y=mx+c

y=mx+c.

1 Samuel 2:22-36

"And the child Samuel grew in stature, and in favour both with the Lord and men... Then I will raise up for Myself a faithful priest who shall do according to what is in My heart and in My mind. I will build him a sure house, and he shall walk before My anointed forever."

- 1 Samuel 2:26,35

I wonder what the author of 1 Samuel meant when he recounted how Samuel grew in stature and in favour with God and men. To understand better perhaps, that which is on God’s heart and on His mind – and to see that expressed through our work, and the way in which we go about “loving” our neighbours as ourselves?

Needless to say, we will find it difficult to love our neighbours if we hardly know ourselves – and my greatest fear often, is the fear that that I will find myself quite unlovable when I do find out about the real me. And no wonder we find it hard to love our neighbours when we find out that we sometimes can’t even seem to get past the first hurdle of loving ourselves.

Two factors remain in the Equation of Love at any one time:

me + my neighbour

It has been observed that God seeks to bring about change in us from the centre outwards, gradually bringing more and more of our conduct under the "new standard" - a standard based on the type of life that Christ had come to model for us.

In C.S. Lewis’ wickedly brilliant book, The Screwtape Letters, the worldly-wise old devil advices his nephew Wormwood, a novice demon in charge of securing the damnation of an ordinary young man on the topic of spiritual growth and prayer:

“Keep his mind on the inner life… Keep his mind off the most elementary duties by directing it to the most advanced and spiritual ones. Aggravate the most human useful characteristic, the horror and neglect of the obvious. You must bring him to a condition in which we can practise self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts about himself which are perfectly clear to anyone who has ever lived in the same house with or worked in the same office.” (pp.11-2)

me > my neighbour

I don’t for a moment think the most unlovable parts of us have anything to do with our weaknesses. Rather, it is a lofty and puffed up self-centredness that makes the me outweigh our neighbour in the balance of life as we fail to recognise the parts of us which have been found most wanting, and as we esteem ourselves better than our neighbours.

me = my neighbour

The truth of the matter is: we share more in common with our neighbour than we think. It would shock many a snob in us with our ‘holier-than-thou’ attitude, that our neighbour has in fact, been made in the image of God just as we have been, regardless of whether we are Christian or not, black or white, queer or straight.

In other words, they are as lovable as we are, or put another way, we are as unlovable as they are. Cracked pots we all are, and the one who has learnt to love has found that the formula is none other than Patience added to Humility and Grace – esteeming others better than ourselves.

Screwtape instructs Wormwood:

“It is no doubt, impossible to prevent his praying for his mother, but we have means of rendering the prayer innocuous. Make sure that they are always very ‘spiritual’, that he is always concerned with the state of her soul and never with her rheumatism. Two advantages will follow. In the first place, his attention will be kept on what he regards as her sins, by which, with a little guidance from you, he can be induced to mean any of her actions which are inconvenient or irritating to himself.” (p.12)

Perhaps we can refer to this as the spotting-the-plank-in-your-own-eye principle. We find our neighbours unlovable because we find them inconvenient to the Self that demands his own way and stakes His own right, and we find our neighbour unlovable because they irritate Self by poking him where his ego is most insecure, where he is found most weak and most vulnerable to embarrassment.

We find our neighbour so unlovable, because we have failed to hear their story, the tragedies and the hardships which have suffered them ill, and so we leave those burdens that God meant us to carry for them by the wayside, and walk blissfully ignorant on the opposite side of the road.

Maybe the Love Equation is none so complicated after all. Maybe we can finally learn to love our neighbour. I think we may have a good chance of grasping the ins and outs of this equation when we practice and work with them like we used to do in our classrooms once upon a time, chewing on our pencil stumps and scratching our heads, and raising our hands occasionally when we dared to ask our Teacher what we failed to comprehend. I think the foibles and careless mistakes that we incur would, on the last analysis, only seek to point out where we have gone wrong, and where our equations have failed to balance.

To do according to what is in God’s heart and mind is to understand the Kingdom principles and heavenly formulas that undergird this equation. If we may use y=mx+c to calculate the gradient of a slope, then it follows that we must use God’s Equation of Love to work out the problems of us and our neighbour, no matter how un-intuitive they may come across to us at first. Such, is the law of practise.

