Because it's been a while...

here are 5 graces for today:
1: despite the Wii-induced soreness in my shoulders and upper back, I'm ready to play some more
2: did I mention I now have a Wii? Had to buy a used one to get Wii Fit...scarcer than hen's teeth around here
3: I like boxing better than yoga
4: I remembered the internet password, so my Wii is updating itself
5: it was an absolutely gorgeous afternoon, after a windy rainy morning.

F5 Blogroll Celebration

Mary Beth offers this thought for today's RevGalBlogPals Friday 5:

in my blog sidebar is a list titled, "Blogs I Read Every Day." After my mother became a blogger, she asked me how I could possibly read that many blogs daily!? I had to confess it then: Okay, I don't read them all every day! I have over 100 on there! But I have favorites, and you do too.
Some of you probably use feed readers to let you know when your favorite bloggers have posted...not me, not yet. I just have folks who are part of my day-to-day.

So for today's Friday Five, give us five blogs you visit regularly, and tell us briefly WHY you like them. These can be RevGal and Pal bloggers and others ... or news sites, knitting sites, etc. Who are you showing the love to on a pretty constant basis?

Hopefully we will all get to know some new bloggy friends this way!

I don't keep my list in a sidebar (lazy, mostly), but here are several I read every day:
Likehacker: it appeals to my desire to get organized and has a set of tags just for me: "office supply fetish".
Dog and God: I started reading Dogblogger's first blog, written in the voice of her dog, Cub. Cub's gone on to the great dog romp in the sky, but I keep up with this new blog.
The Daily Coyote: I don't know when or how I got hooked on this, but I love the story of a woman raising a coyote pup. Great pictures, and even a good book. As a side note, she tells us from time to time about what's on the message board of the local UMC.
I Can Haz Cheezburger: I <3 me some LOLCats!
Smitten Kitchen: Food pron, for reals. Love the recipes and the commentary.

There are lots more...can't wait to see what the rest of RevGalBlogPals come up with!

Never lie to the dog

Some time ago, I read a novel by Dean Koontz in which the following piece of wisdom was key: Never lie to the dog. No matter what lies you have to tell yourself in the mirror, no matter how bad things get, never lie to the dog.
Everyone should have a safe place to tell the truth. A place where you can say what needs to be said without shame or fear, where you can sort of float the unpleasant truth out there and see how it feels, or be proud for some accomplishment when you think you should be modest. For some, the safe place might be the dog, or a therapist, or a journal.
But I think this kind of truth-telling can be a kind of prayer. It's an honest, soul-baring prayer, in which we admit that we don't always like ourselves or our actions, that we can be unpleasant way down deep, and that we need affirmation far more than we'd like. At least that's what it is for me sometimes.
And it's a kind of prayer I need, because I have discovered in myself an incredible capacity for fantasy, for denying reality, for believing stuff that's just not true. Not lying to the dog (or to God) lets me hear the lies in what I tell myself, and to know that I am loved, that I am smart and capable, that sometimes life is hard, but that I can survive, and even thrive, because I don't do it alone.
It's a new rule at our house, don't lie to the dog. Each of us is committed to finding a place to tell the whole truth when we need to, and it's not one another. I don't know that any marriage can survive that! But we need place where we can say the hard things: I hurt, I'm angry, I don't feel loved, I did a really great thing, whatever. And we need a place where the hard things are accepted and acceptable, where we get a sense that there is a love for us that truly exists without conditions, that celebrates our victories, even when we can't see them clearly, and lets us see that our grief, while real, is not all there is.
For me, that place is God. For the main character in that Koontz novel, it was the dog.
Who is it for you?

I'm back! + Thoughts on online communication

I got home late Sunday night, and jumped right into work with a funeral Monday. Whew! But I'm glad to be home and in my own bed...being the crazy aunt in the basement is just a part-time gig, but one I wish I could have more often. Exceptional One is a delight, and I really hate that I don't get to see her more often.
So on another note, I'm involved in this converstaion online about my DMin group's next class. It looks both exciting and demanding, and all the expectations of us (which are high) have not been clearly articulated. As we have been wont to do in the past, the group of us have been in contact via email to discuss it. Usually this is a good thing; we have very different personalities and work styles, and so we can talk through a lot and get a lot of different perspectives on things.
Not this time. One person's done a lot of legwork about where we will stay and what's being asked of us, which I appreciate, but questions came up about whether or not the class would be pass/fail, as we'd been led to expect, and about the compressed schedule. Some of us have some small anxiety about the timeframe and that the assignments as informally articulated to us seem ambitious. Intriguing and potentially fun, but ambitious.
All this is fine, as far as I'm concerned. Let's talk it out and get whatever info we need, so that we can be comfortable with it. But we have one classmate who's been trying, I think, to calm the waters. It's coming off, to me, as dismissive and condescending, and I think it's pretty well stifled any further conversation.
Here's my problem: if we were having this conversation in person, I'd say something. But we're not. It's happening via email and Facecrack, and that means we're only getting snippets of what one another is communication. I suspect my classmate has read too much anxiety into my emails and those of our other classmates. I don't think we've been able to read the nuances of our questions. And I'm pretty sure that I'm reading condescension in where I'm meant to hear that it isn't a big deal.
I usually love all the means of staying in touch the internet affords. Today, though, I'm reminded of how much of our communication relies on facial expression and tone of voice and intagibles that aren't communicated by words on a screen. So I'm going to let it blow over, and assume the best of all of us concerned. I just regret that here we seem to be having a communication glitch that could affect our relationships.
Or maybe it's just me, hence the letting go.

A huge sigh, a long snooze, and a sad good-bye

It's been three great days with my sister and her family.
I have:
washed and folded many loads of baby clothes
helped organize and put away said baby clothes
helped assemble goodie bags for my niece's 3rd birthday party
helped her mom send out last minute changes to the directions, which had a small but potentially fatal flaw
napped through one Duke game, and am getting ready to snooze through another
done many rounds of dishes--far more than I would do at my house (Ben's job, plus we don't cook often enough)
slept in the basement like the crazy aunt I am
made signs to direct people to the aforementioned birthday party
learned how to upload and edit video (in a very rudimentary way, but still, I'm proud)
read many books and sung many nursery songs
taken my first trip by train (at least half of it; I'll finish it off tomorrow)
walked for an hour in a mall. A real, enclosed mall with lots of fun stores. We don't have malls where I live.
received many, many hugs and kisses
laughed and laughed and laughed
watched Exceptional One (my niece) play and run and be silly and act like the big girl she is
spent time with my sister
and so much more I can't even think about it all!
Tomorrow I go back home, and I'll be sad. Exceptional One is powerfully cute, and Exceptional Two is due in only six weeks...I wish I could stay. But Ben misses me, the WonderMutt misses me, and there's work to be done. (Notice I did not say the spooky Boo cat misses me. That would be a lie. She'd prefer I never come home!)
So sigh...what a great time it's been!
I'll be snoozing in just a few minutes...
and tomorrow's good-bye will be a little sad; I'll be back again in a couple of months or so--when I'll have both a niece and a nephew to play with!

Friday Five: Signs of Hope

From Songbird:

My beloved speaks and says to me: “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away; for now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land. The fig tree puts forth its figs, and the vines are in blossom; they give forth fragrance. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away. Song of Solomon 2:10-13

In the late, late winter, as the snow begins to recede here in Maine, we begin to look almost desperately for signs of spring, signs of hope that the weather has turned and a new day is on the horizon. For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, Easter and Spring twine inextricably, the crocuses and daffodils peeking through the Earth as we await the risen Christ.
Share with us five signs of hope that you can see today or have experienced in the past.

1: The cherry trees are blooming in DC.
2: I've played outside with my niece for the last 3 days.
3: The ponies are back on "our" end of the island, where I can watch them while I eat lunch.
4: There's less than one year left until the deadline for my dissertation. Wait, is that hope or desperation?
5: We're moving toward Easter...always a reminder of resurrection!

Fortune Cookies and train travel

are sources of both wisdom and laughs.
But not these two.
"Darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can do that."
"Let your hook be cast. In the pool where you least expect it will be fish."
Seriously.
First there's the punctuation and scansion...the phrasing's always a bit awkward.
Secondly, there's the cheese factor: these two are particularly cheesy examples, to me. The first is an inane attempt at profundity, and the second is optimistic to the point of absurdity.
Thirdly, I still in the back of my head read fortunes the way we did in college...tacking in the phrase "in bed" at the end. Usually it redeems even the worst fortune cookie saying, and you can at last get a good laugh out of it. Even that doesn't fix these two.

