celtic cross

My wife checked out the book from the library called “Journeys of Simplicity” and it consists of vignettes of poems, prayers, and lists of meaningful possessions of over forty spiritual travelers.  A few quotes in the book gravitated to my attention that I wish to share with you:

We take delight in things; we take delight in being loosed from things. Between these two delights, we must dance our lives.  -Philip Harnden. Quaker author.

The following is a prayer of a Celtic woman over a hundred years ago. It a prayer that transforms ordinary chores into sacraments.  Rising in an earthen hut in the cold morning as the rest of the household is still asleep she begins her daily sacred routine; washing her face and tending to the night banked fire:

Splashing my face with three palmfuls of water

God of Life. Christ of Love. Spirit of Peace.

Triune of Grace

Kindling my fire thrice lift the peat

God, kindle in me a flame of love

To neighbor, foe and friend.

My kindred all. Amen.

Navigating life and faced with choices of what to pour energy into I was refreshed to remember the vital importance of maintaining a simple awareness that God is infused in the details of life. Our invitation is to cultivate this way of seeing and be a pure conduit for love to flow….

Here’e a gem of a beat from Slak that we’ve been working on for a few months. We figured it was time to give everyone a little preview of whats in the mix.  This was streamed and recorded live at on the weekly Inkre:Mentals broadcast @ www.loveisconcrete.com…you can click here to watch the whole show. 

Please feel free to add comments, prayers, and/or questions about the lyrics.  The question we ask is: “How do you stand in pain?”

Here we are, Here we are…Before God. Before Family. I vow my love to your life permanent as it can be. Tiffany…this is our brave start. The most epic day of our life so far. Here we are, Here we are…Oh my God; love us into this love, cause this is the day we always dreamed of…..

Faith: The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen

My 28^th birthday was on Sunday and it felt like I hit bottom on a two-week slide of self-loathing.  Here’s the day everyone wants to sing songs to me, look me in the eye and give encouraging words, wish me blessings on the upcoming year, and I want to get away to avoid the healing pain of reality.   It’s hard to hear a bunch of loving words that you don’t agree with.  I’m thinking either these people have no idea who I am OR more likely, I have no idea who I am.

There are holes in my faith that have been drilled with diamond tipped false-beliefs and it became obvious when my brother Jesse spoke truth to me and I didn’t believe what he was saying but I had faith that he was speaking truth.  I didn’t believe I could handle being celebrated on Sunday… (in faith) I showed up to our gathering called the Bridge, two after parties, and later went to work.  The outcome was I made it though and I’m sitting in front of a drawing board of identity squinting to see the lines.  Jesus tells us to seek first the kingdom of righteousness – he also says we will move mountains with faith the size of a mustard seed.  How’s it going?

That’s a question I’ve dreaded answering lately is “How’s it going?”  I’d rather not bring people down, so I have practiced padded answers that divert the focus of the conversation to something/someone else, benefiting nobody.  There is a prophetess in our community that I unsuccessfully tried to avoid on Sunday because I knew that she could look deep into my soul, listen beyond my padded answer, and crush my heart with truth that I both crave and fear.  Deborah grabs my arm and asks, “How’s it going?”  I give her a padded “OK” (instantly felt like my cover was blown) – and the truth finally comes out, “I’m really uncomfortable with the confusion in my life right now.”  …you have no idea how good it felt to say this out loud to another person!  With a smile she says, “Good, this is good for you right now.”  I take a breath and let the message sink in – one false belief I harbored was that my confusion is a bad thing.

If you’re lost, isn’t it better to know you’re lost rather than stumble blindly deeper into darkness?  Isn’t it better to admit being confused and open to direction?  The man who doesn’t believe he’s sick will refuse a visit to the doctor.

We need people in our lives to speak truth to us when we believe the lies.  We need faith in order to receive their words (despite whether or not we believe them).  The people in your life are mirrors to see yourself in.  I’m thankful to all the mirrors that reflect the image of God that we were created in so I can remember from where I came. A super special thanks goes out to my friends and family who helped redeem my birthday this year and give back a part of me that was lost.

