Category: solace

Swallowed with All Hope

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Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days.
Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires
with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals.
Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices.
Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way
for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review
each of your life’s ten million choices. Endure moments
of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you.
Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound
of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart.
Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope,
where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all
the things you did and could have done. Remember
treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes
pointing again and again down, down into the black depths.
~ Dan Albergotti “Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale” from The Boatloads

“In my distress I called to the Lord,
    and he answered me.
From deep in the realm of the dead I called for help,
    and you listened to my cry.
You hurled me into the depths,
    into the very heart of the seas,
    and the currents swirled about me;
all your waves and breakers
    swept over me.
 I said, ‘I have been banished
    from your sight;
yet I will look again
    toward your holy temple.’
The engulfing waters threatened me,[b]
    the deep surrounded me;
    seaweed was wrapped around my head.
To the roots of the mountains I sank down;
    the earth beneath barred me in forever.
But you, Lord my God,
    brought my life up from the pit.

“When my life was ebbing away,
    I remembered you, Lord,
and my prayer rose to you,
    to your holy temple.

“Those who cling to worthless idols
    turn away from God’s love for them.

 But I, with shouts of grateful praise,
    will sacrifice to you.
What I have vowed I will make good.
    I will say, ‘Salvation comes from the Lord.“

~from Jonah 2

Jonsh Leaving the Whale by Jan Brueghel the Elder

“It is a childish work—the whale has the head of a dog
and Jonah looks suspiciously fresh.”
                                                       —www.artbible.info

In candied red, the white-bearded
prophet emerges hands still clasped in prayer,
clean, really clean, maybe too clean, first-day-
of-school clean, baptism clean.  It is a childish
painting, perhaps, the punished coming up
for air after a three-day, divine timeout,
his begging and pleading inside this flesh
box, sincere or not, but he’s out, old and fresh
in a world around him, Brueghel is sure
to make clear, swirling blue-black and solid
brown, the earth’s bruising, perhaps a wish
of healing yellow in the distance, a light
faded behind the eye’s focus. The dogfish
eyes big and rolling back mouth open

like the cave like the tomb like the brown creek
carp we refuse to touch hate to catch squishy
and formless but counted nonetheless.  But
he will dirty himself again after Nineveh
under the vine cussing at God telling
God His own business, and he will forget
the welcoming red the fresh fruit color
of that cloak—the thin (or thinning) clearing
in the background beyond sea and storm,
even the mouth as exit as release.
He will soon forget to consider how
suspicious it is for a man like him
sitting in death’s darkness for three days
to come out so clean so bright so forgiven.
~Jacob Stratman “a poem for my sons when they yell at God” from Christian Century

As I grumble about what I think is wrong with the world, I fail to understand that God has heard much grumbling from His children before. And much of what is wrong with the world is also wrong with me.

It must get tiresome, listening to it.

Perhaps that is why Jonah, who wanted to die rather than deal with the sinful city he had been sent to redeem, was given a little respite for three days to think things over until he understood what his role was.

By counting all those ribs inside the whale, he was thinking about all the things he had done wrong and all the things he should have done, but didn’t.

Whenever I stand in a structure with powerful beams towering over and surrounding me, I too feel swallowed whole. I am no more than a tiny speck within a vast organism.

Nevertheless, small as I am, I still matter to God. I am being prepared to be spit out, to do what I’m supposed to do, and not be concerned nearly as much with my disgruntlement with the rest of the world as with my disgruntlement with myself.

Swallowed whole by hope. Spit out forgiven.

