I do not have to preach this Sunday. A gifted young woman in our congregation will be speaking a message that God has put on her heart. That leaves me with space, treasured space.
I will fill some of that space with great conversation with my daughter who’s taking the train up from the city this afternoon. And some of that space will be spent watching a crew remove the old tree that fell on our garage. But a lot of space will be filled with scraping old paint off of the porch railing, and while I scrape, I think and think. One thing I will be thinking about is this poem “Staying Power” found at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/audio/Staying Power_.mp3 . Listen to it and tell me what you think.
We all have our skeptical moments, even pastors. This poem is told from the perspective of an atheist most of the time who sometimes wonders about God. And here I am, so sure of God most of the time, who wonders sometimes if I have been fooled. I wonder what my daughter, who is good at seeing things from the underside, thinks. Maybe she will join the thinking and we’ll scrape away at the false assumptions and get down to the bare wood of what it means to have faith in God.
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