On to the subject of train travel: that's what I did today. I woke up (several times, actually) in the noisiest motel in the world and went to the train station and rode from Rocky Mount NC to Union Station in Washington DC, where I then rode on two different subway trains to get to where my sister picked me up. I didn't get lost anywhere--no small feat for me--and I've spent the afternoon and evening with my sister's family.
I'm presently washing baby clothes so we can get the baby's room squared away. There's also Exceptional One's birthday party to do on Saturday, with treat bags to pack up and some other things to pick up. I'm glad to be here...the kiddo is the cutest ever, and my sister's house is generally a pretty easy place to be. They're relaxed hosts and I'm just here to help out, anyway. So I'm looking forward to a good time. And cuteness, of course!

Too tired to blog...

at least for now. But a post on fortune-cookie fortunes is coming.
Meanwhile, here's this:

see more Lolcats and funny pictures
Hope you get a chuckle from it. I did.
Or maybe it was an unladylike snort.

The disciples remembered...a sermon on John 2:13-22

Every good storyteller (and even most of the bad ones) has a purpose to telling his stories. I remember an old volume we had when I was growing up of Aesop’s fables, and getting to the point of each one: sour grapes with the fox and preparing for the hard times to come with the ants and the grasshopper. I remember the songs my parents loved that told stories: “Mr. Bojangles” and “American Pie” come to mind. Many of these stories have points which are not always very clear to us, and the stories about Jesus in the gospel are often in that category. We’re left wondering, “what on earth does that mean?” and “what are we supposed to do about it?”
Today’s story is one of those. As we read the gospels, there are two stories—at two different times in Jesus’ life—about Jesus driving moneychangers and vendors out of the temple. We are perhaps most familiar with the stories told in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, which speak of Jesus’ saying that the house of God has been turned into a den of thieves. The way they tell the story, this event happens right before Jesus’ trial and crucifixion, even provoked them. John tells the story a little differently, though.
The way John tells it, this is the second “public” act of Jesus’ ministry. In John’s gospel, the story of the cleansing of the temple comes right after the story of Jesus turning water into wine at the wedding party in Cana. From there, says John, Jesus went up to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover.
This time of year, it is good for us to remember the Passover: the last of the plagues, when Moses was trying to lead the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt, also called the plague of the firstborn. It’s one of the bloodier stories of our faith: how God sent a messenger of death to kill the firstborn son in each house that was not marked on the doorframe with blood from a fresh-killed lamb. This celebration of liberation would be celebrated by Jews for thousands of years, to this day. Because tradition says that Jesus’ trial and death and resurrection occur on or immediately after the Passover celebration, our Easter celebration is set each year by the Sunday following the Passover, which is itself tied to a lunar calendar, which is why it moves around from year to year. The Passover is important for John because he wants us to see clearly that, like the lamb slain in each Hebrew home the night of the last plague, Jesus’ death and resurrection make possible our resurrection.
For the Passover celebration, thousands of Jews from all over the known world made their way to Jerusalem to offer sacrifice. Because it was impossible to bring a perfect and unblemished animal over a great distance, worshippers needed to purchase an animal there in Jerusalem to meet the standards for sacrifice. Vendors of sacrificial animals performed a needed service in the area, making sure that suitable animals were available to all who needed them. Because the temple only accepted Jewish coins, those who had money from other places—either earned by their work in another country where they lived and worked, or received in payment for goods or services there at home—needed to change their foreign currency before their offering of money would be accepted in the temple. Both moneychangers and the sellers of cattle, sheep, and doves were vital to the operation of the temple, especially when these special festivals rolled around.
So it’s natural that we would be a little confused when Jesus makes himself a whip, overturns their tables, and drives both men and beasts out of the court of the Gentiles in the Temple. Matthew, Mark, and Luke make a little more sense out of this dramatic act by suggesting that these businesspeople were thieves, taking an unfair profit or engaging in unethical business practices…and because it’s clear that they had the sanction of the high priest to be there, it’s not surprising that this attack might have brought about the accusations against Jesus at the end of his ministry. It all begins to make sense to us…until we look at it from John’s perspective.
John’s gospel is different from the other three. It seems to have been written later, as much as 70 years or more after Jesus’ death. John’s gospel is more theological, and he identifies signs that prove that Jesus is the Son of God. The changing of water into wine at Cana is one of those signs for John, as is Jesus’ challenge to the Jewish authorities when he says, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” Only after Jesus’ death and resurrection will the disciples remember what Jesus said, and understand that he was speaking of his body, and not the very large stone temple in Jerusalem.
Jesus’ cleansing of the moneychangers and animal-sellers in the temple is, I think, another of these signs. I’m not sure any of the disciples got it right away; when John tells us that the disciples remembered what Jesus said, sometimes he goes so far as to say that they don’t remember until after Jesus was raised from the dead. For us, who have come so many years after those first disciples, we can take some comfort in knowing that John intends us to understand these stories in the light of Jesus’ death and resurrection.
In that light, we can look then at the cleansing of the temple and wonder, what was Jesus so mad about? If it wasn’t about thieves cheating the people of God, as it seems to be in the other gospels, then what is going on? Perhaps the key comes only when we take an imaginary step away from the temple, away from the Jews, and remember who Jesus called to come and know God and what kind of people he spent time with. It helps, too, to remember where they were: in the court of the Gentiles, inside the temple.
