There comes a time when you need to make a list and leave it out next to a plate of cookies… Here’s one I made, with a few suggestions for campus ministers (and others) who are looking for new books, shows, and resources for enlivening faith and community. Take a look over at the National Campus Ministry Association blog…and feel free to leave your browser open where someone jolly might see it and pick up a thing or two for your stocking.
The RevGalBlogPals group sends a weekly email with encouragement, highlights from blogs around the group, and a short article and a prayer for the week at hand. I wrote this week’s article and prayer (below) on the theme of fall break — for which I am very ready! I hope it reminds you to enjoy a break soon.
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When my dad was growing up on a tobacco farm in Southside Virginia, the family ritual was to take a mid-morning break right there in the fields. My great-grandfather would say, “I think it’s time for a bit hit,” and that was the cue to sit down for a few minutes for a snack, which was always the same: a Pepsi and a pack of Nabs. Simple and satisfying, enough to go on until lunch.
In campus ministry, the first big hit of the year is fall break. We start fast and furious in mid-August and steamroll our way to the third week of Advent, when exams end and my congregation leaves me until the season after Epiphany. It’s startling how much can fit into the first six or so weeks before fall break – and how tired I can be so early in the year, so far from Advent 3.
I have been tempted to use the weekend without my usual preaching gig to get ahead, and then to keep at my desk Monday and Tuesday while the university is a ghost town, to get more things done. Instead, I give myself full permission to be off these precious four days when students are off. My husband and I often take a short trip and indulge in ways we usually don’t, like last year’s ridiculously long naps in a hotel right on the beach. I make no apologies.
The thing about a big hit is you know when you need one. In my ministry and my life, I’m trying to trust that and give myself what I know I need when I need it. I’m constantly surprised at how easy that sounds and how hard I find it to do. So I’m thankful that this weekend the university has called for a big hit and we are pointing the car towards the mountains, with napping, hiking, slow meals, and something bubbly to drink in our very near future. Simple and satisfying, enough to go on until Advent.
God of the six days of creation and the seventh day of rest, remind us of how we are made in your image. You are not too busy or important to rest and relax, and neither are we. Give us the rest we crave and the fearless hearts we need to accept this. Amen.
“Meet George Jetson, Jane his wife, his boy Elroy…”
It was a scattered summer and the time I had hoped to devote to pottery went to other things. My summer pottery class produced just four pots and so far I’ve only fired one. Here it is and, yes, I realize it looks like something from The Jetsons or maybe an homage to Ho Jo’s or a slightly-miscolored attempt at UVA colors. There are a lot of ways in which it isn’t really a “me” pot.
Maybe someone will see this and know just the right home for it (and if that’s you, let me know). But I’m proud of it because it represents a lot of New. I made it in the first class with a new teacher and I was attempting to make something in her style, thrown then altered by stretching and cutting the clay. I was also trying out underglazes for the first time, which are painted on (the outside of this bowl) or sprayed on (in the center), rather than dipping the pot into them, and whose colors stay true through firing. Even the colors I chose were departures from my usual earthy palette.
Before my very first pottery class four years ago, I was so hopeful I’d be “good.” I recognized my mind starting to count on that outcome and gave myself a talking to. I showed up early for the first class and said to my teacher Nan, “I hope I can do this and that I’m good. But no matter what, I want to have fun.”
Summer was full and fall is looking the same. Times like these tempt me to treat play like another job, one more area of work in which to push myself to excel/produce/accomplish/check off the list/insert-more-impressive-and-exhausting-things-here. It’s good at precisely these times to remember and reclaim that original intention, to have fun when I’m supposed to be playing, and not to turn it into more work.
So, no apologies for “only” making four pots in the last class and there will be no production schedule mandate for the fall class. And no apology for my Jetsons bowl, which isn’t me at all, but is definitely new and even a little playful.
Last night was one of those 3:30am nights. Awake, mind already racing at full speed, rehearsing, rehashing. I hate those nights.
I usually sleep well so when I don’t it feels especially abrupt and intrusive and disorienting. And it sometimes means maybe, just maybe, I need some decompression and download time I’m not giving myself, so my mind takes over in my sleep when my defenses are down. I was up for a while, trying to breathe and listen to my rain sounds app, then, when that didn’t work, trying to zone out to the background of familiar Friends episodes until a fitful, anxiety-dream-filled sleep set in from about 5:30-8am.
