March 2021 – Awakening Light

Who are the faithful?

There is a prayer vigil today. Where are the faithful? Praying at home? Coming to church? Going to work? Prayer comes in many forms. Taking care of family. a garden, pets, making phone calls to friends, walking in Nature…Smiles, helping those in food banks, what is your prayer today?

Who goes to their knees, to speak words of kindness and joy? To be compassionate and loving. Churches, unite in love in your hearts. It began with Christ. It continues with you. At home. Everywhere we are, God is. Each and every moment give thanks for God’s everlasting Love.

Lenten Retreat Reflections

John 13:³⁴“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. ³⁵By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

Sometimes when I go walking, I feel so attune with Nature, hugging a tree, letting my fingers caress the rough bark weathered by the seasons. So, longing to be bubbling inside feeling God sparkle in every moment everywhere I look. I remember how much I long to just be in His Presence.

Today I start my day standing in my yard, listening to the wind on a cold Lenten March day. I feel the chill of the day precluding a coming storm. The cold tears my eyes and my heart bleeds for my once beautiful trees with infestations eating away at their core.

Remnants of a ripped apart limb broken off during a high wind show me how this strong tree has stayed with us throughout the winter months. No matter what, it stands tall hoping to see another spring. It sheds small teardrops of twigs at its base.

My ash still embraces the squirrels that climb its limbs enjoying each moment with these little ones. Enjoy your run, your home may be gone before you know it. Like the squirrels I climb upward, jumping from one limb of life to another with faith that there will be a branch that will hold me, food to feed me. Positive energy surges through me, the seed of faith planted early in life still grows facing adversity.

My dying ash seems to have compassion for me. As I hug it, its strong base just holds steady. Why is it that those most hurt seem to share the most love? Rough bark seems to like my touch.

Love is like that, holding onto you, enfolding you, enlivening you as it reaches out in its own joyfully proclaiming every moment. Do I share this aliveness so clearly embedded in creation?

Filled with years of systems, plans, hurts, last chances, I urgently wish to see beneath the exterior/facade of busyness…

The more that life tears at what I think is real, the more I see layers of “truth” fall away. I bow in quiet prayer to open my mind to the wisdom and truth plugging into the beautiful source generating flooding light.

Time and again these moments of quiet prayer hold me. Its cousin Nature renews and lifts me above the seemingly unending timeline onto the dimension of being, knowing somehow all is connected…the heartbeats of trees, birds, pulsing stars, flowing water from the sky and rivers, budding growth on bare branches and me. On a speck of a section of a tiny planet within a smaller solar system within a galaxy of planets.

How can I be important to the absolute, the Source…my development, His wish to see me become more like Himself get out from under your circumstances and get tuned into God shining patience joy filled in the deepening of Love.

Be humble, accept your humanness living in Christ in God. Be grateful for each moment to extend, infuse and live the Love that God so lovingly has for us. We live unaware of how He feeds us with every moment, we must just listen with our hearts.

Starving

Guest Blog by Laurie Stawicki

Hello Friends! Have you ever awakened from a dream and discovered that in your dream, you had become or accomplished so much more than you are right now? Have you ever wondered what life would be like if you let go, really let go of the past, and started taking steps towards your dream life? Have you ever meditated on what you’d really like out of life, and what you want your accomplishments to be at the end?

We only have one life to live. And it is so important to take a few moments or even an hour, a day, or a week or more away, and write down your hopes and dreams and what your goals will be. (Get out your notebook today! Start with a dream brainstorm.)

If you need help with confidence, get help from a coach or a counselor or even a friend. What God has put in you, do not allow to fade like a flower and forever be unused. Bring forth your gifts and talents for the community around you to be blessed by and to encourage others towards being all they can be, and so it becomes a circle.

You give who you are and what you have so the next person is inspired to do the same, and we all feed off of each other in a good way, to edify, uplift, purposefully contribute who we are and who God made us to be, functioning in His body, and blessing God and ourselves with our gifts and contributions to others and the world.

Let’s not give up! This is your day! Never, never, never give up the dreams God has put in your heart. And if for some reason you have moved away from them, do a recovery dive! Take a new step in your original direction! There is no time to waste!

“This poem is about the dreams God has put in each child, including you, and what might become of them. Amen.

Starving for Dreams

They scrounge in the
Dust looking for something
not Remembering
what it was they Lost
So Long Ago
Children’s Young hopes
Set Aside for the time
But Time became long
And Longer they served
Someone else’s dream
Slaves to the fact that they
Dependent on others for the
image of freedom
Forgot their own
and Died, remembering Not
from Whence they Came
from God their thoughts
Put to rest as Young adults
Never to be seen again
except as a foggy dream
in the night, half asleep
half awake, an angel’s reminder
that they were made for MORE—
Thoughts in the pallor of busy lives
Forgotten as in Dis-Believed, as In
not Honored for their Whole Purpose—
to Love, to be LOVED, and to Die with
their hands full of
what could have been
Had they Listened–
Had they Heard—
Had they begun to Believe
that inside their future
they held the Seed, As Children,
to Become All they were Meant
TO BE—
Had they Not compared
their Dreams to Another’s—
Had they Known that in the Internal
Gold Treasure Trove of
their gossamer Thoughts, Intentions
and Hopes—
they could Have It ALL—
Don’t let GO—
Remember
Who You Are
What You Dreamed (before Someone
taught you they were impossible)
Keep Listening to the Deep
Impregnable Art of the
Threads of Design in Your Mind
and Heart—
Creator and Created One
In Sync.

Blessing Others, Self and God
By Keeping to Your True Destiny
Fullness of Joy
Being Doing Dreaming
Art in your music,
numbers, architecture
of a life fully lived
before God—
as in—Who You Were Meant to Be—
Amen.