Noonday Notes

Issue No. 34

February 13h, 2026

I’m going dancing tonight. And a song is stuck in my head. Texas Time. Not because Keith Urban’s voice is so high that it took me forever to figure out who sang this song, but because I keep singing “Martha Time” instead of Texas Time. This is my own take.

It’s Spring in South Texas in case you didn’t know, and that means everything feels urgent, I can wear tank tops again, and text threads are talking about spring break and summer plans.

There’s a lot of good work to do, it’s overwhelming at times. It’s very Martha energy. Busy, necessary, responsible, moving from one thing to the next because it all matters.

In the story of Mary and Martha in Luke 10:38-42, Martha isn’t doing anything wrong. She’s doing what needs to be done. But Jesus names what’s underneath it: worry, distraction, being pulled in too many directions. Mary, on the other hand, notices that the Jesus is right in front of her. She stops. She sits. She chooses presence over productivity, not because work doesn’t matter, but because being with the sacred does.

Spring exposes the truth that time is finite. There are only so many hours in a day. Only so many beds that can be planted. Only so much I can cross off in my bullet journal as completed. How we spend our time reveals what we believe is important, whether we mean for it to or not.

A question has come to me this week: where am I being invited into Mary time right now? And can I chill out the Martha in me enough? We’ve turned over beds making room for what’s next. We’ve said goodbye to some crops from last season and are moving onward. This is farming and life of course.

Next week we head into this lesson not only with the land, but also with Lent. Lent doesn’t ask us to do more. It asks us to pay attention. To practice restraint. To abstain. To notice what’s crowding our time and our hearts. To remember that the holy isn’t waiting for us on the other side of our to-do list, it’s already here.

Spring will always be busy. There will always be work to do. But it is also an invitation to choose more carefully how we spend our time. To trust that presence is not a distraction from faithfulness, but one of its truest forms. Martha’ energy with Mary’s posture.

Read the rest of the newsletter here.