Scripps Sundays

Anna- I love this reflection from Sarah Bessey. It's no small thing...  💛 The snow began falling on Sunday night while we slept. I woke up on Monday morning to heavy snow blanketing the neighbourhood brown lawns and spindly trees, the streetlights illuminating the still-falling flakes. It was all beautiful again. Our sixteen-year-old and I suited up for the shovelling of the driveway and walks. My husband travels a lot for work right now and I forgot how to get the snowblower going, so manual labour it was. We shovelled steadily in the pre-dawn darkness together, alongside our neighbours, exchanged mittened-hellos to each other and kept clearing sidewalks together. I made an appointment with the physiotherapist later for the inevitable toll this will take on me. It’s no small thing to do this work. When I sent the younger two off to school at last in the weak light of morning, they were bundled up with boots on their feet, scarves around their necks. We had to buy new gear this wi...

  (I heard this on a podcast a while back and immediately thought of you.... This is what her best friend wrote in her yearbook as a senior in high school...) 

A Blessing for Epiphany (or your senior year in college...)  If you could see the journey whole you might never undertake it; might never dare the first step that propels you from the place you have known toward the place you know not. Call it one of the mercies of the road: that we see it only by stages as it opens before us, as it comes into our keeping step by single step. There is nothing for it but to go and by our going take the vows the pilgrim takes: to be faithful to the next step; to rely on more than the map; to heed the signposts of intuition and dream; to follow the star that only you will recognize; to keep an open eye for the wonders that attend the path; to press on beyond distractions beyond fatigue beyond what would tempt you from the way. There are vows that only you will know; the secret promises for your particular path and the new ones you will need to make when the road is revealed by turns you could not have foreseen. Keep them, break them, make them again: ...

I loved reading Gregory Boyle's new book on the plane over Christmas and typed out my favorite quotes for you here that I thought might be relevant after your Faith and Justice conference this weekend.  The first two quotes stood out to me in particular with you in terms of your word for 2025: grounded .   And this is all I want. To be freshly grounded in endless, oceanic love. Restored to a more grounded sense of myself in God’s presence. - Gregory Boyle,  Cherished Belonging We need to cherish with every breath… Hence, we connect cherishing with every breath we take, otherwise we forget. - Gregory Boyle,  Cherished Belonging May we be given the grace to “cultivate a new way of seeing.” - Gregory Boyle,  Cherished Belonging Tenderness is the highest form of spiritual maturity.    - Gregory Boyle,  Cherished Belonging No us and Them- just Us, This is, indeed, God’s dream come true. - Gregory Boyle,  Cherished Belonging The Tender One say...