November Twenty-Nineteen

November Twenty-Nineteen 

"She is like what champagne would look like if it took human form, and her joy bubbles over into each of us."  -Lisa Jo Baker The Middle Matters

“The whole creation cries to us penetratingly with a great joy about the existence and the beauty and the love of God. The music roars it into our ears, the landscape calls it into our eyes....

 ...In all of nature we find God’s initials, and all God’s creatures are God’s love letters to us.

“All of nature burns with love created through love to light love in us. Nature is like a shadow of God, a reflection of God’s beauty. The still, blue lake is a reflection of God. Each of my cells is a hymn about the Creator and an ongoing declaration of love.”

–Ernesto Cardenal, To Live Is to Love

"Loving God, from whom no secret is hid (and none need to be), out of the thoughts and feelings which whirl within, I grope for the language to carry to you my secrets and all the wonders that seize my heart.

...Praise be to you for holding me in the womb of mystery thought all the eons of creation until now and raising me to life in this time and place....

...I am so thankful to be alive- breathing, moving, sensing, wide-eyed, cock-eared alive—in this mysterious instant, at this luminous time, on this nurturing earth, this blue pearl of great price whirling through uncharted space, attended by vigilant stars; during these days of chance and battle, with streaks of hope and holiness on the horizon, touched by nature’s pleading beauty and friendship’s steady hold.... 

...I am so thankful to be alive- eyes in love with seeing, ears in love with hearing, heart in love with attending, mind in love with connecting; eager to miss no message of grace in the ballet of beauty or in the cramp of struggle of this incredible gift of life...

...attentive to all the clues of love, daringly and outlandishly scattered for me through Jesus’ life, overturning habit and hate; attentive to the dreams he renews, the wounds he heals, the promises he nails up for me to step out on...

...I am so thankful to be alive, thankful for those times when the rhythms of my life catch the cadences of your kingdom, when there is a lightning in me for a moment, when the creep of courage allows me to dare to serve the gifts you have put in me...

...thankful for the surge of determination to accept difficulty not as an excuse for passivity, but as a goad to creativity, as the door to abundant life, and the seed of peace the world cannot take away, as it takes away so much else.... 

...I am so thankful to be alive…hold me always in the womb of mystery and raise me again and again forever, to life, and to love, and to the claims of your kingdom.

-Ted Loder, Guerrillas of Grace