Last year about this time I had just led my first retreat for a small group of out of town friends. As I prepared and after I had completed the retreat on New Birth I found I had little to say about my experience. I was able to notice and name some things I had learned, but that was all. I found myself surprised and wondered if my friends might even have been a little miffed by my not mentioning our time together here in my blog. My imagination is greater than their sensitivity, so I don't think any of the women actually were offended.

This summer my husband and I have been asked to lead the closing segment of a two day conference of Christian library directors. At first my mind began to scramble and labor: How would I craft my knowledge with the topic? I talked with a friend, and together we began to imagine how I might proceed. 

But lately, I have noticed a theme running through my life: (to quote Paul Simon) "slow down you move too fast" and in this slowed down time I am wondering if I just might have enough to give them already. If I look even at the material I gathered together to share at an open house my husband and I hosted with a visual artist, would I find a hint or an outline?

I think I will. And I think I will try hard not to try so hard this time. Self-defeating effort? Maybe I will relax and trust and do the work required at a pace that honors the life I share with the Risen Lord.

I have been working with a local nutritionist to detox my body after years of eating one version or another of the American diet. So, this morning I suggested my husband make a pancake with acorn squash. He began with the squash and probably added almond meal, coconut flour or brown rice flour . . . I didn't watch. He has done this several times.

I topped it with plain yogurt, wild, organic blueberries, and probably a sprinkling of stevia. After doing without wheat flour and maple syrup for months, I have almost entirely come to experience this plate of food as yummy. 

I have been working hard to re-order my kitchen and my thinking to fit this new way of eating, because I can see that very little is going to change, as far as Dr. Dunn is concerned. One food or another may be reintroduced, but I think that she will never recommend that I return to wheat, corn, sugar, and so on. 

So I am working to make changes to last a life time in the realm of food.

Our health comprises many areas. In my daughter's work as a nutritionist, she talks of primary and secondary foods. Primary foods are the relationships we have with our body, family, work, etc. Secondary foods refer to what we eat. I like that kind of framing of various dimensions of my life.

The obvious questions are: How do significant changes of diet affect our primary relationships? And do new behaviors enhance our spiritual well-being? 

I am working at becoming aware of these things.

I am detoxing, which means I am home sick. Every day I get up, dress, work around the house and collapse back on the bed to rest. 

While preparing breakfast this morning, I listened to Backpacking Through The Revolutions Of North Africa by Eric Westervelt (http://www.npr.org/2011/04/10/135246285/backpacking-through-the-revolutions-of-north-africa). As Westervelt brings us news from the Middle East he meets many people. One is Billy Six, a 24 year old German man. “He is currently walking and hitchhiking across Africa. He says he lives cheaply, takes the occasional odd job, but mostly relies on the kindness of strangers.

To some people, it might seem a bit crazy going into places where there's revolution and war. ‘Maybe I am crazy,’ he says, ‘but therefore I really know now what is going on. I also know these are not dangerous people. These are very, very nice, friendly people. They try to help me.’”

Returning to bed, I read parts or all of several essays in the NYT magazine. In Package to Nowhere, by Elizabeth D. Samet, I hear about Chris, a former student at of hers at West Point. They spent many hours talking face to face before his deployment to Afghanistan. The day she had a small box ready to mail to him in the trunk of her car, an officer called to tell her that Chris had been killed two days earlier. The synchronicity of these two facts was painful. “Chris was the very person who might have helped me sort it out. He had a sense of equilibrium and self-awareness seldom found in 23 year olds, and he hoped to attend graduate school in counseling one day. He was keenly interested in Jung, whom he was reading in Afghanistan, together with an eclectic library of writers . . .”  

I also read Dominic Bracco’s story: Three Brothers Mourn a Slain Friend, Juarex, Mexico. One of the brothers, David Antonio Garcia Delgado mused, “I was feeling sentimental and thought, Why kill someone who’s done nothing? Sometimes I think, What am I doing here? Couldn’t I be someplace else? Someplace where there’s space to just be?”

Rising to bathe and dress for the day, bright bits of these three stories stayed with me.

I remember Billy Six’s affirmation of the people in the midst of politiical revolutions helping him.

I remember Elizabeth D. Samet’s description of Chris, the young man so ready to live.

I remember David Antonio Garcia Delgado's profound reflection on the violent chaos so close to his home.

Inside me, these memories are threaded together. What do they have in common? Death and violence, to be sure. But they are not just stories of danger, loss and trauma. They are most profoundly each a story of light, of truth, of love. Why did the authors want to tell their stories? Who knows. But I am encouraged that they did.