Is it possible that I can see the moon moving in the sky? It seems like it, and no, I'm not driving in the car and claiming that the moon is following me. Which is an interesting, spooky feeling, but not what I'm talking about.
During the time I've been sitting in my backyard, the moon has traveled from behind my house to eleven o'clock in the sky. It has certainly moved. The sense that I am seeing it move comes, I think, from looking past and through grapevine leaves that are tumbling off their support and bouncing gently in the breeze. My brain thinks the leaves are still or stable and attributes their motion, in one plane anyway, to the moon.
I see the moon, the moon sees me.
God bless the moon, and God bless me.
Because the truth is, I am moving, too, on this rotating earth. Though I seem still.
The moon and I, moving through this universe.
Saturday, June 22, 2013
Saturday, June 15, 2013
Work them out in me
This is embarrassing to admit, but the big question I've been asking myself lately is, what is life for? Embarrassing because, well, at my age, you'd think I'd either a) know; or b) have made up a pretty good answer for myself. But honestly, this is the question rattling through my brain: why?
And while it seems I'm asking in a general sense--like, is there a purpose to the whole planet--I'm also asking in a personal sense: what is my life for? I don't think I'd be asking about the larger purpose if I felt I had a personal answer.
So yes, it really is all about me.
The thing I liked about having small children is that I always knew what to do and why it was important. The kids were important. Letting them know that they could trust me was important. As they grew, it was important that they knew they were loved and that they loved in return. It was important that they knew themselves and came to understand that the world is complicated and interesting.
I worked at all of these things, reflecting back to them a world that made sense, a world that cared for them and that was a place where their actions made a difference.
Funny how when it's just about me, I find it harder to keep batting that balloon up in the air, hard to think that life is anything but a cycle of "getting and spending" or of failing to control the weeds in the garden or the clutter on my desk. Hard to know just what I'm supposed to do.
So yeah, keywords for indexing this blog post would include "empty nest syndrome."
The world goes on--a fact which contributes significantly to my struggle. My husband and I had sex and had babies so that the babies could grow up and have sex and more babies. And yes, this next generation has some different ideas and believes that it's all happening to them afresh, but it's pretty much nothing more than the world going around. Things don't move toward an end of history, or toward "happily ever after" and if they did, you'd still have to explain what's happening in the "after."
So is it just genes struggling to will out because that's what DNA makes them do?
Gosh, in the words of my heroine, Nellie Forbush, "I just can't work myself up to getting that low." (South Pacific, Act 1, Scene 1.)
And because I can't--because I'm sitting on the couch writing about what's the reason for it all--I'm noticing God in the room. Because it seems just asking if there is a reason for life invokes God's presence.
If I were a decided atheist I might not be calling that presence God. It might be reason or purpose or just the awesomeness of living. And while I do call it God, I also call it a working out of purpose, of love, of compassion--things that happen in relationships.
Work them out in me, O Lord.
And while it seems I'm asking in a general sense--like, is there a purpose to the whole planet--I'm also asking in a personal sense: what is my life for? I don't think I'd be asking about the larger purpose if I felt I had a personal answer.
So yes, it really is all about me.
The thing I liked about having small children is that I always knew what to do and why it was important. The kids were important. Letting them know that they could trust me was important. As they grew, it was important that they knew they were loved and that they loved in return. It was important that they knew themselves and came to understand that the world is complicated and interesting.
I worked at all of these things, reflecting back to them a world that made sense, a world that cared for them and that was a place where their actions made a difference.
Funny how when it's just about me, I find it harder to keep batting that balloon up in the air, hard to think that life is anything but a cycle of "getting and spending" or of failing to control the weeds in the garden or the clutter on my desk. Hard to know just what I'm supposed to do.
So yeah, keywords for indexing this blog post would include "empty nest syndrome."
The world goes on--a fact which contributes significantly to my struggle. My husband and I had sex and had babies so that the babies could grow up and have sex and more babies. And yes, this next generation has some different ideas and believes that it's all happening to them afresh, but it's pretty much nothing more than the world going around. Things don't move toward an end of history, or toward "happily ever after" and if they did, you'd still have to explain what's happening in the "after."
So is it just genes struggling to will out because that's what DNA makes them do?
Gosh, in the words of my heroine, Nellie Forbush, "I just can't work myself up to getting that low." (South Pacific, Act 1, Scene 1.)
