Traveling Mercies

This week, some friends from my church family are in Ghana helping with the building of a children's hospital in Berekum.  So their comfort and safety is heavy on my mind. 

The traveling mercy prayers I say are meant to ask God to watch over my loved ones while we are apart, but, in reality, it's the work of earthly citizens to make sure they are welcomed, safe, and protected; treated with grace, kindness and hospitality.  I worry and pray that these citizens are doing that job well. 

But what about the rest of us?  Clichéd as this sounds, we are, all of us, travelers.  Moving like transients through this world; whether walking around our hometowns or on a mission trip halfway around the world. 

It's our job as stewards of God's love and compassion to make sure that all travelers in our midst are also welcomed, safe and protected, whether they are from another continent, from another country, or from within a 5-mile radius.  Whether they are visiting dignitaries, or, simply, faces we don't recognize sitting three pews over.

"Continue to love each other like brothers, and remember always to welcome strangers, for by doing this, some people have entertained angels without knowing it."

Forever I will move like the world that turns beneath me
And when I lose my direction I'll look up to the sky
And when the black cloak drags upon the ground
I'll be ready to surrender, and remember
Well we're all in this together
If I live the life I'm given, I won't be scared to die

Loving Your Neighbor: You're Doing It Right

Broke my ankle Friday.  Thought it was just a bad sprain, but no.   It was actually a revelation about my church family.

Thank you.

For the help bringing my bags in.

For the late night ice pack.

For the shared Advil.

For the distraction of board games.

For the annoying prods to go to the hospital.

For the offer of grocery shopping.

For the casserole.

For the kind words and prayers.

"The ultimate perfection of the contemplative life is not a heaven of separate individuals, each one viewing his own private intuition of God; it is a sea of Love which flows through the One Body of all the elect, all the angels and saints, and their contemplation would be incomplete if it were not shared, or if it were shared with fewer souls, or with spirits capable of less vision and less joy."
--Thomas Merton

Waiting to Dance

On days like this, I don't read magazines to learn how to make heart-shaped cupcakes, or set the perfect romantic mood.

On days like this, I avoid the guy in the train station concourse hawking buckets full of flowers .

On days like this, I wonder about next year.

On days like this, the Void flexes its muscles.

On days like this, I strain to hear the music and wait for God to ask me to dance.

Oh, play me a blues song and fade down the light
I'm sad as a proud man can be sad tonight
Just let me dream on, oh, just let me sway
While the sweet violins and the saxophones play

And Miss, you don't know me but can't we pretend
That we care for each other till the band reach the end?

One step for aching and two steps for breaking
Waltzing's for dreamers and losers in love
One step for sighing, two steps for crying
Waltzing's for dreamers and losers in love

Now, they say love's for gamblers, the pendulum swings
I bet hard on love and I lost everything
So, don't send me home, now, put a shot in my arm
And we'll drink out old memories and we'll drink in the dawn

And Mr. Bandleader, won't you play one more time?
For I've good folding money in this pocket of mine

Oh, one step for aching, two steps for breaking
Waltzing's for dreamers and losers in love
One step for sighing, two steps for crying
Waltzing's for dreamers and losers in love

Miss, you don't know me but can't we pretend
That we care for each other till the band reach the end?

Oh, one step for aching, two steps for breaking
Waltzing's for dreamers and losers in love
One step for sighing, two steps for crying
Waltzing's for dreamers and losers in love

Waltzing's for dreamers and losers in love

Lent

For Lent this year I've decided to give up two things and take on one.

First, I'm giving up McDonald's.  Well, all fast food really.  Anything that has a drive-through window is out of the question for the next several weeks.  This may seem like an easy one to you, but as a lazy person single mom, I rely on this way too much.  Plus it's been my go-to dinner after Bible study on Wednesday nights. 

Next I think I'm going to give up staying up late on weeknights.  There's really no good reason to be up past 11 on a work night.  I may have to find a way to fight through insomnia's grip (no, not going to medicate....yet) until I get there.  But the intent still stands; lights out, TV and laptop off by 11.

Now for the taking on.  I actually wasn't thinking of taking anything on until church tonight when the pastor mentioned it as an option.  There's a bunch of things that would make sense to add to my days - devotions, reading my Bible, prayer, contemplative time - I don't know.  These are all great and necessary things.  But I kind of already do them, so I was afraid they'd fall into the realm of counterfeit (see yesterday's post). 

So for Lent, I'm taking on sin. 

