Pensacola Oil Spill Editorial Cartoon
The editorial underneath, Death of a Fisherman, refers to the suicide of a charter boat fisherman. His business tanked, he joined the BP clean-up. After an early morning meeting, he killed himself. All he ever wanted to do was fish. His heart was broken.
Breath of Fresh Air at Christ’s Church, Pensacola
AdventureMan and I slid into our seats just as the bell started ringing, and looked at one another in concern – “Does it feel hot in here to you?” “Yep.”
It was only eight in the morning, but the church was breathless.
It made me smile, remembering our church in Tunisia, St. George’s, where there was no air conditioning, only fans – when the electricity was working. St. George’s is the oldest Anglican Church in Africa, and is located in the large Tunis souk. Summers were long and hot, and many a Sunday I had to gather my squirming two-year-old and take him out to the garden for a stern talking-to. It was a wonderful, diverse church, and we loved our time there – breathless or not.
And we got through the service, heat and all, it wasn’t that bad.
The sermon was really good. Father Neal was talking about Jesus, invited to a banquet, having his feet washed by the tears of Mary Magdelen, and dried with her hair.
As an aside, one of the things I love about Jesus was his kindness to women, including them when he talked, healing their hurts, defending them against stoning – in a culture not unlike that in which we have been living, where women are contracted into marriage, “protected” by laws which often deprive them of independence and choices, and living lives greatly separate from men. Jesus spoke to women, and he spoke to their hearts. He included them among his followers and supporters. In the context of his society, his behavior was radical and challenging to the status quo.
Father Neal totally got that. He talked about the scandalous sensuality of Mary’s act, washing Jesus feet and then drying them with her long hair. He talked about hair, traditionally covered in that part of the world, being a woman’s glory, and only privately displayed among family and to husband. He talked about her remorse, and her humility, and that through her loving act, her spirit was cleansed and her sins forgiven. And he talked about the customs and traditions of hospitality, and the shock of Jesus criticizing his host – who was criticizing him – for his lack of welcome, and signs of hospitality to an honored guest.
His sermon was a breath of fresh air in a very warm church. We held on to every word.
Later in the day, old friends came for dinner, and our son and his wife and our grandson. Cannot imagine a more wonderful day. 🙂
Pray – then Listen
(Warning – this is religious based musing; if that is offensive to you, skip this post 🙂 )
Jesus often used the phrase “if you have the eyes to see” and “if you have the ears to hear” after telling his listeners a metaphorical story.
Yesterday, AdventureMan and I had another huge surprise. We filed for a tax exemption, and we were told that for this year, the previous exemption would hold, and then next year, our exemption would start. You would think that might be bad news, but in our case, the previous owner had all kinds of wonderful exemptions, and in a year with a lot of expenses, not having a huge property tax bill sounds really good to us.
“Humd’allal!” I said to AdventureMan as we left the building. (Thanks be to God!)
When we knew we wanted to retire this year, we began praying about it together every morning before AdventureMan headed off to work. We specifically asked that God be in every detail of the move – and as you can imagine, a move back to the USA from Qatar has a lot of details. It was more complicated than “just” a move. We had a huge storage shipment which needed to meet up with us in Pensacola, a cat that needed to come with us. We needed to buy a house, and to do that, we had to sell a house, and we needed to buy cars, and basic household appliances; we needed to start up all over again with groceries, and with cleaning supplies, and gardening supplies, and the most basic items you take for granted every day in your well-established lives. There were a LOT of details, an overwhelming amount of detail, and, by the grace of God, every detail was covered.
Some details, like the total rewiring of our house, may not seem like such a blessing, but, by the grace of God, we had the money to cover the need, and we are glad we could get the rewire done before moving in, and we are really really glad not to have to worry about fires happening in our electrical system. If and when we need to sell this house, having had it rewired helps its salability, too.
Some people might call it good luck. We don’t think so. We think it is God, answering prayers, in control of all the details, and blessing us in ways we can’t even begin to imagine. Every now and then, we have “the eyes to see.”
Mongolian Porn
Today as I was emptying my spam folder, I glanced through and saw that one encouraged us to visit a site specializing in Mongolian Porn.
Somehow, that totally cracks me up. Porn is pathetic and laughable enough as it is, but . . . Mongolian porn? I cannot imagine . . .
Maybe they yak a lot?
The Alabama Muttawa
As we were driving into Alabama this morning (not such a big deal as it sounds, as we live right on the border of Alabama) we passed through Foley, where we found a large group of Alabama members of the committee to prevent vice and promote virtue:
They find a busy corner and parade their signs, hold up their Bibles, and read aloud from the bible to passing motorists. No switches to hit women in shorts or sundresses or swimming suits, no authority to tell people how to behave, only armed with conviction. It’s a very gentle kind of moral authority, encouraging people to make the right choice.
