What goes around.....

Knowing how numbing and exhausting hospital time can be, Gene & I volunteered to cook a meal for our friends tonight.  So we spent a few hours cooking beef vegetable soup, carrot cake and French baguette bread.  We already had our dinner, home made chili, and Gene had doubled the baguette recipe so I knew fresh bread would be awaiting my return home from delivering the meal.

I was reading response, a mission magazine published by the national women's group to which I belong.  I find the articles informative and many times challenging to my faith views.  I need that.  It is so easy to get to be 65 and be a little too sure of knowing all one needs to know.  Anyway a new view on savoring was presented in an article named simply Savoring.  Starting with statements about the need for reconciliation in so many aspects of our lives, Sharon L. Vandegrift brought to me a new challenge.  The need to savor as a spiritual discipline.  "To appreciate fully ..... sensitizes us to blessings all around us and empowers us to more fully embrace a life grounded in gratitude ..... The question is not when God will act, but rather, how might we be attuned to the Divine activity already going on in the world? .....  The ability to see the holy in others is essential for reconciliation.""

As I was driving to take the meal to our dear friends I was rerunning an unpleasant situation that happened recently.  A bad habit I have is replaying conflict situations.  Something, maybe the sunset, maybe the light changing quickly, whatever, something caused me to remembered the article on savoring.  I chose to stop that negative thought loop, step back and look for the goodness in the situation.   Upon returning home from delivering the food, our neighbor had delivered a huge corner of her birthday cake!  So maybe what comes back around is in direct proportion on the positive negative scale as what goes out!

Like so much in my life when I think I got nothing, I really have a cup full, a cup overflowing.