09 October: Trust

This Five Minute Friday also is Day 9 of Kate Motaung's October 2015 edition of 31 days of free writes. Write for five minutes. Simply write or type.

Friday 09 October: Trust

State Street Bank & Trust. The full faith and trust of the United States government back the greenback and give it true value as legal tender? Some people are trust-worthy, worth awarding (giving) them our trust and allegiance. Some versions of the bible translate the Greek pistis – trust, confidence in, as "faith," which too many interpret as intellectual assent and agreement, rather than as determination to allow God's life to embrace ours, and with (trust and) abandon follow The Way of the Crucified and Risen Christ.

I'd guess everyone who's ever lived on this earth has had at least some problems trusting other humans, and in turn, trusting God with their lives. If the disciple, agent, or representative is not worth our trust, what does that say about the one who sent them? In the ancient near east, the presence of the emissary or ambassador equaled the presence of the person who sent that individual. Hmmmmm.... is that not our own situation in the world, with people observing and too often experiencing bad, deplorable Christian behaviors and attitudes and then logically wanting nothing to do with the church or with the Lord of the Church? Was it Gandhi or someone else who said, "I like your Jesus but I don't much care for your Christians?" Lots of people agree with that sentiment, I'd trust.

The first stanza of the closing chorale from J.S. Bach's St. John Passion:

Lord, Thee I love with all my heart;
I pray Thee, ne’er from me depart,
With tender mercy cheer me.
Earth has no pleasure I would share.
Yea, heav’n itself were void and bare
If Thou, Lord, wert not near me.

And should my heart for sorrow break,
My trust in Thee can nothing shake.
Thou art the portion I have sought;
Thy precious blood my soul has bought.
Lord Jesus Christ, my God and Lord, my God and Lord,
Forsake me not! I trust Thy Word.

Tune, «Herzlich Lieb hab' ich dich, O Herr»
Words by Martin Schalling; translated by Catherine Winkworth
ELW (Evangelical Lutheran Worship) 750; LBW (Lutheran Book of Worship) 325

Although I remembered the trust lines, this stanza is a copy-paste.

08 October: Purple

Week 2 begins today, with Day 8 of Kate Motaung's October 2015 edition of 31 days of free writes. Write for five minutes. Don't edit.

Thursday 08 October: Purple

Today it's purple. Unlike many people, esp many females, I've never really liked broad expenses of purple and its variants such as lavender and violet, but I've always enjoyed a touch of it as an accent color, especially when those accents are floral. In the book of Acts we read about Lydia, who was the first European – the first non-Asian – Christian:

¹⁴A certain woman named Lydia, a worshiper of God, was listening to us; she was from the city of Thyatira and a dealer in purple cloth. The Lord opened her heart to listen eagerly to what was said by Paul. ¹⁵When she and her household were baptized, she urged us, saying, "If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come and stay at my home." And she prevailed upon us.

Besides showing hospitality to strangers, Lydia was a dealer and purveyor of purple, which in those days was incredibly costly to produce, so almost exclusively reserved for royalty and people with enough financial wherewithal to afford it. In the liturgical year, purple is the color of penance and repentance. Paraments and vestments during Lent usually are purple. Some purples are 50% each red and blue. Notice quite often people identity politically as not blue, not red, but purple? I think that means they're more oriented to candidate quality, to the best course of action, than to whether the candidate is a red republican or a blue democrat, or which political party has sponsored a bill, initiative, or referendum.

There are purples that veer toward red, such as magenta and fuchsia. There are purples on the bluer side—such as the periwinkle I truly love, but only in pastel tint type presentations. However, I believe periwinkle by definition is softer, lighter, less saturated than many other purples?

You've heard of purple prose? That, too! Purple and magenta often are part of the spectrum of a desert sunset, and hints of those colors often find a place in a seaside coastal color palette.

07 October: Love

Day 7 of Kate Motaung's October 2015 edition of 31 days of free writes. Write for five minutes. Don't edit.

Wednesday 07 October: Love


RCL year B, Easter 3, 1 John 3:1 – "See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God and that is what we are."
Long ago, C.S. Lewis wrote a book about Love. Scripture brings us four distinctive, yet sometimes overlapping categories of love: storge, eros, philios, and agape. In fact, those categories were not Christian originals but derived from the Greek culture that surrounded the early church. In any case, this still is a free write about love for only five minutes, so instead of attempting to describe each type, I'll reflect on love in general.

