A meditation on the water softener

I was attempting a time of silent prayer the other morning, but I kept getting distracted by the sounds. The birds were singing just outside the window. The furnace would start up. I could hear a clock ticking on the wall. I decided to turn the “distractions” into signals and meditations.

Birds were singing the simple joys of

life. The furnace reminded me that the Holy Spirit was a fire to be warm within me. The ticking clock pointed me to be patient in the good steadiness of God’s time.

Then I could hear the water softener. It was starting its re-charging cycle. I knew that I had just recently added salt. I thought of the salt and the water

and how the softener would remove the hardness, or reduce some of the minerals that would otherwise build up inthe system. I wondered if I had a spiritual water softening cycle as well. Is that what prayer is also about: recharging and removing some of the hardness that builds up in my system?

I need softer water. Jesus gives us this living water and we are called to be salt of the earth and to have salt. I thought of how the water softener is set on a regular schedule to do its re-conditioning. I can also re-program it for times when I need it to work more often because of more water usage.

Maybe I should at least be as organized as the plumbing in my house. Refill the salt. Keep the re-charge schedule of prayer and worship. Schedule more when needed. Care for the hardness that builds up my heart.

Soften my heart, O God. Let me enjoy the water of life you offer.

Ministry Matters™ | Articles | Ten Tips for Holier Holy Communion

Ministry Matters™ | Articles | Ten Tips for Holier Holy Communion

Some good words for the day by way of inward/outward

Accepted and Loved

By Jean Vanier

When I discover that I am accepted and loved as a person, with my strengths and weaknesses, when I discover that I carry within myself a secret, the secret of my uniqueness, then I can begin to open up to others and respect their secret.
Each human being, however small or weak, has something to bring to humanity. As we start to really get to know others, as we begin to listen to each other's stories, things begin to change. We begin the movement from exclusion to inclusion, from fear to trust, from closedness to openness, from judgment and prejudice to forgiveness and understanding. It is a movement of the heart.

Source:

• Community and Growth

http://www.eagandailyphoto.blogspot.com/2012/07/meet-new-shepherd.html

Obviously I have not  been posting. But think about this. The last post with text was called When Advent Comes.  Now I have  been appointed to Advent United Methodist Church but when that post was made in November I had no idea that would be in my future.  And the date, November 11, 2011, would also be 11-11-11 which happens to be my wife's favorite and we enjoy noting  11:11 time signals as good omens,   But my "sign" is that the post after Advent simply says : "God in All" 
I look forward to ministry at Advent trusting that God is in it all!

God In All

God In All

When Advent Comes

I will revisit these words and listen for the Advent terms!

Hope
By Seamus Heaney
Human beings suffer,
they torture one another,
they get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
can fully right a wrong
inflicted or endured.

The innocent in gaols
beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
faints at the funeral home.

History says, Don't hope
on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up
and hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
on the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
and cures and healing wells.

Call the miracle self-healing:
The utter self-revealing
double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
the outcry and the birth-cry
of new life at its term.

Source: The Cure at Troy

posted at inward/outward on 11-11-2011

N. Gordon Cosby quoted at inward/outward
If you feel you can't tolerate the mess, the only advice I can give to you is this: choose what for you is a better mess, if you can find it. But wherever you go, you go to the next mess. You may take a couple of years to find out how messy it is, but you will find it to be a mess. God has tolerated many messes for many eons.

Henri Nouwen on Loving the Church

Loving the Church often seems close to impossible. Still, we must keep reminding ourselves that all people in the Church - whether powerful or powerless, conservative or progressive, tolerant or fanatic - belong to that long line of witnesses moving through this valley of tears, singing songs of praise and thanksgiving, listening to the voice of their Lord, and eating together from the bread that keeps multiplying as it is shared. When we remember that, we may be able to say, "I love the Church, and I am glad to belong to it."

Loving the Church is our sacred duty. Without a true love for the Church, we cannot live in it in joy and peace. And without a true love for the Church, we cannot call people to it.

from inward/outward

Eugenio Zolli
The books of Sacred Scripture contain much more than what is written in them. Our soul also has depths unknown to us. On the sacred pages and in our soul, there are melodies we do not hear. In the spaces of the world there are melodies which no one catches because no one listens.

Source: Before the Dawn

From Richard Rohr

CONTEMPLATION


Could meditation/contemplation be the very thing that has the power to both democratize, reform, and and mature Christianity? It alone does not demand major education, does not need a hierarchy of decision makers, does not need to argue about gender issues in leadership or liturgy, does not need preachers and bishops, and does not need membership requirements that include and exclude. Contemplation’s non-verbal character makes all our arguments about “the right words” and the perfectly correct understanding of those words largely useless. We clergy are almost put out of business.

Deep prayer on the inside heals the outside and the in-between simply by reconnecting everything at its core and at our Center. And let us be honest–Jesus talked a lot more about praying and healing than any of the issues that continue to preoccupy most of our churches.

Adapted from A Lever and A Place to Stand:
The Contemplative Stance, The Active Prayer, pp. 58-59

A Prayer by Bishop Woodie White:
And now, may the Lord torment you, may the Lord keep before you the faces of the hungry and the lonely and the rejected and the despised, and may the Lord give you courage and strength and compassion to make ours a better world, to make your community a better community, to make your church a better church. And may you do your very best to make it so. And after you have done your best, may the Lord grant you peace.

From Inward/outward

I pass this on from one of my favorite devotional sites

By Nancy Compton Williams
I must learn
the calligraphy
of egret stance,
poised on a word
that lies beneath
the weaving current,
steady, still.

Source: Christianity and Literature

Original Unity

"The deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. It is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept. Not that we discover a new unity. We discover an older unity. My dear Brothers [and Sisters], we are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are."
- Thomas Merton

Copied from Verse and Voice/ Sojourners

Come and join Park Church on facebook

The Rev. Bruce Reyes-Chow - Finding Commonality Despite Our Differences - Day1.org

The Rev. Bruce Reyes-Chow - Finding Commonality Despite Our Differences - Day1.org

Copied from inward./outward

New Dimensions of Love
By Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
We have before us the glorious opportunity to inject a new dimension of love into the veins of our civilization. There is still a voice crying out in terms that echo across the generations, saying: Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you, that you may be the children of your Father which is in Heaven. This love might well be the salvation of our civilization.

Source: I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World (Speech given to the First Annual Institute on Nonviolence and Social Change in Dec 1956)

In these black and white days of snow
I think the cardinal is red
just for days as this,
just because my eyes and soul enjoy it,
red outstanding
in the black and white,
one of the things God and I agree on.

TAKE ME INTO A NEW YEAR, Gracious God. Help me to continue looking for meaning, seeking peace, praying for light, dancing for joy, working for justice, and singing your praise. I go into the new year filled with expectations, a touch of worry, and a bundle of hope. I do not journey into the new year alone but with you as my guide, with a commitment to my disciplines, with a community of family, friends, and faith. Take me into the new year, Creator of beauty and wonder. Bless me with the companionship of Jesus, and gift me with the guidance and power of the Spirit. Amen.

- Larry James Peacock
Openings: A Daybook of Saints, Psalms, and Prayer

From page 398 of Openings: A Daybook of Saints, Psalms, and Prayer by Larry James Peacock. Copyright © 2003

From Upper Room

A Prayer: For the Birth of a New Year

God of winter morning,
Of new day born from the waters of night;
A feeble cry from Mother Earth's horizon,
A murmured moan from lingering stars;
Infant soft, blue-veined is your child, Dawn.
Into the waiting arms of Your people
You gift this newness to us...

O God, help us to look with awe-laden eyes,
Let us hear with soft-edged hearts the first cries
of the New Year, of a new day,
that we may come running as if life,
fragile and tear-stained,
awaits us.

O Creator, lover of life,
What child has been born as Day this hour?
Stretched across heaven and earth,
Arms wide open
Waiting for us to return the embrace --
To count fingers and toes of light and rivers,
bird and flower,
woman, man, and child.
Straining to hear a whispered word --
A song of peace,
A hymn of promise,
A lullaby of justice.

God who was, now is, and will still be,
Show us the way of newness --
conceived by Your desire,
born of Your Love's labor,
made visible,
embraceable.

O Lord,
In this now toddling year,
we move, outstretched in hope, toward You.

Amen


Pamela Hawkins is serves as Managing Editor of Weavings: A Journal of the Christian Spiritual Life. An Elder in the United Methodist Church, she lives in Nashville, Tennessee with her husband Ray. Pamela is the author of the Upper Room books The Awkward Season: Prayers for Lent and Simply Wait: Cultivating Stillness in the Season of Advent.