Pastors Message – May, 2014

Deep silence leads us to realize that prayer is, above all, acceptance. When we pray we are standing with our hands open to the world. We know that God will become known to us in nature around us, in people we meet, in situations we run into. We trust that the world hold’s God secret within it, and we expect that secret to be shown to us. Prayer creates that openness in which God is given to us. Indeed, God wants to be admitted into the human heart, received with open hands, and loved with the same love in which we have been created.
– Henri J. M. Nouwen

Dear Friends,

At a Lenten Dinner I spoke of the story of the "widow’s mite", one of the Bible stories leading up to the Passion of Christ. Immediately my mind was taken to hands and their posturing. My thought was that this was a woman of poverty, stark means, alone in the loss of her husband, a person who knew what it meant to be a second-class citizen in that cultural society. Yet, her posture was one of open hands. The song "Grandma’s Hands" by Bill Withers played in my head.

Our hands tell a story of what we have done, where we have been in the etching of scars, lines, missing fingers, callouses. Sometimes our hands are clenched in anger, sometimes holding on to animosity, hatred, sometimes unwilling to let go. Sometimes, like the widow with open hands, are we willing to be open and generous in spirit? Sometimes are we willing to receive the grace and love that God freely gifts each and every one of us with open hands? May the posture of open hands encourage us to God’s will, to the presence of others, and openness ….

Finally, from the cross, with openness Jesus cried out loudly, "Father, I place my life in your hands!" [Luke 23:46] Then he breathed his last.

In Christ,