I was able to preach this sermon for my final preaching class (I believe it's more formally called "Lay Speakers Deliver Effective Sermons) as well as for the closing commitment service. I felt it went fairly well, but as always with speaking, it's a learning experience--learning myself and my own comfort zones (and how to get out of them) and learning how to be more in tune with God and the message He wants me to speak. I felt I was doing exactly what God wanted me to be doing at that moment, though, and speaking the words He wanted me to speak -- an emotional high to carry through the early week. I hope I never stop feeling this way after preaching.
INTRODUCTION TO SCRIPTURE: Paul writes these words to the people at Corinth. In a flourishing city of approximately 500,000 merchants, sailors, professional gamblers, athletes and freed slaves, the Corinthian Church became a melting pot of the microcosm of which it was a part. Paul writes to encourage them to continue to try to live in harmony and build on their common foundation, although their national, social, economic and religious backgrounds were very different. (paraphrased from Compact Bible Dictionary, written and compiled by Ronald F. Youngblood, F.F. Bruce & R.K. Harrison)
[Read 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10]
PRAYER: Heavenly Father, may the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, you who is our rock and our redeemer. Amen
MEDITATION:
“Something to Chew On”
I.
I am the daughter of an amazing cook and baker. Just about anything my mother sets out to make turns out delicious. So, it’s only natural that I’ve grown up to countless questions of my own cooking abilities.
“Have you learned how to make your mom’s macaroni and cheese yet?”
“Oh, that pie was just delicious. What kind do you make?”
“Did you help your mother make this amazing soup?”
Well, I can tell you that I’ve set out more times than one to imitate her style—to create that rich, chocolate pudding or achieve the perfect consistency of broth in soup—but I look at her recipes and I see these cryptic directions (they may sound familiar to you)—“a pinch of salt,” “a sprinkle each of cinnamon and allspice”, “a few shakes of this and that.”
I stare transfixed at the page, wondering just how to measure a sprinkle or a shake. What if my “pinch” is bigger than my mom’s? What if it’s too small? I turn to my mother for clarification and usually receive another response you may find familiar, “Just do what feels right.”
Friends, I can tell you that I’ve had more flat cookies, crusty brownies, dry macaroni and cheese dishes, overcooked noodles and soupy rice than the rest. I’ve missed more cups of flour and sugar, more eggs. I’ve neglected to let my biscuits rise all the way. I’ve left the eggs out of pumpkin pie.
But, I can tell you that each time I have forgotten these things, I have learned how important it is that these ingredients are there. Each time I’ve overcooked pasta, I’ve learned just how to know when it’s the right time to take the heat off.
I still have this example I’m following, but I’m learning that in the absence of set recipes, I’m beginning to learn for myself how to create something new rather than simply follow what has already been done.
II.
Paul says, speaking to the Corinthians, “Here we are, then, speaking for Christ, as though God himself were making his appeal through us.” (2 Corinthians 5:20) We have this message to share, this “treasure in clay jars”, as we’ve heard before. ( 2 Corinthians 4:7). But God didn’t hand down the message typed in MLA format with 1-inch margins. God sent the commandments, yes. God sent the prophets. God even sent his son. We believe that God continues to speak through the Holy Spirit.
And yet, when Paul says again in the text, “This is the hour to receive God’s favor; today is the day to be saved!” I know that I begin to wonder, “Where is this message we’re supposed to give? What role do we have in all of this?”
I am just another speaker, another voice in the cacophony of others, but I believe that God is calling us to this: to stop waiting for an exact recipe, perhaps to stop trying to pass on a recipe of leadership to the next leaders following us. If God was our mothers, he would tell us to stop trying so hard to determine what the right sized sprinkle or pinch is and just do what feels right.
Just do what feels right? I can hear it now, “But that would be too hard. We need guidelines. We need order. We can’t just have chaos...and if we just do what “feels right” ...we might just come up with something NEW.”
Are you hearing what I’m hearing?
Friends, we will never be without guidelines and order. The last time I checked, we still had this book. (hold up Bible) I’m going to guess that those of you seated here today have seen this before.
Our challenge is to make this book come alive for those around us. Are we up to the challenge?
III.
In her book, Mudhouse Sabbath, Lauren F. Winner captures the words of a sixth century theologian, Julianus Pomerius, encouraging readers to break a fast and “unbend one’s self” in order to practice hospitality. She shares later, “I understand why he had spoken of hospitality as unbending one’s self. The irony is that the unbending requires inviting my neighbors into the very places where I am most bent.” (pp. 46 and 53)
IV.
I know that if I wait until any place I live is “clean enough” for visitors, I’m going to be waiting a long time. I know too, and perhaps more importantly, that if I’m waiting for perfection before I allow people into the “bent” and just plain rusted areas of my life, I’m going to be waiting a long while. In fact, I just might not have to do it at all!
In allowing people into the imperfect areas of our lives, we allow two things. First, we allow that they may see that leadership and ministry is not about perfection. And, seeing imperfect leaders, they may see where they are able to lead too.
Second, when we allow people to see our faults, we are opening ourselves up to those same areas that need change. Where do we need reconciliation? Where might we need comfort?
When we allow this honesty, we open ourselves up for God’s help.
V.
A pastor tells of his own encounter with the need for this reconciliation. In preparing for Ash Wednesday, his church had entered into a rigorous debate regarding the imposition of ashes at the Ash Wednesday service.
“Some people in the congregation argued against the practice claiming that it could promote holier-than-thou attitudes amongst the faithfully smudged. Others worried that the aftermath of the ritual would look a bit too much like a public display of piety the kind that the Gospel of Matthew cautions us about. Objecting, still others claimed that they found it to be a powerful way to grapple with mortality, to participate in a sign of humility, to mark the beginning of Lent.
“What was Ash Wednesday, after all, without some soot on one's brow? Attempting to mediate, the pastor suggested a compromise. Set it up, he declared, so that individuals could decide. If people wanted ashes, they could mark themselves.
“So when it came time for the service, a liturgy which also included the Lord's Supper, the pastor stood and explained that worshippers were to come forward for the sacrament. First they would receive the wafer—‘Body of Christ.’ Next they would receive the wine—‘Blood of Christ.’ Then, the pastor gestured to an elder who was standing there holding a small saucer of ashes. If the worshippers so desired, they could self-impose ashes. So, the people stood and came. . . Decently and in order, except for one small problem, the pastor had failed to explain the meaning of a key liturgical term ‘impose.’
