Wheelchairs...

Wheelchairs

by Rhina P. Espaillat

Arrayed as if this ward were some bright deck
scrubbed for a long, romantic, costly cruise,
they wait for passengers, steel arm and neck
gleaming with welcome. Three, exchanging views,
huddle like cronies glad to be aboard
together among strangers; here and there
a loner muses; two lean close to hoard
some gossip much too scandalous to share.

Nurses in soft pastels chatter and smile;
light music tinkles somewhere overhead,
and floral paintings in a sprightly style
conjure the ghost of summer, long since dead.
But wheelchairs, glinting, wink as if to say,
Not now, not yet, but you and I, someday..."

 

"Wheelchairs" by Rhina P. Espaillat, from Playing At Stillness. © Truman State University Press, 2005. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

 

From "The Writers Alamanac"

Communion ...

Communion

Daniel Berrigan

 

Sometime in your life,
hope that you might see one starved man,
the look on his face when the bread
finally arrives. Hope that you
might have baked it or bought it
or even kneaded it yourself.
For that look on his face,
for your meeting his eyes
across a piece of bread,
you might be willing to lose a lot,
or suffer a lot,
or die a little even.

Source: Unknown

Add your thoughts at inward/outward

Wrong Turn

Wrong Turn

by Luci Shaw

I took a wrong turn the other day.
A mistake, but it led me to the shop where I found
the very thing I'd been searching for.

With my brother I opened a packet
of old letters from my mother and saw a side of her
that sweetened what had been deeply sour.

Later that day the radio sang a song from
a time when I was discovering love,
and folded me into itself again.

"Wrong Turn" by Luci Shaw, from What the Light Was Like. © WordFarm, 2006. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

 

From "The Writers Almanac"

Invitation to Photography: Silence

Invitation to Photography: Silence, a group on Flickr.

A wonderful collection of photos by photographers around the world on the theme of silence.

...in the silence...

It is in the silence
that my hope is, and my aim.
A song whose lines

I cannot make or sing
sounds men's silence
like a root. Let me say

and not mourn: the world
lives in the death of speech
and sings there.

---Wendell Berry, excerpted from "The Silence"

Quakers are More than Oats -- We're SPICE-y!

I'll be teaching a new Sunday School series beginning Sunday September 9th at West Newton Friends (6800 S. Mooresville Rd, Indianapolis).  It's on the Quaker SPICES -- to learn more, click the video!

Love & Care

Learning to Care

Leonardo Boff

When we love, we care; and when we care, we love. That is why the ethos of loving is complemented by the ethos of caring. Caring is the key category of the new paradigm of civilization that is struggling to emerge all over the world.

The lack of caring for scarce resources and the way nature is treated--the absence of caring in relation to the power of science and technology, which has built weapons of mass destruction, of devastation to the biosphere and to the survival of the human species itself--is bringing us to an unprecedented impasse. Either we care or we perish.

Source: Unknown

Add your thoughts at inward/outward

Love Not Addiction

Choosing God

Gerald May

 

God refuses to be an object for attachment because God desires full love, not addiction. Love born of true freedom, love free from attachment, requires that we search for a deepening awareness of God, just as God freely reaches out to us. In addition, full love for God means we must turn to God over and against other things.


If our choice of God is to be made with integrity, we must first have felt other attractions and chosen, painfully, not to make them our gods.


True love, then, is not only born of freedom; it is also born of difficult choice. A mature and meaningful love must say something like, 'I have experienced other goodnesses, and they are beautiful, but it is You, my true heart's desire, whom I choose above all.'


We have to turn away before we can come home with dignity.

Source: Addiction and Grace

Read more and add your thoughts at inward/outward

"Living" by Denise Levertov

Living

Denise Levertov

The fire in leaf and grass
so green it seems
each summer the last summer.


The wind blowing, the leaves
the shivering in the sun,
each day the last day.


A red salamander
so cold and so
easy to catch, dreamily


moves his delicate feet
and long tail. I hold
my hand open for him to go.


Each minute the last minute.

Source: Good Poems selected by Garrison Keillor

Add your thoughts at inward/outward

This message is a daily service of inward/outward.

Aware

by Denise Levertov

When I opened the door
I found the vine leaves
speaking among themselves in abundant
whispers.
                   My presence made them
hush their green breath,
embarrassed, the way
humans stand up, buttoning their jackets,
acting as if they were leaving anyway, as if
the conversation had ended
just before you arrived.
                                               I liked
the glimpse I had, though,
of their obscure
gestures. I liked the sound
of such private voices. Next time
I'll move like cautious sunlight, open
the door by fractions, eavesdrop
peacefully.

