Patience and Trust, Lent's First Post...a Little Late

So it has been my intention to post daily in Lent. Ok, well you know what they say about good intentions. And to that I say, who are they anyway, and what do they know about my life! I do own that I am getting a late start to the daily posts. In my own defense I will say that the early days of Lent were consumed by wresting with Mark's Gospel for last Sunday and the sermon I was determined to finish.  That took until midway through Saturday, and by that point I had much nothing left to say to anyone other than the dog.

I do need to get back to writing, though.  If for no other reason, it is a good way to disperse some of my stress. Much better than going around losing and misplacing things, which is what I have been doing lately.  Last week ir was a pair of sunglasses, my favorite blue winter scarf and page three of that above- mentioned sermon.  That last one...that was discovered IN the pulpit as I completed the preaching of page two! Talk about things that are guaranteed to raise your heart rate.  I was deeply grateful that it had been one of "those" sermons. You know, the ones that you spend hours and hours and hours....looking for the right thoughts, the right words.  It was only because I had been there so long, at the river, in the wilderness and back that I had a even a small prayer of knowing in that heart-stopping moment what I might say next, how I might wrap this baby up and bring it home.  I told R after the service what happened.  He said even he, as well as he knows me, had no clue I was just making it up as I went along. This gives me hope that maybe, someday...I really won't be a word for word manuscript preacher.  But for the immediate future...I will be checking my pages much closer before I leave the house!  By the way, I also found the scarf at the coffee shop and the sunglasses under the seat in the car.  All in all good end to a stressful week.

We did an exercise in one of the groups at my day job recently.  Our task was to identify some quality that we needed to "absorb" and then imagine ourselves taking that in into ourselves in whatever way made sense to us.  What came to mind immediately for me were two words, patience and trust, as I seem to have a rather significant shortage of both right now.  I think this is symptomatic of too much change, too much transition.  March marks the beginning of about fifteen months of active change in our lives, on top of the thinking, planning and prepping that went on for at least nine months or so before that...since right about the time we got married in fact.  Which was of course preceded by a year or so of planning, prepping and thinking about that, which was preceded by another two or three years of lots of change. Really, when I think about it, it was sometime in mid-2007 that I last lived under the delusion that my world was a settled little orderly universe in which I maintained some modicum of control.  It might have been even earlier, maybe it was before I was ordained.  At some level, the when of it doesn't matter.  Suffice it to say, it has been a long and interesting ride. Parts of it have been really fun, and parts of it not so much.  I have certainly learned a lot.  And right now, I am really, really tired.

And It is not quite done, this change and transition, we still have some big stuff ahead.  Another house move, another vocational shift or two on the part of both of my hats as well as a whole lot of uncertainty on the job front for R.  By Fall the dust will all have settled and I am hopeful that I will be able to look around and say with some satisfaction, "now this is what we wished for, hoped for, worked for."  And also....we are DONE! So when we had that little group exercise today, I flung myself out there into that future with trust.  I imagined us there, happy, settled and content.  I trust it will happen.  It will  take patience to put all the pieces together.  Some have begun to be assembled, I need to trust that they will hold and others will be added on to make this big bright picture that we hope for and long for.