Some days my narrow shoulders buckle under the weight of listening to my friends' troubles. Other days I feel like the luckiest man alive - God thick
all around me while in the midst of sorrows. But most days, I’m a little dizzy with a
concoction of both.
I think about you this day, this ash wednesday morning. With
your wonderful anglican bells and smells and liturgy you’ll join this Man-God who
walks with and before us to Jerusalem. And like you, I’ll humbly cross the foreheads of my
friends with an ashed-covered thumb. Yep… today i’m the luckiest man alive!
The season that today inaugurates seems more like a journey
than all the others. Christmas, Epiphany, Pentecost; they all seem done to me. Or ignored by me. Maybe it’s simply the journey with Jesus that is so appealing. And scary.
My mentor gave me this grrrreat book for Christmas compiled
by James Houston called Letters of Faith
through the Seasons. One of the letters was written by a seminarian
completing her doctorate, who feels both called to and trapped between her true
vocation of prayer and theological scholarship. The journey she travels is
quite harrowing:
I sense that I am at a
road that is forking, but I cannot see it cognitively. Only in prayer do I see
that I am at a juncture, an opportunity to choose. One is the path God has
chosen for me. The other is the path of my own choice, to continue to do
theology, to be “successful” at it, to publish, to receive acclaim.
So please pray with me
for traveling mercies – that God
would protect me through this time in my life. It is never a “crisis,” but it
is always the undertow that threatens to pull me under. I think it is the
difference between ending up as a theologian or as someone-who-prays.
We will all feel the slight undertow today.
Would you pray with me:
Traveling mercies to us all, my Lord, traveling mercies on
our journey this Lenten season.
