by Chrissy Muhr
Back in eighth grade, a friend and I got lost while exploring.
“If we have to spend the night in the woods,” Amelia growled at me, “I’m going to have to kill you.”
I smiled nervously, calculating how best to escape should it come to that: “Maybe if you climb that tree, you’ll be able to see which direction we should go.”
I didn’t know if this would be any better than my original idea of letting the dog lead us home (we’d ended up going in circles for an hour), but it put a little distance between us. Just in case. We were in the woods not far from my house. I should have known how to get home, but I didn’t. Up in the tree, Amelia thought she could see a break in the forest, so we walked in that direction until we finally found the road.
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by Chrissy Muhr
Stone on Stone
My heart is stone on stone, wounds patched with rock
I’ve quarried from my mother’s tongue and mortared
With my father’s truths until they block
The pain and strife with which this life is quartered.
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by: Chrissy Muhr
On a spiritual retreat this last year, I noticed something about fire. Adding new sticks to already-smoldering logs made a lot of smoke, but it took a long time for flames to appear.
It’s kind of like my spiritual life.
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by: Chrissy Muhr
It has been said that John is the Quaker gospel. It’s in John that Jesus calls his disciples Friends (John 15:15). John gives importance to women by telling the story of the first woman missionary – the Samaritan woman (John 4:3-9). And it is in this gospel that Jesus is referred to as the light.
That image of God as light pervades the writings of early Friends as well as the journal of George Fox.
God is seen as opposed to the forces of darkness. The “ocean of light” represents God’s love reaching out to humanity. Even though darkness seems to cover the world, the light is infinitely larger and all-encompassing. God’s love is a never-ending ocean that flows over the darkness and conquers it.
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by: Chrissy Muhr
Sometimes there are words. Sometimes silence. But always, there is music. And I’ve found, especially recently, that this is the image of God that resonates with me.
God as music: the Father composes, the Son conducts, the Spirit enables, and the music flows.
This God music strums the strings of creation, hums through my experience, shapes and shares truth in the voices of a human choir – my friends and neighbors. God doesn’t just speak to me, he sings to my condition.
Listen.
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by: Chrissy Muhr
Over and over I’ve come to places of decision. Places where it wasn’t enough to know right, to believe truth. I had to act.
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