I offer this weekly #LetUsPray as a way to stay anchored amidst the turmoil of the day. Paid subscribers have access to liturgical resources and sermon prompts based on the week's readings from The Revised Common Lectionary and/or The Narrative Lectionary.
It feels like EVERY day we can say something to the effect, "When we look at the world, it seems like there is another round of violence, suffering, and hurt being experienced by God's people."
I hate that this has been normalized. It makes me angry, sad, and sometimes severely pessimistic about the future. And then something happens to remind me that, yes, there is too much pain in the world, but there is also healing. Does it come about when or how I want it to? Rarely, but healing is present.
This next section of My Faith montage follows the acknowledging of hurt. Even though we may cause much of the pain in the world, we are also part of the healing.
And yet we know what it is to be HEALED. To be healed is to be whole. To move toward healing is to move toward holiness. In mind. In body. In gut. In heart. In spirit. In soul.
You cannot be healed if I am still hurting. I cannot know wholeness if you are still in agony. We cannot experience either while neighbors and strangers suffer still.
My wholeness is intricately and intrinsically woven together with yours and yours with mine. Healing is mine is yours is ours. Wholeness is ours is yours is mine.
Yet we cannot know healing and wholeness without the One who loves us into being. God loves healing into the world. In whispers. In whimsy. In wonder. In exhale. In excitement. In euphoria. In solitude. In silence. In subtlety.
Our bodies, minds, and souls are healed by God. Healed in ways creative, soothing, beautiful, and bold. Healed in ways surprising, subtle, unruly, and old. Through boisterous laughter uncontained, and anger righteously expressed, through sounds that soothe and silence that settles, through communities organized and justice realized, through intimacy, generosity, understanding, and rest, through equity, jubilance, remembrance, and risk, through lament and confession, through forgiving and being forgiven, through grace offered and grace accepted, through being seen, being heard, being known.
In all of these things, in God’s good time, in unexpected ways, God’s healing and wholeness is a mighty balm for our bone-tired bodies, for our compassion-fatigued hearts, and for our weary, weary souls.
