THOUGHTS

Reprint from April 10, 2014

THE BLACK HOLE

"I knew a well-to-do lady, a friend of our family, who was eating with her husband at a fine dining restaurant in San Francisco several years ago.  It was out on a pier where they had valet parking.  She had forgotten her medicine in the car so she went out into the dark to get it.  What she did not know was that one of the pier pilings had rotted away leaving a gaping hole into which she fell, landing many feet below in the cold ocean with broken bones and barely clinging to life and timbers.  When she did not return, her husband went searching.  A rescue effort was soon underway, and our friend spent a long time in the hospital recovering, still hanging between life and death.

*Disclaimer: I have no idea which pier it was.

Life can be like that, candlelight dinners one moment and falling through a black hole in the next, wondering if we can be rescued.  (This is where we are suspended right now in this pandemic.)  We all have fallen and have been left broken, barely clinging to life praying for someone to come save us.  But in our rescue, we must let go of that to which we cling.

"For I consider that the sufferings of this present time

are not worthy to be compared with the glory

which shall be revealed in us."

Romans 8:18

"Through loyalty to the past our mind refuses to realize that tomorrow's joy is possible only if today's makes way for it; that each wave owes the beauty of its line only to the withdrawal of the preceding one."  Andre Gide

"God rises up out of the sea like a treasure in the waves,

and when language recedes His brightness remains on the shore of our being."

Thomas Merton

"In his quietest moments, a man hears in the depths of his being a voice which tells him that he comes from a country to which one day he must return."  Paul Burton

"It's not all about the here and now, clinging to a life preserver, it's about looking forward to the place He has prepared for us where ultimate healing and wholeness is made possible: at homeness.

"Thy kingdom come,

Thy will be done."

Even Jesus surrendered to say, 
"Nevertheless, not my will, but Thine be done."