The Prayer of Jesus in John 17

17 After saying all these things, Jesus looked up to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son so he can give glory back to you. ² For you have given him authority over everyone. He gives eternal life to each one you have given him. ³ And this is the way to have eternal life—to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, the one you sent to earth. ⁴ I brought glory to you here on earth by completing the work you gave me to do. ⁵ Now, Father, bring me into the glory we shared before the world began.

  

I woke this morning called to ponder these words. 

I wonder what work shall I complete in this world? We are not long here. What are my aims, goals, and hopes? Will my actions lead to that which is everlasting? Are my actions marked by love? Not always, not lately. Weary am I of this inflamed world and her heartache, her divisions, and her despair. Yet, I seek to renew a covenant with Him, a relationship marked by Love which shall last.

 

⁶ “I have revealed you^[a] to the ones you gave me from this world. They were always yours. You gave them to me, and they have kept your word. ⁷ Now they know that everything I have is a gift from you, ⁸ for I have passed on to them the message you gave me. They accepted it and know that I came from you, and they believe you sent me.

We have always been His.  Do we believe it? Do I live in that place? We have been one with God since the beginning. Nothing can change that. Yet, a gift is received by one who opens it. A gift left unopened does not alter the heart intent of the Giver. Do I open His gift daily?

 

⁹ “My prayer is not for the world, but for those you have given me, because they belong to you. ¹⁰ All who are mine belong to you, and you have given them to me, so they bring me glory. ¹¹ Now I am departing from the world; they are staying in this world, but I am coming to you. Holy Father, you have given me your name;^[b] now protect them by the power of your name so that they will be united just as we are.

Do I live knowing there is protection and power in His name? Always. We may not see or recognize the power or the protection, but it's there. There is power, love, grace, and truth, in that Name. 

 ¹² During my time here, I protected them by the power of the name you gave me.^[c] I guarded them so that not one was lost, except the one headed for destruction, as the Scriptures foretold.

¹³ “Now I am coming to you. I told them many things while I was with them in this world so they would be filled with my joy. ¹⁴ I have given them your word. And the world hates them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. ¹⁵ I’m not asking you to take them out of the world, but to keep them safe from the evil one. ¹⁶ They do not belong to this world any more than I do. ¹⁷ Make them holy by your truth; teach them your word, which is truth. ¹⁸ Just as you sent me into the world, I am sending them into the world. ¹⁹ And I give myself as a holy sacrifice for them so they can be made holy by your truth.

Do I have joy which comes from the things He's shared with me? If I admit it, as of late, "no". The world rips apart at her seams, so feels my soul. But my spirit, your spirit, we are alive. Living. Well. If we walk in truth. Freedom. Love. Grace. 

Let us not forget. We don't belong to this world - we belong to Him. We are called to bring healing to this world while we are here, but it is not our final home. Our physical bodies are but seeds waiting to be blown upon the wind and planted in a far more beautiful and lasting garden.

 

²⁰ “I am praying not only for these disciples but also for all who will ever believe in me through their message. ²¹ I pray that they will all be one, just as you and I are one—as you are in me, Father, and I am in you. And may they be in us so that the world will believe you sent me.

On this Good Friday, is the church, even if only in my small corner of the world, the only place I can change, one? Are we one against injustice? Are we one in protecting the widow and orphan? Are we one in loving and advocating for the downtrodden and children? Are we one with Him in His love?

 

²² “I have given them the glory you gave me, so they may be one as we are one. ²³ I am in them and you are in me. May they experience such perfect unity that the world will know that you sent me and that you love them as much as you love me. ²⁴ Father, I want these whom you have given me to be with me where I am. Then they can see all the glory you gave me because you loved me even before the world began!

²⁵ “O righteous Father, the world doesn’t know you, but I do; and these disciples know you sent me. ²⁶ I have revealed you to them, and I will continue to do so. Then your love for me will be in them, and I will be in them.”

May it be so. 

As He went to the cross for you and I, may we be one in Him. Because if we are in Him, truly living as He lived, we are one with each other and with Jesus Christ.

And if we are in Jesus when the world cracks, it will not be the outpouring of pain, but the splitting open of the tomb. And if we are in Jesus when the world cracks, it will not be more broken hearts, nor refugees crying for shelter, nor bombs exploding, but the outpouring of Life giving Grace which heals us.

Easter, my friends, is for our pain and brokenness. It is for every moment we cannot condone, and every hurt we cannot explain. One day, the belly of the world will laugh, not groan. While we argue and ache now, one day we will rise with the Light.

