Tag Archives: spiritual healing

Where There is no Vision

“Where there is no vision, the people perish.”  Proverbs 29:18a

One of my favorite scripture quotes. It feels so visceral, so challenging, so immediate. For those of us it speaks to, it challenges to us is to dream. To hope.  To imagine a world worth working toward.

When decency seems to fail, when violence is commonplace, and when the ascendence of white masculinity is viewed as the norm, we must dream powerful dreams. We must dream to survive.

The question for us is: how do a terrified and sometimes broken people dream?
Let our visions be informed but not driven by our anger.
Let our visions be informed but not driven by our pain.
Let our visions, instead, be informed and driven by hope. 
Now is the time we need to dream big. We need to risk daring a largeness. The seemingly impossible.

We are heirs to visionaries throughout time, including the dreamers who founded this nation. We will be no more perfect than they were, but we stand on their shoulders and can move what we share of the vision forward. Our imperfections do not reflect on the vision, but on our ability to bring it fully to fruition. It is okay to be imperfect. It is not okay to let our imperfections keep us from doing the work. We are farther along because of the many who went before us.  Let the work continue.
Now is our time.  

New Chapter. New Book.

I tell my story because I want to understand how the pieces fit together. But there is another part – looking for others who may have shared my experiences or enough similar ones to see to what conclusions they have come, how they were shaped, what wisdom they gleaned that I missed. And in some ways, to find people who are home to me.  Did they ask the same questions? Are there questions I can explore I haven’t considered? 

            Always beneath those questions are the questions: no matter how different we are, how do our lives intersect? where do we connect? Or can we? 

            I often talk about backing up and taking the long view. In those moments I see the connections: the way humanity is woven together and with creation. What seems disparate has tendrils of connection curling beneath the surface. 

            So today I begin to tell another part of my story. The passion that drives me is a gift from Godde. The call to pastor Circle of Grace is a gift and challenge of the Spirit. The struggle to live into the passion is both the gift and curse of community. I cannot tell more of my story without telling the story of Circle of Grace.

While this is my story it is also the story of many people who passed through our metaphorical doors. Some came to stay, some came for a while, some left angry and hurt. I hope to structure the tale to include the telling of others as well as my own.

The truth is sometimes difficult to share. Or even admit. I claim here and now that my truth is only a facet of our shared experiences. I heard a word the other day that that sums up my anxiety, joy, and trepidation of this leg of my journey: “flawsome.” 

            Thank you for listening. This is the beginning of my next book. Ask me questions. Challenge my assumptions. I see a bumpy road ahead and, I hope, will see a few more pieces of the puzzle of me fit together.

Retro-Wednesday: Circle of Grace as Elephant Orphanage

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This was first posted in 2010.

I received a thoughtful email from someone who used to attend Circle of Grace about my last post.  She had some insightful responses and agreed with my assessment of Circle of Grace as a place of spiritual healing.  

 She went on to remind me that many folks who ‘came through’ Circle of Grace often returned to traditional churches as she, herself, had.   She returned to the church in which she had grown up and with whom she had a deep connection but she continued, she would never had been able to do that without her time at Circle of Grace.  She said that she, too, pondered why we hadn’t grown and concluded that we needed to remain small to do the healing work we do.

 It reminds me of what my spiritual director shared with me some time ago.  She had seen a 60 Minutes special about an elephant orphanage in Africa.  A woman began a refuge for baby elephants whose mothers had been killed by poachers or who had physical defects (e.g. blindness) that had caused their ‘tribe’ to abandon them.  She and her workers take in these baby elephants and provide medical care and nourishment.  When a baby recovers sufficiently they go about the business of teaching the baby how to be an elephant- including pounding the ground with small logs to teach her/him how to read sound through the ground.   

 Some of the babies are so damaged or ill they don’t make it.  Some are able to be reunited with their ‘aunties’ and assimilate back into the wild.  Some recover but are never able to return to the wild and a new ‘tribe’ has evolved at the orphanage.   

 “That’s what Circle of Grace is like!”  she exclaimed.  “Some people heal and return to the church of their childhoods.  And some people find themselves to be more at home at Circle of Grace and become a part of its ongoing healing ministry, forming a new and different kind of ‘tribe’.”

 I remembered that comment after I got the email this week:  two very different people seeing the same thing from different perspectives.  A final thought my emailing friend shared was that she now takes stands and provides a much needed witness in her more traditional church. 

 I’ll keep pondering all these things and we’ll keep talking about these things.  For too many years I assumed we were supposed to follow a certain pattern and achieve specific things: membership, space, programs…

 Now, I just want us to walk as faithfully as we are able and do the work to which we are called.  I want us to keep on living into who we are and not into any superimposed idea of who we think we should be.  It’s an ongoing learning experience.  It is always challenging.  We’re always going to have to question our assumptions and let some of them go.  

 But I don’t guess we would do it any other way.