Blog - Hope

I’m a soul and I like cake.

It’s been a rough couple of weeks, to be sure, in the news here and abroad.

Ten years ago yesterday, all was mostly well in my world.

Tuesday, post Holy Week.

Daughter Else asks magnificent questions.

Wally Taylor teaches New Testament at (the truly outstanding) Trinity Lutheran Seminary, in the fair city of Columbus, Ohio.

So tomorrow, on Ash Wednesday, many–not all, but many–people in the Christian Church mark the beginning of Lent.

(This blog is an adaptation of a recent presentation I gave at the Sawmill Retreat Center in Huron, OH, for a clergy and rostered leaders’ event for two combined ELCA synods.  The theme of our days together was that of discipleship).

Appropriately, I think, I tend to keep personal updates off of my OMG Facebook page.

I was fussing with the idea of re-posting this blog this week, but then a friend of mine made reference to it today, and I viewed it as a sign that maybe I should just as well go ahead and do it for the third year running.

Google yields only one pop song, and an iffy one at that, with the word “finitude” in its lyrics.

Dear all,

I have Reinhold Niebuhr on the mind these days.

Twice in the last several months I’ve had occasion to tell the tale of the time I stood in front of my late husband’s closet, charged with choosing the clothes in which he’d be buried.

We have been waiting for weeks now to sing that very first verse: “Joy to the world, the Lord is come!”

So tonight I learned that the tradition of paper advent calendars with windows that open to chocolate, or, for the more pious of us, Bible verses, started in Germany in the early 1900s.

Many years ago, my Grandma Madsen got fired from the Brookings South Dakota jail.

I was listening, the other day, to a man on the radio who said that he advocated “Value Based Voting.”

“How is the Holy Spirit found in everyday life?”

John Westerhoff wrote:
“Stewardship is what we do after we say we believe, that is, after we give our love, loyalty, and trust to God, from whom each and every aspect of our lives comes as a gift. As members of God’ s household, we are subject to God’ s economy or stewardship, that is, God’ s plan to reconcile the whole world and bring creation to its proper end.” (Grateful and Generous Hearts, Atlanta: St. Luke’s Press, 1997, p. 20.)
I know that I’ve blogged about Westerhoff’s words before.