Sunday, January 26, 2014

Defining God

This Sunday was a simple day filled with everyday moments.  I left the warmth of my bed at 6:30am (and I wasn't even preaching!) to shovel 2 inches of snow from our driveway.  A bagel and orange juice breakfast followed by a hot shower prepared me for going to Sunday worship.  Cheryl, Kristen, and I were pleasantly surprised by having good friends, Pastors Hugh and Erma Rohrer, join us as their church was snowed out of services.  It was a communion Sunday and we had-for me-those awful, tasteless wafers and grape juice.  Surely Jesus meant for us to have two of the joys of life-good bread and wine!

Lunch was at the Southside Diner where they might not call out "Norm" when I enter but they do know my name!  A solid breakfast for me at 1:00 in the afternoon and some teasing with the wait staff.  Then home to shovel off what the city plows threw back onto my driveway.  With the promise/threat of bitter cold and more snow the next 3 days it was off to the library to pick up some reading material.  Man does not live by television alone.

Two pain pills and a recliner carried me away for a winter's nap.  A light supper and washing the dishes brings me to the first shadows of the night.  A simple day with everyday moments.  In the darkness a siren now echoes and a life faces a crisis-may it become song and not sorrow for those at the end of the ambulance run.  A God given day and I choose to end by sharing with you a poem by Jane Kenyon.  Her poetry speaks powerfully to me.  She defines God in her poem Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks. 

I am the blossom pressed in a book, found again after two hundred years...
I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper....
When the young girl who starves sits down to a table she will sit beside me....
I am food on the prisoner's plate...
I am water rushing to the wellhead, filling the pitcher until it spills....
I am the patient gardener of the dry and weedy garden....
I am the stone step, the latch, and the working hinge...
I am the heart connected by joy...the longest hair, white before the rest....
I am there in the basket of fruit presented to the widow...
I am the mush rose opening unattended, the fern on the boggy summit....
I am the one whose love overcomes you, already with you when you think to call my name...

And so a simple day ends with a simple definition of God that comforts me and reminds me of where to look for God's presence.