The real issue here, I suspect, was not that they were doing business in the temple itself: as we’ve learned, the services provided by the money-changes and sellers of animals were crucial to the temple system. I think maybe Jesus was more concerned with where, exactly, in the temple they were. The temple was laid out in series of courts through which people could enter and find their place. There was a court of women after which women could go no further. There was a court of priests, where only the priests could go, and inside that, the holy of holies, where only one priest could go, and then only on the appropriate day. The court of the Gentiles was as far as those who were not Jews could go—the closest they could come to where the Jews believed God was. This is what upset Jesus so much: not the business that they were doing, but that where they did it interfered with how people worshiped and interacted with God—something Jesus came to make easier, not harder.
On this third Sunday in Lent, we are living in the light of Jesus’ death and resurrection. We don’t really know any other way to be; we certainly wouldn’t give back the gift of salvation, let alone our understanding of the grace of God. This Lenten season calls us to think about what grace means to us, how we might make more room in our lives for God, and what changes we might make in our lives to be better people. Lent is also a good time for us to think about our own stories of faith and see where they lead us, what we see differently now as we remember the people and events and experiences that have made us who we are.
In Celtic Christianity, which originated in Ireland and Scotland centuries ago, there is the concept of “thin places.” Thin places are places where God seems particularly close to us, where it seems like we can almost reach out and touch Jesus, where the Spirit of God is so close we can almost see God working. The difficulty with these experiences, I think, is that so often we don’t know what’s happening until later. We may not even realize what’s happening until it’s over, until we’ve seen the event in a different light, until, like the disciples, we have a chance to look back and to remember.
When I was in college, I had one of those experiences. I was a fairly typical college student, in that I didn’t go regularly to church while I was away at school. The Methodist church closest to the campus, almost right across the street from my freshman dorm, was full of retirees who had come to the community for a quieter life, and weren’t always as welcoming as they thought they were to a crowd of students. I can’t tell you that there was ever an unkind word said or anything done to give us that impression, but even the Wesley Foundation, located next to the church, felt the chill from time to time. So I was not a particularly good Methodist in college.
During my senior year, a friend started a Pentecostal ministry and I began to attend worship with him. We had what you might call a kind of convert’s zeal, convinced we had it all figured out and everyone who didn’t believe exactly what we did had it all wrong. Not all Pentecostals are like that, and I’ve since gotten over it, but I’m sharing it with you today because it gives some context to the rest of this story. I was also a member of a coed service fraternity that was full of all kinds of interesting people: Christians and Wiccans and Muslims and people who didn’t know what they believed—and we called one another “brother.” Even the girls. It was silly, but it was fun, and when we said “brother” to one another, we knew we belonged.
Apparently at some point during this year, another friend from the Pentecostal church and I were driving somewhere, with two other members of our fraternity. They happened to be members of the campus Wiccan group, a kind of neopagans, and we had not always been particularly kind to them. I’m not sure we ever said or did anything that anyone could point out, but I’m confident that we were not particularly warm and welcoming to them. On that trip, we nearly had an accident, and my friend Kris said, “we have to pull over and pray right now!” I don’t know what made me do it, but I turned to our fraternity brothers in the back seat and asked if they minded if we prayed.
To be honest, I don’t remember this incident at all. To this day, I can’t think of any reason the four of us would be in a car together. I especially can’t understand why they would have chosen to ride with us, when we had so clearly drawn a line between who was in and who was out of the Kingdom of God, at least as we saw it. Everything I know about this story comes from one of the people in the backseat that night, who emailed me several years ago to tell me that I had played a significant role in their coming to Christian faith. My consideration in asking if it would be okay with them if Kris and I prayed showed them that God was more generous and more gracious than we had been in the past.
There was a thin place that night in that car, that night I can’t remember. For just a little while, God reached through and opened up a little path into someone’s heart. To this day, I don’t know if it was theirs or mine—maybe both. I can’t even say that this interaction played a role in my becoming a pastor; I had already been a pastor for several years before I got that email. What I do know is that something happened in that car that night that we didn’t understand at the time. We didn’t recognize that something momentous was going on. But ten years later, someone remembered, and was gracious enough to reach out to me and share it with me.
It was such a little thing. Just once I set aside the condescension my little church had for these two people we should have called friends and did call brothers, and when I did, a little space was made for Jesus Christ to make a difference in the lives of two people. I don’t take any credit for this; how could I, when I can’t even remember it? But I treasure two things about this: that someone thought enough of me to tell me about it, and that I was there at one of those thin places where God reaches into our lives.
One of the big mistakes that we make as Christians is that sometimes we try too hard. My friends and I were trying to be the best kind of Christians we knew how to be, but in trying too hard, we cut ourselves off from sharing God’s love and grace with others. That Methodist church tried hard; they gave land and space and buildings to the Wesley Foundation and supported Methodist students on mission trips and with Bible studies. But they tried a little too hard to make us just like them, and it made us uncomfortable to be there. Living faithful and obedient Christian lives is not about trying to be Christian, but about simply being Christian. It’s not about what we can do, but about what we let God do in us. That’s what happened that day in the car, I think. I stopped trying so hard and just was Christian, gracious, in that moment, and Christ reached through me and into their hearts and lives.
As we think about what it means to keep a holy Lent, to be Christians, to follow Christ wholly, perhaps we can look back over our lives for some thin places where Jesus touched us and changed us. And perhaps this time of introspection, of thinking about what it is Jesus has done for us in his life, death, and resurrection, can help us to create thin places for others to come in contact with God, to share our faith and our hope. I pray so.