When I told my husband about the stew of dreams that rushed in during that time, he said I managed to include every major anxiety-inducing situation. Why, yes, I did. One dream included our home’s roof leaking in two places, the discovery that a small child used one of our vases as a toilet, and realizing after lounging unshowered in my pjs all day that I had one hour to be dressed and at a wedding. I made it to the wedding in question, where I was not the clergyperson presiding but where I was supposed to pray before a meal. I stumbled as I started the prayer, stopped myself, and said, “I’m just going to start over.” Then, as I gathered my thoughts in a moment of silence and was about to open my mouth to try again, the clergyperson I didn’t know who was officiating the wedding – Generic Priest Collar Dude – jumped in and just slapped out the prayer himself.
Luckily, my husband had the coffee ready when I woke up.
My autistic stepson Blair sometimes has trouble sleeping straight through the night so I’ve taken to gently telling him, when he comes for his good night hug right before bed, I hope you have a good, long sleep. I hope you have beautiful dreams and you rest and sleep all the way until morning when it’s time for everyone to wake up. And in the morning, we’ll say “Good morning!” and give you another hug.
Even when I know things have built up and I need decompression and meditation, I’m not as good at saying similar things to myself. Today, as the dreams recede, I’m hoping a swim in the sun and the space of an afternoon off can help where words seem lacking.
On long backpacking hikes in my twenties, we passed the time going up and down mountains by cataloguing the ways we were struggling. Going up, we were breathless and our muscles were shaky; going down, knees and ankles, different muscles. One wasn’t really better or worse than the other, just hard in different ways. We never said much about the hike itself on the few flat portions of trail.
I find myself doing this in the rest of life. I spend a lot of time hoping for and anticipating the uphill sections – the family vacation planned for July, the next kiln opening, finishing the project, beating my mile swim time – and a lot of time dreading and trying to just make it through the downhill sections – sickness, cleaning the bathroom, meetings and reports, uncomfortable conversations with difficult people. I’m realizing lately that I have underappreciated the occasional straight, flat parts of “the trail.”
Hiking in April after a sluggish and inactive winter, we were on a well-groomed trail with small, intermittent flat stretches built into the switchbacks. Going up, I used those stretches to straighten up and catch my breath and gather my wits and steam for the next uphill bit. Going down, I relaxed and felt relief from the joint-pounding, muscle-quivering descent. These seemingly boring straight flat parts saved me – in both directions.
As with many spiritual break-throughs, my own weakness and vulnerability on that first hike of the season allowed me to see and appreciate something I’ve been missing. And needing. Those usually unheralded flat parts had a beauty of their own. I didn’t have to concentrate so hard or push myself or hold myself back. I could just let them take me to the next up or down. They were absolutely necessary for both recovery and gearing up.
The parts (on the trail, in life) that are easily overlooked, the flat reprieves where nothing much happens and we aren’t engaged in heroic measures or managing failures, are as necessary as up and down to get where we are going. It’s easier to see this on the trail than in the midst of life. When my panting slows on a flat path after a steep rise or my knees stop barking after a sharp descent, if I’m paying enough attention I can see the need for something flat and straight and just boring enough to give me a moment. In life off the trail, it seems harder.
This summer, I’m trying to slow myself down enough to appreciate the relative flatness but it’s taking great intention, like pulling on the reins of wild horses. So I’m remembering April’s hike and the unexpected savoring I did on those flat parts of the trail. I know the uphills and downhills of the academic year (and the rest of life) are coming but for right now the path is clear, flat, and straight. I’m catching my breath, offering thanks for this blessedly boring stretch, and letting it take me where it will.
I was swimming along just fine, regularly going for a mile or more, several times a week. I felt strong and sleeker than usual. Then, one day, I just didn’t feel like it and had to argue myself into going to the pool. I felt bloated and stressed and harried, and in my convincing conversation with myself, I reminded me that this is exactly the kind of time when it’s important to go ahead and get moving instead of eating half a cake in front of the TV. It’s probably a result of watching too much TV and too many movies, but on the first lap I kept waiting to start feeling better. I’m moving now. I complied. Kick in the soaring inspirational montage music and I’ll feel sleekness return. I’ll be out of the funk.
