Today

Now it is November and with the turning of the figurative calendar page comes the temptation to project. What will tomorrow hold? The rest of this month? This year? Anxiety rises with each what if? that bubbles to the surface.

Yes, we are heading toward the short and darkest days of the year. Yes, there are traditions, and we wonder which of them we’ll keep and which we’ll release. Yes, there is that election and how all of that will play out. And the pandemic. Yes, we’re still riding a strange wave there.

This morning I sit in silence in the den with a sleeping Yorkie wrapped in a blanket on my lap, and return to a liturgy of reading and prayer that quiets the storm. I’ve risen too early thanks to our mucking with time yesterday, but the extra hour is a gift.

I ponder and pray, contemplate and cry out, worship—but find what I need most of all in silence and solitude and stillness.

In a slim volume called Venite: A Book of Daily Prayer (Robert Benson, 2017) I read the same words I read most days: “this is the way of the kingdom . . .”.

And I am reminded . ..

That today matters.

That looking ahead is all well and good, and sometimes there’s good reason to do so, but not just now.

That there will be opportunities to give more than I take and the choices I make will create ripples I won’t even see.

That transformation is more important than transaction.

That the Divine doesn’t sort us into categories.

That the world needs your gifts as much as it needs mine.

And that the most important thing I can do today is simple, but I will struggle to do it reasonably well.

Love.

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November is Adoption Awareness Month. The best way to understand adoption is to listen to adoptees.

For a limited time this month, both of my memoirs are available on Kindle for $1.99.

I’m sharing links to other adoptee memoirs throughout the month on my Facebook page.