I Went to Prison Today

not as an inmate, but to pick one up who had been released. The Abbess of St. Paisius asked if I'd do them a "pastoral favor"... how can you say "NO" to an Abbess? Anyway, S.K. was imprisoned for drug use and prostitution.

She was being released on Sunday morning. She called and asked if I could pick her up. I kind of hesitated...right in the middle of Matins and I'm the Reader for our mission. But then I thought, oh yeah...sure, I'll pass by on the other side because I'm going to the Temple and can't be bothered with a wounded body lying by the side of the road. OK. That nanosecond of hesitation is worthy of repentance. Some day the gospel will sink in....

I learned early on in "pastoral ministry" classes that you never leave yourself alone with a woman in a "counseling situation". Transporting a prostitute to a halfway house alone? ehhhh...yeah. I figured it might be a good idea to take another woman with me. But who from the Mission could I take? My wife is the only person in our Mission who can carry everyone in the choir and is the choir director. Bill (my co-host on the radio show) can read, so I took his wife with me. We arrived and waited almost two hours in the parking lot of the prison for her to be released. She is 50-ish, haggard and, if a prostitute, would be the object of someone's absolute desperation for human contact. We talked while we took her to Walmart to buy her some clothes and personal items, then to Taco Bell for the first fast food she'd had in almost two years. Then to the halfway house to check in but which didn't open the doors until 5pm, to my house for the afternoon, then back to the halfway house.

All of her family, mother, father, brothers, step family, and kids are on drugs. Some have died, committed suicide and several are in prison. She has one sober brother. She is afraid. Her stomach hurt from fear. She is out of prison, clean and sober and knows no one, has no one and is in a strange town. A perfect recipe for relapse. She wants to call us, she hints and fishes around for more help than we are able to give. I deflect the bait and talk about recovery, fear and staying focussed on the future. She says I sound like someone who is in recovery. I just say we are ALL in recovery from life and sin. She laughs, "Yeah, I guess you're right...that's good, I'll remember that..." She says her life is in the hands of the Lord. Foxhole conversion? I dunno. I've heard that before from druggies coming off detox and rehab. I always pray its real. It is real, I suppose, at the moment, like for all of us. Staying real in the long run? God only knows.

I parked at the curb, got her bag, and we wove our way through all the crazy homeless people congregated at the door of the shelter hoping for a bed for the night. She had a ticket, they didn't. She went in the door, turned and looked like a child walking through the doors of first grade away from her mother for the first time. I looked at all the people she would be cast in with at the shelter. They are all in prison.

Prison. Self made, man made, chemical, environmental, forced upon us, chosen by us, they are all hell. "Bring my soul out of prison that I may praise Thy name..." Lord have mercy!

Death by Computer

Ohhhh kaaayyyyy.... I just spent 4 days recovering from a Windows XP computer crash. I saw it coming like one of those slow motion car wrecks that you know is going to happen and you just sit and watch helplessly. I went to print a document and started getting error messages. I removed and reloaded my printer software... more error messages. Tech support, more error messages, system restore, and error messages that wouldn't stop popping up, then frozen machine hell breaks loose. Nothing moves, nothing loads, nothing makes a sound. I'm staring at a blue screen headstone.

So, I reinstall XP... and DAMN! I lose everything. Weeks worth of files, radio shows, documents, email, all gone in a nano second. Yeah, yeah...daily back ups... you don't have to tell me twice.

I found a data recovery program for 29.95. Bought it, ran it, got my stuff back as far as I can tell. Now I know why "data doctors" cost so much. I probably spent 20 hours doing the recovery. I just finished reloading all my critical software. What I wouldn't give for Bill Gate's home phone number at 3:30 in the morning......

Cussing

GOSHAMICKLEDICKLEPICKLEGEEWILLYWOBBERSDOGMYCATS AND ROWWRBAZZLE!
Wow! You sure are cussable!

