In light of the last few weeks of sermons about developing deeper roots, being aware of our stories and lenses that affect our current lives and experience of God and each other, these questions from Pastor Rich Villodas are timely and helpful:
5 questions that help me gauge my spiritual health:
Am I giving myself to intentional times of prayer and Scripture?
Am I committed to interior examination?
Am I joining my life to the poor and marginalized?
Am I connected to others in ways that foster vulnerability?
Am I growing in love?
Grace and peace,
Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation
The Way Through
If we’re going to be honest,
it’s hard to see a pathway out of this.
Empathy might not be dead,
but discord and division have so overgrown
the field, it’s hard to imagine
a way to harvest peace. Of course,
there’s always counting on a miracle.
It works in the movies, although
the truth is clearly that miracles,
by their very nature, are not to
be relied on. Except, of course, that the
caterpillar carries beneath its green skin
tiny fragments of what will become
the monarch butterfly’s wings.
The azure dragonflies you see at play
by any pond or lake or stream
are an echo from 300 million years ago,
when their giant ancestors stormed the skies.
The minerals in your bones aren’t different
than the limestone where those fossils
are found. I’m not saying it’s all
going to be joy and delight.
I’m saying that life
is long, and complicated, and we
belong to a family that has found
a million ways to thrive.
Lynn Ungar
Grace and peace,
Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation
May I live this day
Compassionate of heart,
Clear in word,
Gracious in awareness,
Courageous in thought,
Generous in love.
John O’Donohue, from "Matins" in To Bless the Space Between Us
Grace and peace,
Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation
SO thankful for this pastor's words this week:
If you’re paying attention, it’s exhausting out there. The news hollers like a 3 a.m. car alarm, bills pile up, and the future feels like a fogged-up windshield. It’s tempting to crawl under the covers and wait for the all-clear.
But the life of faith keeps tugging at our sleeve: hope.
Not the thin, chirpy kind that insists “everything happens for a reason.” I mean the stubborn, biblical sort—the “sure and steadfast anchor of the soul.” The psalmist names the source: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” That’s not naïveté; that’s testimony from people who’ve seen some things and still found God showing up.
Scripture is a greatest-hits album of God meeting people on their worst days. Wilderness wanderers find bread they didn’t bake. Terrified disciples hear a word stronger than wind. Women weeping at a tomb discover that death has overplayed its hand. Again and again, fear converts into courage, despair into a livable future.
The new world God is midwifing doesn’t airbrush the present; it reframes it. The cross isn’t erased—it’s folded into a bigger story than Caesar can imagine. Hope doesn’t whisk us away from pain; it hands us work gloves. We lament gun violence, racial terror, and cruelty toward the poor and the stranger, and we drag those headlines into God’s project of redemption, restoration, and repair.
So the church can’t be a vaguely spiritual waiting room. We’re a community apprenticed to resurrection. When someone’s candle gutters, we don’t scold about flame maintenance; we cup our hands and share the light. When courage leaks, we loan ours. When cynicism whispers nothing changes, we rehearse the story again.
This is our wager: the God who raised Jesus hasn’t retired or handed the world to the loudest bullies. In confusing times, we cling to hope without apology, scatter it recklessly, and trust the One who hasn’t abandoned us yet.
And when your hands get tired, we’ll hold the lamp for you.
-Rev. Derek Penwell
Douglass Boulevard Christian Church
Grace and peace,
Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation
Consider this new word: Ratiljóstˆ (an Icelandic term that I’ve never heard before).
It means having “enough light to find your way by.” Similar to other words from Northern Europe that have served a good purpose among us in recent years in terms of expanding our sense of how to live. Like “hygge,” the Danish word for coziness. Or “lagom,” the Swedish word for “not too much, not too little; just right.” Or “sisu,” Finnish for grit in the face of great adversity.
Ratiljóst, enough light to find your way by.
This word, or to be more honest, this definition, has been rolling around in my mind ever since I heard it. Enough light to find your way by. Isn’t that the longing of each day? Particularly in these days of stress and fear and grief, these days of political angst, of economic angst, of division. Enough light to find your way by. Maybe it’s a word you’d like to consider as well. Ratiljóst
Let’s be light for each other, shall we? I need your light, and maybe you need mine too.
