The beauty of creation persevered.  At 40-degrees, it was down right balmy.  I have learned that I need help, and I learned that more today.  I have had a good simple idea for getting the church and the neighborhood kids together.  Getting others enthused to help has been the difficulty.  Add to that the paralysis of winter and I keep finding myself pieces short of being able to do this thing for the kids.  So I spent much of Saturday inching closer to being able to do for the kids something nice and easy and fun.  Still I couldn’t seal the deal.  I found myself torn because I was doing this all by myself.  In the beauty of the day, I felt really lonely.  M was insightful in encouraging me and helping me see my strengths and weaknesses.  I learned that I need to ask people very directly to participate, or it doesn’t happen.  I was still disappointed.

I did feel like a really old school preacher.  As I toured my church facilities, I had to confront leftover snow and ice in all sorts of places.  I played groundskeeper at 2 of my 3 churches.  It actually did feel like part of my job, even thought others are technically responsible for it.  As the only paid employee, things ultimately fall to me.

One thing I did regarding my disciplines was to create a scorecard for my Lenten disciplines.  I created an excel sheet that marks and quantifies my spiritual progress.  On a scale of 1-4 I track my success in negotiating my faithfulness to myself.  I get 4 points for successfully negotiating a discipline.  I get a 1 for doing poorly.  I average the scores over 7 categories.  Unfortunately, day 1 has been my most disciplined thus far.

Day 4’s progress:

1a)  Driving the speed limit–I gave myself a 3 for catching myself speeding several times.  I also chose not to pass a woman going 40 in a 55.

1b)  Foul language–Fail

2)  Fasting Lunch–This I did.  But there was nothing spiritual about it.

3)  Giving up Facebook–I am thinking of this one as something to pad my stats.

4)  Reading–I prepped for sermon, etc., but not really the reading intended here.

5)  God and Me–This is going well.

6)  Visiting Parishioners–Don’t really do much of this on Saturdays.