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.

Five Minute Friday :: Might

The gospel came to you not in word only,
but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with conviction.
I Thessalonians 1:5
• Five Minute Friday :: Might Linkup

Then he answered and spake unto me, saying,
"This is the word of the Lord unto Zerubbabel, saying,
'Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit,
saith the Lord of hosts.'" Zechariah 4:6

Zerubbabel was supposed to oversee finishing rebuilding the Jerusalem Temple, but construction had slowed down and run into a glitch, as we might say. This passage reassures him that [human] resources aren't sufficient to accomplish God's work, or even to get anything done properly and completely. Cooperation and partnership between earth and heaven gets it finished, finished well, and – maybe most important – on God's timeline, not ours.

Our human power and might and effort and related gifts aren't wrong at all. After all, they are "gifts" or givens from God, and they're necessary for the ministries God calls us to. Our work in this world always partners with God's Spirit at the behest of God's call. Do you remember when Moses dialogued with God regarding "Moses, your people" or "God, your people," because it's always both/and?

Glitches in our lives happen because too often we humans try to do too much under our own steam, looking at our own clocks and calendars, too often not acknowledging the Spirit. Maybe we don't want to bother God with those smaller concerns when so much of civilization and creation needs so much healing, repair, and rebuilding?

Late December 2023 I determined to take a six month half year gap time, but as days went by and I assessed my situation, I realized a gap year made more sense. Now the chronology has spilled over a few more months into 2025, but signs and circumstances have made it clear it's finally time to move on. On God's timeline, not mine. And I anticipate more delays, possibly a roadblock or a few.

"Trust the process" has become such a cliché because that's how life works. Immerse yourself in the journey, savor each hour and each day. Ya know what? That's how humans learn and grow, how ideas develop, how dreams and visions become real. That's the way God engages us and gets things done. Not by human might, humanity's power, but by the Spirit that created the world, the Spirit that redeemed creation, the Spirit that calls us into a new creation.

Anyone who has despised the day of small beginnings
will rejoice to see the plumbline of the Lord's house
in Zerubbabel's hand. Zechariah 4:10a

Can you imagine teaching and preaching God's word without guidance from the HS? Can you imagine spreading the gospel, being the good news of God with us, God among us, without trusting in and waiting for promptings and instructions from the HS? The same holds true for every aspect of every moment of our lives. Think about it!

The gospel came to you not in word only,
but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with conviction.
I Thessalonians 1:5

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Earth Day 2025

Our Power, Our Planet

From previous Earth Days:

• 2023 Invest In Our Planet

• 2020 50 Years :: #ClimateAction

• 2019 #ProtectOurSpecies

• 2018 #EndPlasticPollution

• 2015 #GreenCities

• 2008 Urban Oasis

Five Minute Friday :: Without

• Five Minute friday :: Without Linkup

• From Rolling Home by Eric Andersen

Truth, with all its far out schemes,
Lets time decide what it should mean;
It's not the time but just the dreams that die.
And sometimes when the room is still,
Time with so much truth to kill,
Leaves you by the window sill so tied
Without a wing, to take you high,
Without a clue to tell you why.

Chorus: But I don't know, I ain't been told,
Everybody wants a hand to hold.
They're so afraid of being old,
So scared of dying, so unknown
And so alone, rollin' home.

• Rolling Home lyrics

Time leaves us without any way to know why we're so alone and lonely, so afraid and scared (I didn't write to last week's scared prompt) of… everything, probably. But aging and dying are reasonable stand-ins for everything else we fear.

As songwriter musician Eric Andersen reminds us, time doesn't die, our times don't end. Well, our time on earth eventually does end, but while we're still here our options are open and generous. Endless? No, not for anyone. But somehow we sometimes lose those dreams. (Do you know how and why? Think about it!) Without a dream, we can't go far. Without a dream, we can't claim hope. Without our dreams, our days become routine, often bordering on unbearable.

Dreams energize us. Hitch your life to a star! Your own, your family's, your partner's, even the star-struck dreams and aspirations of the company you work for. Andersen says we're all alone, yet we're rolling home. Isn't homecoming our ultimate desire? A place of belonging, of safety, of overall well-being. A place that celebrates our dreams. A place with everything we need, a place without judgment, fear, loneliness, sorrow; a place and space without… fill in your fears.

Langston Hughes poetry reminds us (no, commands us):

Hold fast to dreams
for if dreams die
life is a broken winged bird
that cannot fly.

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Draw A Bird Day 2025

Thanks to social media, I remembered the annual Draw A Bird Day that happens every April 8th. This is an old birds drawing I like a lot; I'm augmenting it here with its companion fish.

Five Minute Friday :: Persuade

• Five Minute Friday :: Persuade Linkup

I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels,
nor principalities, nor powers, not things present, nor things to come,

nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation,
shall be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 8:38-39

Nothing whatsoever can separate us from God's love and God's presence that is such a present to us. What about peeled pineapples? Just this afternoon one of my housemates made dinner for us and we finished with some fresh pineapple he'd diced into bite-size pieces.

Despite snow in western Canada and in some upper midwestern US states, in spite of chilly days here in LA, evidence of spring abounds in the northern hemisphere. If spring is here – because spring has sprung – winter must have visited, too. Aside from most people having at least a mild seasonal mood pattern; aside from shorter days-longer nights causing a bit of sadness for many; aside from fewer flowers and decreased greenery, less fresh fruit and veggies during the cooler months; our memories grow even shorter than the days, and we forget the glories of new life.

But did you know? Bright, colorful, spring flowers with their promise of even more splendid summer months for those of us with an endless estival love affair form only a hint of the reality; we could call it a type or a foreshadowing of the real thing.

The church has been observing Lent since early March. During Lent we follow Jesus to Jerusalem, to his trial, conviction, crucifixion, death, and burial. And on the third day? An empty grave and a risen Savior. Because nothing, no thing whatsoever, not even death, can keep us away from God's love in Jesus Christ. Not even bleak, cold, endless winter nights. Not even sweet peeled pineapple! I am persuaded!

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