meditation

Mercy in the Wilderness: Prayer for a Pandemic

Mercy in the Wilderness: Prayer for a Pandemic

What if this time we share in the wilderness offers us a gift? The gift of our own undoing. What if it opens the doorways to our souls? The place where we find our true selves again. Where we find one another again. Where we find God again. Or maybe for the first time. Or maybe in a new way. What if we find a new way to be ourselves? To be together? What if there’s mercy in the pruning?

Honestly, it feels like it’s too soon to offer the words “gift” or “mercy” into the chaos. Because there’s so much pain right now. So much fear, anxiety, uncertainty. All of this is real. We feel it deeply, the groaning in our world. We can’t rush or push or work our way past it (although some will try). We must first hold this space together, acknowledge the fear and loss, and find a way to walk together through it. Loving, serving, praying, we will find the way through.

A Way Back to Trust

A Way Back to Trust

Now conscious of my turning, I consider the way back to trust. And I ready myself for the tussle. Because this trust requires honesty. It requires that I look straight into what is real today and pray. Not a flowery prayer that defies reality, but raw, visceral prayers of lament. That cry out for encounter. And in this place of prayer — talking, crying, listening, thanking, releasing — God’s goodness becomes rooted in me again. Because I begin to remember his character, his faithfulness. And I begin to see his face more clearly, the expression of love and kind knowing. In this place, in the light of Love’s face, I can rest. I can wait. I can trust.

Befriending Desire

Befriending Desire

It seems inevitable that part of maturing and growing into adulthood is a process of coming to terms with our earnest desires. You could rightly say that children and adolescents are wanting, needing, longing beings. Just take a three-year-old through the checkout counter at the grocery! As we enter young adulthood, we begin to learn that some of our larger desires and needs will require that we forgo certain immediate desires and needs. In other words, we learn to moderate or deny some desires in the short run, which is evidence of growing maturity.

The Present Is the Gift

The Present Is the Gift

Because here’s the thing. This present moment, the breath I’m taking now, is the only thing that’s real. While I still feel the effects of the past, the past itself is, well, past. And while I anticipate the future with a mix of hope and doubt, the future itself is unknowable. The only place I can know and be known, the only place I can live rooted in love, the only place I can experience God, is in this very messy moment. Rooted in the reality that there is enough, right here, right now. Me in God. God in me. In the now, there is enough.