Today's word

virga - wisps of precipitation which evaporate before reaching the ground

(I suppose I should've worked it so that my 500^th post was something more significant, but then again, that includes six that I started but never finished, so there's still time to do something for my 500^th published post.  Or not.)

A covered bridge, to . . . ?

We can never make up for the past.  We can only strive for today to be the person we're called to be.

This afternoon with my grown daughter was a really precious time.

Character?

It isn't what we think or feel, but it is the choices we make, including those to redirect our thoughts and feelings.  I started to suggest that those are simply brain chemistry, but maybe that's true of our choices, too.  At any rate, I believe our character lies in our choices, our decisions to do what the person we aspire to be would do, to live as the best-version-of-ourselves even when some part of us might want to choose another direction.  It isn't the disregarding of our thoughts and feelings, but putting them into their proper context.  It is choosing to be a loving person, doing what is best for the ones we love rather than what we think will bring us pleasure or satisfaction.

That all sounds harsh, though.  It is loving ourselves enough to be molded or grown into a better person.  It is doing what we think is right not out of sheer, imposed discipline, but because what we desire more is to be the person we know we're growing into, ultimately the very presence of Christ in the world through submission to the Father's will in the grace and power of the Holy Spirit.

Today's words

The first comes to my attention not from the Merriam-Webster site (though the definition is from there) but from 9 Chickweed Lane, which has become one of my guilty comic pleasures:

cloaca - the common chamber into which the intestinal and urogenital tracts discharge especially in monotreme mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and elasmobranch fishes; also : a comparable chamber of an invertebrate


Apparently it is also a synonym for "sewer."  (No, not a person who sews.)


Oh, and:


monotreme - any of an order (Monotremata) of egg-laying mammals comprising the platypuses and echidnas (from the Greek for one hole)


which of course brings us:


echidna - a spiny-coated toothless burrowing nocturnal monotreme mammal (Tachyglossus aculeatus) of Australia, Tasmania, and New Guinea that has a long extensible tongue and long heavy claws and that feeds chiefly on ants; also : a related mammal (Zaglossus bruijni) of New Guinea having a longer snout and shorter spines


None of these is likely to make its way into my working vocabulary.  And with apologies to any readers who may have encountered this before I had a chance to flesh it out.

Today's word

Catachresis - Use of the wrong word for the context


You'd think this word would be in my vocabulary already.  Also, not to be confused with "catechesis."

God is too busy

I often see or hear people express thoughts along these lines: "If there's a God, that entity has far more significant things to be concerned with than X."

Such people have either failed to consider all the implications of omnipotency and omnisciency, or they've concluded that since God hasn't fixed A, B, or C that there can't really be any such thing as an omnipotent, omniscient, all-loving God.

Since there is ample room in such a God's attention span for your immediate concerns, the only remaining issue is whether God exists or not.  Since we can't know, since we must take God's existence as an element of faith supported by our interpretation of the evidence we encounter, we may as well put our every need before God in addition to doing what we think is best about things.  After all, there is no evidence of God that some people won't insist on poking holes through, just as there is no event that some people won't interpret as evidence of God.

Today's word . . .

. . . and a second creepy subject for my blog today:

pediculous - lice infested

And let's not forget its relatives: pediculosis (a lice infection), pedicular (of or relating to lice), pediculoid (resembling or related to the common louse or lice), and pediculicide (an agent that kills lice).  I think we can safely ignore Pediculid (a specific type of louse of the family Pediculidae) if we're not entomologists.