An "attaboy" to the first person who can tell me who said that.

Anyway, I'm sitting here on my other computer waiting for a "data recovery" program to scan my hard drive on my new computer that crashed last night. No, I didn't have a backup...I have a back up of THIS computer but not my new one. I lost about two months worth of radio programs, files and research etc. not to mention all my programs and software I installed for the radio show studio. Oh well...I don't have Bill Gates home phone number to ask him why Windows XP crashed on me after only 8 weeks of using it.

Other than that, life is still as hectic as a one armed wallpaper hanger (that's construction lingo). I had two full time jobs and 7 "side jobs" last week. I worked on an NFL player's house referred by a Diamondbacks pitcher I've worked for, the widow of a former US Senator, and the grand daughter of the founder of Ping golf clubs, and a couple just ordinary rich people and Safeway grocery store's corporate headquarters. But you know what? Drywall and paint is still drywall and paint no matter where the house is and who lives in it or what they do for a living. I treat all my clients the same way whether they live in a trailer or a 20,000 sq ft. house on a hillside. And I do the same quality work for both.

That just makes my life easier to have one facade instead of many, and it keeps me sane not having to remember how awestruck to act at someone's credentials or job or the cost of their doorknobs.

I just viewed the post and I have NO idea how and why those words got underlined.

I've Moved Some Stuff

to another blog. I decided to keep the Introduction to Life, Death and Love: A Journey Through Spiritual Despair here but move the entire manuscript to its own blog. The only thing that will be posted there is the manuscript. This blog will continue to be just my pithless thoughts on daily life in my current world.

Life, Death and Love

I found an old manuscript for a book that I wrote during the late 80's. I remembered writing it, but the computer I wrote it on long since died and I thought it was all in there. I was cleaning my bookshelves and found a tattered manila folder and in it was a sheaf of yellowed, wrinkled and hand-edited papers: my manuscript for "Life, Death and Love: The Heart of Sorrows". It was a time of spiritual desperation that I still vividly recall, but for the most part no longer exist in. By God's mercy, I only now visit the shadows of spiritual desperation, not live in the dark abyss continually. I may post it entirely here, I may do excerpts... I don't know. Much of what is in it is intensely autobiographical and personal, as perhaps a book on spiritual despair must be since it cannot be written about adequately from an academic viewpoint. Anyway, here is the introduction. Perhaps more to come....

LIFE, DEATH AND LOVE: The Heart of Sorrows
A Journey Through Spiritual Despair

Introduction

This is a book about sorrow. It is not about crisis, of some extraordinary evil or desperate station in life dealt you by fate or choice or Satan or God. It is of a kind of life, a life of mourning, of a spiritual melancholy, of perpetual sorrows of a depth and intensity that can only come from believing in God, or longing to believe in God in the face of the chaotic ambiguities and havoc of life.

This book is for the ones who find the experience of spiritual joy elusive. It is for you who feel guilty because you fake the happy Christian life to be accepted by a group who, deep inside, you believe are for the most part faking it too. It is for those who find more reasons to question God, to rail at Him, to argue with Him than to praise Him. It is for those who have a deep and hurting hollow place within them that no sermon, no prayer, no scripture verse, no spiritual exercise has ever touched with healing. It is for those who struggle silently with a sense of abandonment and loneliness in the midst of friends and lovers. It is for those who are exhausted by desperation and waiting for God. It is for those who sometimes feel they can wait on Him no longer and consider death a treasure to be sought more than life. It is for you who have considered suicide because death held out to you an enchanting promise that no logic or philosophy could dissuade you from believing.

