Good morning…
My ongoing wrestling match with God erupted in our blog post for yesterday, Should I Stop Blogging? Digging deep down at the the crossroads of my personal calling I pondered two hard questions.
- “Do I still feel deep gladness as I wake each morning to write a fresh message with God?”
- “Does our written word ministry still meet a deep hunger in the world?”
Having interacting intimately with many of you throughout the day, I snuggled into bed last night sensing, “Yes, Lord, deep gladness still comes alive as I blog.” And “Our written word community does seem to meet a deep hunger in our hurting world.”
Part of my deep discernment came yesterday from the monthly phone call with our spiritual direction cohort of four. The leading listener for the day shared this sacred reading to till the soil of our meaningful time together.
******
This Grace That Scorches Us – A Blessing for Pentecost Day by Jan Richardson
Here’s one thing
you must understand
about this blessing:
it is not
for you alone.
It is stubborn
about this.
Do not even try
to lay hold of it
if you are by yourself,
thinking you can carry it
on your own.
To bear this blessing,
you must first take yourself
to a place where everyone
does not look like you
or think like you,
a place where they do not
believe precisely as you believe,
where their thoughts
and ideas and gestures
are not exact echoes
of your own.
Bring your sorrow.
Bring your grief.
Bring your fear.
Bring your weariness,
your pain,
your disgust at how broken
the world is,
how fractured,
how fragmented
by its fighting,
its wars,
its hungers,
its penchant for power,
its ceaseless repetition
of the history it refuses
to rise above.
I will not tell you
this blessing will fix all that.
But in the place
where you have gathered,
wait.
Watch.
Listen.
Lay aside your inability
to be surprised,
your resistance to what you
do not understand.
See then whether this blessing
turns to flame on your tongue,
sets you to speaking
what you cannot fathom
or opens your ear
to a language
beyond your imagining
that comes as a knowing
in your bones,
a clarity
in your heart
that tells you
this is the reason
we were made:
for this ache
that finally opens us,
for this struggle,
this grace
that scorches us
toward one another
and into
the blazing day.
—Jan Richardson
from Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons
******
We bear this written word ministry together with God, for daily writing is not a blessing I carry alone. Called into this online community of people all over our globe, God has planted me in a place where everyone does not look like me or think like me, a place where people do not believe precisely as I believe, where their thoughts and ideas and gestures are not exact echoes of my own. We have gathered to wait, to watch, to listen with God together each morning.
Every morning we bring to God our sorrow and our grief, our fear and our weariness, our pain and our disgust at how broken the world is. We lay aside our inability to be surprised, our resistance to what we do not understand. This living blessing between us turns to flame on our tongues, setting each of us to speaking what we cannot fathom and opens our ears to a language beyond our imagining that comes as a knowing in our bones, a clarity in our heart calling deep, “This is the reason we were made.”
Our shared daily task is made increasingly clear. In simple humility, let our gardener, God, landscape you with the Word, making a salvation-garden of your life (James 1:19b, MSG).
…Sue…
