Day Fifty-Nine- 2/28/11 Trying Syrian Food and Prayer Day from Last Week

Day Fifty-Nine: 2/28/11
New Thing: Trying Syrian Food and Prayer Day from Last Week          
Inspiration: CAYA Class, Andrew
Cost: About $17   
Time: About an hour     
Bottom Line: You know you are in for a treat when the restaurant's slogan is "Food so good, you'll think we kidnapped your mother."

So delicious.

Reflection: I forgot to mention yesterday that I had reserved my weekly "new prayer style" day for Sunday. However, it actually has fruits for the entire week, so it maybe appropriate to list it today. In our CAYA youth Sunday Forum which I co-lead with my friend Andrew (you may remember him best as DJARM from my very first new thing) we have been discussing the seven deadly sins in contrast to the Beatitudes and in preparation for Lent. We discussed each sin and where we see them in our lives and in society, but we took it a step further by incorporating them into our prayer lives this week. 

"The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things"- Hieronymus Bosch, 1485.

You may remember me devoting one of these prayer days to trying out a new meditation from the book, "Praying in Color." For this class, we decided to try out another exercise and pray in color using the author's "calendar" idea. Essentially, the prayer takes one day and devotes it to a particular intention such as a person, place, or thing. Then, you fill in that design with more detail and color. We decided to devote one day a week to each sin (it works well since there are seven sins and as many days) and ask God to help us remove these since from our life.

Here is a "Praying in Color" calendar example using Lent.

For example, I chose to have "sloth" listed on Monday because I always have a hard time staying motivated on Monday. I colored in my Monday block with ugly colors and did not actually fill up the whole Monday block to symbolize the way sloth can keep us from using all our time for God's work. This little exercise has helped me stay motivated all day, even starting with helping me to get out of bead and work-out this morning. I have been known to sleep in on Mondays, but instead of hitting my alarm clock when it coldly rang this morning, I visualized that ugly little pile of sloth on my prayer paper and got up.      

However, I am very happy that I had not listed "gluttony" as my sin du jour because my other new thing of the day was trying Syrian food during a work lunch. I had a meeting at the Syrian Restaurant "Damascus" in Allentown. I have had plenty of Middle-Eastern food before, but Syrian food has its own flare. We had warm grape leaves, some kind of cheese, pita, babaghanoush, and lamb kabobs. Again, it was all very similar to other delicious food Middle-Eastern food I have had before, but that did not stop me from enjoying this so much! Also, they sell t-shirts which read, "Food so good you'll think we kidnapped you mother." It was indeed delicious, so maybe I'll call Mom tomorrow to make sure she's ok.