Author Archives: Diana Symons

I’ll Have A Slice of Self-Control Please

Self-control can change your life.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. How many times do we talk about love, joy, and peace? Kindness and goodness get thrown in for good measure, but how many times do we talk about self-control? Doesn’t sound that holy. How many times to you hear, ‘God really blessed me with self-control this week!’ Somehow we let that one slip past, like the other parts of scripture that convict us that we really don’t want to deal with.

Self-control would be a pretty good one to get a hold of. Our society is pretty messed up from domestic violence, gang violence, obesity, debt, abortion. Just think how self-control could change so much. Self-control demands limits to our own wants. We usually know what those limits are, we just choose to ignore them. It’s hard. We feel a rush when we indulge in something that’s just outside our control. It’s a mixture of pleasure and guilt. If our conscious is still sensitive, we’ll feel terrible afterward, but will still be helpless to avoid doing it again.

God has a gift to help with that. It’s free. It’s available. All you have to do is ask for it. Don’t think you don’t need it, you’re human. God knows who we are and provided everything we need to live blessed and happy lives. It’s our responsibility to ask and receive those gifts. He wants us to be proactive in this. How much of Him do you want? I going for the full banquet. All the fruit looks pretty good to me. I want more. There’s only so much I can take in today, so I’m going back for more tomorrow.

I want self-control in my life. About that writing project, will I dedicate my time better to finish it? Yeah, I need help. Will I stop before saying something hurtful and negative? Need help. Will self-control help me walk in kindness and consideration for others? Youbetcha. If there’s a blessing from heaven that’s available to me, I want it, as much as I can take in.

Related Post: Go Ahead, Pray For Patience

Read the first chapter of my book Crucible Heart

Love God With Everything You’ve Got

Leave a reply

With all our heart, soul, strength, and mind.

Love God with everything we’ve got.

Then one of the scribes . . . asked Him, “Which is the first commandment of all?” Jesus answered him, “The first of all the commandments is: ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord your God is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ ” (Mk 12:28)

I’ve been a Christian for years and years and years. I thought that meant that I loved God with all my heart, all my soul, all my mind and all my strength. I believed Him. I loved Him. But I was wrong.

Knowledge of and passion for are two different things. God showed me very clearly that I did not love Him totally, passionately. In fact, there was nothing in my life that I was passionate about. Nothing. There were things that I liked, even loved, but nothing that burned with passion inside me. I was all words, no fire.

I became ashamed of my faith because it was weak and valueless. I asked God to forgive me. I confessed the sin of my self-indulgence and arrogance. I shook off the platitudes of pretense and lay before Him stripped of my self-assurance. He gave me back a heart full of blessing and hope.

I tell Him everyday that I love Him with all my heart, all my soul, all my mind and all my strength. He can have all my dreams and hopes. There is nothing I love or want more than Him. He is my heart, my soul, my mind and my strength. And the more I love Him, the more He shows His love for me. I lose nothing and I gain all of heaven. And He still chooses to give me the desires of my heart. He makes my dreams come true.

The Play’s The Thing

Leave a reply

My future daughter-in-law is visiting while she and my son make wedding plans and try to find an apartment. In between their running to and from appointments, she finds time to do her Shakespeare homework for school. She showed me her five-pound Complete Shakespeare that she lugged out with her from Michigan and I pulled out my beat up five-pound copy to compare. Mine has definitely seen better days.

Makes me think back to my young days when I first saw Romeo and Juliet, the Zeffirelli version. I was twelve. My friends and I sat through multiple showings because we were trying to see Romeo’s butt when he got out of bed. I was scandalized that he would really be naked under those sheets. But unlike my friends, that movie ushered me into a lifelong love of Shakespeare. I bought the paperback version of Romeo and Juliet and quoted the balcony scene for weeks. After that, I read all the comedies and several of the histories. I’ve never been a big fan of the tragedies, with one exception. Hamlet is my all time favorite play, with Cyrano de Bergerac a close second, even if it’s not one of the Bard’s.

Hamlet is perfect. He’s the perfect character and the play is perfect in construction. When my son was in middle school, he wanted to enter a school talent contest. He was thinking of quoting a poem, but I upped the ante and pulled out Hamlet’s soliloquy. Once we worked our way through it so he understood what was going on, he tore it up on stage. He said it better than anyone I’ve heard, and yes that’s Mom talking, but also a true Hamlet fan talking. I’ll pass on discussing my own lame version of Ophelia that I played at a Shakespeare festival. The poor girl suffered enough.

