Do you have and agenda or do you have an agenda?
Some people refer to the paper calendars they use to schedule their lives as agendas. Agendae? Whatever. Having gone through the age of the 5”x8”-ish Franklin Planner, which weighed approximately five tons … and Palm Pilots, which famously would get out of sync and wipe out all your calendar and contacts … to the last however many years of smartphones … I keep a small paper calendar, and I like it that way.
If I can’t keep track of in my head, or note in a one-inch space, an average day’s schedule … my life is too busy and I need to reexamine my priorities.
As we are starting to emerge (I hope) from a pandemic, I find things landing on my calendar again. Actual social engagements. Actual travel to look forward to. Last week I dined inside a restaurant for the first time in over a year. Well, I drank a Diet Coke, as I ended up there somewhat inadvertently while waiting for the phone store next door to do a thing with my phone.
The other day I met with a couple people not in my “pandemic bubble” without masks. After starting masked – because be kind to people – we determined all were vaxxed and comfortable going without.
If you haven’t found your routine, schedule, calendar, and/or agenda changed significantly over the last year plus … well … you might be a super important part of the activities we needed to keep running … you might have been a hermit for some time prior … or maybe you’ve been part of the problem.
I finished listening to A Burning in My Bones, a new biography of Eugene Peterson, author of The Message translation of the bible. I give it many thumbs up. I didn’t know much about Peterson prior to the book, just that he wrote “the groovy translation” of the bible and I saw a video of him with Bono a few years ago. There were a number of inspirational lessons we can take from his life, which I won’t go into here, but saying we need to “become uncomfortable with uncertainty” was a line I was amening vigorously.
Having three audiobooks checked out of the library at once, I’ve moved on to The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power is Destroying the Church. It’s a little older title, but still quite relevant. I’m not sure how many thumbs up I’ll give it … it’s not narrated by the author, and the narrator sounds arrogant. I agree with much of what the author says, but it’s not really news to me. And I’m kind of super duper over people bashing the church. Maybe it’s more appropriate for those who haven’t maintained an appropriate separation of church and state in their own minds and lives. There are plenty of those who have come to light in both the Pharisee and Sadducee camps.
Until next week, friends. I have an actual social engagement to get to.
