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Posts tagged ‘Love’

Nov 25

Hundredth Winds

“Love falls to earth, rises from the ground, pools around the afflicted. Love pulls people back to their feet. Bodies and souls are fed. Bones and lives heal. New blades of grass grow from charred soil. The sun rises.”― Anne Lamott, Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers

“This is the most profound spiritual truth I know: that even when we’re most sure that love can’t conquer all, it seems to anyway. It goes down into the rat hole with us, in the guise of our friends, and there it swells and comforts. It gives us second winds, third winds, hundredth winds.”― Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

The sun rises.
The sun sets.
The in between, our canvas.
To paint.
To color.
To create.
Paint. Color. Create.
Hope. Joy. Love.
Hundredth winds to lift you up, keep you going with delight, holding hands on our shared journey.
Love is bigger, deeper, wider than all and anything else.

“Hope is not about proving anything. It’s about choosing to believe this one thing, that love is bigger than any grim, bleak shit anyone can throw at us.”― Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

Nov 15

Softly and Tenderly, Held

“Hold everything in your hands lightly, otherwise it hurts when God pries your fingers open.”― Corrie Ten Boom

“Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength.”― Corrie Ten Boom, Clippings from My Notebook

May you find ease today.
Rhythm, flow, peace.
Put worry down to lighten up.
Find hope in the corners and crevices.
Small and big.
Joy in a smile, in laughter on an ordinary day.
Assured that what comes you will always be held, carried, accompanied.
Entering a place, space, being, presence, undefinable, nearness, depth.
A warmth, love and grace bigger than self and other.
Weaving all of the threads together in to a beautiful tapestry of color and texture.
Give into this hope, grace, love and light.
No fear, only trust.

“Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.”― Corrie ten Boom

Oct 30

The Flying

“Love is not the limitation; love is the flying.”― Wm. Paul Young

“The only answer in this life, to the loneliness we are all bound to feel, is community.”― Dorothy Day

In the activities and commitments of this day.
May you transform the transactional into relational.
Mundane into magic.
Distance into proximity.
Ordinary into extraordinary.
By adding the secret ingredients.
Curiosity, empathy, enthusiasm, wonder, kindness, joy and love.
Love ties it all together.
Give and receive it.
All is transformed and made new by love.

“Most of our life is unimportant, filled with trivial things from morning till night. But when it is transformed by love it is of interest even to the angels.”― Dorothy Day

Sep 25

Held and Hemmed

“God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.” – Saint Augustine

Most days are ordinary.
One after another.
To dos, commitments, activities.
Daily living.
Often going unnoticed and unseen.
And then there are those thresholds, doors, bridges crossed.
One ways.
“Befores” to definitive “afters”.
No going back.
Foreign land we didn’t choose.
A diagnosis, death, relationship fractures, job loss.
The big things that make the small things that trip us up insignificant.
It is here where we relearn to walk again.
To breathe.
To carry on different and never the same.
Wear a helmet time.
No detours or shortcuts, just right up the middle.
So a blessing for all who are in the midst of before and after time.
You are held, hemmed in love and not alone.

for the life you didn’t choose by Kate Bowler, Jessica Richie, The Lives We Actually Have: 100 Blessings for Imperfect Days

“Blessed are you when the shock subsides, when vaguely, you see a line appear that divides before and after. You didn’t draw it, and can barely even make it out. But as surely as minutes add up to hours and days, here you are, forced into a story you never would have written.

Blessed are you in the tender place of awe and dread, wondering how to be whole when dreams have disappeared and part of you with them, where mastery, control, determination, bootstrapping, and grit are consigned to the realm of Before (where most of the world lives), in the fever dream that promises infinite choices, unlimited progress, best life now.

Blessed are we in the After zone, loudly shouting: Is there anybody here? We hear the echo, the shuffle of feet, the murmur of others asking the same question, together in the knowledge that we are far beyond what we know.

God, show us a glimmer of possibility in this new constraint, that small truths will be given back to us.

We are held.
We are safe.
We are loved.
We are loved.
We are loved.”

Aug 29

Ministry of Presence

“Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder. Help someone’s soul heal. Walk out of your house like a shepherd.”― Rumi

“We are called at certain moments to comfort people who are enduring some trauma. Many of us don’t know how to react in such situations, but others do. In the first place, they just show up. They provide a ministry of presence. Next, they don’t compare. The sensitive person understands that each person’s ordeal is unique and should not be compared to anyone else’s. Next, they do the practical things–making lunch, dusting the room, washing the towels. Finally, they don’t try to minimize what is going on. They don’t attempt to reassure with false, saccharine sentiments. They don’t say that the pain is all for the best. They don’t search for silver linings. They do what wise souls do in the presence of tragedy and trauma. They practice a passive activism. They don’t bustle about trying to solve something that cannot be solved. The sensitive person grants the sufferer the dignity of her own process. She lets the sufferer define the meaning of what is going on. She just sits simply through the nights of pain and darkness, being practical, human, simple, and direct.”― David Brooks, The Road to Character

Show up.
Be present for others.
Reach out to those struggling.
Go beyond self to connection.
Nothing to say or do.
A ministry of presence.
Acts of love.
That’s your purpose, our purpose.
To be human and spread it.
A kindness pandemic.
One we never want to recover from.
A lamp, a lifeboat, a ladder.
A generosity of spirit in action.
A lighthouse moving into the world.