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I wrote the first paragraph earlier today, and after trying three or four times to write for an additional four minutes it was a total no go, so my post this time mainly is my own illustration of 1 John 3:1.

Not sure I can continue 5 minutes every single day, but I'll try some of the prompts. I asked myself what I would do if this were client design, and I know I'd push through to the end no matter how tired I was, how non-creative I was feeling (and being), how late the hours were. I can't always apply that reasoning to my own stuff, esp when I'm so exhausted and there's nothing essential about a project.

06 October: Possible

Day 6 of Kate Motaung's 31 days of free writes, October 2015 edition. Write for five minutes. Just write.

Tuesday 06 October: Possible

As I was preparing bible study for this coming Sunday (Revised Common Lectionary Proper 23B / Ordinary Time 28B / Pentecost 20) I noticed the gospel reading includes "For God all things are possible." Mark 10:27b. Here's my visual inspiration and interpretation I retrieved from the past and updated with grungy background style. So literally providential it also fits today's Possible prompt perfectly!


If you can! All things will be possible if only you will trust! Stop even imagining in conventional human terms and categories! With God nothing will be, nothing is, nothing ever has been impossible. Anything is possible! Is anything too hard for God? Nothing is too hard for the Lord!

I AM the God who raises the dead! God whose word creates out of nothing, God whose Spirit redeems the impossibly broken and dead.

My own future possible? Is it not possible for me to trust the God who raises the dead? For the apostle Paul the gospel is death and resurrection. In that case, you must need to be dead before you can be resurrected. In that case, I need to be dead before God can raise me to new life.

Is it even remotely possible I might write 31 days of five minute blog posts? Yep, so far I've been doing it, and if I keep on in this direction, the possible will become probable will become real. But I'm also seriously slowing down and after my five minute write, it's been taking two or three hours to format and post. I don't usually lay shoulds on myself, but the entire process reasonably should be about 15-20 minutes, and I can use all that time to be productive elsewhere and otherwise.

05 October: Home

Day 5 of Kate Motaung's 31 days of free writes, October 2015 edition. You know the drill: write for five minutes without edits, though I always check to be sure autocorrect has changed my inaccuracies to what I intended.

Monday 05 October: Home

Intro: yesterday's word "embrace" was so immediate and familiar I could have kept writing almost forever. Not surprisingly I think about each day's prompt before I start writing, and I realized I've already written and blogged about home and homecoming at least as much as I've considered God's gracious mercy-filled embrace of all creation in Jesus Christ and in the sacraments.

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Home has a literal plethora of dimensions that include a place to be, a way to be, people to be with. We talk about a house becoming a home. First off, several songs with home-related lyrics popped into my mind, and if I blog more about this later, I'm positive I'll think of several more. My starter songs:

Karla Bonoff, Home: "Home sings me of sweet things; life there has its own wings though I'm standing still."

Gerry Rafferty, Baker Street: "When you wake up it's a new morning; sun is shining it's a new morning, and you're going, you're going home."

Al Stewart, Time Passages: "It was late in December, the sky turned to snow ... buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight." (This one is exactly about boarding the train at the commuter rail station in Salem, Massachusetts long ago.)

Mary Chapin Carpenter: Almost Home: "I'm not running; I'm not hiding; I'm not reaching—I'm just resting in the arms of the great wide open. Gonna pull my soul in, and I'm almost home."

Phillip Phillips: Home: "Just know you're not alone; I'm gonna make this place your home. "

And I remembered the last episode of Will & Grace when Grace says to Will, "I don't live here any more." She no longer claimed that physical place and space as her street address or the place she returned to at the end of a work day or a vacation time away. It no longer was her home. That happens to almost everyone in this physically, emotionally, and psychologically mobile society.

You hear about people feeling at home with themselves. Most of us are restless and not at home with ourselves a lot of the time, and it seems as if we feel the best about ourselves, the most at home with ourselves, in the presence of another person who brings us home and makes us at home with ourselves.

A few months ago I returned to Huge Metropolitan Area that wasn't a place I'd previously lived (so technically I didn't return to that city since I never had a street address anywhere there), because I feel at home in the noise, excitement, diversity...

