The Yo-Yo effect

With seminary hopefully starting back up this week, pending Irene and her path. I do have an announcement though that I am no longer fully itinerant as I was last year as I have moved full time to school. Figures my first weekend is a hurricane. Also a display of Gods sense of humor, I was supposed to preach at my new church tomorrow. Yeah about that…

Anyways doing hurricane prep reminded me of a discussion we had in bible study two springs ago. The discussion was when we give something to God but then we take it back or the yo-yo effect. A lot of people when natural disasters strike say its God trying to tell us something, that we are naughty, or not listening to God or not acting with God’s intent. I don’t buy it, never have and likely never will. I do however think that the disrespect we are showing the earth has an effect upon the wacky weather lately. But back to the point.
On Thursday I moved in and went to dinner with a peer and it was great. She needed to stop at the grocery store here in town. Going in it was already pandemonium. Something in my mind told me to get water then, and it was a darn good thing I did. Yesterday I went to go out to prepare and to get food to um eat next week after the storm, and a few other odds and ends. Holy cow people, let the mass panic ensue. People pushing shoving, practically dive bombing items.
Now I’m all for being prepared as my roommate and I have stowed water all over the place in the apartment. But this gets me to thinking God created and is creating and the animals are taken care of, so surely we are also going to be taken care of. Maybe we should collective panic less and plan more. Listen if you’re in an evacuation zone and get the hell out*. But be nice to one another and try to love the stupid people who do stupid things in a storm. But above all try to learn to trust and to not yo-yo.




*to quote Gov. Christy

Purple

When I came home on Friday I cam home to the first flowers of spring bursting forth. I find it interesting that each spring at least in my yard the color of the flowers are purple. Purple is historically the color of royalty but also for Christians the color of lent.

Purple was the color of royalty because it was a hard dye to make and cost a lot of money due to the time it took to create it. I tend to look at how long it took for the bulbs and seeds to generate there energy to create the blooms that bring me such joy and think how they came from the seemingly dead earth but yet are alive. We place purple on our worship spaces on ash Wednesday. Well I am not sure of the ‘official answer’ to why we do this I think it is because we are awaiting. We know the end to the story, that God was seemingly dead but came to prove that everything that we had assumed was wrong. That a royal had come not to keep there kin-dom to themselves but rather to share, so we all could be clothed in the purple of royalty.

I am also drawn to think about one of my favorite movies(I confess I have not read the book, woe to me I know) The Color Purple. Purple is a huge theme that runs through this book along with God. Purple for the main character has associated purple with negative things. A mistress/lover of her husband through their time together shows her that life rather needs to be celebrated. When they discuss this they are in a purple field of lowers and says "You must look at all the good and acknowledge them because God placed them all on earth". After this she comes to learn to love herself and to love God.

Purple for me is a sign of life, just as much as red is a sign of the spirit. Maybe if we think differently we can seek to see the extra-ordinary in the ordinary.

In the snow

This past week I took a Jan Term intensive, more on that at a latter date. However our five-day class got cut short due to one of the trifecta snow storms that have hit the east coast the past few weeks. It was entertaining to me to see everyone upset about nine inches of snow. I’m not sure if its me and my potential cockiness or my New York attitude or just my years of snow related driving that made me feel like this was nothing. Regardless of this I used it as a day to camp out and then to help someone move. Yes move across campus in the snow.

            Now this person had a lot of stuff and was not well packed for a move in any kind of weather, let alone snow and poorly managed snow as well. I digress, so I start gathering possessions that I do not know the value of and placing them into vessels prepared for transport.  Soon we start trudging it the 900 feet from building T to building W where the new residence was. 900 feet really is not that far but in the snow everything is more, longer, colder. Thankfully we found people on campus who we begged into helping and only one slight fall, and minor twist of the ankle by yours truly, we moved a futon a kitchen, clothing from two closets and a dresser and books(not a lot thankfully, seminary students do tend to have  lot of these…).

            It seems funny to me that we did something that we all do rather frequently, and that is move in a time when it seems that you should be sitting still. Creation sits still in the snow, as evidenced by the birds that flock to my front yard at home in NY but stay nested in the height of the storm. But yet once again I was going against the current and well not frocking in the snow doing something somewhat absurd.

            As of late I have come to realize that my life is somewhat absurd, and does not always make sense to me all the time. But I had the unique opportunity to see that we are never quite prepared all the time for what will be asked of us.  I could have said ‘nope its cold and I’m not going to go trudging through the snow’ to the person in need of moving. But what would I be doing if I did that? I would be sitting and taking a passive role, in what turned out to be an entertaining afternoon with good conversation and only a few aspirin latter it was done.

            So often we are caught unprepared, doing activities in quite the wrong season.  But we must stand and deliver with the best that we know we can do. Even if we are quite confidant that we have no clue what it will be. In this case my hands and virgo need to organize where the best gifts that I could offer. Maybe next time it will be my mean crockpot skills, or my box of tissues, or something more.