Orbits of Delight

This morning (1/1/24) I wake at the beginning of my 78^th orbit around the sun.  What a journey!  Earthbound all the while, I didn’t notice the spinning while traveling roughly 30 kilometers a second. Thankfully, gravity prevailed along with the persistent tugs of other gravities like tradition and creature comfort. As 2024 begins, I make no New Year’s Resolutions.  Instead, I will look to the delights ahead; 366 days to enjoy (it’s a Leap Year). Here are eight “in-joy-ments” I anticipate, let’s call them Orbits of Delight drawn from life lessons thus far and based on emerging hunches in a journey toward hope. You can keep the change.  I will:

1. Delight in laughter – remembering the foolish things I say and do, more than suffering over the nonsense of others (especially the U.S. Congress).
2. Delight in weaving community — looking more peripherally making fresh connections with friends, neighbors, and strangers.  
3. Delight in the currency of the Spirit – spending and saving a different form of wealth; banking on common humanity through greetings, stories, smiles and hugs.
4. Delight in tables of fellowship — hosting picnics, parties, and meals to listen for laughter or reach out in care for fear or grief.
5. Delight in welcoming the poor and immigrant – as Rev. Murphy Davis put it, welcoming others “not as a problem to be solved but as a mystery to be loved.”
6. Delight in the achievements of friends – making a phone call or sending a note of celebration.
7. Delight in the beauty of nature – walking and marveling in the land, vegetation, animals, and the sky (including a near total solar eclipse on April 8^th where I live).
8. Delight in being a member of the extended household of God – while patriotism, has it’s merit, it is a puny, second-rate, counterfeit to God’s intentions for me, for us all.