“He came to this realization when the first man to approach received a wafer, dipped it in wine, then turned, and dunked his sodden disk in the plate of ashes, before eating it.
“So startled was the congregation by this strange act of penitence that they were compelled to rethink their liturgy. . . Never again, remarked the pastor, will I suggest that people ‘self-impose.’ But, I wonder, as unpalatable as it might seem, if this man in tasting and swallowing ashes might actually be telling us something important about this day and this season.
“So many of us, still think of Lent as a time to give something up, a season to deny ourselves chocolate for forty days. . . as if that will somehow cultivate spiritual maturity. In eating ashes, this man may provide us with a different perspective on Lent. . . Perhaps it is not a season to give up common pleasures. Perhaps it is a time for us chew on our mortality.” (http://home.netcom.com/~jealsup/ash6e.html)
VI.
The reteller of the story continues with an explanation that “For Paul, righteousness is a human possibility.” Though we may be faced with denial and a knowledge that “we will all, eventually, fall down,” the apostle Paul “pushes us to attempt reconciling acts and rest affirmed in the integrity of God. All this because we have been marked. Not by a sign that we can put on ourselves, for really we cannot self-impose our identity.”
“So we mark each other here not merely with a thumbprint of grit hoping to commemorate our mortality, but we smear a cross on each other's foreheads to remind us that we are marked by another.
“The one who marks us all that we might no longer be slaves to mortality, but free to be God's righteousness in this world.” (see above source)
VII.
So marked, where does our hesitation lie? The wall has been beaten down. If we are no longer bound by our mortality and sin, then we have free reign to answer God’s calling on our lives.
VIII.
I would like to share The Message translation of this passage with you which shares a direct plea from Paul to the church at Corinth. Perhaps it will help to have it in contemporary language.
He writes,
“Companions as we are in this work with you, we beg you, please don’t squander one bit of this marvelous life God has given us. God reminds us, “I heard your call in the nick of time; The day you needed me, I was there to help.” Well, now is the right time to listen, the day to be helped. Don’t put it off; don’t frustrate God’s work by showing up late, throwing a question mark over everything we’re doing. Our work as God’s servants gets validated—or not—in the details. People are watching us as we stay at our post, alertly, unswervingly...in hard times, tough times, bad times; when we’re beaten up, jailed, and mobbed; working hard, working late, working without eating; with pure heart, clear head, steady hand; in gentleness, holiness, and honest love; when we’re telling the truth, and when God’s showing his power; when we’re doing our best setting things right; when we’re praised, and when we’re blamed; slandered, and honored; true to our word, though distrusted; ignored by the world, but recognized by God; terrifically alive, though rumored to be dead; beaten within an inch of our lives, but refusing to die; immersed in tears, yet always filled with deep joy; living on handouts, yet enriching many, having nothing, having it all.
“Dear, dear Corinthians, I can’t tell you how much I long for you to enter this wide-open, spacious life. We didn’t fence you in. The smallness you feel comes from within you. Your lives aren’t small, but you’re living them in a small way. I’m speaking as plainly as I can and with great affection. Open up your lives. Live openly and expansively!”
IX.
Are we ready?
Are we ready to open up our lives and live fully in “this wide-open, spacious life”?
God is calling, “Are we ready?”
I know I am.
Are you?
Amen
Monday, February 11, 2008
Thursday, January 3, 2008
12. The things that keep me up at night
My Closet: Old Navy"Made for you in Cambodia"Aeropostale"Made in Pakistan"The Gap"Made in Vietnam"Express"Made in Hong Kong"The Gap"Made in Turkey"The Gap"Made in India"The Gap"Made in Philippines"The Gap"Made in Northern Mariana Islands"Old Navy"Made in El Salvador"Alia (bought at Goodwill--does second-hand labor abuse make it any less?)"Made in Indonesia"The list goes on, and I struggle to find anything made in the United States. It begs the question--what do we do to erase the contradiction between our faithful beliefs in serving the poor when our clothes remind us that we continually let the poor serve us?
Thursday, December 20, 2007
11. Morning To-Do
DONE French essay: 200-250
Journalism stories: two
DONE Ice cream scoops: check
DONE ICONS--read and review
DONE Call Kathleen regarding music practice for Saturday Christmas Pageant Rehearsal
DONE Learn Angel lines; try to be angelic
DONE Brainstorm for Saturday Youth Party
DONE Bake something Belgian chocolate-related for WHATW
Vacuum
Take down trash
DONE Bake, wrap, write, assemble, etc: friends' gifts for final pre-break day
DONE Visit Grandpa over at Cov. Michigan
Order senior pictures
Confirmands' Rally emails--really now, get on the ball
Kingdom Assigment brainstorming, continued
maybe Albion Scholars information
maybe knitting
maybe PDI
maybe CP
maybe
wrapping, baking, misc. Christmas preparations
Journalism stories: two
DONE Ice cream scoops: check
DONE ICONS--read and review
DONE Call Kathleen regarding music practice for Saturday Christmas Pageant Rehearsal
DONE Learn Angel lines; try to be angelic
DONE Brainstorm for Saturday Youth Party
DONE Bake something Belgian chocolate-related for WHATW
Vacuum
Take down trash
DONE Bake, wrap, write, assemble, etc: friends' gifts for final pre-break day
DONE Visit Grandpa over at Cov. Michigan
Order senior pictures
Confirmands' Rally emails--really now, get on the ball
Kingdom Assigment brainstorming, continued
maybe Albion Scholars information
maybe knitting
maybe PDI
maybe CP
maybe
wrapping, baking, misc. Christmas preparations
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
10. Reflections on Three Kings
As I was leading our church's contemporary service tonight and we read through the Christmas story, I half-hatched a reflection on the story of the Wise Men, a story I'd never really given much attention to before.
1 In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, 2 asking, "Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage." 3 When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him; 4 and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them when the Messiah was to be born. 5 They told him, "In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it has been written by the profit:
6 "And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,
are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;
for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel."
