People see God every day, they just don’t recognize him. Pearl Bailey
Meditation: When we go through life, our everyday concerns easily take over. Home life demands, work life worries and then the daily news flooding into our cars, our homes, our brains and emotional lives. There is not much space to pause and reflect. We often don’t get the chance to stop and pray. Even though it is Lent season, it is hard to halt and ponder where God is in everything we experience. When challenges, bad news, disappointing developments hit our hearts, we easily feel abandoned by God. Where is God? God’s presence seems questionable and far away. Our everyday challenges make us too anxious, too busy to pause and see God in everything. God is paradox. God is the One far away and yet so very close. God is the paradox of being a loving universal presence that we easily experience as very far away and distant, and then God is this loving microscopic creator presence that wants to heal every small cut on our skin that we easily take for granted and don’t think about.
Prayer: Loving God, your absence is felt every day. We wonder where you are when people are being deported. When policies are being made that only serve companies and the already rich. We wish you would intervene. And yet, you are bigger than what is happening. You are seeing the larger picture. You are holding our future, while we are overwhelmed with the present. And then you are also interwoven intimately with every happening in the here and now. You are there in every immigration cell. You are present when a person loses health insurance. You are with us as we sort through the chaos of the day. You are the invisible life force that will restore justice in the end and that will heal our every wound. And we pause. And we are grateful. Amen
“Am I only a God nearby,” declares the Lord, “and not a God far away?” Jeremiah 23:23
“You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways”. Psalm 139:3
Watchwords 