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The Church of Reconciliation in San Antonio has a labyrinth modeled after the classic labyrinth at Chartres. I've walked it three times and find it to be a very meaningful and prayerful experience. You can read about labyrinths and prayer here. One Sunday five or six people from our church went to walk the labyrinth. That sparked some conversation about building a labyrinth of our own at the back of our property. I think that will happen, but we never hurry at Covenant Baptist Church. It will happen when it happens.

Here is a picture of the labyrinth at Reconciliation:

The labyrinth at The Church of Reconciliation is painted on canvass. It comes apart in four pieces, each of which is kept in a duffel bag. Recently someone broke into the parish hall and stole one of the duffel bags. I'm not sure what the thief thought he was getting, but I bet he wasn't expecting a fourth of a medieval labyrinth. Some of us were talking last night at our church about labyrinths, the theft at Reconciliation, and whether or not we will ever construct a labyrinth at our church. This apparently set off a spark in Paul's mind, because yesterday's Lenten watercolor reflects the conversation. The cactus in the painting is because the place on our property where we would build a labyrinth is currently covered with prickly pear cactus. We'll have to do something about that. I don't want prayerful pilgrims visiting our church and getting the idea that if you make a wrong turn praying you might get a painful jab.

Anyway the theft has, of course, caused some difficulty in walking the labyrinth at Reconciliation. I say difficulty, but what I mean is that you can't walk it at all.

Or can you?

By my calculations, three quarters of a labyrinth looks like this:

There are many lessons drawn from a prayerful walk of a circular labyrinth. You really don't know where you will go when you round a corner, and you have no idea when you will arrive in the center. It sort of forces you to focus on the journey. But what if you walked three quarters of a labyrinth? I guess when you popped out into the open space, you could resume your journey at any path opening that seemed right to you.

This would mean that you might find a shortcut and get to the center quickly, or you might never arrive at all and spend an entire afternoon endlessly circling. Who knows what would happen.

In my experience, that's a pretty good description of praying. You pray. You don't know why, exactly. You're hoping some things, I guess. You don't know if praying will be a journey with any end at all. I know people who have prayed for things their entire lives. Or who knows, you might get a miracle right away. I don't know about this stuff. It makes me nervous making claims about prayer one way or another.

Hey, if anyone from the Church of Reconciliation reads this, I wonder if you guys would consider letting me walk three quarters of a labyrinth. I think I'd like to give that a try.

rlp

A woman brought a small book to our church a couple of years ago. She put it on the wooden table in our worship room, right beside the guest book and the orders of worship. Inside the cover she wrote, "Prayers and Thoughts of Covenant People." She left a pencil beside the book but provided no instructions. She never mentioned the book publicly, so neither did I. Occasionally someone notices the book and is inspired to write in it, expressing whatever happens to be on her mind or in her heart. Over time it has become something like a cross between a diary and book of common prayers...

Click here to read the rest of this essay at The Christian Century online.

The Covenant Prayer Book
Click to see inside

Archive of Christian Century Articles by Gordon Atkinson

Part Two:

Note: Click here to read part one.

God love me, I was so young and ignorant. My awareness of myself and of the world was almost completely limited to the sphere of words. I was good with words, and words mattered to me more than anything else. God bless Mrs. Davis for putting up with me and the people at Baylor Medical Center for letting me stumble through my internship like a bull in a china closet.

The good news is that there is a certain grace to ministry that happens when the humanity of the minister collides with the humanity of the bereaved. It’s a comfort to know that God can work both with us and in spite of us. Sometimes God makes use of even our rawest materials.

After Mrs. Davis was finished, I began my much quieter prayer in a calm voice that sounded something like Mr. Rogers. I carefully countered each of her theological points with words that I addressed to God but were meant to teach her a thing or two.

“There is no need to be afraid for Billy, for he is in the hands of his maker.”

“Of course we KNOW, dear Heavenly Father, that death is no longer our enemy.”

“Not our will but yours, not our desire, but your kingdom.”

