World Oceans Day 2025

Although I really like my Santa Monica photograph, it didn't translate well enough into a WOD design. Here's a better one using one of my previous pictures.

• UN World Oceans Day

• World Ocean Day

A day late, here's a poster design for United Nations World Oceans Day 2025; I'll let it cover World Ocean Day, as well. World Water Day on March 22nd emphasizes water with less saline content; WOD is about saltier water.

As much as I often admire my own design, this one disappoints me. For the past few years I'd used the same group of pictures, but I really wanted to incorporate my Santa Monica beach scene this time, so here it is.

Wonder: Sustaining what sustains us is this year's theme.

Five Minute Friday :: Honor

• Five Minute Friday :: Honor Linkup

• I'm picking up on this old one about towels and service—honor, as well.

Yesterday I asked a guest who was checking in at the hostel where I've been staying and working if he needed a towel. He said no, he didn't; he had a couple of towels with him. I replied I always travel with a towel, too. I started that habit when I stayed in European hostels, and continued it traveling cross-country USA, occasionally lodging in a motel or hotel, but often in a hostel or with a classmate or friend who had limited linens with limited or no laundry facilities.

To receive, claim, or possess an honor is a privilege. It's a charge. It's a responsibility. It's often a trust from other humans. It's often a sacred trust from God.

Revelation 7:9,10,12

⁹ After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. ¹⁰ They cried out in a loud voice, saying, "Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!"
¹² "Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen."

Consider honors we have in our families, cities, towns, and workplaces. Honors the church gives us on occasion. The privilege of preaching law and gospel to bring a word of grace; breaking bread and pouring wine, making sure the eschatological feast has flavor and substance. Counseling and consoling. Calls for justice and righteousness.

In order to receive thanksgiving, honor, and glorious blessing, God in Christ Jesus has been responsible – fully responded – to our human needs.

But I started out with towels and time is limited, so where's the honor there?

I observed that to receive, claim, or possess an honor is a privilege. It's a charge. It's a responsibility. It's often a trust from other humans. Often it's a sacred trust from God.

Part of privilege is following Jesus to help make a person or a community more whole. Like a surfer's towel, if you carry one all the time as I generally do (when I travel, not usually round about town) and like that guest does, it can mean warmth and compassion. It can soak up tears, blood, rain, sweat, or water after a refreshing shower. Honoring that other person's needs is a high honor for us. Amen? Amen!

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Spring and May 2025

• I pass this intriguing residential building most Sundays. Look at the jasmine that's bloomed on the balcony!!

• March Summary

• April – Earth Month – Overview

• Urban Wilderness City Paradise Lectionary Blog for May

• Many beautiful spring blooms around town this month include Jasmine, Jacaranda, more Golden Poppies because they have a long season, seemingly ever-blooming Bougainvillea, Tulips at the Florist Shop, Milkweed, and several whose names I don't know. But I love them anyway!

• Tulips for Mothers Day

• One of my housemates made us a Saturday dinner. So good with potatoes, rice, beans, chicken, asparaus, green beans, and broccoli.

• We're having Game Night again at church! Snacks from the first inning after Covid no longer was such a major thing.

• Star jasmine along the sidewalk

• Blackberries and blueberries in my breakfast bowl

• Jacaranda in bloom along Santa Monica Blvd. They'll get purpler as the weeks go by.

• Memorial Day decorations. Always remember. Never forget. Be thankful and humble. We had lunch on the lawn after worship.

• I may write more later about the surprising Finland-Suomi connection that gave me hope.

• I've been picturing common milkweed in the windowboxes almost every week. It's gloriously abundant and I can't wait for the monarchs.

• Fourth Tuesday lunch at the church where the facilities manager offers yoga classes. After lunch we had a session of stretchy and helpful chair yoga (something I'd heard of and wondered about). Here's part of our salad with chili lunch.

• My nearby California golden poppies. This is their second or third blooming this year.

• A group of Santa Monica flowers conclude this month's highlights

Five Minute Friday :: Anymore

• Five Minute Friday :: Anymore Linkup

When do you quit? When does a person lose hope? How long does it take to know I don't live there anymore? I don't do that anymore? I'm not like that anymore? My dreams can't happen anymore?