“Recovering from suffering is not like recovering from a disease. Many people don’t come out healed; they come out different.”― David Brooks, The Road to Character

Jun 20

Held Together in Love

“Each of us is an artist of our days; the greater our integrity and awareness, the more original and creative our time will become.”― John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings

“For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.”― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

What I have rather than what I don’t
What is present and available right now
What I am surrounded with and in, knee deep
What is rather that what was
To possibilities far and wide
To be thrown back into the current and flow
To what will come
All held together by love.

“May we all receive blessing upon blessing. And may we realize our power to bless, heal, and renew one another.”― John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings

Jun 18

2 Comments

No Leashes Day

“of all the sights I love in this world — and there are plenty — very near the top of the list is this one: dogs without leashes.” – Mary Oliver, Dog Songs: Poems

“We meet wonderful people, but lose them
in our busyness.
We’re, as the saying goes, all over the place.
Steadfastness, it seems,
is more about dogs than about us.
One of the reasons we love them so much.”
― Mary Oliver, Dog Songs: Poems

The simplicity of a dog, or two.
To seize the moment.
Squeezing every drop of delight.
Off leash, free to roam.
Unbound and bounding.
Joy on four legs.
Showing the way.
Leaping, retrieving, delighting.
Steadfast, focused, steeped into the moment completely.
May you go off leash today, each day.
Unbusy, awake and attune.
Finding magic in the ordinary by being fully present.
To a leash-free day!

“Or maybe it’s about the wonderful things that may happen if you break the ropes that are holding you.”― Mary Oliver, Dog Songs: Poems

“But I want to extol not the sweetness nor the placidity of the dog, but the wilderness out of which he cannot step entirely, and from which we benefit. For wilderness is our first home too, and in our wild ride into modernity with all its concerns and problems we need also all the good attachments to that origin that we can keep or restore. Dog is one of the messengers of that rich and still magical first world.”― Mary Oliver, Dog Songs

Jun 3

Faith into Deed

“The test of faith is whether I can make space for difference. Can I recognize God’s image in someone who is not in my image, who language, faith, ideal, are different from mine? If I cannot, then I have made God in my image instead of allowing him to remake me in his.”― Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations

May understanding be my first and last act.
Clearing the path for all.
Inviting and allowing difference.
A potpourri of belonging and hospitality.
Love well without rules or restrictions.
Love has none.
Gentle, kind, gritty and enduring.
It sticks.
A real Presence.
An anchoring.
Faith and truth into deed.
No more fear.
Still small voice that is never silenced.
Listen.
The answer will always be love.

“So meaning is made, not just discovered. That is what religion for the most part is: the constant making and remaking of meaning, by the stories we tell, the rituals we perform and the prayers we say. The stories are sacred, the rituals divine commands, and prayer a genuine dialogue with the divine. Religion is an authentic response to a real Presence, but it is also a way of making that presence real by constantly living in response to it. It is truth translated into deed.”― Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning

“In an age of fear, moderation is hard to find and harder to sustain. Who wants to listen to a nuanced argument, when what we want is someone to relieve us from the burden of thought and convince us that we were right all along? So people mock. They blame. They caricature. They demonize. In an age of anxiety, few can hear the still small voice that the Bible tells us is the voice of God.”― Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

May 28

Keen Awareness

“Ordinary love, anonymous and unnoticed as it is, is the substance of peace on earth, the currency of God’s grace in our daily life.”― Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

In the economy of the day
Of a life which is made up of the accumulation of days
In what we choose to do and not to do
In plans, in detours, delays, and in what just happens
May each of us have a keen awareness of the details in the present as well as the 10,000 foot view to see the expanse
To be grateful, joyful, even in the struggles, especially then
Senses sharpened, awareness sharp, grace overflowing.

“God is not found in the soul by adding anything but by subtracting” — Meister Eckhart

May 26

BeautiFULLY Human

“Agape is total love. It is the love that consumes the person who experiences it. Whoever knows and experiences agape learns that nothing else in the world is important – just love.― Paolo Coelho, The Pilgrimage

“To become fully human means learning to turn my gratitude for being alive into some concrete common good. It means growing gentler toward human weakness. It means practicing forgiveness of my and everyone else’s hourly failures to live up to divine standards. It means learning to forget myself on a regular basis in order to attend to the other selves in my vicinity. It means living so that “I’m only human” does not become an excuse for anything. It means receiving the human condition as blessing and not curse, in all its achingly frail and redemptive reality.” – Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith

Stop scrolling.
Start connecting.
Use the phone to call or text at least one person in your circle each day.
A check in to reconnect.
A text that leads to a regular call to an in person real conversation.
There’s a loneliness epidemic.
We are each other’s cure.
Love each day through action, simple as a text and phone call.
A smile to the human who is working three jobs to make ends meet who hands you overpriced coffee for underpriced work.
Family and friends closest to you who may be struggling.
Do not pass by without stopping to look, listen, inquire, listen some more.
Let’s regain our humanity.
In simple acts done lovingly.
Discover the joy in giving, thinking of yourself less, and making someone’s day.
Be fully human, beautiFULLY human today.
Be the garden where others can bloom.
Cast light.

“Love isn’t a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.”― Fred Rogers, The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember

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