Writing to God: Tuesday of Holy Week

Jeremiah 31: 2-13
Enlightenment

Jeremiah is a poem of the joyful future return from exile for the people of Israel.  It is a celebration of the hoped-for journey home - a journey that remembers its brokenness but literally dances in God's delivering presence and love through it all.  The people, it says, "found grace in the wilderness."

In the Gospel of Mark, Tuesday of the last week of Jesus' life begins at chapter 11 verse 20.  It continues until 14:1.  Tuesday is full of action, sayings, and teachings of Jesus - including the Greatest Commandment, predictions of the temple destruction, the lesson from the withered fig tree of Monday, and the widow's offering.
______________

What kinds of lessons do you have to teach us, God?
About love, and mercy, and kindness?
Are they lessons that lend us joy in our grief and a lightness in our daily step?

What kinds of lessons, God, do you have to teach us?
About humility, and patience, and trust?
Will they be lessons to help us in the waiting seasons, the times of change, our losses and failures?

God, what kinds of lessons do you have to teach us?
What about lessons of faith, of hardship, of perserverance?

For you knew what season it was, yesterday, when you went looking for fruit on that fig tree.
And, in the same kind of way, you know the skips and gallops, trips and falls that we take through this life.  You know each and every one.  (That could cause a person to be still before you.)

So we cannot help but ask:  on this long and eventful Tuesday - what lessons do you have to teach us?

But wait.  First we need to understand what it means to be watchful and how to listen - for only then will we be able to hear you.

Amen.