by Karen Mains
The all-too-familiar instinct kept nagging at me, Don't do it, Karen. Don't do it! You're trying to shove too much into the afternoon. You're going to greet your guests tonight with an aching back and hostess' anxiety.
But I did it anyway. Because I really wanted to attend the Naperville Art Festival, and because a friend really wanted me to spend some time with her, I crowded my Sunday afternoon. Ten people were coming for a "Bag Team" brainstorming dinner that evening. The table was set, guests were bringing parts of the meal, but I still had to pick up the special kluski noodles I use and some whipped cream at Jewel-Osco, and the homemade chicken noodle soup (that my family loves) was not in the pot yet!
Obviously, I was hurriedly making a choice that I was not carefully considering. Now I was on my way as my friend drove down Warrenville Road toward Naperville to see this remarkable exhibit of artists' works about which she had been so exultant. The time was 12:30. While stopped at a traffic light, I finally began to do the calculations. It would take a half-hour to get to Naperville: I would have to leave by 2:00, run to the store, get home, debone the chicken, make the soup, mix blackberry liqueur into the whipped cream and create a sauce for the blackberry buckle, the recipe taken from my Cooking French book. If I returned home by 3 o'clock, would I get everything done by the time people arrived? Read more...
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Friday, July 16, 2010
Weather Financial Blowouts Rule #2
by Karen MainsFinancial blowouts can create the kind of community we have forgotten and yet long for in the deepest part of our beings.
I suspect we Christians need to lead the way in breaking up our government dependency. We need to increase our God-given Body of Christ interdependency. We need to explode the myth that unless we have money we can't solve problems. What a deception that is! (My personal mantra learned during these years in God's School of Finance is: We don't need money. we don't need money. We only need Him, the Provider and Sustainer.)
Creativity and ingenuity are our best currencies. So, let’s brainstorm together all the ways we can solve our personal, citywide, regional and national problems We need to develop neighborhood architectures for helping one another; we need to joyfully explore the alternate barter, recycle and trade economies. I do most of my clothes-shopping at Goodwill. I bought a pair of Ralph Lauren pants ($400 online) for $4. I got a great black leather jacket with a furred hood for $30. “You look terrific!” said some younger women I’ve mentored but hadn’t seen for a year. Well, losing 22 of the 30 pounds I gained during our season of financial discontent helped, but letting my hair go white (consequently, $22 for a haircut at the JCPenney Salon—no styling, walking out with my hair wet—instead of $160 for cut, color, styling, blow-dry and tip) not only saves money, it honors the fact that I have achieved these older years. A Daisy Fuentes tunic and Tommy Hilfiger black jeans, $4 apiece from Goodwill, finished the look.
Too bad the concept of community organizer came under such disapprobation in the last election, because God is the original Community Organizer. His platform always includes pulling together a group of unlikely folk who are willing to be inspired by the Holy Spirit to make amazing differences in the world. What a wonderful thing—to create neighborhoods where we actually feel free to borrow sugar, not to mention a car, where we can chat over fences, reinstitute the coffee klatch, tend to those who are feeble, and even know one another’s names and what we each do in the world. Together, we can change the environment around us. Together, we can learn that the meaning of the word “stranger” is not “the neighbor I don’t know who lives next door.”
On one sub-zero day this winter, my African-American neighbor, new to our community, phoned. “How are you doing over there?” she asked. “Is your furnace OK? Are you warm?” I have never had another neighbor, in all the years we’ve lived in the Chicago-area inquire as to our being warm! Needing one another in financial hard times, we can learn again the gift of helping one another. Last summer at Home Depot I bought some clearance table burnished brass lamps for outside our home. My daughter-in-law’s father is a handyman, so he graciously came to teach me how to install the lights—he mounted one with me acting as an assistant apprentice, passing tools and carefully watching over his shoulder. I installed the remaining two without his help and proudly bragged to everyone who came in the front door, “I did it myself.” Six Rules for Weathering Financial Blowouts
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
On Karen Mains
For decades, Karen Mains, a prolific writer and gifted communicator, has offered her talents, as well as her joys and sorrows, to the building of God’s Kingdom.
