The Gift of a Day

Giver of Life: May we receive this day as gift, and return it to you with acts of love and self-giving.

That's from the morning prayer for the first Tuesday in Lent from Daily Prayer, Daily Bread, published in 2006 by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Medaille. We use it for our prayer together at home, and it also forms the basis for the daily Lenten prayers found on our province website. When I read it this morning, my immediate reaction was, "well, that's not so hard!" Or at least, it doesn't have to be, though some days that's more apparent to me than others. Approaching the day as gift, in which the task is really to return it to God with acts of love and self-giving, rather than as a stretch of time in which I have to get a lot of stuff done and convince everyone else that what I've done is the right thing to do...well, that's a horse of a different color, as the Wizard of Oz would say. Alas, detachment from outcomes does not always come so easily...would that I could remember this prayer at every moment, especially the selfish and difficult ones.

Anyway, here's a little gift: this photo is of a tree trunk carved by Kathleen Reitan, chainsaw artist. It's in front of a house in the 5700 block of Nicollet Avenue South in Minneapolis.

Today I'm grateful for: all the kind and caring people who work at the Burn Center at Regions Hospital in St. Paul, for RM's miraculous improvement, for having good-quality work tools, for warmer weather, for the morning mass community at St. Thomas More Parish. Praying for: SG, JM, K&S, Demond's family, the teenage girl recovering from frostbite at Regions, the bus driver, members and staff of the Minnesota Legislature, CK and friends heading to Jamaica for a 2-week church mission tomorrow, CSSJ novices, Sisters of St. Joseph in Canada.

Healer of Hearts, let your word touch us that we may sow pardon and peace. Amen.