13 Days

I have been quiet lately. Not much to report. Promising wiggles with the whole art therapy thing, but no real strides forward as of yet. Generally work has been filled with mass mailings and viewings of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, which has made said mass mailings much more pleasant. Lent has been...full of striving. Or, to be as perfectly accurate as I can be, of striving to strive. 13 days in. It becomes clear that fasting from sugar will not play a large role this year. Still, however, managing to pray from the daily office once a day.

I struggle, moreso lately than in the past, with exactly how much to share with the hundreds of millions of people who, I am sure, are reading this blog. Then I remember that most of my readers are friends, and since I am trying to make my life more open to friends, I should probably divulge. So, a lot of what I'm trying to do with this Lenten season has to do with trying to re-open communication with God. Even if all that communication consists of is my generally informing God that I don't think God has anything to do with my life and that I don't ever think about God. This is also something I think I am trying to remedy. It seems like it makes sense to have some awareness of God in one's days. Even if they are mostly spent under flourescent lighting doing mass mailings with Jon Stewart. These thoughts come after many beleaguered discussions of Brother Lawrence's Practicing the Presence of God with my Bible study in which I generally tried to insist that the Lawrencian way of knowing God was not just impractical, but imprudent, as it would seem to pull us away from life and relationships and what is actually happening and into the navel-gazing realm of trying to cultivate "God-conciousness." They generally tried to insist that my motivation for taking this position probably stemmed from my degenerate state, and really, who am I to disagree? Well, the crux of all the arguing for me, was to try to bring myself to believe that it is good to be aware that God is still around in the midst of mass mailings and calling schools and tabling events and even watching marathon's of America's Next Top Model and trying to parallel park (curse you, parallel parking!!!) and baking pound cakes at the very last minute and that s/he might, in fact, be at least interested in such things because they are a part of my life and s/he might be interested in me.

I'll let you know how it goes.