March Twenty- Nineteen

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.”