Speak Up

 There are times when speaking up is important.  When I see something that is wrong as in someone being wronged, silence would make me a spectator.  Speaking up makes me a witness.  And using my video on my cell phone camera can be a way to speak up as a witness to something that you believe is a wrong done to someone else.  

Silence

 Silence is not really the opposite of speaking out loud.  Sometimes we talk too much without thinking and what comes out is banal at best.  Silence is what gives speech some content worth saying and listening to.  I can sit and listen to people talking and feel no need to “interrupt” for the sake of participating.  My silence is a participation.  And sometimes people need a listening ear and not a talking tongue.  

Retirement

 Retirement is not simply about existing with no purpose.  It is a season of our life.  Seasons have reasons and peculiar activities.  You are entering a new season and it is the time to discover what its purpose is for you.  It is not just about moving to change the outsides such as from cold winters to warmer winters.  Change the insides as well.  It is about a change in patterns of life, ways of doing things, and new things to do as well as old things that have been put aside.  And always a time to avoid isolation.  The “routine” can easily slip into that.  

Cleaver

 I need to be careful that my sermons are not cleaver, but rather profound.  I can come up with cleaver quite easily, but profound takes more time.  It takes prayer to allow the sermons to develop.  Cleaver ideas come more quickly but this is because they are not deep.  Often I am quiet in a room of talkers because I have nothing much to say.  It takes me time.  I prefer to be helpful rather than noticed.  

Two Appetites

 I think that a good balance in daily life is to nourish the body with good balanced foods and then to nourish the soul with good balanced prayer of words, silence, with others, in solitude.  At the end of each day I ask myself how I nourished the insides and the outsides.  I pray early and try to eat a good breakfast on my “normal” days.  Sometimes other stuff happens, but I did not plan the other stuff.  If the day is going to be of schedule then I figure out how and when I am going to do the two nourishings.  I find that many people want me to do things but few are concerned about my nourishing.  So it is up to me.  

Results

 I try to plan plans.  So?  I try not to plan results.  Someone told me that planning results can result in resentments and disappointment to say the least.  I only know what the plan is, and that can be subject to change.  But the results are not up to me.  I am not God.  My ego forgets that from time to time, and plans the results.  In golf, basketball, and soccer you plan the shot.  The result is whatever it is.  I have a lot of bad results in golf.  Only saints can play that game and be content.  

Grateful

 Why emphasize “gratefulness” in any spiritual practice?  Well, I am a bit of a tricky guy.  When things are going well, that is, they are going my way, I tend to take credit.  Things are better, I say, because of what I do.  Magic: prayer, meditation, silence and solitude are what I did to make this a better life.  Humility?  Thanking God for all the Power?  Absent.  Then when things don’t go my way, God messed up.  God is not grateful for all my spiritual practices.  I need a new God.  And so it goes.  The miracle is that once again GRACE wins out and I am drawn back into gratitude.  Life can be what it is.  God has a plan.  So when I wake up I thank God for lots of stuff I did not make happen.  Thank you God for all my blog readers, though I might have lost some now because I fessed up.