Skip to main content

Lent 2025: March 14

The book on lament that I have been reading is guiding me through Lent this year. 

This morning I read two incidents in this pastor's life that cut me to the heart--both because of the content/context and my own cold-hearted reaction. 

Cold-heartedness, lack of compassion (I won't use empathy--that is problematic for me, more on that later), impatience, intolerance, and annoyance. My sins that I must own and confess and repent of. 

I won't get into the stories; one was about a young couple's struggle through a premature birth and the child's medical conditions, the other about a minority member of the congregation questioning the lack of response to a racially charged incident. My responses to both were callous, selfish, ungodly. 

Where does this come from? 

The word of God is sharper than a two-edged sword (not a random metaphor), piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. 13 And there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are naked and open to the eyes of Him to whom we must give account. (Hebrews 4)

What we overlook when quoting these verses is the previous line: Let us therefore be diligent to enter that rest, lest anyone fall according to the same example of disobedience. 

I am writing a book on "that rest." However, I am stuck because I am not enjoying that rest fully due to this sin of annoyance at everyone. Even this morning I got an email from a class member who expressed concern about another one! I am annoyed at both of them, ironically. 

Replace annoyance with understanding of where this annoyance comes from and understanding of their and my human flaws. 

The annoyance comes from wanting to control my time and effort. Neither of these belong to me.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why to Read Fiction, Idea #27: Empathy, anyone?

The Idea #27 is tongue in cheek.  But these are some ideas about writing fiction, which I have done in ten novels (and counting), a dozen short stories, and two produced plays (I know, not exactly the same).  Background: In 2015 a colleague and I wrote an open educational resource public speaking textbook for a grant provided by our University System. We didn't realize at the time that it would go viral and be used all over the world within a few years. There are two reasons for that: it is good (as good as anything on the market) and it is free, although only in digital form. Check out www.exploringpublicspeaking.com for it. We also didn't know at the time that my co-author would die at 39 in 2016. I still miss him. Back to the point, I receive requests for the test banks every other day, and this morning I received one from Pennsylvania. The writer had a signature line: "Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Books I Have Read Lately

 Retirement means more time to read.  One Blood , by Denene Millner. This book and author won the Townsend Prize for Fiction 2025 and therefore beat me as one of the other nine finalists. She deserved it for her dramatic and exotic style; mine feels pale in comparison. I have to admit, I have timed out on it when I got to the third main character's story. It starts with a Black midwife in 1950s/1960s Virginia, who is imprisoned for not lying on a birth certificate about a "white" baby's racial identity. The baby is clearly part Black, meaning either the family had Black ancestors or the mother had a lover (I'm not entirely sure about that). The midwife's daughter is brutally murdered by her lover and in this chaos, the granddaughter is spirited away to New York in a wooden box. (Why I am not sure--New York makes sense, because a relation lives there, but why she couldn't just be put on a train, I'm not sure. I imagine Black people could ride trains in ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Keeping Up Appearances? David's Surprise Anointing to Be King

  Have you ever watched the show, Keeping Up Appearances? What it is. A comedy about a British woman who wants to be thought of as very high class even though her family is low class. Her name is Hyacinth Bucket but she pronounces it Bouquet. She wants everything perfect but her family works against her, and her neighbors run from her. We all know someone who wants to keep up appearances, and sometimes we do. In our everyday life, we depend on our eyes and we automatically trust them, at least at first, and we often don’t look closely or below the surface. Like puzzles. But we know that appearances can be deceiving, even though they catch us. So I wanted to show this video I saw recently because it’s disturbing but informative. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FERa1AI2EK8 AI has gotten far better on making these deep fakes—videos that are not of anyone but totally generated by the software. Even though they look like someone, they are not. Of course, it is stealing fro...
Post a Comment
Read more