Today’s prayer flows out of my reflections this week on walking with Jesus and my renewed sense of focus on God’s purposes for our lives. To draw close to God and neighbour we must open our eyes to the world around us and to the hoped for and much anticipated shalom and wholeness towards which God is guiding all of us.
Mayne Island sunset
Tom and I have been away for the last week on Mayne Island BC. This is an annual trip for us – part vacation and part retreat time, an opportunity to refresh ourselves and renew our sense of purpose. It is also a time to listen intently to God, to evaluate where we feel we are on track and where we feel we have gone astray.
These last few months have been extremely busy and I feel that I have allowed myself to be distracted by the busyness of the urgent without taking the time I need each week to reset my priorities and refocus my life. It has been good to remind myself that there is ample time for all God intends me to do, without rushing or getting pressured. But I am still learning to hear God’s voice saying to me – This is for today, say no to everything else.
My focus for the week has been three questions which came out of my reading of Pope Francis’s book Walking with Jesus:
First:What am I doing to draw closer to God each day? This has been a good time of reflecting on my own spiritual observances and the disciplines I need to keep me intentionally on the journey toward greater intimacy with God. Maintaining Sunday as a day of rest is probably the one I struggle with the most and I need God’s gently reminders at times like this to set me straight.
My second question is: What am I doing to draw closer to neighbors? – and by neighbors I mean all those who are around me, starting with my husband Tom, the small community at the Mustard Seed House, those I work with, those I mentor and those I interact with through this blog, social media, speaking, and mission as well as those who are literally my neighbors near and far on this planet Earth – those I live around, meet in the grocery store and interact with through the news. Our opportunity for neighborly interactions is huge these days, which in itself can be overwhelming.
My third question How do I encourage others to become all that God intends them to be? is in many ways the hardest. It encompasses both of the above – being a good example and mentor to others, supporting endeavors that enable people to earn a just wage, improve their health, housing and economic wellbeing all come into this. But there is more. It is easy for all of us, intentionally or unintentionally, to focus on our own ambitions and promotion to the detriment of those around us. So what I have had to grapple with is: What do I do each day to get beyond myself and protecting my own interests to secure my neighbor’s interests first? (Philippians 2:4) It is a question worth asking ourselves on a regular basis.
So my challenge for you today – what are you doing to draw closer to God and neighbour, and what are you doing to enable others to become all that God intends them to be?
Over the last few days I have been reading Walking with Jesus by Pope Francis. In the introduction, Archbishop Blasé Cupich reminds us that “All is walking” which means that every single action of a Christian is to be a step closer and closer to God and to one’s neighbour.
These words have revolved in my mind throughout the week, encouraging me to reevaluate what I give my time and energy to. They were emphasized by my further reading of this book. As Pope Francis say:
Faith does not merely gaze at Jesus, but sees things as Jesus himself sees them, with his own eyes; it is a participation in his way of seeing (3)
To me these comments are closely linked – we cannot see things as Jesus sees them without being willing to walk the sometimes challenging path that leads us closer to both God and neighbour. Faith is not just about what we believe but even more about what we do with that belief?
The question this all raises for me is: How do I structure my day, my week, my year, so that all that I do intentionally draws me a step closer to God and to my neighbour? In the busyness of life it is very easy to forget that this is the central purpose of the Christian life.
What do you think?
When you get a hole in your sock, do you mend it or throw it away?
In the Tenderloin district in San Francisco (CA), college art teacher Michael Swaine sews socks, pants, coats, and more – for the community, including for those experiencing homelessness.
Years ago Michael found a beautiful antique treadle sewing machine tossed to the curb. On the 15th of each month, he wheels the machine to the sidewalk to provide free repairs.
He was recently featured in a 2-minute CBS News video, and explains that “what started as a tool for mending is a tool for people to stop and talk.” The reporter notes, “It has become less about letting out pants and more about taking in stories and building community.”
Michael shares that many people he talks with have had a tough life and are grateful for someone who will listen to their story and also share his own story. One woman says, “He is healing people with his gift.”
This reminds me of a graduate of Bridge of Hope South Jersey who said this about her Bridge of Hope mentoring friends from a local church: “It’s hard to walk away from all you know and move forward like it didn’t happen when in fact, everyday, you struggle with what happened. I enjoyed knowing there was always a safe place to turn and someone willing to listen without making decisions or passing judgments.”
This summer, the Association of Gospel Rescue Missions invited us to write the first two articles for their May/June Rescue magazine. I am grateful that they wanted to share stories of (and demographics about) single mothers and children facing homelessness.
Each day we talk with agencies, churches, and communities about how Bridge of Hope tools and resources can help them to end family homelessness in their community. We’d love to talk with you. Blessings as you mend the fabric of your neighborhood.
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Today’s post is contributed by Edith Yoder, Executive Director of Bridge of Hope, an organization that develops three-way partnerships between homeless single mothers, trained church-based mentoring groups, and trained case managers. The model has shown an 80% success rate. Women graduate from the Bridge of Hope program having attained permanent rental housing, financial stability through employment, and a support network of friends from a church in their community.
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Watercolor of Discovery Park Lighthouse in Seattle by Dave Baab
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I pray differently in different places. For the past eight years I’ve lived in Dunedin, New Zealand, a city of 120,000 people in a beautiful setting with water and mountains. Now I’m in Seattle for seven months, another city in a beautiful setting with water and mountains. Despite the similarities, I see the need for different prayers here than in Dunedin.
