Category Archives: Moments of Wonder
The Timing of Miracles in Lives Differs
It’s a lovely sunny day in Memphis. I’m as usual playing on face book before getting serious about unpacking my mess of decades of writing in hopes of gathering some together to describe my spiritual journey. The point being, that I am convinced that the timing of it differs from person to person. But if open to mystery, to miracles past our understanding, even if finally only in old age, we can recognize that amazing connection of God to our daily lives. It can be in the timing of really small things or recognizing God’s hand in the large and even scary aspects of our lives. I know that I was a weak person and needed immense doses of grace early on to keep on keeping on. But, there are times in all our lives when our natural strengths are not enough. And if we are naturally strong people we may not recognize our limits as gifts. Because they open us to grace in ways beyond our understanding. To the strong it may seem like failure to need that grace, but it’s the gift of Jesus’ life as a human being. His journey is our journey complete with miracles beyond human understanding, because we too have the Spirit of God within us and surrounding us. God is as alive and well in our times and our lives as God was in Jesus’ life, suffering, death and resurrection. The timing of our need for and openness to God’s interventions is different from one person to another. But ultimately we are all called to experience our limits and need for God’s active participation in our daily lives. Admitting our natural limits is harder for the strong than the weak. But it is part of the spiritual journey. The Spirit is within us and outside us. We are a tiny, but needed part of God’s plan for humanity. But recognizing our personal limits and need for an awareness of our connection to God is part of God’s plan for humanity.
My Journey from Agnostic to Christian
As a Catholic from childhood, I had four children in the first five years of marriage. Unfortunately, I had to have them by Caesarean Section. Then the doctor told me I would die if I had another C section in the next few years. When I asked the priest what to do since birth control was considered a mortal sin, he said,
“Many children have good stepmothers.”
I decided that men who had never married or had children shouldn’t be making that kind of decision for women. Since I unknowingly had made the Catholic Church my God, when I left the Catholic Church, I threw Jesus and God out with it.
I was not a typical woman who loved to cook and bake, sew and make flower arrangements. In fact, I felt totally inadequate as a wife and mother. We were affluent then and I had help and we both enjoyed giving parties. So, for several years we led a party life, and I began drinking even before the parties and on weekday afternoons when we didn’t have parties.
I got scared that I was losing control of my drinking and found a therapy group for alcoholics. After several months of reading and going to therapy, I broke down weeping one night, admitting that I felt totally inadequate as a wife and mother and didn’t think I was capable of loving anyone, even my husband and children. The group did not judge me, but rather seemed to hurt with me. Somehow it was a beginning of healing.
The next day as I was vacuuming, I had a sense of someone standing behind me with their hand gently on my shoulder. My first thought was that it was Jesus, but then decided since I didn’t believe in Jesus it couldn’t be. So, I just put the feeling into my “need more information file.”
Unexpectedly my father died.at fifty-two years of age. I closed down my feelings, so I could deal with it intellectually and cope with life. I took a course at Vanderbilt Divinity school on the Christian View of Death and another on other World Religions. Neither made much impression on me, so I began to visit various Christian denominations and reading the bible. The book of Acts was an eye opener and made me a bit wistful that Christians might still have life changing experiences. About that time some affluent friends of ours gave up their lifestyle and his Vice Presidency in his family’s company to be missionaries in a non-denominational ministry, Campus Crusade for Christ. I hoped they had kept some investments for the future for their three children, but I was intrigued by their willingness to change their life so drastically.
Sometime later they came back to town asking our group of friends to give a Christian coffee where several women would talk about how Jesus had changed their lives. I laughingly invited women to come, saying I didn’t know our current gatherings weren’t Christian, but come and enjoy the great food we were going to have.
Several women gave talks about the changes in their lives and relationships when they said a prayer asking Jesus to be their Savior and Lord. Then they invited us to say the prayer with them. I was impressed with the changes they described, but since I didn’t believe in God or Jesus, I didn’t say the prayer. As the other women who prayed the prayer were being embraced, I started washing dishes.
One of the women came in and asked if I had said the prayer. I said I didn’t believe in God or Jesus, so I had not. She didn’t hesitate, suggesting I say the prayer this way, “Jesus, IF you are who you claimed to be, I want you to be my Savior and Lord.” That seemed like a win/win, so I said the prayer and went back to washing dishes wondering if this would make any difference.
Suddenly, I was simply over come with the feeling of being totally loved with no small print. The joy was so great, I was afraid I’d burst from it. And that began my fifty-seven-year spiritual journey that has had awesome times of joy and very difficult times when I sometimes felt that loving presence even when in great pain.
It has not been easy. And there were times when temptation was so strong that God literally intervened in amazing ways to keep me from screwing up my own and others’ lives.
