paravanes:meditations

Today is my birthday. I am journaling as a part of the celebration. My goal in journaling today is to write clear descriptions of people, situations, and experiences for which I am grateful. None of that run of the mill stuff: "I am grateful for friends, family, home, health, church, employment..." I am going to sit down and write about at least ten situations in the past year where I found God again when I reached the end of myself. With the gift of hindsight, I am going to record those experiences in which God was revealed to me in a new way, an unforgettable way, a personal-powerful-permanent way. Can I make this an annual tradition? Absolutely. Whoever may read these journals after I am gone will have one heck of a story on their hands. I hope they believe it. In the meantime, I will have written for myself a true "memory book." Like the old hymn says, "count your blessings one by one."

A few days ago, I thought I was hungry because I only put two small items in my lunch container for work. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I've never been hungry. "Don't waste food", I've often told my daughter. "There are people starving all over the world." I've now extended this admonition to include not wasting water as there are people struggling all over the world to find clean drinking water. Until I started searching for images of hunger to use with this post, I realized hunger is much uglier and more painful than I had imagined. In the U.S. we are struggling with getting our heads and hands around a $700 billion dollar "bailout" --there are other words, but I won't use them-- of Wall Street. I can imagine someone saying, "You want me to give money to help the hungry? I am the hungry!" I admit I'm not eating out as much as I did a year ago. But I'm not the hungry. I am nowhere near being hungry...

In a time of turmoil, this song always brings me back to center and reminds me of how things really are. This contemporary version of the classic hymn Great is Thy Faithfulness is performed by Selah.

Last weekend, I went in search of essays by Alice Walker . I have loved her work for most of my adult life, even though I lost track of her fiction after The Color Purple . One of Walker's essays, published in the 2006 collection We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Light In A Time Of Darkness , describes the sacrificial life and death of Martin Luther King, Jr. Days after reading Walker, I had the chance to view clips from one of the scariest, most deeply disturbing films I have ever seen: The Wicker Man . I am referring to the excellent 1973 version starring Edward Woodward and Christopher Lee. In this film, a staunchly Christian British police officer volunteers to go to a remote Hebridean island to investigate the disappearance of a young girl. After his arrival, the sergeant realizes he is caught in a strangling maze of "pagan" practices focused on sun worship and possibly human sacrifice. This is not a story with a happy Hollywood ending. The cruelty of the end...