My header picture is the house I lived in my last semester in seminary. Good times with classmates and housemates. Days mostly filled with hope, although of course I knew no one ever knows what the future will bring. I don't live in that part of the country anymore. And too many years have passed without those spacious expectations ever bearing fruit.

When do I quit? Do I even hope anymore? Am I still that person or not (anymore)? Would I return to those years, that house, those classrooms, those streets, those people? Surprisingly, I wouldn't, even if it were possible—though of course it's not anymore.

I remind myself:
• Pray
• Remember
• Dream

God's people Israel kept the past present with rituals, celebrations, and liturgies. They recited and reenacted their history with the God of the Exodus, God of the Covenants, "as if" those events still were happening.

Like God’s primal people Israel, in worship we remember who God is, who we are, how God has acted. We declare our dreams and announce our hopes for the future.

Israel's history with God gave Israel confidence about the future and willingness to continue in partnership with God. Because they never forgot God's saving deeds of redemption and homecoming, they faced the future with hope.

Especially when we celebrate the sacraments, we anticipate, celebrate, and commemorate. Does our history with God give us confidence about the future and resolve to never give up? Not to quit? Do we face an unknown future with hope?

My footer picture is a favorite I've created at least a dozen variations of and featured on this blog a few times. I love it because it evokes summer weeks I spent at a beach house on the sand facing the ocean. It was play time and fun time rather than work time. It reminds me to dream of what might be possible anymore.

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Five Minute Friday :: Persevere

• Five Minute Friday :: Persevere Linkup

Especially in the southern states of the USA, people like to encourage one another to "keep on keepin' on." It doesn't take a regional folk saying to know you won't accomplish much of anything unless you persevere with your dreams, your ideals, your plans, your vision of a future.

This week on my scripture blog I'll be reflecting on a passage from the Acts of the Apostles. As Luke's Volume II opens, Jesus is concluding his post-resurrection ministry. He tells the disciples to wait in Jerusalem because there they will receive God's promised Holy Spirit to such a degree they'll be baptized (immersed) in the life of the Spirit.

Possibly still awaiting and hoping for a military or a royal savior, they ask Jesus if now he will restore "the kingdom" to Israel. Jesus replies the question is wrong because they will receive the power of the Holy Spirit so then they will witness in word and deed "to the ends of the earth" and help establish the reign of heaven on earth that Jesus began. Because the Spirit will indwell them, they'll be able to persevere and accomplish everything God (in the HS, of course) calls them to.

Born of Spirit, Water, and Word, the nascent church made sure everyone had enough, no one lacked essentials. We hear about members constantly being added as a result of dynamic, inviting preaching and caring community, yet the earliest members had followed an itinerant rabbi whose teaching and very existence got him crucified by the occupying Roman imperial government.

Their leader was dead, yet they met Jesus of Nazareth as the very alive Christ of God three days after Rome killed him; the disciples continued to interact with him until his ascension to sovereignty and power "at God's right hand," as the ecumenical creeds proclaim. The disciples kept on keeping on persevering; they kept on persevering on order for God's dreams, plans, ideals, God's visions of a free, just, compassionate, and inclusive future for planet earth would happen.

An Acts scholar could tell us how much elapsed time the book chronicles, but we're continuing to persevere and write the Acts of the contemporary people of God in Jesus Christ. We're keeping on as we persevere in our families, our schools, our neighborhoods, our churches. Some of us have been or still serve in an elected or appointed role in local, county, provincial, or state government. We must persevere in order to resist and overcome those forces that push against God's call to justice, righteousness, and overall well-being.

Because the Holy Spirit dwells in us, we are able to persevere and accomplish what God calls us to. We persevere together in order to help enact God's common wealth of well being and shalom for all creation. And sometimes we even journal about it or blog about it!

