If We Were Having Coffee…. Sadness at the world.

If we were having coffee today I wouldn’t have a whole lot to say. My week has vanished into a fog of a lot of projects at work and just trying to distill my response to all that has been happening here in the US and around the world.  So much violence and hate, so much fear and division.  It makes my heart hurt.

I am in the process of trying to write something about it all, a response of some sort.  I realized that other day that the form that response was trying to take was a sermon.  That is how I think I need to put my thoughts and reflections into the world — so now I have to do some exegetical work around the matters I am going to talk about and find exactly what the message I want to get across is.  Then I have to get up the nerve to share it, and figure out just how I am going to do that.  Part of me that is scared of putting my voice really out in the world wants to just post on my personal Facebook page, limited to friends and family.  But there is another part of me that thinks I need to put this further out there and wants to record it on YouTube and share it across my social-media, including here.

I’m going to have to thing on that more, and I’m sure some of my decision will be based on what I end up speaking about, exactly.

I also need to write up a sermon proposal for another one I want to present and give sometime this year.  There’s a church that I have been able to preach at pretty much annually since I moved back to Oregon and I really love it — there are a handful of things I miss from my days in seminary and being on a path towards ordained ministry, and preaching is one of them.  I’ve often thought that I should try to put together sermons, or little homily’s at the very least, on a more regular basis and just put them online but… it’s different.  I liked the whole organization, working with the entirety of a worship service in order to sculpt an experience — and that’s not quite the same when I am looking just at a sermon.  For me a good and powerful organized worship service in the company of others is somewhat like a stage production – it’s about shaping an experience that helps to bring people to a certain place of openness and connection to the message and to one another. I know that there are those who balk at the idea of drawing a parallel between worship and theater, but to me it is clear and does not, in any way, detract from the power, prayerful-ness and holiness of worship services.

Anyhow, that’s on my mind at the moment, and taking most of my thoughts.  I also have a few other projects that I need to get moving on — a short story draft that I’m supposed to have done by next weekend that is proving to be a challenge for me. I have a lot of ideas, but finding just the right one to use for the theme is giving me a bit of a challenge!

Now I should turn my attention to the work that needs to be done.  In addition to the writing (and editing… I really do want to get back to the rewrites I need to do on that novel, it would be so cool to have a functional draft by the end of the year, and I could manage that), I also need to start reading more again (I’m terribly behind on all my reading challenges, including the personal challenge I set to reread a bunch of books and decide what to keep and what might be able to find new homes elsewhere), and there is the unpacking (from two weeks ago…don’t judge) and laundry and organizing that, once again, has fallen by the wayside.

I did read the most recent Rick Riordan book (oh!  That’s where some of my free-time went!) and really had fun with it, I love his tone and the way his stories send my mind in all directions trying to remember bits of my knowledge of various mythologies as well as sparking ideas in the writers brain about how he might be heading and what he might be doing with all the different versions of our world he’s created… I really should write about my speculations and thoughts (because I had also been so neglecting my blog writing… I’m sorry guys!).

And what I’d set out to have be a short little check in has turned into a bit of a ramble, so I’ll sip on my coffee a bit and let you share some with me about what you’ve been up to and how you’re doing.