12th Blogiversary, Collect, and Quotation for This Week

Monday marks my 12th Blogiversary: I started this blog on August 6, 2006 and while it's waxed and waned over the years (more waning lately--mostly posting book reviews!), it's still going.

So in honor of this blogiversary, I'd like to revive two weekly postings from the murky past: the weekly Propers from the Book of Common Prayer 2011 and a weekly Quotation of the Week.

More than seven years ago, Father Acker of Blessed Trinity Anglican Church wrote and printed a new Book of Common Prayer, the mainstay of Anglican worship since the Church of England left the Roman Catholic Church during the reign of King Henry VIII. This new version, the Book of Common Prayer 2011, is largely based on Thomas Cranmer's original Book of Common Prayer (BCP) of 1549, only with updated language and the Scriptures are from the English Standard Version (ESV) Bible of 2001.

When this BCP was first released for preview for the Anglican Church of North America (ACNA) and the Reformed Episcopal Church (REC), it was largely ignored as the ACNA had started working on their own BCP. I started posting the weekly Collect on Saturday nights to our Facebook group and also posted the Collect here in the sidebar of this blog. I also frequently posted the Collect and Readings as a blog post, and I think I'd like to pick up this habit once again.

TENTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY

THE COLLECT:

LET your merciful ears, O Lord, be open to the prayers of your people; And, so that we may obtain our requests, assist us in asking only for those things that are pleasing to you; Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and rules with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen. (References: Nehemiah 1.11; 1 Chronicles 1.11-12; 1 John 5.14)

THE READINGS:

The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 12.1-11

The Gospel: Luke 19.41-47a

plus Psalm 55.1-8, 23; Psalm 137.1-6; Exodus 20.1-17

And along with the weekly Propers (the Collect plus the Readings), I like to share a quotation for the week. Some are Christian in nature, some literary, some humorous. I have collected quotations officially for seventeen years starting in August 2001, just before we moved from San Diego proper to a small mountain village 50 miles to the east (and 3500 feet in elevation). 

I'm halfway through my second journal in which I jot down quotations from e-mail devotions, bound devotions, articles and books I'm reading, plus lines from poems and/or hymns (and sometimes the entire poem and/or hymn), song lyrics, quotes from TV shows and/or movies, etc. Basically, I jot down anything that I want to "collect" or "keep" or remember--often with a dip pen and bottled ink, just to "keep it real." I have included a Quotation of the Week in the sidebar of this blog since the beginning, and now I want to start posting them in the blog itself again. So here is a quotation from a blog post by a well-known Christian blogger and author that impressed the Truth into my heart:

"And every day, with every word, we get to decide: Do we mar the world, or mark the world?" 

~Ann Voskamp on her blog A Holy Experience

So here they are: the Propers for this week and a Quotation for the week. I may write more about the Propers and the Quotation for each week when I post, so I hope that you'll enjoy my meditative meanderings on these topics, in addition to some book reviews soon to be posted here as well! 

Soli Deo Gloria,