Life...to the max!

...thank you, Thomas:

 

Do not depend on the hope of results....

In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships

that saves everything.

...Thomas Merton

 

...thank you, Yoda!

 

“Try not!

Do, or do not.

There is no try!”

 

...366 days to go to 70!

Woo, hoo...!!!

    Immensely humbled by all the Facebook greetings for this, my 69th birthday.  Thank you!  The first one came in from India (thanks Tom!)...and they have continued coming from all over all day...amazing...thank you, each one, for every remembrance.  This has been a good day!

...50 hours to go:

 

...it's already shaping up to be a different sort of weekend...

        In taking a break from doing some computer work, preparing for a time of speaking Saturday-Tuesday, my mind has wandered a couple of times back to some great sorrow recently experienced...and some amazing joy.  It's been hard...and life-forming.  Crazy...and good...how life stretches us some time.  I've been stretched, way more than usual in these weeks.  The good news is, I'm still standing.

        Though there has been deep hurt...I sense this is part of a liminal threshold that is cleaning up my soul for something important, beyond my imagining in the future.  What?  No clue...but it truly is in God I trust.

        Amazingly, in both the sorrow and the joy I've seen some honest beauty.  Transparency seems to be the gently ordered direction of these hours.  It's been another reminder that the Triune is relentless in loving and forming me into "their" image...all in the necessary preparation of some exceptional and privileged opportunities of speaking before some amazing souls in the next two weeks.

        This caught my eye tonight as I was cleaning up my Apple desktop:

A Cry of Anguish
Abraham Joshua Heschel

A person may go on pondering deeply in intense emotion about his needs, about the need of the moment. That is not yet prayer. Adding "in the name of God" to it will not make it prayer. It is the cry of anguish which becomes a realization of God's mercy that constitutes prayer. It is the moment of a person in anguish forgetting his anguish and thinking of God and God's mercy. That is prayer.... It may last a moment but it is the essence of a lifetime.

Source: The Insecurity of Freedom