of ink + insight

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sunday service 10.15.17

Good morning, Sunday. So nice to see you again.

Life let me write with some amazing human beings this week, some of them for the first time. Life let me show them how to be open, how to keep the pen moving, how to trust others with their words. And then life pushed us off in different directions, each of us changed just a little bit for having been together a short while.

That’s what life does. It brings you together and then takes you away again. It lets you build something and then lets it fall apart. It lets you live in a house for ten years and then it burns it all down or washes it clean into the sea.

Life lets you survive all that and lets you write a poem about it.

Life also lets you grow a stack of books at your bedside, lets you read just one chapter and then lets you fall asleep clutching the pages. Life lets you find vintage Christmas stockings at the consignment store for just $5. Life lets you have a big blue spruce in your front yard and ten red robins in the frosty grass in your backyard.

Life gives you a wind-up toy, a tiny brass angel, and jars of buttons and clothespins and strings of beads. It gives you a color that’s not red, but not pink, but not orange either.

Life gives you a visit with your mother on her birthday, lets you eat Chinese together on the sofa while you watch a movie you both kind of hate, but watch til the end anyway. It lets you go for a walk around the lake another time and puts a golden leaf on the path for you to find, one that is shaped like a heart, one that is tattered and has a hole in it.

That’s what life does. It shows you love where you don’t expect it. 

YOUR TURN

Sunday Service is a recurring community feature and you are invited to join the party!

Regardless of faith, prayer is a beautiful thing. It can be grateful, it can be joyful, it can be a question, it can be a song. This is a place where your writing can be your prayer, an open door for higher wisdom to 'runneth over.'Use the post to the right as an invitation to write your own Sunday Service or capture an image that elicits a stirring in your soul. Keep it short, make it washed in your truth. Write it for you, not for us.

But then share it with us. Trust us. Your words are important to us.

Post your writing or a link to your writing/photo in the comments below.

Or, if you share on social media, use the hashtag #sundayservice to allow us to find you, follow you, sing with you.