Friday, October 29, 2021https://kuc.org/wp-content/uploads/joy-34.jpg

Katie Snipes Lancaster

Scripture
For every house is built by someone,
but God is the builder of everything.
Hebrews 3:4

A Look at Joy
We carry inside us a vision of wholeness that we sense is our true home and that beckons us. Joy is home, and I believe that the tears that came to our eyes were more than anything homesick tears. Woe to us indeed if we forget the homeless ones who have no vote, no power, nobody to lobby for them, who might as well have no faces, the way we try to avoid the troubling sight of them in the streets of the cities where they roam like stray cats. And as we listen each night to the news of what happened in our lives that day, woe to us if we forget our own homeless. To be homeless the way people like you and me are apt to be homeless is to have homes all over the place but not to be really at home in any of them. To be really at home is to be really at peace, and our lives are so intricately interwoven that there can be no real peace for any of us until there is peace for all of us.

(Frederick Beuchner. The Longing for Home: Recollections and Reflections: San Francisco, Harper San Francisco, 1996)

Prayer
Plant within us
a vision of wholeness,
an active love,
a labored peace.
Amen.