Five Minute Friday :: Advantage

• Salad from unsplash

• Five Minute Friday :: Advantage Linkup

Advantage flea and tick medicine. Advantage credit card. The advantage of greater height, of speaking the language—different things are advantageous at different times in different places. A trait that's an advantage in some settings sometimes becomes a disadvantage in others. Tall in height? Can't get into that small space.

Since last winter I've been doing a kind of gap half or three-quarters of a year. Time to breathe, to reflect on the pasts, to dream of some futures. To live a clean break from years that – of course – I learned from and took advantage of, but that I need to admit were altogether far less than I was worth and worthy of. Particularly related to that intentional interval between what was and what will be, at the end of most days I thank God for the gifts of that day. Most of those turn out to have given me an advantage, sometimes over other people(!), often an advantage over my previous self.

In either intro cultural anthropology or anthropology of religion (both were with same wonderful professor) we studied The Ritual Process by Victor Turner. People sometimes refer to almost any inbetween as a liminal time (and in some ways almost any inbetween does position us on the limen or threshold), but in a ritual and liturgical sense, liminality isn't simply an undefined interval; it's an intentional opportunity to be stripped of dysfunctional and unneeded aspects of how I was and who I was before, an emptying that prepares me to take on ways of being that relate to the next chapter. You are a different person after the liminal time than you were before it: you've been undone and you get redone!

This is a free write, so I'll continue by mentioning the early church demonstrated our identity before baptism and afterwards in a far more dramatic way than even most contemporary churches do at the Easter Vigil. Still, although the length of the liminal liturgical interval is brief, baptism is an excellent illustration. FMF host Kate wrote about the advantage of hope Christians possess; baptism bathes us in the hope of Jesus Christ's death and resurrection. How's that for an advantage?

About my header image: we have the advantage of cost-free photographs with legal reuse rights. And I have the advantage of love, love, loving salads! So much that I want to illustrate almost everything I write with a salad.

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