I started this post a year ago and never finished it. I left this site fallow for a year. Needed, in some ways, in the craze of graduate school work. I spend enough time in front of a computer as it is. Yet, today, sitting under some pine trees in my yard, working on a paper on the Trinity, I was inspired to return. I smile at the Holy Spirit's providence: the verses I chose nearly a year ago to date have been haunting me anew in the past month or so. I am in a wonderful class on Luke and Jesus' challenge to his disciples still strikes to the depths of me. When I meditate on it, I hear God saying, "Why do you call out to me, Lena, for aid, but often fail to take the gospel and its requirements of you seriously? Why do you think I am joking when I say you need to leave your possessions and follow me? Why do you feel anxiety about the future and your vocational accomplishments, when I tell you to be humble and trust in my guidance?"
I feel like God is kneading me like the bread dough above (an old picture of a student in Sicily). The motion is cyclical and repetitive. Patiently, again and again, in season after season, God calls my name and asks me to not wander from his statues. His life-giving, world-transforming commandments. His keys to the Kingdom. Like a baker, the Father molds the dough that is me, pushing with the palm of his hand over and over again. The Spirit, in her quiet but potent way, breathes wisdom into me, like the air needed to make the bread light and tender. And Christ, like the yeast, enlivens me with his body.
I doubt this process will ever end: it is the recipe for sanctification. Thank goodness, I am the dough and not the baker, as I shudder at the idea of having to form myself. Thanks be to God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
I feel like God is kneading me like the bread dough above (an old picture of a student in Sicily). The motion is cyclical and repetitive. Patiently, again and again, in season after season, God calls my name and asks me to not wander from his statues. His life-giving, world-transforming commandments. His keys to the Kingdom. Like a baker, the Father molds the dough that is me, pushing with the palm of his hand over and over again. The Spirit, in her quiet but potent way, breathes wisdom into me, like the air needed to make the bread light and tender. And Christ, like the yeast, enlivens me with his body.
I doubt this process will ever end: it is the recipe for sanctification. Thank goodness, I am the dough and not the baker, as I shudder at the idea of having to form myself. Thanks be to God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.