I heart Pixar. I want to own every Pixar movie. Strike that. I want to live in every Pixar movie. Which doesn’t make sense, I know, because how can I converse with cars? (I do, though, with my Annie.) How can I talk to toys–and have them talk back?

I’m up at The Master’s Artist today reflecting on one of the (many) lessons Pixar has taught me: how to create believable worlds when they have nothing to do with reality.

Read On Foreign Worlds and Other Imaginary Matters.

I’m up today at The Master’s Artist, sharing how Miles Davis and my ten-week-old son have inspired me in my writing.

Read Getting My Chops.

I’m up at The Master’s Artist today talking about one of my favorite Christmas traditions: the Christmas tree. It may have had pagan origins, but Christ transformed this profane symbol into one of his new life.

Read more here.

I think sometimes we’re tempted to think:

Wouldn’t it be easier to nuke the Middle East?

Wouldn’t it be easier if the mountains of Haiti, melting around them, would finally collapse and hit the reset button on the whole country?

Wouldn’t it be easier to shed myself of this needy relationship, which only, after all, brings me down?

Wouldn’t it be easier to get rid of all the immigrants and leave them to their own countries and problems?

But that would mean that the Bible would have ended after Genesis 3.

I once worked as a medical receptionist in a surgeon’s office.

All the world’s against me.

Theologically, this is true. The Fall initiated a war between man and man, between man and nature, and between man and God. Of course, Jesus’ victory over the course initiated a reconciliation between those forces.

But I don’t feel reconciled.

Take, for instance, my garden. The squirrels, the bunnies, and a various assortment of bugs seek to destroy that which I seek to grow. 

Or there’s my kitchen, where the ants love to reside. Apparently, they’re after water, not food. No matter how clean I keep the place, they linger. The only way to get rid of them is to spray something harmful to my family and environment.

It’s not the first time it’s been asked. In fact, I’ve seen the question floating out in the cyber world quite often.

What would you tell the 16-year-old you?

At first, I couldn’t come up with a good answer. What if a simple statement to the 16-year-old me so altered my path that I ended up a completely different person?

Then I realized that even if I came up with something stellar, it wouldn’t work anyway for two reasons.

First, the 16-year-old me would have been so shocked and disappointed that the thirty-something-year-old me isn’t accomplishing the plans she so clearly laid out. Why would she listen to this hack?

Second, I had people in my life telling me what I would have said anyway–my parents, my youth leaders, my friends, my parents’ friends. Sure, I could tell her to stress less, but so did other people (and clearly, I didn’t listen to them very well).

Not everyone had this upbringing, I understand. Which is why, instead of asking what we would have told our 16-year-old selves, we should ask what should we tell the 16-year-old next to us.

So what would you tell the 16-year-old in your neighborhood?