Posts tagged "Journal":

Journal Entry

Wednesday is the day I do Morning Prayer as a reading circle and we do the 7-week psalm cycle rather than the 30-day one. So I will choose two verses from Jeremiah. I read it last night with a different reading circle.

Be appalled, O heavens, at this;
be shocked; be utterly desolate, says the Lord,
for my people have have committed two evils:
they have forsaken me,
the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves,
cracked cisterns that can hold no Water.

The image is striking. Who in their right mind would choose a broken cistern instead of an artesian well?

And yet, Jeremiah says in Chapter 2 that this is exactly what the people are doing. They are depending on their own resources instead of reaching out to God.

I wonder how often I do that? Probably every day.

Forsake doesn't just mean ignore. It can also mean renounce or reject. So it's not a forgetting that Jeremiah is pointing to, but an active abandoning.And for what?

Something of my own devising that is ineffective at best and useless now that it cannot hold any water at all.

I need to stick with this metaphor just a little longer. The living fountain is fresh clean water while rain water stored in a cistern can become stale and unhealthy. And even worse, evaporate or disappear through a hole into the ground.

Running through this whole section of Jeremiah is God's soliloquy about the disolution of the relationship between God and the people. The people haven't trusted and depended on God for everything, even for their basic need for water.

Of course, Jeremiah is a prophet and his metaphor is extreme. But how often do I go it alone and do not turn to God?

I have been thinking about this in relation to prayer as a whole. I say many of the prescribed prayers every day. Are they effective? Are they doing any good at all?

• Is there justice?
• Is there peace?

And then I think: If no one prayed for these things would we have any justice or peace at all?

I'm just raising this point about the cistern to remind myself that God is the source and I can never replace this source with something of my own making.

Journal Entry

My boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
I have a goodly heritage.

It's time for me to write about this verse.

It, or similar words, are enscribed on the sun dial in front of the library where I went to seminary. It was understood to be affirmation for the pastor's life.

Since I never received a call or was ordained in this denomination, I have always struggled with this verse.

I have been thinking about letting go of old resentments. I wonder if I can let go of this one. I was strung along, not valued and unsupported. It was a case of blaming the victim.

Is it time to claim this verse for my own? Can I truthfully say now

The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
I have a goodly heritage?

• I have a good life.
• My spiritual gifts are welcome and honored in my community.

I have moved beyond some silly customs. I am who I am.There have been many opportunities to fall away, to become unchurched.

• I have continued to associate with a faith community.
• I have continued to study God's Word.
• I have continued to meet regularly to study and reflect on the Bible.
• I have continued to write and to preach.

Psalm 16 holds other affirmations that I want to embrace.

Verse 9 is of particular interest today:

My heart is glad, and my soul rejoices;
my body also rests secure.

The heart/mind is happy; the spirit is happier still while the body feels safe. This is how the psalm began:

Protect me, o God, for in you I take refuge.

I have certainly done this through my long wilderness wanderings.

Journal Entry

I always come back to the psalms. They are problematic in many ways:

• They imagine a world of many gods. YHWH is one among many.
• YHWH is aligned with the interests of a particular state rather than the whole world. If Israel/Zion/Jerusalem prospers, that is good. If the enemies of Israel/Zion/Jerusalem have the upper hand, that is bad.
• The psalmist is often speaking as a combatant, asking for help in times of physical aggression. Defeating the enemy, bows, arrows, swords and shields come up regularly.

All this being said, I come back to them. Over and over again. Why?

1. They are familiar. I know a few by heart from when I was a child.
2. Their verses continue to resonate with me.
3. Although I have never been particularly good at memorizing long texts, I can keep a verse or part of a verse in mind.

This morning I am focusing on Psalm 9:10.

Those who know your Name will put their trust in you,
for you never forsake those who seek you, O LORD.

As a Christian, one of the complicating factors here is God's name. I have to consciously think about Jesus unless I am in the New Testament. The respectful writing of God's name is often to simply say “The Name.” I find that a bit awkward because it continues to be unfamiliar to me.

I had a translation of the New Testament (I don't even know if I still have the printed book; I never had a soft copy.) that translated “lord” when it was used in the epistles as Christ. The ancient world was not always precise about lord, master, king, etc. There was just the person that you had to obey whether you were enslaved or free. It didn't matter. It came up for me when I was studying Julian of Norwich. She lived in that sort of world, too.

