The Circle of Self

 

As we continue to add words, symbols, images, and ideas to our circles of “God”, “others” and “self”, I want to focus on the circle labeled, “self” ~ your beautifully beloved and sometimes less than brilliant self ~ today.  Here are some great prompts by Gretchen Rubin:

 

What are some favorite things about yourself ~ big and small?

Do you have a favorite movie or TV show that you watch over and over?  If so, why do you enjoy it so much?

If you could add one more room to your house, what would you use it for?

If you could take a class on any subject for free, what class would you take?  Why?

What are two or three activities taking up your time that are particularly interesting or useful? 

Who have been the five most important people in your life?  Are they still alive or in God’s embrace?

 

I pray these questions awaken a few new insights into the beautiful mystery that is your one wild and precious life.  Amen.

Circles of Love

 

Yesterday, I invited you to immerse yourself in pondering how God’s love is showing up in your life or maybe where God feels a bit distant or disconnected.  How is love flowing from others or maybe you feel a drought/deficit in love for/from the people closest to you.  How are you loving/caring and receiving love for yourself?  Those questions, Jesus said, are at the center of faith.  We can spend our whole life and never exhaust or explore all that is evoked in this, because every day adds new experiences and fresh expressions (both good and not so good).  So today, I offer you a blessing from Jan Richardson:

 

Blessing That Meets You in Love

It is true that every blessing begins with love,
that whatever else it might say,
love is always precisely its point.

But it should be noted that this blessing has come today
especially to tell you it is crazy about you.
That it has been in love with you forever.
That it has never not wanted to see your face,
to go through this world in your company.

This blessing thought it was high time it told you so,
just to make sure you know.

If it has been shy in saying this,
it has not been for any lack of wanting to.
It’s just that this blessing knows the risk of offering itself
in a way that will so alter you—

not because it thinks you could stand some improving,
but because this is simply where loving leads.

This blessing knows how love undoes us, unhinges us, unhides us.

It knows how loving can sometimes feel like dying.

But today this blessing has come to tell you the secret
that sends it to your door: that it gives itself only to those willing to come alive;
that it vows itself only to those ready to be born anew.

 

Read, re-read these words.  Return to your circles to see what new expressions you might add to God, others, and yourself because of the blessing above.  May you live this blessing soaked and saturated in love this day.  Amen.

Circles of Life

 

How is your New Year going?  Seriously?  Is 2025 off to a fantastic, fabulous, fun-filled start?  Or are you already frustrated or fuming or wondering why you thought you could do Jazzercise at 5:30 a.m. every morning and eat that bran cereal that honestly tastes like cardboard.  No, strike that, you’d rather eat cardboard.  How are you and God doing so far this year?  This first full week, I want to invite you to ponder prayerfully your connections to God, family/friends, and self. 

 

I invite you to get out a piece of paper and draw three circles ~ label one circle, “God”, and another “others” and the third, “self”.  Then, start writing or drawing in those circles.  What emoji would you give your relationship with God right now?  What words have you been saying to yourself recently, are you being kind/gentle/forgiving of your mistakes and miscues or is your inner critic constantly chattering with unwelcome color commentary about all the places you could have/should have done better?  How about others?  Now, in this circle you could use some definition and discretion.  With 8 billion people on the earth, that is a lot of others.  Not to mention trees and raccoons and soil that has billions more species right beneath your feet ~ so be careful where you step!  I suggest in the “other” circle start small ~ family and close friends.  Don’t try to include everyone you interact with, especially that person who gloats when she wins at bridge with humble brags every time!  Start with those you see each day and each week.

 

This invitation takes time.  You may spend five minutes now and a few more moments after lunch or before dinner and a few more minutes before you lay your head down to sleep. 

 

Why are we doing this?  Great question because Jesus said, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence.’ This is the most important, the first on any list. But there is a second to set alongside it: ‘Love others as well as you love yourself.’.  Love is not abstract or obtuse, love is embodied in you, through you, to you and around you.  God is love ~ to infuse and inspire your life.  This love doesn’t reside on a cul-de-sac to get stuck in your soul but continues to flow in life-giving and life-shaping ways.  Slow down today, this first full week of 2025, to let your passion, prayer, and intellect ponder where love is at with God, others, and yourself.  Amen.

When the Christmas-y Spirit starts to fade

 

God of new days and New Years, that can feel suspiciously like old years.  The past pains often refuse to stay put on December 31 when we hang a new calendar.  We know that peaceful words stop falling from our tongues when we put away the tree.  Our human efforts at love in the air dissipates and disappears quickly when our online music takes down the Christmas music station.  Help us, O God, for our good intentions and resolutions and resolve only take us so far.  Help us, O God, to find the courage and conviction to be light in places where there is too much anger and hate.  Stir within us grace when our inner-defense lawyer wants to argue and prove a point to that person who is pushing all our buttons.  Heal us for all that pulls us away (often in too many directions) from the truths that You are with us and for us ~ and that “us” includes all that was, is and will ever be.  Like images from the universe that continue to evolve and expand, we can’t wrap our minds around Your grace and love and justice and peace.  Our humanness, which is to say our limitedness, stumbles and we don’t like to look foolish God.  So help us this day and every day this year.  Meet us in the messy mangers of life, where unlike Jesus, there is crying we make away in our manger of life.  Meet us amid the scratchy straw, the angels singing, the fleeting moments of love, and the beauty of every day that You have made.  Honestly, openly, willingly, this is HOW we will make it through this day and year.  Amen. And Amen.  

