Thursday, April 7, 2016

the slow heal

I'm as tired as a car with those weird rims and flat-ish tires. I'm worn and frazzled from a week of spiritual rest, which is hard to understand at best and awful  at worst. We've spent the week talking about how to talk about spiritual communication. We were supposed to be silent for half our days, but that went away sometime yesterday as the temperature went up and the talk went up with it.

We talked today and parts of yesterday about reconciliation and forgiveness. What we decided is it is as hard as getting people to volunteer. The hardest part of reconciliation, to me, is empathy. Feeling, but not responding. Knowing, but not reacting. Loving, but not being there. Oh, not really there. Trying, but failing like a person in a new job who has little training but loads of enthusiasm.

 Isn't it a nice thing that I can feel and experience what you feel and experience? That if we have done things of a like mind and heart, we have a chance of connecting?

Oh, I am often not sympathetic, and often don't take the time to even TRY to sympathise with the persons I come in contact with. But I can and must, absolutely must, be with you as you experience your feelings. Experience your desires. Experience your health issues, and your depressions, and your joys. Your child-like moments of like-mindedness. You know what I mean. The moments where love connects or intersects with hate and we no longer are in complete control though we fight it like a championship bout.

I want to respond. In some ways I need to respond, but I can't. It's this that I can't work through. This that I can't re-do or re-make. I am who I am, created by a loving God to be this person. THIS person. No one else.

Reconciliation is in many ways a rebirth, a recalibration, a re-try. A re-effort. We need, in our own denomination, in our own churches, to be reborn, and I suspect that will only come through a movement of God Almighty. It can and will come. It must or we will die a long recalibrated life.

We are not worthy of the love, grace and mercy that God has given us, but we are most lucky recipients. Let us make a difference in a new and fresh way.  Let us. Soon and very soon.

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