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LENT, BURNING BUSHES, AND BEGINNING AGAIN
by Dennis W. Foust, Senior Minister
How are you using these extra hours of daylight? One opportunity, during this season of Lent, is to pursue spiritual renewal by being attentive to what you give your attentiveness.
In our busy lives, we turn aside to give our attentiveness to a plethora of interests and interruptions. Learning to give attention to what really matters is a discipline.
Through the years, I have enjoyed hearing people describe their burning bush moments. These are moments when God’s grace has shimmered alerting you to the possibility that God is at work doing something that you could not have imagined. In words reflecting this eternal Truth, I remind you of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem:
Earth's crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God;
but only he who sees takes off his shoes –
the rest just sit around it and pluck blackberries.
In the biblical story of Moses and the burning bush, he experienced a moment that spurred him forward into new commitments. It was a beginning again moment for Moses. Yet, he had to turn aside to be attentive to God’s message for him in the bush.
Lent affords us with a challenge to begin again. Lent gifts us with additional light so we can turn aside and invest our attentiveness in what really matters. Do you know the poetic thoughts of Louise Fletcher Tabkington?
THE LAND OF BEGINNING AGAIN
I wish there were some wonderful place called the land of beginning again
where all our mistakes and all our heartaches and all our selfish grief
could be dropped like a shabby old coat by the door
and never be put on again.
I wish we could come on it all unaware like the hiker who finds a lost trail,
and I wish that the one to whom our blindness has done the greatest injustice of all
could be at the gates like an old friend that waits
for the comrade he's gladdest to hail.
It wouldn't be possible not to be kind in the Land of Beginning Again
and the ones we misjudged
and the ones whom we grudged their moments of victory then
would find in the grasp of our loving handclasp
more than penitent lips could explain
for what had been hardest we'd know had been best
and what had seemed loss would be gain
for there isn't a sting that will not take a wing
when we’ve faced it and laughed it away
and I think that the laughter is most what we're after
in the Land of Beginning Again.
So I wish that there were some wonderful place called the Land of Beginning Again
where all our mistakes and all our heartaches and all our selfish grief
could be dropped like a shabby old coat at the door
and never be put on again.
Welcome to Lent, beloved, a Land of Beginning Again.
Let us give our attentiveness to shimmering bushes.
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