Rogation Days
AdventureMan and I love sleeping in a little on Tuesdays. This whole retirement thing is like being on vacation every day. No one says we HAVE to go to AquaAerobics, but it is such a great class, we want to go. This morning, however, it dawned grey and cloudy, not quite so cool . . . warmer, and more humid. I have my cup of coffee in my quilt room study, and AdventureMan is next door, in his office/study. It’s one reason we bought this house; we can have our own spaces and still be close enough to call back and forth.
As I am reading my morning devotions, I notice this is a “rogation” day. I have seen the term every now and then on the church calendar, but I haven’t a clue what it is, and today (!) I have the leisure to look it up. It is absolutely fascinating. This is from a website on church liturgies, traditions and prayers :
Rogation Days are an old religious custom which is now seldom observed in the Catholic Church, and many Catholics haven’t even heard of them. Episcopal parishes sometimes still observe them, and many people have them on a personal liturgical calendar.
Ok – so what are they?
The word “rogation” come from the Latin rogare, which means “to ask,” and the Rogation Days are four days set apart to bless the fields, and ask for God’s mercy on all of creation. April 25 (coincidentally the Feast of St. Mark) is called the Major Rogation; the three days preceding Ascension Thursday are called the Minor Rogations. On these days, the congregation used to march the boundaries of the parish, blessing every tree and stone, while chanting or reciting a Litany of Mercy, usually a Litany of the Saints. A few still do.
The Rogation Days were first instituted in the 5th Century by Mamertus, bishop of Vienne in France from 461 to 475. During his episcopate, France was in an almost continuous state of near-disaster. The Goths invaded Gaul. There was an enormous amount of disease; there were fires; there were earthquakes; there were attacks of wild animals. As a result, Mamertus spent a great deal of time in prayer, beseeching God to help the stricken community.
One night, when the village was overwhelmed with a fire, he conceived the idea of instituting a annual procession and litany in which the entire community would pray for God’s blessing and protection. He is reported to have said: “We shall pray to God that He will turn away the plagues from us, and preserve us from all ill, from hail and drought, fire and pestilence, and from the fury of our enemies; to give us favorable seasons, that our land may be fertile, good weather and good health, and that we may have peace and tranquility, and obtain pardon for our sins.”
Thus the custom of processing around the entire length of the parish while invoking a Litany of the Saints began. Over the centuries, it became the custom to also use the procession to “beat the bounds” – to mark and establish the boundaries of the parish – while also blessing the trees, stones and fields. In modern times, the actual purpose of “beating the bounds” – to impress the boundaries of the village on everyone’s mind – has ceased to be necessary due to modern surveying techniques, and the practice is largely ceremonial.
The standard practice in the Episcopal Church is to pray for fruitful seasons on Monday, commerce and industry on Tuesday, and stewardship of creation on Wednesday. When currently observed, the practice frequently has an environmental bent.
– Carl Fortunato
Don’t you love the idea of of “beating the bounds?” I think of the Emirs of Qatar and Kuwait, one day a year, followed by a procession of their countrymen and women, blessing every tree and stone and calling on God/Allah to protect their countries. I think how wonderful it would be in our own USA to have these four days a year (there is a major rogation in April to bless the crops, and then three days preceeding Ascension Day for “beating the bounds,” i.e. blessing the country. Imagine if we were all to pray blessings on our country at least three days a year. Uh Oh. Did I mention it is also a time of fasting?
Ketchup Entry
“It’s been five days since you blogged,” my friend wrote to me. “Isn’t that some kind of a record?”
Well, no.
Back when I went to Damascus for Christmas, it was also the Eid al Kebir, and I was gone for a week and everyone was so busy with their own celebrations that no one really noticed. 🙂 Well, maybe my Mother. 🙂
This time, it has to do with AdventureMan.
AdventureMan became semi-retired this last week. He and the Qatteri Cat flew to Pensacola, where we met up and now the three of us are staying in a hotel while our heroic contractors are battling to have us in the house by April 15th. Will we make it?
The Qatteri Cat was totally freaked out by his long long trip to the United States. First, for all my annoyances with KLM, we have to tell you that they are totally superb when you are shipping an animal with you. At every stage of the journey, they kept AdventureMan informed on QC’s progress, and he was in great shape when he arrived, except that he was really, really scared. He didn’t understand any of this, the long flight, all the noise, the vibration and then the hotel room full of strange smells of a 1,000 previous guests. (If you are a cat, you can smell things we can’t even dream).
