Some thoughts, still nebulous--would love some feedback:

We were talking with Young Episcopal Memoirist today about full-time writers (she is not one). She commented that often a person will have some success with a first book, and she'll quit her job to write full time, and the second book won't be nearly as good because it's too abstract... it doesn't connect, because the writer doesn't bump up against real people on a regular basis. (Sort of like the academics who can't write for a mainstream audience because they only hobnob with eggheads like themselves.) I don't intend to quit my job to write but I found that interesting.

Related to that, last night R shared a piece from Wired Magazine about video games, and the gamemakers have long ago discovered that "abundance is boring." Some of them have created games where the players build stuff, and they've made the materials and real estate "free" in the game and people didn't enjoy playing. I've been pondering this ever since he said it. We talk in the church about God's abundance, but the reality is we live in the tension of everyday life, of "not enough hours in the day," and that can lead to real creativity if we don't let it drive us crazy. I love this, because I feel like I'm MacGyvering my way through this life with its many vocations and avocations.

Young Episcopal Memoirist shared the Celtic idea that (paraphrasing) "you have all the time you need." She said she's been ruminating on that idea, even though she doesn't understand it. I quipped, "I understand it, I just don't agree with it." Which is strange because as a pastor I have been in the habit for years now of talking about how God provides all that we really need (maybe not all that we want). There is enough time, there are enough resources, if we just discern how best to use them.

That doesn't feel helpful at all anymore, because it follows from that that if you don't get everything done, or heck, if you're poor and can't make ends meet, that it's somehow your fault. If I'm called by God to be both a pastor and a mother, and I want to "live a life worth of the calling to which I have been called," then I want to do these things well, but as Songbird said somewhere, parenting is so much about triage. Life is about triage too. It seems much more pastoral to say that there really isn't quite enough, but that it's OK.

I need to think more about this. For one thing there is a cultural dimension to this--the idea of a comfortably middle-class North American white woman saying there is not quite enough is problematic, given the way much of the world lives.