Friday Five: Mid-Lent Check-In

From Sophia at RevGalBlogPals:
The pastor of my grad school parish once gave a fascinating reflection, at about this mid-point in the season, called "How to Survive the Mid-Lent Crisis"! As I recall, his main point was that by halfway through the season we have often found it very challenging to live up to our original plans....But, he suggested--on the analogy of the healing and reframing of our life plans that can happen during a mid-*life* crisis--that that can be even more fruitful.
So here's an invitation to check in on the state of your spirit midway through "this joyful season where we prepare to celebrate the paschal mystery with mind and heart renewed" (Roman Missal). Hopefully there's a good deal of grace, and not too much crisis, in your mid-Lenten experience!

1. Did you give up, or take on, anything special for Lent this year?

I decided to take better care of myself and work on being my best "me," bearing in mind that in some areas I will need to push myself and in others, to be more gracious. I've flippantly referred to this plan as giving up the dark circles under my eyes for Lent.

2. Have you been able to stay with your original plans, or has life gotten in the way?

Pretty much. I've slept more and exercised a little more. I've been fighting a persistent stomach bug, so my eating hasn't been all I could wish. My usual eating plan is hard to follow when you don't want anything to eat but maybe crackers and chicken soup.

3. Has God had any surprising blessings for you during this Lent?

It's been more rewarding than I've thought. I've always been fairly highly strung as far as stress. Add to that a deep-rooted proclivity to procrastinate, and you have a recipe for disaster. I've been somewhat better at managing that part of myself. On the other hand, the house isn't any cleaner. So the taking care of the house to remove that stress on me (I hate a dirty house only marginally more than I hate house-cleaning) has not worked out. Still, there are weeks to go.

4. What is on your inner and/or outer agenda for the remainder of Lent and Holy Week?

Whew. I need to write a contemporary service for Holy Week. I'm thinking of modifying a Tenebrae service from my collection. I'd planned to do that earlier, to accomodate a couple of new musicians who need extra practice time. So that's for next week. Mostly, I'm planning to keep juggling the same balls and work on putting some of them down from time to time.

