Mullings and Musings...

• "Prayer in a Time of Drought" (beautifully written!)

"Jesus said that the rain falls on the just and the unjust. I take that to mean that drought happens to the just and the unjust as well.

The ways of our planet are not always convenient for the creatures on it, to put it mildly.

What I’m saying is the same humility that brings me to prayer also helps me accept that everything does not revolve around my comfort or even my survival."

• "Happy Accidents" (Amen!)

"I used to struggle with the spiritual, existential tension between taking initiative and surrendering to God’s will, wondering how these opposing forces play out in the course of life. I can’t tell the difference any more. All I know is that, theologically speaking, I no longer subscribe to either free will or predestination.

I believe in both.

I have learned to become more comfortable with probablity, with paradox, with the possibility that two contradictory ideas can both be one hundred percent true at the same time."

• "The Gift We Can't Afford to Refuse" (...and why do I need to learn and relearn this lesson... almost every week?)

"The hurry makes us hurt.

Life is not an emergency.

Slow never killed time, only the rushing and racing, the catching up that tries to catch up to time, this is what kills time. Why keep wounding eternity?

Ourselves?"

• "GSA Selling Lighthouses" (I could so see my parents doing something like this... if they decided they wanted to!)

"The lighthouses are being made available as part of the National Historic Lighthouse Preservation Act of 2000. The federal government owns about 250 lighthouses, which are maintained by the U.S. Coast Guard. Once critical for navigation along the nation’s coastal and inland waterways, many have been made obsolete by the advance of radio, radar and satellite navigation.

Under the terms of the legislation, if the Coast Guard decommissions a lighthouse the government tries to find a caretaker agency or buyer rather than see the structures demolished or fall apart from neglect.

“They’re in varying states of repair or disrepair,” Smith said. “They’re not cheap to maintain.”

Over the last half-dozen years, 54 lighthouses have been transferred from the federal government, including six to public agencies, 16 to local governments, three to states and 29 to non-profit organizations, according to Smith. Another 22 have been sold to the public..."

• Down but not out: Voices of the long-term unemployed (Surrounded by poverty here, sometimes it is easy to forget that there are many back in the States who struggle to make ends meet...)

"More than 6.3 million Americans have been out of work for more than half a year. The average jobless stint now lasts longer than nine months. We could go on.

But no facts or figures bring home the grim human dimension of this epidemic better than an account we received from an unemployed Iraq War veteran. "I have led men in combat, but my last job was a temporary cashier position in the women's department at Nordstrom's," he wrote. 'I don't get many interviews, but when I do, I get a lot of handshakes and a 'Thank you for your service, but you're not what we're looking for. ' " 

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Photo by AC.