I do not come to you like Job's friends with the mirrors and smoke of religion to magically turn the reality of these struggles into a shared illusion of joy. I will not try to tell you a step-by-step plan on how to overcome the sorrows because I do not know one. But neither do I seek one because I am not yet sure that they need to be overcome, or that they can be, or even that they should be. As fearful and as dark as the sorrows come, if they come from God it would serve us well to dwell in them, seek their wisdom and learn their ways: Their ways would lead us to God Himself, the Healer of the broken hearted. So all I will tell you is what I have experienced of God, His presence and absence, about humanness and hopelessness and fear and forsakenness, about faith, about love and hope in these, my sorrows.

I do not presume to think that in my struggles I have asked God any new questions, observed some new manifestation of God's ambiguous presence and appalling and embarrassing absences, or cursed God more articulately for any of it. I make no pretense to have suffered any more angst over the futility of existence or fallen any more deeply into despair at injustice, decay, and finitude than anyone else who walks this world with clear and open eyes. I seek only to cast the Light upon the experience, the One True Light that does not seek to trick the eye and hide the wrinkles and spots, but reveals the realities in all their harsh and glorious truths.

Of what value is this if I cannot give you answers, you ask. If nothing else, you will know you are not alone in your sorrows, nor lost while walking in this way, nor are you unspiritual or lacking faith. I write so you will know, even if you are raging at God in the shadows of death, you are indeed longing after and deep within the heart of God, that you are not opposed to Him and cast off by Him. You will know that yours is the common experience of the prophets, the apostles, and of all true lovers and friends of God.

I give you this, Life, Death and Love, each with its peculiar sorrows. They are each an odd road sign that points into the abyss, the unmapped caverns of spiritual despair. They lead us there because, if we will risk the journey, it is there in the darkness that we will find God silently waiting.

I have decided to move the rest of the manuscript to another blog that will be dedicated solely to this book. If the topic of spiritual despair and dealing with the absence of God, the experience of suicidal thoughts and love and romance as signposts to God, then go to my other blog, Life Death and Love and the entire manuscript will be posted there... eventually......

Waiting for Tires

I dropped off a couple tires at Discount Tire because I got a citation from the city for having two flat tires on my 1959 Chevy pickup. Actually the two flat tires were the most attractive part of the truck. It needs paint real bad. Instead of waiting for an hour and reading old issues of Sports Illustrated, Car and Driver, and Women's Day I decided to run home and catch up on computer stuff for a minute, answer email, check out a half dozen blogs I check into whenever I can and perhaps make a pithless comment...you know who you are... OK, did that and I have ten minutes before I have to go back and pick up the tires, put them on the truck and then take my daughter to her "belt test" at the karate place.

I did karate for a little over a year back in the mid '70's when Kung Fu and Bruce Lee were popular. I did it because I worked at a boy's home with violent kids. My first month there I had to tackle a 12 year old who had a baseball bat and was beating the walls in the house. Fortunately he was big but slow and it was in front of all the kids. The mythology that grew around that take down over the years was interesting. Now, this was BEFORE I took lessons, but I soon began and the kids kind of tweaked the chronology and soon it was being told to the new kids that I was a black belt and did a flying wheel kick and broke the baseball bat and took him down. I allegedly had hands so fast I could take your left eye out, show it to your right eye and give you a heart attack and kill you that way. Reality was, I took lessons and, yeah, I was pretty good. I was matched against a black belt in a dojo match. I was an orange belt. I scored the first two points and humiliated him. He broke my knee and was disqualified. I won but still have a bad knee and only an orange belt. The quotable quote from my karate instructor:
"There's no such thing as a humble black belt...its all an act." hmmmmm....
Gotta go pick up my tires.

Too Much Life

Sheesh... where did the last two weeks go???
Mostly about a gazillion hours into work. Self employment is great as long as you can keep all of your clients happy. In construction that means showing up and doing something visible that they consider worth paying for and getting projects done on time. When you have 4 jobs that all have to be done in the same week, you just go from job to job and work until you get done. Fortunately (in a way) one of my clients is Safeway corporate headquarters and I can work there around the clock because they have 24 hour security guards on the premises. There are actually areas that the guards have to sit and watch us while we work. I guess they don't want us stealing the price of brocolli at next week's produce sale... seriously......

