I don't know if I mentioned it before, but I have a friend who just moved herself and her kids back to the States from Norway. I mention that because her oldest daughter Jessie (20) and I went out to Common Grounds to drink coffee and listen to music last night. I feel sorta badly for Jessie, being a 20-year old, new to town, unable to get her license for 6 months, I think, due to the living overseas thing, and therefore cooped up most of the time with her aunt, grandmother, and 2 siblings. So I'm trying to help her meet people so she can get acclimated. Of course, I also just really enjoy her company. Anyway, I wanted to go listen to this particular young man play because I found out that he also works for the company I do, just at a different location. Bless his heart, he tried really hard, and he has a decent voice, but he had this terrible habit of forgetting the words and/or chords to the songs. What's worse, when this would happen, he'd just kinda trail off, then wait a moment and start a different song. It was kinda like listening to a commercial for Hits of the '80's or something, where they just play a portion of each song--"Now how much would you pay?" The kicker was when he sang a song (possibly of his own) that featured...well, yodeling, for lack of a better description. I was afraid at that point that the "Simon" was about to rise up in me, so we left. We did run into a couple of the regulars, however, and had an interesting conversation with Stu, a young man that I've been talking to there who's an Episcopalian trying to become a Buddhist, and has apparently lived just about everywhere except Asia. He's always good for interesting discourse.

Well, the photos are now indeed up, and I have to start getting ready for "church", so I'll sign off with this quote that came in the CQOD the other day. It sounds like something I'd do well to contemplate for a while:

"Slowly, all through the universe, that temple of God is being built. Wherever, in any world, a soul, by free-willed obedience, catches the fire of God's likeness, it is set into the growing walls, a living stone. When, in your hard fight, in your tiresome drudgery, or in your terrible temptation, you catch the purpose of your being and give yourself to God, and so give Him the chance to give Himself to you, your life--a living stone--is taken up and set into that growing wall. Wherever souls are being tried and ripened, in whatever commonplace and homely ways, there God is hewing out the pillars for His temple. Oh, if the stone can only have some vision of the temple of which it is to be a part forever, what patience must fill it as it feels the blows of the hammer, and knows that success for it is simply to let itself be wrought into what shape the Master wills."
~Phillips Brooks (1835-1893), The Law of Growth [1902]

posted by #Debi at 12:57 PM | permalink | 0 comments

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