He is OK now. He has a short memory.
Meanwhile, AdventureMan and I have been doing the business of getting ready to get settled, and at the same time, AM is jet lagging. I tell him I think he is catching up on months of sleep deprivation, and he says he thinks it is just jet lag. It makes me happy to see him sleep.
Today, we went by the house so I could pot a cherry tomato, a very special heirloom tomato that I found at the Emerald Coast Garden Show this last weekend. It is a black cherry tomato, and I have never seen one! I have sent for some other heirloom seeds; I love cherry tomatoes and grape tomatoes, tiny little tomatoes with intense flavor. I love to mix them all together with some green onion tops and just a little lemon-y vinaigrette dressing, maybe on some lettuce. YUMMM!
Anyway, AdventureMan likes gardening, too. He comes by it honestly, both his grandfathers gardened. One of them had chickens, too, and grew peanuts, and corn as well as a garden full of vegetables. I garden on a much smaller scale. Mostly I plant things that will take care of themselves – lavender, rosemary. Here, in the mild climate of Pensacola, basil becomes a perennial (I saw that in Kuwait, too, at our Kuwait gardening friend’s house) and I have planted some bougainvillea, which I am hoping will be hardy enough to weather an occasional cold winter or two like the last one.
When we got to the house – and this is Sunday, in the heart of the Bible-belt deep South – the ceiling and drywall people were there, working on a ceiling. We were surprised to see them there, but we know they are all trying really hard to get us into the house as soon as they can.
I was thinking AdventureMan was going to kick back and take it easy, but it hasn’t turned out that way – we are up and at-’em every day, and we have accomplished amazing things. More about some of that in future posts.
Just wanted to let you know I haven’t forgotten about you – just haven’t had the opportunity to sit for very long to organize my thoughts.
Every Monkey Gets His Turn in The Barrel
AdventureMan and I have this phrase, and I cannot imagine where it came from (from where it came, for you grammar sticklers!) “Every Monkey gets his turn in the barrel.” It’s particularly true in the workplace, or at least almost every workplace where I have worked – it’s like the stock market, sometimes your stock is high, sometimes your stock can fall, and often, it is not so much your performance as the PERCEPTION of your performance.
Often, in the work place, stocks rise and fall based on little or nothing at all. In fact, if you are really really good at what you do, you are sometimes more at risk, because those who are less accomplished always need to focus the attention anywhere but on their own work, and if you are doing well, they will often find something to criticize to keep their own lackluster accomplishments from coming into focus.
But every monkey getting his/her turn in the barrel applies in almost all factors of life. Sometimes you’re up. Sometimes you’re down. Sometimes it has nothing to do with you, it’s just the way things are.
So my trip home was sort of my turn in the barrel. I was a little late getting to the airport, which was not crowded, but there was a long back-up going through passport control to get to the departure gates. They had plenty of staff, but for some reason, they were SO SLOW. When I got to the front, the woman ‘taking care’ of me was busy texting! I asked if the computers were slow today – honestly, she had already stamped my passport, she was just killing time – and she said “No, why?” as if she were unaware of all the people standing in line, waiting to get through.
When I got to Dubai, I had to do this 2 km run from the gate where Emirates comes in to the Delta check-in counter. I always think of it as good exercise, but the humidity in Dubai is particularly high, or else the air conditioning is going out, and at the end of the trek, I am almost soaked with sweat and thinking ‘OMG I need a shower.’ I went to the lounge, but there was a sign “opening at 2100 hours’ and it was 15 minutes after nine. I could see someone in there, but later she stuck her head out and said she couldn’t let anyone in until the ‘attendants’ came, which they did, about 15 minutes later – they had been shopping!
And then I discovered that I had to go to the Air France lounge, not nice at all, near the smoking station so even inside the Air France lounge it smells stale and smokey. I am spoiled. I love the Emirates lounge in Dubai, where they even have tiny small containers of Haggan Daaz ice cream for their clients. 😉 This lounge was filled with American contractors. Yes, we are also American contractors, but this was the other kind – great big fat loud-voiced men, bragging about their salaries and demeaning their wives. I couldn’t wait to get out of there, which I did quickly after checking my e-mails.
The flight from Dubai to Atlanta is just long – more than 15 hours – and started inauspiciously. As we took off, as the plane’s nose lifted, some cupboard fell open and we could hear china and cutlery falling and breaking, a lot of it. I felt so sorry for the flight attendants; they have a lot to do during those flights, and now it was complicated by a disaster at the beginning of the flight. I got through it, mostly by escaping into sleep.
