My friend, Danny, unexpectedly brought Sister Rosemary by my office last week during her visit to Pepperdine. What a gift! I have seen a handful of people who made TIME magazine’s 2014 list of the 100 most influential people in the world in person, but it was most definitely the first time one dropped by my office to say hello. I have my fingers crossed that either Beyoncé or Pope Francis will follow Sister Rosemary’s lead soon.
[Click HERE to read what Academy Award-winning actor, Forrest Whitaker, wrote about Sister Rosemary for TIME in 2014.]
At her evening conversation event last week Sister Rosemary featured stylish purses created at her Tailoring Center using aluminum can pop-tops. She told the audience that she uses this process to teach the women and girls who have been ravaged by war that throw-away trash can be transformed into treasure. What a lovely metaphor.
I’m not so sure that I can take trash and turn it into an actual fashion accessory. But I’m up for changing the way I look at human beings who have been discarded one way or another in this world to see the treasure waiting there in what Mother Teresa once called “distressing disguise.” Sister Rosemary does this with what Whitaker called contagious energy and boundless love. And in the copy of her book “Sewing Hope” that she gifted me she wrote that “love is the key.”
So if it is just as well with you, we might as well get started loving.
With the world apparently spinning out of control, I thought I might as well join the dizzying ride on an indoor bicycle.
On Wednesday evening I will join several friends to present Jesus, Malibu, and the Immigrant at Pepperdine. The event will focus on the Malibu Community Labor Exchange and discuss its work in the context of a Christian worldview of immigration and current political debates about immigration in the United States. It should be a fascinating evening.
Our youngest daughter started middle school when we moved from Mississippi to Malibu in 2008 and needed certain shots to enroll in school, (make up your own jokes friends from Mississippi and California, but be nice!) so we went to a local urgent-care facility and waited. There in the waiting room I met a super-friendly Pepperdine student who was the incoming president of the College Republicans at Seaver College. He excitedly shared with me his plan to place a large American flag on the magnificent front lawn of Pepperdine University for every life lost in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. He said it was going to be awesome. I was impressed by both his initiative and enthusiasm.
It is a big day. My office sits in the heart of Pepperdine University’s main campus in Malibu, and today is the first day of classes for undergraduate students. Next door to my office is Pepperdine’s high-tech, newly-renovated Payson Library complete with a full-functioning Starbucks, and you can feel the highly-caffeinated energy in the air.
Starting to Look Up 