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The Lines Went Flat…

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First of all, we’ve been using the wrong word all these years. It means without rhythm. The only arrhythmia is asystole, I tell my students. That’s the flat line accompanied by the clang of alarms in all the television dramas. There’s not much you can do about it; the patient is dead and usually stays dead. The correct word to describe all the ways a heart can dance and die is dysrhythmia, which means a disordered rhythm. There’s the soldiered march of ventricular tachycardia or the pirouette twirl of Torsades. Ventricular fibrillation simply quivers on the monitor. When these rhythms occur, the patient is pulseless and sometimes you give magnesium, usually shock, and always pump their chest to the beat of whatever song lives in your head. Once I was speaking with a man who stopped in the middle of a word, and I watched the rhythm on the monitor change. When I didn’t feel a pulse, I started CPR, and then we placed the paddles on his chest and shouted, Clear, just like in the movies. And it worked. He opened his eyes and looked at me and said, I don’t feel good. And I said, It’s okay, I’m going to get you better and smoothed the fair from his forehead, but then the alarms blared and the V tach returned, and we did it all over again—the drugs and compressions and shocks, and his eyes opened one more time and he mouthed I’m scared around the tube I’d placed in his throat, and I said, I’m here with you. But that was the last time he said anything. We didn’t stop for thirty minutes or more. He’d waved to his family when the medics loaded him into the ambulance with just a little chest pain, so they were shocked when I entered the small consult room to tell them he had died. His teenage son collapsed and landed on his knees and punched the ground and said, But we were fighting, and I think the last thing I said was I hate you.

All I’m trying to say is that it’s really important to use the right words.
~Rachel Mallalieu “A Brief History of Arrhythmia” from the journal PEMBROKE MAGAZINE

If you break
break going out not in.
How you live your life I don’t care
but I’ll sell my arms for you,
hold your secrets for ever.

If I speak of death
which you fear now, greatly,
it is without answers,
except that each
one we know is
in our blood.
Don’t recall graves.
Memory is permanent.
~Michael Ondaatje from “To a Sad Daughter”

I was still a kid
interning at State
he reminisces late in the meal—
It was a young red-headed woman
looked like my sister
when the lines went flat
I fell apart
shook
like a car with a broken axle
Went to the head surgeon
a fatherly man
Boy, he said, you got to fill a graveyard
before you know this business
and you just did row one, plot one.
~Alicia Suskin Ostriker, “The Surgeon” from The Book of Seventy

Like many other medical professionals who have worked in the trenches of frontline healthcare, I too am fascinated by the emergency room streaming drama “The Pitt.”

At first, I couldn’t watch without feeling I too should be working at the bedside alongside the ER team, trying my best to do the task assigned to me, responding to each new instruction, grateful when things go as hoped, crushed when nothing helps and the patient is lost.

The Pitt is the newest addition to the canon of medical dramas and feels like the real thing. All the technology is there, the medical terminology and procedures are real, in addition to the fraught interaction of professionals under stress. Most of all, it feels real because it shows patients and their families trying to cope with the worst day of their lives.

And medical miracles do happen, on TV and in real life.

Recently, a church friend was rescued in a drowning event, was unconscious on a ventilator for nearly a week, with much uncertainty about how much damage his brain had endured while under water. Several weeks later, he is now home, dealing with some memory gaps and muscle weakness, but improving strength daily.

Last week, I had the privilege of meeting a middle-aged pastor who was saved a few weeks ago when his heart stopped in his sleep. His wife started CPR, paramedics shocked his heart in the field more than once, he was stabilized in the ER, unconscious on a ventilator, cooled down to a lower body temperature to preserve his brain function.

His care team, along with family and friends, watched and waited and prayed, uncertain what would be the rest of his story.

When he was warmed up 24 hours later, he woke up, able to breathe on his own. Other than no memory for those brief hours of unconsciousness, he is still himself – living with a new awareness of his vulnerability and an immense gratitude, now with an implanted defibrillator in his chest.

The right words after being brought back from the dead?
The right words when we never know if they will be the last words we utter or the last we will ever hear?

I know what they would be for me. I carry them in my heart…

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Ordinary as Unmown Grass

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I will seek a letter at the mailbox’s red flag, how many more times?
Walk this puddled gravel drive with the dog and cat, how many more times?

