A Single Layer

This coming Sunday marks the beginning of Advent. Every year I try to take Advent as seriously as possible, and every year that seems to look a little different. I'm posting a few resources here for the similarly serious. Please let me know if any of them are particularly helpful to you. Creighton University's Praying Advent 2012  (This has almost everything you could want in terms of understanding the schedule of the season and praying through it.) The Advent Conspiracy  (Please check this one out - and share it!) Grace Brethren Church of Long Beach sermons from 2011 (Advent series at the top) Catholic Scripture readings for each day of Advent If you know of any others that have been helpful to you, please send them my way. I'm also "curating" a list of some good music for Advent, so let me know if there's anything you appreciate out of the cacophony of the season. To finish us off, here's every other Advent post I've shared in the p

Thanksgiving is a strange holiday. We talk about being grateful, but the day seems devoted to gorging ourselves on more food than we need followed by shopping for as much stuff as we can get for as little money as possible. We complain about family, travel, and weight gain. What we do not do, it seems, is find ways to be grateful. I say "find ways to be," because gratitude ought to be an activity, not just a feeling. It's perhaps because we treat it like a feeling that it holds so little influence over us. I don't know. What I do know is that it is an opportunity to shed, however briefly, our sense of entitlement, our resentments over things we don't have, and to redefine what it is we want during this season. More things? Newer things? Better things? Or something more? Image from Dishing Having said this, I do want to mention that food traditions are among my favorite of all traditions. There's a comfort to the consistency of Thanksgiving. The troubl

It's election day; I voted and so should you. As I was walking out of the polling place earlier, I thought, "There, now I'm responsible for what comes next." I took another step and corrected myself. "I'd be just as responsible if I hadn't voted at all." I was also thinking about responsibility yesterday, but in a different context. I was thinking about the difference between The Vampire Diaries and Supernatural (bear with me). In TVD , whenever something horrible happens, Elena (the main character) does a lot of stupid things and carries a lot of unnecessary burdens because this or that trauma is somehow supposedly her fault. In Supernatural , Sam and Dean do a lot of stupid things too, but rarely from a sense of guilt. They act out of a sense of responsibility for one another and they live (or die) with the consequences. Take a guess which characters are more compelling. So today, after my little responsibility thoughts, I was driving b

via Design Crush , origins unknown