You know what I’m talking about. Highfalutin, seminary-boy words. Very theologically correct and, in my case, very flat. Very much without passion.

After my prayer I opened my eyes, expecting to find her greatly relieved and comforted, and perhaps happy to have learned something in this hard time. After all, one never knows when the Lord has a thing or two to teach us.

Instead I found her staring at me with her mouth open.

“So he’s died? He’s dead?” she asked.

“No, he’s still alive, as far as I know. We have to wait for the doctor to come and give us the news about that.”

Mrs. Davis seemed confused, as if she didn’t know what to make of me or my prayer.

“So he’s not dead?”

“No.”

“You were praying like he was already dead.”

I had no response for this. Not even a somber nod. I just looked back at her. I had no idea what she was talking about.

Her brow furrowed as if she was trying to figure out what kind of a chaplain she was dealing with here. Unable to comprehend me, she bowed her head and commenced her passionate pleas that God save Billy from the hounds of hell and the demonic hosts of the nether regions. This time she never stopped to give me a chance to pray. She kept going right up until the moment the doctor came in and gave her the bad news. Billy fought hard, but he was dead.

I braced myself for what was coming. In her mind and according to her stated theology, the hounds of hell had won the day. The devil and his demons were even now dragging Billy away. I wondered what she would do now that the battle was lost.

To my surprise she clasped her hands together just under her chin, raised her eyes to heaven and said, “Thank you, Jesus.” She gave me a hug and told me again what a wonderful man he had been. “We will miss him dearly,” said she, “but he’s in a better place. He’s gone to his reward.” She quietly signed the necessary forms to start the funeral process and went on her way, leaving me completely befuddled and unable to comprehend what I had just seen.

She made a complete and very sudden 180 degree turnaround. Suddenly his death was a victory and a reward. I puzzled over this for weeks, wondering what caused the change.

Some years later I finally figured it out. Here is the answer to the riddle of Mrs. Davis’ prayer:

Sometimes people don’t mean what they say. They mean what they mean. And never so much as in the prayers we blurt out in times of grief. Prayer is not simply a communication of words. It is a full-bodied expression of the soul. People weave their history, their theology, their brokenness, their buzz words, their ignorance, and what wisdom they have into a very private and intimate conversation with God.

Perhaps grieving is a kind of speaking in tongues. How can you know what people are talking about? They might not even know themselves.

Young ministers would do well to let people have their say and not worry too much about exactly what they say when the chips are down, the awful moment has come, and they are staring into the great unknown. It may be that the only one who can make sense of our grief is the one to whom we speak in those dreaded times.

When last I heard, Mrs. Davis was still alive, in her 80s, and running a cowboy camp meeting named after her husband.

Dear Mrs. Davis, thank you for letting me bear witness to your intimate conversation with your beloved Creator. God understood you just fine, even if I didn’t. And I must say that it was an honor to be there when the littlest cowboy preacher exited stage left.

I think of you and Billy sometimes. And I always smile.

rlp

note: The names in this essay have been changed

Part One:

I’d like to tell you the last chapter of the story of Billy Davis and his wife.

In the middle part of the 20^th century, Billy was a well-known evangelist here in Texas. They called him the littlest cowboy preacher. He wore a hat and boots, and he spoke the language that men of that time and place understood. He was also a shade under five feet tall. There wasn’t much of him, but what was there was pure cowboy, or so they say.

I never met Billy, never laid eyes on him. But I was there at the hospital on the day he died, back in 1988.

In those days I was a chaplain intern at Baylor University Medical Center. I was in my late 20s and scared shitless most of the time. I was afraid I was going to make a mistake, afraid I was going to look stupid, afraid I would say something wrong. I was afraid of a lot of things, but my greatest fear was of looking unsophisticated. It was very important to me to appear theologically sophisticated, or at least as sophisticated as a baptist can be.

I was covering one of the many intensive care units at Baylor when the call came in that someone on my unit was close to death. When I arrived the doctor gave me the particulars.

“His name is Billy Davis. His heart has just about given out. There’s no doubt he’s going to die and fairly soon. It’s just a matter of time. Maybe you can help his wife be prepared for the news. She’s in the family room.”