7 Then Herod secretly called for the wise men and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. 8 Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, "Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage." 9 When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was. 10 When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. 11 On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. 12 And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.
-Matthew 2:1-12
We are well aware of the conflict in this story. Yet, we allow it to stay hidden underneath the main narrative of the three kings' homage to Jesus as they come to praise and rejoice at his side. The Herod narrative is still very present underneath though.
Similarly, we come to worship to rejoice, often taking our own long path to get there--hurrying to get a quick dinner on the table for evening services, wrestling children into clothes or running quick errands for morning services, pushing aside other to-dos to get there on time. But as we come to praise and rejoice in God's presence, we come with our own conflicts and turmoil "brewing" underneath, distracting us even when our main purpose for being present is clear.
Similarly again we know we cannot stay at Jesus' side forever, and we must eventually choose which path to take away from this holy place.
As the kings left, "they left for their own country by another road" or in other versions, " they returned home by a different road" knowing that to go the same way they had come spelled disaster.
As we leave the holy place of our churches, are we called to return home by a different road than we came?
1 In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, 2 asking, "Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage." 3 When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him; 4 and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them when the Messiah was to be born. 5 They told him, "In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it has been written by the profit:
6 "And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,
are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;
for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel."
7 Then Herod secretly called for the wise men and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. 8 Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, "Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage." 9 When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was. 10 When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. 11 On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. 12 And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.
-Matthew 2:1-12
We are well aware of the conflict in this story. Yet, we allow it to stay hidden underneath the main narrative of the three kings' homage to Jesus as they come to praise and rejoice at his side. The Herod narrative is still very present underneath though.
Similarly, we come to worship to rejoice, often taking our own long path to get there--hurrying to get a quick dinner on the table for evening services, wrestling children into clothes or running quick errands for morning services, pushing aside other to-dos to get there on time. But as we come to praise and rejoice in God's presence, we come with our own conflicts and turmoil "brewing" underneath, distracting us even when our main purpose for being present is clear.
Similarly again we know we cannot stay at Jesus' side forever, and we must eventually choose which path to take away from this holy place.
As the kings left, "they left for their own country by another road" or in other versions, " they returned home by a different road" knowing that to go the same way they had come spelled disaster.
As we leave the holy place of our churches, are we called to return home by a different road than we came?
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
9. Not Buying It
I just finished Not Buying It by Judith Levine. It is an extremely well-written and subtly thought-provoking book. She and her husband gave up shopping for a year except for "necessities". The book raises a lot of questions, but in a quiet way. Levine doesn't shout the message but rather narrates it.
Here's an excerpt that you don't have to ski to be able to relate to:
"February 26
Another ski-related trouble offers another clue about consumption.
Paul [Levine's husband]has meetings in Montpelier today. He gets up early and before leaving removes my skis from his car and puts them into mine, so I can go out when I'm finished working. Then he drives off with the wax kit in his car.
At two, I am ready to get up from my desk. I put on my ski clothes, warm up the car. Soon, I'm on my way to the Craftsbury Sports Center, widely regarded as the best place for cross-country skiing in the Northeast, and I'm psyched. Halfway there, this time with my good waxable skis, it occurs to me that I didn't see the wax kit in the back of the car. I pull to the side of the road, open the hatchback, riffle through the bag. I'm right. I get behind the wheel again. Traversing some of the most breathtaking landscape in the northeastern United States, I am locked in a windowless cell of anxiety.
Here's what I'm worried about: "I'm going to have to beg a few swipes of wax from the guy in the warming hut. 'Can I borrow...' 'May I have...' 'You see, Paul drove away with...' 'I'm doing this project and...' I devise various strategies, compose and rehearse appropriate lines. I don't want to sound too demanding, but I don't want to be too nonchalant, either. A note of apology might be appropriate, but abjectness is over the top. Basically, I want to ask for help in such a way as to prevent anyone from noticing I'm asking.
I shouldn't fret. The people who work at hte center are friendly. I ski practically every day; they know me. But I am fretting. They are friendly, they know me, but that doesn't mean they are my friends. They are employees of business, and I am a customer. Customers buy things. It's unfair to ask them to break the rules for me, a friendly person they know, who is not really a friend. The twenty-five-minute trip takes about twenty-five hours. Every one hundred yards I consider turning around and going back home.
This feeling throws me back twenty-five years, to my late twenties. I had come out of college with a $5,000 government-guaranteed National Defense Student Loan and was advised by numerous friends adn former NDSL recipients that no one had ever paid back one of those loans. For two years I didn't. Then Ronald Reagan was elected and sold the debt to Citibank. The bank promptly jacked the interest to the going rate and got serious about collecting, but try as they did, they couldn't manage to collect from me. This was the era before credit companies discovdered that bad debtors are (for the companies' profits) good debtors. Until I paid off the loan and gave the banks a decent interval to reconsider me for a credit card, I could not buy a plane ticket, rent a car, reserve a hotel room, or purchase a winter coat without greenbacks on the counter. I had few greenbacks, so I bought almost nothing. On the rare occasion I traveled, I slept on couches and got around by thumb.
On one such trip, to California in 1975, as I stood on a roadside outside Los Angeles, a motorist informed me of the rung on the American social hierarchy where my credit-unworthy ass had landed. He slowed down as he came close to me. I thought he was going to pick me up. Instead he rolled down his window and practically spat. "Hey, you!" Why don't you get your own goddamn car?"
Approaching the hut at the ski center, I am again my hitchhiking, pad-crashing, cash-economy self, about to rely on the kindness of strangers--or collide with their unkindness. And then I realize it's not ski wax that I want, not even the convenience of having the ski wax ready to use.
What I want is autonomy, the sine qua non of Western commerical citizenship. To be creditworthy is to be worthy of respect. To buy is to be an adult. A person without money is a child, and all children are beggars.
What to do now? My friend Debbie, an editor, has recommended staying undercover, employing a 'don't buy, don't tell' policy. 'If you're a journalist writing about homelessness and you dress in rags and don't bathe for a week but tell everyone "I'm writing about the homeless," people will treat you like a journalist.' When Paul and I tell our friends that we are not going out to dinner because of our yearlong project, they congratulate us. 'If you dress in rags and don't bathe and keep your mouth shut,' Debbie continued, 'people will treat you like a homeless person. You might learn a little about what it's like to be homeless.'
