*sigh* I love beauty!

From maje_charis:

Q. How many roads must a man walk down?

A. One, and hopefully you are following footprints of a man whose feet were pierced.

Q. Okay, for real… What do you believe the right balance is between ministering to your own faith and ministering to your community? Has this balance changed for you now that you’ve entered the novitiate?

A. I think that in ministering to either, the other is ministered to as well. When you are a part of a community, everything you do affects the whole. “When one member of the body suffers, all suffer,” as the Gospel says. So, really, being faithful in your ministry to your own faith or to your community ministers to the other. However, you do want to be careful to not focus too much on one and not the other. You also don’t want to be too rigid in your ministry, say, by scheduling “this much time for me, this much for them.” I find that, through prayer and reflection, you learn to “feel” what is needed in ministry. One day you might minister to others for several hours and spend only thirty minutes on yourself. It may be the opposite on the the next day. The Spirit is unwavering only in its constance, but its movements are always changing and alive. The key is to become attuned to those movements within yourself and to act upon them. I’m still learning.

What do you want to know?

What a magnificent ship she was. “The Beast,” they called her. Boy did she go down in a blaze of glory, and so did two Cylon Basestars. I salute you, Battlestar Pegasus.

It was an honor to watch you consistently roast some toasters.

As a first-year novice, all of us have an outside ministry. Some of us go to homeless shelters, soup kitchens, nursing homes and schools. I am at a nearby school, and it is a blast. I employ a wide-array of skills there, everything from tutoring, being a library assistant, helping eat lunch (my favorite), or being a six-foot child.

Today, however, I employed a skill I’d only ever used on one other occasion. Today I was a birdcatcher.

The school’s principal is moving on after over a decade of service. There was a HUGE goodbye celebration during which a multitude of adorable children showered her with praise and homemade gifts. The principal is a huge Packers fan, so everyone was wearing green and gold.

It turns out that the principal also used to raise parakeets, so some of the teachers got together and bought her a lovely green and gold parakeet. Guess who was asked to put the cage and all the toys together? Me. Guess who asked where the parakeet was? Me. It wasn’t in the cage; it was in a little box with holes in it, as it had just been recently purchased. So, how do you put a bird from a box and into a cage?

Fortunately, the door to the huge classroom was shut, because when I CAREFULLY opened the box, a feathered hand grenade went off and exploded into the air, flying from perch to perch. I chased it around for nearly half an hour, nearly succeeding in grabbing it. Eventually we cornered it in a large walk-in closet, and I had two other teachers block the doorway with a large towel.

It was just the bird and I. Mono y mono. One-on-one. There were only three ways out- me, him, or we go together.

He was flitting from ceiling light to ceiling light, and then from shelf to shelf. Eventually he landed on the edge of a shelf and I tossed a light-weight piece of fabric at him.

Silence.

Was he dead?

I gathered up the fabric, and there was no sign of him. So I took the bundle to the cage and slowly unraveled it to find… the parakeet, looking at me with a grand, “What the *tweet* just happened?”

So I caged the little demon, and another teacher even brought her cage with a parakeet “chik” in it. The Green Hornet dug the extra company, though he didn’t say much. I think he was pretty happy, though, that the lady bird didn’t see him getting caught. It must have been embarassing for a bird with an ego that big.

So, the lesson here is never underestimate the multitude of simple gifts we are all blessed with; you never know when you’ll suddenly have to perform a task you’ve never done before, and discover you’re a natural.