Whether as an author, speaker, or radio and television producer and co-host, Karen has addressed the deep spiritual needs and longings that surface in our current society. Karen’s voice is substantive, often humorous, many times lyrical, but always practical.
Many of her creative works have been birthed out of personal experience. Her first best-selling book Open Heart, Open Home, is considered a classic and deals with the theology of Christian hospitality. It has sold over 600,000 copies and captured experiences out of 12 years serving in an inner city pastorate in a church founded by her husband, David R. Mains. The book challenges believers to use hospitality as a means of bringing redemption to a broken society.
In 1977, Mains’ communication gifts expanded when her husband became director of The Chapel of the Air Ministries. This nationally known outreach featured a syndicated radio broadcast, aired on almost 500 outlets each Monday through Saturday across the U.S. and Canada. Karen often served as co-host on the 15-minute program, lending her unique perspective to issues that impact the spiritual vitality of individual Christians and local churches. Her broadcast research generated the widely accepted book, Child Sexual Abuse: A Hope for Healing, co-authored with Maxine Hancock. The Mains’ media ministry continued with the daily half-hour national television show, You Need 2 Know, which won the 1995 Producer of the Year award from The National Religious Broadcasters.
In 1980, Karen traveled through the barrios and refugee camps in Central America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa. As a result of these journeys, she wrote The Fragile Curtain, which won the 1982 Christopher Award given to writers, producers, and directors whose works affirm the highest values of the human spirit and are representative of the best achievements in their fields.
Mains’ three books for children, The Kingdom Tales Trilogy, was awarded the Gold Medallion by the Evangelical Press Association. These stories are frequently used by pastors as sermon material, have been endlessly adapted in dramatic form for churches and Christian schools, and have been regularly employed for the purposes of deep therapy by Christian counselors.
Karen Mains served on the Board of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship for eight years and was elected its first woman chairperson. She is the co-founder of the Chrysosostom Society, a group of well-known Christian writers committed to excellence in their work. A past member of the Author’s Guild of New York, she works to reconcile, through a variety of means (one of which is the establishment of Artists’ Communities in local churches), the artist to Christianity. As part of her personal interest, Karen now offers informal Wannabee Writers mentoring discussions.
Karen Mains now serves as co-director of Mainstay Ministries where she is responsible for Hungry Souls, a spiritual mentoring outreach that seeks to help people whose appetite for God is greater than what their present environment is meeting. An annual 24-hour Advent Retreat of Silence, 3-day Retreats of Silence to people in the Chicagoland area. She delights in leading hungry souls in growth groups where group spiritual direction is offered. In addition, she has developed Journeys for Hungry Souls, a travel ministry that seeks to introduce pilgrims to the disciplines of pilgrimage.
The lastest growth edge in the Hungry Souls outreach has been to experiment with the powerful healing potential of listening groups. Over the past three years, Karen has overseen, observed, or participated in over 240 small listening groups. She is now beginning a research project that will assess the profound impact of these small group experiences.
Always passionate about the underprivileged and under-resourced, this year Karen and similarly passionate colleagues have launched The Global Bag Project, a way to connect eco-shopping to micro-credit enterprises. The first cooperative bag-making project is now being formed in Nairobi, Kenya. Karen will be traveling to Kenya in March 2009 with a group of 14 women. They will be meeting with Kenyan women to link their distant worlds in pragmatic ways.
Although she has authored over 27 books in the religious fields (her most recent is Going on a God Hunt with IVPress), Karen feels called to write about spiritual meaning into the secular culture, and is now spending much of her time discovering markets that are open to her work.
The Mains have been married for 47 years and live in the western suburbs of Chicago. As the parents of four adult offspring, Karen and David are highly committed to creating healthy families and are eagerly sharing their invaluable spiritual journeys with the next generation, their own 7 grandchildren.
