This sheet of ice is beautiful. The lines of division probably acquiesce to some rules involving frozen water that only scientists and puddles know about. To me, a woman of thread, it looks like a quilt whose rules I know well.
The crystal plate itself defers my sight to an image of the clouds. Perhaps it knows somehow
that the cumulous is its mother and deserves paramount respect. Interestingly, I can look up by looking down.
Today I am at a retreat about small groups in sun baked California. We will no doubt identify the qualities of a healthy program, and what it takes to usher people into connection. The leader knows his stuff, since he spearheads a complex system of 3600 clusters of adults who commit to gathering regularly for prayer, friendship and support. In directing
our attention to the web of folks who will frequent our living rooms, we will be part of a larger, even more lovely pattern of community whose veins stretch like a circulatory system across a congregation.
It is my hope that the marriage groups and mentoring quartets that I care about will flourish from what I hear here. It is already true that when I look into their faces, which are as close as the other side of the coffee table, I see the reflection of the
billowing Source of marriage.
It happened just last week. I was in a tizzy about another pending storm, and the details that clog up as I prepared to exit a house of four dependent children for a week. Yet in the presence of two couples who jammed this event in between hospital visits and retrieving a car smashed into a snow bank, I felt calm. In their eyes I could see the sky instead of just the lines crisscrossing my scope of vision.
