The Promise: Easter as You’ve Never Imagined It

After a year or more of pursuing this vague idea of  living spiritually, God has been calling me into wonder. And not just wondering why or how things are, though that too. I mean an awe, an apprehension and living within mystery. A living out of the Albert Einstein quote, “He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.”

And so as Easter approached, it occurred to me that living spiritually and Easter especially is about wonder, mystery. God, so often doing and being just beyond our ability to fully grasp. Even if we know and believe the facts of Jesus’ resurrection, there is much we cannot explain or understand.

Neal Armstrong said, “Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man’s desire to understand.” There is mystery and wonder in a once occupied tomb now empty. But the heart of Easter is that we cannot completely understand. And the call of the empty tomb and Jesus alive again is to lean into that mystery and wonder, not control and contain it with anemic explanations, either expressions of faith or unbelief.

The Promise began in this pursuit of wonder and led to a conversation about the hidden wonder of Easter and the question, “Why an empty tomb?” By the end of the conversation, we were wondering what the world would be like if the women returning to Jesus’ tomb had found his body still there.

Thus I rewrote Luke 24:1-12 (If this is sin, God forgive me) to reflect Jesus not fulfilling his promise to rise again. Then I gave the storyboard to a gifted young film-maker, Drew Byerly, who filmed and directed our heresy.

Take a moment to reflect. How would I be different? How would you be different? Assuredly we would not be who we are, we would not be changed. Then listen to Neal Browne read what Luke actually wrote. And then spend a few minutes with me in my Easter sermon exploring the question: “Why an Empty Tomb?”

P.S. I am taking a short Sabbatical and taking time to listen, read, learn, pray, walk, and write (though not for public consumption). I will return to blogging in a couple of weeks.

The Good News of Les Mis

The Grace Board by Eugene and Dee Dee Scott. Photo by Eugene C Scott

A few months ago I saw a thought-provoking work of art called “Before I die I want to.”  It’s an artistic bucket-list.  As it was designed to, it made me rethink what is important to me.  I wound up thinking about who I want to spend time with–not what I want to do–before I die.  I wrote a blog about it you can read by clicking here.  As art and an image conveying an idea, it stuck in my head and heart like a splinter.  I’m glad for that.

But it also made me realize very little of what we accomplish in life provides a real, lasting feeling or knowledge of worth that so many of us long for.  To paraphrase that old folk tune “My Bucket List’s Got a Hole in It.”  We check off item after item after item after item endlessly adding new items hoping that the next one will fulfill.  But still we just don’t feel right or good or worthy.  Like puppets, we live with strings attached, pulling or being pulled by our desire to be loved unconditionally.

“I love you,” we say, hoping for a like response.

“I’ll help,” we offer, dying for someone to recognize how important we are.

“Look at what I did,” we shout like a child on a swing for the first time.

How different could our bucket-lists be if we knew we were loved, important, watched over by a God who does love us unconditionally, who loves us whether we deserve it, earn it, want it, or even love back?

In Victor Hugo’s novel “Les Misérables” Jean Valjean receives this kind of gift, a gift of grace.  Caught stealing the Bishop’s silver and facing, once again, life in a tortuous prison, Jean Valjean is “dejected” and “overwhelmed.”

Then the Bishop gives him a second chance.  “Well, but how is this? I gave you the candlesticks too, which are of silver like the rest, and for which you can certainly get two hundred francs.”

Thus freed Jean Valjean cannot believe, because he has done nothing to deserve this.  Then the Bishop says, “Do not forget, never forget, that you have promised to use this money in becoming an honest man.”

Jean Valjean had made no such promise.  But the truth that Hugo proclaims here is that when we receive unconditional love and grace it changes us.  It frees us.  Cuts the strings.  And we must be different.  We can be different!

Because of the Bishop’s grace, Jean Valjean is able to become a new person, start a new life, live under difficult circumstance, run a factory, adopt an orphan, and inspire heroism.  That’s quite a bucket-list.  What are you able to do because of God’s grace?

Imagine then, who each of us could be and what we each of us could do if we received and believed in God’s grace the way Jean Valjean receives and believes in the Bishop’s.  It would matter not that the bucket’s got a hole because God has an endless supply.  And maybe the hole is part of the point.  We let God’s grace and love and forgiveness and eternity out our holes and into the lives of others while God fills us back up.

Oh, that is how I want to live.

