I feel like a cranky grandma right now.  The other morning I found myself in my garden getting mad at insects and waving at drivers to slow down on my street.

I can’t be serious? Who am I?! I become a faculty member and suddenly I’m 80? (I might be in this pic)

I am starting to understand why my grandpa watched golf all day.  It was his meditation and escape.  His dream life on screen and his naptime all wrapped up with the lullaby of shushed applause and the melodic “ooohs and awwws” cooing away all that is wrong in the world. Even the speeding cars.

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Thanksgiving is upon us.  At the same time this thrills me, I am also struck by its ever rapid approach this year. I have been pondering the pace and meaning of time and Thanksgiving quite a bit as I skim cookbooks and Food Network.com as well as navigate through Trader Joes like it's boot camp.

Last week I wrote about the reality of "what is" in terms of books and this week I find myself wrestling with a similar conundrum around food and neighboring.

For the past year, I've found myself speaking in different arenas about what self-care is.  It's hard to define a lifestyle change in a one-time visit, as exciting and great as these events have been.  So I've broken my latest definition of self-care down even further (probably for myself even more than audiences).  Self-care is a "checking-in" to your life, not a "checking-out."  It is a concept flanked by the Word of the Lord saying, "Be still and know I am God" and the gospel of Luke asking -- no, telling -- that we daily need to take up our crosses.  As John Wesley writes, the option of no one not having a cross to bear is gone.

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Kristin Ritzau, author of the new book, A Beautiful Mess, sat down with Cissy Brady-Rogers, a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, to talk about the important themes and outcomes of her book. A Beaufiful Mess is getting attention from key influencers like Dr. John Trent, who says: "Read this book! It is a life-changing look at the unavoidable forces that create unrealistic expectations and perfectionism, and at an even more powerful path towards freedom and the joy-in-life you've been longing for."

"A Beautiful Mess" by Kristin Ritzau from ConversantLife on

Most Christians have heard of the rosary, but relatively few know that using beads as a tool to aid in prayer is an ancient practice that can be found in Anglicanism and Orthodoxy as well as Roman Catholicism. Since I’m Anglican, I’m going to focus on the Anglican rosary as a spiritual discipline.

 

The Anglican rosary (like the Roman Catholic rosary and the Eastern Orthodox prayer rope) is intended to be used as a tactile aid for contemplative prayer: the person praying repeats a short, traditional prayer while holding each bead of the rosary in turn. Far from being the mindless repetition that Jesus condemned, repeated prayers such as these are an attempt to take seriously Scripture’s call to “pray without ceasing.” (1 Thessalonians 5:17).

Over the past few years, I’ve been amazed at how the repetition of a simple prayer helps settle my distracted thoughts and center them on God.

Contemplative prayer sounds restful. Instead of spending all my prayer time talking to God, why not just listen once in a while – resting in the presence of God and waiting on Him? My pastor explained that contemplative prayer involved settling down in silence, just focusing on God, and repeating a phrase like "Lord, have mercy" or the name of Jesus to keep one's attention on Him. I recognized that it was exactly the sort of thing I needed to do, and hey! it sounded easy.

It’s not.

Over the past year, as I’ve experimented with contemplative prayer, I’ve discovered that it is, in fact, really hard.

Contemplative prayer feels like gripping tightly onto a rope when there are little hands tugging at my clothes to pull me away.

I sat down to write today and couldn't find a good starting place.  So I'll start there. I knew the concepts of what I wanted to write about this week: Self-care = intimacy and that I have found intimacy with myself and God through contemplative prayer. I am on a journey of getting to know the self that God wants me to be which is all tangled up in the world around me.... so yeah, I'll just go ahead and jot all that down in a quick blog.  (insert ironic laugh here)

I thought of writing about the fake intimacy that Facebook and the world of technology provide; of the addictions that are haunting our families and communities because people can't find places that will help them become who they are supposed to be. We have become so enmeshed in what family members and friends want from us. The subconscious expectations from youth stomp on our heads so much so that our feet become anchored and can't move. But then I thought, there I go again, going off on technology and using it in order for this message to be heard.

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