Since the weekend, the days have been packed. Saturday night, Anjie and I got a special treat. We went to Taproot Theatre’s annual Gala at the Triple Door in downtown Seattle, where they unveiled the first plans for a new facility built on the property they own at 85th and Greenwood. It’s a stunning conceptual design, and even though its years away, its exciting to be connected to a theatre with that kind of vision. Scott and Pam Nolte, Mark and Karen Lund, and the rest of the Taproot visionaries are heroes to me in a culture over-the-moon about film and television, but not so much about theatre. Yet Taproot continues to make it work, and the live experience is like nothing else.
As an added bonus, we got to see Daniel wow the crowd with a rendition of “Bring Him Home” from Les Miserables that had me and everybody else shaking their heads. Grant Goodeve, of Northwest Backroads fame, was the host for the evening and he was gushing over our son as he closed. He said he just hoped he lived long enough to see Daniel actually play the role of Jean Valjean. My sentiments, exactly.
Sunday’s ticker tape parade at church, the Northwest Church‘s version of Palm Sunday was wild as usual, though the air cannons reportedly misfunctioned and only delivered about half the confetti they had prepared. Kids go nuts for this thing, and for me the metaphor works on many layers.
Monday, we shot a video for our Easter service at Northwest at my friend Marty Gordon’s apartment. Check out Marty’s web site here. He’s a talented artist who used to do full-time ministry. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way Marty ran into the same lack of understanding most evangelical artists experience, and he caught that same disease Cyrus Manning’s suffering from at the beginning of Leaving Ruin: “they-don’t-want-me-here-anymore.” Anyway, Kent Landrum, Merlin Mann, Steve Owen, and Marty and I shot video for nearly six hours, and then I came home and edited a rough cut until around 3:30 a.m., which left Tuesday to be staggered through in a bit of a fog. Oh, that was after a Monday night meeting at the church. The “Future Facilities Committee” was meeting with an architect to get the latest plans on the new building. Northwest faces big decisions about the direction of our ministries and resources.
Tuesday’s fog was lifted a bit by the news of a sizable tax refund, which will help with various kid costs coming up. God has been far better to us that I deserve. Then Daniel and I grabbed a bite to eat at University Village, and then it was home to work on the scripts for the Willow Creek Small Group DVDs which we will shoot in Chicago in May.
Days are full. I’m seeing beauty everywhere, and am so aware of God’s presence. There are terrible things going on in the world, and I start the day remembering that God sees it all, and works into our lives in ways we can’t grasp. We want to know, to understand, to “get it,” but as I look at Spring emerging day by day along the streets near my house, I can’t grasp what this is that pushes out of the ground, up through the trunks of trees and out the ends of lithe branches. It’s common, it’s banal, it’s ordinary…and it’s miraculous. Life, power, energy, thought: all mysteries, all gifts, their management requiring nothing less than divinity.
…I stand amazed in the Presence…
JEFF BERRYMAN 