5. Where do you most long to see resurrection, in your life and/or in the world, this Easter?

In our larger community life as a Church, I'd love to see resurrection in our relationships, especially with those with whom we have disagreements. I'm following the Prop 8 stuff in CA because it affects a friend, and also because I'm struggling with the justice issues involved. In my tradition (United Methodist) and my area (Southeastern Jurisdiction), participants in the conversation seem to be pigeon-holed into either fundamentalists or flaming liberals. I've avoided public comment because there seems to be no room for me in the middle, and I'm not interested in the labels. This also applies to dialogue with/about Muslims, war, poverty, our relationships with other countries, the global economy...I wish we could have a fresh revelation from God about how to gracefully and God-fully have these conversations.

Bonus: Share a favorite scripture, prayer, poem, artwork, or musical selection that speaks Lenten spring to your heart.
I'm following Carrot Top Studio's Lenten Art Journey this year as a meditation aid and provoker of thought and prayer.

Small Graces for a blustery Thursday

1: I did get part of my day off, off.
2: People I work with really care about what we do. Someone pointed out today that we hadn't talked about how to make the arts festival, which is the project for my doctoral research, welcoming to those outside the church. Food for thought.
3: Getting inspired (a little) to work on a sermon for Sunday.
4: A busy Sunday: new members, baby baptism, blessing of prayer shawls, participation by children in leading worship.
5: All of my kids at church are wonderful. This one is particularly brilliant and amazing this week. She made a solar powered fountain for a science project. Is that cool or what???

Lenten Musings: Listening at Golgotha

My Bible study group chose Peter Storey's Listening at Golgotha as their Lenten study. I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed the clarity of his thought and speech. The book originated out of a series of meditations on the "Seven Last Words of Christ" for Holy Week preached at Duke Chapel in 2002.
I missed last week's study for a conference (and last Monday night's "Mamma Mia" singalong), so here are some quotes from the first two readings:
The first word: "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing." (Luke 23:34)

With those words, "Father, forgive them," a new way of life patterned by Jessu has been passed on from calvary to us all. Difficult though it may be, the practice of enemy love lies at the center of our salvation story...
If we claim to follow Jesus, we must believe that love, not force, is God's mightiest weapon; that evil may seem to be rampant as it certainly appeared to be on Good Friday, but it is only the second strongest power in the universe.
Let us pray for the grace to live by these words from the cross.

The second word: "Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise." (Luke 23:43)

Some tell us that following Jesus is a simple matter of inviting him into our hearts. But when we do that, Jesus always asks, "May I bring my friends?"...
For us to be made right with God, repentance is always necessary, but repentance is not so much a condition for forgiveness as a consequence of it...on the Cross, the word of forgiveness is spoken first; it gives birth to one felon's contrite cry. This truth changes the equation of salvation. When will we learn that we do not repent in order to find pardon? We repent because we discover how deeply we have been pardoned--how much we have been forgiven.

Powerful stuff. I took two classes with Dr. Storey when I was at Duke, and came to admire deeply both him and his wife, Elizabeth, who are truly wonderful people. What strikes me most deeply so far is the notion of pardon begetting repentance rather than the other way around, which mainline Protestantism's insistence on conversion so often gets wrong. I think this is what I objected to so much in a recent workshop on evangelism: we reduce to a work of our own logic this miracle of pardon and acceptance when we forget that it is all about relationships (I am a broken record on this subject). It is not about what we do, but what God has done and our response. And even our refusal to do our part does not negate or devalue the love and grace of God.

I did something for me today

Well, I did something for me and the WonderMutt.
I went home intending to do some form of exercise: walk the dog or get on the exercise bike, something. But Ben was home and needed my help with something, and by the time I finished with him there wasn't time to both exercise and re-groom.
So I spent a good long while out in the yard brushing the dog.
We had a nice time.
There were cuddles and face kisses, and lots of hair blowing across the neighbor's lawn.
Tomorrow I will exercise.
Today I'm just appreciating the me time. When do I ever just sit in the sun?

5 Graces for Sunday night

1: It's my week to preach. Always chaotic, because my schedule's full every week and it's hard to find time to prepare, but I always enjoy it.
2: The weather's beautiful!
3: I've been catching up on Buffy and Firefly episodes online.
4: My classmate who was in Kuwait is now home safe with his family.
5: I have a fresh pedicure...a small luxury (or necessity, with my back) but not one to be underestimated.

