Kind of like the sky was last week when I was with my brothers in North Carolina in the early morning. There is a fog and there is a beauty to it. I walk through it and cannot see in the distance, but step by step I am moving.
This has been a busy time for me and I guess that is good. Today I will finish up the 2 grief groups at church and visit at least one person post surgery. I am looking ahead to a book group at the church in the new year and preaching a couple of sermons. It is very good to be there and to be in such a nurturing community.
Last Saturday I led a retreat of about 20 women for Advent. I called it "One Candle is Lit" and I realized the theme for the day was "waiting in the dark for the light." That is a pretty good description of how Advent is for me this season. When I was walking around camp I spent a good deal of time just gazing at the lake that was partially frozen and flowing in the middle where there was a fountain. I had the sense that it reflected how I am these days - both flowing and frozen. The work I do and the time with friends and family does feel life giving and like I am flowing with God's spirit. However, there is a frozenness within me as I know that a year ago I was caring for Chuck and watching his condition gradually weaken. And I look ahead to the one year anniversary of his death which is Christmas Eve and just wonder about it all.
I am preaching on the 29th about Mary "pondering all these things" and I think that deep inside my soul there is a lot of pondering going on. So I wait in the dark for the light. Or rather - I wait in the gray for the light.
And trust that life goes on, the light shines and I am somehow being guided.
I shared this poem at the Retreat. It speaks to me this season. It is by Ted Loder.
O God of all
seasons and senses,
grant us the
sense of your timing to submit gracefully and rejoice quietly in the turn of
the seasons.
In this
season of short days and long nights, of grey and white and cold, teach us the
lessons of endings;
children
growing, friends leaving, loved ones dying, grieving over, grudges over,
blaming over, excuses over.
O God, grant
us a sense of your timing.
In this
season of short days and long nights, of grey and white and cold, teach us the
lessons of beginnings;
that such
waitings and endings may be the starting place,
a planting of
seeds which bring to birth what is ready to be born—
something
right and just and different, a new song, a deeper relationship, a fuller love—
in the
fullness of your time.
O God, grant
us the sense of your timing.
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