Still Christmas

 

As we celebrate the New Year, in the church we are still in the season of Christmas.  We are still harking with the angels, hasting with the shepherds, lowing with the cattle, and traversing a-faring with the Wise Ones.  I know all the decorations are on clearance at the store, if not completely gone to make way for Valentine’s Day.  I know the world is now pushing forward forgetting the smell of the dusty, drafty, dirty barn.  But as people of faith, we keep singing and showing up and sharing the good news of great joy for all the people.  Too often we forget that in John 3, Jesus says, “For God so loves the world!”  Not just the humans you like, but all people and all creatures (great and small) and the world.  So may these words bless you and guide you ~ inspire and infuse you and me and we in the coming days.  From Howard Thurman, ‘When the Song of the Angels is Stilled’

 

When the carols have been stilled,

When the star-topped tree is taken down,

When family and friends are gone home,

When we are back to our schedules

The work of Christmas begins:

   To welcome the refugee,

   To heal a broken planet,

   To feed the hungry,

   To build bridges of trust, not walls of fear,

   To share our gifts,

   To seek justice and peace for all people,

   To bring Christ’s light to the world.

Prayers for a New Year

 

Happy New Year!!  This week I am inviting you to listen to your life ~ your heart, soul, mind, body, all that is within you and around you.  To slow down and breathe today.  You don’t have to have the next 365 days all plotted and planned.  You don’t need an alphabetized resolution list that you will grind your way through with grit.  Your salvation (which is to say your wholeness and integration and faithfulness) is not based on what you do.  God’s love (which is to say the healing and hope ~ our very ground of being) is unconditional and unceasing.  God’s love doesn’t give grades or badges to put on your heavenly sash.  Sorry, no jewels for your heavenly crown…no extra credit for carrying the cross…no earning your way.  Your way is paved with grace upon heaping helping of grace.  But what happens when we don’t feel that way?  What happens when our inner critic goes into hyperdrive or says the thing we did not want to say out loud…in public…for everyone (and God) to hear?  What then?  We breathe.  We ask for forgiveness.  We lean into everlasting arms of healing and hope and love from God.  We return again and again and again to who we are (God’s child) and whose we are (God’s beloved) to live those truths again.  May that bless you each day in 2025.  And here is another blessing for you.

 

Entering the New Year

God of all time, help us enter the New Year quietly,

thoughtful of who we are to ourselves and to others,

mindful that our steps make an impact and our words carry power.

May we walk gently.

May we speak only after we have listened well.

Creator of all life, help us enter the New Year reverently, aware that you have endowed every creature and plant, every person and habitat with beauty and purpose.

May we regard the world with tenderness.

May we honor rather than destroy.

Lover of all souls, help us enter the New Year joyfully, willing to laugh and dance and dream,

remembering our many gifts with thanks and looking forward to blessings yet to come.

May we welcome your lavish love. May we cast off the small, vindictive god our fears have made. May the grace and peace of Christ bless us now and in the days ahead.

- Vinita Hampton Wright 

 

Blessed are you, my friends, especially when/where there is no evidence to prove that.  Amen.

Thresholds

 

Happy New Years Eve!!  Insert confetti flying here.  My soul returns to the great line from O Little Town of Bethlehem, “The hopes and fears of the all the years are met in thee tonight.”  Hopes for 2025.  Fears for 2025.  Certainties and conflicts and confusion and exhaustion and elation and…and…and that which we cannot even name because it sits so far back in the cobwebbed corners of our hearts and souls we don’t even see or hear it.  So here is another blessing for the New Year from Jan Richardson:

 

Blessing the Threshold

This blessing has been waiting for you for a long time.

While you have been making your way here,

this blessing has been gathering itself, making ready, biding its time, praying.

This blessing has been polishing the door, oiling the hinges, sweeping the steps, lighting candles in the windows.

This blessing has been setting the table as it hums a tune from an old song it knows, something about a spiraling road and bread and grace.

All this time it has kept an eye on the horizon,

watching,

keeping vigil,

hardly aware of how it was leaning itself in your direction.

And now that you are here, this blessing can hardly believe its good fortune

that you have finally arrived, that it can drop everything at last to fling its arms wide to you, crying

welcome,

welcome,

welcome!!

 

May the blessing of God’s belovedness enfold and hold you this day and as we enter a New Year at midnight tonight.  Amen.