My Lenten Challenge
To write every day
Ash Wednesday 2023 (the day after)
It’s a long time since I last wrote here – one of my more private reflection spaces. It seems important to try and capture a little of how I am feeling right now and it seems slightly symbolic that Ash Wednesday this year was the last day of my six weeks post surgery. There were various timelines for how quickly I would recover from a laproscopic sigmoid colonectomy ranging from 4-8 weeks. I was feeling pretty good after four weeks and managed a flight to Brisbane in week five but was still being cautious about lifting. While I feel my body has done a good job of healing I thing that the issue now is getting fitter again after being constrained in what I could do up until now (in particular no lifting) I considered going to Ash Wednesday Mass at the Cathedral yesterday (I was even in the city) but was nervous of the crowds and didn’t have a mask. With chemo on the horizon I wasn’t overly...
More InformationTaking a moment… Ash Wednesday 2018
When I started this collection of thoughts during Lent in 2015, I would never in my wildest imaginings have thought I would be sitting here in Malaysia 3 years later. When I started I wanted to use this as a way to capture meandering thoughts that might help me identify a pathway to what next. In 2018 while the path has taken many twists and turns I am coming to another point of what next. And it seems appropriate somehow that I am surrounded by the colour and energy of Chinese New Year with its focus on good fortune and family. Today is Ash Wednesday – I decided to fast and made a somewhat half hearted attempt to find a Mass I could get to easily (reference back to the crazy traffic of Chinese New Year) I have found a couple of Lenten reflection books and interestingly enough the first reflection in each of them connected strongly with some of my thinking this week. In The Art of Lent ...
More InformationDay 32: Tell them what good looks like
I have just been to the supermarket and had one of those experiences where I kept having to bite my tongue. For most of my trip through. the aisles I was in step with a couple with two small children, the mother with about a 9 month old in the stroller, the father with the a 2 1/2 to 3 yr old in the trolley. As could be expected around 4.30 on a Saturday afternoon the toddler was restless and bothersome. Both his parents kept up a bit of a litany of “be good” and “if you’re not good you will have to go and sit in the car by yourself” (and I would have been extraordinarily surprised if they had carried through on that one) Sometimes I have moments when I just want to turn around and say “instead of telling him (or her) to be good, tell him what good looks like” In this case it was probably “Sitting up and helping put things in the trolley”...
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Day 28: The value of what I know vs what I do
Yes there has been a gap – I have written stuff in my head which has never quite got to the digital state. But today – as I left work something kind of magical happened. It was pretty late so I took an alternative route that meant I ran into one of our cloud architects who was on parental leave last week. As we had chatted a fair bit over the last month over his wife’s increasing frustration with late stage pregnancy I stopped to ask him how it went. They had ended up having an unplanned home birth (the midwife got to them just in time). He was bubbling over with this amazing experience of being in their own space and not having to manage a whole lot of other distracting stuff so he could be there in the moment (not quite his words but the theme was there) . It was contagious joy – flowing on from unexpectedly running into another friend who is beginning to “show”...
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Day 19: Silent sadness in my head
Today was my birthday. Last year it was on my birthday the grief broke through the numbness of getting things done for Dad’s funeral when I opened my birthday card from Mum and for the first time in 52 years it was only signed by her. Despite already having that “first” this year it still tr iggered that moment of wanting my Dad, intensified slightly by the first post I saw on my Facebook feed was that a friend in the States had lost her’s. On the other side was the roll call of happy birthday’s sliding across my phone’s lock screen all day – twitter, Facebook, texts and even two phone calls (over lapping each other) from my eldest and my youngest son. And as I walked home I was thinking how privileged I wa to have grown up knowing that despite the times of disagreement and disappointment, I have always known that I was loved deeply and unconditionally....
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Day 18: Sunday Monday
Today one of the developers asked me what I thought the first day of the week was. I paused for a moment and then said Sunday. Apparently SQL databases need you to tell them whether you are going to count Sunday as day 1 of 7 or Monday as day 1 of 7. It made me think of some heated discussions almost thirty years ago when I was a member of a fairly fundamentalist Christian group where the trend for calendars to show Monday as the first day of the week was seen as problematic. It was a question of whether visually representing the week as beginning on Monday focused on work and money rather than God and relationships (Sunday) . Even having moved away from that particular version of faith I still thing it is kind of an interesting question. At it’s simplest do we see the week beginning with a focus on recreation where our time is essentially our own or a focus on effort where typically...
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