Strange Things Happen To Us While We Sleep…

October 18, 2013
I got tired of calling the blurb “This Week At The Table”. It’s too easy to stop seeing the good in familiar things. It seems that we occasionally need to be bumped a little, knocked out of our groove and into a new space where we can reconsider the world around us.

Sometimes that space is the night. Fredrick Buechner, writing in “The Alphabet of Grace”, offers this picture of night:  “Life is grace. Sleep is forgiveness. The night absolves. Darkness wipes the slate clean, not spotless to be sure, but clean enough for another days chalking”.

Sometimes we wake up feeling the goodness of that – of a new day that is another shot at it. But sometimes we wake up with the sensation that we’ve been wrestling all night, struggling to make meaning, to make sense of the lives we live in the daylight.

The Bible has several well known “wrestling in the night” stories. I have referred a couple of times to the story of Jacob’s rocky night of wrestling with God, and this week I would like to explore that story a bit further.
HOLD THE DATE: Sunday, December 22nd (evening)

Despite the beauty of this fall, the reality of the calender is that Christmas isn’t very far away! We have typically gathered as a community to mark the season of Christmas a couple of days before Christmas Eve in order to facilitate people being with their familes during that time. This year, because Christmas Eve / Christmas day are a Tuesday and Wednesday, we will celebrate Christmas as a community on Sunday, December 22nd in the evening. There will be no morning gathering on that Sunday, but our evening time will be an extended one including a shared meal and some other ways of engaging with the essence of Christmas.

This week, we’ll meet at The Frame Arts Warehouse at 10:30 on Sunday morning. See you there!

Peace,

Tim Plett