But I digress.

The strength of this verse today is the connection between trust and forsake. Because I know this one and put my trust in this one I will not be forsaken.

There are many reasons to doubt the Name today. The world continues to be a very dangerous place and life can be so very hard. Yet the promise is clear:

I will not forsake you. Trust me.

Putting my trust in you, Jesus, is hard, but I will.

Journal Entry

I have been mulling over the last bit of Zephaniah 3:15.

The Lord is in your midst, You shall see evil/harm/disaster no more.

This is an amalgamation of several translations all of which have their nuances of meaning. The Hebrew word is ra'ah as in the tree of tov (good) and ra'ah. But ra'ah embraces more meaning than evil.

Zephaniah 3:15 is a promise, not necessarily a reflection of the current state of affairs. Someday this will be true.

I choose to stick with the literal see rather than the expansive fear though there is plenty of fear to go around today with the bombing of Iran underway. If you see a thing it is so. Fear can be imagined when it is not so. See is factual; fear is an emotion.

Perhaps modern translators are trying to put their contemporaries in the frame of mind of the ancient people who read Zephaniah. They would have seen evil with their own eyes. They were surely afraid as they lived through the disaster of the destruction of their city and political organization. They were told by their surviving prophets that God was punishing them for their behavior toward God and their neighbors.

By contrast, fearing disaster may include natural disasters or personal economic disaster, for example. The ancient mindset would attribute these occurrences to the divine but we would not.

I'm not prepared to call the bombing evil at this point. Certainly ill-advised and illegal. It is likely to be a disaster for the Iranians and perhaps us, too. But it is causing harm to them and to our constitutional system.

Lord have mercy!

Rainy Day

It's been very warm here. It won't last, of course. Much of the snow has melted. There are large expanses of water to walk through. Elwood and I have been able to take some long walks. We've gotten very wet. yesterday i was able to go out only in a sweatshirt. But today it rained and we did not go out. Elwood was very annoyed with me. I've been annoyed with my computer so we haven't been good company for each other.

Hardly below zero. We'll...

Hardly below zero. We'll be in the deep freeze until Saturday. So we are staying in.

Doings Today

Today Elwood went to Pet Smart for his quarterly top dog treatment. I went to the cosmetology department at MATC for a pedicure, manicure, eyebrow waxing and hair cut. This is a good plan. I will have the same person cut my hair next time which is good because we are trying to straighten everything out from some poor hair cuts previously. I get to listen in on what the instructors tell the student and who knows, maybe I can learn something to tell another operator. I'm hoping the instructors learn my hair. I was also able to get Elwood a new bone and his food on sale as well as get a regular customer discount.

I brought my GPS with me. I forgot to turn it on at first and it takes a good 20 minutes sometimes to find the GPS signal, but when it did I could listen in as we drove around. My friends made certain I could landmark everywhere we went and gave me exact names. I even have their house marked. What is very cool about traveling this way is that I learned where the West Town Mall is, that Target is nearby and that Pet Smart and other places are near where the kids looked at an apartment for me. They decided it was a car-friendly area, not a pedestrian-friendly area. We all figured out it was far out of town. I would not have known all of this if I had left the GPS home.

I also had it on when my friend brought me home. We were stopping off at the library to pick up my books so I won't have to go anywhere tomorrow when the deep freeze will be upon us. I knew where we were and to say where to turn.

Elwood got a red bow to wear out of the spa. He showed more interest in a new bone and chewed happily.

We ate in a nice restaurant with numerous soup choices. They prepare all their soups gluten-free, adding noodles or rice as a GF alternative when the soup is served. Must keep the noodles and rice from getting gummy, too. I had French garden with basil on top and wonderful crusty bread and butter.

We also had a chance to stop at a second-hand store. I found a canister for Willie Street Coop bulk items and some warm tops including a purple tunic made of Italian yarn.

Doing computer stuff...

Doing computer stuff today, and oh dear vacuuming.

Miscellaneous Notes for January 11

I brought my netbook to Sunday school today. I think it will be helpful to review notes and look up some things on my computer.

It will get very cold here starting Tuesday. Tomorrow we run errands. Willie Street is being cleared of snow so people are advised to stay away. I hope to mark some landmarks and maybe send a few tweets from the phone as I go around town.

Unfortunately, we don't have wireless.

I understand Madison only got 3 1/2 inches of snow Friday. To the south they got much more. Oregon, 7 miles south, got 8 1/2.

The Women of Madison

Happy New Year to everyone!

I haven't posted for a while. Life is like that.

The kids were here Christmas Eve. We went to church together. Brian thought there was a lot of singing. If you wanted a service with lots of singing, this was it. A very good service for people who are not necessarily "into" church or who may think differently than you about church. It had singing, candle lighting, kids and the Christmas story as well as a play about how the Christmas story characters were just ordinary people like us.

The soup was a great success with people taking leftovers home. I decided's ed I need to work a little more on the soup choices. i picked 3 heavy soups and that was way too much in the stomach so a lighter soup choice needs to be found.

It's been very cold here and we've had over 38 inches of snow already. The Sunday before Christmas the wind chill was -35.

With the snow blocking routes and Elwood's creativity, I have found myself in need of help. The women of Madison have come through for me. One woman drove me to the library because the path I was on was snow-blocked. Another woman stopped her car to re-direct us as we were in no man's land along the side of a major road. She made sure we knew where we were before returning to her car.

It is very cold today but lots of people were out, especially on the bike path. I heard someone say,"We have 5 miles to go." I don't know if there was a New Year's walk in progress.

I now have GPS. Sited people can have GPS for under $100. I got GPS for under $1000. It is a dedicated unit and very simple which is what I wanted. There are cheaper solutions on cell phones, but I (a) bounced someone out of his application by fiddling with his phone and (b) I couldn't imagine myself messing around with commands on a phone at a corner in 4 degree weather like there was outside today. I can find out where I am by pushing one button with my gloves on if necessary.

I recorded our route today and learned I had walked over 2.25 miles. I need to walk more, for Elwood's sake as well as to deal with the weight which is creeping up due to inaction.

Bear in mind, the average snowfall in Madison has been 51 inches though last year they had 100. The head of the meteorology department at UW Madison does not think it will be 100 this year, but with 40 inches or so on the ground already who knows.

Writing from Glendale

I'm writing this from Glendale having come here on the bus yesterday. Tomorrow is our cookie bake. It turns out I am making the base for the Italian wedding soup for lunch. I also have to see if I can still make cookies.

I understand there is a big snowstorm on the east coast. We have had snow, too and it is very, very cold.

Wednesday we went to the library. It was the first clear day in a while. I wanted to get a book before it got sent back to its originating library and I had several to return. I also thought it would get us out.

Well, they're digging up alongside Wingra Creek. The intersection of Park and Wingra is not well shoveled and the sidewalk was deteriorating as we approached. I decided to go back. Elwood, who does not like backtracking, suggested we cross Wingra at South. There's a crosswalk and the down curb was shoveled. Normally I don't do this because there is not a stop sign on Wingra nor a light, but traffic was light enough and slow enough I thought we could manage it. Then I discovered the snowbank along the bike path. Okay, we'll walk along it to Fish and get onto the sidewalk there. I also found half a dozen cars parked along the road. Go around. Eventually we found where someone had shoveled through the snow to the bike path./ Much joy.

Our next surprise, or at least mine, was finding myself crossing a street and continuing on open sidewalk. Well, I thought it was open sidewalk. It turned out to be one of the lanes on the main street. In Elwood's defense, the opposite curb was plowed in and only a cut less than the width of a dog gave access to the sidewalk.

But here we were, in the street and we needed to get off of it. So we climbed the snowbank, me on hands and knees because it was too high to step over and too dense to slog through. This happened twice more on our return trip. Boy was I sore. I don't use those muscles. I did have that wonderful feeling of snow on my pant legs I remember from childhood. I haven't felt that for a long time and was quite surprised to find it locked away in memory.

Some of you are not receiving my emails. I'm sending them. Please check junk folders and add me to your white list or receive email from this person list.

I am using the new little netbook I got recently with St. Luke's purse gift. It is easy to carry with me and J. resolved some of my issues with it last night. It has a web cam so hopefully skype calls using it will have video. My home system defaults to my telephone which does not have video but I will see how the wireless connection behaves when I return and we'll go from there.