Waiting Time and Beholding

Before I headed to Florida in February, I read Barbara Brown Taylor’s Leaving Church. This is not about leaving the Christian faith as much as leaving her position as ordained clergy in the Episcopal Church. I share with you the quotes I wrote down. I don’t necessarily agree, but I found them fodder for meditating and reflecting.

 

God is found in right relationships, not in right ideas. The parts of the Christian story that had drawn me into the Church were not the believing parts but the beholding parts:

Behold the Lamb of God. Behold I stand at the door and knock.

Christian faith seemed to depend on beholding things that were clearly beyond belief. Mysteries seize the heart, not orthodox doctrine. If it is true that God exceeds all our efforts to contain God, then dumb-foundedness is what all Christians have most in common.

I wanted to recover the kind of faith that has nothing to do with being sure what I believe and everything to do with trusting God to catch me.

 

One of the reasons I like carrying my camera around when I walk thru my neighborhood or explore new areas, is to slow down and behold God’s beauty and wonder in nature.

This quote from Terry Hershey's blog resonates with me:

I think one of the things I love most about photography is that it often elevates the mundane. When you stop a moment, and preserve it forever, and take the care to frame it, light it, and chose one moment over another, you effectively tell the world – or anyone who cares enough to look at your work; Look at this! And if, even in these mundane moments of life, we find something worth looking at, worth showing the world, then we’re effectively saying, Nothing is mundane. David du Chemin.

I can find God in my everyday world if I take the time to look, to behold.

 

Overnight and this morning we have had a dusting of snow, but by Sunday we are forecasted to be in the 60’s. Warm enough to get out and walk.

 

David Gessner in his book Return of the Osprey says: “ March is the waiting time. Everything poised ready to become something else, a world in need of a nudge.”

 

Warmer temperatures might just be that nudge. Spring at last. After this long hard winter, I am ready to get out and do some beholding.