Friday Five: Preparedness Edition

This week's Friday Five is all about being prepared:

1. You have a busy week, pushing out all time for preparing worship/ Sunday School lessons/ being ready for an important meeting ( or whatever equivalent your profession demands)- how do you cope?
Good meds and my anti-anxiety exercises.

2. You have unexpected visitors, and need to provide them with a meal- what do you do?
Having grown up with parents who lived through the Depression and subsequently lived with residual angst about scarcity, I am used to having pantries and freezers filled to bursting with food...because you just never know what's going to happen. So unexpected guests would not be a problem at Cold Comfort Cottage. Pasta, stir-fry, soup, meat-and-taters -- you want it, I can whip it up.

Three discussion topics:

3. Thinking along the lines of this weeks advent theme; repentance is an important but often neglected aspect of Advent preparations.....
I think Advent preparations themselves are neglected these days, even in liturgical churches. We just don't teach people the value of following the cycle of the Church seasons in corporate worship and in personal practice. I honestly don't think that most of the new folks in my congregation have any meaningful concept of Advent other than it's when we change the parament colors and light a wreath, even after sermons and prayers and worship narration attempting to explain it. But anyway -- I think that, among other things, we in the Church need to recover the idea of repentance as a proactive Godward turning instead of a cowering response to some wagging-fingered "Stop doing that!" directive from Religious Authority Figures. (Although I find my cynical self saying, "Yeah -- good luck with that.")

4. Some of the best experiences in life occur when you simply go with the flow.....
I find myself "flowing" more smoothly this year -- again, partly due to medication that works, but also I think simply adjusting to a new phase in my life where I'm learning to roll with the changes.

5. Details are everything, attention to the small things enables a plan to roll forward smoothly...
...unless you have just enough OCD to become preoccupied and downright mesmerized with the small things, to the point where you lose sight of the biggger picture.

Bonus if you dare- how well prepared are you for Christmas this year?
Giftwise, in great shape; pretty much done, in fact. Cookie-baking-wise, losing some ground but planning on surging ahead this weekend. Spirituality-wise, I've also lost some ground this week simply because it's been so darned busy around here, and because I am so disheartened by the increasingly Balkanized religious atmosphere in this country -- I'm starting to hope that the Premilennialists are right and the self-perceived Holy Folks suddenly get raptured away so the rest of us don't have to endure their political nattering and meddling anymore -- but am hoping to find quiet spaces in the days to come for reflection and attitude adjustment.