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five minutes already! Posting now, and I'll try to make this one I develop more later. Or maybe not.

World Communion Sunday 2015

This is blog 2 for World Communion Sunday 2015; my other post was day 04 in 31 Days of Five Minute Free Writes.

04 October: Embrace

Day 4 of Kate Motaung's 31 days of free writes, October 2015 edition. We get to write for five minutes without edits (but some of these 5-minute sprints may turn out to be excellent starters for future blogs).

Sunday 04 October: Embrace | World Communion Sunday 2015

Take the world in a love embrace!

Great advice from Steppenwolf with their classic driving rocking "Born To Be Wild." Today is World Communion Sunday, an event churches of countless denominations and locations celebrate every single year. No one ever will know all there is to know about the Lord's Supper, Holy Communion, The Eucharist, The Sacrament—there are many interpretations and lots of perspectives, almost none exclusive of any of the others; it's often simply what we emphasize or focus on at a given time. Walter Brueggemann tells us communion is pre-Eucharist, and reminds us we commune with the God of the commandments, the God whose commandments call us to justice, love, mercy, hospitality, and inclusion. Holy Communion may be the most universally accepted term for the rite, ordinance, ritual, or sacrament; "communion" also is a basic concept. It's even from the same root as "community."

Embrace! In Holy Communion we experience again God's embrace of each of us, all of us in the life-transforming, redemptive Christ event. As we follow Jesus' command to "do this!," in turn we embrace the world with food, justice, welcome, shalom. Does anything feel better than being wrapped up in someone else's arms? In a group hug? But that embrace needs to come with content. Not simply here's a hug, now go on your way. Hopefully that embrace is a welcome into friendship and community, maybe the start of something new. A nourishing meal. Conversation. A future together.

When the church embraces creation and then invites everyone to the Lord's Supper, isn't that a sign we've been stewards of the earth, caretakers of creation, we've given the world a big hug, planned and planted wisely, harvested wheat or another grain, baked bread, picked grapes, made wine? Yes, it is!

Take the earth in a wild embrace, and share the bounty with everyone!

As we reach out to our neighbors on this world communion Sunday 2015, and beyond them to a world hungry for good eats, for justice, for peace, for a future – for community – we show them what God has done for us. God has come to earth in Jesus Christ, taken all creation in a love embrace, given us the bread of life and the cup of salvation. Now it's our turn.

"People will come from the east and the west, the north and the south and sit down at the table in the kingdom of God." Luke 13:29, NRSV


The photos are a couple of the many I captured this morning at Westwood PCUSA, Los Angeles, California, USA, North America, Planet Earth.

03 October: Capture

Day 3 of Kate Motaung's 31 days of free writes, October 2015 edition. As usual, we get to write for five minutes, literally free and clear without edits.

Saturday 03 October: Capture

When I discovered the blog button pic for today featured a camera with the word capture, for some reason I came close to raging because it was so ordinary, predicable, so totally conventional. Of course when I take photos I sometimes think in terms of a "capture" of that scene, that moment, that time – in order to capture a memory – but can't people allow themselves flights of fancy?

Today my words about capture relate to people who believe they can capture, contain, restrain the God who more than fills heaven and earth. The idea of a domesticated, contained, captured – captivated? – god was one of the reformer Martin Luther's main theological currents... scripture and our own lives show us a God whose presence and actions are free, elusive, unpredictable, unconventional, and often very very strange from a human perspective. More Luther: "God without strange work is God without proper work!"

The bible brings us a complex history of God's presence and of human attempts to capture, to contain God. Remember the Jerusalem Temple? God did not want to be like those other divinities of the Ancient Near East, closed up in a little box that was the mini-image of the earth and the heavens. After the destruction of the Temple, at least for a while people realized the actual expansive, boundless creation that includes earth and heaven truly was God's temple, place of residence. Had captured God? ...

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Short version wrap-up: with a camera, a sketchpad, a shopping bag or other artifact, we can capture a scene, memory, emotion, a product or a purchase but we cannot capture God, yet God has come to earth, captured each of us, and made a home with all creation.

