… watching for the brushstrokes of God
“Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.” Martin Luther King Jr, Letter from Birmingham Jail
How do you lift fear?
When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flocks,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among people,
To make music in the heart.
~ Howard Thurman
What is your first step?
“…this can change our world in immensely important ways, because if you’re grateful, you’re not fearful, and if you’re not fearful, you’re not violent. If you’re grateful, you act out of a sense of enough and not of a sense of scarcity, and you are willing to share. If you are grateful, you are enjoying the differences between people, and you are respectful to everybody, and that changes this power pyramid under which we live.” ~ David Steindl-Rast
How do you ride the wave of gratefulness?
“There is a place in the soul that neither time nor space nor no created thing can touch.” (German mystic Meister Eckhard)
“…what it means is that your identity is not equivalent to your biography and that there is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there is still a sureness in you, where there’s a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you. And I think the intention of prayer and spirituality and love is now and again to visit that inner kind of sanctuary.” John O’Donohue
Do you know that place?
There are things
We get through
That we grieve
Only later—
When some new loss
Pulls them to the surface
Of the deep well
In which they’ve
Been submerged.
And so today
Our grief for
The world as we’ve
Known it,
For plans laid down,
For possibilities
Now gone forever,
Is laced with
Golden threads
Of loss we had forgotten,
As if distant waves
Are lapping
On an unseen shore
In the dark of night. Judy Brown
What golden threads of loss are rising to the surface for you?
“…going down into the deep pain of another is like jumping into a bottomless abyss – not knowing if or where one will land. To grasp another’s pain means letting go of our own safety limb and falling down to an unknown place. In this place we maybe won’t have the answers that will help alleviate the pain or explain it. We have to be willing to admit, then and there, down in the pit, that we too are helpless and weak and powerless. And who wants to do that, or be there?” Henri Nouwen
How are you called to presence with?
With the Eyes of the Heart 