Too many things on my mind to think straight

So, I'll just jot some seemingly random thoughts here.

Apparently it's test weekend for me. I'm currently wired in a manner that looks like I'm wearing a CIA tap. But it's my walking, 24-hour ECG monitor. I'm trying to prove to the FAA that my heart is healthy enough to fly. Tom, however, says that they're going to find out that I don't actually have a heart. That's fine with me. If I don't have one then it can't fail.

And then tomorrow morning I'm taking the GMAT. I probably should be "studying." But why start now?

I've gotten all kinds of questions about feedback on my little pre-dating escapade. So here's the scoop: of the four women I indicated interest in one shared that opinion. And I'm pretty excited that one. We're meeting again next week. I'm quite looking forward to it. I'll get nervous later.

And no, I'm not telling you where or when we're going. I'm not stupid. My friend tonight said to me "tell me where you're going again, I don't remember."

I don't fall that easily.

I spent a bit this evening pounding on my piano. Poor Beethoven, Bach and Mendelssohn--they have to be cringing up in heaven. It was relaxing, but not very polished. I've owned this book of Bach inventions for over a year and I can only play one. But that's one more than this time last year. Always optimistic--that's me.

Right.

I finished For the Time Being the other day. Miscellaneous quotes, no particular method, order, or agenda:

There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now in China. To get a feel for what this means, simply take yourself--in all your singularity, importance, complexity, and love--and multiply by 1,198,500,000. See? Nothing to it.

§ § §

Augustine said to a group of people, "We are talking about God. What wonder is it that you do not understand? If you do understand, then it is not God."

§ § §

"Suddenly there is a point where religion becomes laughable," Thomas Merton wrote. "Then you decide that you are nevertheless religious." Suddenly?!

§ § §

I have never read any theologian who claims that God is particularly interested in religion, anyway.

§ § §

Many times in Christian churches I have heard the pastor say to God, "All your actions show your wisdom and love." Each time, I reach in vain for the courage to rise and shout, "That's a lie!"--just to put things on a solid footing.

§ § §

We are only about three hundred generations from ten thousand years ago.

§ § §

Paul Tillich devoted only two paragraphs in his three-volume systematic theology to prayer. Those two startling paragraphs suggest, without describing, another mechanism. To entreat and to intercede is to transform situations powerfully. God participates in bad conditions here by including them in his being and ultimately overcoming them. True prayer surrenders to God; that willing surrender itself changes the situation a jot or two by adding power which God can use.

§ § §

I don't know. I don't know beans about God.

§ § §

"Only by living completely in the world can one learn to believe. One must abandon every attempt to make something of oneself--even to make of oneself a righteous person." Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote this in a letter from prison a year before the Nazis hanged him for resisting Nazism and plotting to assassinate Hitler.

§ § §