That’s not what happened. I don’t remember how long I swam that day – maybe a half mile, if I made it that far – and every single stroke was a struggle. There was no montage music. There was no lightening of my load. I never hit my swimming stride to feel sleek and smooth, gliding through the water. I felt like I was thrashing around, slapping and splashing, struggling to breathe.
I was praying the whole time. Praying as I convinced myself to go. Praying as I got into the pool and started thrashing. Praying for my stroke to even out. Praying for God to be with me and lift some of the burden I felt, weighing me down. I thought I was struggling with myself – with self-doubt and that strangely stultifying combination of physical laziness and overwork – but as I doggedly kept slapping the surface of the water, gasping for each breath, I started to think maybe it wasn’t me.
I started to wonder if I was in a wrestling match with God. And, since I was in the pool, I also wondered if God was trying to drown me. That feeling didn’t go away for the entire swim, and I wondered why God would want to wrestle me right then, on a shaky day to begin with, in a particularly vulnerable location.
I love the story of Jacob wrestling all night with the angel/God (Genesis 32: 22-32), refusing to let go or give in until he’d received the blessing he was after. I love the idea of God as one who’s willing to get this intimate with us in our struggles, but until my own wrestling match I always thought of the wrestling itself as merely a metaphor. I preferred my actual experiences of God to be in more in the comforting metaphor variety – Good Shepherd, mother hen (John 10: 11-18, Matthew 23:37).
That day in the pool, I was face-to-face, breath-to-struggling-breath, with a very present but not so comforting God. I don’t know why and I am not sure I know yet what blessing I wrangled that day, but God was definitely present in the pool with me and it wasn’t the comfort I thought it would be when I started swimming and praying.
Months later, when I’d pushed that episode to the back of my mind, it came pouring back to the front during a conversation with my students. We’d been singing the David Crowder Band song “How He Loves,” which includes this line: “If grace is an ocean we’re all sinking.” I told them this doesn’t seem like grace for me, that I like the metaphor of grace as an ocean but it needs language like “floating” and “buoyed up” to describe it. Do we really want grace to sink us? Isn’t that like being drowned by grace?
Then I remembered my wrestling match. Maybe Crowder’s got it right after all. Maybe we do want grace to sink us. From our watery beginnings in baptism, death for Christians is as present as life. When we join the tribe, we enter through a “watery grave,” believing it holds the promise of life. And it does, but we go by the road Christ himself traveled, as Charles Wesley wrote (United Methodist Hymnal, p. 302): “Soar we now where Christ has led, Alleluia!/ Following our exalted head, Alleluia!/ Made like him, like him we rise, Alleluia!/ Ours the cross, the grave, the skies, Alleluia!”
I don’t know why I thought God would stand back in my vulnerable moment instead of jumping in with me. I don’t know why I thought metaphors were enough. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t want a rematch, at least not in the pool. But maybe part of the blessing I received that day was the experience itself, of being taken hold of by God in a desperate and vulnerable moment, and being held onto no matter how I struggled and resisted, no matter how much I begged for a mother hen instead of an underwater sumo wrestler.
Our state flower, blooming right alongside the Monticello Trail, another great local hike.
Every Friday the RevGals post a play-along Friday Five. (Have I mentioned we wrote a book?) This week’s is wide open: “share with us five experiences of renewal that you have recently enjoyed, or would like to launch this Easter season.”
Happy May Day, everyone, and here are my five…
I’ll admit this woman looks like she’s having fun. But I was almost as dismayed with this hotel door hanger as I was with the all-working version we encountered in October. I’m sure she’s working up a sweat with all that jumping. I might even be willing to call it “rejuvenating,” but restful?
Why can’t she be taking a nap? Or be snuggled beneath a blanket reading a book? Why can’t she be listening to music with her feet propped up?
It seems one of the many causalities of our overworking is our resting. When we deign to rest it now looks like a competitive sport rather than an afternoon spent dozing or meandering through a music collection.