May I constantly be aware of the plank in my own eye as I spot the plank in my neighbour’s eye – and so learn to love my neighbour even though this love may feel undeserved, for that is exactly what it is: For we love and are loved in return not because anyone of us deserve it, but because we have known and tasted grace, that we are love-able because of the love of Christ that covers a multitude of sin, the blood of Christ that has covered and blanketed the red crosses scattered abroad all over our examination papers, that have pinned judgement upon each one of us on the numerous problems and equations we have made a blunder of over the course of our lives.

May I grow in stature in and favour both with God and man – to not just love God with all my heart, my soul and my strength, but to also love my neighbour as they are, and I am. Amen.

Skin Deep

1 Samuel 2:12-21 (The Message)

12Eli's own sons were a bad lot. They didn't know GOD and could not have cared less 13about the customs of priests among the people. Ordinarily, when someone offered a sacrifice, the priest's servant was supposed to come up and, while the meat was boiling, 14stab a three-pronged fork into the cooking pot. The priest then got whatever came up on the fork. But this is how Eli's sons treated all the Israelites who came to Shiloh to offer sacrifices to GOD. 15Before they had even burned the fat to GOD, the priest's servant would interrupt whoever was sacrificing and say, "Hand over some of that meat for the priest to roast. He doesn't like boiled meat; he likes his rare." 16If the man objected, "First let the fat be burned--God's portion!-then take all you want," the servant would demand, "No, I want it now. If you won't give it, I'll take it." 17It was a horrible sin these young servants were committing--and right in the presence of GOD!-desecrating the holy offerings to GOD.

18In the midst of all this, Samuel, a boy dressed in a priestly linen tunic, served GOD. 19Additionally, every year his mother would make him a little robe cut to his size and bring it to him when she and her husband came for the annual sacrifice. 20Eli would bless Elkanah and his wife, saying, "GOD give you children to replace this child you have dedicated to GOD." Then they would go home.

21GOD was most especially kind to Hannah. She had three more sons and two daughters! The boy Samuel stayed at the sanctuary and grew up with GOD.

*****

I like my meat rare, thank you. It was probably more than just preference to have their meat rare for the sons of Eli.

Samuel in his little linen tunic and robe – how cute. And it was probably more than cute little Samuel tottering around in the sanctuary of God too.

Anyone knows what its like want something, to want it now, and to want it real bad too?

I visited the dermatologist the other day. It was my third trip after three courses of antibiotics over a period of two years in the big battle between the colony of red angry pimples and me. Oh yes, not to mention the battlefield after the rampage – blotchy red cheeks and forehead after the make-up comes off.

Make-up? I hear you say.

Yes, make-up.

I wear it. And beauty, I contend, is only skin-deep.

Skin-deep because it all boils down to the sebaceous glands that are found just underneath the surface of the skin, and skin-deep because we live in a culture that, whether we care to admit it or not, thrives on appearances, glitz and glamour. We benchmark ourselves against the images that we see on the covers of Vogue, Cleo and Elle.

In Excuse me, do you want to be a model? (Mon, Jan 24, 2005) the Straits Times(http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg) reported how some “illegitimate” modeling agencies have been using the talent-scouting ruse to get their income from aspiring teenage models – getting them to pay hefty sums on portfolios, composite cards and grooming classes. One of the director’s of a modeling agency made this remark for model wannabes: “Look in the mirror before building the dream of being a model. It’s a hurtful business.”

A hurtful business indeed. So do sniffle that snigger in the background before you poo-poo me and write me off as shallow, pathetic, and insecure about who I am. We live in a self-conscious world after all. We uphold noble principles when we say that appearances don’t matter, since it’s the substance that counts.

A whole lot of bullocks? Or is it? So what really counts?

I have a feeling that the problem with us is not just because we want things, but because we want them now.

Jealousy. Envy. Strife.

James candidly asks, “Where do wars and fights come from among you? Do they not come from your desires for pleasure that war in your members? You lust and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and war. Yet you do not have because you do not ask.” (James 4:1-2)

Do not ask? The question drops like a ton of bricks.

God knows I’ve asked. Prayed I have alright in my earlier years, from asking God to heal those angry spots sprouting up all over my face, to flattening that protruding tummy, to slimming down what a dear friend of mine labeled as thunder thighs.

So the ball must now lie in God’s court? His fault for not seeing my anguish and hearkening to my desperate pleas?

“You ask and do not receive, because you ask amiss, that you may spend it on your pleasures.” (James 4:3)

There you go. Not because God is sadistic Big Brother – sitting back and enjoying the show as we struggle to fight ridicule and shun the same sense of shame that Adam and Eve must have felt when they fell from grace and as their glory fell away - that they were no longer free to simply be themselves.

