Daily Reflections and Worship Resources
Trust this:
that at the Last Judgment
God does not peer down at you
over a ledger-book of legal notes and calculations,
and pronounce a verdict.
God sits with you, says, “Come sit in my lap,”
and murmurs God’s pet names for you.
This is your judgment:
terms of endearment.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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For the brokenness of the daughter of my people
I am broken,
I mourn, and horror has seized me.
Is there no balm in Gilead?
—Jeremiah 8.21-22
Yes, all shall be well,
and all manner of things shall be well.
But when the pretty blonde woman on TV says everything’s fine
that’s not what she means. She’s lying.
For before all manner of things shall be well,
first we will be cruel.
For our willingness to harm,
and for those crushed by our cruelty,
my heart is broken.
For children purposefully starved,
for terror calculated as policy,
for earth scorched and abused,
horror has seized me.
For the greed and the lies of the powerful,
for the vacant stare of the destitute,
I am broken.
Let my grief be holy, my sorrow be my prayer.
Before it congeals into rage, let it weep.
This great collapse within me,
this trembling, this irruption of emptiness,
is the heart of God—not wrath, but sorrow.
For my people, and yes, I am among them,
I am broken.
And this is my power: not anger but love.
This great wound is the openness,
where flows the blood of the Lamb,
that heals the world.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:03 — 2.8MB)
As a baker carries the exquisite wedding cake—
heavy and delicate—into the room,
as the ambulance weaves through traffic
with its precious healing cargo inside,
as the woman near her due date
shields her baby through the crowd,
as the milkweed seed is entrusted to the wind
with all its generations,
as clouds hold aloft, in mere vapor,
a flood of water,
as a child reverently carries
a candle through the darkness,
through this day, God, I bear you:
gently, mightily, praying in me.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 0:57 — 1.3MB)
Find a gentle piece of earth.
Sit and be present. Sit still long.
Let the wind hold you, breathe you in and out.
Let the grasses grow up around you
and weave you into a nest.
Let your skin become soil.
Let your body sink down into the folds of fungus,
the fecund lap of earth.
Let the stream flowing by wash your feet, clean them,
rinse away the road, wash away your legs and hips.
You are a sandbank, gradually falling into the water,
becoming part of the flow.
Trees grow up through your spine,
clouds come in and out of your eyes,
whole storm fronts pass through the tabernacle of your lungs.
Allow yourself to become a branch of the great vine.
Now generations gather in you. Tribes and their tribulations,
saints and the scoundrels among them, congregate in you.
Give them time to come.
The woes of the world, and its wonders, seep into you.
And with it all—wonder of wonders, it has been so all along!—
flowing into you is the Divine, that infinite Mystery,
the Love that is the Source of all things,
the gravity that holds, the Life that issues forth in you.
Your breathing is the breathing of God.
Let it be so. Let it be so for a long time. Forever.
When you get up from this place it will come with you—
wonder of wonders, it has been so all along!—
forever.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:38 — 3.6MB)
There was a rich man who had a manager;
he heard that the manager was squandering his property….
—Luke 16.1
And Jesus went around
to everyone who thought they owed God something,
and asked, “What do you think you owe?”
And they would count it up.
And he would say, “Erase it.”
And God said, “That’s my boy.”
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 0:31 — 736.9KB)
God, sometimes I confuse your will and mine.
Teach me to attend.
I forget you are in me.
Lean in me, so I happen to go your way,
even by accident.
Just kick once in a while
to let me know you’re there.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 0:33 — 771.8KB)
In the garden I grabbed a handful of dirt
but it jumped out of my hand—living!
It was a toad, dirt-colored, dirt-still.
I knelt there a while and we looked
at each other and for a moment
no thoughts passed between us.
We were just two clumps of dirt,
two sizes, two stories,
two distances from words.
I was amazed at what I’d thought was dirt.
How often had this happened?
He had no such thoughts.
I returned to my gardening, then looked,
and he had vanished. Only clumps of dirt.
The woods were full of him.
I got up and walked down the street,
practicing believing everything
is more full of life than we know.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:04 — 1.5MB)
What woman having ten silver coins,
if she loses one of them,
does not light a lamp, sweep the house,
and search carefully until she finds it?
—Luke 15.8
God the homemaker, the house-sweeper,
searches
for your lost coin.
It may be a grief swept under,
a shame covered over,
a gift denied.
In her hand it’s worth something.
She will find it, and rejoice.
You be her lamp. Help her look.
And when she finds it (even maybe
her love for you, that you’ve
forgotten behind something),
join the celebration
as she holds it up to the light
and dances.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:07 — 1.5MB)
You may seem in the minority
while so few hold all the power.
Don’t let that fool you.
You may feel small and alone,
standing against selfishness and cruelty.
But you are vast.
Those who deny our unity
draw only from the dry cisterns
of their own fear and self-serving.
But you bud forth from our oneness,
a branch of one vine.
You flow from the infinite ocean
of grace that is God’s energy,
the power that orders the universe.
They have only the strength of their own anxiety,
but your breath and veins flow
with the ferocious life force of all living beings.
It rises through the earth,
overflows you, and warms the world.
Even when you stand alone
you hold us all in your hands,
you are one with countless others.
Even when you fail
you are a root hair of heaven.
You are immense.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:17 — 1.8MB)
Which one of you, having a hundred sheep
and losing one of them,
does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness
and go after the one that is lost until they find it?
—Luke 15.4
None of us, of course.
We cut our losses and guard what we have.
But God, well, they have different math.
With God it’s all about the whole.
With God a hundred minus one is zero,
like a marriage minus one.
God doesn’t have a hundred.
God has ones. Many of them. They all count.
So of course God seeks the one.
There is no one God doesn’t seek.
The ninety-nine complain,
as if they’re somehow slighted.
Affirmative action, they say—
it’s reverse discrimination.
But ever since Eden there’s been
the One Law of God: that we all live together.
Until we’re all included
even God isn’t whole.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:20 — 1.8MB)