REFLECTIONS ON FAITH & ART

Dear Father, Please comfort us in our loss.  Whether it be a loss of life or a loss of security, of sureness about the future - ours and others.  Please hold our hearts in Your hands.  Please comfort us with the glory of the universe, the beauty that exists around us in nature and in other people you've put in our paths. Please help us to be able to reconcile our current situations with the fact that we know and believe You to be good.  All the time.  And let us rest our fears, our doubts and our anger and sadness in that one basic truth. We honor you.  We thank you, cry to you, yell at you, ask you why.  And we love you. Amen.

Rusty and I were talking about how lately we've heard a little more talk than usual about how people feel they deserve more or deserve better.   The funny thing is that if we were really given what we deserve, it wouldn't be pretty.  Thanfully ( so thankful) we don't get what we deserve.  We get grace.  We get love and forgiveness. In thinking more about this friend dealing with illness, I get a knot in my stomach.  Because I know that God doesn't owe us anything.  Our version of "good" or an answer to prayer would be sudden and total healing and a long life here on this earth.  But God exists in a bigger reality where the whole picture is available whereas we're only seeing the view from where we are at any given time and place.  That's scary!  It's sobering to say one minute, "God is good.  All the time."  And to really, honestly believe it.  Then the next minute a loved one dies or someone is diagnosed with a disease that will a

I'm going to be honest and say first that I have no idea what I'm going to say. There. That makes me feel better, eh? During Easter weekend we had very dear friends staying with us. The oldest of the Helwig children had borrowed A Wrinkle in Time the month before. He came back very much excited and wanted to know if there were more books by that author (Madleine L'Engle.) Anyone who knows me will not be surprised to hear that I was happy... moved... to be able to tell him that no only were there more books by the same author but that she wrote three more in that series involving Meg and Charles Wallace. These books, along with C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy and some of his others that make me excited and hopeful for our kids to see the kingdom in the everyday. Here's the weirdness (and bear with me, I promise I have a point.) I started reading the Harry Potter books this past week. I'm a very fast reader. It's a blessing a curse, trust me. I'

Heavenly Father, giver of life and health: Comfort and relieve your sick servant, and give your power of healing to those who minister to her needs, that she may be strengthened in her weakness and have confidence in Your loving care; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen. Sometimes when I don't know what to pray I find comfort and inspiration in the prayers of those who've walked before me.  This is a prayer for the sick from The Book of Common Prayer (Episcopal Church BCP, 1979.) And these words are every bit as relevant to this situation as any I might speak on my own. My offer to pray for a friend is always made honestly.  And I do pray.  If I doubt I'll remember, I don't offer.  Because prayer is too powerful a thing to say you'll do without following through on it.  But sometimes the situation needing prayer is so big or so personal or so whatever that it feels like it needs something constant.  Something that is ongoing rather than something that is

"The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world: but joy, pleasure and merriment, He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstacy. It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacle to our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with our friends, a bath, or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home." ~ C.S. Lewis in The Problem with Pain When I first read this passage from The Problem of Pain I had one of those moments where I completely understood what Lewis meant by "pleasant inns." Just last weekend Rusty and I were trying to explain to friends here about friends back in Maryland. We eventually came to the conclusion that our friend