Heather Holleman's Blog, page 116

Such Blue

Cultivating an Awareness of God

My friend sends me his favorite quote from Elizabeth Barrett Browning from her poem Aurora Leigh. She writes this: 

“Earth’s crammed with heaven, / And every common bush afire with God; / But only he who sees, takes off his shoes, / The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries, / And daub their natural faces unaware. . . ” 

I think about how to cultivate an awareness of God’s presence (to see, to take off my shoes on holy ground, to not live unaware) as I read a resonant quote from Brennan Manning this morning. He writes about saying “yes!” to an act of faith that is “a decisive, wholehearted response of my whole being to the risen Jesus present beside me, before me, around me, and within me.”

Manning presents the idea that this awareness of God “banishes meaninglessness–that dreaded sense that all our life experiences are disconnected and useless.” Now, we can “see our lives as all of one piece” with a divine design in everything. 

Awareness of God means we see the divine design. 

The act of faith: to first believe that Jesus is here with you now, working on your behalf, and always wishing to reveal Himself. There’s a grand design. There’s a whole spiritual world you cannot see except through faith. 

I’m beginning to think there’s an overlooked spiritual discipline of awareness. I think about David in Psalm 25:5 who said “my hope is in you all day long.” All day long. He wrote about God these words in Psalm 26: “Your love is ever before me, and I walk continually in your truth.” Ever before me. Continually in your truth. To see everything through the lens of God’s love, God’s design, and God’s revealing of Himself means we choose this disposition of our heart. We practice it. We interpret the day through this discipline. 

So how? Faith. Choosing. Trusting God’s word. Knowing there’s things happening in the spiritual realm all the time, and sometimes, we know that something happening here has touched eternity. We thank God all day long for His provision and peace. But there’s also hope. There’s expectation.

David says in Psalm 5:3 that he lays his requests before the Lord each morning and then “[waits] in expectation.” 

As we teach others about Jesus, we invite them to enjoy their conscious union with Him. We might present it as a spiritual discipline of faith and hope each new day.

 

Raking, Raking, Raking

I rake leaves all day. I rake big piles onto an enormous blue tarp, and then I drag the tarp to the street where I dump the leaves. In our town, a truck comes by to suck up the leaves every week in autumn. It’s amusing to watch this enormous vacuum cleaner snout emerge from the truck.
But raking. It’s peaceful, rhythmic work. I love verbs with a “k” sound, too. Rake comes from the German word that means “to heap up” and the Old Norse that meant “to shave or scrape.” I’m scraping up the lawn into heaps. I’m making a clean canvas for winter snow.
I haven’t purchased a leaf blower yet, so there’s no noise except the old-fashioned metal rake heaping the leaves and acorns up. I enjoy the warmer day, the light breeze, the bright sun, the blue sky, and the smell of leaves now piled up all around me. Every so often, I’ll check election results, but then I return to the ancient, slow task of raking.

We Keep Loving Others

A thought keeps running through my mind.
Here: Nothing can stop us from loving our neighbor. Nothing can stop us from caring for others and working in small ways, right where we are, to improve lives.
I think of Anne Frank’s beautiful words in her diary: “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”

The Comfort of God

This morning, I spent some time reading 2 Corinthians 1:3-4. I love thinking about God as “the God of all comfort.” We read this:
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.
Think about where you most need comfort today. Imagine how it might appear for you, how the Lord will draw near to you, and what heavenly aid He’ll release on your behalf. Let’s look for it today. What a day this could be!
I love the coziness of the word “comfort.” But I think about all of Paul’s great hardships that included beatings and imprisonment and hunger. How did God comfort him in those grim places? How could Paul praise God like this? How did Paul know God as “the God of all comfort?” I find myself delighted and challenged to think about this.
Paul makes the claim without limitation or restriction: God will comfort us in all our troubles. But why? So we can experience Him as the God of all comfort and then share this supernatural, beautiful, powerful comfort to those around us who need this comfort. The challenge is twofold then: to seek God’s comfort and then share God’s comfort today.