So, inspired by “Before I die,” ”Les Misérables,” and mostly by the grace of God I have received, I made “The Grace Board.” We set it up in church and wrote what all of us are now able to do because of the grace of God.

The Grace Board by Eugene and Dee Dee Scott. Photo by Eugene C Scott

Now it’s your turn.  In the comment section finish the sentence “Because of the grace of God, I am able to . . .”

Understanding Miracles

A Daily Miracle: Sunset by Eugene C. Scott

I looked up from my computer into their wonder-filled eyes, saucer round and big.

“The light went off,” reported the six-year-old girl.

“All by itself,” her five-year-old brother chimed in–breathless.

They were over with their parents, who were downstairs participating in a Bible study.  The two children had been playing quietly in the living room while I was beating against a wall of blogger’s block in the family room.  Their choice of words and the frightened looks on their faces revealed they believed something more than a light bulb burning out had occurred.  They followed me cautiously back into the living room.

I made a beeline through the dark living room for the offending lamp.  It has a timer that turns it on and off.  The recent time change had discombobulated it.  I simply turned it back on.  Relief and disappointment mingled on their faces.  They were hoping for more.  A miracle?  Or at least a profound mystery.

So it is with us adults too.  We encounter things we don’t quite understand–a coincidental happening, an answer to prayer, a remission the doctors can’t account for, a book or blog or friend delivering just the words of encouragement we needed, or something more.  And in our hearts mingle fear and wonder as we step into the dark room of mystery.

We want an explanation and we don’t.  We’re afraid understanding the mechanism of a miracle will unmake it.  But miracles and mysteries are not made or unmade by our understanding them.

That God used doctors and medicine to heal me of my childhood seizures is no less miraculous than if they simply ceased one day through the administration of prayer.  I am still healed.  Natural and logical events manipulated by the hand of God are no less wonderful than those we would call supernatural.

Miracles that seem to have no natural source are not better than others.  This is fallacy.

This may come from another fallacious belief: that understanding equals control.  We may understand the miracle of the earth rotating around the sun and the sun providing warmth and life to us.  But we will never control it.  Understanding such things only gives us a better trail to their source.  God!

Peace Like a River by Leif Enger

In his best-selling novel, Peace Like a River, Leif Enger plays with the idea of miracles.  Reuben, the narrator, is in need of one but is struggling to believe in them.

“My sister, Swede,” says Reuben, “who often sees to the nub, offered this: People fear miracles because they fear being changed–though ignoring them will change you also. Swede said another thing, too, and it rang in me like a bell: No miracle happens without a witness. Someone to declare, Here’s what I saw. Here’s how it went. Make of it what you will.”

I like this.  Miracles are to be witnessed, told, whether they are dissected or not.  And most of all miracles are a change agent of God.

In the story of Jesus healing the man of a demon named Legion, Jesus tells the fearful and wonder-filled man, “Go home to your own people and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you.”

Jesus does not tell him to explain it, understand it, or make more of it than it is.  He is simply to tell about it.

Living spiritually has at its core a call to see life as miraculous.  To see and tell what the Lord has done for you.  From the eggs on your breakfast plate to the disappearance of a tumor.

Leif Enger using Reuben Land’s voice again: “We see a newborn moth unwrapping itself and announce, Look, children, a miracle!  But let an irreversible wound be knit back to seamlessness?  We won’t even see it, though we look at it every day.”

What miracle are you looking at today?

Death in the Family

Dear friends

Last Thursday, October 18, on my 56th birthday, my brother-in-law passed away.  He had been ill for a long time and so it was a bitter release.  I had a blog half-written that is still incomplete.  Managing grief seemed to be the agenda of every day not writing.  Thank you for your understanding.  He was a creative, intelligent man and we will miss him.  A free spirit.

His death certainly was a reminder that living spiritually is not all about profound quotes, surreal sunsets, and happy thoughts.

Life and death walk with their fingers entwined like co-dependant lovers, sometimes angry and out of step with each other but never letting go.  Living spiritually is about facing death while dreaming about the life that is beyond this veil.   Pray for our family that the strength of God fills us for today and the hope of God encourages us for tomorrow and beyond.

Eugene

What Would You Say to a Resurrected Lady?

When I was in ninth grade, a friend and I climbed over the fence of a drive-in theater to watch a movie.  Not because we didn’t have enough money.  Because the drive-in was showing a movie we weren’t allowed to see. Allen Funt of the family friendly TV show “Candid Camera,” which caught people in awkward situations while being filmed secretly, had branched out into movies.

