looking at everything as if for the first or last time

“I stand upon my desk to remind myself that we must constantly look at things in a different way… Just when you think you know something, you have to look at it in another way.”

~Robin Williams as teacher John Keating, 

addressing a group of students 

from atop of a desk, 

from the movie Dead Poet’s Society

“Look at everything as though you are seeing it either for the first or last time, then your time on earth will be filled with glory.”

~Betty Smith, from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

  

God is calling: love and laugh

Today, a personal message for you, just you… from the One who loves you most, the One who never ceases to call you by name… the God who has known you since before you were born.

May it lift you up and fill you with confident joy on this Thursday morning!

Love and laugh. Make your world the happier for your being in it. Love and rejoice on the grey days.

There are wilderness days for My Disciples as well as Mountains of Transfiguration, but on both it is duty, persistently, faithfully done, that tells.

Be gentle with all. Try to see the heart I see, to know the pain and difficulty of the other life, that I know. Try, before you interview anyone, or speak to anyone, to ask Me to act as interpreter between you two.

Just live in the spirit of prayer. In speaking to Me, you find soul-rest. Simple tasks, faithfully done and persisted in, bring their own reward, and are mosaics being laid the pavement of success.

Welcome all who come here. I love you.

~ God Calling, edited by A. J. Russell

“For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mothers womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”~Psalm 139:13-14

restore us, Lord... a litany of images

This Lent I have truly enjoyed taking part of a #LentPhotoaDay2016 creative initiative that I came across online. The idea is that one image -- based on one given word -- became the center of my prayer each day.

I may not have done it every day – and I confess that I didn’t always follow the published words suggested for each day. But I certainly enjoyed engaging with images as a way to ponder on and pray with throughout this Lent.

All my photos – and the words assigned to each image – were posted on my Instagram and Facebook accounts, and often on Twitter.  Here they are, for those of you who missed it, all together in one post!

As we begin this Holy EasterTriddum, these three days in the Church’s year marked with services of remembrance, fasting and prayer, please know that I am praying for each one of you and your families. 

And in order to enter fully into the moment, I will be offline until Easter week.

How splendid the cross of Christ!

It brings life, not death;

light, not darkness;

Paradise, not its loss.

It is the wood on which the Lord,

like a great warrior,

was wounded in hands and feet and side,

but healed thereby our wounds.

A tree had destroyed us,

a tree now brought us life.

                                                     ~Theodore of Studios

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“The real voyage of discovery consists 

not in seeking new landscapes 

but in having new eyes.”

                                         ~Marcel Proust

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JOURNEY

 MIGHTY

REFUGE

  

HANDS/LOVE

 

GATHER

VISION

FAITH / DEVOTION

FREEDOM

JOY

HOME

HEALING

EMPTINESS

SEEDS

RESTORE

  

WITNESS

BELOVED

BALANCE

SILENCE

PERSPECTIVE

OPENNESS

WELCOME

PRESENCE

TRANSFORMATION

EXPECTATION

SOLIDARITY

HOPE

  

PRAYER