By Lilly Lewin —
The tomb is empty, Jesus is ALIVE! So what now?
The disciples were probably asking the same question the days and weeks following Jesus’ resurrection.
I’m sure that their emotions ran the gamut the days after the Light had returned.
I understand why Peter went back to fishing…
It was familiar, it was what he knew best, it was concrete and made sense!
This “coming back to life after dying a horrible death stuff”
seemed way over the top!
It must have been incredible to see and touch and eat with Jesus again!
It also must have been emotionally exhausting too!
The roller coaster from amazing despair to total joy…and then the blandness in between
and all of the questions!
Is he back to stay? For how long? What happens next? What do we do now? How does he do that?…that disappearing and reappearing thing? and then his question, Peter do you love me?
I have felt many of those things post Easter!
The Light of the world that was snuffed out for my sin…and darkened the planet for three days has marvelously returned!
I too have many questions…
I too am impatient for the answers…
How long? What is next?
What are you up to now Jesus?
As I type this, I hear the Light saying what he said to those tired, excited, exhausted, confused, elated, friends of his after Easter… before he ascended to his Father.
Go back to Jerusalem and wait…
Wait, watch… receive the Gift my Father will give you…
So they went back to Jerusalem.
They went back to that upper room that was so special, so sacred and so familiar and normal.
But they had to wait…
They had to receive …
They returned to their friends and shared the story
They waited, they prayed,
All before they could go out again and share the Light .
All before they could go make disciples around the globe.
Jesus is telling us there’s so much more…
We just need to wait and see!
We don’t need to run ahead of Him!
Instead, we need to wait on Him.
We need to seek Jesus in prayer, the Bible, in Silence and solitude and experience Him in nature.
And we need to receive his gift of the Holy Spirit so our cups, our lives can be filled
And we can pour out his love to those around us!
Take time to wait today.
Use this breath prayer to help you pause.
Use this breath prayer to help you receive the Holy Spirit.
Pray this Breath Prayer:
(sit down somewhere comfortable and relax your muscles.
Take a few deep breaths, roll your shoulders and relax your neck and breathe)
Breathe in God’s Peace
Exhale your fear
Breathe in God’s Spirit
Exhale conflict
Breathe in God’s Peace
Exhale confusion
Breathe in God’s Spirit
Exhale unforgiveness for others
Breathe in God’s Peace
Exhale unforgiveness for yourself
Breathe in God’s Spirit
Allow The Spirit to fill you with new life, new mission and
New hope for the days to come.
Breathe deeply and allow God’s Spirit to fill you.
Breathe, Rest. Be with God.
My husband, Dave, now has a chronic lung disease, a form of chronic obstructive lung disease, often called COPD. Watching him suffer has been one of the hardest things I have ever experienced.
About a year ago, I decided I needed help in coping with the stress of his disease (and a few other stressors), so I started seeing a therapist twice a month. My times with him have been very helpful, and in these next few blog posts, I want to reflect on what I’ve learned.
Before I start, I’ll tell you a bit about Dave’s situation. His life is diminished by his disease because his energy is lower and he is prey to frequent lung infections, but he is still himself and still one of my greatest joys and sources of support. My marriage remains a big net positive in my life, a huge blessing. Still, last year I could tell that watching him suffer was causing me stress on a daily basis, and watching him deal with fevers when he has lung infections was tearing my heart up.
Let me tell you about my typical response to his illness when I entered therapy. I was feeling and thinking a bunch of stuff: feeling sad to see all the adjustments Dave has to make, worrying about how the disease will affect him and me in the future, wondering how long he will live, hoping he’ll live a long time for my sake but wondering if it wouldn’t be better for him to die for his sake so his suffering would end, feeling guilty for having thoughts that dying might be better for him, worrying that I’m not trusting God enough with my thoughts and fears, etc., etc.
These thoughts and feelings would swirl around in my head. I was steadily gaining weight without being aware of overeating. The only way I could explain the weight gain was to see that the spinning thoughts and feelings were creating stress, and I was soothing the stress with a bit of extra food every day.
I would try to stop the swirling thoughts and feelings, but I had no success in doing that. Then I felt guilty for not being able to focus my thoughts and feelings on something more positive. I felt continuously guilty for not trusting God more.
The first suggestion my therapist made was to separate the thoughts from the feelings. No one had ever suggested this to me, and I now see this as a spiritual practice, a choice that needs to be made over and over. In this series of blog posts, I’ll tease out what that looks like in practice. To begin, I’ll write about the difference between thoughts and feelings.
Feelings are a normal, healthy part of daily life. Of course I would feel scared, sad, and angry because Dave is dealing with a chronic condition. What loving person wouldn’t feel that?
But the catastrophic thoughts – What will be the trajectory of the illness? When will he die? What will it be like to be a widow? – are demonic, according to my therapist. They are literally demons that pursue and enslave me. They damage my life.
My therapist suggested dealing with the thoughts like a person would deal with distractions during meditation or contemplative prayer. Imagine them as leaves floating down a river. Let them go. But the feelings are to be felt.
He gave me suggestions for dealing with the feelings, and I’ll write about that for the next two weeks. On the fourth week of this series, I’ll write about dealing with the thoughts.
Always before, I saw coping with my swirling thoughts and feelings as a black or white thing: either I’m disciplining my mind to have positive emotions and thoughts, or I’m being honest and feeling/thinking about the negative stuff. The choice was optimism or honesty.
Now I have a different perspective. I see that “honesty” is not the right word to describe catastrophic thoughts about the future. My thoughts focus on things that haven’t happened yet, so they cannot be honest or dishonest. Catastrophic thoughts are simply unhelpful and dysfunctional, which makes them demonic. And indeed, they do demonstrate lack of trust in God.
However, “honesty” is the right word to use to describe experiencing feelings. When I feel sad, scared, angry and/or guilty about Dave’s illness or about anything else, I need to know what to do with those feelings. Those feelings are indeed present. They are a part of me. I find trying not to feel them simply doesn’t work.
By Mary Harwell Sayler —
Praise God your Lover
Who embraces you
like a blanket wrapped
around the chill of your life
and holds you –
insulated from evil,
protected from attack,
cloistered in comfort,
cocooned in Christ –
until, reassured,
you risk new life
and rise in the lift of God’s love.
Mary Harwell Sayler, © 2017, from the book PRAISE!
By Shannon Martin —
Do you ever wonder if you are, perhaps, the resident nut job at your church?
Our church families are just as complicated as our biological families. We all have that one crazy member that everyone can identify as THAT crazy person. The one that we cringe at when we see them coming (yes, church members are still humans!). We find them harmless enough, but they just don’t know when to stop talking or just have no filter……
I am wondering if that is me.
Over the last several years I have been involved in a variety of projects and served in a number of different ways in different capacities. Last year I realized after soul-searching that beyond being a people pleaser I was also very prone to believe that my identity was found in the things I did.
After a lot of reluctance and stubbornness on my part, I finally surrendered to God’s will and began to step back from some things and give other things up completely. This has put me into a very odd position for me.
I am not currently the person serving in different areas, but I have a ton of knowledge about how things have been done, changes that have been made over the years and why they were made, and other historical type information like that. A repository of mostly useless information at this point.
As a result, I get asked a lot of questions……at least at first……and in a way, my busy-a-holic soul loved this because it kept me in touch with those positions I had given up. I was still in the know……I was still important…….
And then the questions stopped coming……and I had to remind myself that this is a VERY GOOD THING!!! I have successfully transitioned out of multiple roles with just a small remaining role in the worship planning/leading arena.
However, I still seem to stumble upon conversations coming and going at church and I JUST CAN’T STOP MYSELF at times from throwing in my two cents worth.
This is why I am now wondering have I become the resident church nut job? The one who just can’t seem to keep her nose out of things that are no longer her concern?
So just as I have had to become more intentional about prayer times and scripture study times, I must now also become intentional about not picking back up the things that are not my current assignments from God.
I have often complained that I don’t like people stepping on my callings, or feel like I am at times being held back by folks from doing the currently assigned tasks from God. However, if I refuse to let things go, then I am the person stepping in the way and holding others back from their full potential in God’s callings for them.
Letting go doesn’t mean losing a part of me, it instead is actually FREEDOM for me. Freedom to continue to grow and the ability to allow others to grow as well. Freedom to spread my wings and be open to trying new things.
My identity is found in belonging to the one true living and eternal God. The God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph. The same God that Deborah, Ruth, and Esther belonged to. This needs to be my focus. This is what I need to be intentional about. I am being prepared for “just such a time as this” (Esther 4:14 – NRSV).
What I do at church does not define who I am in Christ.
My new guiding verse can be found in Isaiah 58:11 (AMP):
“And the Lord will continually guide you, and satisfy your soul in scorched and dry places, and give strength to your bones: and you will be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water whose waters do not fail.”
Going forward I will speak less and listen more. I will reserve my opinions and keep them to myself unless asked specifically for them. Yes, yes, I know, but please try to contain your laughter at those last two statements…… I will, with God’s strength and guidance, be able to accomplish even this!
