Prayer Flags

We headed to church yesterday after a few weeks off from our beach and camping trips. I'm very glad we did because we had a special service where we all created prayer flags.

They team up all the kids with elderly people in the church so they all have a special friend called a Grand-Friend. My son's Grand-Friend was out of town, so they teamed him up with another woman. My daughter is too young for this program, so we went to sit with them and we made our flags. She was a lovely woman who had recently moved here with her husband from the Bay Area. We had a very nice talk about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and many, many books. I have just finished re-reading A Farewell to Arms, and I had forgotten how good (and funny and sad) parts of it were. There were also a lot of good quotes on war. "There is a class that controls a country that is stupid and does not realize anything and never can. That is why we have this war."

We talked about the book and some of the other books I have for the kids, one being Why War is Never a Good Idea by Alice Walker. She has grandkids so she wanted to check them out.

She did a flag for peace. My son did two flags. One said, "Dear God, thank you for the Earth and for food." The other read, "Dear God, thank you for our bodies and fun."

My daughter scribbled on three and asked me to write "Daddy" on them.

Afterwards we put all the flags together on a long string and hung them up outside. We said a special prayer together and went back into the sanctuary to finish the service.

We took a look at the vegetable garden and could not believe how big some of them had gotten! The cucumbers were enormous! It is looking more and more like a real garden. The vegetable garden is a project the kids have worked on to benefit the food bank at our church.

My dad came over to take my son on a bike ride, and my daughter and I had a quiet afternoon.

Yesterday was a hard day for me. I have not been sleeping well, so I don't think that's been helping. Sometimes I can just forget about everything and enjoy my life in spite of it, and other days everything just hits me hard.

When we talked about the different kinds of prayer in church, all the kids said what they did when they prayed. Most of them talked about praying with their fathers. Somehow that just hit me. I have a lot of memories of praying with my dad. We always said grace before meals and he came and said a prayer with me every night before bed. It just made me really sad.

The kids had wanted to call their dad in the morning, but he didn't answer. They tried a few times and then I sent him a text letting him know they were trying to call him. No response all day. I texted him again in the early evening and was like, are you planning to talk to your kids today? Finally he called around 7 and couldn't understand why I wasn't thrilled. I told him it wasn't just not talking to him today, they hadn't seen him all week. He started with the excuses, and I told him that he didn't see them break down over it and he had no idea what it was like. He said I need to be more supportive of him. I told him I was as supportive of him as I could be right now. He's still in San Francisco with his friends.