Only Consistency Allows Change
these reflections are from 2021, this year’s series can be found at https://savedbydesign.wordpress.com/category/grace-into-lent/
A Bishop and I talk.
Not often, but enough. Through these two years our jobs, to lead, listen, act and create have remained the same. But everything else has changed. Everywhere.
The differences in the world’s outcomes are fully ignorant of our motivations. When those motivations do not change and the world does, what are we to do with it?
I cannot change my motivations. It is too late. But this world does not care, and the break between what this world offers and what we can have is rendered stark when the results are simply disconnected with our hopes.
Some things do not change, like our hopes. The fear of missing our selves in a sea of full on isolation has been brewing for two years. We have been playing without lights at night.
The Bishop asked “Are you doing Emily again?”
I did not know.
I have written about 100 essays triggered by the words of a mystery, over 100 years dead during a tiny taste of our inabilities – where Christians – a shrinking group – are in 6 weeks of thinking about what they do not have, and what to do with it. It is Lent, and is a contrivance that means less and less to more and more.
But I care.
Not knowing while still caring is the essence of Faith.
The beauty and curse of faith is that what I deserve means nothing, but what I care about becomes undeniable. Because it always was.
So I deeply love the poems of Emily Dickinson, without knowing anything. Like I know God. The reality of caring cannot be dismissed, no matter how inconvenient. Virtue Signaling Pharisees do say what we Should do, but we know what we care about.
What I care about has not changed, even though two years has been changed by what we cannot control.
So for the few who care, and those who simply bump into them, these triggers create the words that are already in me. Another year.
https://savedbydesign.wordpress.com/category/a-miracle-of-coincidence/
The past:
https://savedbydesign.wordpress.com/category/emilys-days/
https://savedbydesign.wordpress.com/category/a-year-in-lent/
See you in a few weeks.
Saved By Design 