Maybe we all have our go to texts when we are searching the scriptures for wisdom, guidance, a word from the Lord, a nudge in the right direction. I often turn to Paul’s prayers. His prayers are always for the churches as they face all the ups and downs, tensions, blessings and demands of community life.
So, I turned to Colossians 1:9-11, what some scholars call one of Paul’s wish prayers. No, not wishful thinking, but Paul’s wish list of blessings for the Christian house groups in Colossae:
For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you. We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives, so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light.
Paul asks for knowledge of God’s will, all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives so that…. two things —so that they might live a life worthy of the Lord AND so that they may have great endurance and patience. Now there’s a surprise. Yes, we would expect to ask God for knowledge, wisdom and understanding when we are seeking to know God’s will. But patience? A willingness to wait often requires more faith than the rush to action or the exciting risks of new ideas and rapid change.
Here’s why I think Paul’s prayer for patience helps us where we are right now. The long, slow, and stuttering emergence from Covid-19 lockdown and restrictions will require of us courage, risk-taking and a huge amount of goodwill and understanding. To think and pray, to share ideas but listen to each other’s fears, to begin to rebuild differently but also to discern what should change and what we should keep and enhance—that’s a process that works best when we have been empowered with patience.
Paul’s prayer comes from one who knows the wisdom of the gardener who waits for growth, the builder who gets the foundations right, the doctor who doesn’t rush to a diagnosis, and the shepherd who guides but does not chase the sheep. Patience and endurance are very similar words in Paul’s vocabulary. Together they describe the ability to work things out and work things through. Patience is God’s empowering presence, the resilience of the risen Christ strengthening his people.
So perhaps the prayer, “God give us patience” is the prayer for a time like this. I sense and fully understand the urgency, intensity and yes, even impatience, to get started, to get doing, to get the show back on the road. Except the church is not a show, it is a community of the Spirit, a fellowship of believers, and a local expression of the Body of Christ. Together we are the real presence of Jesus, his risen life flowing through and among us as together we seek to serve Him in the power of the Spirit, whose fruit is patience.
This emergence from pandemic coincides with our yearlong celebration of God’s (patient) work through 100 years of Pasadena Covenant Church. What a fabulous legacy we have! Our Centennial team has prepared a blog with images and stories of the foundations of PasCov, beginning this month with focus on the buildings and properties. Read more at :
https://www.pascov.org/centennial
Grace and peace,
Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation
So many have been sharing recently that they are exhausted. Tired of being tired. Chronically weary and threadbare from 18 months of over-functioning in pandemic and with so many pivots. There have not been the usual rhythms of rest and relaxation, work and vacation, school year and summer. We all need deep days of rest and renewal to continue to sustain all that is before us. I came across Pete Greig's Sabbath Blessing on Lectio 365 recently:
May this day bring Sabbath rest to my heart and my home.
May God's image in me be restored, and my imagination in God re-storied.
May the gravity of material things be lightened, and the relativity of time slow down.
May I know grace to embrace my own finite smallness in the arms of God's infinite greatness.
May God's word feed me and His Spirit lead me into the week and into the life to come.
And then there is Jessica Kantrowitz's benediction:
Peace in your exhaustion
Peace in your collapse
Peace in your rising
Peace in your second wind
Peace in your plodding on
Peace in your soaring
Peace in your wrapping up
Peace in your giving up
Peace in your resting
Peace and rest
Peace and rest
Grace and peace,
Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation
Open Invitation from Isaiah the Prophet (2nd part)
Isaiah 55.6 “Seek the Lord while he may be found, call to him while he is close at hand.”
Isaiah is the poet and prophet whose life work seems to have been issuing invitations on behalf of God. Many of us who have been on the road of faith for years can be tempted to think we have ‘found’ God, and no longer need to seek Him. True enough, in one sense. But we will always find ourselves in hard places, or times when hope is low and light is dim. He is near, call upon him; seek God because if you ask you will receive, if you seek you will find, and if you knock —doors open.
Isaiah 55.7 “Let the wicked forsake his ways, and the evil their thoughts: let them return to the Lord, who will take pity on them, and to our God, for he will freely forgive.”
This verse isn’t about other people; it’s about us. Read it alongside these words: “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” (I Jn.1.8-9) Forgiveness is always God’s preferred option.