The movie was “What Do You Say to a Naked Lady.”  And it featured real naked ladies.

Thus our reason for wanting to see it.  Funt, however, unlike me, must have seen naked women before because, after the initial shot of the elevator door opening on a naked woman, his camera concentrated more on the faces of the victims.  Also, we were kicked out shortly after the movie started.  Life is so unfair!

I’ve still not seen the entire movie.

Anyway, Funt’s genius and driving desire seemed to be catching people in situations where they would say things unfiltered, authentic, honest.  Funny.

Recently, as I was preparing to preach on Acts 9:32-43, the story of Peter praying and bringing a woman named Tabitha back to life, I remembered Allen Funt and wondered why no one asked Tabitha what it was like to be dead, or if she wanted to be brought back to life (I know this is a scary glimpse into how my mind works, or doesn’t, as the case may be).

But these are serious questions after all.  Our greatest fear is death.  And the ultimate question is, “what comes after this life?”  We can only imagine, as the song says.

So, I did.  I imagined interviewing Tabitha.  Then I wrote a script and had Mike Davis and Deirdre Byerly perform it and film school student, Drew Byerly, direct and record it.  I showed it in worship.  Take a look at it and tell me what you think.

What would you say to a resurrected lady?

Fighting Entropy or Spiritual Failure

Entropy is everywhere

Entropy is a constant. Entropy is that force that moves life from order to disorder. It takes a newly cleaned room and shuffles keys, books, pillows, and clothing out of their given places and into spots we never dreamed of. In its mildest forms entropy musses freshly combed hair and scatters dust bunnies under the bed.

But it can be a tornado tearing through our  goals and desires, our best intentions, turning them to rubble. It is the force that resists and defeats our New Years resolutions. It is the sad pull of gravity that takes a shiny new community and turns it to a ghetto.

Entropy is constant and powerful and often wears us out.

So too our spiritual lives. Spiritual entropy wears us out. Or it does me.

Shortly after Christmas of 2011, my son, Brendan and I decided to call 2012 The Year of Living Spiritually. 2012 would be a year of actively looking for God in daily life. We would notice things we had before brushed over. We would listen better for God in the usual places like Scripture and worship. But we also decided to look for God in art and music and nature and even in pain. In people. We then recorded our discoveries in daily journals and reported them in blogs and our Living Spiritually Facebook page.

It was exhilarating. God was everywhere. I filled my first journal in three months. I felt alive and awake as never before. I prayed more, listened better.

Then came spiritual entropy. I misplaced my journal and missed a day. Then two. Then more. Scripture reading became spotty. People in line at Wal-Mart once again became hindrances to my agenda rather than unique creations of an incredible God. I turned my back on glorious sunsets much less the smaller artistic touches God often puts on a day.

My eyes glazed over (spiritually and physically) and I ceased to see. I’ve failed spiritually. You ever been there?

But I want what I had back. I don’t want entropy to win. I want to wake up again.

So, how does one fight spiritual entropy?

At this point, I’m not sure. But I do know fighting spiritual entropy is different from fighting physical entropy. Cleaning up the messy room is a start but it’s not the ultimate solution. Spiritual entropy gains strength from our puny efforts to tame it or force order into it.

Unlike physical fitness, spiritual fitness does not come from lifting ever heavier weights.

In spiritual living there is this contradictory concept called rest. Jesus said it this way, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

It’s a letting go. It’s counter intuitive. Hard to define. Tough to live out.

So in coming blogs we will try to define it.

And I’d love to hear from you. How do you fight spiritual entropy?

How the Movie The Return of the King Calls Us to Worship

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King is one of my all-time favorite movies. Not only because it is one of few movies adapted from an even better book that didn’t slaughter the story (Nerd alert! I’ve read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings Trilogy a dozen times). And I’m not alone in my assessment. It was a critical and box-office success and won eleven Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

But I loved The Return of the King because it told such a big engrossing story. Like all good epics Peter Jackson’s movie connected the small everyday lives of its characters: Frodo, Sam, Strider, Legolas, Pippin, Faramir, and gang with a struggle much bigger than themselves. Save Middle Earth from slavery and death. The film deftly shows each individual character’s role in that cosmic battle.