Thus, we live with assurance: The day of His death was conquered by a life giving dawn.

Backpacking with the Saints, Wilderness Hiking As Spiritual Practice

He who would travel happily, must travel light. 

 ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery 

    Backpacking with the Saints

Silence is both the agony and solace of frontier people. 

A desert solitaire must resist much and obey little. 

We are in the wilderness to make love to it, to appreciate it. 

The journey is the destination.

In our trying to do it all, are we changed by any of it?

If we lose something, we have been set free from care. 

~ Abba Euprepius

It is okay to simply be a witness - not to be the star in the universe.

Knowledge is the servant of wonder.

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.

~ James Joyce

Criticism eats into the soul like acid. 

Criticism invariably shuts us down.

We may still love what we cannot comprehend. 

   This is the mystery and power of those beings who serve something other than their own provisional personalities: we cannot escape them. 

   It is essential to remind one's self that it is always the soul that dies first, never the body. 

On the Stack

Botany for Artists

 Wild Comfort, the Solace of Nature

The Old Ways, a Journey on Foot

What the Robin Knows

The Thunder Tree

Early American Naturalists

Holdfast

Originals

The Best of Edward Abbey  

Wintergreen

*Where not otherwise attributed, all quotes/thoughts are by Belden C. Lane

   After months of writing, actually a few years, I post this journal piece by grace and by God. May it find and make its way to whoever needs to read it.  Our Journey Through Ulcerative Colitis.

* It is long-form journalism. Make sure you have a hot cup of tea and a soft seat before you take time to read!

The American Scholar, Musings on Emerson for Our Time

   The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. This every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although, in almost all men, obstructed, and as yet unborn.  The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates. In this action, it is genius....

    In this hope, I accept the topic... — The American Scholar. Let us inquire what light new days and events have thrown on his character, and his hopes.

     I come to this space, after a long absence, unable to remove The American Scholar from my mind. I lie pondering in the night, and by day I write - just not here. 

   I write about Thomas Nuttall who traveled the continent, unparalleled in his time, and I write of issues which Oregonians will soon be aware, of privacy concerns, love, and rights to safeguard, unparalleled in our time. 

   I keep certain convictions ever before me: I can love what I do not comprehend, and children and privacy rights are honorable to protect.

   At home, we are reading through Great American Speeches. We are discussing, pondering, and seeking to live words. We are inviting them into our awareness and actions, as we are ever aware that awareness and actions are needed today. 
 

   Questions of interpretation on The Oregon Equality Act (Senate Bill 2) sit before our governor and legislators. Right now. Today. Oregon parents need to know. Interpretation of The Oregon Equality Act will effect privacy rights for all Oregon's school children. 

   Other issues rise about us: Justice Scalia's passing, presidential races amok, education needs, and privacy concerns. Will we, together, come to the table to labor and think?

   If our age is marked by fear, so too, it's marked by apathy. It's time to act: to find loving solutions together, to be Man Thinking and cooperating together. 

   Let us look to Emerson, let us look to God. In these times, who is the American Scholar and what influences them?

   1. The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature....The scholar is he of all men whom this spectacle most engages....He must settle its value in his mind. What is nature to him? 

   There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself. Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he never can find, — so entire, so boundless. 

    ...to this school-boy under the bending dome of day, is suggested, that he and it proceed from one root; one is leaf and one is flower; relation, sympathy, stirring in every vein. And what is that Root? Is not that the soul of his soul?
 
   So much of nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not yet possess. And, in fine, the ancient precept, "Know thyself," and the modern precept, "Study nature," become at last one maxim. 

   2. The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar, is, the mind of the Past, — in whatever form, whether of literature, of art, of institutions, that mind is inscribed. Books are the best type of the influence of the past, and perhaps we shall get at the truth....

   Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire.

  When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. 

   The discerning will read, in his Plato or Shakespeare, only that least part, — only the authentic utterances of the oracle; — all the rest he rejects, were it never so many times Plato's and Shakespeare's. 

   Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable office, — to teach elements. But they can only highly serve us, when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame. 

   3.  Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it, he is not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into truth. Whilst the world hangs before the eye as a cloud of beauty, we cannot even see its beauty. Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind. The preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is action. Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose not.

    I grasp the hands of those next me, and take my place in the ring to suffer and to work, taught by an instinct, that so shall the dumb abyss be vocal with speech. 

