Today's Word

Today’s Word: Beginnings

Steve · December 10, 2013 · 2 Comments

In begins on the road to Bethlehem. SJG photo.

Just received word from our friends “The Merry Keenans” in England (we lived just west of London for about three years in the mid-1990s) that a
Christmas reading I wrote a number of years ago is going to be performed as part of this year’s carol service at our old parish, St. Joseph’s in Gerrards
Cross, Buckinghamshire, this coming Sunday. The choirs will be conducted by Mary Keenan “herself,” and I’m told there will be mulled wine and minced pies in the parish centre following the festivities. Truly, truly wish we could be there. If by chance you live in that beautiful part of the world (in the Chilterns), please drop by and clap loudly. Tell them the colonists sent you.

Here’s the reading…

The Journey Begins

The journey begins, not at Nazareth as Joseph and Mary prepare for their trip to the City of David, but at a time much earlier.

It begins with darkness…and God…and the Word.

It begins at creation, when God called forth light, life and those made in His own image.

It begins with a man and a woman, banished from the garden and crying out for a new
source of life and salvation.

It begins with a son, standing over the slain body of his brother and listening to the sound of blood crying out from the ground.

It begins with a great flood and the promise of a rainbow.

It begins on a mountain top, with a father’s hand ready to sacrifice his son.

It begins with a child, drawn like water from the river by a Pharaoh’s daughter.

It begins with a bush, burning but not consumed, on a small parcel of holy ground.

It begins with plagues and the deaths of first-born children, with years of wandering in the desert, with manna from heaven and water flowing from rocks, with towers of flame and parted seas, with covenants and commandments and temples and sacred meals.

It begins with songs of praise, psalms of thanksgiving, and words of wisdom for those wise enough to listen.

It begins with the words of prophets, warning of coming destruction and telling of the coming of a Messiah.

It begins with a voice in the wilderness crying, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord.”

It begins with the stirrings of life inside a chosen woman.

It begins on the road to Bethlehem…

Ask yourself in silence: Where did my journey begin? When did God enter it?

Today’s Word: Odd

Steve · December 1, 2013 · 4 Comments

The improbably odd Daddy Longlegs. SJG photo

On more than one occasion, my former spiritual director said to me, “If it’s odd it might be God.” It’s a funny line, a very short poem perhaps, but nevertheless a grain of wisdom to which we would do well to pay attention. For while we very often — perhaps most often — find God in the plain and ordinary moments of our lives, there are also those odd moments of synchronicity, circumstance and coincidence that cause us to pause and wonder, “what’s going on?” And for those of us who hold tight to God and to our lives of faith, we can find ourselves asking, “what’s God up to?”

You know the moments I’m talking about. The phone rings and it’s the very person you were thinking about or needed to hear from to get you through a rough moment. A song comes on the radio and bears just the message you needed to hear. A scripture reading at church seems meant just for you at that very moment. Your dream job becomes available right when you’re best able to accept it. A series of highly improbable events comes together in perfect fashion, leading you to the place you most need to be. Fill in the blank. We’ve all been there.

We can chalk it all up to pure luck or the roll of the dice. We can “do the math” and come up with the odds. We can just ignore that it happened. Or we can begin paying closer attention to the moments and days of our lives and realize that these things happen more often than we ever realized. We can begin to see God living and moving in our lives and call the whole thing a miracle. When we choose that way of living, we find ourselves filled with hope and faith.

Ask yourself in silence: When was the last time “something odd” turned out to be God?

Today’s Word: Gratitude

Steve · November 28, 2013 · 7 Comments

noah — Grateful for Noah. Photo by Ellen Sala.

It’s hard to believe how quickly time flies. Today marks the fourth anniversary of this blog. I started it on a crisp Thanksgiving Day at the Lake of the Ozarks in central Missouri in 2009, feeling extremely grateful for everything and everyone around me. Not much has changed on that front, except that life just keeps getting better and fuller with every passing day and year.

These four years have brought disease and healing, and they have given us new family members, including Jenny’s boyfriend Zach, our beautiful daughter-in-law Jess and, of course, the new keeper of our hearts, our grandson Noah. We treasure the time with older family members and friends and learn to lean in a little closer when they tell stories that we want to make sure we never forget. Our friends — both old and new — become all the more precious to us as the years pass, and the opportunity to spend time with all those we love is a blessing beyond measure. When you face any kind of serious health issue you learn this fast: It is the presence of those special people that enriches our lives, and everything we have or own pales in comparison to the gift of that time together.

Sunset — Grateful for each passing day. SJG photo.

And so we learn to live in gratitude and come to know that “thank you, God” can be the most important and deepest prayer we can ever say. For “thank you, God” means, “I’m paying attention.” It means, “This is not all just about me.” It means, “Everything is gift.” With Noah in our family, we have a fresh and beautiful reminder of the gift of life, a little divine nudge that we should never take any of this for granted, but rather embrace it all with gratitude.

Ask yourself in silence: For what am I grateful today that I couldn’t even have imagined four years ago?

Today’s Word: Changed

Steve · November 26, 2013 · 2 Comments

Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard once wrote that, “the function of prayer is not so much to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.”

We grow up learning to pray by asking for things – take care of me and my parents, give me things I think I want or need, answer my prayer, hear my prayer, be with me during this difficult time. In short, we pray to try and grab God’s attention and influence God’s will for our lives. If we just pray hard and often enough, we believe, God will certainly bend his ear to us, hear our prayer and give us what we want. And, certainly God can do just that and sometimes does. Scripture, indeed, tells us to ask for what we need: “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives; and the one who seeks, finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.” (Matthew 7:7-8)

We perhaps never give up this approach to prayer entirely, but as we grow in our faith we learn that we are the ones changed by prayer, not God. God is the unchanging changer. We are changed by placing ourselves in the presence of God, by spending time in gratitude and contemplation of all that God is and has done. We are changed not by what we are given, but by the giver of the gift, by the Spirit of God that moves and works and lives in us. We cannot help but be changed when we empty ourselves of our desires and open ourselves to the presence of our loving God, content to be held and sustained by the mere touch of the hand of the giver of all that is good and holy.

Ask yourself in silence: When and how have I been changed by prayer?

Today’s Word: Dwelling

Steve · November 22, 2013 · 1 Comment

While in Arizona a few weeks ago, we visited Montezuma Castle National Monument, with its amazingly preserved Pre-Columbian cliff-dwellings that were built and inhabited by the Sinagua people beginning around 700 AD. Standing far below and looking up at the five-story structure, it’s hard to imagine what life must have been like when the structures were inhabited, hard to believe just how treacherous it would have been to live under such conditions, scampering up and down ladders carrying fish and water from nearby Beaver Creek and clinging to the side of a mountain for shelter from weather and enemies.

cliff2 — Montezuma Castle National Monument, Arizona. SJG photo

And yet, life remains treacherous even today. Our dwellings may be more sophisticated, but we often still live under the dangerous conditions imposed by both the society around us and the decisions we make that contribute to those dangers. Our streets and roads are as treacherous as any hand-crafted ladder, and we still cling to things because we somehow believe they will protect us in one way or another. And so we must consider just where we place our trust and where we seek our shelter from the spiritual storms and enemies of our lives. Equally important is our ability to provide a place for God to dwell within us, as Paul suggests in his letter to the Ephesians (3:17-19): “that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, rooted and grounded in love may have strength to comprehend with all the holy ones what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”

Our dwelling place is in God and God’s in us. We fit perfectly together, rooted in love, a communion carved of one piece and clinging inseparably together through time.

Ask yourself in silence: To what do I cling?