Inside the hut, a hot fire burning. Business is slow and Nick is alone behind the counter. Though an agressive racer, off the trail this lanky young Buddhist woudl be flat on the floor were he any more laid back. His demeanor gives me courage. 'Um, could I borrow a little blue wax, just a few swipes?' I ask, assuming the identity of a person who has arrived at a ski center without ski wax and without money.
Nick smiles. 'Borrow it? You can have it.' He takes the ski, bites the plastic cap off a stick of wax, and starts applying it himself.
As I glide down the long hill at the start of Ruthie's Run, I realize that while envy may mobilize consumer desire, it's not the things other people have that one necessarily envies. I mean, how many people actually like Rolex watches? What we want from things is what we want from other people, and from ourselves--whatever it is we want. I want to be a strong, competent athlete, one of the atletic crowd...
Not buying it has forced Paul and me to feel vulnerable and to ask for help, an almost un-American behavior. But the ability to ask for help might be a good skill to cultivate. Today I asked, and got service and a smile. As I ski up the next long hill, I tell myself that what I need is some non-consumer confidence."
From later in the year: "I want something that religions offer in abundance: the permission to desire wildly, to want the biggest stuff--communion, transcendence, joy, and a freedom that has nothing to do with a choice of checking accounts or E-Z access to anything."
Here's an excerpt that you don't have to ski to be able to relate to:
"February 26
Another ski-related trouble offers another clue about consumption.
Paul [Levine's husband]has meetings in Montpelier today. He gets up early and before leaving removes my skis from his car and puts them into mine, so I can go out when I'm finished working. Then he drives off with the wax kit in his car.
At two, I am ready to get up from my desk. I put on my ski clothes, warm up the car. Soon, I'm on my way to the Craftsbury Sports Center, widely regarded as the best place for cross-country skiing in the Northeast, and I'm psyched. Halfway there, this time with my good waxable skis, it occurs to me that I didn't see the wax kit in the back of the car. I pull to the side of the road, open the hatchback, riffle through the bag. I'm right. I get behind the wheel again. Traversing some of the most breathtaking landscape in the northeastern United States, I am locked in a windowless cell of anxiety.
Here's what I'm worried about: "I'm going to have to beg a few swipes of wax from the guy in the warming hut. 'Can I borrow...' 'May I have...' 'You see, Paul drove away with...' 'I'm doing this project and...' I devise various strategies, compose and rehearse appropriate lines. I don't want to sound too demanding, but I don't want to be too nonchalant, either. A note of apology might be appropriate, but abjectness is over the top. Basically, I want to ask for help in such a way as to prevent anyone from noticing I'm asking.
I shouldn't fret. The people who work at hte center are friendly. I ski practically every day; they know me. But I am fretting. They are friendly, they know me, but that doesn't mean they are my friends. They are employees of business, and I am a customer. Customers buy things. It's unfair to ask them to break the rules for me, a friendly person they know, who is not really a friend. The twenty-five-minute trip takes about twenty-five hours. Every one hundred yards I consider turning around and going back home.
This feeling throws me back twenty-five years, to my late twenties. I had come out of college with a $5,000 government-guaranteed National Defense Student Loan and was advised by numerous friends adn former NDSL recipients that no one had ever paid back one of those loans. For two years I didn't. Then Ronald Reagan was elected and sold the debt to Citibank. The bank promptly jacked the interest to the going rate and got serious about collecting, but try as they did, they couldn't manage to collect from me. This was the era before credit companies discovdered that bad debtors are (for the companies' profits) good debtors. Until I paid off the loan and gave the banks a decent interval to reconsider me for a credit card, I could not buy a plane ticket, rent a car, reserve a hotel room, or purchase a winter coat without greenbacks on the counter. I had few greenbacks, so I bought almost nothing. On the rare occasion I traveled, I slept on couches and got around by thumb.
On one such trip, to California in 1975, as I stood on a roadside outside Los Angeles, a motorist informed me of the rung on the American social hierarchy where my credit-unworthy ass had landed. He slowed down as he came close to me. I thought he was going to pick me up. Instead he rolled down his window and practically spat. "Hey, you!" Why don't you get your own goddamn car?"
Approaching the hut at the ski center, I am again my hitchhiking, pad-crashing, cash-economy self, about to rely on the kindness of strangers--or collide with their unkindness. And then I realize it's not ski wax that I want, not even the convenience of having the ski wax ready to use.
What I want is autonomy, the sine qua non of Western commerical citizenship. To be creditworthy is to be worthy of respect. To buy is to be an adult. A person without money is a child, and all children are beggars.
What to do now? My friend Debbie, an editor, has recommended staying undercover, employing a 'don't buy, don't tell' policy. 'If you're a journalist writing about homelessness and you dress in rags and don't bathe for a week but tell everyone "I'm writing about the homeless," people will treat you like a journalist.' When Paul and I tell our friends that we are not going out to dinner because of our yearlong project, they congratulate us. 'If you dress in rags and don't bathe and keep your mouth shut,' Debbie continued, 'people will treat you like a homeless person. You might learn a little about what it's like to be homeless.'
Inside the hut, a hot fire burning. Business is slow and Nick is alone behind the counter. Though an agressive racer, off the trail this lanky young Buddhist woudl be flat on the floor were he any more laid back. His demeanor gives me courage. 'Um, could I borrow a little blue wax, just a few swipes?' I ask, assuming the identity of a person who has arrived at a ski center without ski wax and without money.
Nick smiles. 'Borrow it? You can have it.' He takes the ski, bites the plastic cap off a stick of wax, and starts applying it himself.
As I glide down the long hill at the start of Ruthie's Run, I realize that while envy may mobilize consumer desire, it's not the things other people have that one necessarily envies. I mean, how many people actually like Rolex watches? What we want from things is what we want from other people, and from ourselves--whatever it is we want. I want to be a strong, competent athlete, one of the atletic crowd...
Not buying it has forced Paul and me to feel vulnerable and to ask for help, an almost un-American behavior. But the ability to ask for help might be a good skill to cultivate. Today I asked, and got service and a smile. As I ski up the next long hill, I tell myself that what I need is some non-consumer confidence."