Dislike the sight, row of brown molehills risen like my own petty complaints?
Be here to hear the just-before-spring birds tune up, how many more times?

My life, ordinary as unmown grass, tattered and dormant in fencerows….
Sons asleep upstairs under quilts pieced of castoff jeans, how many more times?

Witness sunrise over the barn, frost on the grass, deer by the pines? Think of “Jesus asking that man, Do you want to be made well? How many more times?

Think of Him asking me. Of walking back to the mailbox in late afternoon,
of pulling it open, reaching in again, how many more times?
~Daye Phillippo “Ordinary Ghazal” from Thunderhead

…it’s easy to forget that the ordinary is just the extraordinary that’s happened over and over again. Sometimes the beauty of your life is apparent. Sometimes you have to go looking for it. And just because you have to look for it doesn’t mean it’s not there.
God, grant me the grace of a normal day.
~Billy Coffey

I tend to get complacent in my daily routines, confident in the knowledge that tomorrow will be very much like yesterday.

I look out on plenty of unmown grass.

The reality is there is nothing ordinary about the events of this day or any other – it might have been otherwise and some day it will be otherwise.

I am reminded to stop rushing, take a look around and actually revel in the quiet moments of daily work, chats, walks, meals, and sleep, and yes, lawn mowing. As both of us suffered, one after the other, through a spring cold which interrupted our plans and schedules, we still knew how remarkable it is to just be here living life together.

We are granted peace even, maybe especially, when not feeling well.

Christ came to earth to remind us to dwell richly in the experience of these moments, to live, wanting to be well, despite our limitations.

God knows, such is a foretaste of the heaven which is to come.

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Come and See: This is Hard…

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In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
John 1: 1 and John 1: 14

When your words came, I ate them;
    they were my joy and my heart’s delight,
for I bear your name,
    Lord God Almighty.
Jeremiah 15:16

At this the Jews there began to grumble about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” They said, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I came down from heaven’?”

“Stop grumbling among yourselves,” Jesus answered. “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them, and I will raise them up at the last day. It is written in the Prophets: ‘They will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard the Father and learned from him comes to me.  No one has seen the Father except the one who is from God; only he has seen the Father. Very truly I tell you, the one who believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, yet they died. But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which anyone may eat and not die.  I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.”

Then the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your ancestors ate manna and died, but whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.”  He said this while teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum.
On hearing it, many of his disciples said, “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?”
John 6:41-60

He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.
Deuteronomy 8:3

“ears of wheat” by Van Gogh – Van Gogh Museum

Where to get bread? An ever-pressing question
That trembles on the lips of anxious mothers,
Bread for their families, bread for all these others;
A whole world on the margin of exhaustion.
And where that hunger has been satisfied
Where to get bread? The question still returns
In our abundance something starves and yearns
We crave fulfillment, crave and are denied.

And then comes One who speaks into our needs
Who opens out the secret hopes we cherish
Whose presence calls our hidden hearts to flourish
Whose words unfold in us like living seeds
Come to me, broken, hungry, incomplete,
I Am the Bread of Life, break Me and eat.
~Malcolm Guite “I Am the Bread of Life”

Throughout his ministry, our Lord emphasized the idea of feeding as something intimately connected with his love and care for souls.

The mystery of the Eucharist does not stand alone. It is the crest of a great wave; a total sacramental disclosure of the dealings of the transcendent God with men. The hunger of the four thousand and five thousand are more than miracles of man is the matter of Christ’s first temptation. The feedings of practical compassion; we feel that in them something of deep significance is done, one of the mysteries of eternal life a little bit unveiled. So too in the supper at Emmaus, when the bread is broken the Holy One is known.