We live in a world that is far from being gracious. And so frustrations escalate and exacerbate our sense of shame for not daring to simply be ourselves for all that we are, in a world that simply does not love us for all that we are.

No, not because God is sadistic, but perhaps because He knows better than any of us do what this sort of fame and beauty can do to us ungracious creatures. A cursory glance through the tabloids of celebrities and stars should convince you of that.

So God never meant for us to look good? Is beauty something that we should not desire?

Sure it is that God meant us to look good. If every man desires to be the Hero, so every woman desires to be the Beauty for her Hero. We can only imagine how stunning Solomon’s bride must have looked – just go read the Song of Solomon. Bathsheba must have been quite an eye-full to have turned David’s eyes from God to her just like that.

All this said, a lesson we must learn from Hannah when we covet that which we do not have – we all may become beautiful through the passage of time, and through the taunts and the provocations, as we present our desires to God.

Yes, we may be asking amiss, but I think the point is not that we ask amiss, but that we are asking. The first accusation that James hurls at us if you recall, is that we fail to ask in the first place. It is through the asking, I contend, that our hearts may be altered, slowly but surely - sprinkled clean by the blood of Christ that washes away all our sins and covers all our shame. It is through the asking that we present our bodies as living sacrifices before God and allow our minds to be constantly renewed and transformed – not by might, not by power, but by His Spirit.

Healing and change comes from inside out, and so do the answers for our prayers and our desires for beauty. “Trust in the Lord and do good,” says David, “Dwell in the land, feed on His faithfulness, Delight yourself in the Lord, and He shall give you the desires of your heart.” (Ps 37:3-4) And so it is, that when our desires do come, they are a tree of life (Pr 13:12) – not because the desires granted us are in themselves any different, but because we may handle them well and handle them right, as we live free from the trappings of our culture.

As I mentioned previously that the greatest miracle of all for Hannah was not the birth of Samuel but the transformation that took place in Hannah; so it follows that the greatest miracle is not that God would grant us our desires, but the miracle that takes place in our hearts as they are tempered to know how to enjoy those desires that He wishes to grant us.

And the even greater miracle?

That God does exceedingly abundantly over and above all that we could ask for or possibly imagine. The blessings that we reap are far more abundant than the desires with which we have learnt to dedicate to God. Hannah poured out her desire to God, trusted Him with her desire, holding His gracious gift with an open palm before Him, and God blessed her with more. Three sons and two daughters to be exact.

What shall we make of this?

One thing we can be sure of, that just as Samuel grew up with God, so our desires are matured in the wisdom of God as we dedicate them to Him, and we are blessed with more. Blessings and miracles manifold to be exact.

Hannah's Tale

Hannah's Tale :: 1 samuel 1:1-2:10

There was a certain man from Ramathaim, a Zuphite from the hill country of Ephraim, whose name was Elkanah, an Ephraimite. He had two wives; one was called Hannah and the other Peninnah. Peninnah had children, but Hannah had none.

Year after year this man went up from his town to worship and sacrifice to the LORD Almighty at Shiloh. Whenever the day came for Elkanah to sacrifice, he would give portions of the meat to his wife Peninnah and to all her sons and daughters. But to Hannah he gave a double portion because he loved her, and the LORD had closed her womb.

And because the LORD had closed her womb, her rival kept provoking her in order to irritate her. This went on year after year. Whenever Hannah went up to the house of the LORD , her rival provoked her till she wept and would not eat.

Once when they had finished eating and drinking in Shiloh, Hannah stood up. Now Eli the priest was sitting on a chair by the doorpost of the LORD's temple. In bitterness of soul Hannah wept much and prayed to the LORD. And she made a vow, saying, "O LORD Almighty, if you will only look upon your servant's misery and remember me, and not forget your servant but give her a son, then I will give him to the LORD for all the days of his life, and no razor will ever be used on his head."

Then she went her way and ate something, and her face was no longer downcast.

So in the course of time Hannah conceived and gave birth to a son. She named him Samuel, saying, "Because I asked the LORD for him."

Then Hannah prayed and said: "My heart rejoices in the LORD ; in the LORD my horn is lifted high..."

Like Hannah, all of us – whose hearts are attuned to God, would desire greatly that we may be fruitful in all our endeavours and to multiply the seeds that we have sown. The comfort in knowing that none of our hard labour was in vain, and the earnest desire to please God and to be a vessel that can carry the purposes of God, to know that we have a womb that is strong enough not just to hold the hopes of a new life, but to carry the burdens and bring life itself to the foetus that has just begin to form and is being conformed to the likeness of Christ.

We can be sure that there will the likes of the Peninnah’s that shall taunt our weaknesses, remind us of the shame and embarrassments that we try so hard to forget, and provoke the most vulnerable parts of us, but perhaps that is God’s way of training us to slay the giants.

For wasn’t that the way for David and Goliath?

The Grace that we hold in our sling is more than sufficient to overcome the taunting of our Enemy. It is precisely when we are weak that we realise how strong God really is, that we too may be strengthened by God if only we realised that we are weak.

Hannah turned her bitterness and anguish heavenward – for she must have understood better than anyone else that man’s striving alone can do little without God’s help. Only the God who created the heavens and the earth could intervene the laws of nature. Indeed we may plant and we may water, but it is the Lord who gives the increase. The preparations of the heart belong to man, but the answer of the heart comes from God. It is He who makes all things possible – from the seemingly plausible, to the absurdly impossible; God is more than able, not by might nor by power, but by the Spirit of God at work in our lives and in our world.

Cast your cares upon the Lord and be anxious about nothing, but by prayer and petition present your requests to God and let His peace which surpasses all understanding guard your heart and your mind in Christ Jesus. Perhaps that is how Hannah left the temple in peace, went her way and ate – her face no longer sad.

I don’t suppose for once that the greatest miracle was just that God remembered Hannah and granted her a son. It had been for years that Hannah had been childless, and imaginably suffering the provocations of Hannah all this while. The greater miracles rather, was the transformation that took place in Hannah that day – in the way she had learnt to respond to her circumstances and in the way she found joy and peace in the knowledge that it was a faithful and almighty God that she worshipped.

And so we behold the words that departed from Hannah’s lips in her prayer of praise and thanksgiving. It was only after the arduous journey that she could have looked back in retrospect to discover to her surprise that all things truly work together for good to those who love Him.

It is out of the abundance of our hearts that the mouth speaks, and it is out of our prayers that we may catch a glimpse of who we are, where we have come from, and where we are headed on this journey. From a heart that refused to be consoled, that accused God for neglecting her (1 Sam 1:10-11), to the powerful prayer of thanksgiving and praise, how Hannah had grown from faith to faith, strength to strength, and glory to glory!

She displayed a deeper understanding of the character and nature of God as she found Grace through her own flesh and blood experiences and discovered God in moments, whether for better or for worse she was being most honest, most human, and most herself.

Telling Stories

"Maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track, you and I, of these stories of who we are where we come from and THE PEOPLE WE HAVE MET along the way because it is precisely through these stories... that GOD makes Himself known to each one of us most powerfully and personally. If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but also spiritually."

- Frederick Buechner, Telling Stories

It's with a heart full of conviction that I have come to trust these words when Jesus called on His disciples to "Embrace this God-life. Really embrace it, and nothing will be too much for you." (Mk 11:22)

Paul had learnt to be content with much as well as with little, to live free through much joy as well as through much sorrow - for nothing will be too much for you.

I think I am beginning to learn that too: to discover how God was really near even when I had dismissed Him to be far; that He was present in my world even when I thought Him to be absent; that He was faith-full even whilst I was faith-less; that He understood love in all its fullness whilst I was still toying with the trinkets of my infatuations and likes.

I was overwhelmed by joy as God's love came persistently knocking on my door in the likeness of Nick's unreserved outpourings into my life. I recoiled initially at the thought of receiving a gift so dear (he had bought me a PDA for my birthday). I was uncomfortable that anyone would lay down so much for me. The pressure, I thought, in receiving, and what of the expectations in reciprocating? My mind rattled on.

Until God spoke as clear as the midday sun - and as loudly and audibly as I have ever heard Him speak: Where your heart is there your treasures are also. Not that I quantified his love with cold hard mammon, mind you.

I was rather, struck by the reflection of his heart. And mine too.

The awful thought that perhaps my reaction was the same way in which we often find ourselves responding to God's generous, unreserved outpourings of love. We refuse to receive because we refuse to believe that there is any good in this world that God created, that anyone would do anything for us with no strings attached - save for the strings of love that expect nothing in return. We refuse to receive because we are unwilling to pour out with the same extravagance and generosity.

