Today's Daily Lesson comes from Luke chapter 12 verses 22-25:
22 He said to his disciples, “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. 23 For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. 24 Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds! 25 And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? 26 If then you are not able to do so small a thing as that, why do you worry about the rest?
In the wake of this week's terror it has been hard to remain present to where we are, who we are with, and what we have. Terror wishes to paralyze us, to make us so anxious about the future that we can no longer live in the present. It's desire is to overwhelm us with and foreboding of what is to come of us and our loved ones and our world.
I am at summer camp. I am with a group of young people who I know to be an amazing group of thinkers and searchers and sensors. They are already becoming serious followers of the Way. They need me here. Though my own family is back at home and always a source of worry and concern and desire to get back home, I know that I am here, with children who also belong to me and who need my faith -- young people of the Way who are looking to me to teach them to be persons of deep wisdom and courageous faith. It's in times like these that that is born.
Last night in worship the leader began worship by inviting us to "Be where your feet are." By that he meant be present, be near, be close to ourselves and to those beside us. After worship We dismissed and I led the youth back for a time of reflection on the day. But before there was reflection there was laughter. One spilled a giant jar of puff balls and then rather than letting them go to waste ate them one by one off the floor. Another talked just how awkward it was to be stuck earlier in the day in a never-ending draw of Indian leg wrestling. We all agreed -- it had looked very, very awkward.
Soon enough the laughter stopped and the talk turned to serious things -- to violence and God and the problem of where evil comes from. I was glad I was where my feet were. I missed my own children, but was glad to be present to others'. They needed this. They needed me. They needed all of me right here.
After the discussion, when all the youth had left to go to the gym and play a game aptly and humorously called "Game with Big Ball", I stayed after to FaceTime my own family. While talking to them and watching my 3-year-old make faces at his dad and stand up on the bed and shake his booty for the camera -- very slow and real smooth like -- I looked up and discovered a poem by Wendell Berry hanging on the wall in the room I was in. It is called "The Peace of Wild Things":
When despair for the world grows in me
And I wake in the night at the least sound
In fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
Rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
Who do not tax their lives with forethought
Of grief. I come into the presence of still waters.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
Waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
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