Good morning... One of the books we are studying in my living room this semester is Margaret Silf's The Other Side of Chaos: Breaking Through When Life Breaks Down. On pages 5 and 6, we read: "Transitions make you ache everywhere. They make you ache, in every joint and muscle and in every brain cell, and in every fiber [...]
Good morning... One line lingers from yesterday's "sue2you" message. "Oh honey, even the saints had spiritual dry spells!" It strikes me that spiritual "dry spells" are not really dry. Actually, dry spells of the Spirit are quite often wet. Wet with weeping. Moist with meaning. Damp with deep desire. Spiritual "dry spells" carry us downstream toward the Savior of [...]
Good morning... After reading yesterday's message, "From dark to dawn," she wrote: "Oh my goodness Sue, we have such parallel stories. Please share Lindsay McCaul's beautiful song "Take My Hand" with your subscriber. Like you, my disconnected time followed a move that unexpectedly brought up emotions of loss from a miscarriage suffered over a decade earlier. We lost a [...]
Good morning... After reading a post about me living on after the life of my dreams was severed, she wrote: "Dear Sue, tears are pouring down my face as I am reading this. I am certainly no stranger to deep dark depressions as I have suffered from these most of my life, but God has chosen to prune me [...]
Good morning... Chaos. We hate the word. We hate the experience. We hate her synonyms. Disarray. Jumble. Turmoil. We love her antonyms. Order. Peace. Calm. Yet one line from one book has stayed with me for twenty five years. "Identity is born out of chaos," penned Sue Bender in her 1991 book, Plain and Simple. What does Bender mean? [...]
Good morning... When darkness was upon the face of the deep (Genesis 1:2), one Hebrew word sums up the atmosphere into which God spoke the first light. "Tohu." English words resembling "tohu" describe an experience familiar to many of us. Confusion. Emptiness. Formlessness. Complete chaos. "Tohu's" primeval disorder precedes God's creative activity. Always has. Always will. A trying time [...]
Good morning... How fun it is for my fingertips to listen for the LORD's movement in the early morning hours. As hurricane Hermine exposes the vulnerability of Florida's Gulf Coast, God's winds now blow us back to the start of it all. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, [...]
Good morning... As I drove to fitness class at the church, a chorus resurfaced from our years of leading youth group in Gettysburg, PA. "Here I am LORD. Is it I LORD? I have heard You calling in the night. I will go LORD if You lead me. I will hold Your people in my heart." Amid planks and [...]
Good morning... "I waken this morning as one being taught." This sentence coaxes me to awareness from my sleeping state. Next a prayer dawns, "LORD, give us a teachable spirit." As we hone the art of early morning listening, LORD, help us to crave the wisdom You teach. Poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning then breaks into my consciousness, adding her [...]
Good morning... This Memorial Day morn, I think of my grandparent's generation, a generation which was heavy laden with the effects of war. Just yesterday, I was reading one of my old journals entries dated August 27, 2005. Back then I wrote these words. "I'm drawn to the note attached to the quilt that covers the old oak rocker [...]
