March 16

Just a note to check in...I have been pretty sick since my last post, but am well on my way to wholeness. I love it how God uses our infirmities so beautifully.  It appears that it is too easy to fill up the hours with busyness and feel good or at least OK with it, and miss what is really most important.

Thursday night I couldn't sleep - my ear hurt.  Friday I dressed for work, and on the way in, knew it was a much better idea to see the doc.  To make a long story short, an antibiotic and antibiotic ear drops with prednisone and two days under the blankets brought my fever down and restored me to semi-vertical life.  But the delight came in the next twp days when I was finally clear enough to read but to weak to do much more.  God came to me in very special ways through his Word, I have been studying I John and a book I had just bought and stashed for summer: An Altar in the World by Barbara Brown Taylor.

It took all of that for me to slow down long enough to really listen, to begin to pay attention once again to the love of God behind his Words....and today I am feeling both spiritually and physically refreshed. 
Let me share a few of the lines from Taylor's book that pressed me further into God's presence.  I know they may not move you as they moved me, or provoked me to thinking....but humor me and see if there might be some line here that God would encourage you to think about how it relates to you.

I had forgotten that the whole world is the house of God....
When had I made the subtle switch myself, becoming convinced that church bodies and buildings were the safest and most reliable places to encounter the living God?........(and my note, at what cost?)

...part of what they (some church people) need saving from is the idea that God sees the world the same way they do.

In reference to Francis of Assissi: Francis could not have told you the difference between the "sacred" and the "secular."  (my note - should here be? to the believer?)

I am a guest here charged with serving other guests.

Wisdom is gained by practicing what is right, and noticing what happens when that practice succeeds and when it fails....Wisdom atrophies if it is not walked on a regular basis.

Well, that is enough for today....