Bigger Picture: Evening Prayer and Soccer Fields: Unexpected Beauty

This dusk found me waiting two hours in another county while our son did a soccer clinic. I spent the time knitting, reading, talking on the phone and praying my Liturgy of the Hours. Then I took a stroll with my cell phone along the edges of an enormous complex of soccer fields. As I walked, my shoes soaking in the damp from the afternoon rain,  I watched boys of varying ages run through drills and scrimmage. This is what I saw when I turned my head in the other direction.

O blest Creator, God most high
great ruler of the universe,
who robes the day with radiant light
now clothes the night in peaceful sleep.






Read other Bigger Picture moments here!

Bigger Picture Moment: Holy Thursday, Middle School Baseball, and Contemplating My Vocation

"You can sleep in another lifetime," my girlfriend told me this afternoon, when I complained to her during my seventh period cafeteria duty that I was bone tired  and asked her if I should show up for my 12 year old's middle school baseball game. After all, I had been to a game yesterday and he had told me he didn't care if I showed up for this away one. "Really?" she said. "You know what that means. Go to the game."

Bigger Picture Moments: From the School Cafeteria, Snow Out the Window and Thinking about Wordsworth's Lucy Gray

My students told me yesterday morning that life is supposed to take an ironic turn on Leap Day.

Well, that afternoon, hours before March, it started snowing. At the high school, the classrooms have small windows to the outside. We could see the snow. I raised the blinds in class to watch and let my students watch.

It is mesmerizing, this snow after a long winter with few flakes.

In the cafeteria, a colleague told me he is heading north as soon as he can; he lives in the mountains and worries about getting home.