The Oxford Project

"In the Storytelling tradition of Studs Terkel and the photographic spirit of Mike Disfarmer, The Oxford Project tells the extraordinary true tale of a seemingly ordinary Midwestern town through the pictures and words of its residents. Equal parts art, American history, cultural anthropology, and human narrative - The Oxford Project is at once personal and universal, surprising and predictable, simple and profound.

The Project began almost twenty-five years ago, when Peter Feldstein undertook the remarkable task of photographing nearly every resident of this town, Oxford, Iowa (pop. 676). The collection of photographs that resulted is a fascinating glimpse into the ethos and character of small-town life. In those stark, full-body images Feldstein managed to capture not only the visage of rural America, but a sense of its underlying spirit."

- from the opening pages of The Oxford Project

I discovered the website for this interesting book/project via another blog. The book is more than 250 pages long, but on the website you can view quite a few of the photographs and stories of the townspeople. What I was able to read and see online was fascinating and gripping in it's own way.

I never actually grew up in a small midwestern town, but have family in rural northwestern Illinois. It definitely reminded me how different the world can seem in different places. Even though I lived in Chicago for 10 years, and now live abroad, part of who I am can be traced to small town and rural Illinois. It also reminded me of how precious small town life can be, when often it's overlooked as so common and uninteresting. I'm convinced that much of America has lost it's connection with our rural roots. And to me there is some mist of sadness about this loss as we become a more urban and global society. Something like this helps shine the light on the unique and valuable way of life that continues unnoticed in many small towns like this.

Update: I discovered this short 3-minute video on youtube about the project. Enjoy!

As an added side note, I am also currently reading the book Gilead, which is also set in a small rural town in Iowa. It's funny how these two things found their way into my life from so seemingly far away. I guess there's nothing like a little nostalgia to offset the difficulty of learning Spanish!!

Crabb-y

As part of my ongoing training with International Teams I recently finished reading Inside Out by Larry Crabb. I tried to write my own two sentence description of the book but was not satisfied with the results. None of the synopsis I found online seemed sufficient to me either. In a few words, he writes about how to achieve real and lasting change by addressing the pain in our life, and the sin our pain leads us to.

For those of you that know me, I am not naturally an introspective person, or one who dwells on pain for very long. So this book was a challenge for me to go through for many reasons. In fact, if it wasn't an 'assignment' it's hard to imagine I would have stuck with it. However, that does not mean it was a waste of time. It was a valuable read, and challenged me to think in ways I normally wouldn't. I encountered a number of things along the way that I thought would be worth sharing or repeating here on the blog.

Rather than write a snazzy two-sentence synopsis of the book, I thought I'd highlight three of the significant ideas I am walking away with from this book.

"We have not taken the truth that our heart is deceitful seriously enough."
Larry clearly has had enough of shallow Christianity, and of Christians who pretend that everything is fantastic, and that becoming a christian fixes everything in this world. He spends a lot of time exploring the pain in life, and encouraging the reader to face the pain in our lives. At times it seemed like he was essentially saying you either have issues and deep pain in your life, or you are in denial. That mindset frustrated me at points. But the book did help me see that there are ways in my life that I seek to protect myself from further pain that are in fact relational sin - meaning that in relationships I put my need for further protection from pain above Jesus' imperative to love God, and to Love others. And for me, part of the journey of this book was to face up to the fact that my heart is deceitful in that I can explain away this deep sin of the heart and live like things are just fine. This was not the first time this year I've considered these words in Jeremiah 17 " The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?" To me it speaks to the mysteries of life. As the next verse states, God searches the heart and examines the mind - essentially - God can understand our hearts, but no one else. Us humans, we seem interminably incapable of discerning our own hearts, much less the hearts of others. If it were clear why would we have centuries of art and literature focused on exploring the human heart and spirit? This means that my own heart is unreliable. And if that is true, it is serious, more serious than I often act.

"When hints of sadness creep into our soul, we must not flee into happy or distracting thoughts."
Another aspect of my life was brought into clearer focus when reading this book - my propensity to selfishly 'demand' that I have time to myself to recover and be refreshed from the daily struggles and pressures of life. It illuminates where I do not fully trust God to provide for my needs, but instead seek to dig my own wells to seek refreshment when we have "living water" available to us. It has me evaluating my use of entertainment and recreation as an escape from daily life rather than seeking more of God and trusting him to provide the refreshment I need. I havn't yet found the pattern, but I intend to build a regular and consistent fast in my life from most forms of electronic media entertainment. (ie like one day a week, or one week a month, where I avoid surfing the internet, watching tv or movies on my own, etc).

"You must make a choice to live honestly."
I highlighted this in a previous posting, but this is the broadest, simplest, and perhaps the most significant take-away I got from the book. Most of the people I admire most are the ones that are the most transparent, and are the most ready to address life as it is, not as we want it to be. It is always refreshing to interact with such people. This book was a good reminder to make an active choice to live life honestly.

While I can't promise it's a fun read, I can recommend this book to anyone who is interested. In the spirit of fairness I should also state that Faith also read the book and really enjoyed it. Psychology majors - go figure.