Last week as you know, we started a kickstarter campaign. A whole 30 days of knuckle biting vulnerability.
One of my friends who has recently completed her own campaign commented
Are you freaking out yet? It was the worst emotional roller coaster of my life. The whole middle of the campaign, that is between the first day or two and the last day or two, can drag on forever and you’ll feel like you’ll never make it and it’s agonizing. And this may feel like the longest 30 days of your life. But putting yourself out there in such a public way to be funded is surprisingly personal and really affects you.
She is right. This is a very vulnerable and personal thing to do, particularly here on the blog. We are now down to 23 days to go and I am already feeling discouraged because we are only 12% towards our goal.
So I am asking you: Want to join MSA on Kickstarter to help us offer E-courses?
Enough said? Go here:
Alright, maybe a few of you need a little more. Read on!
So, you know all the things that you love about MSA, the inspiring content, the collaborative creativity, the diverse community, and the deep spiritual formation? That’s what we want to offer through a series of online courses that will connect us in conversation, study, practice and global community. The first one will start this October, Reimagining How We Prayer, based on the popular book Return to Our Senses, but that is just the beginning. Seminar and workshops reaches 10, 20, 50 people in one location, e-courses reach across the globe and draw thousands of people from England to Australia into the MSA community and MSA ethos. People can work through the course at their own pace, taking time to reflect and renew their spirits. This, we believe will strengthen their faith and transform their spiritual life.
We want to bring the same type of collaborative exploration we do in our writing and speaking to a much wider community of Mustard Seed Associates – and this is how you can help us do that.
Many of you have told me how much you would appreciate having a course like this available. But we need your help to make it happen.
Here are four ways you can help:
1. Check out our Kickstarter site and watch the video
2. Consider making a small donation and help get us to our goal! A donation of $75 means you get to be one of the first to participate in our new course.
3. Share the link with others on facebook, twitter, or your favorite
4. Say a prayer for a successful campaign and keep watching as we cross the finish line, Lord willing!
Don’t Delay – Collaborate Today!
good samaritan – van gogh
This weekend I have been thinking a lot about the love of God. I am getting ready to do a spiritual retreat with a group of doctors this morning and then tomorrow head down to Portland to speak at the Word Made Flesh Conference. In both cases I had intended to focus on prayer but God keeps bringing me back to the need focus instead on “learn to love me more.” Trust and faith are products of love I realize. Trust and faith do not occur spontaneously, nor do they come with focusing on our need to trust and have faith. Trust and faith come by learning to love the God who is trustworthy in all circumstances.
A few weeks ago someone left a comment on one of my posts with a quote from St. Teresa of Avila, “Remember: if you want to make progress on the path and ascend to the places you have longed for, the important thing is not to think much but to love much, and so to do whatever best awakens you to love.” This too resonated in my soul
Prayer is not about getting down on our knees to talk to God. Nor is it about praying for the needs of the world. It is about falling in love and staying in love with God as we converse with and interact with the One who fills every fibre of our being. (see prayer by Father Arrupe)
What awakens us to the love of God which formed us, transforms us, sustains us and empowers us? What awakens us to the love of God so that we crave that intimate place of communion with the lover of our souls. Not just when we sit down in a place of retreat where we intercede for others but moment by moment of every day in the ordinary routines and activities of life?
This is the question that I think is at the heart of the gospels. Jesus whole life is about learning to love the God who is love. That is why James calls “love of God and love of neighbour” the royal law. That is why Jesus spent so much time drawing aside to quiet places to pray. That is why the disciples longed to learn how to pray as Jesus prayed, not in a distant hands off relationship but in an intimate loving interaction that permeated his life and ministry. Learning to love someone means spending time in their presence, becoming familiar with their voice, gazing into their face. It means loving to stand in awe of what they have made, touching, tasting and relishing their love expressed through such creativity.
It also means learning to love what they love. To enter into a loving relationship with God means to desire what God loves – justice and mercy and compassion. It means that our hearts ache with the things that tear God’s heart apart – sin and disease and injustice. Form the fullness of our experience of God’s love we are able to love others. The outpouring of God’s love into the lives of others is I believe one of the most profound expressions of prayer that there can be.
Let me leave you with this beautiful quote from Elaine Heath’s book The Mystical Way of Evangelism to meditate on.
When we come home to the love of God everything changes, beginning with how we pray. Prayer is now at its foundation a contemplative soaking in the infinite love of God. All our intercessions and thanksgivings and wordless cries now issue from the molten core of contemplative prayer. Prayer has become the vital breath, the heartbeat of divine energy without which we cannot live.
So what awakens you to the love of God? I would love to hear your thoughts on this.
Rita and Gerald Iversen
Rita and Gerald recently visited us at the Mustard Seed House. A fascinating couple and it was a privilege to both get to know them a little and have the opportunity to interview them
Gerald describes himself as the chief activist at Simple Living Works. Rita has been making jewelry since she was a kid and now creates through Black Orchid Beads which will shortly be available on the internet.
Check out the resources from Simple Living Works!
BLOG: SimpleLivingWorks.WordPress.com
PODCAST
VIDEOS: YouTube.com/SimpleLivingWorks
Equipping people of faith to challenge consumerism, live justly and celebrate responsibly
An all volunteer educational organization.
And other wonderful resources on Simple Living Works.
A couple of days ago I wrote a post Visions in an Empty Glass following an amazing God moment at church. I continue to savour the images that experience generated for me. God moments like this are not to be taken lightly or dismissed quickly. I am also savouring the new images that post has stirred, finding that I need to pause over each comment, draw breath and allow God to speak to me afresh. Not only are God moments for our edification and learning, the responses that well up from within us and others to these moments are also to be listened to and savoured.
My colleague Andy Wade wrote:
Such powerful images! Change is the state our faith was created for. Not change for change sake, but change that sees us transformed more and more into the likeness of Jesus. I love the imagery of forming/creation – something we all experience by our very existence. Then the filling – we’ve all been filled – it is our breath, our life. The transformation into wine begins as we begin to know Jesus as Saviour (added the “u” for your benefit) Perhaps this is another image of what it means to be “born anew”. Now on the path of “aging”, we are “new wine” in the process of becoming the rich, full-bodied flavour of Christ in the world.
Change is the state our faith was created for. So many of us run from change. We get set in our ways and don’t want to move. I know how easily I get caught up in the familiar routines, once life giving and transformative, now rigid and stagnating.
God makes us all beautiful, handblown goblets, formed from the sand (dust of the earth, but that is not all there is to God’s creativity in our lives. We are made to be transformed.
It occurred to me as I meditated on this that a glass is transparent, the beauty and the glory of God shines through its emptiness. A glass filled with water still allows light to shine through and if you catch it at the right angle, you might see a rainbow. But a glass full of wine is not transparent, it absorbs the light. It glows with the light, and it is only in the drinking of it, really the sharing of it that its full beauty is revealed, not the beauty of the vessel which is our bodies but the beauty, the wonder, the richness of the Spirit that now dwells within.
I shaped you as an empty glass, have filled you with living water and am transforming it into wine.
What imagery do these words I felt God spoke to me (and yes i have changed the original word cup to glass) bring to your mind? Please consider sharing them as I feel there is still more that God wants to speak to all of us about from this vision.
This morning my heart grieves for those who have lost family and friends in the ongoing violence in Gaza. Having worked in refugee camps, I know the horrors that those whose lives are touched by war, face. This is not a question of who is right and who is wrong. I believe that none of us have the right to decide that another person’s life should be cut short. I believe God grieves when those who are made in the image of God kill and maim each other. God is a God of peace not of war. This type of death and violence is a distortion of God’s intention for all persons.
Out of my grief this morning I wrote this prayer which I hope you will pray with me:
God we enter into your tears today.
We weep with you for innocent lives lost.
Our hearts groan with grief for life distorted by death.
