Monday, April 17, 2006

"Lent" - Buechner

Of course it would be the day after Easter that I would come across these thopughts on Lent by Frederick Buechner.

In many cultures there is an ancient custom of giving a tenth of each year's income to some holy use. For Christians, to observe the forty days of Lent is to do the same thing with roughly a tenth of each year's days. After being baptized by John in the river Jordan, Jesus went off alone into the wilderness where he spent forty days asking himself the question what it meant to be Jesus. During Lent, Christians are supposed to ask one way or another what it means to be themselves.

If you had to bet everything you have on whether there is a God or whether there isn't, which side would get your money and why?

When you look at your face in the mirror, what do you see in it that you most like and what do you see in it that you most deplore?

If you had only one last message to leave to the handful of people who are most important to you, what would it be in twenty-five words or less?

Of all the things you have done in your life, which is the one you would most like to undo? Which is the one that makes you the happiest to remember?

Is there any person in the world, or any cause, that, if circumstances called for it, you would be willing to die for?

If this were the last day of your life, what would you do with it?

To hear yourself try to answer questions like these is to begin to hear something not only of who you are but of both what you are becoming and what you are failing to become. It can be a pretty depressing business all in all, but if sack cloth and ashes are at the start of it, something like Easter may be at the end.

2 comments:

Crystal Starr said...

Kim your new blog look is just awesome!! How do you do that???

Kimberly Cangelosi said...

Thanks Crystal! Most of it was done by just replacing the colors. I decided on a new color scheme, looked up the html code for the colors, plugged them in the template in place of the old colors. I also replaced the header and description images that were provided by blogger with my own. I didn't have to crop or resize them, just put in html commands like 'center' or 'left bottom' to display the parts I wanted. The slowest part of the process was tweaking the existing code to get things to look just right - some colors needed semicolons after them and some didn't, and some padding had to be adjusted to move the header and description texts - that was all trial and error. If you want to give your template an face-lift I'd love to help :)