Lent Offering: A distracted mind

My pastor said something a week ago: "One of the greatest resources we have is our attention. What we give our attention to can drag us down and change our life." So for Lent this year, I am once again giving up social media (though I may go online to post these). 

This got me thinking about what it's liked to have a distracted and fragmented mind. 
I was challenged to follow the example of a friend who is doing a "creative lent". Rather than giving up anything for lent, he is attempting to create something each day: often a haiku or text combined with a photo. 

I decided to try to do this as well, but not each day. I've had a bit of writer's block and then was frustrated at images that I could conjure in my head but not produce effectively. 
Then I remembered that I have enjoyed playing with AI images on occasion and so I fired up Adobe Express and Firefly and came up with these to go with a 5-7-5 haiku-like poem.

[pictures created by Adobe Express AI and Adobe Firefly by Tim Tillinghast]

Wax tears

Wax - on the inside of my candle jar
Hardened over time
Layer by layer as the jar is tilted and turned.
The flame of your Spirit
Melts the wax from the inside out.
Slowly, gently the core softens and pools.
Then if I coax the flame to the edges,
Wax wells up and runs down
Like the tears I could not cry,
Flowing down
Leaving the glass clean and
HOT and
Letting the light pass to those outside.
And as my tears melt, they provide
Fuel for the Flame to burn. . .
Brighter.
Come, Holy Spirit,  Come.

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A Computer Spiritual

This computer's not my home;
I'm loggin' in and loggin' out. 
My treasures are backed up

Somewhere up in "the Cloud". 
When the Blue Screen beckons me 
to Windows' broken shore, 
Well, I won't feel at home 
in this hard-drive anymore. 

Oh Lord, you know 
I've got no friend like you. 
And if "the Cloud" is not my home, 
then Lord what will I do? 
When the Blue Screen ushers me
to Windows' broken shore, 
Oh no, I won't feel at home, 
In this hard-drive anymore.


--------------------
Written as I migrate BACK off of my Toshiba laptop to another one. This is the one that was purchased in Feburary 2012, had hardware issues in August - Sept involving a faulty power button. Got fixed and was working fine until yesterday. SIGH

Thoughts from the Pressure cooker - part 1

If you have been following the news, you will know that Mali had a coup d'état on March 21, 2012. 

This is not my first time to be in the "insecurity pressure cooker" having seen and even helped evacuate my colleagues out of Côte d'Ivoire on three separate occasions (2002, 2003, 2004).

As a third-grader, I lived through a week in Lebanon when fighter planes were flying overhead and we had to stay inside. Then in Yemen there were 2 different occasions when the President was assassinated and there was more staying inside. I remember it being tense and uncertain, and also the fact that we had no school.

These past few weeks have been different, the first time in the midst of the situation myself as an adult. In the past, I have been on the outside helping to get others out before and there is intense pressure and then a relief when they are all out.

This time I was on the inside, coordinating with my team, making decisions and trying to get everything in order for those we leave behind, trying to manage resources in the face of an economic embargo, and trying to pack up my own stuff.
The first group of our expats left on March 31 and April 1, getting across land borders. Others left one or two at a time by plane over the next week and the last 4 of us left on April 11. We hope we can go back fairly soon..

It was an intense time, likely one of the most intense I have ever lived. I'm going to try and blog some about it as that helps me gather my thoughts and process things.

Thought 1:  God meets us there. Isaiah 43:1-3
 In the midst of curfews and troubled times, our normal Bible studies and church times and meeting places were disrupted. However, we managed to come together spontaneously for prayer and worship and sharing of scripture where we could. Perhaps it was the uncertainty of the situation, the rawness of our emotions in the midst of harried preparations, or the stripping away of unimportant things, but these were times when the prayers were intense and heartfelt, the worship glorious, with the Word of God ministering simply and profoundly without explanation needed.

The remnant

Our Triennial conference and spiritual retreat had to be cancelled due to the problems, but we went ahead after 1 week with a "mini-retreat" just 2 hours a day singing, testimonies, and prayer in small groups. What a sweet time that was, culminating with communion. God used the time to knit us together as a group for the intense work in the 10 days to come.

