What does your heart see?

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote: "And now, here is my secret, a very simple secret: It's only at the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye."

Our heart has eyes and our heart has hands.

Let's just make the decision that we're going to make our heart be the place we look from for the rest of the day. Right now, pause for a moment and let your heart show you how wonderful it is to be alive, how blessed you are to have a breath of life and how blessed you are to be able to choose what you pay attention to.

What is essential is invisible to the eye. It's only with the heart that you and I can see rightly, so let us look from the heart today and make it a great day.

-Mary Morrissey,

Peace is not something you must hope for in the future.

Rather, it is a deepening of the present,

and unless you look for it in the present

you will never find it.

-Thomas Merton

Living Well

Living well through loss involves learning how to grieve. Grieving teaches us to live again in the absence of someone or something significant. Grieving isn’t just a time of unbearable emptiness and tears but a whole process of becoming a new person shaped by the memory of what is lost, not defined by it.

Grieving enables us to become a person who has experienced a divorce, not a divorced person. It enables us to become a person who has lost a partner, not a widow. It enables us to become a person who has experienced the loss of a job, not a loser. Grieving enables us to know ourselves who lose something when change occurs, not as people who are losers.

- Dan Moseley

Lose, Love, Live: The Spiritual Gifts of Loss and Change

FYI INFO

Want to know what is happening in the United Methodist Churches? Check out "Channels" for great information.

http://www.pnwumc.org/attachments/-01_Channels43_screen.pdf

Easter Week # 2

Where shattered hearts are made whole,
where wounded souls are healed,
where life is stronger than death:
there, the stone has been rolled away.
Where the lonely become our friends,
where a stranger is welcomed home,
where hope is stronger than despair,

there, we find Jesus walking.

Where closed wallets are opened,
where the anxious find serenity,
where love is stronger than hate:
there, Jesus is opening our eyes.
The stone has been rolled away!
Jesus is our companion on the journey!
Our eyes are opened to the needs of others!
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
Alleluia! Christ is with us!

-Thom Shuman

www.lectionaryliturgies.blogspot.com

Post Easter Blessings

The risen Christ walks beside us—awaiting our invitation to stay with us, break bread with us, interpret life for us, give us hope, and share in thanksgiving. May we, like the disciples before us, have our eyes opened to recognize Christ as he comes to walk beside us this day.

-Rueben P. Job
A Guide to Prayer for All Who Seek God

Easter Blessing

If you are looking for a blessing, do not linger here.

Here is only emptiness, a hollow, a husk

where a blessing used to be.

This blessing was not content in its confinement.

It could not abide its isolation,the unrelenting silence,

the pressing stench of death.

So if it is a blessing that you seek,

open your own mouth.

Fill your lungs with the air that this new

morning brings and then release it with a cry.

Hear how the blessing breaks forth in your own voice

how your own lips form every word

you never dreamed to say.

See how the blessing circles back again wanting you to

repeat it but louder, how it draws you, pulls you

sends you to proclaim its only word:

risen

risen

risen.

- Jan Richardson

www.thepaintedprayerbook.com