… watching for the brushstrokes of God
“What I saw was the power of a flutist to move a town, address an evil, and bring the powerful to accountability. Without any visible power or even prestige, much less a violent weapon, a flutist transformed a whole community.“ ~ John Paul Lederach, The Moral Imagination
How do you use creativity or art to transform your community?
Into a world which needed you
My wish for you
Is that you continue
Continue
To be who and how you are
To astonish a mean world
With your acts of kindness
Continue
To dare to love deeply
And risk everything
For the good thing
Continue
~ excerpts from Maya Angelou Poem
Where do you need to hear “continue”?
Your story is not just a shallow pool collecting a little rain here and there from what maybe-could’ve-should’ve been. Your story is a sea, weighted with mystery, and wave after wave it reveals more and more, no matter the opportunities you missed or left behind on the shore. ~Morgan Harper Nichols
What does it reveal to you?
The Hebrew word anavah is usually translated as “humility,” a word we struggle with. What it conveys is to occupy your God-given space in the world—to not take up too much or too little. Thus we don’t squish anyone or force others to fill our space.
What would it look like to simply occupy the space that is yours? No more, no less.
All those days you felt like dust….
This is the moment
we ask for the blessing
that lives within
the ancient ashes,
that makes its home
inside the soil of
this sacred earth. ~ Jan Richardson, Blessing the Dust
How do you claim what God can do with dust? With our dust?
“Indeed, it is as though Christianity, wherever it went in the modern colonies, inverted its sense of hospitality. It claimed to be the host, the owner of the spaces it entered, and demanded native people enter its cultural logics, its ways of being in the world and its conceptualities.” ~ Willie James Jennings
What does true hospitality look like?
With the Eyes of the Heart 