I opened the door to find a gentle, grandmotherly woman sitting quietly with both hands laid reverently on the top of the very worn Bible in her lap. I introduced myself using one of my standard opening lines.

“Mrs. Davis? I’m Gordon Atkinson, one of the chaplains here at the hospital.”

She looked at me for a second or two, then asked if I had ever heard of her husband.

“No ma’am, I haven’t.”

She seemed surprised. “Are you sure? He’s known as the littlest cowboy preacher. He’s very short, but he’s preached revivals and camp meetings all over Texas. He was a small man, but powerful in word and deed.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I nodded somberly and made a “hmmm” noise deep in my throat. A very thoughtful, somber nod with a deep “hmm” works pretty well in a pinch. The person you are speaking with will hear it in whatever way helps them the most at that moment.

After a few minutes of me nodding and her telling me more about her husband, she grabbed my arm and started pulling me down toward the floor.

“Get on your knees, chaplain. We gotta get prayin.”

I must say, this made me very uncomfortable. I was more of a “sit in a chair, lean forward and dispense somber nods” kind of chaplain. Not so much a flop on the floor and “get prayin” chaplain. Still, I figured if the woman wanted to get on the floor and pray, the least I could do was get down there with her and do my part. I knelt awkwardly and tried to find a comfortable position for my knees and feet, which wasn’t easy since I was wearing a suit and stiff, new wingtip shoes.

Mrs. Davis, on the other hand, looked as though she had been on the floor praying many times. She grasped her bible with both hands, held it up in the air, and began what seemed at the time to be the strangest prayer I had ever heard. It lasted about five minutes, which is a VERY long time if you’re kneeling on the floor with a woman who is shouting, moaning, and rocking back and forth. At any moment I expected the medical staff to burst into the room to see who was dying.

She cried out to the Lord in her grief. She said that demons were dragging her husband down to hell. She begged and pleaded for God to spare his life. She reminded God that Billy might be his smallest servant, but he was by no means the least of them. “Please, dear God,” she prayed. “Save my little Billy, your servant, your own little cowboy preacher who loves you so. Save him from the vicious hounds of hell that would drag him down to perdition.”

Somewhere in the middle of this prayer, my mouth fell open and I turned to look at her. Her eyes were squeezed shut. She was putting everything she had into this.

This was a kind of praying I had not heard in the quiet Baptist churches of my experience. The hounds of hell? I’d never heard of them. It sounded like the title of a book that Edgar Allan Poe might have written.

I was bothered by the theology of her prayer. A central teaching of Christianity is that death is no longer something to fear. We approach death faithfully, knowing that it is an inevitable part of life and trusting that it is a birth into a new kind of existence. We share this idea with many spiritual traditions. It seemed to me that Mrs. Davis was forgetting that part of our faith.

Finally, she stopped praying. She took a couple of deep breaths and nodded at me, indicating that it was my turn. I was glad to have a chance to pray because so much of what she was saying was making me uncomfortable.

And I thought this might be just the right time for a little theology lesson.

Part two will be posted Monday, December 26th. Have a Merry Christmas, everyone!

rlp

note: The names in this essay have been changed

I'm a baptist. What do I know from rosaries? Nothing really, which is why it made perfect sense when my friend Paul, who works at Viva Books, saw me holding one and said, "Do you even know what to do with that thing?"

"Yes," I said a little defensively. But the truth is, I had no idea. All I knew about rosaries I learned from the movies and from Steve Cuellar, my friend who lived across the street when we were kids. Steve went to a Catholic school and once told me a joke about rosaries.

"How do you pray the rosary when you're in a hurry?" he asked.

"I don't know," I mumbled, trying to remember what a rosary was.

"Big bead, little bead, little bead, little bead, little bead," he said with a giggle.

I had NO Idea what he was talking about or why it would be funny. So Steve patiently explained that they prayed the "Hail Mary" or the "Our Father" for each bead.

"You pray the what what and the what?" I said, for I had no idea what those prayers were.

