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.
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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.

Writing to God: Day 33

Luke 19: 1-6
From God

If you were walking down my street today, Lord, would I scurry up a tree to see you?  Would I run inside and lock the door and pretend I wasn't home?

I pray that today
Is one of those days
That I'll remember to stop;

I'll be ready to greet you
In whatever way
You show up.

And I'll climb to the highest places
Just to see you.
Where ever you may be.

I'll make an effort,
In spite of my weaknesses
to see life from a different perspective.

Perhaps, then, I'll be more open to your love, your forgiveness, your invitation to come inside and sit with me.

I wonder how such a simple thing could change the way I live?

Amen.