Whenever I sense a thirst, a restlessness, I have hope for new life.

So I was offered the following question...

"You work with people who live with failure every day. Have you found that 'backsliding' draws them further from God, or presses them toward God?"

Failure in who's eyes I ask?
Surely failure is more to do with social norms, preferences and ideal isms?

Yet, to answer this question, I have seen in our women, a spirituality , a connection with God, that I have seen nowhere else.

I have come to trust that the greater their knowledge of their own misery, the more profound their confidence in the goodness and mercy of God...for surely mercy and misery are so closely connected that the one cannot be exercised without the other?

Henri Nouwen worte of a constant struggle to distinguish between the voice of his wounded self, which never went away, and the voivce of God. Gradually he came to see that the voice of God only speaks through wounded selves.

In my own life I mainly hear the voice of a wounded self trying to articulate the voice of God.

I live in daily awareness of how much easier it is to edit a question like the one above, than edit a life.

If Emma and I stand long enough we always sense a thirst and a restlessness, and so hope for new life.

"each of us has a beggar on the streets of our souls. do we walk past with criticism, ignorance, or do we applaud the poor accordion playing?"
Annonymous (for now!!!!)

some things are loved because they are worthy; some things are worthy because they are loved.
Ian Pitt - Watson

learning to breathe

Everyone tells you where you need to go
Everyone tells you when you need to leave
Everyone tells you what you need to know
Everyone tells you who you need to be

But everything inside you knows
There's more than what you've heard
There's so much more than empty conversations
Filled with empty words

And you're on fire
When He's near you
You're on fire
When He speaks
You're on fire
Burning at these mysteries

And it is funny, because these past days I have been feeling. Feeling stuff that is sore.
Everything inside me looks like everything I hate.

You are the hope I have for change, you are the only chance I think I am prepared to take.

I'm standing on the edge of me.
I'm standing on the edge of everything I've never been before.
You are the hope I have for change.
You are my hope in this gospel.
You are His kingdom on earth as it is in Heaven.

Roberta, Biddy, Denise...I see you.

Your on fire
When you're near Him
Your on fire
When He speaks

We would rather be ruined than changed...

My week has passed...I have been in town on several occasisons.

There was little linkage between the seen and an unseen world of justice, truth and love.

Does belief make things real?
Make things feel alright?
Does belief make things true?
Things like you...you and I ?

Today, our ladies rest in my mind...


Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

Children chave no fixed preconceptions of reality.

Children know how to accpet a gift.

Children know how to trust.

Who is the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven? The disciples asked this because they were trying hard, and Jesus showed them a child who in all probability neither knew nor much cared to know what the Kingdom of Heaven was nor what such a question might mean. And then He told them to become like that little chiild - neither knowing in the sense of understanding nor caring in the sense of being anxious. (Frederick Buechner)