Trying to keep a blog going is tough work, and so I decided to close off this blog. However,the book, Listening To Your Life by Frederick Buechner has inspired me to keep the blog going. It is a daily meditation book and I resolve to use it as a starting point each day. January 1 - "Life Itself Is Grace"! and January 2 - "If God Speaks"! Buechner recommends that grace and God are found in the everyday, the ordinary, the mundane. He provides wonderful examples in these two meditations - things like kissing a spouse goodbye or taking your child to school in the morning. Too often these events slip through our hourglasses of time and before we know it the precious ordinariness of our days are gone forever. Just ask any mother or father whose last child goes off to college, or a young mother or father putting their child on the school bus for kindergarten for the first time. Not monumental events in the realm of things, but monumental enough in an ordinary life. I never really thought about how God's grace is with us through these moments. I hope that there was some part of me way down deep that recognized God's presence and grace in the humdrum of my daily existence. Did I hear Him speak to me when I was washing the family's clothes, food shopping, preparing meals? Do I hear him now in the quiet hours of retirement with my husband? Is He speaking to me in the stress of caring for the elderly? Sometimes when I am feeling overwhelmed by my current life situation, I need to stop and remember that life is grace and God is speaking to me. There is purpose here - a ministry perhaps - do I feel it? Do I hear it?