Monday, September 5, 2016
There is a certain time in my daily prayer routine when I give attention to each of certain names that aren’t on any list. This happens to include every single member of the church youth group whose name is known to me. (It happens to include all those names. It’s not by design. Each one got on there individually.)
Only one of those individuals is the same color as me.
16:03 Thursday 2016-09-08
A case on point.
Today as I walked toward the shelter, I contemplated that I am likely to have no smokes during the day tomorrow. How will I handle this; how will I feel about it? Factors:
• How important is it, compared to other things I may attend to?
• Can I take things in stride?
• (There was a third one, that escapes me just now.)
Then I arrived at the shelter. It was 15:25, and the gate was locked. In the end, I got turned away.
For the second time in two days.
The seductiveness of turmoil.
Thursday, August 25, 2016
My foremost task for today is to keep myself focused on the practical things I need to do to improve my lot in life.
They can be seen as boring, mundane, dreary, tedious, and so on — if I fail to love myself enough to actually want to do them.
Accordingly, this morning I was reading through various news articles, and on one page, at the end, the links to “related” articles included this:
I didn’t read the article, but boy, just that headline really got my engines going. I can’t remember the last time I was in a setting where someone might have been told, “Check your privilege.” Normally this is addressed to a white person, and, as I’ve noted before, in my world there aren’t enough white people to matter.
(Originally posted 05/12/13. Reblogged 04/18/24.)
Wednesday 04/24/13
Facing various issues as to how to spend my time. The current appearance of this blog is a far cry from what I want, but I don’t want time spent redesigning it to take away from job search. The same dilemma presents in choice of whether to use my tax refund to restore my former website on Yahoo! for $125.00/year, or instead rebuild the site as part of this blog.
My church is about to launch Saturday morning prayer services in which I will have a leadership role. I will be offering teachings on prayer; I think I have about two hours’ worth of material, and an issue rises of whether to try to organize that into 10-minute or instead 15-minute segments. And there’s an issue that what I would present to the prayer team members only, isn’t necessarily what I’d present to the general public.
This morning at McDonald’s I was reflecting on these things, and on what I might teach to an audience drawn from the general public. I began to understand why Ambrose Worrall fails to refer to Kabbalah.
Prayer team members will be principally interested in learning how to pray effectively for others. People who come from the general public will be principally interested in how to pray effectively for themselves — how to get their own prayers answered.
I presume to be pretty good at the former. That’s how I became prayer ministry coordinator to start with. I’m not so good at the latter.
Continue reading x From my diary: Learning to pray
I’m posting very little new material these days, but there are hundreds of posts different folks may not have seen the first time around. So I’ve had in mind possibly to start “recycling” old posts.
I happened across this one today. Actually, its story has been on my mind given recent difficulties getting into the shelter. And when I re-read it today, I was moved, not just by the story about Leo, but the remark about dwelling in untoward feelings. I see so many people around me, and so many expressions in the media, of folk dwelling in grievance, anger, the feeling of injustice, of being disadvantaged, of harboring resentment especially against those of different skin color.
And even within Christianity, I find sometimes such negativity being encouraged, in the name of justice; wholly forgetting the Gospel mandate to forgive, forgive, forgive.
The below post first appeared 2015-12-12.
===============================================
Saturday 2015-12-05
14:40. Actually, Leo arrived first.
But he got turned away.
Tuesday afternoon at the library, instead of doing anything on [church obligations], I spent time with several articles that could have been predicted to make me angry. I’ve forgotten specifics about them, and Net History from the library terminal isn’t available to me here. The deal is, I recognized an appetite for darkness; “The Itch.” Similarly yesterday, yesterday morning, once I realized I really had nothing to do that day, I became intensely angry and prone to look for ways to act out that anger; e.g. by finding more such articles to fume over. Went through some more of the same last night, albeit presence in the shower saw it all go away.
All this in the face of my goal of being perpetually happy and cheerful and an emanator of light and joy.
Continue reading * Appetites for darkness; befriending the shadow self.
A grassy lot inspires a vision of what can be when a community cares for itself.
When I take the bus to church in the morning, I normally get off at the closest stop, walk three blocks north and one block east. At the corner where I turn is a vacant lot. I don’t know who owns it. In months past, it has typically been heavily littered.
One morning not long ago, as I approached that lot, I saw that it had been cleaned. I saw this from fifty feet away. The way things are around here, that little bit of beauty nearly knocked me down. It took my breath away. It lifted my spirits.
A tiny bit of beauty can powerfully affect one’s mood. A mere glimpse of a pretty face can make one’s whole day.
I reflected: harmony is the essence of beauty, exemplified in the orderliness of the clean lot as contrasted with the chaos of its previous litter. I reflected on the relatednesses among light, love, harmony, order and prosperity, on the one hand; and darkness, strife, chaos and need, on the other. What does it take to begin to establish harmony? I concluded that perhaps love, or self-love, is the beginning of creation.
What if the whole community cared for itself as someone cared for that lot? Continue reading * For us
It’s happened often enough lately that I may as well tell it.
When I go into the shower room at the shelter, often enough, unhappiness meets me.
The shower stall I prefer isn’t available, and I resent it.
This guy is taking up half the shower bench, and the other half is full also, and I resent it.
This other guy is taking up all kinds of too much time getting dressed, and I resent it.
As soon as I turn my attention to what I will actually do — where to put my clothes, choosing a stall that is available, and getting undressed in itself — all those bad feelings vanish.
Complaining means you’re not doing what you can.
Related: Here – Now – Can
Reblogged 12/21/23.
These words will scandalize some readers.
Sometime in the future, I will no doubt discuss the same ideas in a more well-ordered way. But I think I need to produce some expression now.
Jesus never called upon his followers to “change the world.” Jesus never confronted injustice, oppression, slavery or “the system.”
He had opportunities to do so.
An unexpected blessing, in my current trying times:
Three Spiritual Principles to Help You through Trying Times
Note, 08/01/23: The link no longer points there.
The Homeless Blogger 