I'm not going to try to completely eliminate it; as if that's even possible.  The more I pretend that it doesn't exist, the more insidious and powerful it becomes.  No -  I'm going to sin boldly.  I'm going to embrace it.  But I'm going to look my deficient character in the eye and own my transgressions instead of ignoring them or making excuses for them.  Perhaps, after 40 days of that, I will have the upper hand and.be prepared to rejoice more boldly on Easter.

 

Five Things That Don't Work For Lent

These are merely my opinion, so they might not apply to you, dear reader.

1)  Thinking I'm proving something to God - I don't think that He is looking for me to prove to Him that I can go five and a half weeks without a Diet Coke.

2)  Messing up and then quitting - God is a god of do-overs.  If I slip up, there's no reason I shouldn't repent and start again.  If I can't do that over Lent, how could I expect to do that in "real life"?

3)  Switching midstream - I'll admit it.  There have been years where I picked something to give up and after a week or two, I switched to something 'easier'.  Lame.  Lent should be a time for the broken me to become stronger.

4)  Not filling the new void with Christ - Do I give up a favorite food, but not feed others?  Give up TV time to pursue just another mindless activity?

5)  Counterfeit sacrifice - Been there.  This is like being so busy that you've had to skip a couple meals and then turning around and calling it fasting.  Or spending your precious Saturday mornings helping at a soup kitchen and resenting it all the while.  Or adopting pseudo-asceticism based on self-loathing.  It would be better for my soul to honestly give nothing up at all.

Anyway, I have no idea what I'm going to do.  I'm hopeful it will come to me at Ash Wednesday service tomorrow evening.

Stewardship of Miracles

Working on my prayer life again.  Focused mostly on end-of-day thank yous, pre-meal graces and after-the-school-bus-pick-up take care of hers.  Haven't really started back in with the selfish-y prayers yet.  It's just a matter of time, though.  Ok, ok, I've talked to God about 'me' things, but I haven't outright asked Him for anything.  Well, not anything big.  Yikes.

Today on the way home from work I was stuck sitting in traffic and started thinking (always questionable) about miracles and prayers in general.  Sort of looking for what they have in common, what's different; why they often don't seem to be answered.

My general hypothesis (if my pastor is reading this - please avert your eyes), is that maybe answered prayers, or things we may consider to be miracles, can begin only when human intervention is exhausted.  Just speaking for myself, and based on a brief review of some of the things I've asked most frequently for God to perform for me , there is probably only a small portion of those requests for a miracle that is something that would actually only occur by divine intervention. 

If I break down a petition to its individual components, all but perhaps the very last bit could probably be accomplished, for all intents and purposes, without God - mostly by myself, but sometimes by or through others.  In retrospect, there's a bunch of things I've asked for that really don't need His intercession at all - so in essence, I've been praying for short-cuts; for God to support my sloth.  He's not going to clean my house, or hand me a social life, or put my script in another's head, or pay my bills.  I really need to be more discerning and thoughtful in what I think I need.  Looks I have some work to do.

No wonder my answered prayer jar is still empty. 

The other bottom line is this - if we can be brave enough to share our prayers for the everyday miracles, we should be able to help each other get closer to their fulfillment.

Sacred Times

If you have read anything here in the last few weeks, you'll know that I've been annoyed by trying to 'hear' God. His silence - or, more, my inability to sit and listen - has left me more than a little frustrated. To the point of believing that He's nowhere around. Nothing had happened to cause me to feel like that - no trauma or crisis or anything.

Well, I didn't know what to do, so I was talking with a friend this weekend about it (sacred time right there), and he suggested that maybe I was actually too close (I'm paraphrasing). Well the truth is, I haven't been willing to wait and listen in silence.

Here's some things I've been trying to get in the right state of mind - maybe something here will work for me. Or you. Even if it doesn't, these don't hurt.

My journal - well the blog, at least. Whether I'm able to write something or not, I sit with my laptop and think about the day, about God

Examen - sometimes this comes naturally from the journaling

Reading - pretty straight-forward. Different translations of the Bible; books of poetry; other blogs

Meditating - sometimes this looks an awful lot like a nap

Music - usually classical, depending on my mental state and mood. If it's really bad, bluegrass

Prayer - obvious, but not always easy.

What has struck me since that conversation is the realization that I didn't hear Him before I went down this path either. He was just as silent before, and I didn't have any problem believing. I'm going to keep waiting for a whisper, an embrace, a shout, a call, a vision, a dream, a push.

Maybe the best thing for me to do is to stop trying so hard.