Whether as an author, speaker, or radio and television producer and co-host, Karen has addressed the deep spiritual needs and longings that surface in our current society. Karen’s voice is substantive, often humorous, many times lyrical, but always practical.
Many of her creative works have been birthed out of personal experience. Her first best-selling book Open Heart, Open Home, is considered a classic and deals with the theology of Christian hospitality. It has sold over 600,000 copies and captured experiences out of 12 years serving in an inner city pastorate in a church founded by her husband, David R. Mains. The book challenges believers to use hospitality as a means of bringing redemption to a broken society.
In 1977, Mains’ communication gifts expanded when her husband became director of The Chapel of the Air Ministries. This nationally known outreach featured a syndicated radio broadcast, aired on almost 500 outlets each Monday through Saturday across the U.S. and Canada. Karen often served as co-host on the 15-minute program, lending her unique perspective to issues that impact the spiritual vitality of individual Christians and local churches. Her broadcast research generated the widely accepted book, Child Sexual Abuse: A Hope for Healing, co-authored with Maxine Hancock. The Mains’ media ministry continued with the daily half-hour national television show, You Need 2 Know, which won the 1995 Producer of the Year award from The National Religious Broadcasters.
In 1980, Karen traveled through the barrios and refugee camps in Central America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa. As a result of these journeys, she wrote The Fragile Curtain, which won the 1982 Christopher Award given to writers, producers, and directors whose works affirm the highest values of the human spirit and are representative of the best achievements in their fields.
Mains’ three books for children, The Kingdom Tales Trilogy, was awarded the Gold Medallion by the Evangelical Press Association. These stories are frequently used by pastors as sermon material, have been endlessly adapted in dramatic form for churches and Christian schools, and have been regularly employed for the purposes of deep therapy by Christian counselors.
Karen Mains served on the Board of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship for eight years and was elected its first woman chairperson. She is the co-founder of the Chrysosostom Society, a group of well-known Christian writers committed to excellence in their work. A past member of the Author’s Guild of New York, she works to reconcile, through a variety of means (one of which is the establishment of Artists’ Communities in local churches), the artist to Christianity. As part of her personal interest, Karen now offers informal Wannabee Writers mentoring discussions.
Karen Mains now serves as co-director of Mainstay Ministries where she is responsible for Hungry Souls, a spiritual mentoring outreach that seeks to help people whose appetite for God is greater than what their present environment is meeting. An annual 24-hour Advent Retreat of Silence, 3-day Retreats of Silence to people in the Chicagoland area. She delights in leading hungry souls in growth groups where group spiritual direction is offered. In addition, she has developed Journeys for Hungry Souls, a travel ministry that seeks to introduce pilgrims to the disciplines of pilgrimage.
The lastest growth edge in the Hungry Souls outreach has been to experiment with the powerful healing potential of listening groups. Over the past three years, Karen has overseen, observed, or participated in over 240 small listening groups. She is now beginning a research project that will assess the profound impact of these small group experiences.
Always passionate about the underprivileged and under-resourced, this year Karen and similarly passionate colleagues have launched The Global Bag Project, a way to connect eco-shopping to micro-credit enterprises. The first cooperative bag-making project is now being formed in Nairobi, Kenya. Karen will be traveling to Kenya in March 2009 with a group of 14 women. They will be meeting with Kenyan women to link their distant worlds in pragmatic ways.
Although she has authored over 27 books in the religious fields (her most recent is Going on a God Hunt with IVPress), Karen feels called to write about spiritual meaning into the secular culture, and is now spending much of her time discovering markets that are open to her work.
The Mains have been married for 47 years and live in the western suburbs of Chicago. As the parents of four adult offspring, Karen and David are highly committed to creating healthy families and are eagerly sharing their invaluable spiritual journeys with the next generation, their own 7 grandchildren.
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