It is peculiar to Christianity, indeed part of the mystery of the Incarnation, that it constantly shows us this coming of God through and in homely and fugitive things and events; and puts the need and dependence of the creature at the very heart of prayer.
~Evelyn Underhill from “Abba”

Either secretly or sacramentally, all living Christians are perpetual penitents and perpetual communicants, there is no other way of carrying on.  The Eucharist represents a perpetual pouring out of his very life to feed and enhance our small and feeble lives. 
~Evelyn Underhill from “Light of Christ”

This is a hard teaching. No wonder the disciples were grumbling.
Who can accept Christ offering His own flesh and blood as a meal?

Yet we are well prepared for the feast of God’s Words in the Old Testament; nevertheless God’s people are unsatisfied, wanting more.

As the Word become flesh, Jesus reminds us that it is our joy and privilege to eat the Word of God, to absorb it completely, allowing it to fulfill and nourish us.

As His body on earth, the church joins together regularly to eat this mystical meal, nourished by Words that give us eternal life.

It isn’t just a hard teaching.
It is His incredible mysterious gift of Himself,
to feed our flesh and our spirits.

I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year alongside my church family. Once a week, I will invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together.

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Turning Off the Light

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This post is from April 14, 2025 –
about a special mare who still lives in our hearts:

Marlee has gone home this morning, far sooner than we planned.  She was only twenty two, born only two months after our daughter’s birth, much too young an age for a Haflinger to die.

But something dire was happening to her over the last two weeks — not eating much,  an expanding girth, then shortness of breath, and last week it was confirmed she had untreatable lymphoma.

Her bright eyes were shining to the end so it was very hard to ask the vet to turn the light off.  But the time had come.

Marlee M&B came to us as a six month old “runty orphan” baby by the lovely stallion Sterling Silver,  but she was suddenly weaned at three days when her mama Melissa died of sepsis. 

She never really weaned from her bottle/bucket feeding humans Stefan and Andrea Bundshuh at M&B Farm in Canada. From them she knew people’s behavior, learned their nonverbal language, and understood human subtleties that most horses never learn. This made her quite a handling challenge as a youngster as it also meant there was no natural reserve nor natural respect for people. She had no boundaries taught by a mother, so we tried to teach her the proper social cues.

When turned out with the herd as a youngster, she was completely clueless–she’d approach the dominant alpha mare incorrectly, without proper submission, get herself bitten and kicked and was the bottom of the social heap for years, a lonesome little filly with few friends and very few social skills. She had never learned submission with people either, and had to have many remedial lessons on her training path.

Once she was a mature working mare, her relationship with people markedly improved as there was structure to her work and predictability for her, and after having her own foals, she picked up cues and signals that helped her keep her foal safe, though she had always been one of our most relaxed “do whatever you need to do” mothers when we handled her foals as she simply never learned that she needed to be concerned.

Over the years, as the herd has changed, Marlee became the alpha mare, largely by default and seniority, so I don’t believe she really trusted her position as “real”. She tended to bully, and react too quickly out of her own insecurity about her inherited position. She was very skilled with her ears but she was also a master at the tail “whip” and the tensed upper lip–no teeth, just a slight wrinkling of the lip.  The herd scattered when they saw her face change.  The irony of it all is that when she was  “on top” of the herd hierarchy, she was more lonely than when she was at the bottom and I think a whole lot less happy as she had few grooming partners any more.

She accompanied us to the fair for a week of display of our Haflingers year after year after year — she could be always counted on to greet the public and enjoy days of braiding and petting and kids sitting on her back.

The day she started formal under saddle training under Val Bash was when the light bulb went off in her head–this was a job she could do! This was constant communication and interaction with a human being, which she craved! This was what she was meant for! And she thrived under saddle, advancing quickly in her skills, almost too fast, as she wanted so much to please her trainer.

She had, at the time, an unequaled record among North American Haflingers. She was not only regional champion in her beginner novice division of eventing as a pregnant 5 year old, but also received USDF Horse of the Year awards in First and Second Level dressage that year as the highest scoring Haflinger.

