FootprintsintheWind.com

The picture of God we carry does not decide whether we can have a personal relationship. Old man, young man, woman, attributes or none, Spirit, force, field, or any other image: all are inaccurate. Yet none precludes saying my Intimate One.

:- Doug.

Last night I read a piece by Jeff Aitken about how as a Jew who had a first nations background, he felt like an outsider. This was pointed to by Chris Corrigan, a person who feels like an outsider because of Ojibway plus Irish and Scottish backgrounds. And I felt it even though I am white and protestant if not Anglo-Saxon, but was fat at least through grade school and have been through high school and puberty. We all feel like outsiders and we all long to be insiders: loved, accepted, even argued with.

We have an opportunity: include one another.

:- Doug.

Turning to one another. Peace. I really have in mind the Hebrew shalom: safety, prosperity.

Turning to one another: What can it mean? Literally, we face each other. We trust each other. We contend with one another. But we are together, for that is where our growth comes—in the between. That is where our health and wholeness exists.

So “we” are not so much about “together” as meeting in between. We face each other, for whatever comes of it. There is a shared event, a common fruitfulness, which leads to our individual fruitfulness and back again.

Is that not what we want is to be fruitful? Is that not what we seek when we are included, and what we miss when excluded?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 746

What we need in this old world that God so loves is more turning to one another. Peace means wholeness, fullness, completeness, a place beyond space-time where everything is possible. We all feel as if we are outsiders: this then is our chance! We can include.

Please pass it on.

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A real relationship takes reciprocal acts of compassion. Now then when you act to help someone suffering from poverty, do either of you expect compassion to flow from the one who has “less?” Actually, you do: for when your help is met with indifference rather than heart-felt thanks, you feel hurt, impoverished. So when you seek to help, seek also to be helped; give the person the dignity of being met as whole and human. You can in the least ask for his or her blessing, or to be met.

:- Doug.