March Twenty-Nineteen
Bless
this day,
this blank page
newly turned.
May its story,
once written,
bring only glory
to your name.
- John Birch
Don't miss any opportunity to exert the power you have to remind others of who they are: invaluable, priceless, and irreplaceable. Remind yourself too. -Donna Hicks
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely
to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against
it. –Rumi
Love isn't a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now. -Mr Rogers
The biggest human temptation is to settle for
too little. -Thomas Merton
God is forming us into a new people. And the place of that
formation is in the small moments of today. –Tish Harrison Warren
Intense love does not
measure, it just gives.
–Mother Teresa
Parenting
is do-overs times infinity. –Lisa Jo Baker
Rodney Clapp writes about a theological
understanding of church, communities, and families and the role society plays
in raising children. In one of the concluding chapters of his book Families at the Crossroads, he talks about the
concept of welcoming children/ teenagers as a meditation in welcoming in “the
stranger”. He says, “the postmodern world is a world where we are much more aware of and
must learn to live with the “other,” those unlike us no less than those like
us. In postmodern terms, then, we might say Christians have children so we
can become the kind of people who welcome strangers.” Later he says this- “Christian parenthood, then, is a practice in
hospitality, in the welcoming and support of strangers. Welcoming the strangers
who are our children, we learn a little about being out of control, about the
possibility of surprise (and so of hope), about how strange we ourselves are.
Moment by mundane moment- dealing with rebellion, hosting birthday parties,
struggling to understand exactly what a toddler has dreamed and been so
frightened by in the night- we pick up skills in patience, empathy, generosity,
forgiveness. And all these are transferable skills, skills we can and must use
to welcome other strangers, especially to those strangers who are not our
children but our brothers and sisters in Christ.”