Then I come home and wrestle with my new computer. Installing a printer was a major battle.
Probably 12 hours worth of installing, uninstalling, surfing for drivers, updates, Windows help files, emailing tech support, trying solutions, taking the printer back to Comp USA and getting a new brand, then finding out I have the same issue with the HP that I had with the Epson... AAARRRGGHGHHHH!!!!! Go through that again, except HP's tech support got me hooked up finally.

Out of town a few days. Get off work, run to Tucson to speak at the College ministry (OCF) meetings two Tuesday nights. Then a visit to St. Paisius Monastery for the consecration of their new Church building's altar area. The footings were poured and the site is laid out for the Church. Bishop Longin was there and over 200 people/priests etc. I was privileged to be the "protosealerarch"...during the service I sealed the cannister that holds the relics, holy earth and oil that is embedded in the earth at the site where the altar will be. Now we begin construction!
Then a day trip to St. Anthony's Monastery in Florence to help drywall and finish the new bakery for the monastery. In between all that there's life in general, our new Mission, trying to figure out how to use my new production studio equipment and software for the radio program, recording and producing new programs, and trying to find some time to sleep.

My wife just left at 10:30pm to take our son and his friend back to Tucson. She'll be on the road until 3:00am after getting up this morning at 5:00am to fix food for our Mission agape meal/ coffee hour. Honestly, I pray she makes it back. I know I couldn't drive them, I fall asleep at the wheel in a heartbeat just driving in town. I fed my father in law, changed him and put him to bed. I need to go to bed.

Sometimes I think my life is just way too crazy. Tomorrow I only have two jobs to do. And a radio show to record and produce. A light day. Thank God.
Goodnight.

Radio Angst

I've been doing a local Orthodox radio show every Sunday afternoon for almost 7 years. A local priest started it and I was a guest on his show when a group of us converted. After the show he asked if I would do the show every other week to give him a break. I ended up doing it about 48 weeks a year. His parish dropped their support a year ago and I found some priests who said they'd take up the pastoral direction and a part of the financial support, I'd have to raise the rest. We signed a contract, and seamlessly began a new program which was more in line with the vision I originally had for it. We put up a new website and the show took off beyond our wildest hopes.

That began the worst year of my life in Orthodoxy. There is no way to blog all that has happened without scandalizing someone, so I won't.

My Bishop who is aware of all of the wierdness and has been in the middle of some of it says ignore it all...if you weren't doing something no one would talk about you, keep focussed, don't quit. Its hard. But, I was trained for this when I was the ministry in the church of Christ. I recall an elder's meeting where the Youth Minister and I asked for a cost of living raise once. Elder J.D. looked at us and said, "Everyone knows preachers are a necessary evil, we have to hire you because we couldn't have a church without ya'll. But everyone knows the only reason someone is a preacher is they can't do anything else and make a real living. So you are lucky to be getting what you are getting." That was just one meeting. I took almost 20 years of that kind of stuff from him. So, yeah, I came into Orthodoxy with a thick callous. I have a high tolerance for pain when it comes to doing what I believe in. The only thing I can honestly say is I did everything I have done with blessings from priests and bishops and with spiritual guidance and advice. I've been obedient. All else is in the hands of God.

The upshot of the past 13 months for the purpose of this post is merely this: we couldn't raise enough money to keep the radio show on the air locally. By the time our contract was coming due to be renewed we were over 4,000.00 in arrears and counting to the tune of 325.00 a week. I just couldn't keep up with keeping the show afloat on my own any more. (My court thing with my business ended up costing me over 7,000. so far.) So after 7 years, I decided to call it quits...locally. That was a hard decision. But the facts were we had little local support and a lot of controversy, the website has grown exponentially, and we just can't seem to pick winning numbers in the Lotto... :)

Through the extreme generosity of our internet listeners and a local person, we've been able to pay off our debt. That allowed me to buy a small studio set up to put in my basement office and begin recording programs for our program website, and for Ancient Faith Radio and Incarnation Broadcast Network

So, we're still "on the air". Now I have this studio and new software and I have to learn how to use it all in my spare time. I'm a tech-dunce. So we're going to record, and as I figure it out the quality of production might get better, but for now its just two guys in my basement talking about stuff into a microphone. Not elegant, not broadcast quality, but its a new beginning.