Fast forward to a few months ago. RLP reader R.G. wrote me and asked if he could send me a rosary that he had made himself. His idea was for me to give it to someone who needed one. On an impulse I wrote back and asked if I could have it for myself. I felt the need for a little praying, and I wondered if the beads might help me focus.

"Sure," he said. "I'll send you two. One for you and one for someone else who needs one."

About a week later a little package arrived with two rosaries in it, each in its own crocheted pouch. Now I ask you, is there anything scarier than a baptist with a rosary? Well, maybe a baptist sitting in a Catholic church, eyes tightly shut, rosary in hand, chanting, "Big bead, little bead, little bead..."

The rosary RG sent me

Now the thing is, as a baptist, I'm not much into Hail Marys. So I decided to make up my own little prayer routine. Catholic rosaries have a cross or crucifix, a medallion, 6 dividing beads that are set apart or larger, (The big beads in Steve's little joke) five sets of ten beads, and a set of three beads.

This baptist takes a deep breath, closes his eyes, and quotes Jesus' version of the shema, the beatitudes, the model prayer, Micah 6:8, prayers for the first ten people who come to mind, prayers for family, prayers for the three parts of my life (writer, pastor, family guy), prayers for the three sisters, a prayer for Jeanene and I, and I close by holding the cross and repeating these words of Jesus: "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever gains his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will gain it. And what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his life."

I don't know why, but it embarrasses me a little to admit that I even kiss the crucifix when I'm done. <cringing> I know... kinda corny but anyway, yeah, I do it.

I've always had such a hard time staying awake and attentive in my praying. The beads help me somehow, so now I'm a rosary carrying baptist minister with a blog and a vulgar mouth.

If that ain't ecumenical, I don't know what is.

I found a credit card rosary and bought it just because it was so funky. It was only a dollar. Ever seen one of these? It's supposed to be a rosary for the modern world. A thin line of metal with soldered bumps on a flat piece of plastic.

I don't think so

I think I'll stick with my beads. I like the feel of them. I like the way I feel holding them. I like listening to the sound of my chanting voice and feeling the rhythm of my own breathing.

"Big bead, little bead, big bead, little bead."

Thanks, R.G.,

rlp

Dear RLP,

You wrote something in an essay in your book called, "Why Don't You Write Something About Prayer?"

"You don't pray so you can change things in the world. It's not magic. You might ask, and you might hope for change, but ultimately changing things cannot be your motivation."

This leaves me with the question, what the heck is your motivation supposed to be? To see more of God? To be changed so that you become the answer to your prayer? I've read stuff to that effect.

With thanks,   A.

-----------------------------------------

A,

I think that if your only motivation for praying is hoping to receive something, you are likely going to be disappointed. Prayer is a long journey of listening and slowly becoming. I think the journey itself is the most important thing.

But that's a rather mysterious answer, isn't it? It's the sort of thing a person understands in hindsight. It's the kind of answer that might be true, but might not be helpful. Why don't I share with you some of my own more specific motivations for praying.

If I close my eyes and think about my own journey of prayer, here are some motivations that come to mind:

• I pray in obedience to Christ, who commanded us to pray. That's probably the bottom line for me. Jesus prayed a lot. All night sometimes. If I call myself a follower of Christ, I must become humble enough to do the same, even if I do not understand prayer. (And I do NOT understand it.)
   
• I pray out of a desire to communicate with the Creator of all that is. I have a desire to become more aware of the constant presence of God in the world. Yes, I have this crazy hope that praying might lead me in this direction. However, I'm not looking for quick fixes or even to feel good on some specific day. Even this very healthy desire can become an idol if I only pray to achieve some kind of enlightenment
   
• I pray to honestly express my desires for myself and for others. In this, I pray very much as a child would pray. What God does with these intercessions, I do not know. It doesn't seem important to me at this stage of the game.
   
• I pray because I am very small and the intelligence behind the universe is very large. Prayer is humbling, and proper humility is a good thing.
   
