Someone Less Messed Up

When I taught Vacation Bible School and wasn't tanked up on Valium and doing the very very slow-moving puppet shows, I memorized tons of Bible verses and still find myself speaking in them to this day without realizing it.  I had a lot of gold stars by my name for this gift of memory; I loved gold stars because I thought they meant something, that I could collect enough and cash them in for a new self like collecting enough tickets at Chuck E. Cheese for a stuffed animal except that I'd trade myself for someone less messed up and along and I'd be one of the girls I envied, the ones that made everything look effortless.  If I'd actually been understanding that which my mouth could recite, I would have known this was futile and that God loved me as I was and as I would be.   And that times were hard and necessary and how this works to our good even when we cannot see it.

That's my favorite verse, the one on my refrigerator right under the Trailer Park Tramp postcard, the one about how we experience something of the death of Jesus all the time, but that we are never alone, knocked down, but not out.  I go a lot with Carver about not knowing why we do what we do and love his poem, Distress Sale, about a garage sale and about how he can't help anyone because he's trying to recover from drinking so much and he doesn't have any money.   But he wrote about it and in the image, there's love and sadness and tragedy.  And that does help.  Because we feel alone so often, but what we don't see is that someone is watching our pain and feeling it and helping us endure it even when we don't know it.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"Wherever three or four Catholics are found, there ye shall also find a fifth." Garret Keizer

Cocktail Hour

Drinking music suggestion: Gotan Project La Revancha Del Tango

Benedictions and Maledictions

Thanks so much for all the encouragement on the book -- and Laura, from your lips to God's ear! Happy Monday!