What I learned from the past year's blog posts

Lynne Baab • Tuesday July 22 2025

Eleven months and three weeks ago, on July 30, 2024, I wrote the first post in this series about the flow of time. I started this year-long series in the middle of the church season of Ordinary Time. I wanted to write about the ways God’s presence through the Holy Spirit comforts, sustains, guides, and empowers us in our daily, ordinary days.

In this last post in the series, I’ll describe what I learned from writing the series.

1. There are A LOT of special days and holidays. If you do an online search for “holidays in July,” you’ll get numerous websites with long lists. Often the dates vary in the different lists. Part of the problem is that various international groups proclaim certain days, and national groups make other decisions. Here are chocolate-related holidays I wish I’d written about: World Chocolate Day on July 7 and American National Chocolate Day on October 28. In Ghana, a large producer of chocolate, National Chocolate Day is February 14, Valentine’s Day. A sensible choice! But when should we celebrate chocolate? Maybe every day!

2. Ordinary Time isn’t what I thought it was. I love the idea of Ordinary Time, where I like to talk about Jesus’s presence with us in our ordinary days. A year ago, when I prepared to write about why I like Ordinary Time, I learned something shocking from a Methodist Church website:

“The word ‘ordinary’ here does not mean ‘routine’ or ‘not special.’ Instead, it refers to the ‘ordinal numbers’ (first, second, third, etc.) used to name and count the Sundays (such as the Third Sunday after Epiphany). This term comes from the Latin ordinalis, meaning ‘numbered’ or ‘ordered’ and tempus ordinarium, ‘measured time.’”

Despite my general desire to know the truth about things, I decided to persist in my ignorance. I have continued to talk and write about Ordinary Time as an opportunity to grow in experiencing God’s presence in everyday life.

3. The Church calendar is a gift that can connect us with Jesus’s life, God’s purposes, and our growth as disciples. Over the course of a year, we get to focus on so many different events in Jesus’s life and the life of the Church. Such wonderful holidays: Christmas! Easter! Pentecost! We get to think about preparing for Jesus’s first and second coming during Advent. In Lent, we get to walk with Jesus to the cross and ponder his great gift to us. At Epiphany, we celebrate the wise men coming, and we also think about God’s light and God’s revelation to the whole world. On Trinity Sunday, in May or June, we get to think theologically about this God we worship. On Christ the King Sunday, right before Advent, we can ponder the Kingdom of God — that important and perhaps confusing topic Jesus talked about so often.

Some holidays, like Christmas, have been sucked into the wider culture’s patterns. We try to keep Christ at the center of Christmas, but for other holidays, we have lost a Christian focus that can bring lovely meaning and challenge for growth. Halloween is rooted in All Hallows Eve and All Saints Day, beautiful holidays in our Christian tradition. Some Christian holy days that used to be significant in earlier centuries have been almost completely lost. Two examples are the Feast of St Michael and All Angels and Our Lady of Sorrows, a festival that could be helpful in these sad times. Christians often miss opportunities to connect with people outside the Church on holidays that reflect values we share, including the World Day of Social Justice, Earth Day, and Arbor Day.

After writing this series and reflecting on what I learned, I feel grateful for the incredibly variety and richness in the Christian story. I also rejoice in the way we can learn from the celebrations of people from other cultures, such as Chinese New Year and the Jewish High Holidays, which include Rosh Hashanah and the Feast of Tabernacles.

One of my all-time favorite hymns, Crown Him with Many Crowns, has a verse about time. When I looked it up, I learned that six verses were written by Canadian-British hymn writer Matthew Bridges (1800-1894) and another six by British minister Godfrey Thring (1823-1903). That’s why there are so many different verses in various hymnals. The original verses have often been chopped in half and combined with other verses. Here’s the original verse about time, written by Bridges:

Crown him the Lord of years!
  The Potentate of time,
Creator of the rolling spheres,
  Ineffably sublime!
Glassed in a sea of light,
  Where everlasting waves
Reflect his throne, the Infinite!
  Who lives, and loves, and saves.

God, the Infinite, the Potentate of time, you created time for us to live in. Thank you for our past, present, and future. Thank you for the rhythms of time. Thank you for the fun of the holidays we have celebrated all our lives, as well as the holidays we remember to recognize only occasionally. Our times are in your hands. Guard and keep us. Open us to see you in new ways in the rhythms of our lives.

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Next week: first post in a new series about journey as a helpful metaphor for faith. Illustration by Dave Baab: Gene Coulon Park, Renton, sculptures dressed for Memorial Day, another holiday I did not write about in this series.

One year ago, I published a collection of blog posts in a book entitled Friendship, Listening, and Empathy: A Prayer Guide. A couple dozen of Dave's beautiful watercolors illustrate the book. It makes a nice gift for people who are trying to grow in any of those three areas. Available in paperback and audiobook, and for Kindle.

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