Isaiah 58

Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke?

Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? when thou seest the naked, that thou cover him; and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh?

Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, and thine health shall spring forth speedily: and thy righteousness shall go before thee; the glory of the LORD shall be thy reward.

Then shalt thou call, and the LORD shall answer; thou shalt cry, and he shall say, Here I am. If thou take away from the midst of thee the yoke, the putting forth of the finger, and speaking vanity;

And if thou draw out thy soul to the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted soul; then shall thy light rise in obscurity, and thy darkness be as the noon day:

And the LORD shall guide thee continually, and satisfy thy soul in drought, and make fat thy bones: and thou shalt be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.

Can one sue the Almighty?

There is a point to be had in here somewhere.

State Senator Chambers Sues God

Random discipline

I am a painful Picasso when it comes to writing poetry. My "blue period" included such titles as Bad Burton and Chasing Butterflies. My abuse of rhyme and meter should have been tried as criminal.

“call it fate, but I thought it seemed right,
to see a butterfly there in the morning light…”

Bad poetry aside, I try to write a little bit every day. Sometimes I publish it here, and sometimes I do not. I don’t know what this ritual accomplishes other than to discipline my brain to convert thoughts to words through my fingers.

So here goes random discipline:

Every few days I am stirred by something that happens in the universe. Usually it is subtle—the way something looks or smells and releases a fragment of memory or a phrase that marches out of context through my head until I recognize that it needs to be heard.

I saw a "house-biter" destroying a little house to make way for a mansion. The jaws clamped over the roof and crumbled the walls that once held the hopes and sorrows of a family. And, I wrote and wrote and wrote about the old giving way to the new. The cycles of life.

Sausage McMuffins inspired another piece about my mother watching me eat the popular breakfast sandwich and remarking: "I am glad you can enjoy swine's flesh." It prompted me to remember the Hebrew dietary laws that governed the food on the table of childhood even though we were not Jewish. And, the oh, so funny story of how a friend of ours, who discovered that he and his sister were eating bacon, yelled "Spit it out Lisa! It's pig meat."

Once I wrote a whole short story based on the phrase: "It was a road that would have been better left untraveled." Of course, I found out in short order that my spell check didn't think that UNTRAVELED is a word. It wanted me to use the word UNRAVELED. And, unraveled might also have been an appropriate use.

It was a road better left unraveled, but I didn’t know that until I was half way down it.

The road less raveled. The road less graveled. The road less traveled.

Writing. I do love words and good writing. I don’t know how to tell you what good writing is, but I know it when I read it. It is not cluttery. It doesn’t have too many images. And, it should make me see and feel what is beneath the words.

I have come to favor incomplete sentences when used for emphasis. I rather like the idea of breaking the traditional rules of writing. I still feel rebellious when I start a sentence with AND or BUT. I follow the AP stylebook's rules for commas. Writing should just flow and the need for a comma will be apparent. I like a metaphor that adds to my understanding. A metaphor that sits in the middle of the page clipping its literary toenails...well...it isn't so useful.

There is nothing disciplined about this writing and it took me less than five minutes. Will I use this? No. Maybe. Okay. I will.

The Psychology of Social Movements

Found this book at the swapshop. Borrowed this review...

The Psychology of Social Movements by Hadley Cantril sets forth an outline by which social movements can be judged and their outcomes predicted. Cantril looked beyond the surface of social movements to examine the psychology behind them. What motivates people to follow an untried leader? What does the social environment do to make people suggestible? What are people thinking about, puzzled about, and hoping for when they lose themselves in some cause that seems strange or esoteric to the observer? What makes them drink the Kool-aid?

How we lost grandma

I have such a sick sense of humor. This tickled my funny bone. Click here to read the author's original post.

Is MORE ever ENOUGH?

I killed a man once
not in the usual ways--
poison, knife, gun.
instead I ate his heart
slowly.

My darkness devoured
each new piece he offered and
his goodness filled my
belly.

He gave until finally
there was nothing
left when I asked
for More.

“The less you talk, the more you're listened to.”
Abigail Van Buren

Happy Sabbath

Can you help me get my ass outta the ditch?

Cutest Foot Ever Born

A curious spike

Darkness

I fell asleep and woke with a panic attack an hour ago. It has been a while since that has happened. I think I understand the origin of its insistence, but I still feel jarred by the fierce landing of my consciousness from sweet sleep to biting reality.

"Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people." Carl Jung

I have spent years learning to light my own darkness. Sometimes I wonder if I have learned anything at all other than the hell of my inner being. The taste of my own terror. And the clambering beat of my disquieted soul.

Coming Home

What has been keeping me busy.

Recommended Reading

"I had a ton of things to tell him. I wanted him to find a solution to all of our shortages of clothes; of meat, so it could again be distributed through the ration books. I also wanted him to give our Christmas back. And to come live with us. I wanted to let him know how much we really needed him..."

It was a different read, but one I really enjoyed. I think Fidel might have created another child waiting for the "highwayman."

I was a Coupon Queen

Last night I enjoyed what might have been the best meal I have ever eaten. The filet mignon was just the right amount of pink. The potatoes were mashed perfection. The cream of asparagus soup melted against my tongue. The wine was light, and the creme brulee made me want to sing a love song. (This is my very best attempt at erotic food description.)