• I pray because I want to. I like it. Just today I sat before a beautiful fountain, listening and whispering small prayers. I enjoy praying, especially a contemplative and meditative sort of praying. I find it more relaxing now that I've quit thinking of prayer as a job or a chore.

If you desire to know about prayer, that desire is a wonderful place to start. You don't need manuals or instructions. Just sit quietly and be honest if and when you speak.

rlp

Used with permission from A. Slightly edited from the original.

Jeanene and I watched a movie called “Saved” the night before she had surgery. This was a serious surgery. Not particularly life threatening, but a significant incision and a general anesthesia. The movie was a nice distraction for us that evening.

I don’t know who made this movie or why they made it. I don’t know if they intended it to be a wild exaggeration of reality, or if they felt it was a reasonable depiction of the way some people practice Christianity.

I can tell you this: While I’ve never been involved with any Christians who manifested all of the forms of insanity in this movie, I have experienced just about everything you see in “Saved” at one time or another.

The histrionic worship; the mindless, babbling prayers crammed full of religious phrases that no one really understands; the sickly-sweet “Jesus is so awesome” language; the controlling and emotionally crippled ministers with their grandiosity and closet sexual issues; the bad art; the scary t-shirts; the Christian label slapped on everything from cars to calzones in order to increase sales or boost egos. Yes, my friends, I have seen it all. Been there, done that, laughed at the t-shirt in a cheesy Christian catalog. These are the sort of things that used to make me fantasize about leaving Christianity and embracing some other, “less crazy” worldview. Perhaps some form of scientific empiricism would fit the bill, wherein I wouldn’t claim absolute belief about anything without solid and repeatable evidence that can be detected with one of the five senses.

I mean, with empiricism you know you’ll miss some truth simply because humanity has not experienced it yet, and you know you'll have to fudge a bit when it comes to the subject of love, but at least you know where you stand. Christianity, on the other hand, is all over the map. One minute you’re watching the Discovery Channel and considering the evidence for global warming, and the next minute you’re standing before a group of people and telling them that Jesus died for their sins and rose again on the third day.

Who can make sense of a claim like that?

And yet, I have not left Christianity for a number of personal, emotional, and relational reasons that I have a hard time sorting out myself, much less explaining to others. I find myself wanting to say, “You kinda had to be there. And I mean for my whole forty-three year odyssey.” The truth is, it's hard to know where to begin talking about my personal reconciliation with matters of faith and the heart.

But I CAN tell you something that happened to Jeanene and me the morning after we watched “Saved.” It was nothing miraculous or even out of the ordinary, but it meant a lot to us.

That morning a handful of friends from Covenant Baptist Church came by the hospital before Jeanene was taken into surgery. These were not people who had gotten our names from a list of needs at the church office and were fulfilling some sort of religious obligation. These were old and well-established friends with whom we have fought many battles and walked through good times and hard times together.

These were our people, you understand. Our people. The people with whom Jeanene and I and our three daughters share our daily lives.

We gathered in a circle around her bed, holding hands. Jeanene closed her eyes and we prayed quietly for her. The prayers were not particularly fancy, nor were they filled with a lot of religious phrases. We were fully aware that our prayers would not guarantee some sort of miraculous healing or blessing, though we were humble enough not to count out that possibility. We were also well aware that this little prayer meeting did not mean that the Creator of the universe was suddenly at our beck and call, waiting to grant us special dispensations from the bumps, bruises, and grief that come with human life.

While we prayed, I felt a mysterious sense of awareness. I felt that something important was going on, something beyond us and bigger than us. Something, in fact, so big that we have no need or desire to try to explain it, market it, promise it, or claim any kind of ownership of it. We were dear friends gathered in love and in the very name of God. It was a quiet episode and no record of the details exists. Our prayers were not recorded for sale in some inspirational book. No movie will ever be made about that moment in time.

And yet, this truth remains. I would do just about anything, go just about anywhere, and even sell most of my possessions for a chance to walk through life with these gentle pilgrims. I will own any label you please. Crackpot, dreamer, shoddy thinker, weak-minded. None of these matter for I have found the pearl of great price. And the transforming power of that discovery and of that joy lies at the center of my life.

