active waiting and birth

BEST- Neighborhood update. My neighbor comes to my house, two young daughters in tow, almost every day. The girls need to come see Anj after their naps, and they lay on my kitchen floor, coloring in their bodies I have outlined on butcher paper, or coloring a box we are waiting to cut up and make into forts. The girls were adopted from foster care, and while they lay with their toes in the air, belly up or belly down, their mom and I drink tea, made with the ritual of the kettle and loose tea leaves, milk put in the glasses first, in the English way, and then the tea poured. And their mom sits with her toes wrapped around my kitchen stool, and tells me what God is doing in her life, tells me how she is starting to hear the Spirit within, and that she sometimes finds that scary. Tells me her view of God is changing. She calls me her divining rod, and I tell her that a divining rod only points to that which is already there. Sometimes, after her husband is home, she comes back and sits on my kitchen stool again, and I wrap my hands around my warm cup of coffee, lean against my kitchen cabinet and listen to her heart.

A week ago I gave her one of my favorite books, Sleeping with Bread by the Linns, and yesterday she sat in my kitchen, and asked – Could we do a best and worst group for our neighborhood? I know three women who want to come. Can we do it at your house? Can you elder us?

I smiled, she remembered I went to the eldering retreat, she had asked me how it went. I said, we can do it here, we can elder each other. A while ago - a year or more, on this blog, I shared my desire for a best and worst group in our neighborhood.  It will be a mixed faith group. We start the Sunday after Easter. I am glad I waited.

Comments

[Lisa]

Big huge grin on my face. Way Open.

[Barb]

My heart leaps as I read this :)

[bobbie]

oh anj - tears are streaming down my face - this is so beautiful! you are a radiant light and i love you! thank you for being patient, for waiting for way to open, for not forcing or pushing, but marking the passage of time at sojourn as a light with the total faith that it would open when it was time.

this makes my heart glad!

[Jim]

Too easy to look at the Church in all its organizational, dogmatic agenda and lose heart. How good to come here and read of God at work in the vessel. Peace, my friend.....

[Candy]

cool, anj. very cool.

[Hope]

When I was in college I worked as a peer tutor and all of us who worked in this program would gather and sit on a circular couch every Thursday and share the best and the worst of the week. I loved it. We cheered and we cried with one another around that couch.

You teach me what it looks like to wait for the Spirit's prompting and leading.

[aola]

I agree with Jim... you are an example for all of us of the church at work.

[Deb]

I wish I lived in your neighborhood.