An Ash Wednesday toast to God from Omaha, NE

I'm here in Omaha for business and as you can tell zuzu you were right, the hotel does have free wifi. Lucky me. :)

The ash Wednesday service tonight was just what I needed. It was highly mellow, reflective using hymns, scripture and prayers spoken in unison. It was also candle filled (as it should be IMO). My normal church is much more contemporary. Yet I love this too. This symbolic and metaphor filled space created by the use of traditions and words of old.

There is something soothing about sitting in a quiet, attention filled, dimly lit church hearing scripture read aloud. I LOVE LOVE LOVE being read to. And the pastor was a woman so it was even better. She is one of the more beautiful mature (seasoned) woman pastors of my denomination. Her name is Martha, and she is gifted and I bless her...

I of course wanted to tell her but I couldn't because after a solemn ash Wednesday service you can't exactly go chatting all about. We all left in silence in the dark with ashes on our foreheads to remind us of how we came from dust and to dust we will return. A fact of life and faith I tend to find oddly encouraging.

Afterwards the two women I'm training and their husbands took me to a very nice Italian restaurant for dinner. I enjoyed our conversation and was surprised by how much I enjoyed the husbands of these women. They were really engaging, interested in what I thought, talkative... We talked about the church service of course but also about the relationship between nature (the environment) and faith, how different generations feel about church, getting a more spiritually sensitive radar (analogy) and much more.

It was also the first time I've been out to dinner and someone has made a well-spoken actual toast to God, wine and all. It was sortof a spiritual moment for me. We all realized that none of us ever had toasted Jesus/God. It sounds cheesy, but I think if I pray to God then he deserves a toast as well. He is after all the guy who turned water into wine!

So I wish you some wine glasses clinking in toast on this fine Ash Weds. evening.Type