Grace and peace,
Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation
Weight
As a baker carries the exquisite wedding cake—
heavy and delicate—into the room,
as the ambulance weaves through traffic
with its precious healing cargo inside,
as the woman near her due date
shields her baby through the crowd,
as the milkweed seed is entrusted to the wind
with all its generations,
as clouds hold aloft, in mere vapor,
a flood of water,
as a child reverently carries
a candle through the darkness,
through this day, God, I bear you:
gently, mightily, praying in me.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Grace and peace,
Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation
When we try to understand the world, the ever-expanding volume of information at our fingertips overwhelms. Noise surrounds us from every direction: the constant hum of traffic, the endless stream of songs, videos and news updates. Distraction becomes the norm.
Yet, it is silence that reigns supreme. A wordless quiet envelopes the planet, waiting for us to listen. I’m reminded of this each time I get to the mountains or take a phone-free moment in my backyard. In those moments, the noise fades and silence speaks. It is a wordless call to depth, a bright abyss, a gentle knock at the door.
To this, many say, “Ruthlessly eliminate noise from your life!” We must confront distraction with fierce dedication and make space for quiet. We drown out silence because we fear it. To avoid boredom, we fill our lives with constant activity – building sandcastles of productivity – because the vast expanse of silence tugs on our souls.
Make boredom your friend and quiet your companion. Welcome the ignorance of current events and allow yourself to be be unproductive and inefficient. We are not machines. Silence is the path back to our humanity.
If I were a physician, and if I were allowed to prescribe just one remedy for all the ills of the modern world, I would prescribe silence. Even if the Word of God were proclaimed in the modern world, how could one hear it with so much noise? Therefore, create silence.” Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
Grace and peace,
Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation
Let your steadfast love become my comfort, according to your promise to your servant. Psalm 119:76
There it is again, God’s promise and our obedience. We are at our best as God’s servants, finding our life’s meaning and joy in following his ways – or as the Psalm poet so often says, “walk in the way of the righteous.” In contrast to an unstable world, God’s love is steadfast, immovable, always and forever dependable. That is our comfort. Whatever the circumstances we have to work through in our lives, the unforeseen crisis or the predictable demands of life as it is for us, we can be sure of this one thing – the earth is full of God’s steadfast love, which enfolds and holds us.
Grace and peace,
Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation
Are you a doomscroller? It refers to that addictive continuum of social media and online news, which hooks you in with clickbait to read of the horrors that have happened, are happening, and might happen.
Somewhere in our mental storehouse there’s a place for "hopescrolling," and I've been wondering if that might revive the practice of memorizing Scripture, "Your Word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path."
Here's a good starting verse. I've changed the pronoun to make it a first person plural personal prayer:
"May the God of hope fill us with all joy and peace as we trust in him, so that we may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit." (Romans 15:13)
Grace and peace,
Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation
Lord God, whose power is the power of love in pursuit of justice, we pray for our broken world.
Forgive us when we close our ears and eyes to the relentless deluge of heart-breaking news and endless analysis, of facts and figures, of graphic images of human suffering and human cruelty.
Give us inner strength to overcome compassion fatigue, so that we never stop caring; renew in us the power of conscience to recognise and to name injustice and cruelty; give us words to pray, and words to say that make for peace and reconciliation, in a world divided into enemies and allies and everyone claiming they are right and everyone else is wrong.
God of Love, Mercy and Justice, we follow the crucified and risen Jesus, the one called the Prince of Peace. Help us today to kneel at the cross and look again at the cost of forgiveness and the price of reconciliation; then help us to stand at the empty tomb and hear the words of life, “He is not here – he is risen!”
So may we in our daily lives be peacemakers, bridge-builders, life-givers, couriers and carriers of the love of God, light shining in the shadows of fear and sadness, ambassadors of Christ whose message is spoken in acts of grace and words of healing and forgiveness.
God of grace, use us, each one of us, in your ministry of compassion for the broken; equip us, each one of us, with the gift of a forgiving spirit and a passion for reconciliation.
Strengthen us, each one of us, to speak the truth in love, to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with you, our God
Through Jesus Christ our Lord, and in the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Grace and peace,
Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation