The Other Side of Lent

I liked her, but secretly.  My professor in seminary was a small Korean woman who spoke into our first-semester lives a host of things, most of which we weren't certain we agreed with.  Each week, as she taught us multicultural ministry, her lectures came out with chopped-up ideas and uncomfortable questions.  I couldn't always track with her but when I did she left me gasping over the profound new way she viewed truth and God and love.  She used phrases like "both/and" and "we are spiritual beings who have a human experience." But I was among students who preferred saying "either/or" and disdained that cultic "spiritual" talk.

Because we were 24.  And evangelical.  And seminary students.  And we lived in the Western World. And we knew so many things, you see.

She made me uncomfortable in my faith but I was drawn to her uniqueness.  So, I kept my mouth shut while the other students fumed and shook their heads.  I kept listening.  Over the years, she encouraged me in different classes and finally nominated me for a "Graduate Who's Who" edition and essentially said, "Don't be silent anymore. You are somebody."

But everyone didn't have the same experience.  Some students took their pent-up anger to the dean of the school to say, "She's wrong" and "She shouldn't be teaching."  He disagreed.  And the wisdom of age and experience trumped the passionate jump of youth whose depth of insight was not deep enough to make a splash in the world.

Sometimes we think we're more than we are. 

Yes, I'm taking up laughter for Lent.  But it's not that haughty, gloss-over the hard stuff, look-at-me-like-we're-in-middle-school kind of laughter.  There's another side, a self-reproaching awareness, a step into the humble.  The other side of Lent is that I am giving up taking myself so seriously. 

Here's what I know: I don't part the waters for any one.  I don't hold back any powers of destruction, see the complete picture of truth, or establish a foundation in any place.  Nothing is truly built on my life.  I like to think that in tandem with the rest of the Church I have a role to play, but I don't make her body move, establish her beauty, or push her blood through her veins.

I have as much opportunity to follow Wisdom as anyone else and equal chances to draw the short stick when I attempt to take hold of her.  In my attempts to be kind, I am not always right.  In my attempts to be right, I cheat kindness.  Nothing sets me apart except the expectations of those around me.  And in this season I'm saying to myself, "You don't save anyone.  Let the expectations be directed to God."

Reading through Job again I suddenly see how self-important Job is and all my prior impressions are now shattered.  Where was the righteous man who was so innocently acted upon?  The sermons and stories and New Testament scriptures over the course of my life painted him so saintly.  "Well, sometimes tragic things happen to the best of us."  But in this read-through all I see is his pride and all I sense is his entitlement.  Perhaps I'm learning to read it through my own heart.

When we take ourselves so seriously ("I deserved something different") we jump into anger and offense.  We demand responses.  We view ourselves as examples of truth.  We can't take a joke or make fun of ourselves.  We dare not be wrong.  Thus, you see, where the need for laughter comes in.

A friend of mine said last week, "Sometimes things falling apart seems like a dreaded unraveling to be avoided at all reasonable cost. Then it happens, usually in more than one way, and the grip I had on my ravelry is laughable. Levity and relief enter, an unexpected benefit. Suddenly I realize: the universe of possibly is now open to me."

This Lenten season, if any new truth is going to open up to me -- and please, God, may it be so -- I need to make room for it lest the ego fill the whole space that was meant for wonder and worship and worth. 

We give up so that we might take up.  They happen together else we fill the void with ourselves.

Lent is for Laughing

Then I [wisdom] was constantly at his side.  I was filled with delight day after day, rejoicing always in his presence, 

rejoicing in his whole world and delighting in mankind.  

-- Proverbs 8:30-31

I had a great aunt whose faith was the vehicle through which she served the world.  She spent 40 years in ministry, cared for a disabled daughter and loved the same man for 60 years.  Her life's work took her to people on reservations and in prisons, to senior citizens, migrants and gamblers.  When she passed away four autumns ago it was in order to begin a long deserved rest.

When my aunt's health initially started to decline she told her husband that, should she pass on before him, she knew the woman he should marry.  She named for him a woman they'd known some 57 years prior.  A few months after my aunt's memorial, he found the woman she named, widowed now herself, and after many long distance phone calls and a visit, they were married in the spring.

My uncle's resolve demonstrates that there is a way to find joy during times of sorrow and it just might be to let sorrow do its work of leading us to joy.  James says, 'Count it all joy when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance and may endurance have its perfect result that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.'  Count it all can be defined as consider it all.  I've written before about how this is a thinking word... a cognitive assent to think through, process, what the trial just might be doing to bring us to wholeness.  The joy here is not necessarily a feeling, but a hopeful knowing.

In this season of life, I walk around with this mixture of joy and sorrow.  Joy for what God led us to spend the last 15 months doing with people that were inspiring and generous and loyal.  And yet sorrow for the pain of the piercing arrows I've endured, and even caused, in the days since we saw fit to let that chapter close.  Some days I mourn and some days I dance.  And feeling truly 'tossed by the wind' I know finding wisdom going forward will require that I abandon this double-mindedness.

Which brings me to Lent.

Over the past six years, Lent has proven to be the most formative time of year for me.  The practices I've participated in have shaped, stretched and frustrated me.  We've given up things like meat and income. I've taken up things like writing, prayer and presence. This year I wanted to resolutely set out to take up joy and gratitude but I wanted to make that more tangible and more effective for all of us in our home.

So, here it is. This year, I'm taking up laughing for Lent.  And it's a family project.  I heard it said, in a recent interview with April Smith, who lost her two young sons in an EF4 tornado back in May, that to live in sorrow would negate their life.  And in that moment it occurred to me that no matter what the untold stories are of our last year, I needed to move firmly into the joy that comes from the bone-deep gratitude I feel as a result of it. I need to match what I know with what I feel. I think that's Paul's idea of 'making joy complete' -- to be one in spirit and in mind.

Every day I'll practice the abandon that might take the form of play or sport or celebration.  I'll read truly witty authors, the kind that make me laugh out loud.  I'll watch a movie once a week that's funny -- and not in the dark humor or frat party kind of way.  My kids and I will practice levity and irony and watch Jimmy Fallon clips and go to family friendly improv.  Even the people I spend time with need to be okay with calling out the absurdities of life and poking fun at our own faults. This Lent I am committed to laugh and laughter really only works when we do it together.

We tend to look at Lent as this somber time when we whip our own backs and kill our own spirits.  But I believe that God loves it when we love life.  My friend, Margaret Feinberg says, "Joy begins in God and all that exists was born in joy." (By the way, read her newest book. It will form the way you view joy). The book of Proverbs describes a women in this way: "Strength and dignity are her clothing, and she laughs at the time to come.  She opens her mouth with wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue."   When we're laughing at life we find a way to understand others and the events of our lives.  When we're seeing the joy we're moving into wisdom.  When gratitude is our lens then we can know the strength brought by abandon.  Sorrow can be shackling, but laughter breaks the chains.

At my core, gratitude has already won. Now, for the next 40 days, my body will practice what my soul already knows.  And on this next Resurrection Day I'll celebrate the delight of life. "Then I will go to the altar of God, to God, my joy and my delight." -- Psalm 43:4

(**I know what I'm going to read, but I'm completely lost on funny movies.  If you know some good ones, leave me a comment.  Thanks!)

When Lent Ends and We Wander

It's three weeks after Easter and something is amiss.

I have a restless spirit inside.  When we start to feel restless we give each other lots of advice like:  

• Get outside -- We have new sod in the backyard (a three year dream), I've cleared and planted a little garden, and the basketball hoop, the sandbox and the bikes have been broken in for the season. 
• Clear the calendar and refocus -- We've had two weekends with no obligations other than general house upkeep, taking bike rides and playing baseball together.  
• Make sure to get date nights -- My husband and I have had two dates in three weeks.  Connection is happening here.
• Shake up the school day -- The boys and I have had several field trips and hikes together.  And in school we've begun our last unit wherein ds asked to linger on Vikings... so we did.
• Take time for yourself -- I've had two evenings with friends and actually spent two hours shopping this weekend which is unheard of in my world.

Then why the restlessness?  I looked at what's missing from my list and I've concluded that it's the second loss of Lent.   The first loss was felt during Lent; the sacrifice, the giving up.  The second is what I'm feeling afterward; the loss of the disciplines.  During Lent I fasted and read through prayers.  When Lent was over I stopped.  During Lent I led a Bible study through Romans.  We happened to finish before Easter.  The disciplines in my life have nearly ceased. 

What I'm feeling is not the restlessness of needing something new, but the ache of needing something ancient, something practiced.  In the middle of it I questioned if my Lenten fast was actually producing any spiritual product in me.  In its absence I now see what it did.   

In Exodus 24:7, the people of Israel respond to God's covenant, marked by the giving of the Ten Commandments, and in the Hebrew what they say is translated as, "we will do and we will hear."  The doing, the practice, would precede the hearing, the deeper understanding and life-propelling belief.  Maybe they didn't understand why keeping the Sabbath day set apart or how honoring the legacy of their families would benefit them at the start, but they agreed first of all to do -- to go through the motions and trust that God's pleasant relationship with them would be the result.

As a student of the spiritual disciplines I know this to be true.  How funny that I thought I'd take some time off from them.  The doing breaks down our ego that wants to preserve itself in perceived security and productivity.  The hearing can't happen when we're filled with other types of doing even when the agendas are of family, learning and ministry. 

The fast itself was not the goal; the open lines of dependence and attentiveness was.  The fast was not a means to an end; it was the viaduct of continual grace.  

We think that the doing is burdensome to us.  But missing the hearing bears a greater weight as I allow my mind and my spirit to wander in search of a regular place to land.  I can't hear unless I do.  I'm too crowded with good intentions.  And so I've begun my next season of discipline which will take me through the Ordinary Time.  And we'll just keep the doing going and trust that God's pleasant relationship will by my result.

The Loss of Lent

I joked with my husband the other day --

In this final week of Lent, in which we've gone without meat for 40 days, I said that we could revisit the food that we liked the best.  Have a request week.  Lent: A Look Back.  We'd eat the meals that we'd most enjoyed.  It's interesting how they seemed to be meals most like those in ordinary time:  chili, fajitas, macaroni and cheese.  We'd even eat another meal of red beans and rice (as if we cannot have it after Easter).

This lenten experiment comes to a close in a week.  On that Easter day our community will throw a party and that party will involve a meat smoker named Moe.  It frightens me a little.  My culinary studies friend said, "Be careful going back to meat after going so long without.  It could take a month to add it back completely."  So, I'm afraid of that.  But I'm also afraid of what it will mean.  In one sense, I understand the joy of the occasion; a party is completely appropriate when one encounters a substitutionary atonement.  But in another sense, I think I've missed the point of the fast.

I've thought more about food in these past 40 days than I ever have.  I have not for one day mindlessly eaten anything.  I've planned and even pre-prepped every meal and found solace in my stocked vegetable bin and pantry of vegetable broth, olive oil and Parmesean cheese... the staples of our Spring.  I've thought less about God than perhaps a fasting pilgrim ought.  In all my activity I still felt the emptiness in our meals, and I sought to fill it.  I was left wanting.  I focused on all the things I could still have and tried to forget the loss I was supposed to be embracing.  All that I did in order to "get through" this loss feels, now, a little like denial.

This weekend, my husband was out of town.  This isn't the first time, of course.  But the moment he left I missed him.  He was still fairly close and yet he wasn't anywhere.  The loss crept in and I swept it away in the same manner I've coped through Lent.  I planned the days.  I filled the time and space with my boys, my to-do list, and with cooking videos late into the night.  I left a light on and slept next to the pile of the day's unfolded laundry.  At least something was there.  I filled that space too.

There's something dark about my aversion toward feeling loss.  Albert Haase calls this the false self that avoids pain, blame, criticism, disgrace and loss and he suggests that we "never flee from the present moment, even if it is painful, confusing, sorrowful, distressing or heartbreaking.  'Surrender to suffering as if it were a loving energy.'"*  This is distinctly what I have not done during Lent.  Each meal has been as intentional as the life of a blind friend of mine who sets everything where she knows she can find it.  If I plan it, I won't stumble.  If I can anticipate it, I'll succeed.

My success was more important than my grief, than my God.

How then will Moe's appear to me on Easter?  I'm afraid that I will look at it and succumb to guilt for not having missed the savior who died, only wanting to celebrate the redemption of life.  I did not sacrifice, I only substituted.  I missed the lenten idea.

Should I elongate the suffering until I feel it in my bones?  No.  When the bridegroom is present it isn't time for fasting.  True, we go with Christ into his suffering, but we equally walk with him into new life.  It remains to be seen whether I go to Moe with celebration or with the cleansing grief that comes when I realize that God himself has had mercy on me, a sinner.

*Coming Home To Your True Self:  Leaving the Emptiness of False Attractions by Albert Haase, O.F.M.

Broken for Me

The memory of tonight's homemade macaroni and cheese lingers.  

Made by my husband's hands with the guidance of a capable recipe, it met me after my Monday evening workout with all the comfort and satisfaction it promised.  I was looking forward to this meal.  It didn't disappoint.  Thirteen days without meat and I'm at the threshold of walking away from it for good.  

That's not the point of this fast.  However, as I daily engage it I continue to question what its point exactly is.  My understanding of Lent was enriched through some of my weekend reading. 

During Lent, death gives way to life, just as it does in the change of seasons.  

A part of Lent is death. That's the giving up.  Last Sunday I made sausage.  Sundays are a traditional day off from the fast. Our boys are enjoying that little break and I wondered if I should break my fast too.  My husband said, "Not for me."  And where he goes I will go.  It's easy to make succulent meals without the meat.  I haven't missed it.  I wanted to do some missing.  I made two sausages for myself, I thanked God for it, for the day of grace and feasting.  And I gave my share to my boys.  I needed to feel a little of the death -- to intentionally go without.  

The fast was a way to ritualize and enter into the death of Christ, with the hopes of sharing in the resurrection...

There is joy yet to come in this season.  In me.  In the world.  We daily step forward into it.  But for all of us, our death is present even at our birth.  All life is joy and sorrow; not one without the other.  In this season, I am attempting to invite a bit more of the sorrow.  But I can't keep from focusing so much more on the joy -- like reading a story when I already know the ending.  To this point, the true practice of penance is still quite lost on me.

For me this fast is a joyful tension.  I'm happy to give up, happy to work around, happy to find another route to nourishment.  The challenge itself makes me happy.  How carnal of me to actually enjoy Lent.  Yet, each time I prepare a meal I sense the brokenness of it.  It is incomplete and still it's the best it can be.  The meals without meat reflect who I am; broken and longing for a day to be made whole.  Knowing the joy will come... is coming.  I cannot completely grieve.  Yet I cannot completely rejoice.  This is the joyful tension of Lent.

...the practice of penance is a way to ritually experience in our own lives the self-emptying of Christ.

He gave himself up for us.  The fast doesn't truly make me more like him.  It's a tawdry attempt at best.  But as I continue to push into this meager sacrifice I can more intimately connect with the ultimate one given as grace on my behalf.  

Thanks be to God.

Lenten Eve

At Christmastime, I feel a sense of mixed anticipation when we light that first advent candle the Sunday after Thanksgiving.  As the flame ignites I feel the minor paradox of wishing it weren't so and wishing it would be tomorrow.  In that moment, all the work is ahead of me.  I had to unpack the advent wreath, find suitable candles and a book of matches. Nothing else was required in order to begin.  

At Eastertime, I have wished and wished for a way to lead my family to engage in the season.  My evangelical roots never mentioned Lent, only Easter.  It was about resurrection, yes, but also new clothes and deviled eggs and ham.  And it was just one day.  Later in my life, Good Friday practices began to creep in.  Even so, Easter still seemed to be something we bumped into as we went around a corner.

I think I've been sending up my own shoots from those roots for several years now.  I've observed Lent, but in my own way, taking up instead of giving up.   I've not felt compelled to move toward the traditional ideas of sacrifice, thinking perhaps they were overused or even irrelevant.  And just what vices did I have that I needed to break free from?  I don't drink coffee, watch t.v., eat daily doses of sugar.  It seemed that giving up wasn't what Lent wanted from this evangelical girl.  And that seemed to make perfect sense.  

This year we are going to lean in a little more.  As a family, we are going to do some giving up.  My children are intrigued.  My husband seems completely agreed.  I am expectant... of what I have no idea.  But we are moving toward resurrection together.

We are going to give up meat for 40 days.  We are not extreme carnivores.  Meat is not a stumbling block for us.  It is something of daily life.  Mundane.  Quotidian.  There is no sense of luxury in meat.  I don't feel any degree of attachment to it.  Or will I find that I do?  

I've spent the last several days looking up ideas, recipes, to help us move through this time with a sense of newness.  When giving up something we often go seeking something else to fill its space.  I have mapped out menus, watched cooking videos, asked friends for ideas.  I have shopped not once, but twice assuring my youngest that, yes, we would at some point buy salami once again.  We have slowly eaten away the vestiges of meat products as if we were moving or leaving the country for a month and knew everything would spoil if we didn't consume it now.  

And today as I moved the frozen sausage to the back of the freezer, safe to eat on those Bridegroom Sundays, and stacked the edamame and pre-cooked broccoli and cheese calzones in front of it, I reflected upon my work of preparation.  It reminded me a little of what the Jewish households do prior to Sabbath.  I sensed a bit of the sacred as I stacked cilantro, cucumbers and carrots whose day will come tomorrow.  There has been clear intention in my work.  I will do without this one thing.  I want to miss it a little, but I don't want my desire to have it back consume me.  I want to experience a new taste, but of God more than hummus made twenty ways.  

This is not about food.  It's about tension.  It's about paradox.  Paradox is that place where two profound truths can be true at once.  The same man who was savior was also decimated.  The God who loves generously exhibits bone-chilling justice.  We learn through effectiveness as well as failure.  We each need both community and isolation.  The paradox of new life is suffering.  Both are true.  But how much do I know even one of them well?

Tomorrow I'll know what tomorrow will hold.  Not today.  But I've loved the preparation. Alongside my giving up, I'm taking up daily prayers, repeating them every ten days.  Vowing to live with whatever discomfort arises.  The loving and the suffering go hand in hand.  And when celebrating Easter I will rejoice that all the work has, indeed, been done.

There is a name for the endurance we must practice until a larger love arrives:  it is called suffering.  We will not be able to teach in the power of paradox until we are willing to suffer the tension of opposites, until we understand that such suffering is neither to be avoided nor merely to be survived but must be actively embraced for the way it expands our own hearts.         Parker J. Palmer  - The Courage To Teach

Cleaning up After Lent

This is only my second year observing Lent in any fashion.  Each year, I've taken something up for the season, something that I felt would draw out my passion for God, that would stretch me a bit and help me sense things anew.   These activities, to some extent, succeeded at reaching inside of me to bring out my true self that continually gropes for God.

The wider practice, of course, is to give something up for Lent; foregoing something enjoyable creates a void, one God longs to fill with himself.  Perhaps one year I will feel so moved.  It is certainly good to make that kind of room.  What I saw however, and only in some instances, were those who attempted the most difficult thing imaginable, tackling it as a personal record of sorts.  Or those who make Lent into a do-over, a chance to kick a bad habit.  Or even those who test God by giving up life-giving things like medication ...or marriage.   

