updated 9h ago
Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep
I’ve come to also see grief as part of the everyday experience of being human in a world that is both good and cruel. In this sense, grief is a constant for us. It is a real and right response to our vulnerability.
from Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep by Tish Harrison Warren
Justin Reidy added 1mo ago
Our bright and shining lives, our explosions of joy, good work, and love, are always silhouetted by the shadow of death. There are times when sorrow quickens and sharpens, towering and unavoidable, and times it recedes. But it remains the white noise of all of human experience.
from Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep by Tish Harrison Warren
Justin Reidy added 1mo ago
unless we make space for grief, we cannot know the depths of the love of God, the healing God wrings from pain, the way grieving yields wisdom, comfort, even joy.
from Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep by Tish Harrison Warren
Justin Reidy added 1mo ago
The church’s prophetic witness to an outrage culture is to be a people who know how to weep together at the pain and injustice in the world (both past and present) and at the reality of our own sin and brokenness. We must learn to listen to the fear and sadness underneath the anger that people spew through political vitriol and digital venom.
from Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep by Tish Harrison Warren
Justin Reidy added 1mo ago
We are tempted by nearly every current of culture to form our lives so that there is no time for grief, but only the dim hum of consumption, dulling our agony—but, with it, our joy, wonder, and longing. The Psalms call us back into the dramatic depths of reality.
from Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep by Tish Harrison Warren
Justin Reidy added 1mo ago
I’ve come to believe that in order to sustain faith over a lifetime, we need to learn different ways of praying. Prayer is a vast territory, with room for silence and shouting, for creativity and repetition, for original and received prayers, for imagination and reason.
from Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep by Tish Harrison Warren
Justin Reidy added 1mo ago
I needed the sort of comfort that doesn’t pretend that things are shiny or safe or right in the world. I needed a comfort that looked unflinchingly at loss and death.
from Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep by Tish Harrison Warren
Justin Reidy added 1mo ago
Inherited prayers and practices of the church tether us to belief, far more securely than our own vacillating perspective or self-expression.
from Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep by Tish Harrison Warren
Justin Reidy added 1mo ago
Mystery is an encounter with an unsearchable reality, an acknowledgement that the world crackles with possibility because it is steeped in the shocking and unpredictable presence of God.
from Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep by Tish Harrison Warren
Justin Reidy added 1mo ago