Advent

At that time, we were waiting.

For what? you ask.

For everything in the world that was fading and being made new.

For the return of the one who had come.

For the real to become yet more real.

For Christmas.

End in sight

However long the way,
Dark the night,
Rocky the path I grope along--

Let me see with the
Eyes of my spirit
That City of peace and
Delight I will call Home.

. . .

To travel straight, one must
Look at the horizon.

Dismayed to discover

[and then I found that I had rushed the silence out
and was alone.]

Foretaste

I love when we who are meant to be

home together

are.

The world to come

gives samples

of its delights.

Observation

The leaves that shimmer in the evening light

are the ones flexible enough to bend with the wind.

The evening's question

The horizons are misty.

Is this art or life?

Just a bit

John Piper had a thoughtful post at the Desiring God blog explaining why twitter has not been a stultifying medium for writing for him.

Size is not inherently virtue.

On Hospitality

I remembered again this past weekend how much I love giving hospitality. As I am between homes of my own, a friend offered to co-host a party with me on Saturday night.

It's amazing how much the investment of preparing food opens your heart to those you serve. Something about the act of sharing food, having labored in preparation, ties us, holistic beings that we are, more closely to one another than any meeting in a neutral place. I hesitate to say that the body serves the soul--perhaps it does, or perhaps our bodies, subject as they are to the weakness of this waiting-consummation-world, have their own function in our personhood. Equal, different, complementarian.

The touch, the smell, the taste of being together is wrapped up in hospitality. Preparing food is the not-yetness of physical presence. The foretaste of whole companionship. The firstfruits.

This, too, is a very good thing. The man, after all, was formed from the dust before God breathed the breath of life. Let us not forget the body's part when we prepare to feed the soul.

Beginnings

Faith is that scarlet thread leading through the side-wending looping labyrinth of hope.

These virtues are never so real, and never so far, as in the hard moments. Growth comes through pruning, which God kindly takes care of in my life. But growth comes, too, from watering, from tenderly tying the wayward tendrils back to the trellis. These happen, often, in community and conversation. And that is what I hope to foster here.