Tend the Connections
How do we make connections? We live our lives surrounded and upheld by an almost infinite number of relationships. Some relationships we aren’t even aware of as we live in a global economy. Other relationships we live more fully enjoying or wrestling with. At whatever level we want to consider the issue, we cannot ignore the myriad connections we have throughout our daily lives. So how do we make those connections?
The word we use to describe that process is communication. Without relationships we would have no need for communication and without communication we find relationships hard to maintain. We are almost overwhelmed today with opportunities and means for communication. You can email me at work or at home. You can read my blog (which you are already doing) or be my Facebook friend. You can follow my Twitter tweets and I can follow yours. If computers aren’t your thing, there is always the telephone: church, home, and cell. Yet, with all those technological ways of communicating information and are very helpful ways of connecting, they cannot compare to what happens when we have the opportunity to share and listen face to face.
With all those means of relating together available they do us no good if we don’t use them. For example, if you are in the hospital or need someone to talk to and not call, then we have no way of knowing your need and responding. In the same way, if in our families we each have thoughts and ideas and concerns and questions but don’t communicate them with the people in our lives how will they know.
Sometimes communication is easy, sometimes it is very hard. Sometimes the words and ideas flow easily from mind and heart to speech or page and sometimes those thoughts and emotions move like hardened cement or clay deposits. Sometimes when we listen it is like light surrounds and fills our hearts and other times it is like we are deaf in deep darkness.
In our daily relationships we need to continually renew our commitment to nurture those connections. When it hard, we need patience, perseverance, and grace to not give up and anticipate those times when the relationship is in that state of easy flow. In the larger scheme of relationships what is important is not whether we are communicating well or poorly at any particular moment, but that we remain committed to the relationship until the time of richness arrives.
If that is true in our relationships with other human beings whom we can see, hear, and touch, it is more important in our relationship with God. Lent offers to us the invitation to renew our commitment to nurture our connection with God in our daily living. Since it takes time to connect with humans, we need to remember to take the time to connect with God.
When we gather together for worship or study we are seeking to support and encourage each other in our connection with God. When we pick up our Bibles and read to hear what God wants us to know right now in our lives, we are opening our lives to the living Word. When we set aside the busy-ness of our lives to spend time with God in prayer, we are showing that we want to tend to that living connection with God through the Holy Spirit. Prayer is both that wonderful invitation of God to share with God’s heart what is in our hearts, it also becomes a way to quiet our minds so we are able to hear the loving whispers of the Beloved Redeemer.