What Happened??

I have about 15 minutes before I have to leave for Vespers...what happened to the last couple weeks?? I get up at 5:00, I go to bed about 11 or later sometimes. You'd think in that many hours in a day, I'd have time to "blog" SOMETHING. sigh....

I guess the fast foward version is setting up a new computer and network... THAT was a huge chunk of hours for this tech-dunce. Did you know that Windows 2000 and XP can't talk to each other? Sheesh...XP can even talk to '98 and ME... but can it talk to the OS I have... of course not.
I also set up a recording studio in my basement in order to continue broadcasting our radio program on the internet. That was the motivation for a new computer with more RAM and faster processing. Oops... gotta run. Vespers time! Later.....

Vanity, Vanity, All is Vanity

I'm supposed to be leading Reader's Typika right now for our Mission, but I'm staying home with my father in law who has diahhrea. Its just not compassionate to make him sit in a dirty Depends for 4 hours because his daughter and son in law are the Reader and chanter/choir director and can't change several times him during the service. My wife carries the bulk of the musical responsibilities and we have someone who can intone "Lord have mercy" and read Psalms just fine, even without a black robe on.

So... I know I'm not a monk. I know I live in the world. I know we are to be "in the world but not of it". I visit the monasteries quite a bit, I know there are no mirrors. Last week I stood in front of the mirror and re-invented myself with a shave and a haircut. Now to maintain it, I have to stand in front of a mirror much longer than I used to. What's the problem? IS there a problem? Am I creating one, or by being aware of the fact that there could be a problem I have in fact avoided it actually being one? Where is the intersection of image/world/culture and vanity?

To begin, everyone has to be something, even a monk who doesn't shave or cut his hair at all.
That in itself is an "image" within a certain culture that just happens to be tied to the Church. I know priests and laymen that have adopted the monkish look as part of their "Orthodoxy". I know the traditions vary regarding priests' hairstyles and beardedness and the topic of clerical facial hair becomes an instant flame war on some discussion lists. I recall seeing two priests comparing pony tails and discussing the "bad hair days" when the pony tails didn't quite hang right because they were works in progress. Hmmmm...I thought, gee, if you can't really be unvain I guess you can at least try to look like the people who aren't. After all, image is everything, right? sigh....of course not every priest with a beard and pony tail primp and condition it with Paul Mitchell products. Its harder to flame someone's inner thoughts than an outward appearance, after all hair is just hair, right? Its ego PLUS hair that gets us. Ego plus anything, actually.

OK, I know I'm rambling here. Anyway, so I'm finally getting in touch with my inner Charlie Chan-ness. I'd say Jet Li, but at my age, with my gut, its more like "Biplane Li". Its not that I was ever ashamed of it, but it just wasn't something on the surface. I could even watch movies that portrayed Chinese people in stereotyical roles and not be offended for myself or the Chinese culture... nor am I about to become a Chonky "Jesse Jackson" looking under every adjective and noun for racial slurs. But race is an interesting thing. It is a reality. SHOULD we celebrate our racial heritages? Can we do that without walling ourselves off? Is politicized and mandated multi-culturalism just another liberal plot to stick the Rainbow up our collective ummmmm.....
Or is politicized melting pot uniformity-ism just another conservative plot to keep non-English speaking people from burning up our tax dollars? Those things are way beyond me. All I want to do is find a place in my head for what and who I am connected to a much larger community that stretches back thousands of years and intergrate that into where, who and what I am now.
Its not about living in the past, or in my head in some illusion or comic book version of a culture I've only encountered on a non-verbal basis. My mother never sat down with me and said "This is how WE do this... or this is the Chinese attitude toward that..." Although when I read about the culture and talk to people, I can see I was raised wellll... Chinese, insofar as my mother reflected the culture she was raised in after they immigrated to Hawaii when she was a child.
I know I unconciously passed some of that along to my kids, albeit now watered down and obscured by the fact of being Chonky and first generation American born.

I also have two adopted racially mixed kids. My daughter, whose birth mother told us she slept with a Mexican man, I recently figured out is actually Navajo. I met her "twin sister of different mothers" at a McDonald's in Gallup New Mexico last year. My son, whose birth mother also claimed a Mexican stud... well, he passes for Greek, Arabic, Mulato, and Mexican. We know this from his girlfriend's parent's reactions to him. They both look like "my kids". Well, except for the fact my son is 6'5"...if they look at me with suprise, and I just tell them he gets his height from his mother. ehhhhh.... I have no idea where this thought was going....

So, back to the original point, or search for a point. I think it was "Everyone has to be something". No matter if we cut our hair or not, style it or not, we are engaging our culture, be it ethnic, religious, or business by how we groom ourselves. Something as simple as what we do with our God given hair we are making a statment. How that statement intersects with the bigger statement of our lives is the issue. Is Christ manifest, not because of or in spite of, but within my racial and cultural heritage? Do dreds, or Fu-manchu's, or pony tails, or beards or smooth faces make a Christian? Of course not. Can they be baptized? Absolutely, my hair went into the water with me, if I recall correctly. So all that's left really is me. Yeah, I'm vain. Heck, I have a blog, for crying out loud. Yeah, I like it when people say "I like your new look". But I liked it when people liked my old looks. And of course there's people who don't like any of them. Whatever. I don't live and breathe by my critics or fans, ultimately. I live and breathe in Christ who made me Chonky. How do I praise and glorify Him FOR what I am, and IN what I am?
That is the issue.

spam spam spam

No, its not a Monty Python skit. Unfortunately spammers have found my blog. I have no clue how that guy found out I need a "male enlargement treatment"... ahem.....but if I want that information made public on my blog I'LL post it, thankyou. Anyway, folks, I guess I need to resort to that annoying speedbump where you have to duplicate the fun house mirror letters in order to post a comment. I know... but heck, what significant thing were you going to do with those 10 seconds it takes to log in? Its a fallen world, even in blogger land powered by Google and Microsoft. sigh.....

Roots

When I was a child, I did not know that it was too soon after World War II that my father married my mother, Nellie Kim Yuen Ching. When my father took her home to meet his parents in Cabot, Arkansas (just north of Little Rock), my grandmother looked at my mother, then at my father and said "We sent you over there to kill them, not marry them." After I was born, the first grandchild, my Grandmother warmed up. When I was two, she used to put me on her lap as my granfather drove around downtown Little Rock and have me yell out the car window "HEY JIGABOO!" to the Black people.

I'm what we call "Chonky", half Chinese, half Honky.
I was called "Chinky-loo" on the playgrounds in elementary school. My father was transferred to Taiwan in the early 60's and I was a half-breed there too. The Chinese kids saw me as "White", the white kids saw me as "Chinese". It was just wierd to both of them that I brought peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch in a brown sack and not rice in a rectangular tin box.

By the time I got to high school we were far enough removed from the War that only the reddest of the rednecks would make fun of me. Then Cheech and Chong put out their first album and Bruce Lee became popular. For once in my life, I was actually racially cool. For the last 35 years I've not experienced anything like my childhood. Here in Arizona people ask me if I'm Mexican sometimes, or Indian (casino Indian, not tech support Indian...). Some guess Chinese. It is no big deal, but there always seemed to be a part of me that was like some old pictures and souveniers of a nearly forgotten time and place pushed far under the bed in a shoebox. You know its there, you even know what's in it, but you only think of it at odd times, and you never take it out to look at it or show anyone.