-Thanks for reading – comments about faith and belief, false-beliefs, or on struggles celebrating yourself are much appreciated.  Bless Bless

- Justin

Tonight I simultaneously sipped some  herbal tea  and Martin Luther King Jr. writings.  I came across an exquisite sermon he wrote in a Georgia jail entitled, “Shattered Dreams”.  As I took in the flavor of MLK’s sermon about ‘absorbing the most intense pain without abandoning our sense of hope’ (Strength to Love, King, p.95)  freshly painted pictures and video’s of Haiti’s crisis of the devastating 7.0 earthquake  plauged my mind that I had just viewed on the Al-Jezeera news website.

The dreams and hopes to trade a better future for a weary past in Haiti were smashed in a matter of seconds. Death. Agony. Destruction.

MLK Jr’s dreams of non-violence, freedom, equality and ‘transforming the dangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood’  (I Have a Dream) linger on unrealized in the midst of violence, wars and greed that plauge our nation.

MLK asks the question in his sermon, “what do we do with unsatisfied hopes?”

He preaches to us to honestly confront our shattered dreams. This is the first step toward redemption. Applying this ointment of MLK’s preaching to our wounds today; What if we honestly confront our  own smashed hopes of a better world and a better life? What if we honestly confront what has happened to our Haitian neighbors to the south?  What if we daringly stared at these shattered dreams and mustered enough faith to believe that God dwells with us and with those in life’s most confining and oppressive circumstances?

I don’t know what would happen. I’d like to hear your thoughts.

I’m left thinking what else can we do but keep caravaning into the mystery of the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazereth as the gateway to find hope in utter brokenness.

sunset on 2009

Hello all, here are a few  goals for incremental advancement in this human experience in 2010 that I’m thinking about….

My New Year Intentions:

-Be a damn good husband to Tiffany and love her in the cruciform style of the Messiah and learn to dance in the two becoming one mystery… (I’m getting married in March!!!)

-Seek God through; contemplative prayer practice, embedding into the scriptures, creative compassionate actions and experimenting new ways to celebrate and lament.

-Start back up with my interviewing habit.

-Write songs and rap my heart out, record raps, freestyle when the opportunity comes and make quality art and share it all over the land.

-Learn a bunch about gardening, vegetables, and herbs as I grow stuff at my house and at Roosevelt.

-Be creative and imaginative in my youth advocacy

-Being open to surprises….

These are a few of my new years intentions, what are some that are stirring in you?

If you’ve ever given something away for free (time, money, possessions…etc) you know how good it feels. Only when we give freely are we freed from our possessions possessing us. Robert, Vickie, Anna, all members of the Bridge community freely gave us their time, care, resources, people opened up their homes to us (Thanks Jo!), we lived and ate food that was provided for by loving people from all over the US, and we were not required to give anything back in return. People gave up what they “owned.” We also broke our bank accounts in faith to offer this world an invitation into what we experience living in as community of people who love and follow Jesus – The Christ.

All we need to live has already been given to us – even life itself has been given to us! All this other “stuff” that we possess is not ours – we came into this world with nothing, we’ll leave with the same. Acts Chapter 4 of the Bible describes what a community centered around Christ looked like in the first century AD and reads like this in the Message version:

32-33The whole congregation of believers was united as one—one heart, one mind! They didn’t even claim ownership of their own possessions. No one said, “That’s mine; you can’t have it.” They shared everything. The apostles gave powerful witness to the resurrection of the Master Jesus, and grace was on all of them.

34-35And so it turned out that not a person among them was needy. Those who owned fields or houses sold them and brought the price of the sale to the apostles and made an offering of it. The apostles then distributed it according to each person’s need.

This community is a beautiful thing to imagine. One must look hard to find a group of people living the life described above. This doesn’t mean that early Christ-following communities didn’t have some of the same problems that we do today, but this paints a picture to how things could be. This is the alternative to protecting an identity found in our earthly possessions.

What do I hold onto as part of my identity…as if it actually belongs to me?