Tag Archives: imagination

Grace as a practice of love

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Grace is love freely given, with no restrictions and no demands on the person who is loved. Grace chooses to accept and respect other people simply because they are part of God’s creation, made in God’s image, and because God loves them. Grace is not only God’s gift to us individually, but our gift to other people.

God’s path of grace winds gracefully through the woods of this world filled with the sounds of people crying out for simple respect and for love freely given.

Gracious thoughts flow more freely for me now than ten years ago. I confess to a natural tendency to be critical of people, to see them do something “wrong” and to quickly “know” what they “should” do. Because I am naturally passive, I usually would not tell them, unless they asked. But the thoughts and judgments were there.

As a child I learned what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount: “Do not judge” and “First take the log out of your own eye so you can see clearly to take the splinter out of your neighbor’s eye.” Yet I did not live up to those words. Judgments, even condemnations, came easily.

In the past ten years, an important path of my journey has been to move toward grace, toward love freely given, toward a non-judgmental and gracious attitude toward other people. It is not an easy path to walk.

THE GRACE OF GOD

We hear grace in these words from John’s gospel: God did not send [the] Son into the world to con-demn the world, but to save [heal] the world through him. [John 3:17] God loved the world and sent light into the darkness of this world because of divine grace, as a gift because of God’s own choice and not because of anything we had done. This is the gospel of grace.

If some choose not to accept that grace and choose not to come into the light of God’s love, they are like people given a wrapped present who set it down and never open it and never enjoy it. … Continue reading here

Five Movements

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Five Movements of Changing Churches:

1.      Compassion – Love of God and all creation guides all our decisions and actions.

2.      Contemplation – Practices of prayer and meditation combine with a deepening spirituality at the core of our Christian life.

3.      Community – Individual behavior comes out of knowing ourselves as part of a community of both church and world with a commitment to the well-being of all.

4.      Connection – Awareness that our relationship with God weaves together with all of God’s creation creates action seeking to heal and restore.

5.      Cooperation – Working together to fulfill God’s desires for creation displaces competition and exclusion, making shalom a reality for all.

Connecting

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This new Google and Facebook world is all about connecting – with old friends and new friends, with people we’ve never met and may never meet, with people who know what we want to know or have what we want to have. It’s a world of immediate connections – instant messaging, search results in a fraction of a second, texting, videoconferencing.

It’s a new world where interdependence and the web of networks in our world have become apparent. How can we nurture the fantasy that we don’t need other people or that we can stand on our own without help? Or that other people do not need our help?

In this world that values connecting, the Church can thrive as it nurtures its calling to connect people with other people and with God. We will thrive as we offer the help other people need and seek out their help with what we need. We will thrive if we open up ourselves to the world around us, knowing that we are part of the web of life, an essential, God-called part of all of life.

Find a new way

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When we are in conflict with someone, we often think the solution lies within our previous experience. That is, we believe if we can just go back and do it this way or that way—some way we have known before—the conflict will be over. Of course, each person involved probably has a different idea of what that way might be.

Albert Einstein is quoted as saying that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. He also said that “the significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.” – Conflict always comes out of change. Our lives are changing. Our circumstances, relationships, beliefs are all being tested and challenged and affected by forces beyond our control. Our discomfort and dis-ease (anxiety) generates conflict within ourselves and between us and other people.

Especially when conflict clearly comes from changes forced upon us, we need to remember Einstein’s words. We cannot just go back and do what we once did. We will go crazy. We cannot just try a slightly different version of what we did before. We must be creative and imaginative and find another way. We must move to a new level of thinking through the use of creative imagination and find a new way out of our conflict.

What gives you life?

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From our friends, Dennis and Sheila Linn, we learned this saying: “It is almost always God’s will to do more of what gives you life.” When we’re seeking discernment about God’s will for our lives, we need to ask ourselves this question: “What gives me life?” What excites me, energizes me? What stirs up creative ideas in my mind and new dreams in my heart?

 

I find that when I seem “stuck” in trying to figure out what God wants me to do, I often feel drained of energy. I feel lethargic, perhaps even paralyzed, unable to do anything or to think of any way out of the situation. In those moments, if I can step back from the cliff of uncertainty and confusion and open myself to the Spirit’s creative imagination within me, I often find that something within me begins to stir. A flicker of light, like a door to the outside being opened in a dark room, begins to illuminate the darkness. New thoughts begin to come into my mind. New dreams begin to stream into my heart. I sense a renewed energy and growing excitement as I begin to see what had been hidden.

 

What gives you life? Where is the hidden energy within you? What might the Spirit be whispering in the ears of your heart? What creative ideas and new visions are even now beginning to come in through the door on those beams of light? Let the light shine within you and cast a brilliant light on your path as the Spirit leads you forward.