Momma's Day

To all the mothering types of the world: Happy Mother's Day. As I discovered many of my colleagues do, I struggle with the inclusion of Mother's Day on Sunday morning. For some it's a great day of joy and happiness, but for so many others, it's just NOT. For women who long to give birth but can't, for women whose children - of any age - have preceded them in death, for men and women who have difficult relationships with their moms... so many reasons that it can be a harder than average day.
There was much discussion on the RevGalBlogPals blog about Mother's Day and how to include it, or not, in worship. One of the most helpful pieces was posted at a pearl down under. I included this litany in the prayers of intercession this morning. I think it's pretty great.

Of course, this is my first momma's day as a momma, and apart from the sleep deprivation, I have to say it's been a good day. I got to talk to my Mom and my Mom-in-law. G gave me a great card and a gift certificate to the spa at the hospital (where I had an absolutely GLORIOUS pre-natal massage about a month before baby arrived). And I got to spend the day snuggling with one of the cutest kids ever. Here's a photo (taken 13 days ago) of the Munchkin whose Momma I am blessed to be:

What I've Been Up To

Here she is, in all her newborn glory.

When folks ask me how I am, my new answer is "I'm 'New-Mom Tired.'" And loving it, of course. There have been so many would-have-been posts over the last few months. Oh well. Some almost get written. Most don't. And life goes on.

2009 in Pictures

The year in photos from The New York Times - some powerful pictures.

Yuletide Greetings

Merry Christmas! We had a lovely day in Bozeman - a few snowflakes fell as the sun came up and while we opened our packages - it was a little like being in a snowglobe. Worship this morning was considerably more intimate than last night, which was to be expected. I always think it's amazing how few congregations even have a service on Christmas Day, and am glad we do, even though it is fairly small. We began with "Carols By Request" - letting folks choose their favorite carols to sing. It's one way to get more music in, since we don't sing too many Christmas carols during Advent. After returning home we had lunch, talked to our parents and then took naps before getting ready for Christmas dinner. We'd invited a member of our congregation to join us - she's an international graduate student at MSU and is a lot of fun. Her tales of Christmas in Zimbabwe were interesting - definitely not like Christmas in Bozeman! Hope you enjoyed the first of the twelve days of Christmas. Merry merry!

Procrastination Station

One of the best parts of signing up for National Novel Writing Month, besides actually writing a novel (I hit the 19,000 word mark last night, and hope to be at 25,000 words before I go to bed on Sunday night), is the NaNoWriMo website. It rocks. Just about all of it is accessible to everyone, though to post in the forums you need to register, which also implies you're writing a book. ANYWAY - one of my favorite sections, of course, is the "Procrastination Station." Every day or two, two new links to wonderful websites and opportunities to avoid writing are posted. Yesterday I discovered wordle, and if you haven't seen it yet, go check it out. You can paste in a bunch of text (like your whole novel so far, or a sermon, or anything) and it generates a word cloud based upon it. The most frequently used words are the biggest, on down to pretty small type for the least frequently used words. You can change the font, the color, the orientation of the words. Super fun! Plus, you can use what you create any way you want - I'm thinking there are some uber-groovy t-shirts in our youth group's future!

Here's an example: this is the wordle of the top 150 words from my Consecration Sunday sermon from last year (Grant's preaching at Commitment Sunday this year. Pray for him - it's this week!)