by Elizabeth | Feb 1, 2012 | Learning Story
The End of Memory by Miroslav Volf
This rainy afternoon, I’m thinking about peacemaking, and inevitably that takes me to those who have suffered grievous wrongs and yet continued to hope. So, today a word from one of my all-time favorites, Miroslav Volf:
“Grievous wrongdoing doesn’t just wound the body and soul, and it doesn’t just worm its way into our identity. It also entraps us. Like a ball chained to a prisoner’s leg, it drags heavily on our spirit and prevents it from roaming freely, stretching itself into the unknown, playing with new possibilities. Susan Brison describes with deep insight how a wrongdoing endured robs a person of the future. “The past,’ she writes, ‘reaches toward the present and throttles desire before it can become directed toward the future.’
“Even more definitively, in Jesus Christ God has promised to every human being a new horizon of possibilities – a new life into which each of us is called to grow in our own way and ultimately a new world freed from all enmity, a world of love. To be a Christian means that new possibilities are defined by that promise, not by any past experience, no matter how devastating. If the traumatized believe the promise — if they live into the promise, even if they are tempted at first to mock it – they will, in Kelsey’s words, enter a world ‘marked by a genuinely open future that they could not have imagined in the living death of the old world they have constructed for themselves.’”
Volf is also quoting in this section David Kelsey, Imagining Redemption
by Elizabeth | Jan 30, 2012 | Learning Story
Putting the final touches on an upcoming workshop on community — what is it and why do we do it — here are two great quotes — the first from Jesus, the second from Mother Theresa. I challenge us all — let’s not just read them — let’s look at the faces of three people we come across – at least two strangers, and think about what it truly means to incarnate the love God created us to receive and give.
“My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, 21 that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22 I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— 23 I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” John 17:20-23
“People today are hungry for love, for understanding love, which is…the only answer to loneliness and great poverty. That is why we are able to go to countries like England and America and Australia, where there is no hunger for bread. But there people are suffering from terrible loneliness, terrible despair, terrible hatred, feeling unwanted, feeling helpless, feeling hopeless. They have forgotten how to smile, they have forgotten the beauty of the human touch. They are forgetting what is human love. They need someone who will understand and respect them.”
Mother Theresa
by Elizabeth | Jan 24, 2012 | Learning Story
Cool quote from Virginia Woolf…from my favorite site: www.thesaurus.com
“It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only? Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities? For we have too much likeness as it is, and if an explorer should come back and bring word of other sexes looking through the branches of other trees at other skies, nothing would be of greater service to humanity; and we should have the immense pleasure into the bargain of watching Professor X rush for his measuring-rods to prove himself “superior.”” Virginia Woolf
Read more – http://w.po.st/share/entry/redir?publisherKey=Dictionary&url=http%3A%2F%2Fquotes.dictionary.com%2FIt_would_be_a_thousand_pities_if_women&title=%20It_would_be_a_thousand_pities_if_women&sharer=copypaste
by Elizabeth | Jan 23, 2012 | Learning Story
"The day came..."
“The day came when the risk of remaining in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Anais Nin
“So the woman left her water jar and went away into town and said to the people, ‘Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?’” John 4: 28-29.
Yesterday I ventured into the relatively new-to-me, very exciting, but often intimidating practice of visual journaling, a technique of using visual media to let your mind and heart wander. I’m eager to tell you that I feel terribly incompetent at it, and it feels risky to share the pages that came, but since doing so seems to be the action of living this story, here goes…
I opened my journal to a page in progress, which I had begun by pasting a driveway discovery: a shell/bud/pod from our crepe myrtle trees that had “flowered” in the most exotic manner. [Yes, I recognize none of this is correct botanically:)].
Flipping through some books to get ideas for what to do next, I saw the old quote, familiar from greeting cards (probably to the author, Anais Nin’s, great chagrin), and debated whether or not to use it, because it seemed a little clichéd. But I have my own story of when the “day came,” when a dear friend sent me these encouraging words, so I decided it should go in.
As I worked, though, my mind and heart ran to the story of the Samaritan woman, who likely never forgot the day when she was invited out of the shame of her sin to live in the love she was made for. Hers is a stunning story of “the day came….” Jesus asked her to fetch water for him, and the day came. Jesus told her to call her husband, and the day came. Jesus told her he was the Messiah, and the day came.
The risk of remaining in the bud was apparently no more an option even, and she ran back to the townspeople who had helped hold her in her tightly-closed hard shell and told them about a man who “told her everything she ever did.” The woman drank from the well of Living Water (sorry to mix the metaphors but not really sorry because Paul did it all the time☺). Bursting forth into bloom, with Jesus as the fixing center, her lovely colors spread into full glory, bounding from the page.
So then I had to make a sunflower, my personal symbol of hope, bursting off the page, with Christ at the center.
