With our semi annual Free Clothing Day coming up someone asked me why I do it. Why do I do the things I do, for whose benefit and what do I get out of it? So rather than launch into my own personal confession I asked them what makes their heart ache. Do they hurt when they see an elderly person struggle with an armful of groceries? Does their heart ache when they pass someone who is desperate for help? Can they just walk away from the lost or the lonely?

The answer I got was quite normal in today’s society, “what will I get from helping anyone but myself”. Still they pressed on to learn what drives me to do the things I do and although I would have loved to say something really clever or even mildly deep I came up with the reasoning of a 5 year old.

When I first started going to Church it was my first exposure to the world of have and have not and I did not like it, one bit. The Church I went to was an ultra conservative, very old money, don’t come in here dirty sort of Church. I was, and still am, convinced that the ushers actually smelled people as they were seating them to make sure that they smelled as good as they looked. Everyone was wearing their Sunday best, smiled their Sunday best and acted their Sunday best for 55 minutes.

One thing the Church did was have a Pentecost Sunday Feast where everyone was invited to bring their favorite dish to share as part of the celebration. The route from our house to the Church involved driving under an overpass and every Sunday I would ask my parents to stop and pick up the man who lived under it. Each Sunday we did not stop, each Sunday I would watch him until I could see him no more and then we were safely encased in our 55 minute dome of perfection.

During one of the Pentecost Sunday Feasts the leader of our Sunday school asked me what I brought for the Feast. Upset that we had driven past the man yet again I demanded that we go and get him so he could share in the Feast with us. To say that the leader was unimpressed with my little 5 year old attitude is an understatement. To say that the rest of the congregation was even less impressed with my rant in their presence is an even bigger understatement. Somehow I had managed to slip past the leader outstretched hand and her screams of ”get back here” went unheard as I headed for the Sanctuary.

An entire congregation of more than 200 people gasped as I ranted about how fake we were being if we were unwilling to share our food with the man who lived under the overpass. This for my parents was only the beginning of my 5 year opinion on equality as I took every opportunity to escape from Sunday School and head upstairs to where the adults were. By my fourth escape my parents were “advised” that Sunday school may not be the best place for me and that I would be more easily controlled if I sat with them.

40 plus years later I have managed to control my outbursts, I have learned when and where to exert my opinion but my heart has not changed. It is after all the heart that He created me with and while my works may change my motives never will.

Why do I do the things I do? Because “as you do for the least of these you also do for me” and for the man who lived and died under that overpass because too many people passed him by, all but a 5 year old girl who still carries him in her heart.

Here’s a trait of humanity that I really don’t get, window shopping. I don’t mean going to the mall,  looking in the store windows but never entering to buy something. I’m talking about the inexplicable need for married people to window shop, look but don’t touch but make it obvious you’re looking.

I appreciate a good looking fella as much as the next person (that’s why I married one) what I don’t get is why do some married people feel the need to make it obvious that they find someone else attractive.

There is a guy who works in the same building that I do and every time he breezes through the atrium he feels the need to go out of his way just to stop and chat with me. There’s also a woman  female who finds me “attractive”but I won’t get into that one. My initial reaction was “well this could be fun” because with an attraction comes power.

This unseen power became obvious to me in my youth when I discovered that I could make a boy do something outside of his normal character so he could impress me. I do not find that the least bit attractive, never have, never will. I have a deep dislike for weak minded people who can be persuaded to do things they wouldn’t ordinarily do for the sake of impressing someone else.

I first noticed this fella’s attraction to me when he would do stuff for me like fix a drawer or rearrange a large cooling fridge. My boss had asked him to do the same exact things and he told her he would get to it as soon as he could, “probably be a week or two though”. Yet when I asked him who I should talk to about getting these things done he would go get his tools, return and fix whatever needed to be fixed, right away.

When I asked him what that was all about he replied, “I really like you”. Umm, helloo, I’m married, have been happily so for 23 years and so are you. To which he replied, “what’s wrong with looking at the menu, I’m not ordering anything, just admiring the dessert”. EEE YYY UU KKKK!!!

Call me a prude but I think this crosses the line of respect. Respect for my marriage, respect for my husband and not the least respect for the fella’s marriage vows and wife.

Sadly I liked it a lot better when he would just hang around the outskirts of our shop and watch me. Creepier, but ignorance was a bliss.

“Our character is what we do when we think no one is looking.” –H. Jackson Brown Jr.–

Well I’m going all out here with doing the tradition. I’ve done a retrospect, very thin, very short retrospect but I did one just the same. In keeping with the whole end of one year, start of another year tradition, here is my list of things I would like to do in 2008.