F5: Hasty Pudding Edition

Songbird to the rescue:
Our regular poster, Sally, having been oppressed by Blogger today, I bring you a hasty Friday Five on the subject of pudding. If you are not a fan of pudding, then you will feel solidarity with Sally, except that you will be oppressed by pudding instead. ;-)

1) First of all, thumbs up? or thumbs down? Do you like pudding?

Sort of. Not really. Thumbs down, I guess.
(I like almost all chocolate gooey things, but I'm skeptical of anything custard-like.)

2) Instant or cooked? (Does anyone make pudding from scratch?)

Instant is satisfying from time to time, when I'm in the mood for chocolate goo. I confess, I usually prefer undercooked brownies to satisfy the gooey craving.

3) If you had to choose, would you prefer corn pudding or figgy pudding?

Corn, no question. Figs are odd fruit. I'll eat an occasional one fresh, or baked in a Newton, but that's about it. no figgy breads, cakes, puddings, preserves, pies, etc. for me.

4) Have you ever finger painted with pudding?

Nope. Sounds like fun.

5) Finally, what is the matter with Mary Jane?

Rice pudding doesn't appeal to me either!

Bonus: Share a favorite recipe that includes pudding!

Mmm...if I had a favorite, it would probably be this: Lemon Lush. As sort of trifle with a shortbready crust, creamy filling, and lovely tart filling. The linnk takes you to a close approximation of what I remember. Needs pecans in the crust (I am in the South, of course).

Musings on a 20 year old truck

I love my truck.
I've always loved this truck, at least since my dad bought it when I was in high school. It's a great truck: a Ford F-150, with no modern frills, although I'm sure the rear-wheel anti-lock brakes was a premium feature back in the day. It's tan, and used to have a walnut stripe, but it got a fresh paint job a few years back.
Like every old vehicle, it's got its issues. For example, right after Ben's car blew up and I started driving it every day, it needed a new battery and alternator. Since we've always had major issues with our vehicles at one point or another (my favorite being the one where the mechanic, who was wonderful, said, "you've got a deeper problem than I can fix. You need to get rid of this car,") so we typically go to the worst case scenario with every new issue.
When it started making a scary-bad metallic rattling noise on Monday on my way to an out of town event this week, I thought, "Oh, crap, what can it be now?" I really thought it was the lifters...requiring a partial rebuild, basically, and very expensive, but also not something I had to rush to the mechanic for. I was scheduled for a tune-up on Thursday, so I thought I'd just nurse it along and see what the mechanic said.
If my diagnosis had been right, I'd have been a genius...and we'd had put in heavier weight oil and limped along as long as we could.
But I was wrong. Good news: an easy repair, and very reasonable. Bad-ish news: my diagnosis was wrong, and I could have easily been stranded somewhere on my was back from out of town. Water pump. Fan clutch.
Fixed.
So now the truck runs better than it has since I got it last fall, and I'm starting to think about a name. All good vehicles need a name, I think, and the truck is very good. Ben's suggested Mae, and I'm thinking Mathilda. Not something terribly cheesy (I've rejected Iola and Lula Mae out of hand. They're great names, but not for this truck).
I'd love to have some other suggestions. I'm thinking practical, with a little whimsy and an unselfconsious dignity.
Of course, it is (just) a truck...

And a bonus 5 graces:
1: it's like a dog parade outside--everyone's out walking
2: the weather's beautiful
3: my truck is excellent
4: the dog was powerfully cute and cuddlesome last night
5: this week has been kind of fun!

Busy, busy bee

After Lent's false start last week with the stomach yuck, this week seems to be more productive. I didn't realize how hard it would be to try to be the best me this Lent, or as I described it to someone recently, what I'm giving up for Lent this year is the dark smudges under my eyes.
I've got better on sleep and I feel more rested, although I did sleep ten hours last night and was late to a meeting this morning. Oh, well. I needed the sleep. And I went home and got on the exercise bike for a little while; if I'd only had fresh food in the house, I could have made myself a good lunch. Small steps, I think.
And my doctoral project is moving forward. In talking to a friend earlier this week, I realized that what I need is a concrete plan for what I want to be doing and where I want to be doing it. I've always been sort of relaxed about things, waiting to see where time took me. Now, though, I've got some things I really want to do, and i''m afraid if I don't plan to do them, they'll never happen. So I'm going to be thinking about how to structure that. Do I need a 5 year plan? A 10 year plan? Do I want to try just setting a series of goals, and maybe not need deadlines? I don't know. Much to ponder, and to pray on. It's all exciting, and I don't want to get overwhelmed or to let something slip by me. That happens all too often.

