This Day

In our kitchen window that looks out on the Bay -- or did before the fig tree and the sago palm and the grapefruit trees got so enormous that you can’t see anything beyond them -- Linda has a couple of tiles with quotations. One tile says “nothing is worth more than this day.” It’s attributed to Goethe, but who knows who actually said these things, it’s like reading one of the canonical Gospels, especially John, and wondering how the author knew all these verbatim discourses three generations after Easter. But it doesn’t matter, there the tile is in the window. Seems to me that Patty gave it to us a couple of years before her death but after she knew her cancer was terminal. It’s a good reminder that all life is terminal. Speaking for self alone, I confronted that realization during my cardiac waiting time from October 2010 through January 2011, and now that the immediacy seems to be lifted, I don’t want to forget it. Nothing is more important than this day. It’s all we have.

Up early, I just now finished preparing my Sunday school lesson for this morning, first one for the Fall 2013 season. At the request of people in the class, we’ll start out with Genesis. Today the older of the two creation stories, the one with God in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve. Whether it’s a sermon or a homily or my Sunday school lesson, the preparation generally continues until I start talking. Sometimes on the way to the pulpit after reading the Gospel. This is not my Sunday to preach (next Sunday is) and what to say will be up in the air until the moment it starts out of the mouth. Same this morning.

Come to Sunday School this morning. It ought to be lots of fun.

TomW+