For those of you who live in the United States, I trust this past week was a beneficial week for you. And I’m well aware that we’ll be exercising some of those “benefits” away this week. Seriously, what once was a holiday that I barely enjoyed as a teen (I think it was the fact that many people crammed into a small hot house for 3-4 days) is now a week that I treasure and enjoy. I don’t do the shopping adventure, but I like the time with family, the opportunity to stop and reflect, and to catch up a bit too. And maybe it’s because I’m the one now orchestrating the cramming of people into familiar places.
Have you noticed how Thanksgiving is becoming less of a just a day and more of a week off? It seems that more schools are giving the Wednesday before off as well … and more families are planning bigger vacations around the holiday. Quite a few colleges now give the whole week off and I think that more and more will consider it, though I am not sure how that will affect student learning. I had many students skip my class on Tuesday, even those who knew that doing so lowered their final grade since they had used their skips up already.
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Posted on Monday, November 26th, 2012 at 7:56 AM in IN THIS CORNER. One comment
This is a bit of a “thinking out loud” therapeutic post. I invite you to jump in on this and respond.
I’ve been reflecting this past month on ‘wisdom’ and what it looks like in everyday life. The importance of wisdom seemed to pop up often – during various meetings where the future seemed unclear, while parenting teenaged children, and in my reading. Wisdom’s value seems obvious. It’s what separates people, yet it seems to be a rare commodity. Troll through the Internet, watch the news, or listen to people talk at your local gathering place and you’ll find anything but wisdom at work.
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Posted on Monday, April 9th, 2012 at 7:35 AM in LEAD WELL. 2 comments
[This was one of my more popular posts last year, so I modified it a bit and reposted it .... because I'm shoveling/moving mulch.]
Recently a small dump truck put 8 cubic yards of hardwood mulch in my driveway. On purpose. It’s the amount we purchased this year to spruce up our flower beds for Lauren’s upcoming graduation party. Everything has to be perfect, you know!
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Posted on Wednesday, May 25th, 2011 at 6:06 PM in IN THIS CORNER, LEAD WELL. No comments
My son asked me to sit at the piano and play a new choral piece they got a school. The song is powerful, featuring six part harmonies and a captivating melody. For a former music major, it would be a fun piece to play…Except that I couldn’t. Oh, I muddled through it even though I hadn’t been practicing or playing much for quite a long time. It felt alien to slowly figure out which notes to play. And the sounds coming from the piano were off key and wrong. I chuckled a bit as I played, I used to be able to take such a piece and play it a third higher or lower, figuring out the key changes in my head as I played.
I experienced significant disappointment that I had lost so much of what once was so important – and I was sad to be so out of practice. I knew that if I had the historic capability, with regular practice, to return to some form. But I also feared that maybe I would never be able to play like I once did. I tried a simple B flat scale run to see if I still had the basics, and I could even do play that evenly like I once did.
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Posted on Monday, March 7th, 2011 at 6:35 AM in LEAD WELL, YOUTH MINISTRY. 4 comments
Recently a small dump truck put 12 cubic yards of hardwood mulch in my driveway. On purpose. It’s the amount we purchase every other year to cover all of our flower beds and various areas around the property. It was a big pile! When the UPS guy stopped by later that day (with camping gear for this year’s wilderness trip), he remarked, “Looks like someone’s going to be doing a lot of work.”
I was the someone.
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Posted on Monday, May 17th, 2010 at 3:39 AM in IN THIS CORNER, LEAD WELL. 2 comments
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