With Jessica Heidemann she did a “bridleless” ride display in front of hundreds of people at the annual Haflinger event, and with Garyn Heidemann as instructor,  she became an eventing pony for a young rider whose blonde hair matched Marlee’s.  She galloped with abandon in the field on bareback rides with Emily Vander Haak and became our daughter Lea’s special riding horse over the last few years.

She had a career of mothering along with intermittent riding work, with 5 foals –Winterstraum, Marquisse, Myst, Wintermond, and Nordstrom—each from different stallions, and each very different from one another.

This mare had such a remarkable work ethic, was “fine-tuned” so perfectly with a sensitivity to cues–that our daughter said: “Mom, it’s going to make me such a better rider because I know she pays attention to everything I do with my body–whether my heels are down, whether I’m sitting up straight or not.” 

Marlee was, to put it simply,  trained to train her riders.

We will miss her high pitched whinny from the barn whenever she heard the back door to the house open. We will miss her pushy head butt on the stall door when it was time to close it up for the night.  We will miss that beautiful unforgettable face and those large deep brown eyes where the light was on.

What a ride she had for twenty two years, that dear little orphan.  What a ride she gave to many who trained her and who she trained over the years. Though I never climbed on her back, what joy she gave me,  the surrogate mom who loved and fed her, unable to resist those bright eyes, which are now closed in peace.

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Photo Montage by Emily Vander Haak

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Come and See: The Seal of Approval

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When they found him on the other side of the lake, they asked him, “Rabbi, when did you get here?”

Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw the signs I performed but because you ate the loaves and had your fill.  Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For on him God the Father has placed his seal of approval.”

Then they asked him, “What must we do to do the works God requires?”

Jesus answered, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.”

So they asked him, “What sign then will you give that we may see it and believe you? What will you do? Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written: ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’”

Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, it is not Moses who has given you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”

“Sir,” they said, “always give us this bread.”
John 6: 22-34

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them;
it was not in them, it only came through them,
and what came through them was longing.
These things — the beauty, the memory of our own past —
are good images of what we really desire;
but if they are mistaken for the thing itself
they turn into dumb idols,
breaking the hearts of their worshipers.
For they are not the thing itself;
they are only the scent of a flower we have not found,
the echo of a tune we have not heard,
news from a country we have never visited.
~C.S. Lewis from “Reflections”

At present we are on the outside of the world,
the wrong side of the door.
We discern the freshness and purity of morning,
but they do not make us fresh and pure.
We cannot mingle with the splendours we see.
But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling
with the rumour that it will not always be so.
Some day, God willing, we shall get in.
When human souls have become as perfect
in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is
in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its
or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch.
~C.S. Lewis from The Weight of Glory

I know this hunger the disciples express…
Even when I am fully sated,
still I ask for more.

By loving and longing for more,
I am looking for what is always there,
but settle for a reflection
rather than the thing itself.
Lord, help me wait at your door.

The beauty of anticipation,
confident of fulfillment to come
my thirstiness
slaked
my hunger
satisfied.

I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year alongside my church family. Once a week, I will invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together.

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Remembering Who I Am

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All day I try to say nothing but thank you,
breathe the syllables in and out with every step I
take through the rooms of my house and outside into
a profusion of shaggy-headed dandelions in the garden
where the tulips’ black stamens shake in their crimson cups.

I am saying thank you, yes, to this burgeoning spring
and to the cold wind of its changes. Gratitude comes easy
after a hot shower, when my loosened muscles work,
when eyes and mind begin to clear and even unruly
hair combs into place.

Dialogue with the invisible can go on every minute,
and with surprising gaiety I am saying thank you as I
remember who I am, a woman learning to praise
something as small as dandelion petals floating on the
steaming surface of this bowl of vegetable soup,
my happy, savoring tongue.
~Jeanne Lohmann “To Say Nothing But Thank You”

Returned from long travel, I sit
in the familiar, sun-streaked pew, waiting
for the bread and wine of holy Communion.
The old comfort does not rise in me, only
apathy and bafflement.

