No Perfect, Just Real

Daily Devotion - March 18

I will try to send a brief message each day while we are pausing gathering in person.
- Kara

I've been struck today with how we are in utterly new territory, completely uncharted waters.  Most of us who are living now can't remember an experience like this, and there is no real end to the weirdness in sight. We are all sharing the unknown, and making it through the best way we can.

Suddenly parents are homeschooling, suddenly people are working from home, suddenly people are laid off, or afraid to go to the store.  We're learning new technology, we're paying attention to the news vigilantly. We're figuring out how to cook dried beans because they told us we should stock up on dried beans. It's exhausting and confusing.  

There is no perfect way to do any of these things.
We just do them.
The best we can, and sometimes not even that, sometimes just however we can.

Even if apparently everyone else in the neighborhood is teaching fantastic, educational lessons to perfectly behaved children with energy and love, and you are policing fights and cleaning up messes and trying not to lay on the floor and cry, you are winning. You are making it through.

Each day, we figure out how to get that prescription, how to cancel that appointment, how to communicate with someone we love, how to let go of another thing we were looking forward to, how to fill our hours in ways that keep us sane.

There is no template for this, and nobody is doing it best.  

Maybe it would be good for us to all have a few reminders from the Way of God:

• Life begins begins in gift and abundance.
• Everyone is valued, all participate.
• You are loved just as you are.
• You are not meant to be perfect, (there’s no such thing); you are meant to be you.
• You are made by God for connection and communion. On this journey of life that begins in gift and ends in connection and communion, the people journeying alongside you are neighbor, friend, brother and sister, not threats, rivals or competitors.
• You need each other to be whole, and what we have is for sharing. 
• Life doesn’t make sense alone and isolated and against; you are created for relationship with God and with each other, and there is no such thing as one without the other.
• The goal is wholeness, connection and joy, and the world and those of us in it, are wired for this.
• We have everything we need, and would remember that, and live in that if we regularly stopped everything long enough to let God remind us.
• The world is filled with beauty, infused with the light of God who holds us all.
• Living a good life is shaped around “everyone having what they need” justice, “standing with you” kindness, and “attentive and open” walking humbly with God. (Micah 6:8)

So - go google the penguins touring the aquarium, the Venice canals full of fish and birds and clear water, the guy who is visiting his dad in assisted living by sitting on a lawn chair and talking on his cell phone through a window, the many many many neighbors offering to help each other in my neighborhood and yours and every other neighborhood in this nation. (The energy it will take me to link those things directly in here feels like more than I have left for technology today - google them, they're great).

This world is gorgeous and we ridiculous humans are adorable and brave, and making our way through it all right now, just by being human.

I mean, look at this guy?  He's winning too!

CONNECTING RITUAL:

Here's a wonderful prayer from Thomas Merton.

Perhaps tonight, before we go to bed, whatever time that is in each of our homes, we might all say this prayer, and so join our souls:
My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.

Nor do I really know myself,
and the fact that I think I am following your will
does not mean that I am actually doing so.

But I believe that the desire to please you
does in fact please you.
And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.

And I know that, if I do this,
You will lead me by the right road,
though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore I will trust you always
though I may seem to be lost
and in the shadow of death.

I will not fear, for you are ever with me,
and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

Amen.