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I’m writing to you today from Chicago, which is not where I expected to be right now. I was supposed to be just outside D.C. today looking at cherry blossoms and gathering with a group of catechists for a Lenten day of reflection. Instead, I am looking at a magnolia tree. Similar color. Also beautiful. But an indication that Spring is not as far along here as in the South.

I had the most amazing conversation last week with a two-year-old named Louise, the granddaughter of a good friend of mine. Louise had a remarkable vocabulary for a two-year-old.

“Where do you live?” she asked.

I let her know I had a house in Atlanta.

“Do you have everything you need at your house?” she asked.

I had to pause there and think for a moment. We are a little short on toilet paper and yogurt sometimes, but eventually I had to admit, “Yes, Louise, I have everything that I need.”

She persisted, “Do you have everything that you need?”

It began with a cup of tea on Ash Wednesday. I had just filled it when my Lyft arrived early for the airport.

“I am so sorry,” I texted my husband. “My Lenten practice this year was going to be to try to keep the house more tidy, but when you get home you’ll find I left a full tea mug in the middle of the living room coffee table.” [Short background note: My husband does most of the cleaning and when I leave things around it irritates him, though he doesn’t complain… much]

This past Sunday, for the first time in a long time, I attempted to introduce a group of 3-to-6-year-old children to the parable of the leaven (Matthew 13: 33). I say “attempted” because it did not go particularly well. Or, I suppose, it went about as well as you can expect it to go when three measures of flour, one teaspoon of yeast, a half-cup of water, and ten pre-school boys are involved. Much of the conversation went something like this:

Me reading: “The Kingdom of God is like yeast that a woman took and mixed with…”

Boy 1: “Can we eat the dough?”

Me: “No.”

The last two weeks have been a warm whirlwind of activity. Whirlwind because they were booked solid with work projects. Warm because they were spent in South Florida and Hawaii.

I’ve received a couple calls in recent weeks asking if I might be able to give a talk on hope. Partly, I suspect Pope Francis is to blame. He has declared 2025 as a Jubilee Year in which we are to become “pilgrims of hope.” But partly, I suspect people are reaching out because hope is a bit in short supply right now. At least I know it is for me.

This past weekend I made a lovely silent retreat at Ignatius House just outside Atlanta. It is a little odd, I suppose, to go to all the effort needed to visit a retreat center only 15 minutes from where one lives. Why pack a suitcase and go sleep in a bed not your own, when you have a perfect good bed that you sleep better in just down the road? But—in a shout out to retreat centers everywhere—even a slight change of location can make all the difference in the world when it comes to clearing out one’s head space.

I am about to head to the grocery store for the fourth time in four days. I am not proud of adding to Atlanta traffic and I am sure that my frequent appearance only adds to the chaos the checkers and baggers are experiencing at present. But for some reason, whenever there is snow in the forecast, I feel my pantry must be stocked with every ingredient known to humankind. And yet I always leave the store forgetting one. Today the trip will be for orange juice.

Anyone out there have childhood memories of a book series called “Choose Your Own Adventure”? The first one came out in 1976 and over the next 20+ years, close to 200 volumes came into print. Before these books came out, I’d always assumed reading to be a one-directional exercise. You start with the front cover and then you move page by page in order till you reach the back cover. The “Choose Your Own Adventure” series was the first time we readers got some choices along the way.

“This may be news to you, you may never have heard my voice before, the most severe, the most demanding, the most terrible for you to listen to, [but] I have to tell you that you are all in a state of mortal sin. You now live in it, and you will die in it.”[i]