Week of September 8 devotional points

Sunday-Ps.139 is today’s reading. Let’s look a moment at the line “I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” In a culture that dissects body image, isn’t this a glorious thing to hear? what part of your body are you most proud and least happy with? what part of your emotions a and mind are fearfully and wonderfully made? Are you able to say the same thing about others whom you encounter?

Monday—From John Philip Newell-“At the beginning of the day/we seek your countenance among us, O God,/in the countless forms of creation all around using the sun's rising glory/in the face of friend and stranger./ Your Presence within every presence/your Light within all light/your Heart at the heart of this moment./May the fresh light of morning wash our sight/that we may see your Life/in every life this day.

Tuesday-We’ve been harvesting tomatoes, and the Farmer’s Market seems to be bursting with them. I like ot make BLTs with the first ones of the season, and then I make sauce and salsa and cook with the rest. Do you have an emotional or spiritual BLTs that you especially like at certain times of the year? When you have an abundance of a spiritual resource how do you use and preserve it?

Wednesday- We will read Jer. 18, with the famous image of God as potter. At the Japanese festival, we saw examples of the way the artists try to capture a fleeting moment in the kiln to be frozen on the pottery in shape or color. It gave me a new angle on the image, where at times god may highlight some part of our experience that we may have not noticed as vital at the time, but divine vision is better than even our hindsight.

Thursday-I went to the Japanese Fest at the MO Botanical gardens on Labor Day. I so admire the persistent care and patience of the culture in approaching beauty through miniscule changes in raking stones or trimming an ornamental bush or arranging some seemingly simple flowers in a pot. Taking time and care with something adds a lot of ourselves to something; it turns an object into a keepsake or a piece into a craft. I like to think that God does craft work with us.

Friday-we will read Philemon this week as well, in one swoop in worship. I like it as it deals with a thorny moral issue in a most subtle way. Paul tries to persuade a slave owner that his new faith should compel him to treat the slave in a wholly new way.He tries to get him to see that he is now part of something larger than his rights and that he should start to see a slave as a brother more than as a commodity. Paul won’t command him, as he is trying to have him see things from a new perspective through his own processes.

Saturday-From Frederick Buechner: “it is not just the saints of the church that we should remember in our prayers, but all the foolish ones and wise ones, the shy ones and overbearing ones, the broken ones and whole ones, the despots and tosspots and crackpots of our lives who, one way or another, have been our particular fathers and mothers and saints, and whom we loved without knowing we loved them and by whom we were helped to whatever little we may have, or ever hope to have, of some kind of seedy sainthood of our own.” go through some of your history and identify the sorts of folks Buechner considers in the import of yo