From later in the year: "I want something that religions offer in abundance: the permission to desire wildly, to want the biggest stuff--communion, transcendence, joy, and a freedom that has nothing to do with a choice of checking accounts or E-Z access to anything."
8. Schoolwork
Two essays written for school assignments that I came across...nothing profound but they echo some of my recent sentiments.
1. Assignment: to choose a position on the legality of DDT and write a paper from that point of view.
When my village discontinued the use of DDT for disease control, my son contracted malaria and died. There is nothing, absolutely nothing to bring a man closer to social justice than to have it affect him personally. Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, commonly known as DDT was first synthesized in 1874 but wasn't discovered as a highly effective insecticide until 1935.Capable of killing hundreds of kinds of insects in one application, DDT was widely used during World War II for crop protection and the eradication of malaria. After environmental concerns began to be introduced, it was banned in the United States in 1972. More and more countries are taking on this view. How can we support a worldwide ban of DDT when it provides the only current solution to our children dying at the hands of malaria? We must make better use of current knowledge and technology at hand to overcome the hurdle malaria presents to future progress worldwide.
Malaria thrives in social crisis, weak health systems, and impoverished villages. It is the leading problem here in sub-Saharan Africa, where about 550 million people are at risk of malaria. Five percent of children are likely to die of malaria-related illness before the age of five. Out of one million deaths worldwide, ninety percent of these deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa. Much effort has been taken to eradicate the disease in other nations. By contrast, little has been put into controlling the malaria situation here. One of the main reasons is that malaria eradication requires a comprehensive approach. While chloroquine was once the main drug used, the discovery of new antimalarials is not keeping pace.
The most effective treatment discovered to date is the spraying of DDT on house walls to prevent malaria transmission. This method attacks the mosquito vectors of malaria where they contact the human host. One survey showing data analysis from 1993to 1995 showed that countries that have recently discontinued their spray problems have reported large increases in malaria infection. Ecuador, after increasing their use of DDT, saw a 61% reduction in malaria rates. This treatment is also cost-effective. Affected families spend $2 to $25 on malaria treatment along with between $0.20 and $15 on prevention. Is this to be the price when we earn less than $1 a day? Treatment costs for rural families are often as high as 13%. Many of us are simply too poor to pay for ample protection if we abandon DDT for malaria control.
Additionally, high costs and a decrease in foreign aid make it impossible for many countries to switch to DDT alternatives. One common treatment, malathion, is proven to be five times more expensive than DDT. Mefloquine is newly available and highly effective against multi-resistant strains, but is expensive and may cost five to ten times more than malathion. This means, twenty-five to fifty times more than DDT spraying. Investment in vaccine development has a high chance of success and is likely to be hugely cost-effective, but it may take fifteen years to develop this vaccine. We need an answer now, and that answer remains to DDT. Someone once said, don't throw away your paper just because you dreamed a computer. Namely, don't get rid of the old stand-by that has proven effective time and time again when the idea for something better is still in your head.
Bans and environmental concerns continue to be the number one argument against DDT spraying. When used on fields, exposure to the environment can cause thinning of bird eggshells, sterility in animals, and reduced fetal weights. Bats are particularly sensitive to its use as a pesticide. Yet it must be made clear that this proposal is not to continue its use as a pesticide. The only practical use of DDT is in malaria prevention. North, Central, and South American countries used 1, 172, 077 kilograms of DDT to spray house walls in 1993. While sounding like a large amount of insecticide, this represents less than 6% of the DDT levels used in the United States in 1968 alone. The level of treatment to spray the entire country of Guyana, covering approximately 215, 000 km², is roughly equal to the amount of DDT once used to spray only 4km² of cotton. When used in houses, it has no effect on animals outside the house and it has an extremely slow accumulation in humans so as to be virtually harmless. In fact, it is less harmful than caffeine, and as a carcinogen, there is only a 0.0008 chance of cancer. It must remain firm that DDT should be produced and distributed only for governmental use in malaria control.
When faced with a solution, we must act. Malaria in school-children reduces the effectiveness of their education as a major cause of absenteeism. In cities, it drives away potential opportunity by making some zones unsuitable for habitation. Malaria affects tourism in countries where the risk is high of contracting the disease. Therefore, malaria may thus be a cause, and not simply a consequence, of underdevelopment and poverty.
This problem affects us worldwide. Malaria is not just "over there" in Africa. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention released that although malaria was eradicated in the United States in the early 1950s, there were 1,337 cases of malaria (including eight deaths) reported for the United States in 2002. This problem continues into a new millennium even fifty years after a discovered solution.
Malaria was directly responsible for five childhood deaths in Africa this past year. Thousands of other children died from illnesses brought on by malaria—respiratory infections, diarrhea, and malnutrition. When these children are my children, are my neighbor's children, this number is too high. Wrote one authority in 1955, "This is the DDT era of malariology. For the first time it is economically feasible for nations, however undeveloped and whatever the climate, to banish malaria completely from their borders." It has been fifty years and still we struggle.
To reference two old African proverbs, "If you don't stand for something, you will fall for something. Let us not look to where we have fallen, but to where we have slipped." We have come partway, eradicating the disease in many countries and treating it in our villages, but let us run full force to the problem and defeat it. Support initiatives are already in place. We need a multi-faceted approach to malaria eradication in Africa, and worldwide. It has been too long to ignore the suffering of 300 million clinical cases. Every movement must begin with a first step forward and so, let us move ahead with a common goal, working together to oppose the worldwide ban of DDT.
Assignment two: A five to seven-minute oratory on topic of students' choosing
In 1986, the Supreme Court’s ruling in the case Plessy v. Ferguson created the infamous standard “separate but equal.” Over 100 years later, we’ve dissociated this phrase from racial inequality in schools and public places, but still it persists with greater magnitude for the standards we set for low-income students in our schools. The present inequalities in our American education system are unacceptable, particularly in light of legislation such as No Child Left Behind that masks the problem rather than seeking a sustainable solution.