I have learned that saying the prayer isn’t a magic incantation. For some of us it makes an immediate difference, but it doesn’t make us perfect. And for some it doesn’t make a difference for years. Asking Jesus to be our savior is one thing. Letting Him be Lord is a whole other ball game and for me it’s taking a lifetime. Different personalities experience the Spiritual Journey in very different ways. Some of us are relationship people. Others are worker bees and doers. Some are thinkers and questioners. God did not make His children with a cookie-cutter.
Following Jesus means literally following in His footprints in His journey through the Gospels. And that takes grace in our emotional, intellectual, physical, and spiritual lives that changes us in many different ways over the years.
We are loved unconditionally, but we are on a journey of change from being needy to being loving. And that is not easy and takes commitment, courage, and grace.
We Come Like the Shepherds to Jesus
What does the prayer “Jesus, come and be born in my heart?” imply?
Who first witnessed His coming? Shepherds…….not Kings. If we try to imagine being one of them, what would we be like? Poor obviously, politically powerless, without social status, accepting of physical hardship, called to put the wellbeing of defenseless sheep ahead of our own comfort, but being part of a band of brothers who share this vulnerability and commitment, and who one night are suddenly awestruck by a “charged” atmosphere full of significance around a vulnerable baby and its tired, worried, helpless parents. Those are the hearts that are open to Jesus. When we pray, “Come Lord Jesus, be born in our hearts,” we admit our vulnerability, our neediness, our call to protect and support God’s helpless ones, and our dependency on mutual support. To me this prayer describes both our own situation and our call together through openness to Jesus, as both our Savior and Lord. This is the heart of religion. This is Spirituality. And this is the call of the church. Are we listening?
Come AS a Little Child: To Pray or Not to Pray Chapter 11
Many, probably all, people experience miracles large and small. Some don’t expect them, so miss their significance and others are hesitant to speak of them. Humanity has come to either reject what we don’t understand or to only connect miracles with “saints or the delusional.” And we all know deep down that we’re not saints.
After my experience of the love of God expressed in Jesus, I wondered why I was having so many and such a variety of them. Some of the major ones were to major heartbreaking problems, but many were just little boosts over tiny bumps in the road of my daily life.
When I encouraged my children, aged 8, 6, 5 and 4 to ask Jesus to be their Savior and Lord, they had not been going to church or Sunday School. Their responses were unique to each of their personalities, but not based on being taught much about God or Jesus other than His love. In writing about these, it brought alive for me Jesus stressing coming to the Lord as a child.
I have become convinced that the reason I experienced things even the other “born again” Christians did not, was because of having thrown out everything I had been taught in church and by the society around me, I was pretty much coming as a child without preconceived notions. When I read the Bible while I was questioning everything, I realized I had never heard Christians talk about personal miracles, only ones connected to extremely holy people who lived long ago and far away. When I began to devour Scripture like a starving person after my conversion, I went from believing nothing, to believing everything. I came with an open mind and heart like a child.
I have come to see that each generation is to some extent limited by what we are taught when young by authority figures. Even those, who like me question, are still limited by what we have absorbed from the culture of our times.
A lot of my spiritual journey has involved letting go of preconceived ideas. At the age of eighty-four I am still having to do that. It’s scary to realize that no person or group knows all the truth and believes nothing but the truth even with the help of God. We are simply not equal to God. And not only is God not finished teaching us yet, but God is not finished teaching humanity yet.
An eye opener to me was becoming aware of the pattern of growth in Jesus from when he was a brilliant twelve-year old, but still emotionally immature so needing his mother’s guidance in learning to consider others’ feelings. The Scriptures say he went home with his parents and GREW in truth and holiness. Then at thirty he needs a push from his mother to make the leap from his comfort zone into his calling to a whole other level of ministry….miracles. Jesus then still believes his call is only to God’s chosen, the Jews. But he is challenged not only by an unclean woman and heretics, but by a soldier of the oppressive conquerors to out of the kindness of his heart, include them in his kingdom of the Love of God. He comes to understand that his call is not about political freedom, but spiritual freedom. He slowly and with natural human reluctance recognizes that he will not be a conquering hero, but a rejected vulnerable scapegoat for even those who kill him. And he tells his disciples who depend on him for faith for miracles, that he must leave, so they will experience the spirit of God within them to also do what he has done and will do. And finally, on the cross he makes the leap from “Why have you forsaken me?” to “Your will, not mine” Growth in truth and holiness takes a life time. And a lot of it involves letting go of some of the beliefs that make us feel most secure. And ultimately it is the challenge of, “Your will, not mine.”