The power of our shared community, which we call the Spirit of God, helps me to be faithful even when I am feeling faithless. It helps me to be trusting even when I am feeling cynical. It helps me to become like a child even when childhood seems very far away and long ago.

There is a truth here that is hard to put into words. It is a life truth, a living truth, a truth of sinew and muscle and shared history and held hands. It is a truth that is utterly beyond us and somehow within us. It is a truth that makes us feel so small and childlike that we may have slipped, unnoticed, into the very Kingdom of Heaven.

Something out there is much greater than I. I am aware of it and in awe of it. This is the beginning and the end of Wisdom.

rlp

NOTE: I'm working on an mp3 audio file of this essay, but I'm having some trouble with my mixing software. I'm still new at this. I wanted to post it at the same time that I put the essay online, but it will probably be later tonight or tomorrow.

On Thursday some of the people who visit here regularly gathered in the chat room to pray. I didn't organize it or plan it, nor was I involved in any way other than as a simple participant. This sprang naturally out of the friendships that have grown in the chat room. I can't tell you how happy that makes me. I dropped in that evening and found people talking about the disaster on the Gulf coast. Every once in awhile someone would write a prayer and others would respond.

Our Christian spiritual tradition teaches us that the prayers of the people are powerful and matter in this world. Sadly, we often think of prayer as something to be done at a formal moment, like in church or at the table. Others get bogged down in thinking about what prayers do or do not do. That's often been my problem.

Praying is a simple thing. Turning one's heart and mind toward the source of goodness. The exact mechanism by which prayers work is unknown. Nor do we know much about how God does or does not work in our world. Clearly we are often left to struggle and grow through great evil and times of difficulty.

I find that it helps my spirit to gather with other people who are worshipping at the altar of goodness and mercy. We call that altar the very being and presence of God.

Here are a couple of prayers that were offered in that chatroom that evening. I'm posting them at the request of those who were there.

[name changed] 10:08 pm: Our wondrous Creator, in recent days we have been shocked by the devastation from mindless forces of nature. The great evil we see makes us wonder if you really have anything to do with our lives here on earth. We wonder if you truly care about us as individuals. What we read in the scriptures seems impossible based on what we see in the world. (more coming...)

[name changed] 10:09 pm: In times like these we pray out of devotion, commitment, and in obedience to Christ, who prayed like a little child. We pray even if we despair. (more coming...)

[name changed] 10:10 pm: Be with our brothers and sisters in the gulf coast areas. They are struggling to survive. They are grieving those who did not survive. And they are facing the kind of evil that comes when selfishness reaches it's deepest levels. Surely we know the presence of evil in this world. (last bit coming...)

[name changed] 10:11 pm: Bless and keep them in the middle of this tragedy, we pray. And shore up our faith for it fails us sometimes. We are weak, though we would be strong. Do not forsake us, but strengthen us so that our living would be as full of love as our praying. Amen.

[name changed] 10:12 pm: Amen
[name changed] 10:12 pm: Amen
[name changed] 10:12 pm: Amen. That was lovely.
[name changed] 10:12 pm: amen.

[name changed] 10:20 pm: Oh, Spirit of Justice and Mercy, let us be wise as we begin to find answers to the question "Why?" Let us be careful in who is held accountable, but let us also be unflinching in seeing what needs to be seen. Oh, dear God, let us not cry "Peace, Peace" in the face of war. Let us not hide our eyes. Free us from apathy. Free us from powerlessness. Free us from our fear. Let us be strong and good and compassionate and welcoming. Help us, O God of Peace and Love, be a part of building a better world. A world that you can be proud of. A world that we can be proud of. Help us remember that the Kinship of God is within us. Amen.

[name changed] 10:25 pm: Amen

rlp

I work hard to keep a fuzzy boundary between my calling as a pastor and my writing here. I try not to have agendas, spiritual or otherwise for this blog. I write what is in my heart, trying not to concern myself with how you might receive it. I need this boundary. I need something in my life that is just for me.

