Author: Laurie Gudim

Last week during our spiritual direction supervision meeting, one of my colleagues read a confession.  She talked about feeling totally listless, gray.  About how she cannot force herself to pray, how her exercise program has gone out the window and she finds herself turning on the TV too often, watching too much “news” and other empty programming.  At several points as I listened I found myself silently affirming, “I do that, too.”

“You love me into opening my eyes, opening my overwhelmed heart.  You urge me into prayer.  You push me into the tearing compassion that is its own anchor in a charred and broken world.  You dare me to give — just one more time — and then another — never more than what I have — but sometimes all I have.”

“Like all Christians, I am called to be an emissary of the Good News.  There is another way to live, and it manifests in care for other people and for the planet.  Christ teaches us this way.  All that we have belongs to God; we are merely stewards. “

“In today’s second lesson from the Hebrew Bible, Wisdom is a woman.  She has prepared a banquet in her home, and she invites all who are simple to turn in there.  Eat, drink, and be wise, she invites.”

“‘Speak to those who cross your path,” says God. “Help forge relationships between them and me.  Learn their languages of hope and meaning, and make a crack so that I can enter their understanding.  Because I am right there like a beggar at their gates.'”

“In my experience, deciding with my mind that I believe in Jesus is as foolish as deciding that I believe in water.  I can decide to go boating or swimming, I can fish in a river, I can sit by the side of the ocean and watch the endless crash of waves, I can drink fresh water or cook with it or freeze it into ice.  All those things make sense.  But deciding whether or not I believe in water is a pointless exercise.”

“You might tell me that this vision is idealistic.  It glosses over the petty side of church life.  For instance, there are always going to be competitions and struggles.  People will always seek power.  They’ll have precious rituals or items that they feel they absolutely must protect.”

“God does not take care of Grandma and Grandpa in the way that I as a small child expected.  After all, Grandma and Grandpa died.  God takes care of them in a more essential way.  God stands in a never-ending relationship with us, a relationship in which we are one with everything that exists.”

God of all the earth, our country is celebrating its 245th anniversary today. And we who live in this nation have much to be grateful

“And then I came to understand that I could always touch his clothes, for what he wears is love.  Caring for the people of the world that he cares for, I would be touching the hem of his robe all the time.  As loathsome as I imagined myself to be, I was still more than all right, and I was meant for love.”