What shall we do about this?” I asked
my God…
~Jane Kenyon from “Woman, Why Are You Weeping?”

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.
~Jane Kenyon “Let Evening Come”

We resist nightfall in our lives.

We fear the dark of violence and threats of war,
the suffering of innocent people who are harmed directly,
and those harmed by lack of resources
which go to bomb-making and dropping.

I wish I could remain forever sunshiny, vital and irreplaceable, living each moment with the energy I feel at dawn.

Yet I know that the forward momentum of time
inevitably winds me down to twilight.

We are not alone in our need to catch our breath,
to be still and grateful for each little thing –
each petal, each taste, each sun ray illuminating the dark.

What shall we do about this? we ask our God.

We savor what we will, with gratitude, as evening comes.
There is no stopping it as
our lungs fill with the breath of God, our Creator.

We are not left comfortless.

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…Or What’s a Heaven For?

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And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look, he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows; a bright
Serpent, a river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
                        On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky. Many people
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.
~R.S. Thomas “The Coming”

…for each of us has known the pleasure
of spring, the way it feels for something closed

to open: the soft, heavenly weather of arrival.
~Faith Shearin from “Geese” from Moving the Piano

Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a heaven for? 
~Robert Browning from “Andrea del Sarto”

“Let me go there”
And You did. Knowing what awaited You.

Your arms out wide
to embrace us
who try to grasp
a heaven which eludes us.

This heaven, Your heaven
You brought down to us,
knowing our terrible need.

You wanted to come here,
knowing all this.

Holding us firmly
within your wounded grip,
You the Son
handed us back to heaven.

A sorrowful holy season of opening and emptying:
from cloistered tight
to reaching beyond our grasp.
Or what’s a heaven for?

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A World So Broken: This Sacred Tension

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…by Easter Tuesday, we often find ourselves back in the shadows.

The cancer is still there. That financial struggle is not resolved. The depression returns. That relationship is still broken. We might ask, “If Christ is risen, why does the world still feel so broken?” This is not a lack of faith; it’s the honest lament of believers who are learning to walk in the tension of the now and the not yet. 

This sacred tension calls us to rejoice and weep on Easter Tuesday.

Rejoice that Jesus is risen. We have a living hope. We are promised an eternal inheritance, which is being kept for us by the one who purchased it with his own life. But embrace the grief too. Sadness is the healing emotion of the soul. Sorrow is a gift from God that allows our souls to breathe and cope in a world that aches, longing for restoration. 
~Brian Croft from “Embracing a Sacred Tension”

For you are not a God who delights in wickedness;
    evil may not dwell with you.
5 The boastful shall not stand before your eyes;
    you hate all evildoers.
6 You destroy those who speak lies;
    the Lord abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful man.
Psalm 5: 4-6

To invite Jesus to cleanse the temple of our hearts
is not to ask for guilt and shame.
It is to ask for healing.
The same Lord who overturned tables did so
not to destroy and humiliate,
but to reclaim and restore.
He interrupts only that which obstructs.
He removes only that which hinders life and worship.
His cleansing is never punitive; it is always redemptive.
~Scott Sauls from “What Would Jesus Overturn in Your Life?”

To live coram Deo is to live one’s entire life
in the presence of God,
under the authority of God,
to the glory of God. 

To live in the presence of God is to understand
that whatever we are doing and wherever we are doing it,
we are acting under the gaze of God.

There is no place so remote that we can escape His penetrating gaze.

To live all of life coram Deo is to live a life of integrity.
It is a life of wholeness that finds
its unity and coherency
in the majesty of God.

Our lives are to be living sacrifices,
oblations offered in a spirit of adoration and gratitude.

A fragmented life is a life of disintegration.
It is marked by inconsistency, disharmony, confusion,
conflict, contradiction, and chaos.

