One
Sunday, he asked me to sit up close to the pulpit. He wanted me to hear his sermon, he said, and
as I listened to him talk about the beauty of God’s creation and our duty to be
awed by it, all of a sudden I heard him telling the congregation about a little
girl who kept tadpoles in a birdbath so that she could watch over them as they
turned into frogs, and how her care for those creatures was part of God’s care
for the whole world. It was as if
someone had turned on all the lights- not only to hear myself spoken of in
church, but to hear that my life was part of God’s life, and that something as
ordinary as a tadpole connected the two.
My friend’s words changed everything for me. I could no longer see myself or the least
detail of my life in the same way again.
When the service was over that day I walked out of it into a
God-enchanted world, where I could not wait to find further clues to heaven on
earth. Every leaf, every ant, every shiny rock called out to me- begging to be
watched, to be listened to, to be handled and examined. I
became a detective of divinity, collecting evidence of God’s genius and
admiring the tracks left for me to follow: locusts shedding their hard bodies
for soft, new winged ones; prickly pods of milkweed spilling silky white hair;
lightning spinning webs of cold fire in the sky, as intricate as the veins in
my own wrist. My friend taught me to
believe that these were all words in the language of God.”
-Barbara Brown Taylor The Preaching Life
more pictures below from Lyla's stay with us this past week:
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