Like The Return of the King, Worship is Epic

Epic stories well-told, such as The Return of the King, become classics because they strike a chord deep in our souls. Instinctively we want to be part of the chorus singing about the significance of life, if even singing from the back row. Or to return to a movie metaphor: simply to be even an extra in the army of Gondor might be enough to give our lives meaning.

This is because God created us to be a part of something grand, epic, so to speak. That is what that strange activity called worship is supposed to do: connect our small, everyday lives to something–or more so, Someone–bigger.

What Blocks Worship?

Donald Miller, of Blue Like Jazz fame, calls this living a better story. Worship is the door through which we enter a better story, God’s story. Unfortunately the story conflict often blocking the way is not a malicious ring, or Sauron but daily drudgery. Doing dishes, watching the news, rushing here or there. Forgetfulness.

Maybe we ignore God’s casting call to play even a small role in God’s Grand Story because we think we are miscast, or unable, or we believe there is no such thing as a Grand Story. Yet, as I wrote in my last blog, there are no expendable crew members for God. You are not miscast as a worshiper. It’s the role you and I were made for. Most people, when asked what they would do with large lottery winnings, say pay off debt and then do something big, like help the homeless. Worship. And, as to belief, even non-theistic scientists search for the meaning of life, the answer, the Big Bang. Again worship, just not of God.

We were created to worship God. This is why moutainscapes, brilliant music, the flick of a bird’s wing, or the birth of a baby freeze us mid-breath and leave us seeking more. They tantalize our earth-bound imaginations. Encountering these mysterious moments free our imaginations while at the same time worship of God anchors them to something real, not just fanciful.

Worship is More than Filling our God Tanks on Sunday

Sadly even many who believe in God have forsaken this gorgeous gift from God, unless it be the rare gape at nature.

For many the trappings of religion are what deaden the desire to worship God. Church does not often feel epic. Worship has become a show, or duty, or a time and place to get what we need from God. Worship today is filled with purposes and propositions and practical applications. All the while keeping the true mystery of communicating with God miles from us.

“In Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places” Eugene H. Peterson debunks this popular view of worship. He writes, “Fear-of the Lord [his biblical term for a lifestyle of worship] is not studying about God but living in reverence before God. . . is not a technique for acquiring spiritual know-how but a willed not knowing [italics mine]. It is not so much know-how we lack; we lack a simple being there. Fear-of-the-Lord nurtured in worship and prayer, silence and quiet, love and sacrifice, turns everything we do into a life of ‘breathing God’.”

Much church worship is anything but breathing God. Worship is simply “being there.” Where? In the Presence of God.

Add Worship Back into Your Life’s Menu

But just like when some meals are bland and wolfed down only to fill our empty stomaches, we do not stop seeking that one gourmet meal set in an ambiance of laughter and delight, so too we need not give up the wonder of worship simply because we have turned it into fast food.

Next time you see a movie or read a story or view a sunset that makes you yearn for something bigger, give in to the urge and turn your eyes to God. It’s God calling, trying to connect you to something epic, Someone bigger than yourself. Go ahead, worship.

Eugene C. Scott believes the command to love God with all we are is an invitation to worship. Join him in the year The Year of Living Spiritually. You can join the Living Spiritually community by following that blog and clicking here and liking the page. He is also co-pastor of The Neighborhood Church.

2001 A Space Odyssey, Psalm 121, and Home

I grew up in southwest Denver with the Rocky Mountains beginning their ascent just fifteen miles west of my house. During the day, they towered over us. In the evening the sun set red behind them.

At night, from anywhere in my little world, I could look west and see a huge cross hanging on Mount Lindo. Just one sweep with my eyes told me where I was (the city was simpler then) and centered me, though I would not have called it that then.

One night as a middle schooler, I came out of a local theater after watching the confusing, frightening film “2001 A Space Odyssey.” The movie disturbed me. I didn’t know what on earth to make of it. I felt lost, disconnected from reality, as if my space tether had been cut. Then, standing in the parking lot waiting for my mom I looked west, and found the cross hanging there in the night sky. Suddenly I knew where I was. My feet touched down on my soil again. My soul settled.

Photo by Scott Lowther

Those mountains became more than landmarks for me. They are my roots, my anchor. My father loved fishing and hunting and camping. He took us up into the mountains every chance he got. After he died of a heart attack, climbing back up into the mountains was how I kept in touch with him.