Yeah, I know, it’s just a door hanger. It’s some hotel marketing department’s creative answer to standard equipment. I get that I’m allowed to rest how I want to no matter what the picture shows. I just think we deserve work that looks less like a constant war and rest that looks a lot less like work. We deserve cycles of work and rest rather than one-speed-fits-all living with the labels changed every now and then.
The competing voices in my head each sound reasonable. That’s the problem.
One voice is the keep-track-of-it voice. The one who wants to capture the precise moment with a picture or by writing down that perfectly turned phrase. This voice knows that someday when I stumble upon the preserved memory I’ll stop and take it in again. I’ll be so happy then that I kept it and can remember and relive it.
The other voice is the be-here-now voice. The one who wants to be fully immersed in the present experience, not with one eye on the future memory of the moment I’m still trying to have right now. This voice knows that whatever I remember, unaided, will be enough and just the thing I needed to know when the time comes and that, even if I can technically remember nothing from the present experience, it will have changed me somehow whether or not I can articulate or point to or recall it.
Being the kind of English major I was in college was the perfect combination of these voices. I came to class with novel in hand, underlined and highlighted. I opened my notebook to a fresh sheet and dated the page. The things I wrote in my notebook were extensions of thoughts, an idea or something I wondered about because of the conversation taking place in class. I rarely wrote down plot points of facts or direct quotes from the professor or my fellow students. Mine were not the notes a friend would borrow to catch up on what she missed when absent. My notebook might have only the word “sea” underlined, with no other words nearby, from a discussion of Mrs. Dalloway. It might have the beginnings of an outline for the paper I conceived of during and because of the discussion.
As an English major, I was committed to living in the texts, wading around in them, feeling emotions because of them. For me, class was an extension of the reading experience – a bunch of readers wading in together and seeing how swift the current was or how temperate the water. Who needs notes to understand or remember that sort of thing?
Those note-taking enterprises were entirely different from, say, attending a workshop on saving for retirement, where the terms are not organic or natural to me and where remembering the feeling of the workshop isn’t an adequate action plan to take home and implement afterwards. That kind of endeavor needs 1-2-3 and if/then.
Theology and religious life seem much more like my version of English class than like a retirement workshop. I don’t mean we don’t need rigor and specifics when studying theology or biblical texts, but it does seem we are meant to wade in and see what happens and let our minds free-associate and our hearts feel. I think I used to do that more.
I resist the preacher-with-all-the-answers model of ministry, though too often I have looked for the right or best answer. I’ve let the questioner or the question back me into a corner rather than seeing him or it as an invitation to go swimming.
I notice a strange thing happening these days. As we concoct more and more easily retrievable means of “remembering” (phones and computers and email that can store ridiculous amounts of info, texts, photos, correspondence, recordings…) I’m increasingly worried over forgetting, misplacing, or missing out on something. Strange since it is actually hard to lose track of our information now and easy to save it without once thinking of whether it’s worth saving. (Recent research indicates our devices don’t help us with recall as much as we might like – or as much as old school pen and paper.)
At a fall conference on theology and storytelling, I didn’t feel like preparing for the right answer or being the good note taker. I knew for sure I would forget finer points but I was tired and I was thinking of the time away as a deep well. I needed water, not documentation. So out of exhaustion more than intent, at first, I gave myself permission not to take notes. I sat with an open page and wrote very little. As I watched others in the conference typing and writing furiously, I felt conspicuous at first. I heard the voices in my head arguing. They both made their good points. I was positive I’d forget some things worth remembering – but the permission to be fully present while it was happening was freeing and more important than being able to tell someone else exactly what the speaker had said later on.
I’ve been trying to do this more. Permission not to take notes is an invitation to step in and try the water. I’m guaranteed to forget a few things, maybe even some important things. But that was always going to happen, no matter how copious the notes or diligent the note taker. Besides, I can jot down a few impressions of the experience later, while I dry off on the bank.
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Photo credit: “Mark Cantrell taking notes” © 2009 Gary Peeples, USFWF, CC BY 2.0
I was visiting a 90-something-year-old who had just asked how things were going. I admitted I had too much on my plate and felt overwhelmed by it at that moment. She said, “I can’t remember the last time I was overwhelmed.” I was annoyed and ungenerous in my heart.