And because I can't--because I'm sitting on the couch writing about what's the reason for it all--I'm noticing God in the room. Because it seems just asking if there is a reason for life invokes God's presence.
If I were a decided atheist I might not be calling that presence God. It might be reason or purpose or just the awesomeness of living. And while I do call it God, I also call it a working out of purpose, of love, of compassion--things that happen in relationships.
Work them out in me, O Lord.
Saturday, May 11, 2013
Pretending together
Knee, shoulder, hip--I awoke with aches and pains this morning after sitting through two performances of our lower-grade musical yesterday, on the floor stage right. The kids pretty much knew what to do when they got onstage but many had trouble listening for when to do it. I hissed "go, go now" and "leave, leave, get off the stage." Supported success.
But with the awkwardness of scooting around on the floor also comes the fun of hanging out with kids while we all pretend something together. That's what I love about theater--the fact that we all somehow agree to pretend together. With a paper horizon hung on the wall behind the platform stage, with costumes pulled from closets at home or made from baseball caps, yarn, fleece and other stuff from the aisles at Hobby Lobby, we had a ranch onstage, a thunderstorm, a stampede, a couple of square dances, horses, longhorns, cowboys, and a prairie full of four-year-old prairie dogs with little feet kicking in the air.
A couple hundred adults went along with all of this. They weren't pulled in and transported to another time and place the way they would have been in a movie theatre. They were well aware of gym lights overhead, babies in the audience, and the many leaps of belief required of them to follow the story of "The Cowboy and the Black-Eyed Pea." But even so, you lay the logic of the story out there and people follow. They go along with all the "what ifs."
I staged my first play at the age of ten. It was a historical epic in four scenes (actually four pieces of notebook paper) with five characters and two romantic sub-plots. I rehearsed it with four friends, invited to be in the cast, and the single rehearsal didn't go all that well. It devolved into the two boys climbing on chairs and throwing bits of paper at each other. But we had a performance in front of the whole class one afternoon. It fell short of what I had visualized in my head, but adults were impressed. And I was marked as way more serious about practically everything than my classmates. I went on to direct a version of "Peter Pan" in sixth grade in lessons led by a student teacher. That met with more success probably because the crowd control issue went much better. And when Peter came to the rescue and jumped onto the piano bench to confront Captain Hook, it was truly thrilling.
At least I think so. Maybe I'm so wrapped up in believing in what I create that I don't notice that others are observers more than believers. It's possible. That would be a dangerous way to live real life--though plenty of people do that. But it's a great way to escape for a while.
But with the awkwardness of scooting around on the floor also comes the fun of hanging out with kids while we all pretend something together. That's what I love about theater--the fact that we all somehow agree to pretend together. With a paper horizon hung on the wall behind the platform stage, with costumes pulled from closets at home or made from baseball caps, yarn, fleece and other stuff from the aisles at Hobby Lobby, we had a ranch onstage, a thunderstorm, a stampede, a couple of square dances, horses, longhorns, cowboys, and a prairie full of four-year-old prairie dogs with little feet kicking in the air.
A couple hundred adults went along with all of this. They weren't pulled in and transported to another time and place the way they would have been in a movie theatre. They were well aware of gym lights overhead, babies in the audience, and the many leaps of belief required of them to follow the story of "The Cowboy and the Black-Eyed Pea." But even so, you lay the logic of the story out there and people follow. They go along with all the "what ifs."
I staged my first play at the age of ten. It was a historical epic in four scenes (actually four pieces of notebook paper) with five characters and two romantic sub-plots. I rehearsed it with four friends, invited to be in the cast, and the single rehearsal didn't go all that well. It devolved into the two boys climbing on chairs and throwing bits of paper at each other. But we had a performance in front of the whole class one afternoon. It fell short of what I had visualized in my head, but adults were impressed. And I was marked as way more serious about practically everything than my classmates. I went on to direct a version of "Peter Pan" in sixth grade in lessons led by a student teacher. That met with more success probably because the crowd control issue went much better. And when Peter came to the rescue and jumped onto the piano bench to confront Captain Hook, it was truly thrilling.
At least I think so. Maybe I'm so wrapped up in believing in what I create that I don't notice that others are observers more than believers. It's possible. That would be a dangerous way to live real life--though plenty of people do that. But it's a great way to escape for a while.
Saturday, March 23, 2013
Consolation
Before this afternoon's St. Matthew Passion rehearsal began, my friend Laura, the orchestra I organist, said "I have something to show you." She reached into her tote bag and pulled out a small green book with "J. S. Bach/St. Matthew Passion" on the cover. She opened it and showed me my father's name, Herbert Gotsch, on the flyleaf, in the unmistakeable large-and-small cap style he used to write his name on books and music. My brand-new blue Bärenreiter Urtext has my name, G. Gotsch, on the cover in a similar large-and-small-caps style. It is a conscious imitation.
The small green book is a miniature score, with a German introduction dated 1929. There are no notes in the score, nothing that tells me how he came to have this or what he may have done with it. Laura found it at Concordia where she works; when Daddy died in 1984, we gave much of his library to the music department there, where he had taught organ for 35 years and had conducted Bach's St. John Passion on a Palm Sunday long ago, when I was in second grade. I remember discovering as I sat through the performance that recitatives were short but arias went on forever. I also remember the fun of sitting on my parents' bed watching Daddy put on tails and all the studs and buttons and suspenders that went with them.
Laura said she would give me the book after tomorrow's performance. She treasured it because my dad was her organ teacher and dear to her, but as she said, he was even more dear to me. As things turned out, she gave it to me after today's rehearsal. She had thought she would use it to follow along on the movements where she wasn't playing, but she decided instead to just listen--and rest.
Somewhere on the shelf in my living room, or perhaps in the sheet music cabinet that was my Grandma Gotsch's and then my father's, is a choral score for the St. Matthew Passion, with my grandfather's name, also Herbert Gotsch, written on the cover. It is a distinctive signature, with a consistent slant and carefully spaced letters. My father's signature looks much like it. The application of the same handwriting method taught in Lutheran parochial schools from one generation to the next? Or another conscious imitation?
Grandpa Gotsch would have sung the St. Matthew Passion with "the old Chicago Bach choir," as my dad always called it. I am singing it with it the Bach Cantata Vespers choir at Grace Lutheran Church in River Forest tomorrow afternoon at 4:00. Laura is the orchestra I continuo organ. Steve Wente, another student of my father's is at the part II organ. Up in the balcony, playing organ with the soprano choir singing "O Lamm Gottes," the chorale tune in the first movement, is Dennis Zimmer, yet another former student of my dad's.
I'm sure there are many other interwoven stories that could be told about the singers and orchestral musicians in this performance, as we take our place in a tradition extending back through the centuries to Mendelssohn and ultimately to Leipzig.
The Matthew Passion is a very emotional piece of music. This became especially clear to me when I watched a DVD of the Berlin Philharmonic performing the St. Matthew Passion "ritualized" by Peter Sellars. Sellars is an opera stage director and the video recording of the performance is deeply moving. The physical movement of the chorus and the soloists reveals much about Bach's poetic structure. Their faces reveal the emotion.
There is lots of suffering in this Passion. Jesus' suffering, yes, of course--but the words of Jesus are limited to the actual gospel text. It's the arias that intensify the sense of suffering--the expressions of the believer's grief at Jesus' suffering. And the arias go on forever, just as they did when I was a child. They are, however, tender; Jesus suffering invokes compassion as much or more than guilt in believers.
For a while at this afternoon's rehearsal, I was thinking about why this piece seems to be so focused on suffering--not on theologies of redemption or justification related to the cross, not on heaven or life eternal. Duples and appoggiaturas, oboes d'amore, violins, and especially the alto solosist say over and over again, "my beloved Jesus, it's unfair that you suffer," and "I will care for you and suffer with you." And to what end: ultimately in the last bass aria, "Make my soul pure in you."
Suffering was surely a more obvious, unavoidable part of life in the 18th century. People were much more likely to die before reaching old age. Women died in childbirth. Children died. Death happened in homes, not hospitals. People died or were horribly injured in accidents and in war. So many things that science and medicine fix now could not be alleviated then. So people needed a Jesus who suffered with them, and people accepted a Jesus who suffered and lost his life.
In our time, we hide suffering, and we hide from it. There's a chorus setting of Matthew's report that people mocked Jesus by saying "If he's the king, why doesn't he come down from the cross? And then we'd believe in him." I think there's a modern version of this false belief. It's the one that goes "I can't believe in a God who allows children to suffer. If God is so powerful, why doesn't he do something about that?"