Isaiah 55.8-9 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
We can never out-think God. Whatever is happening in our lives God knows more about it than we ever could. Our horizons are limited, our line of vision restricted. But God sees the end from the beginning. Faith is to trust when we can’t see, and to go on hoping in the God whose thoughts out-think us, and whose ways are always faithful. In the death and resurrection of Jesus, God’s thoughts display heaven’s wisdom in finding the One way of salvation we would never have thought of.
Isaiah 55. 10-11 “As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.”
Isaiah is the poet and prophet not only of invitations, but of promises. He describes a cycle of blessing under which all who seek God flourish. Rain and snow, the watering of the earth, the sowing of seed and the baking of bread – God’s promises are like that. Life-giving, dependable, a continual cycle of blessing and flourishing. God’s words are sent for a purpose, – and they are words of blessing, creation, fruitfulness and life.
Grace and peace,
Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation
Open Invitation from Isaiah the Prophet
Isaiah 55.1 “Come for water, all who are thirsty; though you have no money, come, buy grain and eat. Come, buy wine and milk, not for money, not for a price.
Three times we are invited – ‘Come’. Sometimes we are so concerned to exalt the power of God and his sovereign call, we forget that God’s love doesn’t compel our love. He invites us to come to Him for all that we need. Money, our capacity to pay our own way, doesn’t matter. God already offers what we need—if we come.
Isaiah 55.2 “Why spend your money for what is not food, your earnings on what will not satisfy? Listen to me and you will fare well, you will enjoy the fat of the land.”
Sometimes we don’t know what’s good for us. We think we do, but we make wrong choices. We yearn to be satisfied with our lives, content, safe, and nourished. Isaiah warned the people of God that they can only be satisfied by the Creator who made them. Instead of pursuing ‘what is not food’, pray “Give us this day our daily bread.”
Isaiah 55.3 “Come to me and listen to my words, hear me and you will have life. I shall make an everlasting covenant with you, to love you faithfully, as I loved David.”
When Jesus poured wine and said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood”, he had in mind verses like this. Through Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross, God has made an everlasting covenant to all who come in faith and trust. Once again, this is the God who says, “Come to me, and listen to my words.” This is the God whose love has the strength of an everlasting covenant. We have God’s word on that!
Grace and peace,
Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation
Called to Say Yes
We are called to say yes.
That the kingdom might break through
To renew and to transform
Our dark and groping world.
We stutter and we stammer
To the lone God who calls
And pleads a New Jerusalem
In the bloodied Sinai Straights.
We are called to say yes
That honeysuckle may twine
And twist its smelling leaves
Over the graves of nuclear arms.
We are called to say yes
That children might play
On the soil of Vietnam where the tanks
Belched blood and death.
We are called to say yes
That black may sing with white
And pledge peace and healing
For the hatred of the past.
We are called to say yes
So that nations might gather
And dance one great movement
For the joy of humankind.
We are called to say yes
So that rich and poor embrace
And become equal in their poverty
Through the silent tears that fall.
We are called to say yes
That the whisper of our God
Might be heard through our sirens
And the screams of our bombs.
We are called to say yes
To a God who still holds fast
To the vision of the Kingdom
For a trembling world of pain.
We are called to say yes
To this God who reaches out
And asks us to share
His crazy dream of love.
Edwina Gateley
Grace and peace,
Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation
Ordinary chitchat is not the stuff of intimacy, but regular contact is because, as the chitchat is going on, something deeper is happening (for good or for bad) under the surface.
Imagine you live in proximity to your mother and you make a commitment to visit her three times a week. Over the course of a year, that means you will be visiting her about 150 times. How many times, among all those times, will you have a deep conversation with her? A dozen times? Five times? A couple of times?
This is also true of our prayer lives and our relationship with God. If we make a commitment to sit in private prayer every day for half an hour, how many times might we expect that we’ll feel a deep movement of soul, a stunning insight, or an affirmation that really warms us? A dozen times a year? Five or six times a year? Perhaps.
Most of the time though our prayer time will be a lot like those visits we make regularly to our mothers. We will treasure those times when something special breaks through, but those times will not be what’s really important. What’s really important will be what’s growing under the surface, namely, a bond and an intimacy that’s based upon a familiarity that can only develop and sustain itself by regular contact, by actually sharing life on a day-to-day basis.
