From The Deacon's Bench

  As I sit down to write this month's blog post, I am in the middle of taking care of several pre-vacation chores.  Planning what clothes to pack, deciding which ones need to be cleaned, checking the weather at our destination to decide if something is too heavy or too light.  How many of each item of clothing, what will not get too wrinkled or take up too much luggage space.  How "dressed-up" do I need to be? Thank goodness, my wife Sarah is the super-planner who takes care of reservations, transportation and travel documents and every other aspect of planning, I would be totally lost and late without her. During Morning Prayer today, I read Luke's Gospel 10:25-37.  As I reflected on that Gospel lesson where the man is left half dead on the side of the road after being beaten and stripped by robbers and people just passed by and didn't even "see" him, it struck me... how often do we get caught up in planning, preparing and all of the other "jobs&q

Sometimes a little space can make all the difference in the world.  Take a look at this... May Day : a day we in the northern hemisphere have historically reserved for fun springtime activities, like the maypole and picnics; a day when we can see summer and sprinklers and Popsicles right around the corner. Mayday is an internationally recognized radio word to signal distress. It's used mostly by aircraft and boats, and most of us are happily only familiar with it through TV and fiction. It appears as both an interjection ("Mayday! Mayday!") and to modify a noun ("a mayday signal"). What a difference a space and capitalization of letters can make! This is not what I originally had in mind to write about this month, but due to circumstances beyond my control, time got away from me, and I realized it was May 2nd and I had not gotten any farther than a title for my post.   That's when the MAYDAY signal went off in my head.  But what was I going to do?????  Well