Tuesday will be day one of the 2020 version of an Intentional Creativity® workshop for Columbia Seminary students. Like last year, our experience will be called Holy Polka Dots.
We will, of course, be deep into the practice of prayer dots.
If it’s anything like last year, this will be a new adventure for some of the brave folks who show up.
It’s a new adventure for me, too. First, I’m in a different place than I was a year ago. I’ve had new experiences and found some new truths. I’ve also made A LOT more dots!!!
I, however, am not the only thing that will be different. There’s been a big change in time, and therefore structure. Instead of about 3 hours on a single day, our current plan is for just over an hour on three different days.
And, if that weren’t complicated enough, there’s no guarantee that the same folks will be there each day.
Hence the voice of my dear friend, Robby Carroll, muttering in my ear.
Robby, who happens to be a Columbia grad from a bit further back in the day, was my teacher and partner in a pastoral counseling practice for a great many wonderful years.
One of my favorite Robby-isms is the certainty, proclaimed with a bit more southern accent than usual, that, “If we’re not learning anything there’s no chance they are!”
I find this especially comforting just now as I am, indeed, learning a lot.
It’s one thing to plan an event around time for paint to dry. It’s another to figure out which very cool bits of philosophy and background and stories need to be left out in order to have time to paint at all!
Between us, I have just started on my here’s one version of where we might be heading canvas for the third time. And, yes, I’m writing while the paint dries!
It reminds me a lot of the days when Saturday nights meant sermon prep. Well, theoretically, Saturday nights were supposed to be sermon polishing but, since we’re being real, sometimes it was more like wrestling with the 17 reasons that what I had planned was not going to work, and coming up with something that might, preferably with the title already printed in the bulletin!
I have a plan. Again. And I’m grateful that prayer dots work just as well when they’re demo dots! My prayer at this moment is that, with abounding grace, this project will come elegantly together, in the sense that elegant means pared down to exactly that which is essential.
For now, the drips which come before the dots are dry and it is time for me to see what comes next.
Probably with some help from my Hallelujah mix on YouTube. (And more than a bit of imagining how I might explain all this for my girls!)
Check back for pictures from day one… Oh, and if you’re of a mind, whisper a prayer that the video fairies will be in a helpful mood!