What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.
-C.S. Lewis
Oh how I want to live simply, to love well, to say thank you.
put me in places to use words, draft pages
to see love and know graces
to watch beauty on faces
put me with you, and I’ll do up my laces
I’ll try to leave traces
of you, only you
put me right here to live out this story
oh great hope and glory
oh show me some more
if I must hide let it be in your shadow
so all that’s reflected is
you, only you
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged grace, life, love, photography, poetry, prayer, tonight, words
“Mystery is not the absence of meaning but the presence of more meaning than we can understand.”
-Dennis Covington
Deep breaths in a yoga class and then peace and for the first time in weeks and weeks, earnest prayer (It’s not that I haven’t prayed. It’s just that I haven’t prayed.) I commit to full stops more frequently, even if that means adding yoga classes to an already oft over-stuffed mix. The pause produces a quiet thought: I need wonder. A world saturated with things to do! and see! and that you have to be! and want! distracts, perhaps. I need wonder, not for wonder’s sake, but because when peeled back and exposed, I utterly long for life in a world spoken “good.”
The juxtaposition of a soul in but not of. Hopefully.
This is working me over today as I find myself aware of grace and tripping on words, endlessly tripping on words. God hears us, and somehow I think He, being Himself, loves to hear from us.
Gracious God, we thank you for the gift of prayer. What an extraordinary thing that we can pray to you, unburden ourselves before you, place our cares, woes and joys before you. I confess I find praying an awkward business. I keep thinking, Who am I to pray? But I know that to be false humility, hiding my prideful desire to be my own creator. So we pray a prayer of joy in prayer, asking that we become your prayers for one another. Amen.
-Stanley Hauerwas
p23, Prayers Plainly Spoken
“Good bread is the great need in poor homes, and oftentimes the best appreciated luxury in the homes of the very rich.”
–A Book for A Cook, The Pillsbury Co. (1905)
Ummm… if I say I’m going to blog every day for something like, say Advent, which has readings for every day, then I set myself up to fail. Apparently. And I’m okay with it. Because life is b u s y.
A few days ago I was writing about having 42 days left in my pastoral role at Grace, and I blinked and now have 24. Amber and I shot our last wedding of the year in the year we became wedding photographers instead of photographers who sometimes shoot weddings. In a week and a half my final trip to Mexico will commence. My family has had birthdays and has more birthdays coming up. Next month this time I will be on vacation. And self-employed in a creative endeavor that started out as a “what if” experiment with one of my besties.
Life is b u s y. And life is moving fast.
Tonight I folded laundry and uploaded client galleries online, tasks that have become the stuff of Sunday night. I found myself thinking about Texas and Toronto and the places in between. I wondered about people and stories and random intersections. I let my mind wander around old backdrops and new faces. And I thought about some words familiar to those of my readers who are church kids as I thought about what happens next and my hopes and some things I want but have not yet realized.
When Jesus wants his followers to understand who God is, he tells them that when kids ask their dad for bread, their dad does not give them stones. He is wanting them to understand something about the way God relates to people. He wants them to know He is good, and not just in some crazy-off-in-the-distant-cosmos kind of way. He is good in a practical, down-to-earth way.
If a kid is hungry and wants bread, her dad gives her bread.
I don’t know all the ins and outs of how we get the things we need and the timing of all of that. I do know this. I have these things I want and/or need and see beyond the horizon. I don’t know how it all fits together. A lot of life is standing wide-eyed with open hands asking for bread. And the bread is given. Always at the right time, a staple to the poor and delicacy to the rich.
We don’t have may answers save the one you brought us today,
as your mom and dad stayed up all night
to painfully receive you from the hands of God:
The proper grieving of a fallen world, is joy.
–“The Proper Grieving of a Fallen World”, Donald Miller
A couple of years ago, my friend Julie and I drank coffee and talked about life the way you do when you meet in the morning and chase caffeine with a walk in the park. Evening conversations marry to beer and walks around city blocks, but I digress. They wanted another baby, Julie and her husband. That want combined with trying had resulted in the ache of frustration, disappointment and hurt. This had gone on for some time. It continued to go on. Conversations would shift from that point to doctor’s visits and consideration of options. Time, in this context, taunts and teases longing. Desire can shift from the dreamy wonder of what could be to the heavy hand of what is not…
Julie, though, is a pragmatic woman, perhaps my most pragmatic friend. We sat there that day, and we prayed. We prayed for a baby. We asked God for help. For a long time when I thought of Julie and remembered to talk to God about her (not as frequent as perhaps prayer could be…), I prayed for a baby. A lot of times prayer seems one-sided. People who are sick don’t get better; they die. Abuse continues. War does not cease. Anxiety robs me of sleep at a maddening rate. People do not change. I do not change. The world does not change. That is my perception.
That perception can be believed as reality. Understanding the seeming lack of resolution for so many things prayed for with earnest does not come on demand. I do not have answers for those whys. Trusting God is all I got, and when there seems to be more mess than redemption, well, that’s not the easy way.
A few weeks ago, though, I met Phoebe. Julie cradled her wobbly frame as she passed this little bundle of a girl to me. She nestled against me and slept, her tiny chest rising and falling to fill tiny lungs with oxygen giving life to this person who did not exist last year. And now she is here.
When I met her I remembered that day in Starbucks and how we prayed. We asked God for help. A couple of years later, the tangibility of this one baby, this beautiful girl, exudes hope every time I see her. We prayed for her, and she is here. She is here, and she is life.
Phoebe does not bring answers or understanding to other circumstances and challenges. The realness of her, though, refreshes faith and hope. We don’t have it all worked out, this seeking of God and his way. But here is this baby, this very real baby, and she who was not here right when she was wanted… she needed to come this way. A fragment of her destiny is a page of my story: we prayed; God heard; she is here.
what do you do when leaders disappoint?
run and hide?
turn the other cheek?
stand up for something different?
does it matter?
is wanting humility from them
an apology for the things they got wrong,
an admittance that they took missteps,
an allegience to do better next time
is that asking too much?
Hmmm… well, this is some writing I would prefer to squirm my way out of. It’s not all Bush’s fault that I don’t want to write about him. I think he probably does what most of us do when he goes to work in the morning: I think he tries to do his best and act out of positive intention. I believe that.
But I feel failed. I feel failed mostly because of the war and how it has been carried out.
I also feel failed by the evangelical church, by the way we have been quick to endorse a leader as God’s choice. I think this is our own misstep, one we should admit. I think we need to be cautious about calling a politician God’s plan to save the world. God had a plan to save the world. And it was political. And things got ugly. And in the end God laid down his life for grace and peace. A stark contrast to protective power that looks out for number one first.
My hope and prayer for Bush is that he be teachable and humble, that he walk in forgiveness, that he love his enemy. My hope and prayer for this next chapter of politics in America, the one that is being written right now, is that we will revise past mistakes. That we will error on the side of grace and peace. That we will trust that God’s plan to save the world is you and me.
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