Christmas is Coming; The Goose is Getting Fat

Can you believe it's almost November?! I can hardly stand it. The entire month of October, I've been looking forward to the 23th because of the costume party Taylor and I hosted. It was a huge success: 50 luminaries lit up the long driveway to the house, 30 hotdogs were consumed, and 27 friends showed up. We had Mario and Peach, Paul Bunyan and Babe, the Blue Ox, an Electrical Outlet, Barbie and Ken, Barbie's Horse, a Building Block, G.I. Joe and many others proudly sporting costumes. It was a very good (and very exhausting) night.

But now it's over, and the house it all cleaned up. My feet hurt, and it's back to looking forward to Day of Prayer and then Thanksgiving. It's amazing how fast time goes . . . even when it feel to be going as slowly as the drip from an IV. But is still presses on, and we get carried away with it even if we're not looking. So, I intend to look. A little prayer card that I got on the Emmaus Walk had an incredibly sobering prayer on it. I will now misquote the entire thing and try to give a brief summary:

"God, thank you for this day you have given me. Please help me see how valuable this day is. I want to use it for good and not evil, for love and not hate. Whatever I do with this day is important, because at the end of it, I will have traded a day of my life for it."

Rather sobering, isn't it? Even if it's just going to Costco or doing homework, by the end of it, that day will be gone, and we can never get it back. So that prayer is mine for you today. As Annie Dillard writes, "There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is a life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet."

Choose the life of the spirit.

I Can't Believe It.

I made a pact at the beginning of the semester that when I'm driving somewhere, I'd only listen to 90.5 -- the Classical Station. I created this pact because I was disgusted with a song I heard (I really don't even know what it was) when driving back into Dayton after I arrived home. So, whenever I'm in the car, I listen to classical. And I love it.

So in the car yesterday to go have dinner, and a song was playing on the popular rap channel that I do like. So I listened to it until it ended and paused to see what the next song was. Naturally, I had no idea what the song was, for it's been for months since I've really listened to any popular music channels (I just recently figured out that the "Party in the USA" song was by Miley Cirus). But there was one line that the rapper "sang" that caught my attention: "Her love is so WIFI."

I decided the song is not worth three minutes of my time and changed it in time to listen to the last half of a concerto by an artist I'd never listened to. But that line stayed in my head. It made me sad for a generation of people who believe that love can be something without commitment, come-and-go, and no-strings-attached. When I think of love, I think of my parents. Theirs is a love of complete commitment, staying-for-a-lifetime, and everything-comes-with-it-(including-the-junk). I would never in my wildest dreams have constructed a simile of that stripe.

It makes me sad, oh it makes me so sad.