Month: June 2025

             And how is it that we hear, each of us,
             in our own native language?
                                      —Acts 2.8

I crave chocolate, but that doesn’t matter.
Years ago my wife craved carrots.
She ate so many her skin turned orange.
We found out it was because her body
really craved beta carotene
because she had cancer. (She lived.)

Sometimes we hear what we want to hear,
and un-hear or mis-hear the rest.
But maybe on Pentecost they heard
because it was something they knew they needed,
something their soul, not just their ego, craved.
Not just a treat, but life.

Sometimes we crave chocolate from God,
hoping to hear what we want.
But deeper, trickier, more silent,
sometimes even more foreign sounding,
is the real Word that we crave.
Your deepest craving is probably true.

Imagine that we are given
not just what people think they want,
but what their souls most deeply crave,
and we are give the power to share it,
so they hear, in their own language,
the grace of God.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:32 — 2.1MB)

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We were sitting around talking
about how he loved us,
when it flared up in us—not a memory,
but inward fire, the love itself,
like a mother’s love that drives her
into a burning house to save her children—
his love, this unbidden passion
for the world, flamed up in us
and drove us into the streets
to seek the stranger, to embrace
the foreigner, and to speak—
how to convey it?—this love
for all who’d been told
they were outsiders,
in languages not our own:
locked doors opened,
fruit placed in their mouths,
hands laid on their shoulders,
belonging nested in the crib
of their hearts. Homecoming.
That day there were no strangers.
We were all kin, all learning
how to listen together for the first time
to this mystery rising up to greet us
in each other, all of us losing
our tongues for the language of God.
Then we knew that fire Jesus had
had not been put out:
it was in us, now, spreading, yes, actually,
like wildfire.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:26 — 2.0MB)

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS