Fraud, Food and Faith

This morning was much like the weather I reported in my last journal entry, multiple layers of clouds, darker to the east over the Cascades, to be sure but a constant wind, though gentler, allowing me to hear the bird song.

This time, I actually stopped on my walk to check my cell phone, something I don’t normally do, because I had noted a message with the word “fraud” in it and if it had anything to do with my credit card I wanted to take care of it immediately. I did. In a light rain. Someone had used my credit card numbers to purchase tickets at Ticketmaster in the amount of over $1390.40 and the Fraud Team had caught it and of course stopped payment. That also explained why last night I was unable to use my credit card to pay the dinner tab at the Rhododendron Restaurant in Bow, WA. The experience reminded me to always carry a second credit card. It will take seven to ten days for me to receive the new one. This incidentally has happened to me several times before. A drag to be sure but happy to deal with the inconvenience under the circumstances.

Having taken care of the fraud issue, I stopped again, in the light rain, to text Cyndy B. whose house I’d walked past on Snohomish Drive to tell her that it looked like her house was being cared for, the yard freshly mowed, a few pieces of furniture on the deck. I was happy to learned she had recently sold it, something she’d wanted to do for some time now. The text led to a text from her and an effort now to get together soon for a hike somewhere, one of our old routines.

Back home by 6:15 AM and slightly wet, I got wet again, taking a quick shower and began baking for church, special chocolate muffins this time, for a farewell lunch for the choir who disbands for the summer following today’s worship service. I liked the muffin’s strong chocolate flavor but not sweet enough for most. I’ll continue to work on it. Brian, Kornelia’s partner, is also residing here so fixed us some almond flour- based pancakes with maple-flavored syrup. These were more acceptable, satisfying my hunger for carbs without either much sweetener or carbs.

Yesterday afternoon was spent reading and absorbing some of the Old Testament psalms, ancient poems I wanted to take a closer look at and maybe create a poem or two from the experience. Nothing has touched me but am developing a growing respect for it with the help of N.T. Wright, a Biblical scholar, who unlike me, grew up with the Psalter, part of his literary life. In his book The Case for the Psalms, he writes “…I propose in this book that the regular praying and singing of the Psalms is transformative…” I just practiced singing Psalm 63 in my new-found voice (which is finally returning after too many years of pipe smoking)  and i got a sense of connection even on this first, experimental, run-through. I sang through it once and used the first two line as the ending ” You, God, are my God, earnestly I seek you; I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you…” The theology in these first two lines means a lot to me in terms of where I am at this point in my beliefs. I see myself, for example, as a child of God who has become aware of a presence within me which give me the power to love, heal, imagine and create. I see everyone else in the same way. All are children of God at various levels of awareness regarding the presence within. It is entirely our choice whether to seek to discover that reality for ourselves. Such is God’s love, intentionally powerless to make that choice for us. We have to make that choice out of our own free will.