* * *
So Jesus, I give you my writing, and my writing career, such as it is, or may be. I leave it our hands and I am not going to worry about it any more, but only pray. (Phil 4:6-8)
I put the clay of my talent, such as it is, into your hands, and leave you to shape it as it pleases you.
Lord Jesus,
I give you my life, my plans,
·      my health of body and mind and spirit,
·      my finances,
·      my relationships.
·       I am not going to worry about these things any more, but only pray.