Bach shows us a God who suffers, and who suffers and dies with us, and in whom our sin and suffering is transformed into faith and righteousness. As I sang the stanza of "O Sacred Head" this afternoon whose text prays for Christ's presence at our death, I thought of people I know who are facing suffering in the weeks and months ahead, and painfully, of my own children and the hard times inevitable in their futures. Tomorrow I'll carry my dad's miniature score with me and think of how cancer weakened him and robbed him of his life. I'll think of my grandfather's dementia, and my husband's. And maybe even of my own death--sure to come someday.
And I'll bless a God who in Jesus is present in all of that anguish, and who transforms it to peace.
The small green book is a miniature score, with a German introduction dated 1929. There are no notes in the score, nothing that tells me how he came to have this or what he may have done with it. Laura found it at Concordia where she works; when Daddy died in 1984, we gave much of his library to the music department there, where he had taught organ for 35 years and had conducted Bach's St. John Passion on a Palm Sunday long ago, when I was in second grade. I remember discovering as I sat through the performance that recitatives were short but arias went on forever. I also remember the fun of sitting on my parents' bed watching Daddy put on tails and all the studs and buttons and suspenders that went with them.
Laura said she would give me the book after tomorrow's performance. She treasured it because my dad was her organ teacher and dear to her, but as she said, he was even more dear to me. As things turned out, she gave it to me after today's rehearsal. She had thought she would use it to follow along on the movements where she wasn't playing, but she decided instead to just listen--and rest.
Somewhere on the shelf in my living room, or perhaps in the sheet music cabinet that was my Grandma Gotsch's and then my father's, is a choral score for the St. Matthew Passion, with my grandfather's name, also Herbert Gotsch, written on the cover. It is a distinctive signature, with a consistent slant and carefully spaced letters. My father's signature looks much like it. The application of the same handwriting method taught in Lutheran parochial schools from one generation to the next? Or another conscious imitation?
Grandpa Gotsch would have sung the St. Matthew Passion with "the old Chicago Bach choir," as my dad always called it. I am singing it with it the Bach Cantata Vespers choir at Grace Lutheran Church in River Forest tomorrow afternoon at 4:00. Laura is the orchestra I continuo organ. Steve Wente, another student of my father's is at the part II organ. Up in the balcony, playing organ with the soprano choir singing "O Lamm Gottes," the chorale tune in the first movement, is Dennis Zimmer, yet another former student of my dad's.
I'm sure there are many other interwoven stories that could be told about the singers and orchestral musicians in this performance, as we take our place in a tradition extending back through the centuries to Mendelssohn and ultimately to Leipzig.
The Matthew Passion is a very emotional piece of music. This became especially clear to me when I watched a DVD of the Berlin Philharmonic performing the St. Matthew Passion "ritualized" by Peter Sellars. Sellars is an opera stage director and the video recording of the performance is deeply moving. The physical movement of the chorus and the soloists reveals much about Bach's poetic structure. Their faces reveal the emotion.
There is lots of suffering in this Passion. Jesus' suffering, yes, of course--but the words of Jesus are limited to the actual gospel text. It's the arias that intensify the sense of suffering--the expressions of the believer's grief at Jesus' suffering. And the arias go on forever, just as they did when I was a child. They are, however, tender; Jesus suffering invokes compassion as much or more than guilt in believers.
For a while at this afternoon's rehearsal, I was thinking about why this piece seems to be so focused on suffering--not on theologies of redemption or justification related to the cross, not on heaven or life eternal. Duples and appoggiaturas, oboes d'amore, violins, and especially the alto solosist say over and over again, "my beloved Jesus, it's unfair that you suffer," and "I will care for you and suffer with you." And to what end: ultimately in the last bass aria, "Make my soul pure in you."
Suffering was surely a more obvious, unavoidable part of life in the 18th century. People were much more likely to die before reaching old age. Women died in childbirth. Children died. Death happened in homes, not hospitals. People died or were horribly injured in accidents and in war. So many things that science and medicine fix now could not be alleviated then. So people needed a Jesus who suffered with them, and people accepted a Jesus who suffered and lost his life.
In our time, we hide suffering, and we hide from it. There's a chorus setting of Matthew's report that people mocked Jesus by saying "If he's the king, why doesn't he come down from the cross? And then we'd believe in him." I think there's a modern version of this false belief. It's the one that goes "I can't believe in a God who allows children to suffer. If God is so powerful, why doesn't he do something about that?"