"Aware" by Denise Levertov, from This Great Unknowing. © New Directions Publishing, 1999. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

 

From The Writer's Almanac

Garden Grace

Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace. The garden door is always open to the holy.

Gardening by Heart by May Sarton

From Add your thoughts at inward/outward

For Nancy -- the gardener of grace at Ploughshares

There's a Wildness...

Wildness

Matthew Fox

Wildness is everywhere in our relationship with the Spirit. Who is in charge here? Certainly not we. Yet there is method behind the madness, peace within the wildness, love within the yearning that is mutual between Spirit and us.... How good it is to be drawn along with all things into the intimacy of the Godself! How natural a place to be. We find repose there. In the Spirit. With the Spirit. Sharing the Spirit's work.

Source: Creativity

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The Peace of Wild Things

The Peace of Wild Things

by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Source: The Peace of Wild Things

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...an all-embracing love...

All-Embracing Love Fyodor Dostoevsky Love people even in their sin, for that is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on earth. Love all of God's creation, the whole and every grain of sand of it. Love every leaf, every ray of God's light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.   Source: The Brothers Karamazov   Add your thoughts at inward/outward

Breathe, Look, Trust

For almost 30 years my wife Nancy has been one of my best spiritual teachers. A woman of deep faith and a centered heart, he’s my primary teacher in learning to appreciate the daily holiness of life. She keeps trying to teach me three important spiritual lessons.....

Read the full article at Conversations Journal

Our brokenness reveals something ...

Our brokenness reveals something about who we are. Our sufferings and pains are not simply bothersome interruptions of our lives; rather, they touch us in our uniqueness and our most intimate individuality. The way I am broken tells you something unique about me. The way you are broken tells me something unique about you. That is the reason for my feeling very privileged when you freely share some of your deep pain with me, and that is why it is an expression of my trust in you when I disclose to you something of my vulnerable side. Our brokenness is always lived and experienced as highly personal, intimate and unique.

by Henri J. M. Nouwen from  Life of the Beloved

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Loving God Rightly

Loving God Rightly

Meister Eckhart

Some people want to see God with their eyes as they see a cow and to love him as they love their cow--they love their cow for the milk and cheese and profit it makes them. This is how it is with people who love God for the sake of outward wealth or inward comfort. They do not rightly love God when they love him for their own advantage. Indeed, I tell you the truth, any object you have on your mind, however good, will be a barrier between you and the inmost truth.

Source: Meister Eckhart, A Modern Translation by Raymond Bernard Blakney

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Sometimes it takes darkness ...

Sweet Darkness

David Whyte

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

Source: The House of Belonging

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... Everything else is better...

Quiet
by Tony Hoagland

Prolonged exposure to death
Has made my friend quieter.

Now his nose is less like a hatchet
And more like a snuffler.

Flames don't erupt from his mouth anymore
And life doesn't crack his thermometer.

Instead of overthrowing the government
He reads fly-fishing catalogues

And takes photographs of water.
An aphorist would say

The horns of the steer have grown straighter.
He has an older heart

that beats younger.
His Attila the Hun imitation

Is not as good as it used to be.
Everything else is better.


************
Hmmm. I wonder why I relate?

Awaken Your Senses Comes to Philadelphia!

Beth Booram's and my Awaken Your Senses workshop is coming to Pendle Hill in Wallingford, PA on October 5-7, 2012.  Based on our Awaken Your Senses book, this interactive and very sensory workshop will teach you ways of engaging your senses and exploring the wonder of God. 

Today would be a great day to register.  I hope we'll see you there!

"...we were made to ..."

War Some of the Time

by Charles Bukowski

when you write a poem it
needn't be intense
it
can be nice and
easy
and you shouldn't necessarily
be
concerned only with things like anger or
love or need;
at any moment the
greatest accomplishment might be to simply
get
up and tap the handle
on that leaking toilet;
I've
done that twice now while typing
this
and now the toilet is
quiet.
to
solve simple problems: that's
the most
satisfying thing, it
gives you a chance and it
gives everything else a chance
too.

we were made to accomplish the easy
things
and made to live through the things
hard.

