Colourful Dreamer

I feel the need to rant about our Government. I actually have some time for John Key. He is a moderate, on the liberal side. But his co-cabinet members scare me to death. For example, with Crusher Collins at the helm, why would anyone want to work at Corrections? And we need good people to stick around and feel valued, not dumped on at every possible moment for political gain. Tony Ryall and Paula Bennet stopped conferences, without ever telling us how much it cost us tax payers to stope the conferences in cancelled air fares, cancellation fees for the venues, lost deposits etc. I know about some of this stuff, I once tried to cancel an event, and found it was cheaper to hold it. We still made a loss, but it was about half what we would have made if we had called it off. So what did these called off conferences cost the tax payer? And what galls me is that is seems it was all done because they (Tony and Paula) know best and don’t need people who work in the field to tell them anything.

So it is lent. Lent is often seen as a time of repentance and giving up stuff. But the ancient Irish, who kind of invented this whole penitence thing didn’t see this as a time of just giving up things for the sake of giving them up, but of building virtues. So, they would identify their vices, and then pray about the virtues they wanted to build up which were the opposite of those vices. They would then spend lent working on the virtues, or developing good spiritual habits. So this lent, I will again stop playing computer games in order that I might pray more, and spend more time with my family and on work stuff including the dissertation. Part of the prayer thing is to again work on praying each day, and to say night prayer at night, cos I would really like to get into the habit of doing that. And I will also blog at least once a week. That would be a good habit to get into. Two habits built out of the time wasted on games. I am looking forward to that.

This is like a confession really. There is a woman I know, who is about my age, maybe younger (which is not hard to do) who is really really overweight (morbidly obese I think it is called) and who smokes heavily. She is really unwell, and has been for a while. Her lungs must be a mess really: really squashed and small, and choked with smoke. Last year she had bad bronchitis. But as far as I can see looking at her and her daughter she has not stopped smoking and has not done anything about her weight. As you might tell, I struggle to be nice around her. Her cough is appalling. No compassion at all!! The other day she collapsed. She is now in hospital; her condition is critical but stable. When I heard about this I thought two things. One is, well this was coming. The other was, "where is my compassion here? How do I know what she has or has not tried to do? Why am I so quick to judge?" I hope and pray she recovers, which is by no means certain. I hope and pray that she does