When you hold resentment toward another, you are bound to that person or condition by an emotional link that is stronger than steel. Forgiveness is the only way to dissolve that link and get free.
– Katherine Ponder
The past gives us experience and memories;
the present gives us challenges and opportunities;
the future gives us vision and hope.
William Arthur Ward
Be strong, and let your heart take courage,
all you who hope for the LORD!
Psalm 31:24
Maritta Terrell
Thoughts are also posted at:
http://thoughtsaday.blogspot.com/
I’m back in Massachusetts after a week of travels in California and Montana. I led a retreat, visited my dearly beloved Pacific Ocean, saw a friend I haven’t seen for 15 years, and spent some time with my sister and brother. I waved to our sons in the Twin Cities as I flew by.
All those places were familiar; they were my home at some time in my life. Now I’m home in Massachusetts, which, after eighteen months, still feels the least like “home” to me. Twenty different houses in seven states (and also England) have at some time been the place I called home. When people ask me where I’m from, what should I say?
This is not uncommon; we are mobile. And our jobs, social surroundings, families and life situations change. In some way all of us, even those of us who live in the house that’s been in the family for generations, are migrants, exiles and refugees. We’ve come from, or are heading, somewhere else. So with all this bumping around, where do we really belong?
Well, hokey as it sounds, we belong in God. Our surroundings may or may not be where we are “from,” but regardless of the landscape, we come from God, we are rooted in God, and we are known and desired in a place that is our own, in God. We are not little specks far below that God looks down on from heaven as from a plane. We live in God’s heart, within God’s compassionate presence, inside God’s love. No matter where we are, we are held in God’s gentle arms. We may be ill suited to our surroundings, or find them foreign, or long for the familiar land or people we call home; we may feel uprooted, alien or lost, and we are probably not now where we will some day be; but we are never outside God’s loving presence. Each of us, wherever we are in our life’s journey, belongs just where we are in God.
When someone asks you where you’re from, pause a moment before you answer and listen for that heavenly voice that silently says, “Right here.”
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
http://www.unfoldinglight.net
The purpose of life is to discover your gift. The meaning of life is to give your gift away.
– David Viscott
Calling, it waits for the hour when the soul shall open itself, having found its God and its home. When this is so, the soul will not keep its wealth to itself, but will let it flow out into the world. Wherever love proceeds from us and becomes truth, the time is fulfilled. Then the divine life floods through our human relationships and all our works. Then everything that is lonely and scattered and seeking for the way of God shall be bound together by divine power. Then, of human effort and of the divine miracle, shall the world be born in which Christ is fulfilled as reality.
– Eberhard Arnold
I would like to have engraved inside every wedding band,
“Be kind to one another.”
This is the Golden Rule of marriage and
the secret of making love last through the years.
– Randolph Ray
But the fruit of the Spirit is
Love, joy, peace, patience,
kindness, goodness, faithfulness,
gentleness, self-control;
against such things there is no law.
Galatians 5:22-23
Maritta Terrell
Thoughts are also posted at:
http://thoughtsaday.blogspot.com/
life: acoustic & amplified 