Help me to be a holy, happy person, free.

Call to Worship This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it. Psalm 118

Meditation We do not have all the answers about why we suffer, but we do know what the answer cannot be. It cannot be that God doesn’t see or care, for he sent his own Son to enter into our suffering. And it cannot be a hopeless situation, for he conquered sin and death by raising his Son from the dead.

Closing Prayer Help me to be resolute and Christ-contained. Never let me wander from the path of obedience to Thy will. Strengthen me for the battles ahead. Give me courage for all the trials, and grace for all the joys. Help me to be a holy, happy person, free from everything contrary to Thy mind. Grant me more and more of the resurrection life: may it rule me, may I walk in its power, and be strengthened through its influence.

Well, meeting with Cate with a C over a little Cartel iced coffee yesterday was heart-shifting. Certainly her clarity and joy and good sense was inspiring. And humbling, as she totally got what it means to serve our same list of kids with hard-to-pronounce names in His love, with creativity set tidily in a sturdy structure and a big, big smile on her face that was totally coming from her heart. 

What a gift today is.

And Jerry Bowen told a story at the little Potbelly sandwich store underneath the massive student housing which now lines Speedway of an old man in Guatemala with long white straggly hair who had spent a bunch of his life hunched over Greek translations and so he really couldn’t sit up straight. But he had a little jar of tiny colored stones. And once a week he thanked God for yet another week of life, and threw one of those stones out across the lawn. Just to pay attention.

And Jerry told another story of a man sitting behind him on an airplane who was sobbing so loudly at the end of a movie that Jerry could hear him, even through his earphones. And he was a guy who had not weighed life properly, and had not restored relationships and now the regret of that broke his heart.

So let me live in the truth today, that each day is a gift to be lived well, in gratitude and love. My fixed Monday prayers requests, May I exult in Your trustworthiness and help step by step throughout the day. May it be so. Exult.

For He has made it; let me rejoice and be glad in it.

Flakes of manna new every morning

 Now the full number of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own, but they had everything in common. Acts 4:30

If I push away the clouds of What Is Not Important, I find myself stumbling into one heart and one soul in the most unexpected places.

In my mother's living room for instance. Wrapped up with a big glistening bow from Our Father of Lights who knows how to give good gifts. Julie Harden has been around forever. She said that she and her husband always were standing up at those end of church altar calls for who feels the tugging of the heart strings to go unto all the corners of the earth to preach the gospel. So there were lots of times that The Harden family was hanging around the  press and I remember their cute little kids, especially the girl with dark curly hair and bright blue eyes that could see the world through a sharpened pencil. And John with the ink-stained apron wrapped around his battle with the creaky monster of a press. And there paths have gone hither and thither and mostly to those sort of nowhere spots so far away likely Papua New Guinea and back again and Sierra Vista now

And there was some staring at the floor as Jenny packed her bags. It was ever-so-clear that she had followed the Prompting and had hopped into the plane to walk through this shadowed valley with us and and to discover the cool streams and green pastures and most of all the I Shall Not Wantness of it all. A gaping maw loomed just ahead and it was beyond out collective imagination to as to who could step in the gap as I packed my bag for Nashville and Zachary and Emma packed their bag for California and Nicole packed her bag for Sedona. That was a lot of bag packing. And I suspect ol' momma just wanted to hop into one of them herself.

And then Julie Harden called. And stepped into the afternoon with such grace and wisdom that it would be not only impossible but flat out ungrateful to overlook God's faithful daily manna provision.

May my heart be constant in a place of praise, for He is worthy.

And we unhemmed all our jeans so they dragged on the floor

But you, O Lord, are a shield about me, my Glory, and the Lifter of my head.

I cried aloud to the Lord, and He answered me from his holy hill. Selah Psalm 3:3

One example of the immeasurable and inexplicable good gifts from the hand of our Creator is that of music.  Really the joy and power of song make no scientific material sense and is one of those “outside the box” indicators.  The same pile outside of the humanist door with Shakespeare sonnets and sunsets.  Why should we marvel at sunsets and rainbows?

And on top of that toppling stack of gifts that are waiting to be named and inventoried on my little list of 1000 are the Psalms which have worked their way into the hearts and souls of humanity for eons and bound them together with truth and peace throughout the travails that are common to man. 

My first tiny glimpse of that was as a young girl ripping through Heidi.  What a novel thought that Heidi’s blind grandmother would find such comfort in the twenty-third Psalm.  Novel.  =) Novel in the sense that is what stories do, wrap words around life so that we slow down and notice and remember, forever.  That was forty-six years ago, and I still remember pausing for that moment, to consider.  

My old Bible that was left behind on a seventh-grade History trip many years ago had moments and dates and names all through the Psalms that I had claimed, that I was praying over someone, or that declared His answer to me, from His holy hill.  So many of these Psalms are tied to a moment or a person.  Or a summer.

I know where I was the summer of ’72: El Instituto Lingüístico de Verano en Tlalpan, México, D.F. My dad was doing an external audit of the books for them, and my mom, the ever good sport was in charge of entertaining twenty-some-odd teenagers.  So we painted some kind of hippie murals on the rec room wall... a big hand with a single finger pointing up One Way and an unrolling parchment with the words, “His banner over me is love,” above the ping pong table.  And my mom sewed big pillows in hippie colors and old blue jeans and lightly tossed them around so we could be cool while we worked out all the Fisher and Spasskey chess games and pretended to argue over and discuss the wisdom of their choices.  And we had to play Rook because it was unChristian to play with real cards because back then they were known to be the gateway drug to all sorts of trouble.  And I read the Agatha Christie books over and over again because that is all that was in the library besides Bible Commentaries.  I did that is, until I started having nightmares full of slashing knives and crashing flower pots mysteriously tossed off balconies. There was Edgar, a young man that I managed to give my address even though I didn’t speak Spanish and he didn’t speak English when we were at the 1968 Olympics swimming pool and he brought me four dozens roses every single afternoon for two weeks until I begged the staff cook to tell him to never come back.  And my mom who of course knew absolutely nothing about soccer started a soccer league and was the center ref and ran back and forth, back and forth on that field every afternoon blowing her whistle, until the afternoon monsoons rolled in, that is.  And then we would gather in the rec room, and a couple of kids would pluck away tunelessly on their guitars and toss their stringy hair back and we would sing those songs, those choruses that were very edgy in a world of hymnbooks.  His banner over me is Love.  With hand motions.  

These edgy new songs which have put the ache of the human heart into words backwards and forwards into time to the very fulcrum of history, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?" that is, "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?"  

My Glory and the Lifter of my head.