Today’s Prayer to Passage will be from the book “Sabbath: Restoring the Sacred Rhythm of Rest” by Wayne Muller.

Today I pray, “Dear God, When I feel You so powerfully within me, I am moved to tears. I am so in love with these moments that I realize I cannot put them into words. I ask that You powerfully attend to me today to put these moments into words for this moment. Thank You. Amen.”

Following my prayer, I held the closed book in my hands and opened it to this passage on page 185:

“What can you let go of? One thing, beginning with the smallest thing. A book unread — can it be given to the library? An old postcard on the refrigerator, no longer current? An old appliance, never used? Old clothing, never worn, to the poor? What of projects that feel like responsibilities but bring joy to no one? Pick one thing this week, another the next, and discard something that has become unnecessary. Feel any release as you let it go.”
—WAYNE MULLER

This feeling of release is a clearing created. And God shows up more amplified in this clearing. I attended my baby nephew’s baptism today. And I was overcome with emotion in the moments for which I had not prepared my heart. My living grandparents were seated behind me, singing hymns in their living, breathing voices. I heard each of my three living grandparents’ voices singing, and I was overcome with emotion.

I cried. And I could not catch hold. My heart felt a love laborious in its depth, and in the many valued lifetimes it would take to fully express this love. There, in a one hundred-year-old pew in a one-hundred-year-old church, the little white church located one mile up the road from the farm where I grew up, there my eldest living ancestors sat behind me. And my newest born descendant sat before me.

When the water was cupped onto his head, “…You are baptized in the name of the Father…and of the Son…and of the Holy Spirit. And marked with the Cross of Christ, forever. Amen.”, the water came about in plentiful tears. This would have been the day to grab a kleenex before leaving the house. A wad of toilet paper, a sock! There I wept, unceasingly. And when the pastor wrapped my baby nephew in a small quilt made by a group of women to signify his being wrapped in God’s Love, the pastor then held up the newborn, introducing him to the room full of people. “…The newest member of the family of Christ.” A moment I cannot put into words.

I suddenly envisioned every newborn child, here to be light unto the world. And I thought of a song that I sang when I was a child at church on Sunday mornings. “This little light of mine. I’m gonna let it shine. This little light of mine. I’m gonna let it shine. This little light of mine. I’m gonna let it shine. Let it shine…let it shine…let it shine.” And I felt a release as I let this light go, out into the world, to shine ever brilliantly. Amen.