Daily (ish)

 

Matthew 6:11 NRSV

Give us this day our daily bread. 

Among all the other daily meditations I get is one titled Daily Zen.  It used to offer short very Zen sounding statements or poems about such things as sitting on a mountain near a tree with a breeze blowing or something equally calming.  They were the kind of statement you can focus on during meditation, which I’m pretty sure was the point.  Then a new person started providing the content.   I noticed the different name on the email, but I would have known it was a new person even if there was no name attached.  The poems and writings kept getting longer, too long to use as a meditation focus, so that was a problem.  But worse, my Daily Zen started showing up maybe a couple of times a week. 

At first I would simply skip the day’s offering if it looked “too long” which was anything more than about two sentences.  Eventually I noticed that the really long ones tended to be poetry, so I started reading them.  They were still too long to serve as a meditation focus on their own, but they often took me to a place where my mind could jump off into new places.  Even so, taking my cue from my dislike of long quotes, I try to only use one or two verses as a place to focus for my daily own meditation posts.

About those Daily Meditation posts.   I tell you about Daily Zen because I know that the Daily part of Daily Meditation isn’t happening quite as it could and that could be disappointing or even annoying.  Right this minute I can blame all the busy-ness around all Christmas services we are doing, but that’s not always the case.  Sometimes I’m just too tired to write another word.  Sometimes I get busy with stuff and remember late at night that I hadn’t written a meditation yet that day. And for the two weeks after Christmas I will be hibernating to gather strength for the coming Lenten Season, so there will be no Daily Meditations during that time.

I am quite sure that you all read some daily meditation(s) besides this one, and I encourage you to continue with that practice.  I’ll still be writing Daily (ish) for the rest of this week until Christmas Day.  I will return from my post-Christmas hibernation on January 9th.  

May the blessings of God fall richly upon you. Amen