I became Orthodox and learned about all the great Saints of the Middle East, Russia, the Balkans, and even America, but even they were Russian or Aleut. I was a stranger of race once again. Then I saw an icon of the Saints of the Boxer Rebellion. Chinese Orthodox Christians, martyrs. One of my kids bought it for me for last Christmas. And it drew me in.

So tonight at the supper table my wife says, "Its time to cut your beard." She has seen me looking at the icon of the saints of the Boxer Rebellion. At 53, I'm Chinese. I'm white bread American. I'm Orthodox. And I'm home.

Kiss

Papparazi catch s-p and Tinkerbell in an intimate moment.

The Tree of Life

Eden lost. The Tree lies asleep, a lace of twigs against the darkening ice gray sky. Where is the Man and the Woman to whom it was to give life? Why is it naked like the Man once was? Why does the earth devour its fallen, umber rotting leaves?

Its limbs twist and reach to heaven, to earth, to no where. In the fullness of time, it will find Heaven and Earth, The Man, nailed to its branches. He opens the sky, He brings the Light.
He is the Leaf fallen yet incorrupt, neither is He devoured by the earth. And in the naked glory of His suffering the Tree awakes and once again gives life, Eden is restored, and Man is given the Fruit of Life.

A Winter's Day

Boston, November 2004, Holy Cross.
I realize that I am approaching the winter of my life. My father in law has brought a sense of mortality to our household. We watch him plunge inexorably into the abyss of his disease. He will eventually be speechless and helpless, a 190 pound infant. He will die in the same state he was born in, absolute dependence on someone who might love him enough to care for him.

There is a cold beauty to death. It is the blessed curse, the end of life spent in the bleakness of corruption and struggle, futility and the stark, chilling cursedness of the consequences of human sin. It is also the leaving behind of beauty, the still-green signs of life and warmth and resurrection, of love. Its curse is that it confirms the solitariness we brought into the world through the breaking of our communion with God. Its blessing is that it ends the inexorable plunge into the abyss of corruption and defeat and loneliness. The winter never quite destroys all life, sin never quite destroys the image of God.

Yes, sin separates, its winter is a cold and lonely place. We sit in the snow, yet among the trees, in the cold and yet in the sun, alone, yet loved, waiting for this mortal seed to bear the fruit of eternal spring.

About the Coolest....

thing I've ever seen, and it only takes about 3 seconds.
Try this, it works.

Unexpected Beauty

I was washing my drywall tools in the far corner of a client's back yard and saw the bush with these one inch round yellow berries split open exposing their brilliant ruby seeds. Such a small occurrence in the grand scheme of all creation, so easily missed. In a couple days the seeds are fallen and rotting black, the berries split and brown. Just goes to show that if we don't pay attention we'll often miss the best stuff God has to offer. (click on the image to enlarge it... I know...you probably already knew that, but I just learned that trick a few days ago.)

Full Moon

Assumption Greek Orthodox Church, Scottsdale, AZ
(I just figured out: click on the picture and it gets bigger! Wow... ain't technology cool?)

The Coolest Thing About Toronto

I just spent 4 days in Toronto at the OCA North American Conference. It was wellll... a conference. Thank God there are people who like reports, budgets, elections and social hours if that's what it takes to run an archdiocese. I was there to get a feel for the ethos of the Archdiocese since we recently moved to the OCA to help start a Mission Church. I liked what I encountered there in spite of the machinery of administration.

Toronto is big, and maybe I just didn't see enough of it, but this was the coolest thing in the city as far as I was concerned. I want it on my front yard.

Light

Gladsome Light of the holy glory... at the setting of the sun we praise Thee, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.