"I understand the significance of self-denial but if we’re not careful, we can so easily just fall into religious practice for the sake of religious practice. If the goal is merely the giving up of something without taking up of something more significant, the focus is just merely on the stuff which we give up or really, the focus is on the practice of giving up something." -- Eugene Cho

During this season, I kept coming back to Jesus's words in Mark where he declares all food clean. "Listen now, all of you— take this to heart. It's not what you swallow that pollutes your life; it's what you vomit—that's the real pollution." 

It's not what we put in, or fail to put in, ourselves that moves us closer to God; it's what comes out of us. What draws us closer to him are the acts of devotion that we create, not necessarily the disciplines we follow.  

I have two friends whose Lenten practices inspired me.  One decided to give up yelling.  Another determined to give up ingratitude.  Perhaps I courageously could have followed suit with something from Jesus' list? "It's what comes out of a person that pollutes: obscenities, lusts, thefts, murders, adulteries, greed, depravity, deceptive dealings, carousing, mean looks, slander, arrogance, foolishness—all these are vomit from the heart. There is the source of your pollution." These are examples of the things that come out of us that wreck us, that cloud our ability to see truth, that make us impatient with the process of God.  These are evidence from our hearts that what we really believe is that God's love ends.  These are precisely the kinds of things that God wants to transform and clean up and bring to himself for renewal.

‎"The practice of entering into the Lenten season has often been reduced to the question: “What are you giving up for Lent?” ... The real question of the Lenten season is: How will I find ways to return to God with all my heart? This begs an even deeper question: Where in my life have I gotten away from God and what are the disciplines that will enable me to find my way back?" -- Ruth Haley Barton‎

Now that the celebration of Easter is upon us (should Easter have an end?) I find that I am staying in my vein of Lenten practice:  listening more intently to what I think the Father is saying.  I do not feel as if Lent was just a season for holding my breath until I can go back to what I once knew, or was.  Spiritual activities ought to grow us more deeply in our love for Christ, enabling us to better sense his presence from that point forward.  They are not temporary interruptions in our otherwise predictable patterns.  Easter is a celebration of the new creation.  Let it be so in me.  

Spring Break Starts Now

We are now commencing our two week spring break tradition.  With Easter being so late this year, perhaps we'll actually get outdoors while we're off.  But who knows.  In fact, the best part of our break this year is that I haven't scheduled it to death.  We have things to do this Wednesday.  And that's about it.

I'm wondering if I'm shooting myself in the foot by not having a game plan [insert saying about idle hands here].  Perhaps I should feel compelled to clean the oven or sort the clothes in the boys' closets?  But it's Holy Week.  And I want to leave room for the mystery.

During our second week I'll actually have four days at home alone.  Dh is taking B and S to visit my parents while he attends Q in Portland.  I'm staying behind with J who is attending a charter school.  My job is to take him back and forth to school each day and then hang out with him in the evening.  But while he's away, I have those four days all planned out... gym, coffee/lunch with a friend and some very specific writing time.

Perhaps I know that since two of my boys will be gone soon, I am leaving room to just enjoy them.  They are the sweetness in my life.    Case in point:  that picture above?  It's what I get when my boys ask if they can pick blossoms from our crabapple tree.  I get the entire branch.  Boys and spring just go hand in hand.

Forty Days of Praying

Last year, I tried a Lenten practice for the very first time... I took up writing for forty minutes every day.  I know most of you might think of Lent as a time to give something up for forty days, but I wasn't so moved.  And it was good.

This year -- and as it turns out, in congruence with my desire to grow into a more helpful person -- I'm taking up 40 days of praying.  For you.

Well, maybe ;-)

This little book above is a month of guided prayers for morning, throughout the day and then in the evening.  My practice is simple:  Read the morning prayer and listen.  Then read it again and identify a friend to bring before the Father and who I can share the prayer with.  And continue throughout the day and into the evening.

So, if you get an email from me with a snippet from St. Teresa's thoughts, you were the one God brought to mind that day.

And it was good.

April First and Holy Week

Every year we take a two week spring break; we can observe Holy Week before Easter and take a week for renewal the week after Easter.