There’s just something wonderful about the wit and language of these plays, and sonnets. I find a lot of performances insufferably cute or horribly pretentious. So much so that I’m afraid to spend the money to see them. Best really to sit quietly and read them while the scenes play out in your head, try as you might to think of someone else besides Gweneth Paltrow playing Portia or Helena.

Shakespeare was the Michelangelo of wordsmithing. I almost wish he had also written prose. His language sweeps from coarse to sublime effortlessly. If novels more popular in his time, he would have, no doubt, written classics, though I suppose that he had a real love for the stage. It’s just amazing that the greatness of his writing continues to carry on. Just goes to show that excellence lives long after mediocre is forgotten.

My Century Cup

Leave a reply

My grandmother was born a hundred years ago today. I know that because I vaguely remember her birthday, but really because I have her baby cup. It’s a very cool looking cup. The base of the cup has six point to it so it flares out at the bottom. The engraving says, “Evelyn March 11, 1911 From Uncle Charles”. From what I remember, Uncle Charles was the rich uncle from New York who send expensive gifts.

The tradition in our family was that when babies were born, a silver cup was given to them with their name engraved. I think in my generation, it was my grandparents who bought the cups. When I was about eleven or twelve, it dawned on me that my other siblings had baby cups, but I didn’t. When I brought it up, no one believed me. There was a lot of discussion for a while until they realized that somehow, the cup was forgotten when I was born.

That’s when my grandmother offered to give me hers. When she found it, it was dark and tarnished and there was a hole at the top where the handle had been broken. She polished it up and had it repaired. You can see the welding on the inside.

So I don’t have a baby cup with my name on it, but I have something better. We were very close to my grandparents as kids so it was tragic to see my grandmother slip into dementia in her old age. She loved her fancy holiday dinners and I was always paid fifty cents to polish the silver, sometimes I got a candy bar. Invariably, she would have me crack walnuts and stuff them in to dates and roll them in powdered sugar for special appetiser. And when I was a real pain while she was babysitting, I was sent outside to pick violets along the side of the house so she could have some peace and quite. I never felt like I could get away with anything at grandma’s house because I was convinced that her two Siamese cats, Ying and Yang, who always watched passively, would tattle on me.

It seems like such a long time ago. I’m happy and a little sad to remember my grandmother, born a hundred years ago today. Gone, but not forgotten.

I Hear Daffodils Outside

Leave a reply

I don’t need to look at the calendar to see that Spring has sprung around here. The daffodils announce that all by themselves. It’s not hard to see how early cultures looked around at the environment to understand how it all started. The wolf and snake have unique characteristics that fit into stories of creation, turtles that support the earth, etc.

I can easily think of the earth having an inner child that lives through a cycle. In the Spring, he jumps up to play and brings out all the flowers in his exuberance. In the Summer, he roams around in lazy pleasure through trees and meadows. In the Fall, he starts getting tired and sits to watch the fields turn yellow and the pumpkins ripen. In the Winter, he just can’t keep his eyes open any more and tucks in for a sleep, taking all the green and warm with him.

Our word for Spring comes from the Old English meaning to literally spring. Makes sense doesn’t it? We go from cold and leafless to sudden blossom in the blink of an eye. Spring leaps out as if the daffodils trumpet the change to wake up the earth child to come out and play.

But, of course, I understand that we live on a planet, perfectly sized and situated in our solar system to allow for an atmosphere and rotation that makes Spring happen. We have a protector planet called Jupiter that’s big enough to absorb errant collisions from blowing us apart. We have enough biodiversity to sustain life, despite our effort to progress. And I don’t think it’s all a happy coincidence of location and evolution. I’m absolutely firm in my belief that we have a God who happens to know a lot about physics and biology. I’ll take His intelligently designed Spring over randomness any day. It’s just so pretty.

The Ethical Traveler

2 Replies

So here’s my current project. In between plotting and character development for my novel, I’m writing grant proposals for Ethical Traveler, www.ethicaltraveler.org. It’s an interesting organization. The travel industry rakes in billions and billions of dollars from airlines, hotels, restaurants, and t-shirts. Most destination countries rely on all that money to support their economies. It’s unfortunate that many of those countries also have questionable practices in the areas of environmental protection, human rights, and social welfare. They kind of get away with doing what ever they want, and they still get tourists to give them money. What if the tourists stop coming?