I Am Beginning to Learn How to Choose Joy
I’m 83 and a widow living alone. I’ve recently had some health issues and had become depressed. But then I read a post called: “Choose Joy.” So, when I looked out my window at the gray day, I focused on the gold and violet pansies hanging there, savoring their rich colors, the contrast that speaks to me of the marriage of joy and sorrow, remembering their velvet softness, valuing their resilience in cold gray weather. I looked around me in my warm bright study, at a cork board of cards with beautiful pictures of birds from caring friends, a picture of daffodils that are my sign of hope, a picture of Jesus holding a child and laughing, a favorite one of my husband laughing with that sparkle in his eyes, our wedding photo with my family, my loving sons and daughter at various stages of their lives, my brother and his spouse Rick, who treat me like a princess when I get to visit them, me smiling just five years ago in a Cathedral in France. How blessed my life has been. How blessed it still is. The quiet joy of peace surrounds me like a comforter. And a tiny bubble of joy rises within me. Yes, we can choose joy!
Choose Joy
Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action. Feel the sorrow, take the action, but keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it becomes mindless, automated, like gravity pulling the stream down its course; until it becomes an inner law of nature. If Viktor Frankl can exclaim yes, to life, in spite of everything- and what an everything he lived through — then so can any one of us amid the rubble of our plans, so trifling by comparison. Joy is not a function of a life free of friction and frustration, but a function of focus — an inner elevation by the fulcrum of choice. So often, it is a matter of attending to what Hermann Hesse called, as the world was about to come unworlded by its first global war, the little joys; so often, those are the slender threads of which we weave the lifeline that saves us.
Delight in the age-salted man on the street corner waiting for the light to change, his age-salted dog beside him, each inclined toward the other with the angular subtlety of absolute devotion.
Delight in the little girl zooming past you on her little bicycle, this fierce emissary of the future, rainbow tassels waving from her handlebars and a hundred beaded braids spilling from her golden helmet.
Delight in the snail taking an afternoon to traverse the abyssal crack in the sidewalk for the sake of pasturing on a single blade of grass.
Delight in the tiny new leaf, so shy and so shamelessly lush, unfurling from the crooked stem of the parched geranium.
I think often of this verse from Jane Hirshfield’s splendid poem-
So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.
Yes, except we furnish both the grains and the scales. I alone can weigh the blue of my sky, you of yours.
~Maria Popova
From the Blog: Make Believe Boutique- the Post: around the bend
The Love of God 2022
The Love of God is so incredibly different and beyond compare that it challenges our ability to accept it. No matter how much we have been loved by family and friends, no matter how famous and wildly adored we may have been by the multitudes, nothing has ever been more than a barely glimpsed shadow of the Love of God. To accept the unconditional love of God with our whole mind, to experience it with an open heart until our spirit is so filled with it that we can just let it overflow to others is pure grace.
The Love of God can free us to see ourselves exactly as we are, fragile and unfinished and to accept our need for forgiveness without guilt, just a true sorrow that sets us free from fear and shame and gives us grace to grow. It begins to not only free us to forgive ourselves, but also others.
The Love of God can heal the insecurities that come from being tiny vulnerable humans in a huge unknown universe, insecurities that stunt our ability to love. The Love of God is the grace that uses our mustard seed of faith to begin freeing us to die to self and live again.
The Love of God fleshed out in Jesus is personal, unconditional, and eternal. The Love of God opens our hearts to joy.
The Love of God frees us to say, “I am yours, God. Take my life and help me become the unique person you created me to be.” There is nothing as healing, powerful, and eternal as the love of God for you.
Three Levels of Positive Response to the Quarantine
1. Many have stepped up their gratitude prayers or lists during the “Great Quarantine.” Which really is a wonderful attitude improving thing to do. When I really get into it, I can write numerous pages, until I have to stop for something else. I never realized I had it so good before starting this. This is something many of us experiencing the challenges of age have learned to do to help ourselves to keep on keeping on and to stop us from becoming curmudgeons.
2: The next level is praising God even for the hard parts. Though God doesn’t need the praise, it is an amazing way of connecting with God and experiencing grace, which not only transforms our situation, but eventually us.
3. The third level is to do both and then to develop the habit of reaching out to someone who is housebound by poor health, care giving or not being able to drive. Calls, cards, and asking if they need something when we plan to grocery shop all will help even after quarantine time.
What in the World is Christianity About for All Christians?
Christianity is about loving people more than loving to be right.
Christianity is about forgiveness for every one.
Christianity is about experiencing the love of God and passing it on.
Christianity is about learning how to love from the life and death of a Jew named Jesus.
Christianity is about the awesome God of the Universe being within each of us.
Christianity is about realizing that we are all imperfect earthen vessels, each unique, but all slightly cracked, so though we are filled with the Spirit of God, we leak.
Christianity is about knowing Jesus is Risen and is a well where we can go to refill.
Christianity is about realizing that the Spirit of God works in diverse ways in different people: like a geyser, like a gentle bubbling brook, or a silent underground river.
Christianity is about valuing the fruit of the Spirit- peace, joy, love – in whatever wrapping or label it comes.
Christianity is about translating the words “born again” into experiencing the unlimited love of God with both our mind and heart and being freed to respond “YES” to God even when the going gets rough.
Christianity is about Jesus showing us that this life is not all there is.
These are summed up in First Corinthians, Chapter 13.
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 