March 2025

Sometimes we wonder if there is a way.

Is there a way to reach one we’ve slowly grown detached from?

Is there a way to bring stability to tumultuous times?

Is there a way to calm and center the mind when it keeps racing and raging?

Is there a way to protect the vulnerable and strengthen the fainthearted?

In response to the tragic flooding in and around Ashville, NC last Fall, David Lamotte wrote an article on hope: “Václav Havel wrote, ‘Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit.’ It is not about what we think is going to happen; it is about where we point our lives, sometimes in spite of the odds rather than because of them. If we take faith seriously, we point our lives toward the possibility of better communities and a better world, and we work to create them, even — and perhaps especially — when the outcomes we desire seem impossibly distant.”

By the Spirit’s guiding we gently turn our faces toward each other and toward the direction the light will come. We trust in Jesus who is the way, the truth and the life (John 14:6). We rise from lament, exhaustion, anxiety – we step up and out and into the posture that God is showing us.

As stewards of creation and lovers of justice, we claim our power and responsibility to do the good we’re wired to do together – pointing our lives toward God’s continuing work of healing and restoration.

Tom

https://faithandleadership.com/advent-western-north-carolina-waiting-deep-hope

https://paintedprayerbook.com/2016/07/18/blessing-when-the-world-is-ending/