Photo by Nick Lipinski
God as this new year dawns,
May we take time to see the newness you are giving birth to.
May we not be blinded by the darkness that consumes our world.
Or consumed by the fear that paralyzes our actions.
May we remember,
Out of winter’s darkness you bring forth light,
Out of winter’s death you give birth to new life.
From New Year’s Prayer
This prayer reflects much of the hope and despair we felt at the end of last year. The hope and promise of Christ’s return was tainted by the horror of Sandy Hook and the uncertainty of the world economy. As we look to the future however, we find hope and promise in the new things God is giving birth to. We look forward, not just to personal change, but to a future in which society is transformed and healing finally comes for the broken, justice for the poor, peace for the nations and restoration to creation
In a volatility and uncertainty world we too need to allow the spirit of God to stir our imaginations and encourage the newness of God to emerge. We need fresh ways to strengthen our faith and equip us to be God’s compassionate response in our communities and around the globe.
Return to Our Senses in Lent
Newness must begin with our faith Our volatile world calls for new forms of prayer and spiritual disciplines that weave intimacy with God into every aspect of life encouraging us to reach out with compassion and love. Lent which begins February 13th, is a season to reflect and refocus our faith. It is a time to ask ourselves: How do I need to change to be a more effective follower of Christ in the future? As was mentioned yesterday, this will be the focus of our Lenten disciplines this year and we hope that you will join us.
- We have just completed a study guide for Return to Our Senses: Reimagining How We Pray and invite you to participate in a Lenten study that will draw you closer to God and equip you to respond in compassion and love to God’s needy world. The guide can be downloaded free and Return to Our Senses will be available at a special discounted price to facilitate its use.
- This will also be the theme for the Godspace Lenten series. The daily reflections and activities throughout the season will complement the resources in Return to Our Senses. We hope you will accept the challenge and use them to develop new disciplines that equip you to respond to God’s needy world. Or perhaps you would like to join the Godspace writing community and contribute your own approaches to innovative, experiential prayer. Our insights can inspire each other to new levels of commitment.
- February 16th I will facilitate a Lenten retreat at the Mustard Seed House here in Seattle. We invite you to join us in a time of reflection and refocusing. Allow new forms of prayer to be woven into your life so that you can become all that God intends you to be.
Igniting the Divine Spark
The second place newness needs to emerge is in the unleashing of our creativity. Our God is a god of unlimited imagination and has placed the divine spark of that creativity within each of us. To provide for ourselves and continue to be generous to those at the margins we need new economic initiatives. Cindy Todd continues to inspire us with the creative business model on which Snohomish Soap is founded. And it is not just us who are inspired. She was featured this last month in Puget Sound Co-operative’s news, and at the end of the month her model will be touted in a TED talk as one of the new and innovative business models for the future.
Throughout February and March Cindy and others will post on the MSA blog about creative business models and the ways that God ignited the divine sparks that gave rise to these. March 16th this will culminate in a workshop Cindy will facilitate at the Mustard Seed House entitled Igniting the Divine Spark. So save the date. This will be an exciting and instructive event.
Unleashing our Imaginations
It is not just in economic provision that God wants to unleash creativity. My husband Tom is busily engaged in research for a new book on creativity and imagination, exploring ways to move from Biblical vision to new design for church, ministry, housing, simplification and sustainable living. He is excited about how God is stirring the imagination and creativity of ordinary people to advance God’s purposes and engages the challenges or our turbulent world.
God is doing something new in our midst and we ask you to help us connect to those at the creative edge. If you know of imaginative business models, ministries, churches or approaches to housing please let Tom know. These will continue to fuel his weekly blog posts so check the MSA blog regularly for new insights.
Teaching in Australia
For our Australian friends who would like to explore these themes in more detail, please consider joining us in Adelaide in June. Tom and I will be teaching an intensive: Reimagining Faith for Turbulent Times at Tabor College in Adelaide Australia in June 2013. Still room & time to sign up. We would love to have some of our friends join us.
Not All That Emerges is New.
Please continue to pray for the launch of Cascadia/CCSP in September this year and let your friends know. It is time for students to sign up and we need your help in getting the word out.
Join MSA Board member Mary De Jong:
For a retreat at the Whidbey Institute in Chinook March 8-10.
For a pilgrimage to Iona off the west coast of Scotland, May 12-20.
Dates you might be interested in:
Return to Our Senses in Lent – Retreat at the Mustard Seed House February 16th
Igniting the Divine Spark – workshop with Cindy Todd at the Mustard Seed House March 16th.
- I will conduct workshops at Missio Alliance Conference in Alexandria VA 10 -13 April 2013.
- Our entire MSA team will probably be at Inhabit conference – Seattle WA April 19, 20
- •Save the date for Spirituality of Gardening at the Mustard Seed House: May 18th
We appreciate your prayers and support as we move into the newness that is emerging.
Return to Our Senses
What are the experiences of everyday life that make you feel close to God or that make you want to respond to our broken world with compassion and love? For most of us it is not pipe organs, pulpits and churches. It is simple things like breathing, drinking a glass of water, running, or taking a photo. Our world is alive with the presence of God, beckoning to us in every moment and through every encounter. We just need help to recognize this.
Lent is a time to reflect on our faith and the practices that sustain it and I want to challenge all of us to consider the experiential practices we can incorporate during the season to increase intimacy with God and concern for God’s world. Is it gardening or painting pictures? Is walking the labyrinth or providing hospitality for those at the margins? Is it participating in something like the $2 challenge or using public transport rather than driving the car? How does this connect you to God and what are you doing to nurture this practice?
Please consider contributing a post about practices you plan to use during Lent and beyond that transform your everyday activities and encounters into prayer and spiritual practices. Posts should be no more than 800 words long and accompanied by a short bio and photos you wish to include. (Please don’t forget to include credits for photos.)