"War Some of the Time" by Charles Bukowski, from Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way. © Ecco Press, 2003. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

From "The Writer's Almanac"

Humans are God's other self....

A God Who Is Friend

Oscar Romero

This is the beauty of prayer and of Christian life: coming to understand that a God who converses with humans has created them and has lifted them up, with the capacity of saying "I" and "you." What would we give to have such power as to create a friend to our taste and with a breath of our own life to make that friend able to understand us and be understood by us and converse intimately--to know our friend as truly another self? That is what God has done; human beings are God's other self. He has lifted us up so that he can talk with us and share his joys, his generosity, his grandeur. He is the God who converses with us.

Source: The Violence of Love

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Laugh because that is the purest...

I Got Kin

Hafiz

Plant
So that your own heart
Will grow.

Love
So God will think,

"Ahhhhh,
I got kin in that body!
I should start inviting that soul over
For coffee and
Rolls."

Sing
Because this is a food
Our starving world
Needs.

Laugh
Because that is the purest
Sound.

Source: The Gift

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Colorado Learnings: The Long and Winding Road...

"Rim Rock Drive offers 23 miles of breathtaking views."  Well, I can attest that the first four miles from the west entrance are breathtaking.  They sure took my breath away.  Especially the first three.

Heading into Colorado National Monument from the west mean taking a road that shoots vertically (okay, I exagerrate a bit) to the park's high (emphasis on high) country.  As we ascended the narrow (and that I do not exagerrate) two lane road, my brother-in-law Dave kept telling Linda and me -- the flatlanders in the back seat) that he would go at whatever speed we needed to feel comfortable.

I thought about saying that reverse would be a good speed -- getting off the mountain!

Up we climbled, Dave and Julie relaxed in the front seat, looking around, marveling at the beauty.  Dave often took one hand off the steering wheel to point out some grand vista or sheer drop.  I kept both hands tightly on my knees (except when wiping the sweat from them) and watched the road ahead -- especially when, coming out of a small, low tunnel, the road took a left turn and all that was visible ahead was sky.  Lots of sky.  A phrase from the opening of "Its a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" (one of our family's favorite movies) kept coming to me.  It's after Jimmy Durante is passing people on a high desert highway and misses a curve.  When they find him, J. Russell Finch (Milton Berle) keeps saying, "Hey, did you see th-the way he went SAILING right out there?"

Yeah.  I could envision it.

We drove along slowly.  Dave comfortable, letting us know that this road was built in the 1930s by WPA and other workers.  And I began to think about that.  How those fellows had taken on the task of making the way for us and the others who would pass that way -- carving a road out of rock face and blasting tunnels so that we could enjoy the views that would only be obtained by reaching the top.

And I thought of all the thousands upon thousands who had travelled that way before me.

I began to relax a little.  I told the J. Russell Finch voice to shut up.  And I reflected that, as on my way of faith, while the road I travel is uniquely mine, sections have been prepared by those who have gone before.  Pilgrims on the the road to the face of our loving God.  And I prayed a little pray of thanks to them who had been before -- both spiritually and literally on this road I travelled.

-- Brent

Colorado Learnings: The Upward Way

I'm a flat-lander.  I readily admit that.  A child of the Midwest, that region is my home in many senses.  I'm rooted and grounded there and love its seasons, flora and fauna.

But i like to travel, too.  I enjoy seeing different parts of God's good earth.  This summer I've seen the Carolina coastline, northern Ohio farm fields, and Colorado's mountains.

Yesterday I did something I would not, on my own, choose to do.  I went on a ride at Colorado National Monument.

Now unlike the the Washington Monument, which I have seen many times whilst in DC, there is no ... um... monument at Colorado National Monument.  There's no stone spire there, no man-made monolith.  Instead the whole place is a geologic monument.  With sheer cliffs dropping 2,000 feet.

That last part is why I would not choose to take a ride there.  I'm not a big fan of sheer drops of 20 feet -- let alone 2,000 feet.  But my sister Julie and her husband Dave wanted me to see this particular part of their state and my sister Linda who is almost as heights-impaired as I am, said she was game, so off we went.

I was fine at first.  Didn't really think much about it.  But they kept talking on the almost 2 hour trip from Montrose to the park entrance about how it wasn't so bad and which side of the car I should not sit on and how I could keep my eyes closed on the way up, if I wanted.

