I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life..and see if I could not learn what it had to teac

.and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

I am going into the woods to...what? Talk about ministry? Come back out with a plan for 2010? Knit? Work our asses off for 3 days and come back exhausted, yet strangely renewed?

We're retreating, and will have all the comforts of home, if your home held 10 adults and had toilets and showers and one telephone on the wall of the coat closet.

I am bringing beer.

One of my comforts, when things in life are tough (at the moment, they aren't, particularly) is that there seems to be little danger that I will come to the end of my life and discover that I have not lived. That I just visited this planet.

More and more I think this is the question I was put on earth to keep asking:

"Why spend money on what is not bread,
and your labor on what does not satisfy?"

Jonny Baker had me thinking about that today. He proposes that planning worship - curating worship - is nothing less than creating a world, and we should consider what kind of world we would create.

I think I would most want to create a world where people have time and space and brain power to do THINGS THEY ACTUALLY CARE ABOUT. Work that is diverting and also significant. Real conversations, not just pleasantries. Making things. Seeing things. Laughing. Not so much driving (except that even driving is a great backdrop for some of the most real conversations. Yesterday, as we were finishing up our errands, Ian said to me "Let's stay. Let's just stay in the car."

"Just drive around?" I asked.

"Yes," he said. "Just stay in the car and drive some more. Just sit in the car."

And I thought, kid, I have spent so many hundreds of hours just staying in cars, doing what we're doing - talking, listening to music, looking out the window - that I know just what you mean. "I'd like that," I said.)

I would like to create a world where no one has to wonder if they are really alive.