bread&tea

As a young kid working for quarters and dollars, I used to think I was a very stingy person with purchases.... until I met REALLY stingy people. Thereafter, I thought I was somewhat prudent, but someone who freely spent and often wandered into wastefulness. But my teen years... they have been quite shocking. Nope, I am definitely not free with spending! Short story shorter, comparing your life to other peoples' only ends up in confusion, stress, and wrong conclusions anyway, so I stopped rating spending compared to others' habits. Life is much  simpler when it's just you and God, though not any less complex , in retrospect. I think, for better or worse, I've settled into something I would dub as "frugally generous". A place with much refinement to be done still, that's for sure. I count it a blessing though, through past experiences and present circumstances, to have friends who quite unknowingly teach me the value of social spending. Eating out, f...

The big things take weeks to mull through and finalize, and in the between time, I find myself constantly racking my brain for stuff that might be interesting. Every day there are insights, analogies, poem beginnings and one-liner thoughts yet to be sought out. None of that is translatable to sufficient length for posting though. Thus, after three hours of on-and-off jotting bullet-point thoughts, outlines, and saving drafts for future work, I still have nothing. Nothing I can get a start on. So I've devised a plan to deceive myself into writing something anyway. I'm telling myself that since I don't have any one big thing with a page worth of writing and a conclusion figured out, I will write about several small things to constitute one big thing. Inevitably it will end up as only one big thing because of the process. Time is fifty-percent of friendships. At least. I'd have to say that your time, what you give, and what you say are the three twined pillars for buil...

Sometimes it's easier to retreat. To just step back and marginalize any feeling of loss with some non-conflict approach. Such as mitigating the sense of being ineffective by returning with an expository contrived of fearlessly written words. It's something I wonder if Paul ever felt like doing. 2 Corinthians 10:10 says, "For some say, 'His letters are weighty and forceful, but in person he is unimpressive and his speaking amounts to nothing." Of course Paul's letters were because he wasn't physically available to teach, but that doesn't stop me from relating to them from my own standpoint. As I can obviously see from the bible, Paul was a great orator, which easily translated (sometimes via dictation) to his letters. I, however, have neither great oratory or God-inspired biblical writing. 2 Corinthians 10 is a great chapter, but verses 1 and 9 through 11 always spring out at me. "By the meekness and gentleness of Christ, I appeal to you-...