About that same time, early October with gorgeous colors ablaze in the trees and perfect crisp weather, a very nice woman at church asked if I’d been doing any hiking. My first and most accurate response, which I somehow managed not to say out loud was, “Are you f*@#ing kidding me?”
Yes, I know I have a problem.
Between college and seminary I worked for 3 years in Appalachia. I lived just outside of a town with one flashing light, on the side of a mountain where I could hear cows mooing from the other side of the mountain and, standing on the front porch, I could look across the ridges to Tennessee. This makes it sound like a simple life and a slower pace. From my current vantage point, I’m tempted to think that way, though it’s not entirely true. I worked for a non-profit hosting huge groups of volunteers doing home repair, with full blast, no-stopping seasons of activity and slight pauses to catch our breath at other times of year.
During that time I first ran across this quote from the Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton (Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander):
“There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”
I highlighted, starred, and dog-eared this quote. I read it and re-read it.
I posted it next to my desk when I first began in campus ministry. Back then, observing the pace at which students were living, I was convinced that one of the best things we could do in campus ministry was to convince students to slow down, empty out, take a day off, and even skip a class here and there. I was dismayed to hear students talk about skipping class – to finish a paper for another class. It was never to lounge on the grass and read poetry or contemplate the sky.
Unfortunately, it’s still just as applicable in campus ministry today, more than a decade later. Even more unfortunately, Merton’s quote is still just as applicable in my own life now as it was when I first read and seized upon it on that hill in Appalachia 25 years ago.
Temptation is great. Memory and will are weak. This time, I can get it all done. This time, I’ll fit in everything everyone wants. This time, it won’t break me to work and never rest.
Wrong again.
In these months of being overwhelmed and undernourished, when I want to snap at pleasant people in church and nonagenarians, I return to Merton’s wisdom. In this Advent season when we hear the invitation to repent (“turn around”), I am trying hard to turn around – again – and to move in the direction of life. Or at least, more life and less death.
It’s been too long since I “skipped class.” I’ve been missing out on poetry and the gorgeousness of the unearned sky. The two hardest things I did in the past week were when I said “No, not now” to people asking for my time or attention.
I’ve been living with this quote for a long time now but it’s newly occurring to me that, yes, it’s about me and choices I make and the encouragement it gives to choose otherwise. But it’s also about a lifelong practice. I used to think I could learn this and embody it and move on to other issues. Now I think maybe Thomas Merton was even wiser than I knew. Maybe his advice is also about the continual staunching of that tide, about the necessary maintenance we must undertake on the retaining wall holding back that persistent hillside of “too much.”
I don’t know that I’ll ever “fix” this as I once imagined was possible, but I hear the call to tend to it. To turn around and tend to my spirit, even as many other things and people need tending. My prayer-in-practice in these waning Advent days is to be met in my turning, to realize at bone-soul level that my best work is to behold and receive. Every time I turn, there’s God. This is my prayer for all of you, too.
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photo credit: “Overwhelmed Flood sign, Upton-upon-Severn,” © 2013, Bob Embleton , CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Come to think of it, “working” is more prominent than “do not disturb.” Pretty disturbing.
We went to the beach in October to rest, just the two of us. We ate an amazing meal, got our feet wet in the ocean, walked in the sand, watched and listened to the surf from our beachside balcony, took naps, watched baseball, and slept all night with the sliding glass door open to the cool air and the constant rumble of waves. Aaaaah.
So imagine my surprise to find no resting option on the “do not disturb” door-hanger at our hotel. Both sides said “do not disturb” but they also both offered the explanation “working,” accompanied by a picture of a very frazzled, business-suited man standing on his head, tie like a floppy noose, in front of a stack of papers and his cell phone. The only way to ask folks not to disturb you at this hotel was to claim the excuse of working. Not sleeping or resting or enjoying passionate sex. Nope. Working was the only acceptable way to claim undisturbed time and space.
This makes me so sad because I’m sure it wasn’t a printing error. Though I flipped the door-hanger back and forth several times to be sure I wasn’t missing something, I’m sure they didn’t mean to put a different message on the opposite side. Why bother asserting my right to some down time when I’m just in the room reading email on my phone? Why bother claiming to sleep when that seems so much more disturb-worthy than working?
This is what it’s come to, folks. Choosing work all the time means eventually it’s the only choice left.
