Blessed by Rocks

I have been blessed by rocks.

After the last post, I was given another gift of rocks.
The new ones are polished, colorful, stones with words on them such as Peace, Joy, Faith, Wisdom, Blessings, and Laugh.

 Kind of like the ones in this photo, but not the same.

I am grateful that the start of my ordained ministry has been filled with rocks.

It's earthy, grounded, incarnational.
Life is full of rocks, challenges which come and offer us opportunities and changes of direction.

God is here.
Even with the rocks.

Someday, I hope you would share some time with me,
and tell me the story of your rock,
your challenge,
your victory and failure,
just us
and our rocks.

There once was a rock...

Rocks are amazing things. 

They are created under pressure 

Or in intense heat

They crumble over ages, and ages, and ages

Destroyed daily by simple things like wind and water 

Picking away at the molecules

One by one

Until mountains of rock

Become the expansive beaches of sand

Undeniably amazing. 

Always, holding a rock is comforting

The solidity, the weight, the sheer confidence

I am a rock, this is what I am. 

From the smallest pebble to the largest mountain boulder

They claim reality

Even while remaining significantly impermanent

Changing daily in that never ending cycle we call life

Undeniably amazing. 

I have a few rock stories. 

But there is one that I wish to tell, here and now

It is about a rock that hit me on the head in the Atlantic Ocean. It's story hasn't finished, but our journey together has hit a critical moment, and this is where I saw God. 

A few days after my beloved previous boyfriend broke up with me, my parents took my sorry self to the Jersey shore. It was a lovely day, sand castles were built, some people got very burnt, we all had sand in our shoes, and I was hit on the head by this rock. I decided to keep the rock, for many reasons, mostly because I felt the desperate need for something solid to hold onto. Fitting nicely between my two hands, this rock fit the bill very well. I decided that as replacement therapy and moral support, I would carry around the rock for a while until I felt... better. 

Almost seven months later, I have still been carrying around the rock daily. While most days I do feel better, there are still days I don't and it's comforting to know I have something solid and real with me that isn't going to leave me. However, coming up on starting a new chapter, actually, a whole new era of my life, my spiritual director suggested I think about putting it down.

I have nowhere to put it, I told him. I'm moving in a few months and my house keeps changing. Thinking, I'm not ready, I don't want to, not yet please...

I stopped thinking about for a few days, the rock safely tucked in my pocket. 

Today, I received my second ordination gift. From my previous boyfriend's parents. 

A rock bowl. 

Specifically designed for keeping rocks which signify important moments in your life. Specifically coming with painted rocks to help you get started and to be added to. Specifically designed to be a home for the rocks which you put down. 

God, I see it. I see what you did there. 

Perhaps it's time to put the rock down. 

Self Monitoring Hospital Beds

Last night I was having a conversation with some friends and we got around to talking about trying to sleep in the hospital. When I worked as a chaplain in a hospital, sleeplessness was the number one complaint I heard. Most people find trying to sleep in hospitals with all the lights, beeps, wires, and interruptions terribly hard. As we were talking, I thought about the apps which monitor sleep while laying the device on the sleeping surface. What a research project it would be to put motion sensors on the inside of the top of the hospital air mattresses and then hook them up to the software which uses the sensory data from the detectors to track sleep cycles and pulse. This would mean a few less wires, lights, beeps, and interruptions for the hospital patients. Granted there are a number of other aspects of a patient's health and vitals which would need to be monitored throughout the night, but the more rest available for each patient may speed recovery time.

Obviously, this is not research that I could do at the moment, but my friends and I thought it was an interesting idea. Perhaps someone else is already doing this kind of research or will do this kind of research in the future. After all, even technology is able to help medicine occasionally. ;)

In Defense of Death

Quite literally. 

This is most recognizably a piece of procrastination artwork. 

It all started while I was reviewing my ethics notes on the subject of cloning...

It seems that some people want to use cloning as a way to defeat aging and to gain immortality. 

C'mon humanity!

Part of what defines us as human beings is the fact that we die. This is a good thing. We need a healthy relationship with death. Alas, our Enlightenment movement away from the mystery in our lives has caught us in a net of fear of dying. We are both fascinated by death, as portrayed by our television shows and our movies. Yet, we shun the idea of death in our own lives, believing that it will not come to us, that it will quietly pass us by as simply as we fail to acknowledge death in our language of people passing away...

Death brings us a lot of pain and sorrow. Death brings us face to face with our experience of time. We would not be so worried about time if we weren't so busy trying to cram everything in before we die. But death also allows us to acknowledge how much we love someone by how much we miss them when they are not in our lives anymore. Death clears space in our lives for new things. We would not get spring without death. We would not get new friendships without death. (By estimate of William Least Heat Moon, a human being meets another 100,000 human beings in their life. How could we keep track of all those human beings if we didn't experience some kind of death in relationships?) each day we shed almost a million dead cells making way for new, energized, cells keeping our lives going. Death keeps our love and laughter in perspective. 

Plenty of novels have been written where immortal characters wish for the change of death, the release, the relief. Plenty of novels have explored the possibility of a culture of immortal beings. The ones I have read seem to show that in such a situation, culture stagnates. Those beings lose any sense of urgency which would motivate them to change. Death rejuvenates us. 

Without death, as a Christian, I have no hope of being united with God. I do not long for death, but I do want to have a healthy appreciation for what it has done for me and this world. 

Without death, we could not be part of the circle of life.

I Don't Think That Word Means What You Think It Means...

Recently, I came across a list claiming to describe successful people. I agreed with most of the items listed and they were things that I am continuously trying to be and achieve, so I wrote them down as a reminder. A few days after, in a conversation with Yoda, I brought up this list. While she agreed that the items on the list were good things to live by, she didn't agree with the "success" label put on them.

Before that conversation, I've never officially looked up success in the dictionary. To me, it was one of those words that could be defined on an individual basis. However, I've never really thought about the implications of this concept of words being defined on an individual basis. It could be chaos! Or at least lead to confusion and misunderstanding.

Of course we looked up success in the dictionary, and I can tell you, I didn't like what I read:

suc·cess [suhk-ses]
noun
1. the favorable or prosperous termination of attempts or endeavors; the accomplishment of one's goals.
2. the attainment of wealth, position, honors, or the like.
3. a performance or achievement that is marked by success, as by the attainment of honors
4. a person or thing that has had success, as measured by attainment of goals, wealth, etc.

First off, I suppose I should say (and I would hope that at least a few people agree so that I don't feel so silly), that while I felt the definition of success varied from person to person, the connotation that the word exudes was always positive. More than positive, like an adjective that everyone (or close to it) works towards their whole lives to define themselves as. So when I read the definition of success with the feeling of what the word implies, it saddened me because it does not describe at all what I work towards in my everyday life. It also worried me that this was the definition for many people and would end up being what they felt most important.

Therefore, we have decided to begin a campaign to change the definition of success. We are still in the planning stages, but we will keep you informed here. Let us know what you think the definition of success should be and what the word means to you.