Start seeing everything as God,
But keep it a secret.
Become like a man who is Awestruck
And Nourished
Listening to a Golden Nightingale
Sing in a beautiful foreign language
While God invisibly nests
Upon its tongue.
Hafiz,
Who can you tell in this world
That when a dog runs up to you
Wagging its ecstatic tail,
You lean down and whisper in its ear,
“Beloved,
I am so glad You are happy to see me.
Beloved,
I am so glad,
So very glad You have come.”
Hafiz
Luke 5:1-11
Holy friend,
we gather this morning
weary and worn from the industry
of our living.
Like the Galilean disciples,
we have been fishing night and day
without a single sardine
to show for our troubles.
We have worked our fingers to the bone,
worried our minds into a fine mess,
and frightened our hearts into hiding.
But it is a new day.
Speak words of grace
into our anxious striving.
Stir us with a new purpose,
and grant us a vision
that a soul would want to drop its neck into.
Reveal to us the abundance,
the hidden, teeming life,
just below the surface of our
longing lives.
What is there to do but to follow
our beloved,
the depth-finder Nazarene,
with a new determination
born not of our grit
but of your grace?
Amen.
Bruce Sanguin