room to flourish

Sunday, June 16, 2013

made in his image, day 7

God created out of the overflow and fullness of his love. There was so much delight within God himself that he wanted others to be drawn into the circle of love that was enjoyed in the original family. The German mystic, Meister Eckhart, once said that God created us out of “the laughter of the Trinity.” There is a sense in which God could not contain himself, he wanted others to be drawn into the life enjoyed in the Godhead. (Dr. Greg Ogden online sermon, Christ Church of Oakbrook)

The early church fathers describe the Trinity as a Round Dance in which Love flames forth from one Person to the Other in a flow that never ceases…The Father is One and his Dance is Three: Love flowing out of the Silence of the Secret One to the Son, and returning to Abba in one concurrent, timeless motion—in the embrace of the Spirit. (Dancing Madly Backwards by Paul Marechal)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: I Have a Maker

I have a Maker

He formed my heart

Before even time began
My life was in His hands

He knows my name,
He knows my every thought
He sees each tear that falls
And hears me when I call

I have a Father,
He calls me His own
He’ll never leave me
no matter where I go

Closing Prayer:
Loving Creator, I have no quarrel with the way you have so carefully designed me in your image. Truly I am your work of art. Take me deeper today. Show me my virtues—the wonders of your design for my life. Help me not to be afraid to look into the depths of myself and believe in what I see—for I am the work of your hands. If I can believe in what I see, then I can rejoice in what I see. Precious in your sight, I am your work of art. Continue to create me in your image. Amen. (Behold Your Life by Macrina Wiederkehr)

made in his image, day 6

Come to Stillness: Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before God.

Opening Prayer:
Blessed are you, God of all creation. Let us who are made in your image and are sustained by your hand reflect you in all that we do, that in all things you may be glorified, forever and ever. Amen. (Work of God)

Psalm for the Week: Psalm 139

Scripture for the Day: 2 Corinthians 3:12-18

Reading for Reflection:

In the mysteries of eternity past, God the Father, God the Son, and the Holy Spirit dwelled in unsurpassed union and intimacy. The Holy Three have always existed as a divine dance of romance, a whirlwind of affection and pleasure and love unending. It was from this pulsating intimacy that God created humanity and the natural order. Though we will always remain the creation, He formed humanity to enter into relationship with the Trinity, the Godhead. In His great mysterious heart was a desire to bring human beings into the holy river of affections known between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and to share in this Divine communion with them. The Father desired a family, and the Son desired a bride. From this overflow of burning desire, humanity was brought forth. (Deep Unto Deep by Dana Candler)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: I Have a Maker

I have a Maker

He formed my heart

Before even time began
My life was in His hands

He knows my name,
He knows my every thought
He sees each tear that falls
And hears me when I call

I have a Father,
He calls me His own
He’ll never leave me
no matter where I go

Friday, June 14, 2013

made in his image, day 5

In reality, however, the image of Christ is the fulfillment of the deepest hungers of the human heart for wholeness. The greatest thirst of our being is for fulfillment in Christ’s image. The most profound yearning of the human spirit, which we try to fill with all sorts of inadequate substitutes, is the yearning for our completeness in the image of Christ. (Invitation to a Journey by M Robert Mulholland Jr.)

John Calvin, the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformer, claimed that the image of God remains on our souls; yet because we have so corrupted the image by sin, it is hard to recognize it in us. In silent moments, though, there is still enough of the image left for us to realize that we thirst for something. (Sacred Thirst by Craig Barnes)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: I Have a Maker

I have a Maker,

He formed my heart

Before even time began
My life was in His hands

He knows my name,
He knows my every thought
He sees each tear that falls
And hears me when I call

I have a Father,
He calls me His own
He’ll never leave me
no matter where I go

Thursday, June 13, 2013

made in his image, day 4

Come to Stillness: Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before God.

Opening Prayer:
Blessed are you, God of all creation. Let us who are made in your image and are sustained by your hand reflect you in all that we do, that in all things you may be glorified, forever and ever. Amen. (Work of God)

Psalm for the Week: Psalm 139

Scripture for the Day: Psalm 8:1-9

Reading for Reflection:

The story that is the Sacred Romance begins not with God alone, the Author at his desk, but with God in relationship, intimacy beyond our wildest imagination, heroic intimacy. The Trinity is at the center of the universe; perfect relationship is the heart of reality. Think of your best moments of love or friendship or creative partnership, the best times with family or friends around the dinner table, your richest conversations, the acts of simple kindness that sometimes seem like the only things that make life worth living. Like the shimmer of sunlight on a lake, these are reflections of the love that flows from among the Trinity. We long for intimacy because we are made in the image of perfect intimacy. (The Sacred Romance by Brent Curtis and John Eldredge)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: I Have a Maker

I have a Maker,

He formed my heart

Before even time began
My life was in His hands

He knows my name,
He knows my every thought
He sees each tear that falls
And hears me when I call

I have a Father,
He calls me His own
He’ll never leave me
no matter where I go

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

made in his image, day 3

Our very existence is one of the never-to-be-repeated ways God has chosen to express himself in space and time. Because we are made in God’s image and likeness, you and I are yet another promise that he has made to the universe that He will continue to love it and care for it.

