Blog to blog

Seems I've been a bit focused on things other than this blog of late. Among other things, helping Bekah to get ready for her semester in Kenya (with SIT, studying Health and Community Development) and taking her to Boston for her flight to Paris and on to Nairobi. Then it was fielding her phone calls and skype connections when her first flight to Nairobi was cancelled due to two flat tires.

We went to bed Saturday night knowing that she had set at least four different alarms in her hotel room at Charles de Gaulle in order to be sure to make it back to the airport for her second try at getting to Nairobi. When our phone rang at 5:30 a.m. Sunday finding me largely still asleep, I was awake enough to know that this was not a good sign. She should have been in the air to Nairobi.

No such luck. Her flight had been postponed again--this time because the crew was late arriving at the airport and the aircraft had not yet been checked for flight readiness. How reassuring.

I spent the next few hours repeatedly checking the Air France flight status website, watching as the the flight's scheduled departure got moved later and later in 10 minute increments, feeling powerless and fretful. At one point, I found myself thinking, "What if I considered the possibility that somehow it's better that this flight leaves late? What if I didn't chafe at this reality?" I don't know if this marked a step forward in maturity and wisdom, but it did open up a bit of open space.

Bekah did eventually get take off from Paris on Sunday. After calling SIT's headquarters in Vermont to be sure that someone would meet her in Nairobi, I did my best to get on with my day.

For some odd reason, neither Air France's website nor www.flightsarriving.com was able to confirm that her plane ever landed in Nairobi! We simply chose to assume that no news really was good news--that had something unthinkable happened, we would have heard, and that Bekah was fine and had connected with her SIT group in Nairobi.

How wonderful for David to receive an unexpected phone call from Bekah today, using a borrowed cell phone as the one she had just purchased was not working! And later my phone rang out with the sound of an arriving text--"Hi. Are you getting this? This is a test."

She's still far away, and for four months. But she's fine. And with the wondrous connecting thread of technology an option at least some of the time. I am grateful.

So now it's time to link blog to blog. One of Bekah's study abroad scholarship grants requires her to keep a blog, posting at least once a week. Here's the link for Bekah in Kenya. Enjoy!

Finishing Things

This morning I've been pondering finishing things. I think this is what Christine Kane, a great creativity mentor, calls "completion". Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project, believes it contributes to your happiness.

It seems to me that my small family and I tend to be a bit sloppy about finishing things. We vacuum a room and leave the vacuum cleaner out. We fill the grossest pot from dinner with hot soapy water, then leave it in the kitchen sink 'til morning when it then requires a whole new batch of hot soapy water to complete the job. One of us will use the stapler or the scotch tape or (ahem) my best kitchen scissors and not return said objects to their usual resting place.

With the vacuum, sometimes I like to think the left out vacuum cleaner is a kind of merit badge (as if the clean rug and floor wouldn't be badge enough?), or like a poster announcing to the people who pass through the room (usually Anna's friends) that at least we do use the vacuum now and then! And maybe it's because this house is so slim on closet space (as David's mother warned us before we bought it) that the vacuum cleaner really has no suitable resting place. (That's stretching the truth a bit, but not by much.)

Maybe it's because David and I are both youngest children, and somebody always picked up after us. Or maybe it's because, in our twenty-two-plus years as parish clergy (that's forty-four-plus years combined), nothing is every finished. Or at least it feels that way.

You finish a sermon or a Sunday morning liturgy, and immediately the deadline for the next one is on the horizon. You finish a liturgical season, like Lent, and without a break, you're at Easter, and Easter's fifty days lead to Pentecost, and then the feast day you'd rather skip over, Trinity Sunday, and then the seemingly endless stretch of Sundays after Pentecost, Sundays that get designated by a strange number "after Pentecost" determined by where Easter actually fell on the calendar in the particular year in question. People and families, the members of your congregation, are never finished either, because the flow of life is never finished, except one life at a time.

I suppose lots of kinds of work have no real end (or your job would end!). At least a year of teaching school comes to an end, one set of students moves on, and you get some summer vacation before starting again.

I have a feeling our non-finishing of things can't be blamed on any one particular facet of who we are or the limitations of our house's storage space. So I have decided to take on a gentle experiment--that is, to do my best to watch and pay attention to what I finish and what I don't; and then to do my best to watch and pay attention to what it's like if I deliberately finish more things, those that are in my power to finish. Like washing out my breakfast oatmeal pot before I start my day's work.

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