Skip to main content

Soon, very soon.

In a little over a week, I enter into household life in the People of Praise, living with a family of six plus another guy near my age who I'll be rooming with. In a little over a week, I begin a high-skilled job consisting of a skill I studied fractionally in college and not since then.

That's it, in a nutshell. These past few weeks have been a flurry interviews, trying to stay out of jail, abetting my patient landlord, falling out of contact with some, falling into contact with others...

Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are, quite naturally, impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability – And that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you. Your ideas mature gradually – let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste. Don’t try to force them on, as though you could be today what time (that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will) will make you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.

- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Defy the old Dragon,
defy the jaws of death,
defy fear as well!
Rage, oh world, and quake,
here I stay,
singing in perfect peace!

- Jesu, meine Freude, by Johann Sebastian Bach

The bread which you do not use is the bread of the hungry; the garment hanging in your wardrobe is the garment of him who is naked; the shoes that you do not wear are the shoes of the one who is barefoot; the money that you keep locked away is the money of the poor; the acts of charity that you do not perform are so many injustices that you commit.
- St. Basil

Popular posts from this blog

free shtuff!

Yesterday I came across a very cool free resource... so you know how designers can find online libraries of fonts as well as high quality, high resolution graphics and photographs? These are usually pay sites. Well check out stock.xchng . Wowsers. Don't be scared off by the required registration... it's all free! Looks like I won't be needing to take a digital camera to any of the tourist traps that I plan on visiting in my lifetime, I can just mooch better pics of said locations from this site! Makes for excellent browsing for awesome desktop background images. It's like Webshots on steroids. It's like discovering Google Maps after having just used MapQuest . (ps- Google Local now offers that map functionality fully integrated ..) Stumbling across that site set my mind rolling on free stuff. I just realized how my professional focus on open source software has been an extension of an interest in free stuff that I had back in high school . (for t

You wouldn't happen to have a few dollars so I can pay my electric bill, would you?

Friday during the day I had very little planned for the evening. I expected to go to the Havard's to jog with Robert-Michael and make some final arrangements for dog-sitting for them. I also made some last-minute plans to briefly join a group of friend's celebrating Allison's birthday, who I've gotten to know recently through a Lenten faith-sharing group. They intended to continue the celebrations later into the evening watching basketball, but I had a number of missed calls from Charles, so I ducked out halfway through. I'm also not much of a March Madness fan, which I know is blasphemy. :) Charles is a neighbor of mine with no steady employment who bikes around the neighborhood and near Notre Dame asking people for money and collecting cans and any scrap items he can recycle or pawn. When I first met him, he readily accepted prayers from me and a few friends, and told us how important smiling is as we parted ways. I've never given him money in the num

Pouno mega dat - What a terrible thing

As I sat in the back of the scout truck, bumping along an especially pock-marked portion of the highway during our return to Banjul , one of my brothers who sat back there with me - Abdoulie - taught me a new phrase. After a particularly jarring pothole, it is appropriate to mutter " Pouno mega dat !". I gave him an "Oy vey!" in return. See me for the proper pronunciation. That's a completely arbitrary approximation, as there is no standard written form of Mandinka. My brain is exploding. I've been attending a Friday afternoon service at a Muslim Mosque downtown with my co-worker Mehdi for awhile now, I think I've been 4 times now. I'm looking at Hindu-Christian dialogue via a book recommendation I received a couple weeks ago about a Catholic Sanyasi , a seeming contradiction in terms. I've discovered that I can possibly embrace my Jewish heritage more fully by learning the ways of Messianic Judaism. I'm arriving very close to my rel