Given all the monasteries and convents around the world, and all the prayer times of these who are devoted to God, and all the prayers of rabbis and ministers of faith, and all the prayers of persons in pews or at their desk chairs or couches or backyard benches or on their feet as they walk to work, prayer is continually being offered up to God on behalf of the world. At any and every time of day or night, even the middle of the night when you wake up and worry, this is a reassuring thing to remember. Our world is flowing with prayer. What good will yet come?
 
May your week hold hope and faith in what we do not yet see.

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation

Because

So I can’t save the world—
can’t save even myself,
can’t wrap my arms around
every frightened child, can’t
foster peace among nations,
can’t bring love to all who
feel unlovable.
So I practice opening my heart
right here in this room and being gentle
with my insufficiency. I practice
walking down the street heart first.
And if it is insufficient to share love,
I will practice loving anyway.
I want to converse about truth,
about trust. I want to invite compassion
into every interaction.
One willing heart can’t stop a war.
One willing heart can’t feed all the hungry.
And sometimes, daunted by a task too big,
I tell myself what’s the use of trying?
But today, the invitation is clear:
to be ridiculously courageous in love.
To open the heart like a lilac in May,
knowing freeze is possible
and opening anyway.
To take love seriously.
To give love wildly.
To race up to the world
as if I were a puppy,
adoring and unjaded,
stumbling on my own exuberance.
To feel the shock of indifference,
of anger, of cruelty, of fear,
and stay open. To love as if it matters,
as if the world depends on it.
 
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation

These words of benediction and blessing from a fellow female pastor made their way into my heart this week. As members of PasCov, a church drawn to love, hear this for yourselves:
 
May you delight in the abundant diversity of creation. The whole world is a splendid gift of beauty. Soak in its splendor, even as you mourn the ways brokenness has infiltrated its perfection.
 
May you celebrate the goodness of being human. What a joy to find yourself made in the image of God. May you be like a trusting child who turns to God’s protection even while denying the power of evil and empire to steal your belovedness.
 
Friends, may we stir our hearts to long for God’s kingdom to come, and God’s will to be done, on earth as it is in heaven. 
 
May you know the tender love of the Father, the companionship of Jesus and the powerful presence of the Spirit.
 
May we be known for our love and our compelling witness to the goodness and unfailing character of God. May we know God’ s presence. May our identity in Jesus be the truest thing about us. May the Spirit abide in us and testify to us again and again of our belovedness as true children of the living God.
 
 Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation

We are a Resurrection people, and Alleluia is our song. Are you singing? How in your waking do you greet the day, and how are you a bearer of God’s amazing grace throughout the day, and how do you end the day well?

What might it mean to live as if each breath, each choice we make, and every encounter is infused with the Spirit? How would we go about washing the dishes, making our to do lists, tending our homes and communities? How might we interact with our children, our work colleagues, or the grocery store attendant?

As we consciously put on the mind of Christ and open our hearts to God’s presence and love, what might we notice? If we saw creation as a living word of God and our bodies as temples of the Spirit, how might we treat them? Are we extending to others what we are receiving of God’s goodness and generosity?

 Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.

1 Corinthians 13:4-8

Read that again, and think of how Jesus lived his life, treated and responded to others. Is there a better checklist on which to measure our own relational, emotional and spiritual health? Precisely because that description of love is way beyond any one of us, without enabling grace, each day we seek once more the renewal of the reality of the Jesus who lives within us.

 Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation

On my bed I remember you; I think of you through the watches of the night. Because you are my help, I sing in the shadow of your wings.

Psalm 63:67

 
Lying awake in the middle of the night it’s often the anxieties we think about, rehearsing all the worst-case scenarios of things going wrong. The Psalm poet knows better. Instead of putting his head under the duvet to shut out a worrying world, he already knows he is under the protective shade of God’s surrounding care. There is a healing wisdom underlying that practice of turning from our own anxieties to a rehearsal of God’s overshadowing mercy.

 Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation

My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?

Psalm 42:2-3

 
Jesus was referring to that same longing of the heart for home and the security of a welcoming love when he called “Blessed” those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. When we use the word ‘devotional’ to describe our times of prayer, or whatever we read and think about in our prayers, we are using a word laden with emotion. This is about the longing of love, the restless and homeless heart seeking the felt and known presence of the living God. When meeting up with someone we love, we might say, “I missed you!” That’s what the Psalm poet means about meeting with God. The anticipation of One we have missed, and the joy of meeting again!
 
 Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation

On Friday night, as I was getting into my car with the pizza I'd just ordered, I caught myself from shutting the door too quickly. In the air, I heard local church bells chime eight o'clock, followed by the first few notes of what I immediately identified as "Blessed Assurance." 
 
Echoes of mercy, whispers of love. 
 
In a year that's held a lot of really hard news, it's been challenging to see the mercies. As a therapist and pastor,  I'm navigating the fire crisis that will impact many lives for years to come. As a person, I'm filled with the same exhaustion and anxieties as everyone else. We are all in this together.
 
So, as I got in my car on Friday, humming along to a hymn I've been singing my entire life, I thought about the echoes of mercy I've heard in my week, the whispers of love I'd forgotten or ignored. The kind emails from colleagues and friends. The daily drives for prayer that continue to be a solace. Freshly blooming flowers. Hopes and dreams for the front yard. Sunshine at 7:00 p.m. Deep breaths. Psalm 36. Supporting small businesses with my dollars. Whispering "all will be well" to myself in moments of what felt like too much. 
 
I don't know what the future holds. I never did. But even in a week like this one, so noisy I almost missed it, there they were: Echoes of mercy. Whispers of love. 

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation

Thine be the glory, risen, conquering Son;
endless is the victory Thou o’er death hast won.
Angels in bright raiment rolled the stone away,
kept the folded grave-clothes where Thy body lay.

Thine be the glory, risen, conquering Son;
endless is the victory Thou o’er death hast won.

By Monday morning the Easter eggs are on sale and the boom in chocolate sales is passed. But Easter is forever. Jesus is risen! Death is defeated! The best hymns push us back into Scripture, and this hymn picks up the detail in John’s Gospel of angels left looking after carefully folded grave clothes. In John, Jesus speaks of being glorified in his death, and rising again. Easter glory blazes with life, and grave clothes are now redundant. Christian faith is a resurrection faith in the living Lord!

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation

Father forgive

Luke 23:34 Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.

Father forgive, and so forgiveness flows;

Flows from the very wound our hatred makes,

Flows through the taunts, the curses and the blows,

Flows through our wasted world, a healing spring,

Welling and cleansing, washing all the marks

Away, the scores and scars of every wrong.

Forgiveness flows to where we need it most:

Right in the pit and smithy of our sin,

Just where the dreadful nails are driven in,

Just where our woundedness has done its worst.

We know your cry of pain should be a curse,

Yet turn to you and find we have been blessed.

We know not what we do, but Heaven knows

For every sin on earth, forgiveness flows.

Malcolm Guite

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson

Pastor for Spiritual Formation