Hope…

It has been a very difficult year.

I am always a little wary of blogging about personal stuff (mine or that relating to my congregation) which is probably why there have been so few blog posts over the past year or so.

It has been another year in limbo with our building and 18 months spent as guests in someone else’s space.

And a year in which ongoing problems with my voice have caused me to question myself and my calling.

It has been a difficult journey and now there is light breaking into darkness.

A quote from Joan Chittister has been buzzing around my mind of late.

It is  about holding on to hope and to all those small acts of will which can eventually transform darkness into light.

“Hope is not a denial of reality. But it is also not some kind of spiritual elixir. It is not a placebo infused out of nowhere. Hope is a series of small actions that transform darkness into light. It is putting one foot in front of the other when we can find no reason to do so at all”.

(Joan Chittister).

The times they are a changin’ (2)

Some wise words from Joan Chittister found on the  peopleforothers blog. Thought I would post them as they follow on nicely from yesterday’s quotation:

Change and conversion are not the same thing…

Change is required of us all. No one and nothing can stand still, cemented in the place, the work, the era that we had come to take for granted.  However comforting the thought, however desirable the situation, what I am now, where I am now, will not always be.

Change will happen. Our only decision is whether to engage it.  If we engage change, we can shape it.  If we resist it, we run the risk of being shriveled by it into less than we are meant to be.

The not-so-obvious part of change is that change alone cannot define the measure of our growth.  Only conversion can do that.  Only the willingness to embrace change, to learn from it and to recognize it in the stuff of my own ultimate development can possible give change its coinage.

Conversion requires the humility to look again at what we always knew to be true and see new truth in it.

Conversion requires the willingness to risk. Stepping out into a new universe of grace and gift is the challenge of conversion.  It is the ability to admit that there may be more to life than my own small perspective on it.

(Picture is from the ‘day of silence’ set by Jonny Baker on Flickr as was yesterday’s bench)