God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. (1 John 4:16b)

The paradox of love in God. We can’t separate one from the other – when we abide in one, we abide in the other. Such a comforting circularity!

• When we get serious about our spiritual journeys, we expend a great deal of effort. We are obsessed with trying harder. Teresa imagined a field that needed watering (our spiritual state in need of nurture). In the first stage of spiritual growth, it is as if we are dragging a heavy oaken bucket, dipping it into a well, hauling the water up, bucket by bucket, and watering the field. This represents the condition where we try desperately to please God, to obey the rules, to get it right for God.

• In the second stage, our prayer and progress lead us to notice a stream running beside the field. All we have to do is drag the oaken bucket through the water and haul it to the field and water it. A little easier, but we still control the pace through our own efforts. That is, we decide what tasks and projects we will undertake, what the content of our prayer will be, how we will nurture our spiritual lives and be pleasing to God.

• In the third stage, we become aware of a gate at the end of the field that opens to an irrigation system. All we have to do is fling the gate open, and the water comes pouring into water the field. It seems that God meets us with grace so nurturing and powerful that we have only to open ourselves to it. Our faith journey becomes not so much what we can do for God, but what God can do through us, for us, in us.

• In the final stage, we merely stand in the rain. When I first internalized the image of standing in a cleansing rain, immersed in the saving love of God through no effort of my own, I was overcome with the realization that Divine Love didn’t require my effort. It was not dependent on my deserving. It was truly, profoundly, eternally unconditional.

(as summarized by Linda Douty)

When your soul whispers of its deepest longings, 
may you quiet yourself to listen.
May you follow the path of yearning to the One alone who blends the uneven edges
into a life of meaning.
May you meet and be united with God
and give thanks for the whispers
that led you there. ~via explorefaith.org

One of my key activities in early spring is the cleaning out of my flowerbeds and the flowerpots in my deck garden. I cut back dead plants and clear out dead leaves on my perennials. I clear out the areas that will need to be replanted removing dead plants and beginning the preparation of the soil to receive new plants and flowers. I prune rose bushes, the butterfly bush and shrubs to make room for new growth. Spring is a time of preparation and dreaming about what is to come. It is my favorite time of year in my garden! 

This year it has been extra cold here in Texas. We had close to a foot of snow a week ago, so my yearly gardening rituals have been delayed. As often is the case, the delay has heightened the yearning to begin this activity. The garden is calling me! Come on spring! 

I was reminded during Ash Wednesday worship this week that if you take the word ‘Lent’ back to its roots it means simply ’spring’. I know spring! Clearing, cleaning, pruning, and hauling off debris. Hard work, yes, but work full of promise, buoyed by the occasional glimpse of the first signs of the emergence of new growth. Growth indiscernible, until you are on your knees and carefully removing last years’ dead and decaying growth. 

It struck me that as much as I love the Lenten work of my garden, I have never been a big fan of Lent in my faith journey. It is just something I tend to pass through on my way to Holy Week. Truthfully, I am more of an Advent pondering and waiting person. 

Lent on the other hard is work! Yes, Lent is spring time in our lives of faith – it is a time of clearing dead and rotting parts of our lives: dreams that have withered and no longer fit, half hearted spiritual practices, angers and resentments that slowly eat away the life in us, laying aside disappointments, etc. Lent is a reality check on any saccharine sweet notions of the faith that we may be harboring. Lent is not for the faint of heart. 

At its most effective, Lent requires us to be tough in our assessments – if it is not growing it must be cut back or removed entirely.  Even if it is something that has grown amazingly in the past, Lent is the time for pruning it back. Pruning is counterintuitive in its effect. We cut a plant’s limbs back significantly in order to bring the limbs back to closer to the central core, and while it might seem that this would mean we would end up with a smaller, less healthy plant at end of the summer, the opposite is actually true! Not pruning stunts the growth and health of the bush. Go figure! This is true in our spiritual lives as well. Pruning removes the dead branches, but also some healthy branches to insure the overall health of the plant. 

The work of Lent in our gardens and in our lives is work done ahead of the growth, hoping that this work might even speed the emergence of life from its dormant state. (Dare we hope!) So this Lent the question I am asking myself is: what in my life needs to be cleared out, pruned and hauled off to make room for growth and more importantly God?

Brighten our darkness LORD. Fill us, send us out as rays of light to those we meet today!

I want to walk as a child of the Light
I want to follow Jesus
God set the stars To give light to the world
The Star of my life is Jesus.

