Week Four, Day Two Joy

I invite you into the prayer practice of Visio Divina this day.

Breathe in to the count of three...exhale to the count of six or seven.

Breathe in the One who scurries around our lives sharing and scattering the sacred in joyful ways...exhale our constantly controlling, clinging, and white-knuckled ways we often live life.

Breathe in hope...breathe out despair.

Breathe in peace and wholeness so that you can feel the breath in every fiber of your being...breathe out stress that causes you to clinch your jaw.

Breathe in love…breath out loneliness and a sense that you must live life all alone.

Breathe in joy of this moment...breathe out the pain of the past or uncertainty about tomorrow.

Breathe and be.

Look at the image and let your eyes stay with the very first thing that you see. Keep your attention on that one part of the image that first catches your eye. Try to keep your eyes from wandering to other parts of the picture. There is a story to this photo, that I will share. But before I do, I invite you to come up with your own story.  I invite you to be creative about why I am sharing this picture.

Consider the following questions:

What emotions does this image evoke in you?

What does the image stir up in you, bring forth in you?

Does this image lead you into an attitude of prayer? If so, let these prayers take form in you. Write them down if you desire.

Reflection

I know that it is a squirrel.  Perhaps you are thinking that I have clearly run out of interesting photos.  Perhaps you are thinking that it was too ambitious to try to write forty devotionals pages and I am scraping the bottom of the barrel.  Perhaps the emotion you named during your prayerful pondering just a few moments ago was perplexing puzzlement.

This is the squirrel story I promised you a few weeks ago.  We had just finished hiking Capilano Suspension Bridge park.  It was a place of profound beauty.  It had been a good afternoon.  And before I saw the “Hope Street” sign from week one, we met the unnamed squirrel above.  We had just sat down for ice cream and to rest, when this squirrel started scurrying all around us.  She was fearless.  Maybe some child had dropped his cone and this squirrel was hyped-up on sugar.  Maybe this squirrel had found a discarded 5-hour energy drink that still had a few drops of liquid left inside.  But this squirrel was at our feet, hoping on tables, causing children to chase after her, and bringing forth smiles and laughter.

I think about when we take our dog out for a walk, she lurches for every squirrel she sees like she wants to play.  Perhaps, in the moment captured and shared above, my dog and I are not so dissimilar.  We both delight in the playfulness of creation.

Cultivating joy is about framing and focusing on the both/and parts of our lives.  It is about trying to make lemonade out of the lemons we have been gifted in life, and such a way of being doesn't come naturally and normal to us.  Such a way of living isn't something we have been schooled in or have much practice in doing or even encouraged by others.

But part of what I pray is at work within you throughout these last few weeks of gazing at photos has been to see one single second captured in time for the profound richness that is drenching that moment.  Of course, we cannot live our life in such slow motion where we are always pausing every single second.  The questions of what you are seeing and why are you seeing have been offered to you as a way to give you insights into you.  If you have kept a journal of the what and why you are seeing, I invite you today to re-read some of your words from the past weeks.

I would also love to hear the story you came up with regarding Ms. Squirrel above.

Cultivating joy offers us the chance to laugh at a silliness of the sacred stirring.  Cultivating joy invites us to tell stories that bring smiles to our face.  Cultivating joy is another way of saying there are traces of God's grace saturating and soaking every second of this day.

Blessings~~