Rare

Last week, the theme I extracted from next year’s lectionary readings for the closest Sunday on the calendar, was Oh! But to Prevail! In other words, a Perspective(s) (our take on what a sermon should be) on persistence. With everything that has happened over the past thirty and counting months since my disciplinary review was ordered, persistence seems to be a fairly typical theme. But as I was preparing for my service, the Focused Moment that emerged didn’t address the review or the work my congregation has been building up to. No, it took a bit of a twist and featured those moments when persistence most pay off and in which persistence seems to take us by the hand and brings us through. Well, we women, that is. Enjoy.

Rare is the child who slides into this world, buoyed by a rush of blood and salt water, whose mother didn’t once cry out that it was too much, that she couldn’t take the pain any longer, that someone needed to make it stop, that whomever was holding her hand needed to just shut up or leave the room.

Rare is the child whose nestles perfectly in the crook of exhausted, shaking arms whose arrival didn’t break o’er the crest of a waterfall of doubt and fear: readiness not quite readied, possibilities unconsidered, and unspoken worries churned to froth upon the boulders of reality.

We are born into amazement, into wonder, our lives yet to be trimmed, framed, and convoluted by the fears that rule the hearts of those who love us. Yet the greater truth to bear is that we are here at all, burst forth by a final, forceful refusal to succumb, our heads bobbing over the precipice of “what might yet be”.

We are the brilliant story of life, lived, dreamed, dared. Beautiful, persistent, rare.