… watching for the brushstrokes of God
“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?
It is said that before entering the sea
a river trembles with fear.
She looks back at the path she has traveled,
from the peaks of the mountains,
the long winding road crossing forests and villages.
And in front of her,
she sees an ocean so vast,
that to enter
there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.
But there is no other way.
The river can not go back. … ~ Khalil Gibran
Where do these lines take you?
In the midst of the barrenness of winter our eyes catch splashes of brightness. Red Cardinals are a joy to behold. They move with purpose, navigating the fine balance of life and death amidst the grey winter clouds, naked trees and cold white snow.
How do you add splashes of color to your days?
Perhaps it takes
a lifetime
to open our eyes,
to learn to see
what has forever
shimmered in front of us —
Jan Richardson, Where the Light Begins
What shimmers before you?
“Winter invites me to rest and contemplation, to making time for quiet walks in the few hours of light. The God of winter invites me into a healing rhythm of rest and renewal, of deep listening in the midst of stillness, of trusting the seeds sprouting deep within that have been planted.” ~ Christine Valters Paintner
What invitation do you sense this winter?
“What exactly does it mean to have a relationship-centric approach to constructive social change? I have come to believe that the answer lies with how we approach and understand relational spaces in a given geography, the fabric of human community broadly defined as the crisscrossing connections of people, their lives, activities, organizational modalities, and even patterns of conflict.” ~ John Paul Lederach, Moral Imagination
What are the “who” connections in your geography?
With the Eyes of the Heart 