Five Minute Friday :: Fresh

• Five Minute Friday Linkup: Fresh

In some contexts fresh implies new; in others if it's fresh it ain't stale or hasn't been cooked or incorporated into a dish with other ingredients. These days? No, all days year round I seek and crave fresh salad and sandwich veggies, breakfast berries, a particular "fresh" that necessarily means locally sourced. Then there's increasingly rare fresh air you hope for when you step outside, open a window, walk along the ocean shore.

My illustration's clearly about forthcoming fresh food, a fresh sea breeze—and so much more. Six place settings, six chairs. Could that mean I'm anticipating fresh friends that may become lifelong companions? That might be too much, but let's say an hour or so of freshly surprising conversation with memories to savor until they're stale.

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Baptism of Jesus 2021

Baptism of Jesus 2021

"You are my Son the Beloved. With you I am well pleased."

Mark 1:11

The Day of Epiphany 2021

"Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn." Isaiah 60:3

December 2020

• December header coordinates with my designs for Advent and Christmas Day.

• Sunday School lessons for December 2020. Per my earlier observations, though they're less dynamic, they're better organized than the notes I used to blog after our in-person meetings.



• Beach grasses are from a Tuesday trip to Roxy's vet for routine tests and checkup. Heather Bolinder painted the Christmas sled and I decorated it bit by bit, year after year. Heather's painting pain website is parked without content; although she hasn't added to her FB page for a long time, you still can enjoy some painting pain pieces and examples of her other art.



• Christmas day walk in the park matched the one J and I did on Thanksgiving Day.



• A trio of tree trunks and branches at the park came together to create an artistic group.



• By venturing outside my usual Canada/Mexico/California I'm still enjoying affordable fresh blueberries in late December. These hail from Peru; they're larger, firmer, and clearly grown to haul some distance.



• Last January before anyone could have imagined 2020, I announced it would be my year of living local. Though I realize many small businesses are Amazon vendors and provide order fulfillment, I didn't order anything amazon during the year, and despite buying some on eBay, the rest of my shopping remained ultra-local.



• I've been illustrating a year of full moons; here's the Cold Moon for December. Sky background and moon itself both are stacks of photoshop filters.

• Would you believe – do you believe? – I'm ready to welcome 2021?

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Sleeping with Bread

Sleeping with Bread: Holding What Gives You Life by Sheila Fabricant Linn, Matthew Linn, and Dennis Linn on Powell's

Sleeping with bread—tucking yourself in at the end of the day with whatever's basic to your survival and overall health. With graceful pastel watercolor illustrations by Francisco Miranda, this giftable paperback provides simple instructions and compelling rationales for anyone of any age doing an Ignatian examen on a regular basis. Can you name your greatest consolation, your most stinging desolation from today? Oh, those Jesuits and their reputation for being so good with discernment! Because they are!

I especially appreciate the authors' counsel that making an examen can be wise and helpful not only at the end of a day, week, month, or year (I'm so ready for 31 December 2020 and 01 January 2021) but also after a meeting at work or anywhere, a conversation, a class as student or instructor, a meal. Can you name the best part? The worst part? What brought life? What caused death? Making an examen as an individual or with other(s) each day over as short a period as a calendar month may help confidently guide you into that critical "what now-what's next" in your own vocational or recreational pursuits, or as a family. You probably remember Howard Thurman, the late and great preacher to Boston University telling us: Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you alive, because the world needs people who are fully alive.

My Good Reads review: Discovering Life

The Church: Towards a Common Vision

The Church: Towards a Common Vision on Amazon

We frequently refer to God's Providence—an aspect of God's merciful loving care that involves vision and foresight. The Church: Towards a Common Vision, the ecumenical World Council of Churches Faith and Order Paper Number 214, includes in its title "vision," a word about seeing and perceiving that humans share with the Divine.

Published in 2013, Towards a Common Vision is a convergence text that pairs with Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry. "BEM," from three decades earlier (1982). The book radically condenses conversations related to the nature and practice of faith, sacraments, and ministry in church bodies that confess the triune God. Orthodox, Anglican, Protestant, Evangelical, Pentecostal, and Roman Catholic participants seeking to articulate a "global and multicultural ecumenical vision" [viii] came from all over the globe.

Convergence implies moving together in some directions, yet it is not full consensus, nor is it necessarily an "agreed statement." Maybe surprisingly, the churches agreed more fully on faith and sacraments than they did on ministry. All interlocutors affirmed both scripture and tradition as authoritative, along with the need to proclaim the gospel in languages, symbols, and images related to the time and place at hand—contextualizing within the listeners' overall cultural heritage. Incorporating diversity, an aspect of catholicity, is essential to incarnational presence and embodied ministry.

Towards a Common Vision views Church in biblical terms as both eschatological community and historical reality. The writing in this technical document is easy to understand; the wide format printed throughout in double columns makes it pleasant to hold and to read. And what's the purpose of all these ecumenical discussions? Because… God so loves the world, and calls the church to be in the world and for the world, enabling the church to embody and reflect God's loving trinitarian communion.

Christmas 1 2020

The First Sunday of Christas 2020   When all things were
wrapped in deep silence, and
night in her swift course
was half spent,
your almighty Word,
O Lord, leapt down from
your throne in heaven.

Wisdom 18:14-15