The truth of the matter is, we will never learn to love until we learn to for-give, to first give. And perhaps that is why we find it most mind-bloggling and are consequently moved to repentance (metanoia) when we do finally get our heads around the idea that this God who is Love for-gave us by first giving His beloved Son to us, even whilst we exalted our own kingdoms and thrones - indifferent, ungrateful, and ignorant.

I wonder what must have been going through the mind of the Prodigal Son at the homecoming feast that his Father had thrown for him.

I sat in the movie theatre later that night snuggled up cosily beside Nick. It wasn't until the credits rolled that I discovered that I had already been thoroughly and mercilessly stabbed by Joy so deep that I could only stagger and gasp for air. There was neither melodrama nor some wild proclamation of love, but in that moment I think I began to understand why so many would desire love so greatly.

The deep desire that stirs in each and every one of us to know and be known; to be completely human and at home with an-other, where the trappings of a fiercely materialistic and individualistic society may fall to the wayside, and where we may find a place safe enough to allow our hard shells to crumble into a heap of dust and ashes.

My fears and doubts suffered in the onslaught of Joy's mortal blow: Perfect love casts out all fear - the Lord your God is big, is strong, and is above all else faithful - and nothing will be too much for you.

Tears welled up in my eyes and flowed as freely as Christ's blood from the wounds of His stripes and nail-pierced hands.

I received God's most precious gift of love that night - the gift of a life that is free from fear. The joy-full realisation that I too have now the means to first-give and for-give, just as Christ first gave His life for me. The stab wounds of Joy were as evident as the scars that Thomas witnessed on Jesus' hands.

This life journey has been tough to say the least, fraught with perils, tragedy, and sometimes with burdens so heavy and valleys so dark that I too have cried out "God, God why have You forsaken me?" Yet I have looked to Christ's firm hold on the God-life and witnessed how nothing will be too much for you.

The crucified Christ caused the veil to be torn in two, and the tragedy and sufferings have paradoxically driven me closer to God and given me a firmer hold on a life of faith, hope and love.

The greater the sin and evil, the greater the grace of God that abounds. He who has been forgiven much also knows to forgive much, just as he who has been loved much finds himself full enough to love much. I have felt them all, and felt the extent of God's faithfulness in not just the same measure but more abundantly than that with which I have used to embrace the God-life.

In Buechner's words, "God acts in history and in your and my brief histories not as the puppeteer who sets the scenes and works the strings but rather as the greater director who no matter what role fate casts us in conveys to us somehow from the wings, if we have our eyes, ears, hearts open and sometimes even if we don't, how we can play those roles in a way to enrich and ennoble and hallow the whole vast drama of things including our own small but crucial parts in it." (Telling Stories, p.32)

"The God of biblical faith is the God who meets us at those moments in which for better or for worse we are being most human, most ourselves, and if we lose touch with those moments, if we don't stop from time to time to notice what is happening to us and around us and inside us, we run the tragic risk of losing touch with God too." (Buechner, Telling Stories, p.35-6)

I may be a master at rhetoric - but any homiletical pronouncements about God, I realise, is empty and limp if I am too blind to see and too deaf to hear what God is seeking to do and say through my very own flesh-and-blood experiences.

And so this has been one such attempt to consider not just the lilies of the field, but also the dead sparrow by the roadside. It has also been my attempt to seek Jesus, and to find Him so surprisingly near, in the person of Nick, who has taken his cue from God and enriched the stage upon which my life is being played out, on the stage upon which I have discovered time and again too, that all things work together for good - and nothing will be too much for you.

In Search of Me

I sometimes wonder if I know the real me, buried under the rubble of self-help - so much so that we forget our true selves, and we lose our real selves (cf Mk 8:34-37, The Message).

Who am I really?

An influential representative of the life of Christ? Or the product of a self-made Christianity?

We may all pack the same bags for the same journey, but we all know that the experience of two people walking down the same bit of road may hardly be the same: The seasoned climber and the amateur hiker, the Follower of Christ and the Self-Made Christian, a fine line, and a clear distinction.

For just as faith without works is dead, and that we can no more show our works apart from our faith than we can show our faith apart from our works (James 2:18), so it is that both the Follower of Christ and the Self-Made Christian must do all he can to present himself approved to God (2 Tim 2:15).

What then, between the Follower of Christ and the Self-Made Christian?

Who am I really?

