Grace Traces

This Advent season, I have been focusing on how to orient my life toward hope, peace, love, and joy.  Like the four directions on a compass (north, south, east, and west), these four words can guide our lives not only to the stable where the One who has eternity dancing in his eyes lay away in a manger, these words can guide our lives everyday.  There have been two thoughts I keep returning to with this image.  First is that there is a difference between a compass and a GPS.  My GPS tells me exactly where to go and how to get there.  It has a set path it wants me to take (sometimes for very good reasons because of traffic!)  The other day, I varied the path my GPS was guiding me.  I kept going on one road I knew would also get me to my destination.  The GPS tried three times to get me to take a U-Turn...I thought Siri sounded a bit annoyed each time I ignored and kept going my way.  Now, I love my GPS, it has gotten me back on my path more times that I can count.  But, sometimes

While I truly love the mystery of Christmas and Easter, I find meaning for the church in Pentecost, I enjoy the seasons of preparation in Advent and Lent, by about May every year, we have been through the major Church Event...especially when you consider that Christmas in December is really in a NEW CHURCH CALENDAR year (even as it is the dwindling days of our usual way of telling time).  This means that for well over half the year, six months, we are in what the church calendar calls, "ordinary".  This means God does God's usual work in the midst of the mundane, ordinary, every day.  While we love the music of Christmas and the trumpets of Easter; while I enjoy the preparation of Advent and Lent, the church seasons proclaim that most of the time God shows up not in special Sundays, but normal, every day life.  That is a profound theological statement that is preached to us by the liturgical, church seasons.  We need to be reminded of that daily.  Of course, usually th

So far, we have waited/anticipated/prepared for Christ's birth in Advent and Christmas.  We celebrated God's in-breaking and incarnation at Christmas.  We observed Epiphany, the Wise One's bringing gifts and being saturated in the light of God's presence.  We look at the time in-between Epiphany and Lent as another moment God moves in our midst.  We explored Ash Wednesday, Lent, Holy Week, and Easter as diving deep into God's promise to meet us, even in moments of desertion and betrayal and death.  We looked at the day after, how it takes time for the promise of resurrection to take hold.  There are actually fifty days after Easter.  For a time LONGER than Lent we try to find ways for the empty tomb to take hold fully of our lives.  And then, we arrive at Pentecost, fifty days after Easter.  Usually Pentecost is seen as the birthday of the church.  The story is that as the disciples met in the upper room day after day trying to wrap their minds, hearts, souls,