So, while I may be a recovering busy-a-holic, and a recovering nut job (okay, may not be any way for me to escape this one!), at the beginning, the middle, and the end of every single day I am a child of the one true King. And that makes me ENOUGH.
I know what it is to have little, and I know what it is to have plenty. In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well-fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and of being in need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me. (Philippians 4:12-13 – NRSV)
Shannon Martin and her husband live in North East Ohio with with their teenage son. They attend Midway Mennonite Church. You can also find some of her writings I on her blog Wisdom Wanderings.
Shiphrah and Puah are two of the most minor characters in the Bible, and their story consists of only a few verses. I enjoy their story, though—not only because their actions profoundly influenced the scriptural story of liberation but also because of how they managed to succeed. Exodus tells us that Pharaoh had become uneasy at the population of Hebrews in Egypt, so he instructed the midwives, Shiphrah and Puah included, to kill any Hebrew boys at birth. Rather than refusing outright, a refusal that would probably have just lea to their own deaths, these two midwives took advantage of Pharaoh’s ignorance and told him a tale that no woman would have believed. “The Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women,” they said, “for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them.”
This story reminds me of another short story, “A Jury of Her Peers” by Susan Glaspell. In this story, the men overlook evidence that the women are able to interpret. The men, those who possess much more public power than the women do, simply don’t recognize that sloppy embroidery or a dead parakeet is significant. They also don’t realize that they ought to ask the women what they’ve noticed. The men and the women see the same things, but only the women are able to ascribe meaning to what they see. The women save their friend from a possible conviction for murder simply by keeping quiet.
People who possess little authority can seldom overcome their opponents through sheer force. They have to rely on other means—by understanding their oppressors better than they understand themselves, by outwitting those too arrogant to question their own limitations. Exodus doesn’t tell us what the midwives think of Pharaoh, whether they consider him simply naïve or an outright fool, whether they’re just taking advantage of his understandable limitations. He doesn’t question their presentation of the Hebrew women’s character. Why would he? He doesn’t know anything about childbirth. Why would he know? Why would he care to know?
This story offers a lesson in justice, but it also offers a lesson in humility. However much any of us knows, we probably don’t know enough. We’ve probably each stared right at something and overlooked its meaning. And the story suggests that God approves of wiliness, of tricking our opponents when that’s the option we have. Someday, perhaps, we might all live in the peaceable kingdom, none of us grasping after power or so enraged with greed that we accept the harm we cause to get what we want. My faith teaches me that such a thing could happen, though my experience tells me that it won’t likely happen soon. Until then, let’s use these two often overlooked women as our models; when we can’t eradicate evil, let’s try to outwit it.
Yesterday, I spoke at Austin Mustard Seed Church on rest and Sabbath. It was a great opportunity to refresh my own understanding of what it means to find our rest in God.
With the aid of Biblegateway.com I looked up a number of psalms that talk about resting in God, and compared how different versions translate the passages. Rest from a biblical perspective is definitely not about taking a nap when we are exhausted.
In Psalm 62:1,2 one of my favourites verses on rest, The Message talks about breathing room for my soul. What a beautiful way to describe the rest we find when we wait quietly and allow the presence of God to fill us.
Breathing room for the soul, that wonderful place of intimacy where we delight in God and God delights in us.
Rest like this does not just happen however. These breathing room moments are created when we intentionally sit quietly imagining God in us and around us, filling us to overflowing with the wonder of a warm embrace. They are brief personal moments when we deliberately pause for time out from our busy schedules and allow a sense of stillness to dissipate the concerns of the day.
How Do We Cultivate These Restful Moments.
1. Take notice of the spaces that encourage rest – possibly a place in nature life beside a waterfall or in a garden corner; or a special at home place like a comfortable armchair, or a cosy meal with friends; or even at work place where we invite God into our office, a local coffee shop or a park bench. Taking notice of these places and visiting them regularly throughout the day is a wonderful way to experience breathing room for the soul.
Question: What are the spaces you visit regularly that encourage you to enter the rest of God?
2. Notice the sensory experiences that allow our souls to breathe. For some it is sights like photos, written prayers or scriptures, religious icons or paintings. For others it is sounds like water cascading over rocks, bells ringing, birds singing. Still others find rest when the aromas of baking bread or the fragrance of flowers come to them. Or perhaps it is the feel of the texture of wood, or velvet or a loved one’s face that draws you into God’s rest. It can even be the taste of a good meal, a cup of coffee or a piece of chocolate.
Question: What types of sensory stimuli allow your soul to breathe and enter the rest of God?
3. Recognize actions that encourage you to stop, rest and delight in God. Moses took off his shoes when he recognized that he had entered a holy place, and without his sandals on it was obvious that he was there to stay a while. For some of us it is kneeling, or raising our hands in the air that carries us into that place of rest. For others it is reciting a breathing prayer or walking the labyrinth. Sometimes it is in community with others – preparing a meal together, singing together, gardening together are all actions I have found can draw me into that restful presence of God. Even washing the dishes or vacuuming the floor are special, sacramental actions that invite some of us into the place where we delight in God.
Question: What are the actions you can identify that encourage you to stop, rest and delight in God?
What Is Your Response?
Sit quietly, hands in your lap, palms upwards ready to receive from God.
Close your eyes and take a couple of deep breaths in and out, visualize them flowing into your heart and your soul. Relax into the presence of God and imagine God in you and around you. Enjoy the wonder of God’s warm embrace.
Bring to mind one thing that delights you about God.
Sit for a moment and savour that delight.
Now imagine one thing about you that God delights in.
Sit still and allow the delight of God to fill you.
Open your eyes and take out your journal. Write down what you experienced. You might like to respond with a prayer, a doodle, a sketch or even a song.
by Lilly Lewin —
The Celtic Christians prayed along the way…they prayed as they got up in the morning and rekindled the fire, they prayed as they went out the door to work, they prayed for family members as they cleaned up their homes, they prayed for their work as they walked down the lanes to the fields.
I find this comforting as there are so many mundane tasks that have to be done day in, and day out. The prayers of the Celtic Christians have inspired to me to pray along the way too. To pray using everyday things, and allow every day tasks and chores to be prayer times.
So for Freerange Friday we are going to pray with our laundry!
Missing socks…
Missing dreams…
Maybe your dreams have been lost like a sock in a dryer…
Maybe you cannot find it’s mate
Or maybe your dreams have become shrunk or wrinkled?
Maybe they have been sitting too long wet and still in the bin
and now they stink…
Like old cheese.
What are your dreams with God?
What are God’s dreams for you?
Have you asked God lately?
Take some time,
Pray about this.
Dream Big.
As you sort, fold or wash your socks, let your dreams grow.
Talk to God about your dreams, your dreams that may have holes in them, or gotten lost or separated along the way.
Dreams that are worn thin and need new life.
Dream Big with God about your life!
Ask God to show you the dreams God has for you as you wash &fold socks.
Clothes prayers:
How’s your spiritual life at the moment?
Is it in dirty piles on the floor? Or heaped in a corner ?
Is it neatly folded and put away so no one can see it?
Is like your favorite T-shirt and pair of jeans?
Or is it more like a prom dress put away for a one time gig?
Is it well-worn?
Or does it still have on the tags?
Is it a hand me down faith or have you received it on your own?
Does it need mending?
Does it need to be re-sized because you’ve out grown it or lost some weight?
What garment, what piece of clothing represents your spiritual life right now?
Take it out of the pile, or the drawer or the closet and hang it up where you can see it each day…allow God to speak to you through this garment or item.
Is there a garment or item of clothing that you’d like to represent your new life in God? Place that out too or cut out a picture of this item and hang it up where you can see it daily. Allow the Holy Spirit to speak to you through the piles in your room, the laundry basket and even your wardrobe or closet.
Praying for others:
If you do laundry for other people….like your family or roommates,
Pray for them as you wash their clothes or as you fold them. And if you have kids help you wash and fold, get them to pray with you!
Ask Jesus to warm their hearts, to clean any spots or soiled areas that are troubling them. To help them feel clean and whole. To be refreshed with the Spirit. What else comes to mind?
If you do laundry at a laundromat, pray for the people you see around you….
Consider their lives…
What are their needs?
Ask Jesus to touch their lives in ways that make him real to them.
Take along some extra Quarters to give to someone who might need help with their laundry, or help someone carry out a load or two.
Ask Jesus to help you see with new eyes the needs around you.
If you use a dry cleaner, get to know them.
Too often service providers don’t get treated with honor or respect.
Begin to pray for them and their business.
Jesus, thank you that you are with us in the day to day pieces of living.
Thank you for the power to sort through the piles that clutter our lives.
Thank you for seeing the spots and loving us even with our stains.
Thank you that you already know our dirty laundry, the stuff we try so hard to hide away, and you long to set us free.
Thank you for your promise to wash us and make us whiter than snow.
Help us to know this. Help us to receive this!
Help us to receive your love and your cleansing forgiveness.
And Help us Lord to share your cleansing love and forgiveness with those around us.
AMEN
freerangeworship.com
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