Living Story Grace

The Gift of Getting Caught

etstory — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:29:55 +0000

When my children were young, I remember a mom telling me that she always prayed that if her teenagers got in trouble, they would be “caught.” I hadn’t ever really thought of it before, but her point was an excellent one — if they were caught, they could experience discipline and consequences, forgiveness and redemption. On a rather interesting side note, one night when my husband was coming home from a late night on call, he ‘caught’ her son with several others rolling a neighbor’s tree in grand style. When he called her, she was completely gracious and grateful to him for telling her:).
I love this quote from Sharon Hersh on being caught…
“This book considers the gift of getting caught, because this is when we have the chance to experience being known, loved, and still wanted….we will examine the gift of humiliation that leads to the gift of surrender…we will look at the unlikely gift of woundedness, because wounds, no matter how painful or unsightly, are where Love gets in with the healing gifts of mercy and forgiveness.” Sharon Hersh, “The Last Addiction”

Finding Hope in Loss

etstory — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:30:32 +0000

Wrongdoing and Reconciliation

etstory — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 22:07:14 +0000

The End of Memory by Miroslav Volf

This rainy afternoon, I’m thinking about peacemaking, and inevitably that takes me to those who have suffered grievous wrongs and yet continued to hope. So, today a word from one of my all-time favorites, Miroslav Volf:

“Grievous wrongdoing doesn’t just wound the body and soul, and it doesn’t just worm its way into our identity. It also entraps us. Like a ball chained to a prisoner’s leg, it drags heavily on our spirit and prevents it from roaming freely, stretching itself into the unknown, playing with new possibilities. Susan Brison describes with deep insight how a wrongdoing endured robs a person of the future. “The past,’ she writes, ‘reaches toward the present and throttles desire before it can become directed toward the future.’

“Even more definitively, in Jesus Christ God has promised to every human being a new horizon of possibilities – a new life into which each of us is called to grow in our own way and ultimately a new world freed from all enmity, a world of love. To be a Christian means that new possibilities are defined by that promise, not by any past experience, no matter how devastating. If the traumatized believe the promise — if they live into the promise, even if they are tempted at first to mock it – they will, in Kelsey’s words, enter a world ‘marked by a genuinely open future that they could not have imagined in the living death of the old world they have constructed for themselves.’”
Volf is also quoting in this section David Kelsey, Imagining Redemption

Community: The Basic Quest from Mother Theresa

etstory — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 20:15:53 +0000

Putting the final touches on an upcoming workshop on community — what is it and why do we do it — here are two great quotes — the first from Jesus, the second from Mother Theresa. I challenge us all — let’s not just read them — let’s look at the faces of three people we come across – at least two strangers, and think about what it truly means to incarnate the love God created us to receive and give.

“My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, 21 that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22 I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— 23 I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” John 17:20-23

“People today are hungry for love, for understanding love, which is…the only answer to loneliness and great poverty. That is why we are able to go to countries like England and America and Australia, where there is no hunger for bread. But there people are suffering from terrible loneliness, terrible despair, terrible hatred, feeling unwanted, feeling helpless, feeling hopeless. They have forgotten how to smile, they have forgotten the beauty of the human touch. They are forgetting what is human love. They need someone who will understand and respect them.”
Mother Theresa

Shame, Vulnerability, and Connection

etstory — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 20:42:52 +0000