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

Our Father, who waits with patient love and runs to meet us as soon as we turn to return to you, we pray for all those who today are feeling lost, unloved, unwanted, far away from the love and safety of a community.

Those whose lives have slowly broken down into loneliness and loss of love - May they discover the friendship and acceptance of Jesus and his followers, including us.

Those who no longer have a home and safe space in which to live - May they find welcome and support in the company of Jesus and his followers, including us.

Those who struggle against the inner anguish of depression, loss of meaning and purpose in their life - May they recover hope and strength to go on because they are cared for, and looked after by those whose compassion, like God’s love, never gives up on them,

Those who are travelling in the far country of grief and loss, trying to make sense of the unfamiliar landscape of their life - May they know the strong comfort of faithful friends, the accompanying love of God who knows their sorrow and shares the burden of the days.

Father, we all know people who are struggling, who are in the far country, and who want to find their way back to a life of safety, community and welcome. God of compassion, we bring each of them into our minds and hearts, and so into the presence and reality of your grace, and peace and love in Christ. 

May they each discover the outstretched arms of your welcome, and recover a new sense of their own place in your love, and in the communities of Jesus and his followers, here in this church, and in all the gathered communities of Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation

I think there is no suffering greater than
what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe. 
I know what torment this is, but I can only see it, 
in myself anyway, as the process by which faith is deepened. 
What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. 
They think faith is a big electric blanket, 
when of course it is the cross. 
It is much harder to believe than not to believe. 
If you feel you can’t believe, you must at least do this: 
keep an open mind. 
Keep it open toward faith, 
keep wanting it, 
keep asking for it, 
and leave the rest to God.

~Flannery O’Connor from The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor 

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation

In some sense it always Advent, even now in Lent. We are pilgrims, ever leaning into the future. We are always waiting. Yet. Yet we are living now, in this precise moment. It is all we have. The past has slipped through our fingers, the future is for the moment unknowable. It can feel like we are merely marking time, or enduring the storms that rage. Yet. Yet we can live, not simply wrapped in our own thoughts, but awake to the needs that present themselves now, awake to each other, awake to God…
Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation

Grace and peace be yours in abundance.
1 Peter 1:2

Or as in another translation, “Grace and peace be yours to the fullest measure.” Grace and peace, as much as you can contain, and then God expands your capacity! Grace is God’s self-giving in Christ, undeserved, utterly unlooked for, free, but always seeking the response of an answering love of grateful glad obedience. Peace is that pervasive sense that nothing can separate us from God’s love, and that God’s grace is sufficient whatever comes our way. These are the signs of God’s work within and among the people of God. Chosen, once strangers, perhaps scattered, but graced with peace.

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation

Immortal, invisible, God only wise, 
In light inaccessible hid from our eyes,
Most blessèd, most glorious, the Ancient of Days,
Almighty, victorious, thy great Name we praise.

Worship is a balance between intimacy and awe. Praise is the recognition of God’s glory, the acknowledgement of our limited understanding, and a celebration of God’s grace, wisdom, mercy and love. This verse is a confession of the heart that God is beyond our grasp, his purposes are from everlasting to everlasting. In a world of flux and uncertainty, when our hearts are anxious and life seems uncertain, take time to look beyond the horizons of our sight to the only wise God, the Ancient of Days.

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation