View From the Hammock brought to you by Purple Frog

     Cats do not like me. I am sure this is because they somehow know that I like dogs more. I tried several time to bring cats home when I was a girl to prove it wrong, but every time it was a fiasco: the cats either ran away, or even tried to commit suicide.

     Thank God for my hammock! It is so much cooler now that to swing in my hammock becomes an exquisit treat. The inspiration is an extra bonus...      The memory of my high school Civil Defense Class teacher suddenly poped up.

     What a peaceful morning: I'm writing my new blog, and my cat Grishka is napping right under my desk near the window. Grishka is short for Grigori Rasputin.

     Driving can be competitive, exhilarating, and adventures, but it doesn't have to be.

My friend Kerry Herndon and I talked about leadership once. My understanding of leadership was inspired by listening to symphony. 

     Did you ever notice older couples sitting in silence over breakfast in a restaurant? Looking at a woman staring into nowhere with a blank face, I defined that silence as tiredness from each other once and forever.

     What is this with decreasing fat and sodium  content in McDonalds menue by 15% in eight years? Why not decreasing it 50 or even 90 percent in three months? Ah, the flavor....

     Tolerating pain for six months with no break was too much, even for a Russian woman.

     I found a counterintuitive article on losing weight that commanded, “ Shut your mouth!” As soon as you announce to your family and friends about your goal to lose 10-15 pounds, the choir of voices sing a song against it.       Looking for a book to read, I was stopped by the title: “The modern Temper” by Joseph Wood Krutch. The book was written in 1929 and talked about our human nature. The question that made me want to read the book was about why appreciating such writers as Sophocles or Shakespeare, we had no one for centuries who wrote anything as majestic as they did. As soon as you get an ambition to write the book of your dream, the same choir will sing a song against it. If we place any modern writing that was written after those giants, it would be like placing an egg next to the Great Canyon, trying to compare their qualities.Does it mean that our civilization degrades from generation to generation?       Sever...

I do not see myself as a savior or a therapist. To be completely honest, I used to try to be both until I got it! The role of a pastor is to help people to find the  JOY  and the sacred purpose in the midst of a crisis or in the midst of a routine and uneventful life.

     Moving from place to place in America taught me many things. The picture of me, coming to America in June of 1995 with one suitcase and no money is placed against another picture of me next to a moving truck full of furniture and boxes with clothes eight years later, was way too embarrassing. I couldn’t believe it: I was becoming an American. I protested, I was ashamed, I was denying the fact that it was I, who collected all that stuff. But I had to admit the fact that the movers' semi-trailer was full of my stuff!

      Russian language historically is a merge of many languages. Lots and lots of words are borrowed or adopted from German, Italian, Greek, French, Latin. Philosophy is FILOSOFIA, theater is TEATR, music is MUSIKA.

No, baba is not a European traditional east cake that women bake for Easter. I’ve heard a very similar word “Bubba” in America and learned very quickly that this name is pejorative, something similar to “redneck”. “Those ‘bubbas’ in the Pentagon, you know!” My friend expressed his frustration with bureaucracy and politics.

  “What that say?”

Sharif Abdullah  in his book Creating the World that Works for All paints an image of humanity as a sinking ship, where “salvation does not lie in acquiring more and more resources; it lies in getting off the vessel.”  This image can be easily applied to many Protestant churches. 

I agree with Douglas Hall that the confession of the faith arises sometimes at a point when it is almost too late, and “the powerful of the world have gone too far.” He believes that when“the powerless are victimized then the faithful church resists.” [1] I see his point very well: Vladimir Lenin came up with a similar postulate, known as Principle of Power Balance   required for revolution: “Change is possible when the top (the powerful) cannot  rule in the new way, and the powerless refuse to  live in the old way.” Modern Russians reinvented the old postulate in a new way, “When the top doesn't want to  rule in the NEW way, and the mob (the powerless) WANTS  to  live  in the OLD way.” This new interpretation sounds scary if applied to the Methodist church. What if we are right whereRussians are: unable to live in a new way?!  There was another Soviet formula that had to be memorized by the nation: “We say ‘the Communist Party’ but we...