Here’s where Ethical Traveler comes in. Every year they put out a Top 10 list of the World’s Best Ethical Destinations. This is a list of countries that are great to visit and have made serious improvement in the areas of environmental protection and human rights and social welfare. For example:

Palau, which declared its waters a dolphin, shark and whale sanctuary, rescinded support for Japanese “scientific” whaling, and called for an international moratorium on shark finning.
Costa Rica returned to the list, after falling off last year, due to increased efforts by recently elected president Laura Chinchilla to address human trafficking problems.
Quantifying social welfare improvements are not as straightforward, but issues such as access to safe drinking water, sustainable water management, responsible sanitation practices, and agricultural management are carefully noted.

Taking our tourism dollars to countries working hard to improve the quality of life for their people and the environment affirms their good work. That sends a message to countries that don’t. It’s a passive-agressive way of telling some countries we won’t support your sex trade or toxic waste dumping.

To be honest, I never thought about how my travel affected the countries I visit. Do the few dollars I spend on a meal really make that much difference? Added to the billions of other dollars spent on food and travel, yes, I guess it does. Will I think twice next time I plan to travel overseas? Youbetcha. But what if I have a reason to go to one of those countries that didn’t make the Top 10 list? I would still go. It’s when I have a choice in a destination that I would consider where I want my dollars to vote. Think about it. There’s a whole lot of world to see. Why not check out the places doing good?

Sprouting Idea Seeds For Fun and Profit!

Leave a reply

I’m reading a book I picked up at BEA a few years ago called The Mind of Your Story, discover what drives your fiction, by Lisa Lenard-Cook. She talks a lot about the left brain, right brain thing. Apparently, I get which one is which mixed up all the time, but I do get that one side leads in analytic thinking and the other in creativity.

She talks about taking individual story ideas and putting them together with other story ideas. Maybe you think about a hurricane hitting a small seacoast town. Later on you think about a baby that’s born without legs. And then you something makes you think about aliens landing to learn about our culture. You might put those three story seeds together and write about a woman giving birth during a hurricane and being rescued by compassionate aliens. Hmm, that might be fun to write!

One of her examples was about visiting some elderly friends who both had Alzheimer’s. She went on to describe how she put that story together with two other story seeds, but I was stuck on the two friends with Alzheimer’s. My grandmother had that so I remembered what it was like in the nursing home, seeing her in her wheelchair, lost to the world. She couldn’t, or wouldn’t talk much, and when she did, it wasn’t really her. But two friends with the same illness in the same nursing home made me think of a story idea. What if the two of them could communicate to each other? What if there were lively conversations between them that no one else could see? It could be both sweet and painful.

I’m not very good at writing down tidbits of ideas that I get, but I’m going to start doing that. They may not turn into full-length books, but maybe short stories. Or maybe there is a breakout novel in those germ seeds. That’s the fun part of being a writer. It’s ok to let your imagination run away with you. If you don’t, your stories can be stilted. The three seed idea is intriguing too. Sounds like an interesting way to come up with ideas if you’re stuck.

What do you do to come up with ideas?

Creation Mode: On

2 Replies

God put His creativity in all of us.

I’m a Christian, so I’m just going to step over the primordial soup theory and say that I believe that God created everything–and I love the way He did it. When He made Adam, He breathed life into him. By doing that, He put something of Himself into us. No, I’m not saying we’re little gods. Adam wasn’t made of God’s rib, he was made of clay. But that breath of life was as creative as saying, “Let there be light.”

Now this is all my theory, of course, but I believe that, just as everyone has some amount of faith to believe, everyone also has some amount of creativity in them. They have to, it came from that first breath of life. And just like faith, we have to get serious sometimes to take hold of it. It’s amazing to see people like Akiane, who seemed to be born with a full understanding of their talents, but even Michelangelo spent time as an apprentice before creating his masterpieces. It’s there, but it may need cultivating. It may need some classes to understand how it works and years to bring into full development. Think about a normal child, not Akiane, who starts off coloring with crayons, then learns to use colored pencils, then watercolor, then oils. The talent is developed along with learning to access the creative part inside.

I’m sure that scientists can point to where creativity lives in our brain. “It’s right here on this brain map in what we like to call the Anterior Darwinian Lobe.” I don’t know where it lives, I just know it’s there. It’s hiding with all those other gifts we’ve been given and forget to access: peace, joy, patience, faith. Sometimes we have to just get quiet and ask God to help us find them.