Coram Deo … before the face of God.
…a life that is open before God.
…a life in which all that is done is done as to the Lord.
…a life lived by principle, not expediency; by humility before God,
not defiance.
~R.C. Sproul from “What Does “coram Deo” mean?”

On this Easter Tuesday, we cannot escape His gaze…
all of us, all colors, shapes and size, even the leadership of our nation.
We are created in His image, imago dei, so He looks at us
as His reflections in the mirror of this troubled world.

What we do, how we speak and write, how we treat others –
reflects the face of God.

Jesus is the embodied temple who brought His sacrifice to the people,
rather than people coming to the temple with their sacrifices.

I cringe to think how hard we try to hide from His gaze.

Yet some don’t make a pretense of hiding – they make it quite public:
our elected leader chooses Easter to publish a vile message filled with profanity, name-calling and threats, then gives a fragmented and disintegrated Easter speech, to celebrating families with children, with
inconsistency, dishonesty, disharmony, confusion, conflict, contradiction, and chaos.

We drown together in the mud of our mutual guilt and lack of humility. All that we do to others, we do to God Himself.

We must be on our knees asking for cleansing,
for the temples of our hearts to be overturned,
our corruption scattered, our sorrows lifted.

Jesus comes to cleanse, repair, reclaim and restore –
His mission to save us from ourselves.

Kind of takes one’s breath away.

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Bring to Light the Mystery: Before Darkness Overtakes You

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No matter how deep our darkness, He is deeper still. 
~Corrie ten Boom from The Hiding Place

Then Jesus told them:
You are going to have the light just a little while longer.
Walk while you have the light, before darkness overtakes you.
The man who walks in the dark does not know where he is going.
John 12:35

I think he planned it, sort of, from the start;
whether he knew they’d choose the fruit or not,
he scattered hints around the garden, what to do
in case they got themselves kicked out. A shirt
of fur around the lamb. The stream converting
water into syllables. Bamboo pipes.
The caps of mushrooms round as wheels.
Bluebirds composing tunes. He knew nothing
they started later would be new. Except he
didn’t factor in the thorns, how they would smart
as Adam—leaving—drove one through his foot.
How clever Romans would invent a crown.
He didn’t figure weeds could break His heart.
~Jeanne Murray Walker “Foreknowledge”

Thoughts on Holy Tuesday:

Many older people when stressed with illness, while hospitalized or disrupted from their routine, will become disoriented, even confused in the evening, unable to sleep, or be at ease.  It is referred to as “sundowning” by the care providers who must try to keep an older patient safe, calm and oriented to time and place.

It isn’t at all clear what is happening in the brain as the sun goes down, but over the years of watching this happen in my patients, I think it is a very primal fear response to loss of light. We don’t know where we are lost in the dark. We don’t know what is out there that may hurt us.

Jesus knew the dangers of the night, both as God and as man.  As the Light of the World, soon to hang from the cross as the sky blackened and the sun was covered over, His illumination will dim and die. 

At that moment, both God and man are plunged into enveloping darkness: an extreme  “sundowning” where all hope is lost, and we can lose our way.

Yet if we stay rooted to Jesus, not leave the cross, we can put down our heavy burden and rest. We can celebrate the arrival of brilliant light in our lives. Instead of darkness overcoming us, our lives are covered in the glory and grace of Resurrection Day.

The Son settled among us.  Darkness can no longer overtake us, even at death. The Light will illuminate the path we are meant to take.

This year’s Barnstorming Lenten theme is Ephesians 3:9:

…to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things…

Lyrics:
What if instead of more violence
We let our weapons fall silent?
No more revenge or retribution
No more war or persecution.

It could be beautiful.

What if instead of our judgment
We soften our hearts that have hardened?
Instead of certainty and pride
We love and sacrifice.

It could be beautiful.

Can we see the other as our brother?
Can we sing the darkness to light?
Sounding chords of compassion and grace
Set the swords of judgement aside

Let mercy’s eyes
See the other human face.
~Kyle Pederson

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