There was a time that the bill for this fine meal would have been my grocery money for the month.

During that time, my coupon caddy was the size of a small country. My weekly routine included shopping in two different towns at seven different stores. My days were devoted to clipping and snipping those precious bits of paper that meant only one thing for me. FREE GROCERIES.

It is possible to play the system of coupons and rebates to get free stuff. You buy something on sale. Use a coupon. Mail in a rebate. And, items are free or if you are lucky, you make money. Like all systems, it has its flaws. It breeds a sense of deficit rather than a sense of sufficiency. There is never enough free stuff to make up for what you lack. Who really needs forty-seven tubes of toothpaste, sixty-two boxes of Glad trash bags, ninety-six boxes of band-aids or twenty-three bottles of shampoo even if they are free?

I will admit that a fever guided my hobby in those days. I raided my friend's cupboard shelves for UPC symbols. I hunted down triple coupon stores. I scavenged extra Sunday supplements from the recycling center. I was a madwoman.

Those who knew me thought I just LOVED to coupon and rebate. And, I did. For the first three months. After that, the fever was driven by need.

The truth was, I had a husband who had $250 of medication and medical bills a month with no health insurance. His stipend along with the house we had on campus was $500 a month. You do the math.

Every coupon that I clipped. Every rebate that I matched. Every dollar that I saved ensured that we had the money to pay for his medical needs.

Without Judgment

I am curious to know how many people attend a church service when they are on vacation? There is no right or wrong answer. I do not attend church when I am on vacation. Jim does, or he would if I didn't whine and pitch a fit like a shrew.

We have been fortunate enough to stay in a house on the Cape this week. Actually, Jim and Jared have been here all week, and I joined them on the weekend. The house with its traditional dormers and shingled sides is shaded by giant oak trees and surrounded by a split rail fence. It is just a quarter mile from the beach. It couldn't be more perfect.

The owners of this fine house are lovely folks who have befriended Jim and his ministry. They remember the old days of Fair Haven and Fair Haven Christian School.

In any event, they have generously shared this house with our family, and they stopped by the house Saturday morning to "check" on us bringing a Ziploc bag of freshly cleaned bluefish that they had caught that morning. I chatted with the Mrs. about the best way to cook it, and Jim chatted with the Mr. about how relaxing the week had been.

I adore both of them, by the way. He wears suspenders that are often askew. He has a warmth you can't fake. And, that he loves my husband is enough for me to like him forever. She is spunky in the way that only 60 somethings can be. Far from being finished with the adventures of life, she is busy making sure she does the things she has always wanted to do. Much of the bluefish they brought had been caught and cleaned by her that morning on her first EVER fishing trip.

We all chatted in that comfortable way people talk when they are enjoying the dog days of summer....and, then they mentioned that when we were deciding where to go to church the next morning, we could consider the church next door that had both a traditional and contemporary service. They thought Jim would like the contemporary music the most. (SURPRISE!)

The key phrase was "when" we decided where to go to church not IF. It startled me to realize that there are some folks who don't take vacation from church at all. It isn't even in their thinking.

Jim thanked them, and said he hadn't yet decided what he was going to do, but he was strongly being encouraged to play hookie. The crestfallen faces smote my heart. I tried not to feel bad, but I did just a little. I felt as though my vacation heathenism had somehow disappointed our benefactors. I didn't feel bad enough to go just to please them, but it made me consider the situation.

I was trying to remember why church had never been an issue when I went on vacation with my family growing up. Our vacations were usually in campgrounds. I do remember that we had our own little service around the campfire on Sunday morning. Sometimes we invited folks my parents had befriended to join us, but we never went to church anywhere else. Then I remembered: Kingdom people didn't go to church at other churches back then. They just didn't.

Later that day, we were driving to Mashpee, and we saw a little white church with a big banner across the front that read: CELEBRATE RECOVERY!

I thought that IF I was going to church on vacation, that is where I would like to go. Because we are all in recovery of some sort or another. Some may be recovering from the traditional vices such as drugs or alcohol. But, we might be recovering from the loss of faith. We might be recovering from betrayal. We might be recovering from a death so unfair that we haven't yet been able to reconcile our hearts with God. We might be recovering from things we have done to numb our pain--things that instead have bruised our souls. We might be recovering from the past. The present. The future.

Others, who have been fortunate enough to be spared the aforementioned losses, might simply need to recover from their sense of spiritual superiority. They might need to work on recovering from pride before they have to do the really hard work of recovering from the fall that certainly follows on the heels of such smugness.

The truth is: We all have something from which we need to recover. The hurts. The painful places. The losses. All turn to lessons and growth in recovery. And, recovery turns to discovery as we learn to live again.

As for me and my household we will serve the Lord. And, if we go to church on vacation, we will go where folks CELEBRATE RECOVERY! (with an exclamation point).

Tumbling Turrets

Is it just me, or does these turrets look familiar? One was a sideshow and one was a movement. Both were kingdoms built by men. Both reigned at the turn of the century. Both drew people from their very core. Both marked the souls of their believers. Both kingdoms. Both so mighty. Both gone.