We also were taught a new song by our resident ethnomusicologist, Rob Baker, who has been writing a song every week this year. He shared that the Lord had given him this one before the troubles and it  ended up being one that would speak to both his heart and ours deeply. (check it out here).

The third Sunday in the pressure cooker was Easter Sunday! Our numbers had dwindled to 20 and we were all exhausted, but we gathered together on the lawn for a "sunrise" service at 7 a.m. The generator was blaring just 30 feet away a reminder that all was not well in our immediate world. The preparations had been hasty, nothing was polished, but again God met us in the powerful songs of old.

In our sharing time, many of us remarked on how we were so busy doing so much to get ready to leave, but Easter came unfettered by all that was going on around us, bringing hope once again for victory when all looks dark.

After our service, we had our traditional Easter morning "breakfast food" potluck, again hurriedly prepared by tired people. The normal baked goods and sausage and egg casseroles were replaced by some Easter eggs we had managed to color the night before, some croissants from the store, bread and cheese. . . A simple meal but one shared with great fellowship and joy. I recalled how the original passover meal was one eaten in haste with ordinary sorts of food.

So there you have it. Lesson 1.

In the midst of trials,
the simple becomes profound,
the "important" gets stripped away to insignificant.
God meets us there in simplicity in his Word, in a song, in the people he surrounds us with.
And when we get to the other side, wherever that might be, we find that He has gone on ahead to prepare the way. 

Candle Tending and Caring for the soul

Abraham Heschel in his book "The Sabbath" says, "Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul. ... Six days a week we seek to dominate the world, on the seventh day we try to dominate the self."

One of the things I do to remind myself it is the Sabbath is to light candles around the house. I see those throughout the day and remember that this is time set apart for resting, caring for my soul, and particularly NOT working.

Candles in the prayer room at the KC Boiler room
(I don't have this many going at my house at once)

As a consequence of burning candles, I tend to go through a lot of them and have started making candles as sort of a hobby, which fulfills two functions: one, it gives me a creative outlet that I can actually do here in Mali, and two, it is a socially acceptable way to play with fire. :-)

One thing I have noticed is that candles, in order to really fulfill their purpose of giving light and burning for a long time, need to be tended to, much in the way the 10 bridesmaids had to "keep their lamps ready" for the coming of the bridegroom. Matthew 25:1-13 tells their story. They got their lamps while they waited for the bridegroom to arrive. Five were smart and bought extra oil in advance and five did not and so when he finally came at midnight, they didn't have enough oil to light their lamps.

Cell phone charging tower on the
bike trip I took last year. 

It seems that the metaphor of constantly tending to something to keep it alive may be lost on our modern culture. What things do we really have to tend to over time? I know early on in my time in Africa, I used lanterns, which need to be filled with kerosene, have their wicks trimmed, and the globes cleaned.  In my daily life now, I still have to tend to my water filtration system, cleaning the filter at least once a week, keeping the siphon going, making sure I don't overfill it which results in water all over the floor, or underfill which results in . . . not enough water to drink.

What are the possible parallels in modern life? Perhaps trying to keep digital devices fully charged up when you're away from home. How would the parable go today? "There were 10 hollywood groupies waiting for the big star to appear. 5 kept their smartphones on standby to save their batteries, but 5 SMSed and tweeted until he finally appeared....."


But back to candles. 
As I thought about candles several things came to mind.
First off, candles can be really beautiful and some people will never light them so as to keep them looking pretty. But they never really provide any light or warmth if you keep them pristine. Our purpose in life is to burn bright for others to see.

If left on its own, a candle will burn out rather quickly. For example, a hole might form in one side and all the wax will flow out the hole and it will be burned down in 15 minutes.
If the wind (or ceiling fan) is blowing and the candle is not properly shielded, it will either blow quickly out OR burn through a lot of wax in a short time. (Cue sappy Elton John music. . . . )

I had a pillar candle in a glass jar in the kitchen last week. This was a home-made candle and the wick was not properly centered, so that it ended up burning straight down one side of the candle. When I came upon it, there was maybe an inch of wick sitting curled up in a bit of melted wax. You could see the bottom of the jar. It would have been "out" in 15 minutes if I had not intervened. I managed to cut off a bunch of the unmelted wax and put it down next to the wick and melt it. Then I gently moved the wick more towards the center and straightened it up. I have been tending to this candle, and it now has several hours of life left in it.
Sometimes in life, we burn a bit too close to the margin and we need to have our wick "re-centered" and boundaries shifted around to provide enough context and margin to keep going. 

I have found that candles in small jars or tins burn nicely for much longer than an equivalent non-shielded candle. The wax tends to melt uniformly and form a pool all the way across the top of the container. It will burn slowly and steadily without distracting air currents. Sometimes, though, the melted wax will get too deep and the flame will go way down, and even go out. In those cases, you have to pour off a bit of the excess wax that is drowning out the flame.  What distractions are battering your flame left and right? What excess things in your life are drowning out your flame?

Other times the jar candles will burns too quickly and the flame gets big. I found that if I have some left over wax from another candle, I can hold this over the flame and let it melt down into the candle, providing a bit of extra fuel, filling up the "reservoir" and allowing it to burn a lot longer.  We need to make time to get "fueled up", especially in times when our activities cause us to put out a lot of light. 

Lord, help me keep me care for the seed of eternity planted in my soul, 
Tending to the unique flame you have given me to burn in my corner of the world.
Help me not to burn too quickly - bright but burned up before my time.
Help me to keep my wick centered on you and not over next to the edges, 
where I am likely to melt out and make a mess without having given much light.
Protect me from distracting winds that blow, 
From having too much to do which will drown my flame
or from burning while low on fuel which will cause me to burn too fast and too bright. 
 Amen

“Tune our spirits, O Lord, to sing out with the sky.”

“Tune our spirits, O Lord, to sing out with the sky.”

This was part of the daily reading for October 30 in "Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals"

I immediately paused and wondered why it is so hard to sing out with the sky, when I am so distracted by things here below and wrote this little poem/prayer.

Tune our spirits, O Lord, to sing out with the sky!

Why is my heart so easily turned to things below?

To earthly groans,

To the hushed oohs and aahs over the latest technology unveiled,

To the whispers of celebrity gossip,

To the harsh warbling of political posturing,

To speculations on wars and rumors of war,

To the cries of my flesh and physical cravings,

To the auto-reminders bleeping away for daily events,

To endless email discussions.

Fix my eyes on things above

That my spirit may hear the cry of your heart, God.

To sing out with the sky and leave earthly cares below, if just for a moment.

It's a constant struggle to weed out distractions and create space for me to hear God speaking. 

Be Still, My soul (a poem)

It's been a long while since I wrote a poem. I am working on journaling as a way to grow spiritually, interact with ideas, and "craft my soul". This incorporates ideas from a sermon I listened to on Ecclesiastes 4:5-6 (that mentioned Matthew 3:16), and a devotional reading that referenced Psalm 23.

 

Be Still, My Soul

Be still, my soul.

Let my self with its need for attention, distraction and connectedness

Melt into the background

Like hard wax becoming molten in the presence of your flame.

Be still, my soul,

Relax the hand that grasps

Into an open hand

From which my empty trinkets can be taken

And into which blessings dropped easily.

Be still, my soul.

Defrag my mind.

Untether me from the machine,

Unsynch me from calendars and contacts

Log me off of status updates seeking friends’ likes.

Be still, my soul.

Let me rest like Jesus

With whom You were ‘well-pleased’ before his ministry started,

Who acted out of that acceptance rather than trying to earn it,

Who was content to do ONLY what You had showed Him to do,

Not taking on himself everything that others had left undone.

Open up, hand!

Breathe out self’s preoccupations -

Breathe in Spirit’s life.

Safe pastures,

Still waters,

HE restores my soul.

Be still, my soul

Can’t grab the living water

Or quantify it, test its purity.

Let it flow over my open hand, where it will.

Be still, beside still waters.