So what is the problem? For over forty years, Jonathan Kozol has studied unequal education standards. In his book Savage Inequalities, he states, “On an average morning in Chicago, 5700 children in 190 classrooms come to school to find they have no teacher.” (Kozol, p. 52) Many teachers, feeling that they are making no progress in their classrooms, come in only three days a week, arriving late on the mornings they do come in. The number of substitute teachers is not great enough to fill the void left by the missing teachers. “On the top floor of a New York elementary school [formerly a roller rink] a sixth-grade [class] of thirty children shares a room with 29 bilingual second graders. Because of the high class size there is an assistant with each teacher. This means that 59 children and four grown-ups—63 in all—must share a room that, in a suburban school, would hold no more than twenty children and one teacher.” (Kozol, p. 87)
Children in low-income schools have inadequate materials for learning. Unless their teachers are willing to purchase supplies out of their own pockets, students go without updated textbooks and resource materials. Students’ science labs are particularly inadequate. Many are without lab tables or sinks, and they are forced to perform experiments that have inaccurate results due to poor materials. For instance, Kozol watches as students drop water into glasses to observe wave patterns. The experiment calls for a saucer with a wide circumference, but as a cost-saving measure the school system has bought them cheap plastic cocktail glasses. The waves can’t form, and the students are right in their observation of a “small splash.” Still, the teacher persists in the original lesson plan. (Kozol, p. 139)
A student in Washington D.C., when asked what one improvement she would give to the school, replies that she would purchase blue curtains because everything else in the cinderblock school would look less gray and dismal with a little blue. (Kozol, p. 181) A mother in the neighborhood describes the effect on the children. “My children know very well the system is unfair.... They see it on TV, and in advertisements, and in the movies. They see the president in his place in Maine, riding around the harbor in his motorboat and playing golf with other wealthy men. They know that men like these did not come out of schools in Roxbury or Harlem.... When you tell them that the government can’t find the money to provide them with a decent place to go to school, they don’t believe it and they know that it’s a choice that has been made—a choice about how much they matter to society. They see it as a message: ‘This is to tell you that you don’t much matter. You are ugly to us so we crowd you into ugly places. You are dirty so it will not hurt to pack you into dirty places.’” (Kozol, p. 179)
As a society, we naturally form into groups—by location, socioeconomic status, background, religion, ethnicity. We group to belong and lift those up we feel the strongest connection with. When it comes to our schools we are no different. We want the best for our children and the children closest to us. We want the best schools, teachers and resources for them, and we should, but we also start to feel that these things we have are a type of inheritance, something we’ve earned to keep for ourselves. It’s not that we don’t care about children stuck in inadequate schools, it’s that we don’t want overcrowding and lower standards for our own children. Right?
Our government has developed its own solution. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation was created in 2002 with one objective: “to have all children at or above grade level by 2014.” (United States Department of Education) More recently, President Bush and the Department of Education have worked to reauthorize the legislation. However, three glaring deficits still remain. First, our children are not numbers. The NCLB emphasis is placed on standardized test scores for all grade levels, particularly those in grades 3-8. In released publicity for NCLB’s reauthorization, Secretary Margaret Spellings consistently repeats the idea of improving individual growth models. This is good, however, what is better is finding a way to present children who don’t test well. For children already too far behind, teachers are forced to simply teach them the test in order to receive adequate school funding for the following school year. Children are no longer learning how to think, only how to accept spoon-fed information.
Second, we need the personal stories in our government’s publicity of success. In twelve videos posted on the Department’s site as success stories, not a single one showed a child addressed. Children were shown working, but it was teachers and experts who were asked to report on their success. Only the children will know the true effect improved education in the classroom has had them.
Third, Spellings repeats the statistic again and again that half of African and American and Hispanic students don’t graduate from high school. The problem of unequal education is not just black and white. It’s not just a race problem anymore, and by making it so, we’re pigeonholing those affected. We’re adding to the problem’s cycle. We are looking at diversity and equality for those of all economic levels, not simply those of minority races. The use of the term minority to refer to race is overused in a country that prides itself in diversity. We are a country of minorities, both racial and otherwise. Thus, we need to address resourcing for the education of people of all income levels.
A Century Foundation initiative, Equality and Education, pushes for the integration of schools to form more middle-income schools. This is not entirely unreasonable as statistics show that middle-income students are the majority. Education is most effective in the presence of dedicated teachers, parent involvement, and students who care and know they have the ability to succeed. Does it make more sense that the government who pour more money into a few schools or integrate schools so that the widest pool of resources can be given to the vast majority of students? We learn from a young age that the hardest thing is often the best thing to do. Somehow that idea doesn’t carry over to our government. It is both possible and desirable that the human resources given to middle- and high-income students be shared with low-income students.
It is best that integration begin at the earliest age possible. “If [the government] had first given Head Start to our children and pre-kindergarten, and materials and classes of 15 or 18 children in the elementary grades, and computers and attractive buildings and enough books and supplies and teachers salaries sufficient to compete with the suburban schools, and then come in a few years later with their tests and test-demands, it might have been fair play. Instead, they leave us as we are, separate and unequal, underfunded, with large classes, and with virtually no Head Start and they think tat they can test our children into a mechanical proficiency.” (Kozol, p. 143)
Equal education advocates frequently use the metaphor of an uneven playing field. “Unlike a tainted sports event, however, a childhood cannot be played again. We are children only once; and, after those few years are gone, there is no second chance to make amends. In this respect, the consequences of unequal education have a terrible finality. Those who are denied cannot be “made whole” by a later act of government.” (Kozol, 1980)
Grace & Peace!
1. Assignment: to choose a position on the legality of DDT and write a paper from that point of view.
When my village discontinued the use of DDT for disease control, my son contracted malaria and died. There is nothing, absolutely nothing to bring a man closer to social justice than to have it affect him personally. Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, commonly known as DDT was first synthesized in 1874 but wasn't discovered as a highly effective insecticide until 1935.Capable of killing hundreds of kinds of insects in one application, DDT was widely used during World War II for crop protection and the eradication of malaria. After environmental concerns began to be introduced, it was banned in the United States in 1972. More and more countries are taking on this view. How can we support a worldwide ban of DDT when it provides the only current solution to our children dying at the hands of malaria? We must make better use of current knowledge and technology at hand to overcome the hurdle malaria presents to future progress worldwide.
