mostly thoughts

That's all I seem to write about... mostly just thoughts. I guess what I "do" is so comprehensive and fun and hum-drum that it doesn't ever seem to make it in here. Too personal. Not that thoughts aren't. The outside events shape me, for sure, but these are the things that shape my thinking, that form me before and after the goings and doing of things.

I have Frederich Buechner's book Secrets in the Dark, A Life in Sermons. Right now I'm reading his sermon on "Adolescence and the Stewardship of Pain." Interesting for me because I work with adolescents, and I am much like an adolescent myself in many ways. Anyway, he related a conversation with a guy named Howard Butt, who said to him once after hearing him speak: "You have had a good deal of pain in your life, and you have been a good steward of it."

I would like to be a good steward of the pain in my life, what has gone before and what is yet to come. I would believe, still, as I have believed, that Christ can and will redeem everything that I (we) allow him into. The privilege of pain is that it can open me (us, one, all) up for transformation... new life in place of old death. I am thankful for that. Anticipatory.