During my early morning quiet time, I read “Show me a sign of your favor….” (Psalm 86:17a). Then it struck me, like a loud shout of ‘Alleluia” from a congregational member while a preacher is giving his/her sermon to a stoic, mainline church. Without asking, God showed me his favor the previous night. Let me explain.
A Winter of Being Fallow
Recently, a friend said to me as she entered what would be the last day of her husband’s life, “I don’t know any more how to pray.” The heartache expressed in that question – do I pray for him to live? Or do I pray for him to die? – resonated with me through all those times I haven’t been sure how to pray. My response to her, “with groanings too deep for words,” comes straight from Romans 8:26, and reminds us that our prayers need not have words attached.
The Value of an Apron
Over the holidays, I found myself in the kitchen more than usual. I enjoy whipping up a batch of cookies or measuring ingredients for a pie (especially if one of my grandchildren is with me). I enjoy the rich aroma of soup bubbling away on the stove or the smell of freshly baked bread. However, I tend to be an untidy cook. When I plan to get down to cooking seriously, I put on my apron. My apron signals to myself, and those around me, that I mean business. This signal says, “things are going to get messy.” “Take notice - this recipe will take more time and effort than you might expect.” But hopefully, my apron also signals that something wonderful is out there in the future, and the end product will be worth the effort and wait.
God Helps a Forced Schedule Become an Unforced Rhythm of Grace
The Sacrament of Letting Go
Fall has arrived in my neck of the woods, and I am soaking in the beauty all around me. I am grateful for the reminder nature gives each year - that letting go can be beautiful. I am excited to share a favorite poem with you and I pray it is a blessing to you in this season. After reading Macrina’s words, I am deeply touched by the thought that my vulnerability, my dependence, my need and my emptiness, is where my Beauty can be found. May I be courageous enough to give to the world and those I love from this place.
I would love to know what is evoked in you as you read.
Soul Care in the Midst
All of us are busy. We are productive, responsible, connected people, making good things happen in our families and the world. Unfortunately it is not unusual for our busyness to interfere with our life with God, squeezing out soul care. In response, voices within our Christian community call us to slow down and live with more margin.
Sometimes the invitation to slow down is the convicting voice of the Spirit helping us to see that we are slaves to our “programs for happiness” as Thomas Keating would say. In this case, change is iin order. But sometimes we just feel guilty because there is nothing we can actually cut out to make our life less busy. We can’t give away a child, quit a job, stop caring for aging parents, or leave other commitments in order to lead a less busy life. Rather than feeling guilty and longing for the day when things “settle down a bit,” perhaps there are seasons of life when the invitation is to connect with God in the midst of a full life.
I’ve been living with the word “midst.” God with me and me with God in the midst of life in all its busyness: God with me in the midst of one-thing-after-another days, unexpected twists, and too-short nights. God delighting in the pulse and pace of my life, not wanting me to be looking for a way out, but to learn how to connect with him in the midst of it all.
Eyeing The Feeling Wheel
Sometime ago I was struggling to wrap my brain around an emotion I couldn’t quite name to my spiritual direction supervisor. As I hummed and hawed, she wondered if I might check out The Feeling Wheel. I told her I had suggested this resource to a few directees. Actually, I had been on a roll with The Feeling Wheel doing my own work. Recently, this tool has helped me see my feelings of apathy and indifference stem from boredom and the primary emotion of sadness.
The Feeling Wheel helps me identify and name my own individual feelings during spiritual direction sessions. It’s like an interior compass designed to help me locate how I’m feeling, pausing, shifting and perhaps already traveling with a directee, and with God.
The Feeling Wheel has helped me admit to, and accept, my changing emotions in a direction session I see as an evolving thread. The directee starts out with the when, where, and how of what they’ve been doing. This “thread of reporting” becomes a “thread of self-awareness” where one’s story is told through unedited questions, desires, a burst of joy, a thought that tails off into doubt.
I'll Never Be More Loved
“I'll never be more loved than I am right now
Wasn't holding You up
So there's nothing I can do to let You down
It doesn't take a trophy to make You proud
I'll never be more loved than I am right now”
These are lyrics from a song called “Jireh.” Over the last couple of months, I hear this song on the radio at least twice a day. Whatever I’m doing it can bring me to a pause and I soak in the reality that “I’ll never be more loved than I am right now.” It’s so powerful and like a cool glass of water, my whole being is refreshed. And, like water, I need this over and over, both the reminder that I’m God’s beloved, and the refreshment it brings.
Many years ago, I had a thought while I was spending time with God in prayer. In my imagination, I was dead and with God in heaven, and there I realized that if I had any clue just how much God loved me while I was alive, that I would have lived differently. It made me sad and I asked God to PLEASE help me to know in my core now how much He loves me.
God in an Apron
I was listening in on my father’s Sunday school class this spring and was caught short by this verse from Luke 12: “How fortunate those servants will be when the master knocks and they open the door immediately! You know what the master will do? He’ll put on an apron, sit them down at the kitchen table, and he’ll serve them a midnight snack.” I’m used to Master/Servant stories in the Bible. Most of them end with “Well done” or “You’re out.” This one pauses with the Master putting an apron around his waist and serving a midnight snack. It rather breaks all the norms.
Life from Fire
The image of eight years ago is still etched in my mind. The vivid mental picture is a large, Yellowstone National Park meadow with a trail meandering through the center of the meadow. It was on that trail that I was walking nearly eight years ago. There was tall prairie grass waving in the wind while spotted throughout the meadow were the charred remains of the jack pines, a reminder of the devastation of past wildfires. Wildfires destroyed thirty-six percent of the park in 1988 and yet, as I walked through the meadow there was beauty, the beauty of new growth, wildflowers in full bloom and new trees reaching out toward the sun. It was there that the Lord spoke to me with the words, “Out of the dust of ashes and death comes new life.” Words much needed, for you see, only weeks before, my wife of forty years had died of cancer.