Bach shows us a God who suffers, and who suffers and dies with us, and in whom our sin and suffering is transformed into faith and righteousness. As I sang the stanza of "O Sacred Head" this afternoon whose text prays for Christ's presence at our death, I thought of people I know who are facing suffering in the weeks and months ahead, and painfully, of my own children and the hard times inevitable in their futures. Tomorrow I'll carry my dad's miniature score with me and think of how cancer weakened him and robbed him of his life. I'll think of my grandfather's dementia, and my husband's. And maybe even of my own death--sure to come someday.
And I'll bless a God who in Jesus is present in all of that anguish, and who transforms it to peace.
Saturday, February 09, 2013
Three things
For today, three things I know to be true:
A bright blue sky on a winter day makes even concrete buildings look beautiful.
A dad can be more delighted and fascinated by his son than by his business.
People are not alike, not at all.
And one more for tomorrow, Transfiguration:
Even down from the mountaintop the veil can be lifted
if human breath, human hearts pause to let in the divine.
A bright blue sky on a winter day makes even concrete buildings look beautiful.
A dad can be more delighted and fascinated by his son than by his business.
People are not alike, not at all.
And one more for tomorrow, Transfiguration:
Even down from the mountaintop the veil can be lifted
if human breath, human hearts pause to let in the divine.
Call this chapter "The Perverse Lutheran Goes to the ALDE Conference."
ALDE stands for Association of Lutheran Development Executives, and there are a lot of them here. I spent the last hour and half reading through the program booklet, browsing speakers' bios, and flipping through the list of conference attendees, and there are Concordias and Luthers and Lutheran acronyms aplenty. It's another world of Lutheranism, beyond pastors, teachers and church musicians. Given the way institutions are shifting and small congregations are closing, this development world is a big part of the future of ministry.
We're in Indianapolis, so the conference has a Speedway theme--harmless for the most part, except for the session descriptions written in a speedway metaphor. Who knows what those speakers will talk about after the smoke clears from the starting gun.
A conference is what you learn, but it's also the experience of going away. Staying in a hotel room where the hot water in the shower is endless. Walking fast through skywalks and convention halls. Getting a little lost. Going to a Welcome Event in an old and pretty nifty ballroom. Staying up late alone in a quiet room but hearing voices outside.
On the ride down here I listened to all kinds of music--Sinatra, Bach, Van Morrison, Dawn Upshaw. Practiced breathing in silently, lowering the larynx, raising the palate, the air moving along the roof of my mouth and falling to the bottom of my lungs. This is my singing project--trying to become a better singer, with a voice that will subtly do all that I want it to do, and raising the palate is the specific assignment that followed me out of a voice lesson earlier this week.
But how shall I sing my high C's this weekend? In the hotel room early in the morning? Everywhere I look there are things that absorb sound rather than amplify it. Upholstered chairs, carpet, acoustical ceiling tile, bedspreads, drapes. No singing in "Speedway" sessions on direct mail and graphic design. Not even in sessions on getting your message out there.
So there's a challenge here--something about being an artist and having a day job. I plug away at web sites and press releases and newsletter, at the best and most concise way to say something, at the hook that will get readers' attention, but God for me is in the high C's and the writing that is trying to communicate something deeper than a meeting time or even the mission of a ministry.
Here's another c-word: cardinal. I saw two males sitting side by side on the bare branches of the forsythia bush as I went out the back door this morning. Bright red, feathers puffed out, so much color in a mere bird.
I try to end posts with some kind of connection. I'm a Lutheran, therefore I ask, catechetically, "What does this mean?' I dunno, but I think I'll wear the red turtleneck tomorrow.
ALDE stands for Association of Lutheran Development Executives, and there are a lot of them here. I spent the last hour and half reading through the program booklet, browsing speakers' bios, and flipping through the list of conference attendees, and there are Concordias and Luthers and Lutheran acronyms aplenty. It's another world of Lutheranism, beyond pastors, teachers and church musicians. Given the way institutions are shifting and small congregations are closing, this development world is a big part of the future of ministry.
We're in Indianapolis, so the conference has a Speedway theme--harmless for the most part, except for the session descriptions written in a speedway metaphor. Who knows what those speakers will talk about after the smoke clears from the starting gun.
A conference is what you learn, but it's also the experience of going away. Staying in a hotel room where the hot water in the shower is endless. Walking fast through skywalks and convention halls. Getting a little lost. Going to a Welcome Event in an old and pretty nifty ballroom. Staying up late alone in a quiet room but hearing voices outside.
