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Last Wednesday made a month since I've posted anything on this blog. What can I say, life has been kicking my butt, or at least trying.

In the past month I quit the soup kitchen gig

, and started at a gas station; lost a dear friend to suicide and felt the scariness of not knowing Jesus; celebrated with my sister at her wedding and saw the passion of ministry in my husbands eyes again; graduated with my certification as a spiritual director and started back at running. 

Life has been trying to kick my butt, but the cool part of it is I am getting those Ah-ha moments, and I gotta tell ya, I feel like I'm starting to come back into my own skin. Or at least, I'm starting to breath again. So there is an urge to write. 

So I write and I think. 

Sometimes life is just flat out hard people! Not just for me, but for us all!  

Allow the Holy Spirit to lead you today and see what happens. 

Happiness!

Lent. What does it mean anyway? What are we suppose to be doing? Well, it's the time before Easter where I should be making space in my life for Jesus. It's a time of preparation, it's a time to repent, to change the direction in which I am looking for happiness. The call to repentance is the invitation to take stock of our emotional programs for happiness and to change them. They have been instinctual, they need to change to spiritual. 

You know the liturgy for Lent begins with the temptation of Christ in the desert. The three instinctual needs that we all experience in growing up; security, esteem and power. Security in changing stones to bread, esteem in making a name for himself by jumping off a building, and power in having absolute power over the nations of the world. We are tempted to find easy, fast answers. Here's a story I found to help.

A master had lost his keys to his house and was looking for it on the lawn outside, running his fingers through each blade of grass. His disciples came along and asked the master what had happened. "I have lost the key to my house", he said. "Can we help you find it?" they asked. "I'd be delighted!" he replied. With that the disciples got down on their hands and knees beside him and started running their fingers through the grass too. After some time, one of them asked, "Master, have you any idea where you might have lost the key?" He answered, "Yes, of course. I lost it in the house." The disciples looked at one another in astonishment. "Then why are we looking for it out here?" they exclaimed. The master replied, "Because there is more light here!"

This is the human condition. We have all lost the key to happiness and are looking for it outside ourselves where it cannot possibly be found. We search outside because it is easier or more pleasant; there's more light out there. There is also more company. "If we look for happiness in emotional programs that promise happiness through symbols of security/survival, affection/esteem, or power/control, we can find plenty of help, because everyone else is trying to do the same thing." (Thomas Keating) When we look for the key where it can be found, we may find ourselves along, abandoned by friends and relatives who feel threatened by our search. 

Lent is about looking inside.  

Solitude

My dear sweet friend, Pat, who knows my love for Henri Nouwen, gave me a book 2 years ago to read before we left seminary. I just now found it again and have started reading it. It's called The Way of the Heart and I think I'm going to have to read it very slowly, cuz it packed with stuff.

I'm thinking a lot about solitude lately, how bout you? To start off with, my whole definition is changing daily about this word. I use to equal it to solitary confinement, and while the words are similar, I believe the way in which I'm looking at them is what is changing. 

Nouwen say's it this way: Solitude is the place of purification and transformation, the place of the great struggle and the great encounter...the place of our salvation. 

The Desert Father's and Mother's left what they knew and went out into the desert to live a life of solitude, yet in their aloneness, they were with Jesus. Jesus himself went out into the desert where he was tempted with the three compulsions of the world: to be relevant ("turn stones into loaves"), to be spectacular ("throw yourself down"), and to be powerful ("I will give you all these kingdoms").

Solitude is the place where great struggles and great encounters happen! We struggle with our false self and we encounter God who offers himself as a substance of the new self. 

I know all this, really I do. However, lately, I've been struggling with just about everything. Things used to work so well, pray life was good, heard from God, took time to knock and seek and I really thought I was in the desert. What I'm understanding now is, I was in a sort of solitude. That solitude is calling me back again, and I'm struggling with how to do that and ministry. Kinda like, the rubber hitting the road.

So, I'm on a journey that I feel like I've been on before, yet there are things that I left by the side of the road, so I could pick them up again, when the time was more right. I'm thinking the time is more right. 

It's kinda like what Augustine said:

Thou must be emptied of that wherewith thou art full,

that thou mayest be filled with that whereof thou art empty.

Wow! Won't you walk with me for awhile on this road?