I read Dakota: A Spiritual Geography in 2001, soon after Kathleen Norris released it. In fact, I devoured it. She talked about how her spiritual life, her prayer life, was impacted by the place where she lived, South Dakota, and the people who lived there. At that time I was living in Seattle, and I realized how deeply my prayers were impacted by my sense of place. Mount Rainier has always been a lodestone to me, and the water and mountains speak to me of God’s creativity and majesty.
Now I’m thinking about my prayers in Seattle versus Dunedin in a different way. My spiritual geography of 2015 is calling me to make some shifts in prayer. Here are some examples:
1. Prayers for people who are far away versus prayers for people who are close by. My older son, his wife and daughter live in Seattle. My mother lives one hour away. My brother, his wife and my nephew live three hours away. My niece lives a few hours further away. When I’m here in Seattle I see these people with some regularity. When I’m in Dunedin I go months or years without seeing them. Praying for people close by is different in many ways than praying for people far away. Close by, I need to pray for my conversations with them. I need to ask God’s help for showing love to them by my actions when I’m with them. When I’m far away I pray for them differently, asking God to bless them and help them, asking God to help me to show love to them from a distance. Despite all the wonderful ways to communicate with people far away, love looks different from different distances, and so we need to pray specifically for God’s help in giving and receiving love based on location.
2. Prayers for specific location-based stressors. The traffic in Seattle is horrific. I find myself angry at someone in another car almost every day. I can see that I need to begin some entirely new prayer practices around this tendency to get angry so easily at the way other people drive. This is something we don’t deal with in Dunedin, where a “traffic jam” might involve 10 cars at an intersection. In Dunedin, my primary stressor is different. There, my major stress comes from living so far from so many people I love. I believe God will call us back to Seattle someday, and I need to trust God for the timing of that move and trust God for peace in living so far away. Identifying the major stressors in different places calls us to pray (and ask forgiveness) in location-specific ways.
I pray often for the rivers in New Zealand, because one of the biggest environmental issues on the South Island is the number of farmers switching from sheep to cows, and cows have a much bigger impact on the rivers. But what should I be praying for in Seattle related to caring for the earth? Politics is another arena where prayers for specific local issues vary from one place to the next.
What are the location-specific needs and issues that inform your prayers? In what ways do you pray differently in different places? In what ways do you need to?
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Today’s post is contributed by Lynne Baab the author of numerous books and Bible study guides on prayer and other Christian spiritual practices, including The Power of Listening, Sabbath Keeping, Fasting, and Joy Together: Spiritual Practices for Your Congregation. She teaches pastoral theology at the University of Otago in New Zealand. She has also recently published a new novel, Death in Dunedin, a mystery set in her beautiful adopted home town, Dunedin New Zealand.
Visit her website, www.lynnebaab.com, to read her blog, access numerous articles she has written about spiritual practices, and find information about her books.
Last week I posted a prayer God May Your Kingdom Come and commented that Jesus reminds us to pray daily for the coming of God’s kingdom. Yet many of us do not have a clear vision of what this means. When my husband Tom and I speak about the kingdom of God we often use the following verses from Isaiah to portray the beautiful imagery of hope and completion for which we all long: Isaiah 65: 17 – 25; Isaiah 2: 1-4; Isaiah 25: 6-9, Isaiah 35: 1-7; Isaiah 9: 2-7.
These verses are so indelibly imprinted on my mind that they have formed the basis for many of the liturgies and prayers I have written about God’s kingdom, including the prayer above. I love to read through them periodically and savour the imagery. I love to imagine what it would look like if the shalom of God really came to our world, and I love to contemplate what I can do to make it happen, not just writing poetry but getting involved in the brokenness of our world which needs to be transformed.
The kingdom of God is not some idealistic dream, it is a reality that is slowly breaking into our world and God asks us to commit our lives to bringing that dream into reality.
What is your response?
Read through Isaiah 65: 17-25. How does the imagery of this passage reflect your own view of the kingdom of God? What is one thing you plan to do this week that will further God’s kingdom vision?
good samaritan – african from Jesusmafa.com
The Kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed is the fulfillment of the shalom vision from the Old Testament. It is a place in which all humanity, particularly the poor and excluded, in fact all creation is freed from slavery and bondage reconciled and made whole. It is a new heaven and a new earth rich with the promise of shalom, of wholeness and well-being for all and established through the mediation of Christ.
God’s vision of the restoration of shalom was obviously very much at the center of Jesus life. Throughout the gospels Jesus went about bringing glimpses of God’s shalom future into peoples lives. Time after time He led them out of the old oppressions and into new freedoms. To those enslaved by hunger, He gave the freedom of food and even envisioned the new kingdom as a great banquet. To the guilt-ridden, He announced forgiveness and release from the burden of sin. He came to lepers who had been excommunicated for their disease and freed them to come back with full acceptance into the community. He came to the women who had been overlooked and often marginalized and gave them the assurance that they were of equal importance in the eyes of God. He came to the deaf and opened ears, to the blind and gave them sight. To all human kind He offered the hope of a new life and a new world in which shalom relationships were once again at the center of life.
What is your response?
Read through Isaiah 65:17-25 again. Now listen to the video below which was inspired by these scriptures, and then sit for a few minutes imagining a world in which the shalom of God is revealed in its fulness. How does your spirit respond to these thoughts? Perhaps you would like to write your own prayer or poem? Are there other responses God is asking of you?
I often get asked how I write the prayers I publish regularly on this blog. One way is by meditating on scripture. I find that reading through the scripture, saying it aloud, and then allowing my thoughts and promptings to flow out in a prayer is one way to lodge that scripture in the depths of my heart. The prayer above came out of such a process. It is based on Psalm 139 which is one of my favourite prayers.
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