JUST TOO BUSY

Stuff is moved to the new office. Some stuff is out of boxes. Other stuff is in boxes. It's different down here. Quieter. Noisier. It's good.

The ladies of Metzger Upper West gave me a "lifetime membership" today at break. That's cool. It's amazing when community happens without any help. That's a good thing.

I have a presentation of faith development this coming Monday. We're soundly criticizing Fowler and presenting two evangelical options: Darling and Loder. Loder, by the way, has an amazing book called Logic of the Spirit (info over at What I'm Reading). If you're at all involved in nurture, it's a must read!

CORPORATE MOVE...

I admit it. I hate moving. I hate packing. I hate the dust and the piles and the decisions and the waiting and the inconvenience of the whole thing. We were supposed to move to our new offices tomorrow morning. Now it looks like MAYBE tomorrow afternoon. Alright. All my files are packed. My desk is empty. Thankfully--oh yea, I'm supposed to be thankful--I do most of my work on computer. But still. I hate moving.

TUESDAY THANKS

Thankful for the extra sleep I got because the polls don't open until 7 am.
Thankful that it really does rain in California, but that this usually happens at night so we can all commute in relative dryness.
Thankful for the faith development assignment in the CE class--this is good stuff that I'll post on when the presentation is done.

Finally, thankful for the morning prayer over at A Cup of Rich:

Thanks be to You Lord God, King of the Universe,
For the change of the seasons,
For Winter turning to Spring,
For the changing rythm of life,
For bringing the warmth of Your light,
For bringing joy, and rest, and peace to us.

Amen, and amen!

What I'm doing for Lent

First, some background. (1) I'm Baptist and we really don't do Lent. (2) I'm also generally a non-conformist, so often I do do Lent. (3) I'm in a class this spring called Expository Methods in Daniel and Revelation and our first paper was on Daniel 4--you know where Nebuchadnezzar gets to act like a donkey for seven years until he wises up and acknowledges that the Most High God rules. Anyway, the paper had an application section--very wise!--and and what I'm doing for Lent is my application.

I'm generally a smart person--this is not bragging (at least not this time), I just am. I'm also in seminary, which, by the way, is a place where we learn a bunch of stuff that most other people don't know. Now, the combination of non-conformity, smarts, and seminary training is arrogance waiting to happen. A big contributing factor is neglecting thankfulness. Too often I take the amazing-mundane gifts of God to be merely mudane, rather than amazing-mundane. For example, being smart is basically mundane. It doesn't necessarily lead to anything. The capacity itself has nothing to do with me, so not much to brag about, but the working out of smarts is, frankly, often lots of work--this is where the arrogance comes in. By neglecting thankfulness--forgetting to remember that the capacity for smarts and the ability to develop them are from God--the whole thing gets out of perspective and I start to think that I'm all that.

So, I decided to at least try to remember to be thankful everyday, and to that end I set an alarm on my palm pilot--fairly pitiful, I know, but it's working, so hey.

Today I am thankful that God still loves me when I'm crabby. Today I am crabby, but I am also thankful. So it begins...

Psalm 116:16-18