   I do not see how any man can afford, for the sake of his nerves and his nap, to spare any action in which he can partake. It (action) is pearls and rubies to his discourse.

  The mind now thinks; now acts; and each fit reproduces the other. When the artist has exhausted his materials, when the fancy no longer paints, when thoughts are no longer apprehended, and books are a weariness, — he has always the resource to live. Character is higher than intellect. Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary. The stream retreats to its source. A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think. 

    I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be said of the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome; always we are invited to work; only be this limitation observed, that a man shall not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgements and modes of action.  

   They are such as become Man Thinking. The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances.  

   These being his functions, it becomes him to feel all confidence in himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. 

   In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach; and bide his own time....

 

   He learns that he who has mastered any law in his private thoughts, is master to that extent of all men whose language he speaks...they drink his words because he fulfils for them their own nature....

   The people delight in it; the better part of every man feels, This is my music; this is myself. For a man, rightly viewed comprehendeth the particular natures of all men. It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men. 

   If there is any period one would desire to be born in, — is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old, can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?  

   This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.

The Beauty of Rest

Love

Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.

~TS Eliot

Advent Emerging

   I love the image below by Rockwell. Do you see St. Nick's book has only the words "Good Boys" on it? The hysterical implication is all girls are good, but that good boys can be confined to a single volume.

   From previous experience, I proffer that good boys may be hard to find in art museums near Christmas, and that Christmas does not always bring out the best of good girls nor their mothers!

   As for Advent: It's been a month. J has worked 3 weeks straight, 12 hour days (at least) with 1 day off. He's ready for a much needed break; we are ready for his presence with us. 

   Yet God's grace sustains us. God's grace holds us close. It helps us do the next thing, share the next word, and shop and wrap joy. We walk into the dark holding the light.

       We began advent with our favorite German inspired advent walk.

       But we also began advent with the loss of another lamb.

      And the terror that comes with watching a cougar haul off a precious lamb while your son plays soccer nearby cannot be described. And it occurred within 90 minutes of sharing these words with someone I love:

The wolf will live with the lamb,
    the leopard will lie down with the goat,
the calf and the lion and the yearling together;
    and a little child will lead them.

Isaiah 11:6

  There is a battle between light and dark. Winter solstice has come and gone, and so too the darkness must give way to the light. The darkness hasn't a choice, dear ones. The light is coming, and it comes from a single source.

   Yes, this December, we have dashed the mouth of the lion. We overcame through Christ - it is He who shuts the mouth of the lion from our children, and pays the cost Himself. He is the Lamb of God.  Do you see?

   Through Him alone, we celebrate amidst the pouring rain, dark days, and loss. Through the lashing wind and rain, He emerges, He is enough, and He is good.

      And His rainbows this month? There have been too many to count!

   And Sunday, we finally made it to a local tree farm to cut a massive Nordmann. She's 10' tall and drinks like an elephant. I do miss the fir smell which Nordmann's lack, but maybe this is your tree if you have allergies.

 

   Note to self: A tree with a 5" diameter base in a 6" diameter tree stand means watering every few hours. Brother has been using his hydrodynamics water works to keep her full up. It has been a great gift which has lasted years.

   We have settled into baking and are working on peppermint bark, chocolate gingerbread cookies, baklava, and chocolate peppermint crackles. The kids are really enjoying audible Cinnamon Bear stories while they bake, and make origami decorations for the Christmas tree. We are keeping it very low key this year for everyone. 

  More and more, we are moving toward home made presents and giving the gift of our time and presence. We cannot buy what truly counts. We can only give it.

   There will be a few small things under the tree. We will see if this and this is a hit. I hope so! 

    She offered up songs in the middle school Christmas Cantata. It was wonderful to see her sing with joy after being so sick last year. God is exceedingly gracious. 

   We took in White Christmas at The Gallery Theatre in McMinnville. Darling. They've watched a White Christmas too many times to count, and yesterday watched The Christmas Story. We are writing stories all around us, living stories, breathing stories, and we are being invited into the One's story.

   I keep coming back to Rohr's words during our advent devotional times: Jesus did not come to change God's mind about humanity, but to change humanity's mind about God.

   For those of you facing loss this month: One day, in Him, we will gain those we have lost. When the dawn of new time arises, our lanterns we will lay down. We won't need them - the world will give way to the Light. 

   Even now, all earth speaks to His birth and resurrection - if only we would believe. If only we would ask for eyes with which to see.

   Wishing you a blessed Advent, and the awareness and awe of His glory emerging. 

~ Kim