As it turns out, we are not what we eat. It is what comes out of us that pollutes, said Jesus: obscenities, lusts, thefts, murders, adulteries, greed, depravity, deceptive dealings, carousing, mean looks, slander, arrogance, foolishness. It is these that are vomit from the heart, said He. (Mk 7:20-23) "The Pharisees make a big show of saying the right thing, but their heart isn't in it. They act like they are worshipping me, but they don't mean it. They just use me as a cover for teaching whatever suits their fancy, ditching God's command and taking up the latest fad." (Mk 7:6-8)

Who would have thought that while we battle the giants in our world of materialism, individualism, humanism and superficialism, there is still another sinister evil in whch we must fight - a contamination from within that threatens to make us lose heart, to harden our hearts - that numbs us from the sense of eternity that had long been chiselled in our hearts since the Beginning (Ecc 3:11).

To be a Follower of Christ is to embark on a journey of the heart. To seek first His Kingdom and His righteousness, is to embark on a mission in search of our true selves, our real selves.

"If your hand or your foot gets in God's way, chop it off and throw it away. You are better off maimed or lame and alive than the proud owner of two hands and feet, godless in a furnace of eternal fire. And if your eye distracts you from God, pull it out and throw it away. You are better off one-eyed and alive than exercising your twenty-twenty vision from inside the fire of hell."

- Mk 9:43-48

It might cost you an arm and a leg, but I think it's worth it.

The Return of Joy

"...the return of Joy had introduced into my life a duality which makes it difficult to narrate... I am telling a story of two lives. They had nothing to do with each other: oil and vinegar, a river running beside a canal, Jekyll and Hyde. Fix your eye on either and it claims to be the sole truth. When I remember my outer life I see clearly that the other is but momentary flashes, seconds of gold scattered in months of dross, each instantly swallowed up in the old, familiar, sordid, hopeless weariness. When I remember my inner life I see that everything... was merely a coarse curtain which at any moment might be drawn aside to reveal all the heavens I then knew."

- C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

Unlike mere Happiness, true Joy comes into our lives as a mixed bag of paradoxes. We experience it in those heart wrenching moments where we let go of those whom we love most dearly precisely because we love them so much. We realise that our love has been tried and tested when we are able to hold those things which mean everything to us with an open palm, because to lose them, is to lose everything.

Joy, as meek and as unassuming as she may seem, really deals a mortal blow to that which we call Self - and so Joy has no more to do with Self than Passion can have anything more to do with Propriety. We desire Joy as we sit and behold a hauntingly beautiful sunset and wistfully wished that there was someone sitting beside us to share it with. Joy is only made full when we get to share it with someone else: when friends celebrate our birth-day and when our proud parents attend our graduation. A happily wedded two share their bliss with the many, and the fattened calf is killed and a party thrown when the prodigal son finally returns home.

Perhaps reality doesn't always turn out to be gruesome when the coarse curtains are drawn aside. As C.S. Lewis puts it, oil and vinegar, Jekyll and Hyde - fix your eyes on either and it claims to be the sole truth. Joy in all its paradoxes. Perhaps that's why it makes our stories so difficult to narrate. Perhaps, it might help to realise that we haven't quite got the full story. Perhaps we are really, part of a bigger Story.

Uncollected Pieces

collect* [noun] Middle English collecte, from Old French, from Medieval Latin collecta (short for oratio ad collectam prayer upon assembly): short prayer comprising an invocation, petition, and conclusion; [verb] Latin collectus, past participle of colligere to collect, from com- + legere to gather: 1. to bring together into one body or place 2. to gain or regain control of(thoughts)



Religion, says Frederick Buechner, points to that area of human experience where in one way or another man comes upon mystery as a summons to pilgrimage. Indeed, I have come upon mystery, a mystery in which I seek to comprehend, and yet in which I know I will never be able to fully understand.

The summons to pilgrimage must necessarily begin of course, with mile zero - since they are the musings of not just my mind, but my heart and soul, as I grapple with the things of my life, my friends, and my world.

Un-collected, because these are my attempts to pick up the pieces of the good, the bad and the ugly - left behind from the hustle and bustle of a hurried and harried day, and to bring together onto one page, faith and love, fears and doubts, mingled with joy and sorrow, and to turn them all heavenward in hope, invocation and in earnest prayer.

If we look just close enough and hard enough, we are bound to discover the fingerprints of God all over our world, and perhaps we may catch glimpses too, of the life of Christ here and there, now and then, alive in the hearts of our monstrous souls.