Daily 5 - Year 2, Day 250

Today's Daily 5:

1. sleeping fairly peacefully for a change
2. managing to fit in attendance at S & J's wedding when I wasn't sure I could, while squishing a final exam in between the ceremony and reception
3. a great reception dinner with Indian food and good wine
4. hanging out and laughing with friends
5. 1 year, 250 days of making these lists.

Saturday Between

Most years I keep this Saturday between Good Friday and Easter as a quiet day.  One marked by the waiting and wondering.

This year is totally different.

At 1:00 I will attend the wedding ceremony of some dear friends from my house church.

At 3:30 I will write a final examination in Latin American History.  (This, at least, I ruefully admit, will be covered in prayer, since it is not a topic I feel like I have a strong grasp of.)

As soon as I finish my exam, I'll be heading back across the city to attend the wedding reception (at which I'll likely arrive late, thanks to an overlap in the end of my exam and the beginning of the reception.)  I'll spend the evening celebrating.

It's a different way to spend this quiet, in between day, celebrating, and studying, but I'm very much looking forward to it (well, other than the exam I suppose!)  To living in a joyful place, waiting for tomorrow morning and joyfully preparing for resurrection.

Daily 5 - Year 2, Day 249

Today's Daily 5:

1. Sleeping in a little
2. Tenebrae service
3. accomplishing, relatively painlessly, a task I'd been dreading for several days
4. a family evening that was way less awkward than I'd expected
5. Vietnamese food for supper (seriously my favorite food ever)

Good Friday

Good Friday is an odd sort of day to encounter, when you're having a year in which you've boldly declared that this year the thing you're giving up for Lent is in fact the practice of Lent.

It's odder still when you in fact gave up Lent because it had become a grinding obligation - a continual and unending suffering, with no room for feasting or joy.

I woke this morning, and stood in the shower (the place where I do some of my best thinking and praying) and pondered.

For the last several years, I've lived the Lenten season as a reflection of life.  My life seemed to only carry suffering, there was little love or joy in my faith, and Lent seemed a perfect fit for that - a season of fasting, suffering, denial, preparation.  A season that moves inexorably towards this day that we mark the crucifixion, the death of a savior.  Easter had become a sort of afterthought - an "oh yes, and there was resurrection," but I was stuck on that Friday, stuck in death and pain and anguish.  I lived out my days and months and years in a Friday mindset.

And this year I declared that enough was enough.  I wasn't going to encourage my natural proclivity for suffering and angst.  Lent moved quickly, this year, with an awareness of the coming of Easter, but not the weighing, dragging of days that it has had for the past several.

I read somewhere that Christians are Easter people, living in a Good Friday world.  I was just a Good Friday person most of the time.

And so I found myself pondering in the shower this morning, feeling almost offended that a day had arrived that demanded my attention focus, at least for a time again, on the suffering.  How dare I be forced to think about that?

And yet, if I can't, if I can't pause and recognize this suffering that has been marked for my healing, what good am I?  How can I be an Easter person, if I can't also see and empathize with a Good Friday world? If I close my eyes and cloister myself in my own controlled world?

I become useless cloistered away in that fashion, and I wither.  And, the reality that these last years have so clearly taught is this - I can't control even my own world, my own desire to avoid personal suffering.

And so today I'm pausing.

I paused through an hour long Tenebrae service - a carefully constructed meditation on shadows, with roots in the fourth century.  I walked in silence from the church, with the others in attendance.  The solemnity that follows the removal of Christ, his laying in the tomb.  The entrance to the days between.

And I'm pondering.

I have learned that being a Good Friday person isn't healthy, and I'm working to learn what it is to be that Easter person, while still carrying great empathy and compassion for a Good Friday world.  I'm learning what it is to exist in those Good Friday moments, without them becoming overpowering.

And I'm thinking about my one word for the year.  Heal.

I'm recognizing that without a Good Friday moment, that healing would not be mine.

And so I wait, today, for resurrection Sunday.

Daily 5 - Year 2, Day 248

Today's Daily 5:

1. This is my 3800th blog post - how cool is that?  6 years, 3800 posts.
2. a day that was actually spent mostly away from the computer. I spend most of my life online, but every once in a while it's nice to have a day away from the computer.
3. a final exam (super early this morning - I maintain that 8am is not a time of day at which one should be able to regurgitate vast amounts of specific information) that went well
4. managing to get to a yoga class tonight
5. squeezing in a short afternoon nap
6. getting some much needed errands accomplished
7. an iced passion tea lemonade
8. reading a novel on the bus home after my exam
9. deciding that a hoodie and yoga pants would be the perfect uniform for an early morning exam
10. This image (found here), which cracked me up: