Skip to main content

Lent 2025: March 21

 Observing a season like Lent, at least in the way I am, requires a self-examination and humility, at the very least. 

Short note: the President of our college, who is a devout Byzantine Catholic (that is a faction I had never heard of before he came to us), stopped by at Baptist Collegiate Ministries yesterday to see what we were doing. We invited him to eat, but he said he was doing keto and giving up carbs for Lent. (a church had brought Stouffer's Lasagna, very tasty but I had massive heartburn afterward and had not taken my meds for it). I have not focused on giving up something for my health, although I have stopped watching most of media or TV I used to, which I will continue. 

For me, a family member (in-law) died this week and I got pressured into going to the service tomorrow in another state. This deceased person was highly irresponsible and left a wake of hurt.  It's a 6-7 hours car trip with my husband, and we will have to spend the night in a hotel. I am not excited but resigned. My first response was feeling trapped and quite angry. The Spirit of repentance and humility of this season of looking toward the cross convicted and rebuked me of this selfishness and childishness. Plus, I have gotten far too set in my ways about going anywhere, and that needs to stop. I have lost joy about being. Why? Again, lack of gratitude explains so much. 

So, my reflection today is the goodness of God. The abundance and grace and outpouring of gifts seen and unseen, physical and spiritual, human and inanimate. Americans are foolish. The more we have the more we complain about it. We buy things that require so much extra time to take care of. 

I finished the Lament book and need a book to read for Bible study. Romans? Or John Piper's 50 Reasons Jesus Came to Die?  (I rarely recommend books but I do that one, although he misses a few.) We have such a superficial understanding of that subject, it's disturbing. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

January 26, 2025: Joseph Campbell's view of things

  A colleague sent me this quote the other day. He said that it had really helped him through life and as he faced changes and retirement, and it also helped him follow his bliss and find what he really wanted to do.  “The problem in middle life, when the body has reached its climax of power and begins to decline, is to identify yourself, not with the body, which is falling away, but with the consciousness of which it is a vehicle. This is something I learned from myths. What am I? Am I the bulb that carries the light? Or am I the light of which the bulb is a vehicle? One of the psychological problems in growing old is the fear of death. People resist the door of death. But this body is a vehicle of consciousness, and if you can identify with the consciousness, you can watch this body go like an old car. There goes the fender, there goes the tire, one thing after another— but it’s predictable. And then, gradually, the whole thing drops off, and consciousness rejoins consciousn...
Post a Comment
Read more

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

Starting Over

We are ridiculously dependent on information technology.  I found that out two weeks ago when my MAC of ten years went inoperative. "Crashed." "Died."  Fortunately, some smart technicians were able to salvage my files; I should call them my life, my work, my creativity.  But I did lose my passwords. Specifically, I lost the password to my two blogs, which I have not posted to since the crash.   My first blog, partsofspeaking.blogspot.com had been in operation since 2006. It had almost 3000 posts on it.  Fortunately, I can still get to them. The whole world can. The fact that I can't get into edit or post it any longer means I also can't take it down. It is going to be there as long as Google Blogger will be. If anything there would get me in trouble, well, I'll have to live with that.  The second one, highereducationobserver.blogspot.com, is where I wrote about my professional expertise as a department chair. It reflected more research. In both blogs, ...
Post a Comment
Read more