Malaria thrives in social crisis, weak health systems, and impoverished villages. It is the leading problem here in sub-Saharan Africa, where about 550 million people are at risk of malaria. Five percent of children are likely to die of malaria-related illness before the age of five. Out of one million deaths worldwide, ninety percent of these deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa. Much effort has been taken to eradicate the disease in other nations. By contrast, little has been put into controlling the malaria situation here. One of the main reasons is that malaria eradication requires a comprehensive approach. While chloroquine was once the main drug used, the discovery of new antimalarials is not keeping pace.
The most effective treatment discovered to date is the spraying of DDT on house walls to prevent malaria transmission. This method attacks the mosquito vectors of malaria where they contact the human host. One survey showing data analysis from 1993to 1995 showed that countries that have recently discontinued their spray problems have reported large increases in malaria infection. Ecuador, after increasing their use of DDT, saw a 61% reduction in malaria rates. This treatment is also cost-effective. Affected families spend $2 to $25 on malaria treatment along with between $0.20 and $15 on prevention. Is this to be the price when we earn less than $1 a day? Treatment costs for rural families are often as high as 13%. Many of us are simply too poor to pay for ample protection if we abandon DDT for malaria control.
Additionally, high costs and a decrease in foreign aid make it impossible for many countries to switch to DDT alternatives. One common treatment, malathion, is proven to be five times more expensive than DDT. Mefloquine is newly available and highly effective against multi-resistant strains, but is expensive and may cost five to ten times more than malathion. This means, twenty-five to fifty times more than DDT spraying. Investment in vaccine development has a high chance of success and is likely to be hugely cost-effective, but it may take fifteen years to develop this vaccine. We need an answer now, and that answer remains to DDT. Someone once said, don't throw away your paper just because you dreamed a computer. Namely, don't get rid of the old stand-by that has proven effective time and time again when the idea for something better is still in your head.
Bans and environmental concerns continue to be the number one argument against DDT spraying. When used on fields, exposure to the environment can cause thinning of bird eggshells, sterility in animals, and reduced fetal weights. Bats are particularly sensitive to its use as a pesticide. Yet it must be made clear that this proposal is not to continue its use as a pesticide. The only practical use of DDT is in malaria prevention. North, Central, and South American countries used 1, 172, 077 kilograms of DDT to spray house walls in 1993. While sounding like a large amount of insecticide, this represents less than 6% of the DDT levels used in the United States in 1968 alone. The level of treatment to spray the entire country of Guyana, covering approximately 215, 000 km², is roughly equal to the amount of DDT once used to spray only 4km² of cotton. When used in houses, it has no effect on animals outside the house and it has an extremely slow accumulation in humans so as to be virtually harmless. In fact, it is less harmful than caffeine, and as a carcinogen, there is only a 0.0008 chance of cancer. It must remain firm that DDT should be produced and distributed only for governmental use in malaria control.
When faced with a solution, we must act. Malaria in school-children reduces the effectiveness of their education as a major cause of absenteeism. In cities, it drives away potential opportunity by making some zones unsuitable for habitation. Malaria affects tourism in countries where the risk is high of contracting the disease. Therefore, malaria may thus be a cause, and not simply a consequence, of underdevelopment and poverty.
This problem affects us worldwide. Malaria is not just "over there" in Africa. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention released that although malaria was eradicated in the United States in the early 1950s, there were 1,337 cases of malaria (including eight deaths) reported for the United States in 2002. This problem continues into a new millennium even fifty years after a discovered solution.
Malaria was directly responsible for five childhood deaths in Africa this past year. Thousands of other children died from illnesses brought on by malaria—respiratory infections, diarrhea, and malnutrition. When these children are my children, are my neighbor's children, this number is too high. Wrote one authority in 1955, "This is the DDT era of malariology. For the first time it is economically feasible for nations, however undeveloped and whatever the climate, to banish malaria completely from their borders." It has been fifty years and still we struggle.
To reference two old African proverbs, "If you don't stand for something, you will fall for something. Let us not look to where we have fallen, but to where we have slipped." We have come partway, eradicating the disease in many countries and treating it in our villages, but let us run full force to the problem and defeat it. Support initiatives are already in place. We need a multi-faceted approach to malaria eradication in Africa, and worldwide. It has been too long to ignore the suffering of 300 million clinical cases. Every movement must begin with a first step forward and so, let us move ahead with a common goal, working together to oppose the worldwide ban of DDT.
Assignment two: A five to seven-minute oratory on topic of students' choosing
In 1986, the Supreme Court’s ruling in the case Plessy v. Ferguson created the infamous standard “separate but equal.” Over 100 years later, we’ve dissociated this phrase from racial inequality in schools and public places, but still it persists with greater magnitude for the standards we set for low-income students in our schools. The present inequalities in our American education system are unacceptable, particularly in light of legislation such as No Child Left Behind that masks the problem rather than seeking a sustainable solution.
So what is the problem? For over forty years, Jonathan Kozol has studied unequal education standards. In his book Savage Inequalities, he states, “On an average morning in Chicago, 5700 children in 190 classrooms come to school to find they have no teacher.” (Kozol, p. 52) Many teachers, feeling that they are making no progress in their classrooms, come in only three days a week, arriving late on the mornings they do come in. The number of substitute teachers is not great enough to fill the void left by the missing teachers. “On the top floor of a New York elementary school [formerly a roller rink] a sixth-grade [class] of thirty children shares a room with 29 bilingual second graders. Because of the high class size there is an assistant with each teacher. This means that 59 children and four grown-ups—63 in all—must share a room that, in a suburban school, would hold no more than twenty children and one teacher.” (Kozol, p. 87)
Children in low-income schools have inadequate materials for learning. Unless their teachers are willing to purchase supplies out of their own pockets, students go without updated textbooks and resource materials. Students’ science labs are particularly inadequate. Many are without lab tables or sinks, and they are forced to perform experiments that have inaccurate results due to poor materials. For instance, Kozol watches as students drop water into glasses to observe wave patterns. The experiment calls for a saucer with a wide circumference, but as a cost-saving measure the school system has bought them cheap plastic cocktail glasses. The waves can’t form, and the students are right in their observation of a “small splash.” Still, the teacher persists in the original lesson plan. (Kozol, p. 139)
A student in Washington D.C., when asked what one improvement she would give to the school, replies that she would purchase blue curtains because everything else in the cinderblock school would look less gray and dismal with a little blue. (Kozol, p. 181) A mother in the neighborhood describes the effect on the children. “My children know very well the system is unfair.... They see it on TV, and in advertisements, and in the movies. They see the president in his place in Maine, riding around the harbor in his motorboat and playing golf with other wealthy men. They know that men like these did not come out of schools in Roxbury or Harlem.... When you tell them that the government can’t find the money to provide them with a decent place to go to school, they don’t believe it and they know that it’s a choice that has been made—a choice about how much they matter to society. They see it as a message: ‘This is to tell you that you don’t much matter. You are ugly to us so we crowd you into ugly places. You are dirty so it will not hurt to pack you into dirty places.’” (Kozol, p. 179)
As a society, we naturally form into groups—by location, socioeconomic status, background, religion, ethnicity. We group to belong and lift those up we feel the strongest connection with. When it comes to our schools we are no different. We want the best for our children and the children closest to us. We want the best schools, teachers and resources for them, and we should, but we also start to feel that these things we have are a type of inheritance, something we’ve earned to keep for ourselves. It’s not that we don’t care about children stuck in inadequate schools, it’s that we don’t want overcrowding and lower standards for our own children. Right?
