Good morning…
Yesterday afternoon we had our final Monday class of the fall semester. To keep our attendance high, we have learned to end classes before the week of Thanksgiving. After reading a poem about effortless unity with God, sharing the details of some very important prayer concerns, and fleshing out a Spirit-led giving opportunity, together we read aloud quotes from this dynamic semester of discussing Simple Faith by Margaret Silf.
I think all of us might be encouraged by the wisdom God is growing. If you were asked to pick a few of the following quotes touching you most deeply, which ones might you choose? Which ones are the hardest for you to swallow?
***
She will look back
over the kaleidoscope
of her life
and notice how
the fragments of experience
that made no sense at all
at the time were,
all along,
shaping a rather
beautiful pattern.
***
We are each a part
of a vast and interdependent
web of life
in which every individual
finds his or her meaning
in the context of the whole.
***
Creation itself
is covered
with the footprints
of the Creator.
***
God is right here
in our ordinary days and weeks,
our conversations and interactions,
our joys and our sorrows,
waiting to be recognized.
***
“Every happening, great and small,
is a parable whereby God speaks to us,
and the art of life is to get the message.”
– Malcolm Muggeridge
***
“I am a little pencil
in the hand of a writing God
who is sending a love letter to the world.”
– Mother Teresa
***
Certainty divides. Mystery unites us.
***
If we think we have “arrived,”
we have gone down
a cul-de-sac.
***
“True faith is a leap away from fossilized beliefs
into the mystery of the Unknown God.” – Soren Kierkegaard
***
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” – Mary Oliver
***
Change won’t happen on its own.
It won’t grow unless we plant the seeds.
***
Each of us carries
a seed of God’s kingdom –
something that only we can
plant and nurture,
each of us uniquely.
***
One problem we have
in turning the ideal into the real
is that we try to leap across miles
rather than navigate inches.
We are not asked to save the world
but only to take each next loving step.
***
What happened today
to make me feel more alive,
more truly myself,
more grounded at the core of my being?
***
“Everyone must decide whether
to walk in the light of creative altruism
or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.”
– Martin Luther King Jr.
***
“An unexamined life is not worth living.” – Socrates
***
The currency of change is in our own back pockets.
***
“Ideals are like stars.
You can never reach them.
But you can use them to help you plot your course.”
– Andre Gide
***
Getting the right balance between solitude and community
is always going to be a challenge as we journey in faith.
***
Soul friends are like midwives.
They help bring Christ to birth in your life and your circumstances.
***
Perhaps faith is not to know but still to trust.
***
“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
***
Even though we have journeyed together through another fertile fall, there is still a lot which remains unsolved in each one of our hearts. The crucial questions stealing our sleep become fodder for honest prayer. If you had to name them, what unanswered questions are guiding you into this holiday season? Resisting the urge to nail down the answers, how might you learn to love your personalized questions like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign language?
Have patience.
Live each question.
Experience everything.
Perhaps, gradually, without even noticing it, some distant day we will given answers to blossom our one wild and precious life.
Now faith means putting our full confidence in the things we hope for, it means being certain of things we cannot see. It was this kind of faith that won their reputation for the saints of old. And it is after all only by faith that our minds accept as fact that the whole scheme of time and space was created by God’s command—that the world which we can see has come into being through principles which are invisible (Hebrews 11:1-3, PHILLIPS).
…Sue…