As we arrived in Atlanta, everything had changed. I just did this trip six weeks ago, but there is a new traffic pattern, a longer trek, sterner instructions about how and where to get into line. My bags, marked “priority’, were, as often is the case, nearly the last off the plane, and I trundled them through customs, and then had to run (honestly, this is like a herd of cattle) to get into another long, snaking line to go through security again – this time in Atlanta, where you have to take off your shoes, take out computers, can only use a 1 quart zippering plastic bag, etc.
I had thought I had plenty of time, but a large troop flight came in from Afghanistan, and we all had to move aside to give them priority. That is the one inconvenience I did not mind at all – I am so proud everyone moved over with no grumbling and let our servicepeople through, to get them on their way for R&R.
Security found me very interesting, and this is my own fault. I have a little Waterford crystal sugar jar that I took with me. I’ve had it since the early years of our marriage, and I often hand carry it to the next post. It’s too bad that lead crystal goes opaque in the scanners, and that the shape was a little like that of a hand grenade. I also had my wireless router with me, and this led to a long, long, very long inspection of everything I was carrying.
As I griped later to my son, he said “And I am sure it never occurred to you that you were arriving from the Middle East on a one-way ticket.”
LLLLLOOOOLLLL @ me. Nope. It had never occurred to me. I guess I was thinking about other things – farewells, clearing out the house, packing, mortgage papers, insurance papers, TAXES (Oh aaaAAARRRGGHHH, yes we have an extension, but we still have to get them done!)
So this trip, I was the monkey. I rolled around in that barrel. Actually, because I had no real agenda, other than be in P’cola by Monday to close on a house, I could roll with it and figure that I have had so many breaks, so many times, that if I needed to take this roll in the barrel, so be it, God is good and needed to give the breaks to that old guy in the wheel chair and that family with two kids in strollers, and all those fine young people who serve our country in strange and alien lands . . .
And, at the end of my journey is my son, his wife, and our grandson, and a sweet, relaxed day with them, doing not much but catching up. 🙂 The real chaos starts this coming week, early on Monday morning. Think I’d better get to church, get some fortification for the demands of this coming week.
Keep Another’s Confidence
This is from a wonderful website by by Rick Warren, who writes about the Purpose Driven Life and who sends out daily inspirational messages. I love this one.
Connect be keeping someone’s confidence
by Rick Warren
“A gossip betrays a confidence, but a trustworthy man keeps a secret.” Proverbs 11:13 (NIV)
If relationships are going to work, we have to be confidential with information.
Are you the kind of person that someone can trust with confidential information? We tend to think of gossip as one of those little sins, a misdemeanor sin. But when God talks about gossip, He puts it on a list with things like sexual immorality and murder.
Why? Because it is incredibly destructive to relationships.
What is gossip? Gossip is talking about a situation with somebody who is neither a part of the solution nor a part of the problem. And if we’re honest with ourselves, what we’re doing is making ourselves feel a little more important at somebody else’s expense. We’re talking about their hurts and their problems, but in a way that makes us feel a little bit superior to them. That’s the danger and the hurt of gossip.
There’s a story in the Old Testament about a family that struggled with gossip. Moses had a sister name Miriam who one day got caught up in gossiping about Moses amidst the rest of the people. God called them together – Moses and Miriam. He spoke with Miriam and told her what she’d done wrong and immediately He gave her leprosy.
But look at what God did next; he invited Moses to pray for Miriam’s healing – to pray for the one who gossiped against him.
Some of you have been deeply hurt by gossip. The story of Moses and Miriam suggests God would say to you, “Pray for that person’s healing, the one who gossiped against you. That way you can be released from the hurt that’s come into your life.”
Perhaps you’re the one whose been gossiping. You’ve been the one talking about other people. This story is in the Old Testament to remind us how serious gossip is, how hurtful it can be to people no matter what side of the situation you’re on.
The truth is, when you keep confidences it makes your relationships healthier. It enables you to keep connecting with others in positive and genuine way.
What is so interesting to me is that Islam has the same prohibitions against gossip, called back-biting, and puts a high level of prohibition against it. The prophet Mohammed warned against it repeatedly.
I love it that Rick Warren puts it into context by warning that it destroys relationships.
Recent Comments
ExpatAlien on What Country am I Living … intlxpatr on Yellowstone: Old Faithful to C… Michelle on Yellowstone: Old Faithful to C… Cathy on No Grown-Ups in Charge intlxpatr on Waiting for Snow Wikipedia Donate Button
Amazina
Early Voting in Florida
Here There and Everywhere 