All that made me a mite jittery.  So did, upon our arrival at the park entrance, Linda saying, "Okay, let's switch seats."  She said it was so I could have the best views for photos, but it was really because she wanted to be on the side of the car facing the solid rock walls instead of the sheer (I have I mentioned that the drops offs are sheer?) drop onto the rocks below.

I was still pretty much okay.  Until a car pulled up next to us.  The driver and passenger looked up at the roads clinging to the side of the rock face, looked at each other, looked up again, looked back at each other ... and turned around and left.

I took a deep breathe, we pulled up to the ranger station, got our sticker and started up a gentle climb.  I looked at the map the ranger had kindly given us just as the road took a decided un-gentle angle of descent and all guard rails disappeared (to make it easier for the car to plunge all the way to the bottom of Fruita Canyon I guess).  According to the map, ahead lay Dead Man's Curve.

My goal was to make it there -- and past. 

My hands were sweaty, my breathing shallow.  I wanted to lean to the inside to "help" keep the car on the road (unknown forces were probably at work trying to suck us off the road).  I wanted to close my eyes.  But instead, I reminded myself to breathe deep.  I sat back.  I wiped my hands on my shorts.  I stole small glances out the side window while Julie and Dave "ooohed" and "aahed."  I admitted to myself and them that I was scared.  And I told myself that soon I would be at a place that was more comfortable to me than an automobile climbing along the edge -- and would be witness to some vistas that I'd never witness any other way.

Like life, I thought.  I'm in the midst of a sort scary trek now... after having left a long-term, solid, well-paying, fulfilling position with a wonderful organization to do ... to do what?  To find another  solid, well-paying, fulfilling position with a wonderful organization?  To write, edit, speak, lead retreats, consult with churches? 

The road I'm on looks pretty scary in some ways.  But the safety of the flatlands is behind me.  I'm on the climb.  The cliffs look pretty sheer.  But, like yesterday, I'm in good company.  Many other of God's children are traveling similar paths, and some are with me on mine.

And, like yesterday, I have a driver and guide who's trustworthy and knows the terrain, even if I don't.  So, like the old gospel hymn says:

I'm pressing on the upward way

New heights I'm gaining every day;

Still praying as I'm onward bound,

“Lord, plant my feet on higher ground.”

Now, if I can just make it past "Dead Man's Curve."

-- Brent

What is happening to me now?

What is Now?

Brenda Ueland

Sometimes say softly to yourself: "Now...now. What is happening to me now? This is now. What is coming into me now? This moment?" Then suddenly you begin to see the world as you had not seen it before, to hear people's voices and not only what they are saying but what they are trying to say and you sense the whole truth about them. And you sense existence, not piecemeal--not this object and that--but as a translucent whole.

Source: If You Want to Write

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Cleaning the Bathroom

Today's poem on The Writer's Almanac reminded me of the depth and truth of Carrie Newcomer's "Holy As A Day Is Spent"

Cleaning the Bathroom

by Phyllis Hoge

Cleaning the bathroom is humbling and good.
Enamel and glass feel smoother than wood

as the mind, barely thinking, goes passive. Meanwhile
the hand, gliding easily over the tile

or toilet or mirror, finds tangible peace,
in the rhythm of rubbing, a kindly release

and the patience of porcelain fixtures can drain
what's flashy or fancy in favor of plain.

In style unpretentious, demeanor serene,
the bathroom is basic. Its function: to clean.

"Cleaning the Bathroom" by Phyllis Hoge, from Hello, House. © Fithian Press, 2012. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

when we no longer know what to do....

The Real Work

by Wendell Berry

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

"The Real Work" by Wendell Berry, from Standing by Words. © 1983, Used by permission of Counterpoint. (buy now)

From the Writers Almanac.

This is one of my favorite Wendell Berry poems.  And it's appearance today, as I seek clarity for my future regarding work and direction, seems God-sent.  ;-)

a huge silence might interrupt this sadness...

If We Could Do Nothing Pablo Neruda If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving, and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death. Source: Keeping Still Add your thoughts at inward/outward

...you wait for that one thing...

And you wait, you wait for that one thing
that will infinitely enlarge your life;
the gigantic, the stupendous,
the awakening of stones,
depths turned round toward you.

The volumes bound in rust and gold
flicker dimly on the shelves;
and you think of lands traveled across,
of paintings, of the clothes of
women found and lost.

And then suddenly you know: it was then.
You rise, and before you
stands the fear and prayer and shape
of a vanished year.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, “Memory” translated by Edward Snow

no one is us...

