Summer Projects

I didn't blog all that much this summer. I was doing to many other projects, things that required not a little time. Here is a sampling:

The Prayer Closet

This last Sunday night my wife and I dropped our kids off at Children's Choir and went for a walk around the lake next to our church. Before the "date night" was over we ended up praying together in one of the newly remodeled prayer rooms at our church. The rooms are used by prayer teams/ministers on Sunday mornings with those who are in need.

My call to ministry is in Spiritual Direction with and through art.

I was contemplating the bare walls of the little room, and wondering about what it would be like for these walls to be adorned with ebenezers. My first thought was that such objects might be intimidating to the uninitiated - when their focus should be on encountering God through prayer in the moment. Then I saw a vision of this little prayer closet opening onto a huge rotund gallery of paintings and sculptures and objects commemorating encounters with God. I was overwhelmed. To make a long story short - I feel this vision is a calling to be involved in the prayer ministry of our church - engaging others in their journey, offering Spiritual Direction, creating and helping others to create their own ebenezers. What FUN!

In many ways this is an outward call that includes the inward practices of quiet, reflection, surrender, and prayer. It is both humbling and exciting to think that the ministry before me exists in a little unadorned windowless closet.

Our Prayer

Like cold steel shackles chafe and burn the skin, rubbing raw and scaring. I watch despair and incapacitating obligation bite viciously through to their bones.

Then a flash of bright springtime green with little yellow flowers dotting the field and cotton wisps floating in the air. In slow motion stretching, yearning eyes heavenward, leaving the earth she leaps, a pirouette of joyous vibrant color, the icy black chains falling broken back to the ground.

and back again to black eyed doubt and duty. Peeling wallpaper, rust and must make their home in bewildered blinded hearts, becoming embittered - cracked and peeling just like the walls of this cell. Like late fall leaves caught up in a thorny juniper, dry and crackling, so fragile after a season with no rain.

How to remove them without crushing them to dust?

The enemy watches too. Giggling with glee at his priceless catch of princes and queens.

Oh tears! Sweet gift of tears! Flow like sacred waters of baptism. Immerse these drying souls and soften them - be a salve for their affliction. Holy tears from our savior.

Look up and feel the life giving summer rain as it kicks up coronas of dead and dying dust all around you with each weighty plop.

Plop

Plop

Stand up from the spiritual squalor and humbly stretch your needy arms upward in the downpour of his compassion and care.

Lord hear our prayer.