Hallelujah

When I think I have something to write about I often let it roll around in my head for a day or two to see if anything worthwhile will take shape. The danger with the delay between the thought and the writing is sometimes the whole mess dissolves into a distant memory. I went to bed last night thinking I would let a particular idea stew a while and woke up this morning with no memory of what the idea had been. I do remember waking up in the night with the moon shining fully on my face. Does that count?

This morning I turned on CBC radio and fell in love with not only the sound of a man's voice but the fullness of what he had to say. I wish you could have heard him too. It was pure pleasure. The man who was being interviewed wrote and sings one of my all time favourite songs, Hallelujah. And in the course of listening to his conversation he said a few words that reminded me what I wanted to write about. How cool is that? Thank you Leonard Cohen for retrieving a piece of my brain.

And speaking of men, the man in my life gave me the greatest chuckle yesterday. Because of my health issues he has taken up the slack in house work - he does a darn fine job of it too I might add. He washed the fancy schmancy thing that hangs in front of the shower doors and was going to rehang it. He asked if the valance goes in front of the shower curtain or behind. When I tell him it goes in front he swears up a storm. Back down the hallway he goes to fix it. I chuckled outloud and yelled down the hallway that I had no idea he knew what a valance was. Oh, that was sweet. He didn't think so, especially not after hanging it up wrong three times before the blankety-blank valance was back where it belonged. I chuckled the rest of the day to think that my husband knows what a valance is. Sorry to sound so stereotypical, but we are. It would be like me knowing where the dipstick was on the motorbike.(Please tell me a motorbike has one.)

So what post idea did Leonard Cohen remind me of? He talked about how people can judge us based on our opinion on a single issue as if that were the sum total of who we were. He talked about being for or against things.

I have been mulling over for a few days now my tendency to have conversations solely about things I am against and rarely about things I am for. I have spent most of my life talking like this and I am weary of it. I mean, I can tell you what is wrong with not only myself, the church, and the world, or just insert blank here and I can tell you what is wrong with it, too. I wondered wouldn't I like myself better if I was for more than I was against? I wondered if when we stop holding our humanity against ourselves, we lose our need to be against everything, including other people a great deal of the time? I have wondered why some people can talk about what they are for (without forgetting what they are against) yet without the need to hold everything in their 'against pile' in front of them like a shield preceding every conversation.

It's a whole new idea for me. There is hope for me yet! Hallelujah!!