We do not know how to pray,
But your Spirit groans within us,
With sighs too deep for words.
When our needs burden us,
And the pain of our world overwhelms,
Your Spirit is here.
It breathes in all people,
In all places.
Lord may it breathe today
Peace in the midst of war,
Comfort in the midst of horror,
Life in the midst of death.
Amen.
On Sunday at church I had a vision. No I don’t think I am going off the deep end but I do believe that God touched me in a special way. As the rector lifted the empty cup, a handblown clear glass chalice, before filling it with wine for communion it caught the light and sparkled in the glow. I felt the love of God sweep over me.
I shaped you as an empty cup, have filled you with living water and am transforming it into wine.
It was a profound experience that I carry with me as I go through the week. It is the centre of my reflections each morning as I do not believe that this was meant to be a momentary experience but an enduring learning opportunity. You may like to spend time on this guided meditation God led me through as a result.
This morning I searched for scriptures that connected to the three images in these words. The first imagery that came to mind was from Isaiah 64:8 (The Voice)
Still, Eternal One, You are our Father.
We are just clay, and You are the potter.
We are the product of Your creative action, shaped and formed into something of worth.
Even the empty vessels that we are are shaped by God’s creative action, not for destruction but into something of worth. Read through this scripture in several translation and allow God to speak to you of your worth as a vessel of the living God.
The second scripture that came to mind is John 4:10 (New Living Translation)
Jesus replied, “If you only knew the gift God has for you and who you are speaking to, you would ask me, and I would give you living water.”
God’s desire is to fill all of us with living water, all we need to do is ask.
The third scripture that I meditated on was John 2:1-10, the wedding at Cana (New Living Translation):
The next day there was a wedding celebration in the village of Cana in Galilee. Jesus’ mother was there, and Jesus and his disciples were also invited to the celebration. The wine supply ran out during the festivities, so Jesus’ mother told him, “They have no more wine.”
“Dear woman, that’s not our problem,” Jesus replied. “My time has not yet come.”
But his mother told the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”
Standing nearby were six stone water jars, used for Jewish ceremonial washing. Each could hold twenty to thirty gallons. Jesus told the servants, “Fill the jars with water.” When the jars had been filled, he said, “Now dip some out, and take it to the master of ceremonies.” So the servants followed his instructions.
When the master of ceremonies tasted the water that was now wine, not knowing where it had come from (though, of course, the servants knew), he called the bridegroom over. “A host always serves the best wine first,” he said. “Then, when everyone has had a lot to drink, he brings out the less expensive wine. But you have kept the best until now!”
Jesus kept the best till last. The wonder of the transformation Jesus brings about in our lives is that, like a good wine, is that it continues to improve with age. And the banquet at the end of time will bring out the best wine in all of us.
But the thing about wine is that it must be shared to be appreciated. We must give it to others to drink for it to be fully enjoyed.
So much to think about here. So much that God is still saying to me. Would love to hear what God might say to you through this too.
Well it has happened. We have just launched our first kickstarter campaign. We are starting a new venture into E-courses and ask you to help us launch this. We think that this is part of the exciting future of Mustard Seed Associates, and I mean E-Courses, rather than a single e-course. We’re starting with Re-Imagining How We Pray this fall, based on the popular book Return to Our Senses, which has brought many of you to this blog, but that’s just the beginning. Seminars and workshops reach 10, 20 or 50 people in one place at one time, E-courses can literally reach thousands from England to Australia. People can work at their own pace, take time to reflect and renew. This we believe can strengthen peoples’ faith and transform their prayer life.
We want to bring the type of collaborative exploration that we do here on the Godspace blog to a much wider community of Mustard Seed Associates – and this is how you can help us do that.
These E-courses are an an exciting new way to offer everything MSA is about – inspiring, connecting, creating – unleashing the creative potential of ordinary people to make a difference in our communities and our world, and the place to start is, we believe with spiritual formation. So please consider giving us a kickstart and joining this exciting campaign so that we can help people around the world reimagine how we pray.
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