This sad revelation made our pre-vacation decision to stay off email even more meaningful. For me, it was a total offline weekend, no email and no social media. Woody stayed away from email but checked into Facebook here and there. That’s what worked for us on this trip. The point is, we thought about it and talked about it in advance. We set up our perimeter so we could enjoy the pace and place and each other.
If you don’t set and practice your own boundaries, no one else will do it. Even in a beachfront hotel room on a day off.
Last Sunday I preached in a church that has three different worship services in three different locations within the church. One is a moderately sized chapel, one is a voluminous fellowship hall with a stage at one end, and the last one is the original sanctuary of the old downtown church. The variations in space accompanied the differences in worship style. The one thing all three had in common: a clock easily seen from the pulpit.
I know all the practical reasons for this. As someone who doesn’t wear a watch and doesn’t carry my cell phone into worship, I can appreciate the orientation the clocks give, especially in that church where pastors rush from service to service to make it in time for all three. Still, I was a bit sad and wistful thinking of those clocks and the importance we place — even in a weekly set aside time to worship — on adhering to the schedule.
I’ve been longing for less scheduled time in my life. I’ve been wanting to roam freely through at least some of my days or seasons, without the constant constraint of being pre-scheduled for the next appointment or task. I’ve realized lately that my great skill in organizing and scheduling is both help and hindrance, both a survival mechanism and something that might be slowly killing my spirit.
Along with several of my sister writer-pastors from last summer’s Collegeville retreat, I’m now part of a cohort awarded a grant through Austin Seminary’s College of Pastoral Leaders. We wrote the bulk of the grant together but we each had to write individual responses to certain questions. Every one of us commented on the swirl of demands on our time and attention and how we need to establish more balance and pace in our lives. We didn’t discuss this as a theme but reading through our responses it was the one, glaring thing we all had in common.
This summer, re-reading MaryAnn McKibben Dana’s Sabbath in the Suburbs, I came across this already-highlighted passage (p.150): “I have found it much more liberating spiritually to embrace the idea of holy scarcity. There isn’t ever enough time. Even when we strip away all the inessentials — even when we focus only on the things that are good and nourishing and important for ourselves, our families, and the world — there is still not enough time. But our hope is not in there being enough time but in there being enough grace to muddle through the scarcities of our days.”
I keep trying to believe the myth that I can reallocate time and rework the schedule so there will be enough time, as if there is a secret key to this I haven’t stumbled upon but I’m oh-so-close to finding. When I’m honest I see how even when the options are all deemed good, I can’t say “yes” to everything. Making friends with time, as McKibben Dana calls it, means embracing “no.”
I have known days so full they seemed out of time, perfectly paced, lingering just so. They are rare. I’ve known many more that were crammed full, often with amazing things and people, but so packed it was hard to take it all in or to “come down” enough to go to sleep at the end of them.
“Our hope is not in there being enough time but in there being enough grace to muddle through the scarcities of our days.” At least half of our biblical stories are about this very thing: wanting to be God instead of ourselves. Guilty as charged. Through my amazing organizational skills, I want to command time to obey me, find the elusive formula to the perfectly balanced day, and sleep satisfied in my own powers of management and discernment. This hasn’t been working out so far.
When I look more closely, I see those few full timeless-seeming days in context. There were dishes in the sink while we sat outside churning the homemade ice cream, watching the sky turn black and star-pricked. There were emails left untouched and – gasp! – unseen when we hiked by the waterfalls and rested in a meadow for as long as we felt like it.
Perfection is always illusion. Mastery is misguided.
“Even when we focus only on the things that are good and nourishing and important for ourselves, our families, and the world — there is still not enough time.” My choices aren’t usually between horrible, bad, soul-denying things and beautiful, transporting, soul-enriching things. Many, many times I have the wonderful choice in this time-limited life between two very good things.
That’s the rub. That’s what I’m trying to make sense of these days and make a little peace with as I go forward. Saying “no” is, painfully, often a “no” to something or someone I’d really like to spend time with, too. But I’m tired of this torn-ness and never-ending calendar calculation. I’m ready for more imperfection and the grace that orients better than any clock.
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photo credit: “time” © 2012 János Balázs, CC BY-SA 2.0