Thinking on these things . . .

You know what I long for Lord; you hear my every sigh. Psalms 38:9 A sigh isn’t a prayer – it hasn’t even enough energy to be a plea - it is an honest ragged exhale of emotion; frustration, desire, sorrow, exhaustion. There are many verses that say that the Almighty God of the Universe hears my every prayer but this comforts me in that my God is so attuned to me that he hears my unspoken longings and catches every sigh.

I am a simple minded person. I am visual. I am forgetful. I've just gotten a beautiful hanging plant. I carefully brought it home and placed it on the hook and it looked wonderful! The next morning it was all withered and curling up against itself. So I watered it really well and it perked right up and again looked great. This morning it's all curled up and withered looking. Hmmm . What a great plant! Here I thought I was getting something to brighten up my yard and what I've actually gotten is my own botanical reminder. I am just like my plant in that I need to be watered daily. It seems no matter how great the day before has been, how abundantly I've been satisfied and filled that the next morning I'm dry and thirsty, and when the sun is beating down on me, I need even more water. I easily relate to the psalmist when he said "My soul thirsts for you; my whole body longs for you in this parched and weary land where there is no water" (Psalms 63:1). And th...

Honesty It seems like it’s been a common thread in my life for the past few weeks beginning with an Adult Sunday School class on that topic. What does it mean to be honest? What about “don’t ask, don’t tell”? What if I lead you to believe something is true that isn’t even though I never actually say that it’s true? What if I know something that I don’t share that you should know? What is our responsibility as Christians to be honest, totally 100% honest? We didn’t have many answers, I think we raised even more questions and a lot of stories about how these different types of “honesty” have played out in our personal lives, and what effect being honest has on those around us and what they think of us. We looked at scripture and saw that there is no deceit at all in God: well that pretty much answered the question of how honest should we be… So I found myself on the phone with someone very upset about how they perceived I’d treated them and hearing them say “tell me honestly do you have ...

…we run out of time, out of money, out of gas. There’s not enough hot water, food, or supplies. We’ve run out of patience, strength, compassion. We are finite. Everything around us is finite. Even something that seems as infinite as the ocean viewed from a sandy shore, ends somewhere over the horizon. We live in a finite world and because we do we cannot grasp the infinite. Unconditional love. Eternal life. An always faithful God. Forgiveness for every sin. Grace enough to cover every need. The unending, unwavering desire of God for us to be close to Him. Perhaps for many days I manage to be faithful, to be loving, to be compassionate and helpful and serving, then I’m not. My determination is finite. My abilities are finite. My love is finite. Yet, He calls me saying “I have loved you with an everlasting love.” I answer “I will love you for all my life Lord.” But actually all I give is just this moment because it’s all I can hold at a time. The only thing I know I’ll have, is what I h...

It is the time for Communion. Of stopping and remembering. Of confession and celebration. I have always had an affinity for communion. As a child it was the only ceremonial thing my church participated in – the passing of the gold trays with the broken crackers and the little plastic cups of grape juice. As an adult it’s a time to pause amid all the doing and remember why I do what I do. To remember that my service comes from love because of the love that flowed freely for me from the Cross. Only recently have I experienced communion by intinction – that is to say when you come forward and take the bread and dip it in the juice. The first time I participated in communion this way, the pastor holding the cup looked into my eyes and said, “The blood of Christ shed for you.” I heard those words as if they were the first time. Sunday I found myself holding the plate with the bread, and saying to each one that came, “The body of Christ broken for you”. I have sung for congregations, and tau...

It is a bright, beautiful, clear, sunny morning. Was it a morning like this when You awoke, Jesus? Did You sleep well last night knowing it would be Your last in a mortal body, knowing there would be no sleep for You tonight, or were You up into the wee hours of the morning in one last earnest conversation with those You loved—one for only their ears and not the record of Scripture, as You sought to fortify them for what was to come? Did You stretch and flex Your hands as You greeted the dawn and perhaps, as the beams of sunlight fell on Your tough, callused palm, did You contemplate its surface, still unmarred by a piercing wound? It is amazing, Lord, how You suffered for me at Calvary, but Your love was also shown by how You walked to Your cross, with a steady, unswerving step. You alone knew that by the moon’s rising You would be abandoned by those who are now waking up around You. You knew that the usual early morning greetings and frivolity of a group that had spent many a night a...

Psalms 57:2 I cry out to God Most High to God who will fulfill His purpose for me . Psalms 57:7 My heart is confident in you O God, no wonder I can sing your praises Psalms 33:4 For the word of the Lord holds true and everything He does is worthy of our trust Psalms 33:11 But the Lord's plans stand firm forever; His intentions can never be shaken. The winter started off brutal and then in mid-January it was suddenly warm and the bulbs, beguiled by this surprise, started coming up. "No! Don't! Not yet..." I shouted to them through the tightly latched window. They didn't listen. And then, as winter does, it came back and it was sub-zero for weeks and there was snow and it looked so hopeless. There'd be no flowers this spring. But there are. There shouldn't be based on what happened, but the flowers are here and beautiful. The promise of Spring robed in white and yellow. The Psalms send the same message as the daffodils. No matter what I see or think, no m...