On the ride down here I listened to all kinds of music--Sinatra, Bach, Van Morrison, Dawn Upshaw. Practiced breathing in silently, lowering the larynx, raising the palate, the air moving along the roof of my mouth and falling to the bottom of my lungs. This is my singing project--trying to become a better singer, with a voice that will subtly do all that I want it to do, and raising the palate is the specific assignment that followed me out of a voice lesson earlier this week.
But how shall I sing my high C's this weekend? In the hotel room early in the morning? Everywhere I look there are things that absorb sound rather than amplify it. Upholstered chairs, carpet, acoustical ceiling tile, bedspreads, drapes. No singing in "Speedway" sessions on direct mail and graphic design. Not even in sessions on getting your message out there.
So there's a challenge here--something about being an artist and having a day job. I plug away at web sites and press releases and newsletter, at the best and most concise way to say something, at the hook that will get readers' attention, but God for me is in the high C's and the writing that is trying to communicate something deeper than a meeting time or even the mission of a ministry.
Here's another c-word: cardinal. I saw two males sitting side by side on the bare branches of the forsythia bush as I went out the back door this morning. Bright red, feathers puffed out, so much color in a mere bird.
I try to end posts with some kind of connection. I'm a Lutheran, therefore I ask, catechetically, "What does this mean?' I dunno, but I think I'll wear the red turtleneck tomorrow.
Monday, February 04, 2013
Monday morning hits
Up early on a Monday morning and frittered away the time online. Which leaves me starting the week already convinced that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, to use a phrase I once explored in this blog. (And yes, a good blogger would link to it, but I'd have to find it. Didn't put keyword: handbasket in the info on the post.)
Here's Ezra Klein in the Washington Post summing up the NFL's dilemma and wholly inadequate response to the issue of hard hits in football and how the head trauma sets up the slow destruction of player's brains via CTE (chronic traumatice encephalopathy). I have come to believe that CTE was the source of my husband, Lon's Alzheimer's-like dementia, which took away his life and left him depressed and messed-up long before it caused his death in 2006. The manly violence of football and professional wrestling were very much involved.
Needless to say, I didn't watch the Super Bowl yesterday.
More craziness: my daughter, Eliza, announced on Facebook last night that she is making plans to move out. It's a little surprising to me--usually these kinds of declarations are symptomatic of a good fight with her mom, part of the none-too-subtle negotiating process we're going through as she, a 22-year-old young woman with Down syndrome, becomes an independent young adult--but one who still needs daily guidance, and a home provided for her. Given that we spent much of yesterday at home together, in separate rooms, each on her own in odd worlds of solitude, I do wonder if we're both going to end up completely demented in another decade or so.
But probably not. Monday is here, with routines, lists, tasks, activities. A couple ibuprofen to clear the headache I have because of forgetting to refill my allergy medicine and I'm good for a new week.
Love endures all things. Love endures. Something like that was the take-with from yesterday's worship. And "Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you," says God. And loved you. Tenderly, knowing what craziness life held--even modern life.
Peace!
Here's Ezra Klein in the Washington Post summing up the NFL's dilemma and wholly inadequate response to the issue of hard hits in football and how the head trauma sets up the slow destruction of player's brains via CTE (chronic traumatice encephalopathy). I have come to believe that CTE was the source of my husband, Lon's Alzheimer's-like dementia, which took away his life and left him depressed and messed-up long before it caused his death in 2006. The manly violence of football and professional wrestling were very much involved.
Needless to say, I didn't watch the Super Bowl yesterday.
More craziness: my daughter, Eliza, announced on Facebook last night that she is making plans to move out. It's a little surprising to me--usually these kinds of declarations are symptomatic of a good fight with her mom, part of the none-too-subtle negotiating process we're going through as she, a 22-year-old young woman with Down syndrome, becomes an independent young adult--but one who still needs daily guidance, and a home provided for her. Given that we spent much of yesterday at home together, in separate rooms, each on her own in odd worlds of solitude, I do wonder if we're both going to end up completely demented in another decade or so.
But probably not. Monday is here, with routines, lists, tasks, activities. A couple ibuprofen to clear the headache I have because of forgetting to refill my allergy medicine and I'm good for a new week.
Love endures all things. Love endures. Something like that was the take-with from yesterday's worship. And "Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you," says God. And loved you. Tenderly, knowing what craziness life held--even modern life.
Peace!
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