The emphasis for this series comes from my new book Return to Our Senses: Reimagining How We Pray which was written out of my own hunger for experiential forms of prayer that open my eyes and ears and in fact all my senses to new ways to interact with God in every moment. We have just published a study guide that many of our friends and associates plan to use during Lent. I hope that the blog series will provide additional resources for those who want to integrate their faith and their everyday life.
So get ready to join us for Lent.
- Join us for a time of retreat of reflection and refocusing. Establish new spiritual disciplines for the season: March 1st 2014 at the Mustard Seed House.
- Join us in the study of Return to Our Senses and challenge your friends to participate too. The study guide can be downloaded free from the MSA website.
- Share with us the experiential prayer practices you plan to incorporate in your life during this season
- Contribute a post to the series Return to Our Senses in Lent.
I posted this on the Light for the Journey Facebook page this morning and thought that some of you might appreciate it too.
Gardening together
On Wednesday I started teaching a class at St Andrew’s Episcopal Church here in Seattle on Spirituality and Gardening. I always learn so much from what others share. This time some of our discussion revolved around how overwhelming getting underway in the garden can be. I know the feeling. I used to try to do it all myself and as I got busier (partly because of teaching these seminars) I found that both the garden and my spiritual wellbeing suffered.
I don’t think gardening is meant to be done alone. We all know the saying It takes a village to raise a child. well I think we should create another saying: It takes a community to run a garden.
On Saturday we will hold our first garden day at the Mustard Seed House and so I have been busy recruiting helpers. As someone commented to me this last week: It is becoming a mini community garden. We want to make sure this year that there is plenty to share not just amongst the garden helpers but also to the broader community. Its a great way to increase our gardening expertise and get a few home grown vegetables for those who do not have their own garden. This will be mainly a planning time & getting ready to plant (inside not out). If you would like to join the team let me know.
This is one way to grow food that can be very effective in an urban area. It is a win win situation – some of us have more room than we can effectively garden, others don’t have any room at all. Some of us have gardened for years, others are novices. We can all learn from each other and have some great fellowship in the process. There are a number of more formal programs like this city slicker farms that teach people to garden in their own yards. Sharing backyards is an organization that helps connect people who want to garden with places to do it. And here is a great article that lists a number of yard sharing organizations
To me, a less inviting but also good option is to offer your backyard for someone else to garden, and get a small share of the produce. (called lazy locavores by some)
Another possibility is to form a garden co-op. Gardening together is always more fun. Get a group of gardeners together, plan what will grow best in each of your gardens and work out a schedule so that you spend time together in each of the gardens involved. This is a little different from a community garden, a term which I think can be a misnomer because people often have their own patches and do very little together.
To live sustainably into the future we need to learn to co-operate and to form community. I know there are a lot of other ways to garden together and would love to hear your suggestions.
Last week I posted about what I discovered recently regarding the ownership of many of my favourite seed companies. This morning Bill Guerrant from White Flint Farm sent me a link to this very helpful article at Northwest Edible Life which I decided to post as a follow up. All is not how it seems on the surface and we often need to keep our minds open and continue researching to help us have a realistic perspective. I must say this is a huge relief to me because I love Territorial Seeds not just because it is local to the Pacific NW but because its catalogue also contains great planting advice on a broad array of vegetables.
People are under the impression that Territorial Seeds and other beloved seedhouses are owned by or otherwise eager to peddle Monsanto seed onto unsuspecting home gardeners. While this story line has found a lot of play on various websites, it’s inaccurate and, I believe, does a lot of harm to very ethical seed houses who are doing everything they can to provide the best product to their customers while making business decisions that allow them to stay in business. Read the entire article.
Bald eagle, Tsawwassen B.C.
A few days ago I walked along the beach in Tsawwassen B.C with my friend in Kim Balke. The breathtaking beauty of the mountains, the salty freshness of wind and the barrenness of the trees were all inspiring. In one tree sat 5 bald eagles, majestically surveying the morning scene. Not wanting to disturb the serenity of our walk, I decided to photograph them on the way back.
However as we headed back towards the car, the barren tree in which the eagles perched looked empty. I immediately started making fresh plans to return for a photo shoot. As we moved closer something remarkable happened however – suddenly the eagles came into view. How they had hidden from view in that barren tree I don’t know, but they had.
How often I wondered do I make new plans because I can’t see what I hope for? How often do I mess up and get ahead of what God is doing because I think I understand? A little like Abraham trying to get a son and not seeing how God could possibly accomplish it. How often is my vision limited because I have not walked far enough along God’s path to see what is there? Impatience, limited understanding, lack of faith, they all distort my perspective and make it hard for me to see life from God’s viewpoint. How often do we all mess up what God is wanting to accomplish in our lives because we don’t trust that God is able to accomplish all that is promised?
Hebrews 11:1 reminds us: Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see. So lets all keep walking today along the path that God spreads out before us. Let’s hold onto God’s promises believing that in the right time and in the right place God’s perspective will burst in upon us and enable us to see.
I have been thinking a lot over the last few days about ways I should be engaged in helping to alleviate the world’s suffering in pain. I always feel so inadequate in this area and my heart aches for those who live in poverty. Wrote this prayer earlier in the week
God pierce our hearts with your love,
Break them open into greater capacity,
Break them open ,
That we might hold more of the world’s suffering and joy,
That we might share more of the world’s despair and hope.
Lord break our hearts,
As we stand in the gap between what is and what could be,
Break our hearts open to a largeness that holds the possibility of a better future for all the world’s people.
and just came across this TED talk (have not had time to listen yet but I thought some of you might be interested.
http://www.ted.com/playlists/67/the_quest_to_end_poverty.html
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