This posting skirts the edge of that boundary because it is the prayer I’ve been praying for a week now. Something of its sentiment was in yesterday's sermon. This is what’s on my heart. Thanks for “listening.”

A Prayer For Friends In Moldova:

There is a place in this world, Lord, a land of great poverty and need. It is called Moldova. I know you’ve heard of it.

Orphans are abundant in Moldova. They wander the streets begging for food and searching for shelter. If they are lucky, they are rounded up and warehoused in overcrowded orphanages where metal cribs fill every room and exhausted women drop off bottles and change as many diapers as they can.

In Moldova evil men are everywhere, attracted like rats to garbage. They snatch young girls off the streets with promises of clothing and food, then whisk them into a dark underworld of prostitution, slavery, drug addiction, and death.

The terror of the moment when these girls first understand what is in store for them is an evil so dark and horrible that it causes us to quake with loathing and revulsion. It shakes our faith to its core, and we wonder where you are and why you do not protect these little ones.

For surely you must know, dear God, that this great evil is one of the foulest malignancies ever to worm its way through the stinking flesh of humanity.

And it happens every day.

In Moldova.

And to this needy land, you have called four of our friends from Covenant Baptist Church.

Ben, a lawyer, who has spent his entire career wondering if you really wanted him to take care of children. He has only just found peace with his life and vocation, and now you will break his heart.

Jenny, a young nurse who works in the special care nursery of one of our hospitals. She gives herself every day to the sickest and smallest children. But you will break her heart in new ways.

Brittney and Danielle, two high school girls who live in the schoolgirl reality of America, a world of music, chores, and Friday nights. They have saved their tips and tiny paychecks for a year, and now they go into the darkness to have their tender hearts broken.

These four heard your call and answered it. They have counted the cost and made good plans. You lead and they willingly follow you.

Even unto Moldova.

What good will our four small friends be in the vast ocean of misery that awaits them? What difference can four people make? These questions are above and beyond us. Ours is to follow your Spirit and our hearts. Ours is to offer our gifts into your service. And now four of our own have given themselves in Christ’s name to the least of your children in the lowliest of places.

We do not pray first for their safety, for you have not called them first to be safe. You have called them into harm’s way, and they have followed you there. We do not pray that they be untouched by misery, for you often call those with the strongest and kindest hearts to see the world with your eyes and be broken on the rough and jagged altar of human weakness.

So we take a deep breath, wanting to be right on this, and we pray that their hearts be broken indeed, but that you keep their spirits whole. Yes, break their hearts, but let the breaking lead to a new vision, a higher calling, and a desire to serve humanity with love and with grace.

When their time of service is done, bring them home to us, freshly wounded and newly passionate. We will hear their stories and look at the pictures they took. Our hearts will be broken along with theirs.

And then we shall see what you can do with a hundred or so people whose hearts will beat…

For Moldova.

rlp

Links:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3071965/

http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0305-06.htm

http://www.usembassy.md/en-ambassador_hodges2.htm
 

The idea for this essay came while I was sitting in this swing at Laity Lodge.

I can't imagine absolute silence, neither can I hear it. Even when I'm in a quiet place, my mind produces its own ghostly, seashell sound. The noise in my head is a faint but high-pitched whine accompanied by a lower rumbling that sounds like an engine pulsing away in the distance. These seem to be the default sounds of my brain. It's what I hear when there is nothing else to hear.

About the closest you can come to silence is to become silent yourself and hope for the best. Close your eyes and forsake your vision. Let go of sight and your desperate need to see. Embrace hearing and you will begin to notice the many layers of the sounds around you...

Click here to read the rest of this essay at The Christian Century online.

Archive of Christian Century Articles by Gordon Atkinson

“If I could only describe the high country, how the car strains and the mind races and the lungs ache, how the body slows and the breathing quickens.”

Journal entry
Creede, Colorado
summer 2003

Some people seem very sure of themselves when they talk about this mountain or that mountain, as if mountains were easily defined and well-differentiated one from another...

Click here to read this essay at The Christian Century online.