In describing one of the deep movements within mature prayer, John of the Cross writes: “At this point, God does not communicate himself through the senses as he did before, by means of discursive analysis and the synthesis of ideas but begins to communicate himself through pure spirit in an act of simple contemplation in which there is no discursive succession of thought.”
Think about that the next time you are talking trivialities with your mother – or get bored in prayer. Log that time together and relish the sweet moments when they surprise you.
Grace and peace,
Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation
This prayer has carried my cries across this past week, offered by Rebecca Stringer, formerly at PasCov, now Pastor at Wellspring Covenant Church in Hawaii:
God of Shalom, hear our prayer.
You once likened yourself to a mother hen who wanted to gather her baby chicks to herself to protect them from danger. Will you not do that now?
We remember the story of Hagar in scripture-- a woman from a vulnerable people group who was desperate to save her son and herself. Running for her life, she was joyfully surprised when you showed up in the desert, provided her with comfort and care, and revealed yourself to be the God who Sees.
In your eternal kindness, See now and save the vulnerable! Whether in Kabul, or in rural Afghanistan, or in the rubble of Haiti's towns, protect all who need a safe place. Preserve life. May all who need protection, resources, comfort, medical attention, courage --escape- find what they need supplied for them even in unexpected places. True to your good character, may you show up for a million Hagars in a million places, even when it seems impossible.
God of justice, thwart the plans of all who who exploit their power over the vulnerable. Cause them to fall into their own traps. Bring chaos to their plans and subvert their schemes. May those who live by the sword find their weapons of warfare insufficient and ineffective to bring about the change they seek. Help them pursue better ways of being and doing in the world.
God of comfort, bring comfort and your courage to those who are shattered and in shock. Whether in Afghanistan, or Haiti, or in countries around the world hurting for their sisters and brothers, may your Holy Spirit pray and intercede when there are no words left to say. In the name of the One who came so there could be life-- life everlasting, Amen.
Grace and peace,
Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation
Beauty is an invitation to experiencing the Creator’s love and majesty. When was the last time you beheld something beautiful and just relished the moment as a gift of love from God? This spiritual practice is available to us in every moment and merely requires attention and intention to be blessed.
Beauty is God's bait.
She sets it out and waits
for you to notice.
You pause and gaze,
and, God hopes, linger a bit,
rapt, while she stares at you
because she loves seeing
your face like that.
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
Grace and peace,
Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation
Laundry may seem an odd element in the realm of religious worship, but poet and author, Kathleen Norris has a talent for weaving seemingly disparate fragments of life together to see them as naturally connected. In her The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Llturgy and “Women’s Work”, she points out that "women's work" such as laundry, cooking, and cleaning, done repeatedly, on a daily basis and seemingly never to completion, can be approached in the same manner as liturgy.
If seen as endless and dreary repetition, these domestic rituals become mindless activities to be gotten out of the way. When considered in terms of their enormous life-giving importance, the feeding and clothing of a family and maintaining of a household can be undertaken in the contemplative spirit. They become, like prayer and worship, acts of love that transform us and, in turn, the larger world around us.
“O Father, light up the small duties of this day’s life: may they shine with the beauty of Thy countenance. May we believe that glory can dwell in the commonest task of every day.”
— Saint Augustine
Grace and peace,
Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation
The practice of gratitude is begun simply and yields sweet fruit so quickly!
Three Gratitudes
Every night before I go to sleep
I say out loud
Three things that I’m grateful for,
All the significant, insignificant
Extraordinary, ordinary stuff of my life.
It’s a small practice and humble,
And yet, I find I sleep better
Holding what lightens and softens my life
Ever so briefly at the end of the day.
Sunlight, and blueberries,
Good dogs and wool socks,
A fine rain,
A good friend,
Fresh basil and wild phlox,
My father’s good health,
My daughter’s new job,
The song that always makes me cry,
Always at the same part,
No matter how many times I hear it.
Decent coffee at the airport,
And your quiet breathing,
The stories you told me,
The frost patterns on the windows,
English horns and banjos,
Wood thrush and June bugs,
The smooth glassy calm of the morning pond,
An old coat,
A new poem,
My library card,
And that my car keeps running
Despite all the miles.
And after three things,
More often than not,
I get on a roll and I just keep on going,
I keep naming and listing,
Until I lie grinning,
Blankets pulled up to my chin,
Awash with wonder
At the sweetness of it all.
Carrie Newcomer
Grace and peace,
Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation