The Saturdays of our lives are sometimes our darkest hours, as we wait, like disciples of old, for the new life promised in Christ. In this episode, Mandy speaks to this darkness as we wait and hope.  artwork: The Grey Havens, by Matt Stewart, as seen in the Middle-earth Collectible Card Game INTO THE WEST, Lyrics by Annie Lennox, Produced by Howard Shore Lay down Your sweet and weary head The night is falling You have come to journey's end Sleep now And dream of the ones who came before They are calling From across the distant shore Why do you weep? What are these tears upon your face? Soon you will see All of your fears will pass away Safe in my arms You're only sleeping What can you see On the horizon? Why do the white gulls call? Across the sea A pale moon rises The ships have come to carry you home And all will turn To silver glass A light on the water All Souls pass Hope fades Into the world of night Through shadows falling Out of memory and time Don't say We have come now to the end White shores are calling You and I will meet again And you'll be here in my arms Just sleeping And all will turn To silver glass A light on the water Grey ships pass Into the West   READING: For Holy Saturday: Pg. 174-175 From: Have a Beautiful Terrible Day by Kate Bowler. (SO MANY GEMS IN THIS BOOK! I HIGHLY RECOMMEND IT!) To purchase on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3TX23pE or on Target: https://www.target.com/p/have-a-beautiful-terrible-day-by-kate-bowler-hardcover/-/A-89186641#lnk=sametab   HEBREWS 12:5-12 “My son, do not despise the c]"> [c]chastening of the Lord, Nor be discouraged when you are rebuked by Him; 6 For whom the Lord loves He chastens, And scourges every son whom He receives.” 7 Ifd]">[d] you endure chastening, God deals with you as with sons; for what son is there whom a father does not chasten? 8 But if you are without chastening, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate and not sons. 9 Furthermore, we have had human fathers who corrected us, and we paid them respect. Shall we not much more readily be in subjection to the Father of spirits and live? 10 For they indeed for a few days chastened usas seemed best to them, but He for our profit, that we may be partakers of His holiness. 11 Now no e]"> [e]chastening seems to be joyful for the present, but painful; nevertheless, afterward it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. 12 Therefore strengthen the hands which hang down, and the feeble knees, 13 and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be dislocated, but rather be healed.

Today's podcast features guests, Adelaide Roberts, Miss Wyoming For America Strong and Tyler Schwab, President and CEO of Libertas International, an organization committed to the rescue and after care of girls imprisoned in human trafficking. It's a tough and tender conversation--and an necessary one. To beat an evil of this magnitude, it's going to take all of us! Please listen to the end if possible. For more information about how you can help or to sponsor a girl, please visit: Libertas International.  If donating, please enter: REFLECTING LIGHT PODCAST into the memo space.

Better late than never! Mandy returns with Easter Greetings and a look at the beauty of the mayhem the first Easter, as recorded in the Book of Mark. Wishing you all some beautiful Easter mayhem. xoxo art by He Qi: Women Arriving at the Tomb He Qi Copyright 2021. Limited use. To Purchase Kate Bowlers book:  https://amzn.to/4anG81J    

Are we willing to ride out our storms knowing the Lord is in the boat with us? Matt 8, Luke 5. Image Credit: Yongsong Kim, "The Hand of God.'  https://yongsungkimart.com/products/the-hand-of-god-by-yongsung-kim?variant=40700331393189

With all of the focus on love the past month, it's important to remember to love ourselves. Join Mandy as she discusses how we are each "wonderfully and fearfully made," (Ps. 139:13-18). Love After Love The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other's welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life. © by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes  

When was the last time your rested? TRULY rested? When was the last time you ceased from doing anything--totally stopped and just emjoyed existence? If you're like me, it's been too long. And that's why I recorded this podcast.  Exodus 20: 8-11Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it. All other quotes taken from Chapter 5 of Soul Feast by Marjorie Thompson. https://amzn.to/3SZrUhp TRY IT! SET A GOAL TO CEASE FROM EVERYTHING A FEW TIMES THIS WEEK AND BUILD UP FROM THERE. It's harder than you imagine! (Which means the Elohim probably had an idea of how important it would become to us as humans!) xoxo. Mandy

Small Kindnesses  Danusha Laméris I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you” when someone sneezes, a leftover from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying. And sometimes, when you spill lemons from your grocery bag, someone else will help you pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other. We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot, and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder, and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass. We have so little of each other, now. So far from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange. What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here, have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.” From Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection (Green Writers Press, 2019). Posted by kind permission of the poet.   Small Kindnesses grateful.org "Am I then really all that which other men tell of, or am I only what I know of myself, restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage, struggling for breath, as though hands were compressing my throat, yearning for colors, for flowers, for the voices of birds, thirsting for words of kindness, for neighborliness,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "Who Am I."   Welcome to RandomActsofKindness.org randomactsofkindness.org 2024_RAK_kindness_calendar PDF Document · 8.5 MB

"And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been." Rilke Word of the Year: "Affection" noun af·​fec·​tion ə-ˈfek-shən  Synonyms of affection 1: a feeling of liking and caring for someone or something : tender attachment : FONDNESS She had a deep affection for her parents. Middle English affeccioun "capacity for feeling, emotion, desire, love," borrowed from Anglo-French, "desire, love, inclination, partiality," borrowed from Latin affectiōn-, affectiō "frame of mind, feeling, feeling of attachment," from affec-(variant stem of afficere "to produce an effect on, exert an influence on") + -tiōn-, -tiō, suffix of action nouns Referench: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/affection philostorgos: tenderly loving Original Word:φιλόστοργος, ον Phonetic Spelling:(fil-os'-tor-gos) Definition:tenderly loving Usage:tenderly loving, kindly affectionate to Reference: https://biblehub.com/greek/5387.htm For the full text of the Jefferson Lecture 2012, by Wendell Barry, please visit: https://www.neh.gov/about/awards/jefferson-lecture/wendell-e-berry-biography Photo by Guy Mendes Quoted excerpts from the lecture: “Because a thing is going strong now, it need not go strong for ever,” [Margaret] said. “This craze for motion has only set in during the last hundred years. It may be followed by a civilization that won’t be a movement, because it will rest upon the earth.E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910) p. "The term “imagination” in what I take to be its truest sense refers to a mental faculty that some people have used and thought about with the utmost seriousness. The sense of the verb “to imagine” contains the full richness of the verb “to see.” To imagine is to see most clearly, familiarly, and understandingly with the eyes, but also to see inwardly, with “the mind’s eye.” It is to see, not passively, but with a force of vision and even with visionary force. To take it seriously we must give up at once any notion that imagination is disconnected from reality or truth or knowledge. It has nothing to do either with clever imitation of appearances or with “dreaming up.” It does not depend upon one’s attitude or point of view, but grasps securely the qualities of things seen or envisioned. I will say, from my own belief and experience, that imagination thrives on contact, on tangible connection. For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy." "But the risk, I think, is only that affection is personal. If it is not personal, it is nothing; we don’t, at least, have to worry about governmental or corporate affection. And one of the endeavors of human cultures, from the beginning, has been to qualify and direct the influence of emotion. The word “affection” and the terms of value that cluster around it—love, care, sympathy, mercy, forbearance, respect, reverence—have histories and meanings that raise the issue of worth. We should, as our culture has warned us over and over again, give our affection to things that are true, just, and beautiful. It is by imagination that knowledge is “carried to the heart” (to borrow again from Allen Tate). The faculties of the mind—reason, memory, feeling, intuition, imagination, and the rest—are not distinct from one another. Though some may be favored over others and some ignored, none functions alone. But the human mind, even in its wholeness, even in instances of greatest genius, is irremediably limited. Its several faculties, when we try to use them separately or specialize them, are even more limited. The fact is that we humans are not much to be trusted with what I am calling statistical knowledge, and the larger the statistical quantities the less we are to be trusted. We don’t learn much from big numbers. We don’t understand them very well, and we aren’t much affected by them." ((Who Owns America? edited by Herbert Agar and Allen Tate, ISI Books, Wilmington, DE, 1999,  pages 109–114. (First published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1936.) [Nature] "As Albert Howard, Wes Jackson, and others have carefully understood, she can give us the right patterns and standards for agriculture. If we ignore or offend her, she enforces her will with punishment. She is always trying to tell us that we are not so superior or independent or alone or autonomous as we may think. She tells us in the voice of Edmund Spenser that she is of all creatures “the equall mother, / And knittest each to each, as brother unto brother.” (The Faerie Queene, VII, vii, stanza XIV.) "To hear of a thousand deaths in war is terrible, and we “know” that it is. But as it registers on our hearts, it is not more terrible than one death fully imagined. The economic hardship of one farm family, if they are our neighbors, affects us more painfully than pages of statistics on the decline of the farm population. I can be heartstruck by grief and a kind of compassion at the sight of one gulley (and by shame if I caused it myself), but, conservationist though I am, I am not nearly so upset by an accounting of the tons of plowland sediment borne by the Mississippi River. Wallace Stevens wrote that “Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail.” (Opus Posthumous, edited, with an Introduction by Samuel French Morse, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1957, page 176.) "But we need not wait, as we are doing, to be taught the absolute value of land and of land health by hunger and disease. Affection can teach us, and soon enough, if we grant appropriate standing to affection. For this we must look to the stickers, who “love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.” "E. M. Forster’s novel, Howards End, published in 1910. By then, Forster was aware of the implications of “rural decay,” and in this novel he spoke, with some reason, of his fear that “the literature of the near future will probably ignore the country and seek inspiration from the town. . . . and those who care for the earth with sincerity may wait long ere the pendulum swings back to her again.” (Howards End, page 15, 112). Margaret’s premise, as she puts it to Henry, is the balance point of the book:  “It all turns on affection now . . . Affection. Don’t you see?” (Ibid., page 214). To have beautiful buildings, for example, people obviously must want them to be beautiful and know how to make them beautiful, but evidently they also must love the places where the buildings are to be built. For a long time, in city and countryside, architecture has disregarded the nature and influence of places. It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile . . . That is not imagination. No, it kills it. . . . Your universities? Oh, yes, you have learned men who collect . . . facts, and facts, and empires of facts. But which of them will rekindle the light within? (Ibid., page 30)." “The light within,” I think, means affection, affection as motive and guide. Knowledge without affection leads us astray every time. Affection leads, by way of good work, to authentic hope. The factual knowledge, in which we seem more and more to be placing our trust, leads only to hope of the discovery, endlessly deferrable, of an ultimate fact or smallest particle that at last will explain everything. Margaret’s premise, as she puts it to Henry, is the balance point of the book:  “It all turns on affection now . . . Affection. Don’t you see?” The great reassurance of Forster’s novel is the wholeheartedness of his language. It is to begin with a language not disturbed by mystery, by things unseen. But Forster’s interest throughout is in soul-sustaining habitations: houses, households, earthly places where lives can be made and loved. In defense of such dwellings he uses, without irony or apology, the vocabulary that I have depended on in this talk:  truth, nature, imagination, affection, love, hope, beauty, joy. Those words are hard to keep still within definitions; they make the dictionary hum like a beehive. But in such words, in their resonance within their histories and in their associations with one another, we find our indispensable humanity, without which we are lost and in danger. Of the land-community much has been consumed, much has been wasted, almost nothing has flourished. But this has not been inevitable. We do not have to live as if we are alone.

This week Mandy discusses the distinction between belief and knowledge and examines the heights and depths of "knowing."  1 Ne 8:10 And it came to pass that I beheld a tree, whose fruit was desirable to make one happy. 11 And it came to pass that I did go forth and partake of the fruit thereof; and I beheld that it was most sweet, above all that I ever before tasted. Yea, and I beheld that the fruit thereof was white, to exceed all the whiteness that I had ever seen. 12 And as I partook of the fruit thereof it filled my soul with exceedingly great joy; wherefore, I began to be desirousthat my family should partake of it also; for I knew that it was desirable above all other fruit. "We wanted life, however high the cost. We suffer because we were willing to pay the cost of *being* and of being here with others in their ignorance and inexperience as well as our own. We suffer because we are willing to pay the costs of living with laws of nature, which operate quite consistently whether or not we understand them or can manage them. 

We suffer because, like Christ in the desert, we apparently did not say we would come only if God would change all our stones to bread in time of hunger. We were willing to *know* hunger. Like Christ in the desert, we did not ask God to let us try falling or being bruised only on condition that he catch us before we touch ground and save us from real hurt. We were willing to *know* hurt. Like Christ, we did not agree to come only if God would make everyone bow to us and respect us, or admire us and understand us. 

Like Christ, we came to be ourselves, addressing and creating reality. We are finding out who we are and who we can become regardless of immediate environment or circumstances.” From Francine Bennion’s: “A Latter-day Saint Theology of Suffering” Art: ENCOUNTER Painted by Daniel Cariola from a chapel mural in Magdala, Israel

Welcome to 2024~ We start the year by concluding the Christmas liturgial season ending in Epiphany! noun epiph·​a·​ny i-ˈpi-fə-nē  1 capitalized : January 6 observed as a church festival in commemoration of the coming of the Magi as the first manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles or in the Eastern Church in commemoration of the baptism of Christ 2: an appearance or manifestation especially of a divine being 3a(1): a usually sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something (2): an intuitive grasp of reality through something (such as an event) usually simple and striking (3): an illuminating discovery, realization, or disclosure b: a revealing scene or moment https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/epiphany Journey of the Magi By T.S. Elliot A cold coming we had of it, Just the worst time of the year For a journey, and such a long journey: The ways deep and the weather sharp, The very dead of winter.' And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory, Lying down in the melting snow. There were times we regretted The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces, And the silken girls bringing sherbet. Then the camel men cursing and grumbling and running away, and wanting their liquor and women, And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters, And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly And the villages dirty and charging high prices: A hard time we had of it. At the end we preferred to travel all night, Sleeping in snatches, With the voices singing in our ears, saying That this was all folly. Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley, Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation; With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness, And three trees on the low sky, And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow. Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel, Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver, And feet kicking the empty wine-skins. But there was no information, and so we continued And arriving at evening, not a moment too soon Finding the place; it was (you might say) satisfactory. All this was a long time ago, I remember, And I would do it again, but set down This set down This: were we led all that way for Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death. We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, With an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death. "Every hero needs to venture into the Belly of the Beast. It’s essential to be devoured at least once by the monster. The hero never begins as a hero. He becomes a hero, and that entails the annihilation of his own, unheroic, former self. The hero always undergoes a metamorphosis, from ordinary to extraordinary. The hero, like the snake, sheds its old skin and takes on a new form. To change, you must enter a sacred space, a transformational space. Nothing ever changes in the ordinary space. The familiar world keeps you the same. It has no alchemical power. If you are confined in the same old world, you remain the same old person. You must cross the threshold into the New World."--David Sinclair (Taken from the instagram account: @robertedwardgrant on 1-3-2024