Friday Five: Discovery

On today's RevGalBlogPals Friday Five, Dorcas shares a beautiful experience of taking her four year old granddaughter to the symphony and wondering if young Trinity would enjoy the experience.  An avid Mozart fan, (in Dorcas' words): "[Trinity] was hopping with excitement, but we gave her lots of coaching, and when we arrived she gazed about with wonder at the lovely venue, and when the orchestra began to tune up she sat up straight and gazed, enraptured, with her mouth literally open. It was pure delight to watch her enjoying brand-new sights, sounds and surroundings."  A discovery moment for both generations!

Here is a Friday Five of my own moments of insight, discovery or awareness from childhood and later:

"Do what Daddy says."  Recorded in the baby book of my sister who is 19 months younger than I am is this precocious advice to me, uttered when she was probably two and a half:  "Sharon, if you would just do what Daddy says, you wouldn't get spanked so much."  I tried.  I tried to learn the "behave" lesson.  I'm not there yet.  Hence the pic above.  My hope: Maybe I'm making history!

Love is Awareness.  A fifth grade writing assignment was to complete the phrase "Love is . . ." with one, and only one, word.  My conclusion:  Love is Awareness

I am not a feminist!  Another assigment, this time in a seminary theology class:  Choose a non-traditional theologian's book to read and compare/contrast with more traditional theology. For those of us who had no clue where to begin with the long list the prof had given us, she suggested choosing a theologian that we thought we would not like. That was easy; this native Texan stay-at-home mom chose a feminist theologian.  I was about one and a half pages into Rosemary Radford Reuther's Sexism and God Talk and, to my incredible shock, I found that she was she was speaking my language about God things.  She made sense.  I had not even realized how much "translation" work I had been doing in order to make the gospel message real in my life. 

Please understand me!  I began to understand myself much better when I was introduced to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator in seminary. I knew that people had different personalities, but I had never had the differences explained in categories that made sense. I began to see that there are many different ways that people approach life and process information, and that we need all kinds in order reflect God's image more authentically in community. Through further testing at the end of seminary, I discovered that I had learned to function a certain way (as an ESFJ) when I had to be "on" and in front of people.  When I am relaxed and safe and "off duty" or too tired to keep up the pretense, I go about life in a far different way (INFP).  Good to know!

Grandmother world.  Because we lived in the same city until I was 13, I was blessed to spend time with my grandmothers during my growing up years.  At their houses, I discovered the world of feeding chickens, gathering eggs, flower gardening, making jam, learning to sew, eating "ladies lunch" at the department store restaurant or at the lunch counter at the drugstore.  With them, I was someone I couldn't be anywhere else: a granddaughter.  And they got to be the grandmother.  Now I'm the grandmother to a grandson.  I wonder what we will discover with each other?