After we moved out of Colorado in 1990, I felt lost again, like on that night way back in middle school. I would stand on the great flat plains of Illinois surrounded by corn and look west searching, yearning. No mountains, no cross, no memories. I felt who I was began slipping from my fingers.

Then while we lived in Tulsa, still 790 miles from my mountains, I read, as if for the first time, Psalm 121.

I look up to the mountains;

does my strength come from mountains?

No, my strength comes from God,

who made heaven, and earth, and mountains.

He won’t let you stumble,

your Guardian God won’t fall asleep.

Not on your life! Israel’s

Guardian will never doze or sleep.

God’s your Guardian,

right at your side to protect you—

Shielding you from sunstroke,

sheltering you from moonstroke.

God guards you from every evil,

he guards your very life.

He guards you when you leave and when you return,

he guards you now, he guards you always.

Slowly I realized as much as the Rockies mean to me, they are only symbols of the true source of my identity and strength. As a twelve-year old boy, I knew nothing about God and so looking up and seeing that cross hanging in the night sky only grounded me physically. But it was a prophetic event.

Now those mountains and that cross on Mount Lindo (we moved back to Colorado in 2001) point me to something bigger than myself. To the Creator. To a God of power and love.

Scot Lowther

What is your anchor? Is it something that God is using to point you to Someone even stronger yet?

Eugene C. Scott finds it ironic that he moved back to Colorado in 2001, the same year as the “Space Odyssey” that discombobulated him so. Join him in the year The Year of Living Spiritually. You can join the Living Spiritually community by following that blog and clicking here and liking the page. He is also co-pastor of The Neighborhood Church.

Freeing Yourself from the Curse of the Redshirt, the Expendable Crewman

“Nobody wants to be the expendable crewman,” my friend Mark said over the phone the other day. For some strange reason we were talking about how in the original Star Trek, when Kirk, Bones, Spock, and some anonymous crew member in a red uniform beamed down to a planet filled with hostile aliens, the crewman in the redshirt always ended up dead, while Captain Kirk scores the sexy alien who looks vaguely like a Victoria Secret model, only with green skin.

I loved Star Trek.

A dead “redshirt”, Lt. Leslie (Eddie Paskey), in the Star Trek episode “Obsession” (1967)

To ensure the story had conflict someone had to die and it could’t be Kirk, Spock, Scotty, or Bones (unless it was a show featuring time warps where the deceased Kirk, Spock, Scotty, or Bones comes back by the end of the show, but that’s another story). Trekkies dubbed this guy “the redshirt” or “the expendable crewman.”

And no one wants to be that guy.

But many of us get up each morning, don our redshirts, and beam down to a hostile environment with a sinking suspicion we are indeed expendable. That’s why I don’t wear red much. I don’t want to be the next target.

Do you feel expendable?

But seriously. There is always someone who can do our jobs better, is better looking, is younger, or older, or smarter, nicer, funnier, taller, newer, or just all around better.

For example, when I first decided to go into church planting four years ago, after over twenty-five years in the pastorate, a younger pastor–an expert in church planting–advised me that, at my age, I should consider church redevelopment instead. Translated that means, “Old guys like you can only handle dying churches. Leave the real, hard work to us younger guys.” I wanted to punch him, but he was considerably younger and I didn’t want to hurt him.

He saw me as a redshirt, completely expendable. I’m glad I listened to a higher authority on what I can and can’t do.

Have you been told you’re the expendable crewman?

God, the higher authority, doesn’t see you that way. 

I find it ironic that the Being who needs no one else in order to exist does not view us as expendable while many of us who desperately need each other in order to survive treat each other as disposable.

JesusMosaics

Is that because we’ve been conditioned by a throw-away, newer is better culture? Probably. But we created that culture.

The deeper reason for this attitude might be that we believe if we treat others as redshirts on our crew then we must be the indispensable James T. Kirk–or his equivalent. Treating others as expendable makes us feel as though we are not. Work-a-holism boils down to this.

“I must . . . make . . . myself . . . indispensable,” we groan under the load while our children, spouses, friends, and sometimes God himself wait out by the trash dumpster.

But doesn’t this only make us more insecure?

Thus we’re constantly looking over our shoulders for our replacement, creating a vicious circle. We know he or she looms there because we were once someone’s replacement.

The true source of our security.

