“I will be standing there in front of you….”
(17:6 NRSV)
It was the aloneness that frightened me, your absence
felt more tangibly than metal tube train walls
the numbness, desert-sand-dryness
interrupted only by stabs of vulnerability.
I wondered whether you existed
doubted whether it was worth the effort to get out of bed.
And I could do nothing – nothing but move
through each slow day on will-power, wondering….
Then one day, appetite returned, reawakening taste.
I lived in hope.
Savour spread, colour crept into crannies and crevices.
Faith reappeared (her roots driven deeper)
and before long
a growing sense of your presence, rest
punctuated by stabs of joy
leaving the impression
that you had been there all the time.
~ Leave of Absence, Kevin Kummer
Psalm 95
O come, let us worship….
For the LORD is a great God,
and a great King above all gods.
In his hand are the depths of the earth;
the heights of the mountains are his also.
The sea is his, for he made it,
and the dry land, which his hands have formed.
…and we are…the sheep of his hand (95:6, 3-5, 7 NRSV)
“The single most important thing I did for thirty-five years was stand before a congregation each Sunday morning and say, ‘Let us worship God.’… Every call to worship is a call into the Real World. You’d think that by this time in my life I wouldn’t need to be called anymore. But I do. I encounter such constant and widespread lying about reality each day and meet with such skilled and systematic distortion of the truth that I’m always in danger of losing my grip on reality. The reality, of course, is that God is sovereign and Christ is savior. The reality is that prayer is my mother tongue and the eucharist my basic food. The reality is that baptism, not Myers-Briggs, defines who I am.”
~ Take and Read, Eugene Peterson
Romans 5:1-11
…this grace in which we stand…. (5:2 NRSV)
“…the Lord’s love is unceasing. It is the one sort of love we can experience here and now that doesn’t blow hot and cold. However much He courts us like a lover, chasing us down with an exquisite tenderness, nevertheless He doesn’t play games with us as human lovers do. He doesn’t tease us. He doesn’t try to throw us off balance, just for His own amusement. The Greek deities, we have heard, used to send trials to mortals merely for their sport…. But our God, the God of Israel, doesn’t play games of this sort. His love for us is constant, unswerving. His forgiveness is all-at-once and without reserve. His love is both instantaneous and everlasting.”
~ Clinging: The Experience of Prayer, Emilie Griffin
John 4:5-42
Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!
He cannot be the Messiah, can he? (4:29 NRSV)
“The Word
is hurled at us
like a stone.
And, enabled by
that announcement, each of us
ventures forth into the world
as a hopeful, missional
storyteller.”
~ Nenshu and the Tiger: Parables of Life and Death, Martin Bell
A prayer for the journey:
“O Lord, seek us, O Lord find us
In thy patient care;
Be thy love before, behind us,
Round us everywhere:
Lest the god of this world blind us,
Lest he speak us fair,
Lest he forge a chain to bind us,
Lest he bait a snare.
Turn not from us, call to mind us,
Find, embrace us, bear;
Be thy love before, behind us,
Round us everywhere.”