Another observation: I started this post with my anger that was close to rage about how conventional people can be, yet spoken and written language and words (and actions) absolutely carry expected, everyday, conventions of meaning and reference. In other words, what's so bad about the expected? Communication already is hard enough, and would be even more crazy-making if we needed to question and mine the meanings more than we already do behind everything everyone wrote or spoke. I remember my own blog post late last December when I commented on my delight at the female teenager thurifer at the Christmas Eve liturgy and how moving it was especially to watch her censing the gathered assembly. I wrote effectively I'd captured a picture of her, but didn't have permission to post it. What's wrong with that? I'm saying I took her picture. So simple, plain, pure and clear. So conventional, easy to understand, simple to capture.

What I Learned in September 2015

Each month Emily Freeman hosts What I Learned in... September 2015


1. Surprise! I haven't been annihilated!


2. I was so correct that I needed to be back in A Big City.



3. Dinner from The Taco Lady at the corner of this street is comidas sabrosas, and only $2.00 for a basic chicken or beef taco with abundant condiments!



4. During July I started Mindfulness Meditation every Thursday early afternoon at the Hammer Museum; it's been an inspired idea and practice that in September I resolved to continue.




5. Finally looking outside myself long enough to realize this very street where I currently live will be an amazing resource for a gallery – or more likely several galleries – of house photographs.






6. Not a new learning, yet a life-giving remembering—grace is my star word for this year 2015.

five minute friday: family

This month I'm participating in Kate Motaung's 31 days of free writes, October 2015 edition. Fridays still are Five Minute Fridays, and today we get an extra special Five Minute Friday―Family. I love alliterations!

Friday 02 October: Family

Everyone has psychological, emotional, and related stuff relative to their original biological or adoptive family or families of origin. Defining family can be tricky. In the world of design where I reside a lot of the time, we talk about font families, so that would include every possible variety of a given typeface: bold; italic; light extended; medium condensed; heavy, etc. Some designers name their slanty letters italic, some fontographers call theirs oblique. A typeface "family" means they have enough similarity in style they visually and practically cohere when you use them together—you could say they recognize each other. We sometimes talk about a vegetable family, a flower, or a plant family. The word "familiar" includes the word family. When we speak of being familiar with a place, a concept, a literary or musical work, we mean a degree of recognition of its style and presentation. Familiar with a person we're not necessarily biologically related to?!

Even if you grew up in a close to ideal erewhon world, exactly like everyone else, you still have stuff to sort through regarding your family.

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01 October: Calling

Series Intro:

This month I'm participating in Kate Motaung's 31 days of free writes, October 2015 edition. At times I can be a little defensive, so please remember I haven't edited any of these (yet), though some may turn out to be starter dough for future blog posts. BTW, Kate suggested we could use the one-word prompts that actually were crowd-sourced this time, and that's what I'm doing. Alternately, bloggers could choose their own topics, or fit the prompts into a specific theme. Exactly like Five Minute Fridays, we get to write unedited for five minutes. Simple as that. Scary as that!

Thursday 01 October: Calling

Maybe especially in the church, the concept of having a call or a calling has sacred status. Sacred? Holy? Set apart? Yes, because in many, possibly in most cases, at least related to an assignment within the church, people sense God is the ultimate source of that claim on us, on our time, on our talents. The formal calling may come to an individual from an officially constituted call committee (in the case of calling a pastor or other authorized church staff), from a pastor or church council, session, bishopric, or other configuration of church leaders

But people outside the church and the churches often have a sense of being called to a certain career, to a particular path, to a designated task. Whether or not they're formally religious, whether or not they're spiritual, "other," or one of those recently publicized nones, they've assessed what they're good at doing, their education and experience, and they've looked at the needs around them. They've considered what counsel others have given them, and they've claimed a calling to participate in life, to serve the community and the world in a certain way.

If there's a call, there must be a caller. Right? In the church we claim God ultimately calls us, extends those callings, even though most often reach us through the voice and agency of other humans. If there's a calling, there's a caller, and then there are those who have been called. You know the famous passage from Romans that talks about us humans calling on the Lord?! Interesting stuff!

Romans 10:12-15a, NRSV

¹²For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him. ¹³For, "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved." ¹⁴But how are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him? ¹⁵And how are they to proclaim him unless they are sent?

So we humans are the callers, and God is the called—the One with a calling!