Our government has developed its own solution. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation was created in 2002 with one objective: “to have all children at or above grade level by 2014.” (United States Department of Education) More recently, President Bush and the Department of Education have worked to reauthorize the legislation. However, three glaring deficits still remain. First, our children are not numbers. The NCLB emphasis is placed on standardized test scores for all grade levels, particularly those in grades 3-8. In released publicity for NCLB’s reauthorization, Secretary Margaret Spellings consistently repeats the idea of improving individual growth models. This is good, however, what is better is finding a way to present children who don’t test well. For children already too far behind, teachers are forced to simply teach them the test in order to receive adequate school funding for the following school year. Children are no longer learning how to think, only how to accept spoon-fed information.
Second, we need the personal stories in our government’s publicity of success. In twelve videos posted on the Department’s site as success stories, not a single one showed a child addressed. Children were shown working, but it was teachers and experts who were asked to report on their success. Only the children will know the true effect improved education in the classroom has had them.
Third, Spellings repeats the statistic again and again that half of African and American and Hispanic students don’t graduate from high school. The problem of unequal education is not just black and white. It’s not just a race problem anymore, and by making it so, we’re pigeonholing those affected. We’re adding to the problem’s cycle. We are looking at diversity and equality for those of all economic levels, not simply those of minority races. The use of the term minority to refer to race is overused in a country that prides itself in diversity. We are a country of minorities, both racial and otherwise. Thus, we need to address resourcing for the education of people of all income levels.
A Century Foundation initiative, Equality and Education, pushes for the integration of schools to form more middle-income schools. This is not entirely unreasonable as statistics show that middle-income students are the majority. Education is most effective in the presence of dedicated teachers, parent involvement, and students who care and know they have the ability to succeed. Does it make more sense that the government who pour more money into a few schools or integrate schools so that the widest pool of resources can be given to the vast majority of students? We learn from a young age that the hardest thing is often the best thing to do. Somehow that idea doesn’t carry over to our government. It is both possible and desirable that the human resources given to middle- and high-income students be shared with low-income students.
It is best that integration begin at the earliest age possible. “If [the government] had first given Head Start to our children and pre-kindergarten, and materials and classes of 15 or 18 children in the elementary grades, and computers and attractive buildings and enough books and supplies and teachers salaries sufficient to compete with the suburban schools, and then come in a few years later with their tests and test-demands, it might have been fair play. Instead, they leave us as we are, separate and unequal, underfunded, with large classes, and with virtually no Head Start and they think tat they can test our children into a mechanical proficiency.” (Kozol, p. 143)
Equal education advocates frequently use the metaphor of an uneven playing field. “Unlike a tainted sports event, however, a childhood cannot be played again. We are children only once; and, after those few years are gone, there is no second chance to make amends. In this respect, the consequences of unequal education have a terrible finality. Those who are denied cannot be “made whole” by a later act of government.” (Kozol, 1980)
Grace & Peace!
7. Confessions
I have not been keeping up with this blog. I often think of it and what to post next, but these posts are rarely realized when I sit down at the computer.
With several left to buy for (or for most, I need to buy something small in order to make their present) I'm dangerously close to the $100 limit I set for myself.
With the exception of clearing out my shorts/pants drawer and making a pile for donation, I haven't been following my goal of one thing a day either.
I'm no closer to realizing my K.A. goal.
I'm not particularly ready for Advent or Christmas.
However, "this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead." (Philippians 3:13b)
I'm attempting grace. I'm attempting a fuller mentality of abundace. I'm making the time for family (We've spent every night this week with my grandpa with a scare in the hospital.)
Merciful God,
we confess that we have not love you with our whole heart.
We have failed to be an obedient church.
We have not done your will,
we have broken your law,
we have rebelled against your love,
we have not loved our neighbors,
and we have not heard the cry of the needy.
Forgive us, we pray.
Free us for joyful obedience,
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
-UMH, p. 12, A Service of Word and Table II
But this one thing I do strive for. I try, and I don't stop at it either.
Grace & Peace!
With several left to buy for (or for most, I need to buy something small in order to make their present) I'm dangerously close to the $100 limit I set for myself.
With the exception of clearing out my shorts/pants drawer and making a pile for donation, I haven't been following my goal of one thing a day either.
I'm no closer to realizing my K.A. goal.
I'm not particularly ready for Advent or Christmas.
However, "this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead." (Philippians 3:13b)
I'm attempting grace. I'm attempting a fuller mentality of abundace. I'm making the time for family (We've spent every night this week with my grandpa with a scare in the hospital.)
Merciful God,
we confess that we have not love you with our whole heart.
We have failed to be an obedient church.
We have not done your will,
we have broken your law,
we have rebelled against your love,
we have not loved our neighbors,
and we have not heard the cry of the needy.
Forgive us, we pray.
Free us for joyful obedience,
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
-UMH, p. 12, A Service of Word and Table II
But this one thing I do strive for. I try, and I don't stop at it either.
Grace & Peace!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