Here are five graces for today. I'm trying to do better with these, honest!
1: a great planning team meeting for the Arts Festival, which is the focus of my DMin project.
2: today I spent some time doing something good for myself. I didn't hate it too much, and for once I didn't resent the time.
3: I feel a little more on top of things today.
4: I had a sleepover at a friend's house (half-way to the meeting earlier this week) and we had a "Mamma Mia" sing-a-long with chocolate and nuts and a fun dog to play with.
5: Tomorrow is my day off. Joy!

Snow, snow, snow

Again with the snow!
We're fortunate her, relatively, since we almost never get snow, and what we do get rarely sticks. Lucky, that is, if you don't like snow.
I do.
But I don't get to see it often. Living where I do, close to the water in the South, snow usually passes us by, or turns to rain before it gets to us. About once a year, we get a little dusting that comes off the ocean, and that's it. If we're lucky, a little sticks to the grass and we get to see how pretty it is.
It's better for us when there's not much snow, since people don't know how to handle it. Driving's a real issue, and one I take seriously now that I'm driving the truck, since it's light in the back. I could solve this by putting bags of sand or something in the back, but it's almost never an issue, so I haven't gotten around to it.
Tonight's snow was a bonus. We were supposed to maybe get a dusting this morning, and then it was going to move on. Instead, we actually got a little accumulation. Yay!
Of course, I'm out of town. In the truck. And there's a winter weather advisory about black ice.
No worries; I'll let my friend, who I'm staying with, who lived in New England for years, drive in the morning. By the afternoon, all will be well, and I'll take the truck back home.
And maybe give some thought to putting some weight in the back.
In the meantime, here are five snowy graces:
1: Snow glitters in the moonlight.
2: I love the way doggie paw prints dimple the snow...could pass on the yellow patches.
3: The sound of falling snow.
4: It looks beautiful and doesn't last.
5: Four times...I've seen snow four times this year!

A big good day

I went back to work yesterday, after a few days of the yuck virus. 'nuff said about that.
Yesterday, we learned how to use the church's emergency defibrillators. And much to my relief, lots of people were there, so the odds of me having to know how to do it are small. Judging from the turnout, and the number of people I know are CPR-certified, we are well-covered in the (heaven forbid) event of an emergency.
And that was fine, but exhausting. After two days in the house, I was both anxious to get out and worn out by the experience. At least I've finally seen all of "Firefly" and "Serenity," and I caught up on the first episodes of "Dollhouse", so it was basically an all-Joss Whedon convalesence. I even watched a couple of "Buffy" episodes, just for fun.
Today was long but good. Our morning services went well and were pretty well attended, despite the cold rain. Rumor has it there may be snow overnight (not that it will stick) and in the morning, and it poured last night and today. And then there was the evening service.
We rededicated the Education Building tonight. Several years ago, the church decided it needed to expand the fellowship hall and kitchen, add some entry space, and make all three floors accessible by installing an elevator. The renovations cost nearly 4 times as much as the original building, and added relatively little square footage. Last month, due to several years of faithful and generous giving, the renovation/expansion program was paid off, and we started planning tonight's service.
I'm always anxious when we change things up, and so we picked music I knew the worship team could do very well, and that I felt like the worshippers could pick up fairly easily. We sang a traditional hymn that was part of the 1962 dedication of the original building, and had a note burning right there in the fellowship hall. That was the most anxiety-producing part for me. I made sure we had a bucket of sand ready in case we needed it (splashes less than water and much easier to clean up than the fire extinguisher, which was my back-up) and nagged Eric unmercifully about having a reasonable size container to burn it in, and not making too much smoke. It worked about really well; everyone had a piece of the note (okay, a copy of the note) and put it in the "cauldron," as Eric called it--a pyrex casserole. Fortunately, we didn't burn all that--just a few representative pieces, which worked really well. We didn't even need the sand!
Great singing from the worship team, really great cake and ice cream when it was over. Just an all-around good day.
And now I'm tired. Really tired. But happy, too.