So…blogging for Lent. That went well, huh?  :)

I’m not sure what happened. I woke up on day 3 with a clear plan to write here about shopping for a new car and realizing that I am more of a “satisficer” than a “maximizer” when it comes to adding new things to my life. (I like to find the car – or sweater or coffee mug, etc. –  that meets my needs, buy it, and then get on with life. I don’t need to see and evaluate all of the possibilities before I can make a choice. For more on this distinction, see this from Gretchen Rubin.)

Perhaps my satisficer ways caught up with me, because by the end of the day, I was quite content with not having blogged. The same the next day, and the day after that. As it turns out, the shift in my brain–from living life in tiny scenes suitable for writing to just living life–has been rather complete. More so than I planned, at least.

This has been exacerbated by one big failure on my part: I denied the part of me that has known since childhood that I am not liturgically designed, and tried for the past year to live by the liturgical calendar. I worked hard to care about the seasons of the church.  But Good Lord (and I mean that in a prayerful way, not as blasphemy) I do not care. Try as I might, I cannot sync my attitude toward God with this worldwide timeframe. I am neither sorrowful on schedule nor anticipatory on demand. My gratitude for Jesus’ birth never happens in late December. It pops up all throughout the year like dandelions – pretty, but not the stuff of a well-groomed lawn.  I can’t describe how grateful I was this year when our church finally put away the manger scenes and announced the return to Ordinary Time. I love Ordinary Time!  This is (at least in my experience) when miracles happen today.  To maintain some sort of spiritual equilibrium, I need at least 2/3 of my attention focused on what God is doing today. I can’t live on a diet of just remembering things from the past.

Then Lent came early this year and simply did me in.

So I’m stopping now with the liturgical calendar, and committing to live in Ordinary Time. Only I believe that’s a bit of a misnomer. Extraordinary Time is where we really live. We just have to be brave enough to look for it.

And as God does stuff, I’ll show up here to talk about it. It’s not much of a promise, but I suspect I’ll have a better time of keeping it. Thanks for your patience as God reorganizes me. He seems surprisingly unconcerned with the metrics of social media :)