And then you.

"We arrange our lives as best we can,
      to keep your holiness at bay,
             with our pieties,
                     our doctrines,
                     our liturgies,
                     our moralities,
                     our secret ideologies,
Safe, virtuous, settled.
And then you-
     you and your dreams,
     you and your visions,
     your and your purposes,
     you and your commands,
     you and our neighbors.
We find your holiness not at bay,
     but probing, pervading,
          insisting, demanding.
And we yield, sometimes gladly,
          sometimes resentfully,
          sometimes late... or soon.
We yield because you, beyond us, are our God.
     We are your creatures met by your holiness,
                            by your holiness made our true selves.
     And we yield. Amen."

-Walter Brueggemann,

"And then you",

from Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth.

Absolutely buried in this book and cannot recommend it highly enough

(it mayyy in fact already be on my list for birthday gifts for several of you...)

We are studying Celebration of Discipline in my Spiritual Formation class

(side note: I picked a graduate program that has Nouwen and Foster as assigned reading- I am so in the right place, huh?!),

and this week I copied down a quote about 

"the temptation to study the disciplines without experiencing them".

I am trying to truly pray these words, not just study or even enjoy them.

Brueggemann has been a great fit for me...

somehow as I read and pray it is easy to recognize immediately that the God he wrote to is mine.

But his words and heart convict me-

his prayers spell out clearly that this world and life are not about me.

Excited to keep praying through this book,

helped to find words to Him and hopefully formed into a heart more for Him.

(More will definitely follow.)