When my best friend was beginning to heal from her car accident, we watched a PBS documentary about a team from Crystal Bridges Museum who travelled the US discovering less than famous artists. Curious, we did a little research and found that an exhibit of 61 of the artists would be at my favorite museum in the world, Crystal Bridges in Bentonville, Arkansas. During Lent! As part of my friend’s healing hopefulness, we planned a trip to see the exhibit seven months later.

So here we are. In Bentonville, Arkansas. For the first weekend in Lent.

Seriously injured by a drunk driver who hit her car and then fled the scene, my friend went from being couch bound to wheel chair to walker. As she was finally well enough to travel, she had to learn to navigate an airport via being wheeled by strangers.

Seven months later, my friend is able to walk independently to her airport gate and yesterday hit a milestone of nearly 9,000 steps. Museums will do that!

She is never pain free and is learning how to live in a new body.

It is how we are all invited to do Lent.

Your present circumstances don’t determine where you can go; they merely determine where you start. (Nido Qubei)

And so we begin again. Perhaps with uncertainty. Fear. Suffering. Pain.

Perhaps with hope. Faith. Joy.

Most likely with a soup containing some of each.

Perhaps that’s why parish soup suppers are a mainstay of Lent.

You stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the cross that all might come within the reach of your saving embrace.

So clothe us in your Spirit that we reaching forth our hands in love may bring those who do not know you to the knowledge and love of you, for the honor of your name. AMEN

This is one of my favorite prayers in the Book of Common Prayer. The image of the cross as Jesus reaching forth his hands in love, and our response to that reach as reaching out in love, is the center of my understanding of the cross as a symbol of my faith.

The cross is Love reaching out.

Love reaching out in the midst of suffering and when surrounded by anger and hate.

Love reaching out in the midst of hunger and thirst.

Love reaching out in the midst of fear and loneliness.

Love reaching out in the midst of meals shared.

Love reaching out in the midst of friends and strangers and enemies.

Last evening I went to an art exhibition at the Harwood Museum in Taos of Dean Pulver’s work. Dean is the husband of my dear friend Abby Salsbury whose pottery fills my home. Dean’s art medium is primarily wood with a little metal thrown in on occasion.

When I visited Dean’s studio last Epiphany, he was creating work that was part of the exhibit at the Harwood. There was one piece in process that placed me in a deep pause. To me it looked like a cross.

As Dean and I talked, he told me that building a cross had not been his intent. This led to a thought-filled conversation about the layers of personal meanings of the cross. I told him how I felt so often what I hear people say about the cross feels more like a useful personal weapon than the endless and forgiving and healing love of God.

The curved arms of Dean’s art with its ever moving shadows, depending on the cast of the light, spoke to me of God’s multidimensional love. It is beautiful.

The finished art was on exhibit at the Harwood. Once again I was paused. My heart and eyes filling with emotion of its power.

Dean had named the piece Reach.

The light once again played with the structure casting multidimensional shadows expanding the range of the cross.

Each arm is a curve, openly pulling us to its center. It feels like a safe and open enclosure I could nestle in and be held and rest. It’s not soft but it looks comfortable–in the root meaning of the word, comfort, that means with strength. I could sink into its heart.

I looked back on Dean’s Instagram account. It records his process for creating the art we saw completed at the Harwood. I was paused yet again when I saw the special joinery he had to create to connect the two arms of this piece.

Cross upon cross. Cross within cross.

Reaching out in love.

Note: Cross at the top of the blog from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Kilgore, Texas.

I’m having some good thinking days.

After a very busy couple of weeks at work, traveling from Alvin to Jacksonville and places in between, with the bonus of three appointments with the oral surgeon because of a broken tooth, this long weekend trip to New Mexico was a once again reminder of what a fine tour guide God is. One way or another, God gets me where I need to be.

The husband of a dear Taos friend has an exhibit at the Harwood Museum and tonight is the VIP reception–and my best friend and I are considered VIPs! This was all it took for us to plan a trip to our “home” since 2009 at the Casa de los Abuelos (of the grandparents–how perfect a name is that?).

There’s so much that feels familiar about this “thin space” and like so many trips home, we don’t know how much we need to be there until we arrive.

One of the reasons this feels like home is the warm hugs, smiles, and greetings we receive. People we’ve known for one year or over ten are so very pleased to see us. From the baristas at Coffee Apothecary to Marie at Marie Fleur Salon to a welcome text from my sweet friend Abby, it feels so good to be welcomed not for what I do but simply who I am.

This is what Jesus wants to offer all of us. His heart as our home. Our hearts as his home.

Today surrounded by snow outside, fire in the kiva, fresh coffee with beans locally roasted, I’ll spend some time in God’s heart through prayer–so that the remainder of the day I’ll live with my home in God’s heart.

I’m in Kilgore, Texas this morning. I drove over 200 miles yesterday afternoon through peak, for Texas, East Texas fall. After breakfast at the Hampton Inn, I’ll pack up and go preach and celebrate at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church.

Afterwards, I’ll meet with the leadership of the church and listen and dream with them about what God might have in store for them. Then I’ll drive back home dreaming and imagining about how we all can better partner with God and God’s mission.

I love my job.

A year ago today was my last Sunday at St. Mary’s, a place I’d loved and called home for over twenty years. A place where I’d drive three and one half miles each Sunday morning to preach and celebrate and listen and dream.

I loved my job.

In the year of my pause from my relationship with St. Mary’s, what one parishioner described as a gap year, I have only been back once, with permission, to attend the funeral of a beloved parishioner. It is the way of rector partings.

Yesterday, I wrote the Senior Warden and the Interim Rector for permission to worship on a Sunday morning at St Mary’s during Advent. As God would have it, it’s a rare Sunday that has not already been scheduled, and I am open-calendared.

A baby with whom I have two decades of family connections is being baptized, and the parents invited me to attend. I officiated at the baby’s parent’s marriage and prayed with others for years for this precious girl’s birth in into the world.

If given permission, the third Sunday of Advent, I’ll drive the twenty or something miles from my new home, past my old home, to a parish that is now one of the over one hundred fifty I now serve. I’ll worship and pray and dream. And live some of God’s great yeses to prayers.

I love my life.