July Prayers | On Perspective
“You may say to yourself, ‘My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.’ But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth, and so confirms his covenant, which he swore to your ancestors, as it is today.”
Dear Friends,
Summer is a season that can offer us perspective - on the year behind us, on the ways we’re ordering our lives, our habits, our relationships, our priorities. Ideally, prayer offers such a space each day, but we often need more dramatic events like vacation and travel or reunions with friends and family to find renewed perspective on our lives. One small, perhaps strange, practice I write about below is the act of looking at your house (or a gathering) from the outside. I invite you to literally step away and look back on your life, on where you live or your friends or family gathered, from the outside. Or, perhaps you could look back over old photos or videos. Whatever form it takes, listen and reflect on what fresh perspective God might be offering you in this act of remembrance.
-Christy Yates, Associate Director
A recent piece of creative non-fiction by Associate Director, Christy Yates.
Some nights…
These days I’ve been picking off the crust of the real. Like a barnacle split from the rock which it thought was the whole of it, the bare openings left are tender and raw, exposed and bewildering.
Hold on a minute, one might venture to ask in these off-kilter states: What is really going on here? Who’s in charge and… where’s this all leading? Questions like these are generally lost on us in the daylight hours. Like stars, they’re ever present. We just can’t see them.
Some nights, I slip out of our house in the dark and turn back to watch like one would a movie. It’s as if my spirit is floating free, detached from my limbs, looking askance at my life and observing it for what it is. It’s as if I’m a ghost and someone has cut the cords of drive and obligation. It’s as if I’m freed to simply be still and see.
The girls are busy, oblivious of their outside observer. One sits straight-backed at her desk studying algebra, savoring slow spoonfuls of mug cake, her face glowing faintly from the green light of her laptop. The other, below through another window, reluctantly washes dishes, occasionally checking her phone to find a good tune.
I recommend this practice, this watching your house from the outside at night. It gives you perspective one might say; how can it not? Life will surely go on without me just fine is one truth I surmise after only several minutes. I am watching it for myself!
And then gratitude, more gratitude than one might expect from such a simple scene snipped out of daily life, swells within me.
I inhale suddenly to catch my breath and shift my gaze up to the night sky, stars studded everywhere in the far off freckled space.
A meteorite suddenly scratches the blackness. Then another. And finally one more.
It’s almost too much.