In Him there is no darkness at all
The night and the day are both alike
The lamb is the Light of the city of God
Shine in my heart Lord Jesus.

I want to see the Brightness of God
I want to look at Jesus
Clear Son of righteousness shine on my path
And show me the way to the Father.

In Him there is no darkness at all
The night and the day are both alike
The lamb is the Light of the city of God
Shine in my heart Lord Jesus.

I’m looking for the coming of Christ
I want to be with Jesus
When we have run, with patience, the race
We shall know the joy of Jesus.

In Him there is no darkness at all
The night and the day are both alike
The lamb is the Light of the city of God
Shine in my heart Lord Jesus.

~Kathleen Thomerson

This response was written to a blog post on the ELCA women site. Original post Don’t Find Me Facebook by Emily Hansen on Jan 7th 2010:

I must respectfully disagree – what you describe is not the experience that I have had since I joined fb on my b-day this past year. I try to challenge myself every year to try something new, and this past year it was fb. I am so glad I did!

I am single, live in a big city and travel for work. I have found fb to be a great way for me to keep up with friends during the work week. (BTW – I don’t do fb at work. Work is for work.) I am friends mostly with my family, folks from my church, and other friends local and remote. I don’t ‘friend’ people I don’t know and my friends are the same way – so what we post is only being seen by those we select to see it. In addition, you can send a private message directly to a specific person or group of people.

Below are some positive benefits (partial list!):

1) I am once again connected with some friends who moved and am able to interact with them more easily using this medium. I find that when we get together, I feel closer to them b/c while I may not have seen them for a while, we have been keeping up with each other in the interim.

2) I am friends w/my sister-in-law & nieces on fb. I like keeping up with them on more of the small stuff of life. We only see each other 2 times a year, and I had always regretted that I wasn’t more in tune with their daily lives. When my niece graduated this past May, they put a few pics up w/in a couple of hours! It meant so much to me to feel more connected to the celebration in real time.

3) My son is on staff at a church and has informed the church office of 2 deaths in church members families b/c he is connected to the families via fb.

4) I lead a small group and have set up a group w/in fb so that I can send messages that go only amongst the group. We can continue our discussion with each other throughout the week by posting comments on our studies. We are able to continue to function as a small group throughout the week!

5) I have seen an outpouring of love to people who have lost loved ones on fb.

I believe that fb provides a unique way to be community. As Christians, when we participate, then it becomes Christian community. As the church, I think that we need to be open to the fact that our society is no longer one in which all communication happens homogeneously. No, we live in an age where the means of communication are myriad. As the church, I believe we honor others when, instead to telling them how we will communicate with them, we ask them how they prefer to be communicated with and then communicate with them in their preferred manner. For some this will be via traditional methods: phone calls, newletters and the like. For many others it will be via text message, Facebook or Twitter. This is certainly an exciting time!

Emily why don’t you at least try Facebook and then write another post based on your actual experience? I think you might be pleasantly surprised.

I have been amazed at the way Christian community expands and develops through the use of social media, i.e. facebook, tweeter, … Here is an interesting article on the subject: Does your Church have a Social Media Pastor?

May you listen to your longing to be free.
May the frames of your belonging be large enough for the dreams of your soul.
May you arise each day with a voice of blessing whispering in your heart that something good is going to happen to you.
May you find a harmony between your soul and your life.
May the mansion of your soul never become a haunted place.
May you know the eternal longing which lives at the heart of time.
May there be kindness in your gaze when you look within.
May you never place walls between the light and yourself.
May your angel free your from the prisons of guilt, fear, disappointment, and despair.
May you allow the wild beauty of the invisible world to gather you, mind you, and embrace you in belonging.
~ John O’Donohue, Eternal Echoes

Advent Reflection by Mary Earle @explorefaith

In Finding My Way Home: Pathways to Life and the Spirit, Henri Nouwen, the late spiritual guide, writes:

Most of us consider waiting as something very passive, a hopeless state determined by events totally out of our hands. The bus is late? We cannot do anything about it, so we have to sit there and just wait. It is not difficult to understand the irritation people feel when somebody says, “Just wait.” Words like that push us into passivity.

But there is none of this passivity in Scripture. Those who are waiting are waiting very actively. They know that what they are waiting for is growing from the ground on which they are standing. Right here is a secret for us about waiting. If we wait in the conviction that a seed has been planted and that something has already begun, it changes the way we wait. Active waiting implies being fully present to the moment with the conviction that something is happening where we are and that we want to be present to it.