A Piece of the Puzzle

by Anne Wilson Schaef

 

I imagine the universe as an enormous puzzle. Each of us is a unique and vital piece of that puzzle. No one else has our genes, our life experience; no one is us. We are unique! When we are fully ourselves we are that piece.

Source: When Society Becomes an Addict

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Step into the troubled waters...

Step into the troubled waters

the angel left for you--
the trembling unknown,
the unchartered depth.
The body descending
blurs in the refraction
of sacred Light.

"Bethsaida" by Nancy Compton Williams

Source: The Penwood Review

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...likely to find ourselves participating in the Divine nature ...

"When beauty, truth, life, and love are all present in our relationships, ministries, vocations, life choices, then we are much more likely to find ourselves participating in the Divine nature and living more deeply."
-- an excerpt from my upcoming plenary message to Lake Erie Yearly Meeting of Friends ("Beauty, Truth, Life and Love: Four Keys for Finding Our Way")

"...when they say it the silence is not broken..."

In Texas there's so much space words have a way

Of getting lost in the silence before they're spoken
So people hang on a long time to what they have to say;
And when they say it the silence is not broken,
But it absorbs the words and slowly gives them
Over to miles of white-gold plains and gray-green hills,
And they are part of that silence that outlives them.

excerpted from "In Texas" by May Sarton

Listening is a Kind of Prayer...

Real Listening by Morton Kelsey

Real listening is a kind of prayer, for as we listen, we penetrate through the human ego and hear the Spirit of God, which dwells in the heart of everyone. Real listening is a religious experience. Often, when I have listened deeply to another, I have the same sense of awe as when I have entered into a holy place and communed with the heart of being itself.

Source: Through Defeat to Victory

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...too engrossed in the morning news...

Tanka Diary [Awakened too early on Saturday morning]

by Harryette Mullen

Awakened too early on Saturday morning
by the song of a mockingbird
imitating my clock radio alarm.

*
Walking along the green path with buds
in my ears, too engrossed in the morning news
to listen to the stillness of the garden.

From: Poem-A-Day

for Christ plays in ten thousand places...

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme
by Gerard Manley Hopkins


As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.

Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

The Speed of Love; The Speed of God...

The Speed of Love

Kosuke Koyama

Love has its speed. It is an inner speed. It is a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed. It goes on in the depth of our life, whether we notice it or not, at three miles an hour. It is the speed we walk and therefore it is the speed the love of God walks.

Source: Three Mile an Hour God

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Letting Go: A Poem

Let Something Go

Jane Wagner

I made some studies,
and reality is the leading cause of stress
amongst those in touch with it.
I can take it in small doses,
but as a lifestyle I found it
too confining.
It was just too needful;
it expected me to be there
for it all the time,
and with all I have to do--
I had to let something go.

Source: The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe

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From "The Writer's Almanac"

Could be written about Indiana...

"Tornado Warning" by Joyce Sutphen

That is not the country for poetry.
It has no mountains, its flowers
are plain and never poisonous,
its gardens are packed into blue mason jars.
There are no hedges bordering the roads, the sky
flies up from the ditches, loose in every
direction.
Yet I knew it to be passionate,
even in its low rolling hills, where a red
tractor pushed through the oat field, cutting
down gold straw and beating a stream
of grain into the wagon trailing behind
in the stubble,
I knew it to be melodious
in its birch woods, leaves shadowing
a stone-strewn river, the path along the bank
softened with pine needles, sunlight
woven in and out of branches, the many
colors of green, solid as a pipe organ's
opening chord,
I knew it would haunt
the memory with its single elm,
where a herd of cows found shade
in the July heat, their bony tails
swinging the tufted bristle left and right
over the high ledge of a hip bone,
while at the horizon, a black fist
of storm came on, something not
to be averted, something singular
in its fury,
as any blind heart knows.

"Tornado Warning" by Joyce Sutphen, from Straight Out of View. © Beacon Press, 1995. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

The Cost of Peace

'Of course, let us have peace,' we cry, 'but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties....' There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war--at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake. --Daniel Berrigan

Source: No Bars to Manhood

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Gathering Quakers

“So, how do we let people know?” That was the first question my friend Mary Lee and I had when we felt that God wanted us to start a new worship group focused on theological hospitality and based on Quaker listening worship. We hoped to create a space where people could come share their spiritual experiences in their own language and where we would listen to God and each other together in love and care. We felt certain that other people were, like us, looking for such a place.