This is why knowing we were created and loved by an Indispensable God is so crucial to living healthy, spiritual lives. It gives us a true, unmovable foundation to base our lives on.

God does not need you or me in order for the world to keep spinning, for the world to be healed.

Better! He wants us to play a part.

God is not waiting for someone better to parent your children, sing your song, love your spouse, do your job, pray your prayer, write your book, right a wrong, weed your garden, laugh with your friend, be a part of your community, or dream your dream. God chooses to love you and out of that love chooses to use you.  God’s choice makes you non-expendable, not your false belief that you can live without others, nor your IQ, fast car, job, or lofty, faulty self-image. So take off that damn redshirt and get busy.

Eugene C. Scott is non-expendable in part because he can perform the “live long and prosper” sign without glue or masking tape. Please join the Living Spiritually community by following his blog and clicking here and liking the page. He is also co-pastor of The Neighborhood Church.

The War in Afghanistan and Mother’s Day Combine to Make a Holy Day

Flags along our street marking a return from war

Sunday morning, Mother’s Day, as the light of a new day was still meandering down our street, my across the way neighbor walked out to the curb to pick up his newspaper. He stood for a long time staring up and down the street, holding his paper, a look of satisfaction smoothing his creased face. I followed his gaze.

American flags, on thin steel poles, about ten feet tall, lined my side of the road. He watched the flags catch the wind. I could see the pride swell in him as the flags fluttered.

After a time, he turned on his heel and stepped over the purple flowers draping the sidewalk and started back to his house. But he stopped, turned, and looked to his right at the three small stars and stripes he had decorating his garden. Bending down he pulled the middle flag up, adjusted it, and stuck it back in the ground. Then he stood facing the three flags, erect, heels together as if on a parade ground, as if he wanted to salute, but couldn’t. Maybe because he’s retired Air Force and was not in uniform. He and time stood still. Finally satisfied, he trooped back up to his front door.

The night before, a family in our neighborhood had welcomed home their son from the war in Afghanistan and had asked permission to plant flags along our street. I don’t know the family, though I’m very happy for them. And on Mother’s day weekend! They–along with me and my neighbor–will remember this holiday for a long time.

A daily reminder of a son

Soon my neighbor’s door closed behind him and I returned to brewing my coffee.

Why Celebrate?

Humans celebrate special events. We mark birthdays, rites of passage, anniversaries, raises, graduations, and important memories. Our lives revolve around rhythms: Christmas, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Passover, Easter, Cinco de Mayo, July 4, Father’s Day (hint, hint), and more. If we can’t find a reason to celebrate we make one up.

Animals don’t do this. At least not the ones I’ve known. My sweet dog wagged her entire body, tail first, the same way every time I returned home whether I’d been gone ten minutes or ten days.

We Need Holidays

Perhaps we need holidays because we habituate to the remarkable. “Ho hum,” people living in Vail eventually say to a mountain scape. God paints a new, unique, glorious sunrise every morning and we need a Sunrise Service to make it special. Everyday is a gift but we need birthdays to remind us.

Without a rhythm of feasts and festivals and parties throughout the year we may have to resort to the techniques advertisers use on us shouting, “New and Improved,” “Free,” “Epic television” just to get us to pay attention to our own lives. Or not.

Skeptics ask, “Why celebrate mothers only one day a year?” Yes, we should be grateful for mothers and fathers (hint, hint), and sunrises and our faith and marriages and children and each other every day. But to set a day aside and mark it out for a special celebration elevates the person or issue or idea above all others, if only for that day.

Everyday Can’t Be Holy

This is what the word “holy” originally meant: “special or set apart.” Thus a holiday is a holy day, or season set apart for special recognition. Despite what Garrison Keillor says, we can’t all be above average.

Most of the twenty or so flags are still standing along my street. They are beautiful still; but now when I’m in a hurry to get to an appointment, I can’t drive slowly admiring them and praying for the family whose son returned.

And I have since seen my across the street neighbor once again retrieve his paper. This time he picked it up and went straight back in. Perhaps his coffee and eggs would burn if he lingered. Or perhaps we both had that one holy moment and that was enough. We simply need to be prepared for the next one.

Eugene C. Scott fancies himself a writer so believes he has poetic license to watch people and write stuff about them. He is also attempting to write about what it’s like to live spiritually for a year.  You can join the Living Spiritually community by following this blog and clicking here and liking the page. He is also co-pastor of The Neighborhood Church.