Years ago, when this tradition began and having no prior experience observing Holy Week, I simply wanted to leave a void and see what developed. In my head I pictured it as something like an advent wreath or a nightly family vespers. However, nothing has materialized that we routinely repeat every year.

This year's Holy Week has been filled with meaning for me. The events that have converged during this week have been thoughtfilled, introspective, communal, and worshipful.

The weekend began with a silent retreat with my community. I've never spent an entire day in silence and being silent when there are so many inspiring people a whisper away is a foreign experience. But because we all struggled in that silence together, it was powerful for me to walk alongside my friends practicing this discipline with them. It was a time of joy for me, for remembrance, for renewal. And Palm Sunday began with our first spoken words as we served one another communion. A fitting entry back into the verbally worshipping world.

Our church community worships on Tuesday nights. This means we don't have Palm Sunday or even Easter Sunday to begin and end the story. It seems to create an even quieter Holy Week. But we entered into worship on Tuesday already in process. While we were engaged in life the holy had begun and I caught up my breath to remember it.

Dotted throughout the week there were times for community. A friend and her son joined us for dinner before worship, we engaged in experiences with our co-op several days this week, time with a friend at the park, coffee, planning meetings... as if the holy week is huddling us together reminding us that relationship is the very essence of God.

And today.

Today is the first of April. And in our house it's not about fooling one another, but about remembering God's help and presence. Today is our own Ebenezer. And we observe it by remembering and helping those without homes, as we once were. It just happens to fall on Maundy Thursday this year; a fitting time to offer a "stone of help" to others.

Friday is coming and I look forward to taking the boys through an interactive Easter experience close to our house. Annually, Friday is a sweet time for me as I pray that God will be made real in the hearts of my boys.

Sunday. Resurrection day. Our first year here in Denver, our first anniversary being the church with the people of TNL, and marking for me the thirty-second year that I've walked this journey after Christ.

Perhaps you observe Holy Week in a formal way. Perhaps it's a bittersweet time of remembering your Lenten commitment. Perhaps you run through it preparing Easter dinner, baskets and family gatherings this weekend. To all of us, may we consider how the holy is persistently awaiting our notice of it and turn to look at it.

Peace.

Fourty Days of Writing

I've never really participated in Lent. Our most recent churches have explored some of the practices of Lent... giving something up for the 40 days before Easter in order to encourage discipline and remove barriers that exist between ourselves and God. I've considered giving something up for the past couple years now, but nothing ever arises as "the thing."

This year, I'm going to take something up that is congruent with my current path and, I believe, will achieve the same goal...to encourage discipline and remove barriers. I've been saying I'm going to do this for a little while now and I've even set aside the first six months of 2010 to prepare to do this so these 40 days will be concerted training time. I'm going to spend 40 minutes for these 40 days writing.

I will work on blog posts, articles for my deadlines at Heart of the Matter, journal entries, character sketches, exercises from The Creative Call, or even flesh out a rough outline for a book idea. I may write talks that I'd like to give one day, or just respond to books or scriptures that I'm reading. I have a book review to do as well.

Through it all I hope that what I'm supposed to say becomes clear and a larger work can begin. I also hope that I gain a truer sense of who I am and how I am part of the greater purposes of God.

"Vocation does not come from a voice "out there" calling me to become something I am not. It comes from a voice "in here" calling me to be the person I was born to be." -- Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak

Hello, Spring Break

It's spring break at our house! Of course, it's not spring break for anyone else, and my kids will be plugging away at schoolish things when the neighborhood kids are banging on the door in a couple weeks wanting to play. But it was a natural break in our curriculum. We always take two weeks off at Easter time it's just that we usually begin with Holy Week. However, this gives me time to figure out just what our family will finally do to celebrate and worship during Holy Week. I've been wanting to do something for years.

So, in your comment this week, tell me what your ideas are for Holy Week. I need something for each day...

Other than that, I think I'll post some musings about homeschooling philosophy in general. A couple ideas come to mind.

Off to tackle piles of school-work-past that needs a home. And I'm going to look for some field trips. I hear the zoo is doing something tomorrow...