Month: May 2024

             I do not call you servants any longer…
              but I have called you friends.
                                     —John 15.15

Jesus will have no hierarchies,
no separations or divisions,
not even between us and him.
“Call no one good but God.”
There are no greater and lesser,
no servants and masters,
no insiders and outsiders.
Not even believers and unbelievers.
Only friends, peers, siblings, companions.
Every stranger is a sibling.
Every person you meet is a friend
for whom you would lay down your life.
There is no “them.” There is only us.
In the love of Christ, befriend this world
and everyone in it;
you will never be alone.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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God, teach me to love myself
as you have loved me:
to cherish myself, to delight in my soul,
to appreciate my journey, to care for my well-being,
to commit to my wholeness.
Give me grace to respect and nurture myself,
to offer myself both challenge and rest.
Teach me to forgive myself, to be gentle with myself,
to believe in myself and your hidden greatness in me.
Trusting in my belovedness, I am free and at peace:
in need but not needy, not compulsive, not afraid,
not easily seduced by either pride or despair.
Teach me to love myself
even as you do.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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The brook lays itself down among the trees,
ambling around the hips and shoulders
of the land, not in a hurry, satisfied
to allow itself to be let down to the sea
as the earth will draw it, not of its own mind,
but by the will of gravity and the ground
where it finds itself. It hurries only
when steepness beckons, then pools
in pooling places, pausing, languid,
here or there as if to savor, or to recollect.
Where there are falls it falls.
The water murmurs over stones
when they present themselves, swirling
beside the roots and mosses, gathers
behind a bosom of sticks and leaves
a storm has laid down, then finds its way
beneath them, uncomplaining.
It quietly collects some scalloped ribs of sand,
and just as quietly lets them go.
The stream receives the frogs and fish
who shelter there, and bears the water bugs
who skitter on its face, as well as storm-flung limbs
and whole great trees that fall and settle
in its bed. The water moves around, and carries on.
The brook surrenders itself to the pond,
and waits. At last it sighs over the spillway,
submits to the culvert beneath the road,
and moves on, until, when it is time,
when it is time, it finds the sea.
The spring and the cloud, the ocean,
and the great flowing beneath the earth are all here,
yet the brook is only here.

I will sit with you a while, little brook.
Teach me.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:11 — 3.0MB)

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