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. Â 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. Â Really good TV. Â Saturday night, unwinding on the couch, Scott and I re-watched Episode One of the BBC series Sherlock. Â 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. Â When you update the character of Sherlock to modern-day London, all sorts of interesting questions come to light. Â 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. Â His brain works differently from the brains of others, and that causes problems for him, such as a lack of natural empathy. Â (“Sherlock is a great man,” the character Lestrade says at one point, “and maybe someday he’ll be a good one.”) Â Even so, the writing and the acting in this series are so brilliant that you end up liking Sherlock, even with his undeniable narcissism. Â And there is some fabulous humor in the series, too, which is lacking in a lot of the earlier adaptations. Â 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!