1. actually learn how to play the real version of a guitar. I think it’s sort of sad that, as a camper, I cannot play the guitar and every campfire screams “play something”.

2. be much more disciplined with the things that I am responsible for. Somehow I have allowed myself to give the things that were given to me as a Gift to take a lesser role in my life when they need to be my life.

3. go rock climbing. It’s to the point where I don’t care if it’s indoors or outside, I have this inexplicable need to climb something not related to steps or trees.

4. move beyond the fear gripped mic moments. I have a friend in whom I have given more trust to than he is aware of and every time he has me in front of a crowd and hands me a mic my brain goes into scramble mode. He may be convinced that he himself makes me nervous when in reality it’s the whole mic moment that is my undoing, not good for either of our psyches.

5. give away more this year. Don’t be lining up with your hand out thinking I’m gonna empty my bank account, that’s not what is required of me. I need to give away more of myself, more of my time, more of my love, more of everything that is me and to learn to forgive when I have given myself away and the recipient has thrown it in the trash or done something vile with it.

6. learn to live a little farther out/back. I tend to live for the moment seldom thinking about the moments that have passed or the days ahead. I have a plan for the coming days but I don’t have them stapled to anything leaving too many opportunities for change.

7. continue to jump in with my eyes open and both feet into the Mystery. I think I did pretty good with that in the last year but still found myself walking to the shallow end when the pool of love washed over my head, is it possible to drown in love?

8. write more poetry and care a lot less what the readers will think. I’m not sure why I care in the first place when it comes to my poetry, curious.

9. restrain myself. Sometimes I can look like a crack head hamster desperately searching for it’s exercise wheel and no CV and Elusive it is NOT related to my coffee consumption. I’ve actually cut out the intravenous drip cutting my consumption in half. Yes you should be afraid but I’m working on it.

10. surround myself with more roses. Last year I stepped farther into the flower shop and got cut up pretty bad so this year I’m going to pick my path more carefully maybe stick around longer in the carnation section, they’re nice and soft.

11. continue to take over the world. Yes, continue, one or two at a time.

I would love to know how you plan to make ‘08 different from ‘07.

A couple of years ago someone said to me that peace can only exist in the absence of war and if we eliminate the word “hate” from our own vocabulary it is somehow magically replaced with love. While this may sound reasonable in theory it pretty much washes out when tested. Peace does not automatically fill the void left in the wake of war any more than strife will fill the void in the absence of peace. Instead what is left is a quasi apathy, a lack of something to do, an uneasy sense of now what.

For an obscene number of years now Christmas has been a time of strife, unhealthy tension that goes so far beyond the usual family dynamic of everyone under one roof. Every family gathering has it’s own little hiccups, Aunt May has put on entirely too much perfume, you can’t sit Uncle Ed beside Uncle Bill because they will bicker, don’t let Grandma eat too many brussel sprouts, use the proper cutlery or Aunt Ethel will let everyone know that these are not the proper forks.

All in all it’s pretty petty stuff that you know will occur, you simply deal with it, it’s only for a couple of hours once a year, right? The other side of that coin is having a small family and how amped up and personal the negative gets when we gather together. This year we decided to spend a quiet Christmas together, just the two of us and it was bizarre.

With no looming war ahead of us we felt lost, purposeless, on edge for several hours. It wasn’t until mid afternoon that we truly started to relax and live in the moment of doing whatever we felt like doing whenever it took our fancy to do it. It was like we had escaped from prison and didn’t know where to run to because we knew no one was looking for us.

This was a circumstance where the absence of war does not equal instant peace. Peace, in the absence of war, is a process whereby, once you realize that there is no more war you have to decide what to do next. The process requires steps to be worked through beyond the initial realization that there is no war. You have to learn how to live a life without war that over time will bring a life lived in peace.

In this world that seems so infinite

Knowing that time itself is finite

Will the mark you leave be a butt print from just sitting around?

Would you give away everything you own

If that is what God has asked you to do

Or give it all away so your neighbour has something, anything?

Will reading more books make you smarter

Or would you give them all away for some face time

With the people who make up your life education?

Does your day start with questions of how to get more

Or does it start with questions of how you can do more

Is your life about your persuit of happines for yourself?

Can you spend an entire day making someone else happy

Or will you wonder when your turn will come

Are you aware that billions of people don’t even know your name?

Could you give it all away

Would you give it all away

To change the balance of have and have not?

could you, would you?