But how to let such people know about the new group?...      read more here http://blog.newmediaprojectatunion.org/2012/07/gathering-quakers.html?spref=tw

From a post at the New Media Project at Union Theological Seminary.

Quakers, Revitalization & The Role of Beauty

I think a lot about Quaker faith and how we attract people to it -- which means (for me) attracting them to the ever-living Christ.  As someone who's been a congregational consultant for over ten years, I've seen lots of congregations try lots of things to bring people in the doors. They hear that conservative churches are growing and so they decide that the way to growth is to be more theologically conservative.

Or an expert tells them that "contemporary worship" is attracting new folks -- so they rip out the pipe organ and put in a praise band.

Or start seeker-sensitive services.

Or begin Saturday night services.

Or round-up folks for Cowboy Church (I'm not making this up!).

Or... whatever. Lots of congregations try these things and don't see much in the way of results.

It seems that the one thing we don't do is try and make our faith beautiful.  That's right -- beautiful.  I've been thinking about that a lot after reading Tony Jone's The New Christians. Especially the passage where he says:

"... why in the world would you think that you can do anything to get people to come to church? Instead, why don't you worry about being faithful -- living out a beautiful Christianity -- and see what the spirit does in your midst? I think that people will be more attracted to the Spirit than anything you could ever do to "hook" them. (p. 201)

"Why don't you worry about being faithful -- living out a beautiful Christianity -- and see what the spirit does in your midst?"  I am more than ever convinced of the wisdom undergirding Jones' thinking.

Quaker Wisdom for Today

"Here is the unfailing attraction of the life in Christ. It is a life which even to old age, is always on the upgrade; there is always something calling for a joyful looking forward; it is a life where, across each revelation of God's grace as it comes to us is written, in letters of gold, Thou shalt see greater things than these. It gives full scope ... to our desire for high adventure. No conceivable life can be so interesting, so stimulating, as that which we live in Christ." -- William Littleboy, 1917

State Fair

State Fair, a set on Flickr.

First batch I'm considering for this year's fair...

A Lesson I Needed to Remember Today

I lift up my eyes to the hills.
From whence does my help come?
My help comes from the Lord,
who made heaven and earth.
He will not let your foot be moved,
he who keeps you will not slumber.
Behold, he who keeps Israel
will neither slumber nor sleep.
The Lord is your keeper;
the Lord is your shade
on your right hand.
The sun shall not smite you by day,
nor the moon by night.
The Lord will keep you from all evil;
he will keep your life.
The Lord will keep
your going out and your coming in
from this time forth and for evermore.

When I read this psalm, I'm reminded that I am wrong if I think God’s interest in me depends on my feeling that God is close by. God is my keeper—whether I feel God’s care or not. When we say yes to God, we find ourselves in relationship. Love beckons us into love. We are called into relationship with one who cares for us so much that the hairs of our head are numbered (though in my case, that’s not a very large number).

As we walk on our spiritual pilgrimage, we learn in deeper and deeper ways that God’s care is steady and ongoing. We need not feel God’s care to know it is working, any more than we need to feel gravity to keep us from sailing off into space. The law of God’s ever-watchful presence is as surely in operation as are the natural laws of the universe that we take for granted.

Living into an increasing understanding of God’s ever-presence, is how we can pray along with Thomas Merton:

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this, you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

Merton’s words show us that a life of honest prayer is part of following the way that opens. What is honest varies from time to time, depending on our circumstances. Honest prayer will include some basics—an admission that we feel lost and can’t see the way, letting God know that we desire direction, asking for pure motives in following the way, and stating, by and in faith, that God is with us and we want God to be with us. Use the details and circumstances of your life to shape your honest prayers. What ingredients would you combine to create an honest prayer for today?

- Brent

Music for the Journey: Conversations Journal

I spend a lot of time on the road.  Especially travelling around Indiana.  And no matter how you route it, it’s a long way from Indianapolis to Evansville.  Especially if you go via Seymour.  That’s two hundred twenty five miles, give or take a couple of tenths.  So on a recent trip, as usual, I loaded up with music. I pulled out of Indianapolis to Carrie Newcomer.  Then from Seymour to Evansville “God Help the Girl” streamed out of the speaker.   Next up was Jan Krist, an indie artist who composes singable melodies and thoughtful lyrics.... Read more at http://conversationsjournal.com/2012/06/music-for-the-journey/