It’s winter in Chicago, which doesn’t have the same connotations as, let’s say, winter in Yellowstone - a pristine snowy whiteness covering everything…no, it’s winter in Chicago which doesn't mean that things aren't covered, they are; the cars, the roads , the sidewalks and the signs, but they're not covered in snow, they're covered in a layer of salt. Every car is the same grayish color as the car next to it with slight undertones of the color the car actually is, peeping through the salt. For whatever reason, there is never windshield wiper fluid in the cars that I drive. I get this thin film of kicked up salt and gunk that dries on there and when the sun shines it’s even harder to see where you are going. So, there are those times, that I finally stop at a gas station and clean off my windshield and I am always amazed at how bad it was once it’s clean. Before it was bothersome but it wasn’t that bad, until I get it back to the way it’s supposed to be and then I reali...

I read a statistic that said the average person spends 16 months of their life in the bathroom. I want to know how long one spends in the kitchen! It must be measured in decades! I am always in the kitchen, either stocking it, or preparing a meal, than cleaning up from that meal, than cooking again, cleaning, stocking, cooking. . . Why is it that the sink always has dishes in it? Always! I go to bed at night and everything (sometimes) is bright and shiny and little gremlins come in and by the time everyone is off to school in the morning the kitchen looks like a war zone of breakfast bowls and juice boxes, trash pulled out of the lunch bags that was left from yesterday (are there no garbage cans at school?) and knives with smears of butter and jelly and peanut butter. It’s incredible how much food stuff goes on in the first hour of a school day. It’s intense. For as much time I spend in preparing food for others, I spend little of that eating. While I will chop and grate and mix and sa...

I do not like mirrors. I hate mirrors. Okay, not the mirror per sea, but what I see in the mirror. Does anyone ever look into a mirror and say “Wow!” well, anyone beside the Fonz? Worse than what I see when I purposely look into a mirror is the revelation I get when I’m suddenly looking at a reflection that I didn’t seek out. The sudden illumination you get walking past store windows that reveal those jeans don’t look as great on you as you thought and that hairstyle really isn’t working. I had a mirror thrust in front of my heart today in the form of a winter storm warning. The news came that a church a hundred miles to the north had cancelled its services because of the blizzard that was heading my direction. Maybe our church would be cancelled too – wouldn’t that be great?! Hello – what was that I just saw? In the body of a faithful Christian and church attendee, Sunday school teacher and choir member was a heart that was hopeful that the snow would shut down the services and she’...

9:05 a.m: “I’d like to make an appointment.” “Let me take your number, and we’ll call you back.” By the end of the day, no phone call came to schedule the appointment, and I could only imagine how long it would be until the actual meeting. A lesson to be learned well and early is this: If you want to have an appointment by September, you’d better call and schedule it in July. My education came with my first call to the OB-Gyn. “I’d like to schedule a prenatal exam. I just found out I’m pregnant!” “Is there any particular day that you’d like to see the doctor?” “As soon as possible. I’m available at any time.” (Of course, I was available any time of any day; nothing would stand between me and the health of my baby.) “Okay, let’s see . . . the earliest available appointment would be at 2 p.m., three weeks from Thursday.” Three weeks from Thursday! How could they put me off for that long? I was pregnant. This was my first baby! Terrible things could happen in three weeks—didn’t they under...

I was at a Thursday night rehearsal for some music we’d be doing in church in a couple weeks. This particular piece was beyond my usual frame of reference, a recitative from the Elijah. Now, I’ve been singing my whole life it seems. I remember it driving my parents nuts from the backseat on long car trips. But this genre was going to be a stretch for me, both musically and vocally. So I practiced. I got the CD and sang along with it for a week. I even loaded it on “repeat” in my MP3 player and worked around the house with the music next to me as I folded laundry. I listened and sang with it so often that one day as I was doing the dishes I found I had most of it memorized, so I felt ready. But … when the rehearsal began, and I was to sing all by myself with an organ instead of the recorded orchestra, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t find the entrances or the pitches or the rhythm. And worst of all, it seemed the more I tried to focus and count, the more lost I became; so, not only was I em...

I was thinking this glorious morning with the bright blue sky how we are like the tall oak trees I’m watching in my backyard- with branches lifted towards heaven and roots that have reached down deep into the soil of God’s marvelous love: we are strong and established and are constantly nourished from deep inside ourselves. Now the winds of the Spirit and opportunity loosen and blow from us pieces of ourselves that scatter to cover many places, beyond the reach of where we are planted. We send out our words and prayers and actions into the world, to make contact with others, to cover pain with love, hurt with compassion, offenses with forgiveness, to bring kindness into the routine, color and brightness into lives and our influence is blown far beyond our own little space in the world. Hundreds of leaves are being blown off the trees yet they are still filled with thousands more, so much of ourselves there is to give. . .

My Bible got coconut creamed today. Just like anyone actively involved on a Sunday morning, I had been carrying a bag full of stuff: Bible, Sunday school lesson, speakers for the MP3 player, two flavored coffee creamers, assorted pens and pencils. So somewhere along the way the coconut creamer met the pages of my Bible and my Bible got creamed! Augh! Oh, that feeling, that sinking, shoulder slumping, disappointed feeling: where you just look and sigh. And then the action to fix it, grabbing the paper towels and mopping up the sticky creaminess, separating all the pages and drying them off and as you're cleaning it up, at the same time realizing the extent of the damage. Now this is not a big deal. -- To the rest of the world. But it was my BIBLE. MY Bible. The one I use all the time. It's not that there aren't a half-dozen other Bibles around the house, it's that it's my Bible, the one with all the notes in it, the one with all the verses underlined that have jumped...