Hmm, someone must be working on a new plot for their book! Someone must be pretty happy right now that said plot came after spending some time meditating on the good things of God! Hey, how did you know that? Yeah! It works. And I believe that it works in all kinds of ways. Just because you’re an artist or musician, doesn’t mean that that’s the only area of creativity you’ve got. In fact, I think the more you access that creativity, the more it spreads to other areas of your life. It might show up in the kitchen or garden or torturing your kids.

I’m glad happy about this and I want more. And God is just sweet enough to give it if we ask. What’s cooking inside of you? What ever it is, it’s yours and unique to you. Don’t hide it, it would be such a waste.

Time Marches On, And Changes Everything!

1 Reply

One hundred and sixty-five years ago, 87 people took off in a wagon train to find milk and honey in California. Only 48 of those people survived to find it. The base of the monument in this photo is 20 feet high. That’s how high the snow piled up that year. The worst storm in a hundred years. Bad decisions. Bad timing. Bad luck. What a horrendous ordeal to live through. Aside from the monument and artifacts, there’s nothing left to show for it, only memories of people now long dead. It’s just a fact that people live and die everyday–millions, and we don’t know anything about who they were or what they did. If they are famous we hear about them. If not, only those close to them will remember. I’m so sorry that the people in the Donner party had to suffer what they did, but at least we know something about them. Their lives are remembered, however infamously.

Fifty year ago, I lived on Donner Summit in a tiny town called Norden. That’s why I feel for the history of the place. My father was railroad man and we lived in a row of houses close to the railroad tracks and the train station. All the front doors of the houses were connected to a long hallway that ran up the hill to a central parking area. In the winter time we would have been snowed in if not for that hallway that led up to where snow plows cleared an opening. The snow-covered the houses and we could climb over the roofs, but were forbidden to because the power lines were so close. I have fond memories of building snowmen and snow caves with my siblings and friends. We took skiing lessons at the nearby Sugar Bowl ski resort. I was so sad to move and leave my beautiful blue skis behind for the next family who would use them.

Today, nothing remains of those houses we lived in at Norden, they’ve all been torn down. There’s nothing left, only new concrete tunnels for the trains to travel through unhindered. I visited the Sugar Bowl resort a few years ago and found an oldtimer who remembered some of the people I could name. He said we were called the Mole People because we traveled through the tunnels to get in and out in the winter. (In the summer we could park directly in front of our house.) If not for his memories and ours, it would be as if our little community in Norden never existed. Interstate 80 rushes over the mountains carrying people into a present day far removed from the Donner Party or the Mole People.

I often think about posterity. Maybe that’s why I write. I don’t like to think about someone’s life ending and not being remembered. Everyone has a story. Everyone. I encourage memoir writers. Sometimes they’re the only ones who still remember, and when they are gone, some lives are lost forever. You should think about that. Your grandchildren will thank you.

Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole

2 Replies

I’m probably a little slow about this, but I finally saw Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole last night. (There’s something to be said for being patient and cheap.) I didn’t think the movie was bad, but not great.

I had some issues with it though. Why did the guardians live so far away while Soren’s family could have been with them? At the end of the movie, Soren’s parents show up as if they knew what he’d been up to and it didn’t seem to be a big deal for them to get to the guardian place. Then there’s the old guy who did the training. I have to think that every first grader would see the Star Wars storyline of the young warrior being trained by the gristled veteran who encourages him to trust his “gizzard”. The kids must have been shouting at the screen, “Hey! That’s what Luke had to do to take down the Death Star!” Nothing new there, just a repackage.

And what’s with those names? Soren is the only name that I understood. All the other names sounded like the owls burping. It probably worked better in the book, but I’m sorry, for a movie, it just didn’t work at all. In fact, I have to think that the book is a much better experience than the movie. It probably explains a lot more of what we were supposed to understand. Like, what was all the metal bit magic about? It was bad, I get that, but there was no explanation of what it was. And how does an owl fly through a fire storm with getting singed AT ALL? Oh yeah, he trusted his gizzard.

Yes, yes I know that it was PG rated and the first graders aren’t poking at it like I am, but I like the idea of giving kids excellence, not just entertainment. An entertaining story will keep them interested until the next one starts. An excellent story will stay with them forever. As adults, they will think back to that experience and remember how it effected them.

What did I like about the movie? The animation was spectacular. I don’t know how they do it, but animation seems to get better and better all the time. The ocean waves and fire and lightness of the feathers was entirely realistic. I loved how good it looked. CG is amazing.

I’ll probably pass on the next Owls of Ga’Hoole movie, because it looks like it was set up for a sequel, but I wouldn’t mind reading the book.