The Chalice
This past weekend, I was fortunate enough to spend time in the National Gallery of Art. Harry and I had been there briefly some months before but we hadn’t had ample time to fully contemplate the beauty of some of the grand masterpieces housed there. We were both hoping to have a more spiritual experience as we prayerfully sat with some of the more religious pieces that told our Christian story and contemplate their meaning. This would require moving at a slow and deliberate pace, even sitting for some time in one place rather than hurrying through the entire exhibit.
The day didn’t disappoint as we gazed at gigantic landscapes brimming with detail from every vantage point, close up and far away. We were captivated by the blue hues of Picasso’s the tragedy and caught up in the mystery of the painful and eerie scene along the shore of a sea. We noticed the way Jesus changed in each depiction throughout history from a humble man to a strong angelic warrior. We wondered about Mary and what each painting had to say about her over the centuries.
But the most intriguing of all unexpectedly caught the corner of my eye as I hurried through the part of the museum that housed the sculptures. I had not planned on being drawn to those items and so… even though I said I wouldn’t hurry, I tried to hurry by assuming that somehow I knew the experience that God was planning for me and that it wasn’t going to happen in the sculpture section. Read more
There are moments in our lives when God uses people to inspire us and till up some of the hard soil in order to prepare us for the new growth that he is bringing about. I will never forget attending a recent homecoming event at Eastern Mennonite University and hearing the recipient of the Distinguished Service Award tell her story.
One of the reasons I feel we misunderstand and misuse our time is because we do not view it as a gift. We generally move from day to day with the assumption that there will be another. The consequences? We move from activity to activity, meeting to meeting, shopping spree to movie night, barely able to take it all in. We can easily fall into a sort of stupor where we are kind of sleepwalking through our days, entranced by the ticking of our watches and how our culture defines our day. All the while, we are never fully awakened to the gift at hand, one more day in the presence of God. 
It is always intriguing to me when the various streams from which I am reading all come together in one congruent message. For the past several weeks, I have been reading about the gift of time… each new day… how we receive it… how we perceive it.
As Harry preached this past Sunday on Jesus walking on the water, I was deeply moved as I realized that recently I had been weathering my own storm… it is hard to know where these storms originate and why. Sometimes they arrive as quickly and as unexpectedly as they subside… like a squall on a lake… unpredictable and unforseen but powerful enough to take you down.
Practicing the Sabbath continues to be a life-giving practice for Harry and I. Admittedly, we have had to make some adjustments along the way. For several weeks now, we needed to change the day of the week due to previously scheduled events on Saturdays. So, we decided to make our Sabbath during this time from Thursday evening at sundown until Friday evening at sundown.
The creative work of expressing my spiritual insights and longings into words has become a meaningful spiritual practice for me over the past several years. It began with a prayer journal that I sporadically kept written in pen and pencil. It then evolved into something more freeing and creative, poetry.
Recently, I have heard the comment that perhaps blogging takes away from the pastoral role… that maybe if the pastor spent less time typing away at the computer, they would have more time to… You can imagine all the things one could say to finish the sentence.
As I continue my practice of prayer, Jesus continues to invite me to