Greetings!

The Ohio Chardon High School killings...random killings...no sense...just plain horrible, devastating, cruel, and "long-term sad". The grief, the loss, the lives ended in a moment; Youth, a son, gone forever to shared life on earth.

My Family: 

Today is my mother's birthday...leap year.  She died at 87 years old a few years ago.  Because of her long life, she had time to raise the 6 of us with my dad; she had time to help form us and mold us and pass on courage and goodness and dedication and simplicity and faith and a beautiful look at love.  I still think of her nearly every day...oh, I think about how I might like to share some little thing with her; or I notice some mannerism in me that she passed to me...or maybe I find myself just smiling at who she was.  I was greatly blessed to have such a mother. 

 Andrew, my brother in town, and I will get together today and cook one of Mom's meals together, just to honor her.

 

 On the Other Side of Things:  I've noticed that when we are are together as siblings, grown once-children, we often laugh at the seemingly imperfect side of my Mom as well as the good side.  There are some things that we are still trying to outgrow because of the negative effect my Mom's ways had on us.  There is, sadly, not a one of us who is perfectly perfect. In some way, even my most wonderful mother was what we call in modern terms: DYSFUNCTIONAL

In old fashion terms, she was "just Mom".

 
Lent is the time set aside in the church to take a deeper look at the DYSFUNCTIONAL part of our lives...to go after "renewal"; to sing out "Come Emanual"...GOD BE WITH US...

God dwell more deeply in my soul because I see my own neediness, the hints of "bad", the reality of dysfunction. 

God be with us...make us new...make us whiter than snow...cleanse every trace of dysfunction from our hearts and minds and souls. 

Let us love, oh God, those that are ours to love with a purer love.  Teach me, O God, your ways, your ways of love.