Yet even if we grasp the fact that we are a word uttered by God, we may not grasp what he is trying to say through us. In Seeds of Contemplation Merton writes, “God utters me like a word containing a partial thought of himself. A word will never be able to comprehend the voice that utters it. But if I am true to the concept God utters in me, if I am true to the thought in him I was meant to embody, I shall be full of his actuality and find him everywhere in myself, and find myself nowhere. I shall be lost in him.” (Ruthless Trust by Brennan Manning)

You are a special and sacred word-of-God-made-flesh. He loves you as you are. He spoke your name and created you as a unique person. So be who you are as created by God. In prayer say your own word, sing your own song and be true to it. (A Traveler Toward the Dawn by John Eagan)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: I Have a Maker

I have a Maker,

He formed my heart

Before even time began
My life was in His hands

He knows my name,
He knows my every thought
He sees each tear that falls
And hears me when I call

I have a Father,
He calls me His own
He’ll never leave me
no matter where I go

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

made in his image, day 2

Come to Stillness: Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before God.

Opening Prayer:
Blessed are you, God of all creation. Let us who are made in your image and are sustained by your hand reflect you in all that we do, that in all things you may be glorified, forever and ever. Amen. (Work of God)

Psalm for the Week: Psalm 139

Scripture for the Day: Romans 8:18-27

Reading for Reflection:

These days when someone commits an atrocity, we tend to sigh and say, “That’s human nature.” But our attitude would seem wrong-headed to the desert monks, who understood human beings to be part of the creation that God called good, special in that they are made in the image of God. Sin, then, is an aberration, not natural to us at all. This is why Gregory of Nyssa speaks so often of “returning to the grace of that image which was established in you from the beginning.” Gregory, in fact, saw it as our lifelong task to find out what part of the divine image God has chosen to reveal in us. Like the other early monks, he suggests that we can best do this by realistically determining how God has made us—what our primary faults and temptations are, as well as our gifts—not that we might better “know ourselves,” or in modern parlance, “feel good about ourselves,” but in order that we might become instruments of divine grace for other people. (The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: I Have a Maker

I have a Maker,

He formed my heart

Before even time began
My life was in His hands

He knows my name,
He knows my every thought
He sees each tear that falls
And hears me when I call

I have a Father,
He calls me His own
He’ll never leave me
no matter where I go

Monday, June 10, 2013

made in his image, day 1

I am not sure exactly what all I think we mean when we say that we are made in the image of God. But part of it, I believe, is that the calling voice of God is sounding out in the caves and caverns deep beneath the soil of our souls. And it is by obeying this call we learn who we truly are and what we can become.

So if I do not seem to hear him speak from outside, and if there does not seem to be any message from the sky, then I must listen to the voice that is within me. For that voice, too, is the purposeful, calling voice of God to us.

Not many of us have enough confidence in ourselves to listen to that whispering voice that comes from within. Most of the time, we do not even hear it. But it doesn’t matter because we wouldn’t trust it. We cannot believe that this inner voice is capable of leading us due north.

We seek advice from friends and professionals, disc jockeys and Dear Abbys. We put out a fleece. We flip coins. We take aptitude tests. We do everything but believe that we could possibly have the answers deep within.

The message of Paul in this place is that the calling indeed comes in the lives of the unlikely and the “foolish.” You think you are unlikely; well you’re not. You have difficulty believing that God could do great things in you; well, he wouldn’t.

Now if God can take a tiny seed and, in the process of giving it his life, endow it with a knowledge of what it is supposed to be; if he can give it the purpose and strength and fruitfulness to not only accomplish it all, but to perpetuate itself as well; and if he can give it an inner calendar to tell it when all of this is supposed to be done, why is it so hard to believe he has done the same for our hearts?

Since he has done this for tomatoes and thistles and beans and dandelions, it shouldn’t stretch our credibility so much to believe that his image in us, the image inherent in the life he gives to each of us, is calling us to be.

The trick is to hear the voice, to believe it, and to trust it. (See You at the House by Bob Benson)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: I Have a Maker

I have a Maker,

He formed my heart

Before even time began
My life was in His hands

He knows my name,

He knows my every thought
He sees each tear that falls

And hears me when I call

I have a Father, He calls me His own

He’ll never leave me no matter where I go

room to flourish

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Sunday, June 16, 2013

made in his image, day 7

made in his image, day 6

Friday, June 14, 2013

made in his image, day 5

Thursday, June 13, 2013

made in his image, day 4

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

made in his image, day 3

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

made in his image, day 2

Monday, June 10, 2013

made in his image, day 1