The day to be freed by the compelling love of our Lord Jesus Christ has come. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow, his mercies are new. May we rejoice and burst forth with this great good news!
by Elizabeth | Jan 18, 2012 | Learning Story
I wrote this entry several years ago, but given new grief, both in my life and in others’ dear to me, it seemed like a good day to run it again:
Yesterday, given a 36 hour retreat at a friend’s sanctuary by the sea, I headed out to the beach early to capture the beauty before clouds overtook the sun and grayed the day. I had brought my camera in case I saw any beautiful cloud formations, one of my favorite photographic subjects. I took a picture of the cloud before I saw the sign.
It wasn’t a well-formed rainbow, and I’m afraid some scientist might explain to me exactly what I saw there in terms of the reflection of the sun’s rays and water blah blah blah…But it was a rainbow, if only a fragment of one, and it spoke to me of God’s mercy and grace in time of need.
It has been several weeks of significant losses, both in my own life, and in lives of people very close to me. Strange, sudden, sorrowful deaths have shattered stories of people I love or of friends of people I love. Especially for these loved ones, it is a season of wandering and wondering, as my eldest son put it yesterday, “Is there a point to all of this? Does what I’m doing matter?” I told him, “There are seasons when it looks like death, disease, darkness, and disaster have won. But don’t believe it. Soon, very soon, you will see again that redemption has won. New life is growing, even where we can’t see it. God’s mercy is working, even when we don’t feel it.”
In the midst of these musings, I saw the bow in the cloud. God tells Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and everything living around you and everyone living after you. I’m putting my rainbow in the clouds, a sign of the covenant between me and the Earth. From now on, when I form a cloud over the Earth and the rainbow appears in the cloud, I’ll remember my covenant between me and you and everything living, that never again will floodwaters destroy all life. When the rainbow appears in the cloud, I’ll see it and remember the eternal covenant between God and everything living, every last living creature on Earth.” (Genesis 9:9-16).
God’s covenant with Noah was not the final covenant though. Christ fulfilled the promise that God would fully redeem and restore the broken world. Whether you see the rainbow or not, it is true! Christ has won the victory over sin and death; the promise is fulfilled, and there are signs pointing to the one day when God shall wipe away all tears, remove all mourning, heal all disease, and death will be no more!
by Elizabeth | Jan 16, 2012 | Learning Story
Abbey resting after a run on the beach (which was supposed to be a "photo shoot"
“Consecutives” – short for “consecutive kisses,” a series of “kisses” that may to the untrained eye appear to be licks given to either of my two daughters by our “giant Yorkie” Abbey.
Sadly, after a bout with kidney disease so short we barely knew it was here before it took her, our dog Abbey passed away sometime Saturday night. When we first acquired her, she kept me up at night way more than any of my four babies did. She barked in a loud, body-shaking tone when guests came to the door and didn’t stop for a while after they had entered (unless we put her in her crate). She demanded attention, and any time her “older sister,” our big lab Maddie, seemed to be getting more than she, she barked and jumped to make sure we could not ignore her.
And yet, she was the dog who whined and rolled on the floor in delight when you came home after a long day away; she kept me company in my study in the early mornings and raised one sleepy eye when I asked her if a certain sentence made sense to her. My children, in varying degrees, loved her, and my husband was just plain goofy-cute with her, pulling her into his lap every evening after dinner and letting her “kiss” (lick remaining food off his face)?
So yesterday was the first day of loss. And though that little Abbey-piece of my heart had broken, God showered me with “consecutive” kisses, small uncoincidental occurrences, that reminded me that he is with always.
1. The timing. I wasn’t home. The hard decisions and the final hours were left to be stewarded by the best person to do it, my dear doctor husband. Even though I picture her little soft body (as yes, it had become over the past several weeks), I can’t bear the thought of holding it, as he did, in her final hours.
2. The words I needed to hear. This morning, after my husband called me to tell me she was gone, I opened my computer to read Matthew. But the Bible was already open to a passage I was studying the day before – Revelation 21. As it always is, it was good to read the reminder of the day of shalom finally restored, the day of no more tears is coming – and SOON.
3. Friends and family who understand were nearby. Just yesterday I visited with the friends who inspired us to get a Yorkie. When this couple first visited us at our house, they brought their cute little (8 lb.) lap dog, who sat obediently in my friend’s lap the whole time we were there. This woman’s deep compassion for furry friends is known far and wide. In addition to getting to talk with her, God also provided family. Our elder son and his girlfriend were here with me. Her family Yorkie had just passed away last year. Talk about being surrounded by people who know what this day is like!
4. Scripture again: We visited my ‘home’ church in this city. When the service began, guess what the Scripture passage was? (Yes, see above).
5. Soul-stirring songs, among them…
“How Firm a Foundation” – with this stanza opening my eyes to God’s kindness to all who suffer sorrow.
“When through the deep waters I call thee to go,
The rivers of sorrow shall not overflow;
For I will be with thee thy trouble to bless,
And sanctify to thee thy deepest distress.
Dear friends who stood just a few rows ahead have for the last several months been watching a close family member waste slowly toward death. God did not design us for death. And yet, he offers consecutive kisses of hope, reminding us that one day he will restore all things and those who know him will be with him forever.
“Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. 4 ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’[b] or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”