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Amen Jubilee :: Easter 5

Celebrating Live on Easter 5

1 we gather at the font
2 death has no more dominion
3 glory praise
4 listening, hearing, being
5 we give thee of thine own
6 broken and shed
7 we gather at the welcome table
8 thankful praise
9 jubilee, amen!


"The land shall not be sold in perpetuity,
for the land is mine;
you are but aliens and sojourners with me.
You shall grant redemption of all the land
of your possession."
Leviticus 25:23-24

celebrated live on Easter 5
at the Amen Jubilee
Urban Paradise, USA

Five Minute Friday :: Extra

• Five Minute Friday :: Extra Linkup

My first ever job was working as an extra at a nearby branch of the public library. You probably know about part-time, often after school, usually teens who shelve books, often check out books and other materials customers / patrons / whatever local parlance calls it borrow. Back then audio-visuals (as they called them) were less sophisticated than they are these days—mostly compact discs and movies. Back in those days, we had actual card catalogs.

I began in the summer before my junior year or grade 11 with the maximum 30 hours a week the law allowed for someone my age. When school classes resumed in the fall, I started working about twenty hours a week, which included two evenings until closing at 9 pm and Saturdays from 9 am to 1 pm.

That's a long intro before I tell you although our job title was extras, I believe pages is more typically used to describe this essential library help. Besides, how cool to give those workers the same name we have for parts of the books they deal with?

At our location, some of the teenage extras helped with story hour. I learned to mend books, a skill some individuals, some libraries, and some other related entities could use these days. Because shelving books was an essential part of what we did, we learned quite a bit about the Dewey Decimal System used to organize them, though there are other ways to categorize reading material and from my understanding, the library system I worked for later switched all its branches to LC, or Library of Congress.

That concludes another chapter of Life Stuff on this blog. Thanks for reading!

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Pope Leo XIV

On Thursday 08 May 2025, the conclave elected the first ever North American pope! His birth name is Robert Francis Prevost; he chose the papal name Leo. You've probably been reading "all about it" everywhere, but I still needed to blog.

Back in 2013, before the world knew we'd have Pope Francis, I so did not want Cardinal Sean O'Malley to leave this country. He'd been (he still was at the time) a stellar Archbishop of Boston, but someone told me not to worry, because no way would they [ever?] elect a North American. You can read Cardinal Sean's reflections on Pope Leo XIV.

Like the new Bishop of Rome, Martin Luther was an Augustinian. Someone noted the Augustinians gave the world a Protestant and a Pope!

On Friday 09 May, Liz Cheney said it best on Blue Sky:

In an era that looked as if it might be defined by an American man of depraved cruelty, corruption & shame, what a magnificent thing the Catholic Church has done. The elevation of an American man of goodness, grace, humility, mercy & faith to the Throne of St. Peter is moving & momentous for us all.

That same day when a twitter friend asked our opinion about "the new pope," I wrote:

I'm excited that Pope Leo will continue ministries of justice, inclusion, creation care, etc. Like any human's, his track record isn't perfect, but altogether a great choice. And he's multilingual! I'm mainline protestant, but with the world I'm happy to say Habemus Papam!

Five Minute Friday :: Invest

• Five Minute Friday :: Invest Linkup

Because invest has an overwhelming variety of nuances, I'll mainly run with Kate's agricultural picture as today's prompt.

The Lord your God is bringing you into a good land,
a land with flowers streams and springs, valleys and hills,
a land of wheat and barley, vines and fig trees and pomegranates,
a land of olive trees and honey.
Deuteronomy 8:7-8

The land shall not be sold in perpetuity,
for the land is mine;
you are but aliens and sojourners with me.
You shall grant redemption of all the land
of your possession.
Leviticus 25:23-24

It's all about the land. The dirt, sod, earth beneath our feet forms a heaven for us to live on. It's about investment and stewardship. You may remember the first humans received land as a gift and then as a task or a charge:

The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden
to tend and guard and care for it.
Genesis 2:15

Invest conveys a sense of a long time, something not fleeting or ephemeral. You know about investing in stocks or commodities, in an education, in a dream. Some of those involve a long stretch of time; some entail money; some are about human effort and initiative. Some investments are about all of the above. Creation care in general and farming in particular require legal tender, human grunt work and intellectual insight, and dream worthy results don't happen yesterday. Sometimes not even in a year or two. Have you heard, "We don't inherit the earth from our ancestors—we borrow it from our children?" I illustrated it as one of my designs for Earth Day 2010.

