Sunday evening is such a blah, yucky time, with the specter of Monday morning looming large before me. It seems like a good opportunity to think about the things that make me happy.
Here are three of them.
1. My boys’ artwork. Behold “Happy Truck, ” drawn by Matthew.
Given the temporal nature of his chosen medium, I took a picture of this drawing to keep for posterity. It makes me smile every time I look at it.
2. Great quotations about faith. Someone I know recently shared a memorable line from our pastor: “Stop trying to define God, and let God define you.” Man, I could meditate on that quotation for days. Am I letting God define me? This quotation also inspires me to ponder all kinds of related questions, like What am I called to be and do on this earth, for the short time that I am here? Which unique little piece of the spiritual puzzle do I offer the world? How can my own experiences help other people make sense of their lives — and how can their experiences do the same for me? I love sinking my teeth into questions like this.
3. Really good TV. Saturday night, unwinding on the couch, Scott and I re-watched Episode One of the BBC series Sherlock. I blogged about it a while back, and all I can say is, it’s just as good — if not even better — a second time around. When you update the character of Sherlock to modern-day London, all sorts of interesting questions come to light. The writers for this series really make you look at Sherlock in a new way — he’s a genius, as he always was, but somehow the contemporary setting makes them freer to touch on the fact that his genius comes at a certain cost. His brain works differently from the brains of others, and that causes problems for him, such as a lack of natural empathy. (“Sherlock is a great man,” the character Lestrade says at one point, “and maybe someday he’ll be a good one.”) Even so, the writing and the acting in this series are so brilliant that you end up liking Sherlock, even with his undeniable narcissism. And there is some fabulous humor in the series, too, which is lacking in a lot of the earlier adaptations. Definitely worth a watch, if you like well-written drama (and, as I mentioned earlier, this is one BBC series that my husband likes just as much as I do, if not more … and that is really saying something).
Happy Monday!