Happy Birthday to Me

Today I turn 45 years old! What a wonderful day it’s been so far.
My favorite birthday ritual involves journaling. If you don’t have a birthday ritual, steal mine! Tell me how it goes.
I dream: I think about hopes and fresh goals for the coming year. I reflect: with my Bible in hand, I ask the Holy Spirit to speak to my heart about ways I need to grow and mature this year. I pray: I pray blessings over my family, my students, and my neighbors. I cleanse: I ask God to purify my heart, free me from fears, and lead me away from any activities, relationships, or thoughts that do not please Him. I prepare: I think about what resources I need to move confidently forward in the direction I think God wants me to go. I rejoice: I thank God for everything that comes to mind.
This morning, something funny and special happened. I realized that this was the first birthday in 30 years (30 years!) that I didn’t include weight loss in my birthday goals. I actually didn’t even think about it until I remembered how much I once did. It’s maybe because it simply doesn’t matter so much (ha!–the blessing of age!), but it’s also because of the unexpected blessing of living in a pandemic. All the daily walking, all the healthy eating, and all the new choices to build health and see food as nutrition and medicine changed my life and my relationship to food. So I chuckled about this. It frees up so much mental space to not worry about the body so much. For this, I am thankful.

Swooping Owls

It’s a dark autumn day here. With nearly bare trees and leaves on the path, it feels spooky and mysterious. We gaze up and see a large bird swooping down and then landing in the trees high, high up. An owl? We think the wingspan indicates an owl.

Did you know that owls hoot the loudest in autumn? Apparently, everything is about finding and securing new territory. They may also begin to hoot to seek new mates.

I’m excited to listen deeply for the sounds of owls hooting in the woods behind my house.

 

 

Now We Bundle Up–No Bad Weather, Just Bad Clothing

We’ve loved our daily “loops” around the neighborhood. Since March, our daily walks have sustained us and provided structure, conversation, reflection time, and a regular mood boost.
We’ve gained health, lost weight, and improved our relationships through the daily walk that happens several times a day.
But now, with dropping temperatures, more rain, and a forecast of icy downpours next week, we have to craft our walking plan. We could, of course, abandon the ritual. Or—we could adapt to the weather. We’ll move forward, bundled up. We’ll keep walking.

Pace Yourself

Today I think about pacing ourselves in order to keep running the marathon that’s ahead of us–whatever that long stretch is in our own lives. We can slow down. We can pace ourselves. We have a lot of work left to do in our lives. We don’t have to do it all today.
I’m not a runner, but I do know that finding a perfect, sustainable pace deeply matters for success on a long run. You need that perfect pace.
I think of my perfect pace as challenging myself but not exhausting myself. The perfect pace means I saved energy for unexpected events, that I maintained margin for spontaneous conversation, and that created sustainable patterns for work. The perfect pace means I’m ready to engage tomorrow and the next day and the next. I’m not burning out in any area. I can enter a room and serve as an agent of peace, blessing, and joy. I can enter a room and think of what I can give, not what I need to take because I’m so depleted.
It’s taken a lifetime of knowing how to save energy, how to say no, and how to work sustainably.

PS: Correction from yesterday: Streams in the Desert is a devotional collection from Lettie Cowman whose entries each day quote other authors. Thank you for those who emailed to correct my error! 

Sitting Down with the Lord

A friend sent me a quote from Hannah Whitall Smith that I had never read before. (Thank you, Steve!) I just love it! I wish I had this quote when I wrote Seated with Christ because it conceptualizes so well my thoughts on Ephesians 2:6.
The quote comes from a quote in Streams In The Desert (published in 1925 by Lettie Cowman) devotional from October 28. She writes this on Ephesians 2 and encourages us to “sit down”:
This is our rightful place—“seated . . . with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus,” yet seated and still. But how few of us actually experience this! In fact, most of us believe it is impossible to sit still “in the heavenly realms” while living our everyday life in a world so full of turmoil.
She continues to discuss what it will feel in our spirit to know we are seated with Christ. She writes:
A quiet spirit is of priceless value when performing outward activities. Nothing so greatly hinders the work of God’s unseen spiritual forces, upon which our success in everything truly depends, as the spirit of unrest and anxiety. There is tremendous power in stillness. A great believer once said, “All things come to him who knows how to trust and to be silent.” This fact is rich with meaning, and a true understanding of it would greatly change our ways of working. Instead of continuing our restless striving, we would “sit down” inwardly before the Lord, allowing the divine forces of His Spirit to silently work out the means to accomplish our goals and aspirations.
I think about sitting down with the Lord in a fresh way today.