Those "children" or descendants are as long-range as Abraham's were. Way beyond grandkids and great nieces. We're talking a few centuries down the line, so they can look back and retrospectively love our investments, maybe be inspired and invest a bit or a lot themselves.

For sure God majorly invested in planet earth by creating land to last, and it's been around near-countless millennia. In Romans 8:19 the apostle Paul reminds us all creation waits for us humans to claim our divine image and start (or continue) to steward creation as lovingly as God would: "For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God." As our Leviticus text insists, the land belongs to God. It's only on loan to us.

• Read the entire passage: Romans 8:18-23

It's about the land so we'll have food. So we'll have shelter and bigger buildings, too. So we'll have transportation, tools, and everything that's made from wood and minerals the land provides us. It's about the land because all creation – not solely human creatures – depends on land and human caretaking of the land in order to live, thrive, and flourish.

How have you invested? What have you invested? What will you invest next? Who do you have in mind as you look into the future?

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Five Minute Friday :: Prove

Family of Breads with legal reuse rights from pxhere

• Five Minute Friday :: Prove Linkup

You need to prove your dough before you put it in the oven to bake it into bread. Yeast ferments a lump of dough – the future loaf! – so it rises and expands in size; we sometimes call that leavening. The rising proofs the dough so it comes out of the oven as lovely appealing bread that actually acts like bread—it tastes great and nourishes us well.

Do you not know that a little yeast leavens all of the dough? Clean out the old yeast so that you may be a new batch of dough, as you really are unleavened. For our paschal lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed for us. Because of this, let us celebrate the festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of goodness and truth.
1 Corinthians 5:6-8

The Apostle Paul uses an analogy he hopes his listeners and readers will understand when he says malice and evil become a kind of leaven because they tend to spread easily, similar to the way a small amount of yeast will prove an entire loaf. Moving away from Paul's warning, it takes very little yeast to make a whole loaf rise and shine; as we celebrate the festival of resurrection; that's where we're going today as Easter people. The Holy Spirit of Life that raised Jesus from the dead also raises us to new life. We become yeasty leaven for society and for the church. We rise and we shine!

God gives us Broken Bread and Unbroken Word, as a friend in previous city's website proclaims. The loaf has been proven, baked into bread, blessed, broken, and given to us. The Word is part of the proof of God with us, God among us, God for us.

God calls us to live as salt of the earth. Light of the world. Leaven of society. You've probably experienced how a tiny packet of yeast makes its way through the loaf and proves the whole entire thing? Our lives function the same way. And just as you can add more yeast if it looks like your bread isn't rising, why not take along a companion to help increase the leavening?

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April 2025 Highlights

• Urban Wilderness City Paradise Lectionary Project for April

• Wednesday 02 April • Another Trip to Torrance. I collaged the Stained Glass Windows I thought to capture this time. Have I mentioned google AI makes some really good collages, and has different options for us to make our own?

• Monday 07 April • Ground cover daisies. I don't know how many pics I've taken of ground cover at commercial sites. It's always fun and lively and even encouraging.

• Thursday 17 April • Florist Shop Easter Flowers in a collage by google AI.

• Saturday 19 April • My first time back in town in four years. Here are snacks from the annual Holy Saturday Easter workday; with covid and other disruptions I'm not sure when my last one was.

• Sunday 20 April • Easter Day, the Festival of Resurrection, Queen of Feasts. Lunch on the lawn included Persian Food for the end of Nowruz, the Persian New Year.

• Tuesday 22 April • doubles for Earth Day! I designed a poster for 2025 and my blog linked to six faves from previous years.

• Serendipitously, Earth Day also was the Fourth Tuesday Santa Monica Lunch Brunch I enjoyed for a second time. I collaged the lunch venue and some outside foliage.