I was reminded today of the poem by Oriah Mountain Dreamer, "The Invitation" and this excerpt from it:

"It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life's betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain. I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own, if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic, to remember the limitations of being human."

This has been a hard lesson for me to learn...I'm still learning...

We watched a piece of this talk from Dr. Brene Brown in our service today. Here is the whole thing.

Share your object's story with the community! Send your contribution to Margaret at mrzman@mac.com. Every story is welcome.

This Sunday, the theme of the service was “Love Passion God.” Earlier in the week, members of Journey received an email from Rick asking all of us to bring to service something that we treasured. The first thing that popped into my mind when I read the message was my old stuffed dog.

I’ve had this stuffed toy since I was a child, perhaps seven or eight. I slept with it every night. When I couldn’t find it, I’d shout to no one in particular, “Where’s my dog?” That got to be its name: “My Dog.” I never named it; it had no gender, but it was my comfort. It has just the right shape for hugging with a flattish body with floppy legs, short tail and long beagle-like ears. When it was new my dog’s tail had a squeaker in it that has long since stopped squeaking. My Dog’s head is filled with sawdust and the rest of its body is stuffed with something fiberfill. The fiberfill has been slept on for so many years that it has lost its fluff. My Dog has jowls on its head that had jingle bells in them that have filled with the sawdust and no longer ring. It is a true Velveteen Rabbit toy that has had its pale brown fur loved off. My Dog had eyes, eyebrows, and tongue made from felt that my childhood real dog, Pretzel, chewed off. Pretzel also chewed off My Dog’s black fluffy nose. I’m pretty sure Pretzel was just jealous. My Dog has at least two seams that exhibit the inexpert sewing skills of a child keeping the beloved dog’s stuffing inside. I slept with this toy until at least two years into my marriage when I decided the bed was just too crowded and I put My Dog into the closet. It’s been in one closet or another for almost 38 years. Every time that I cleaned out the closet it was in, I’d ask myself why I was saving this poor thing, but I couldn’t let it go.

During the service, Rick asked us to, in one sentence, explain what it was about this object that made it treasured. Here is my sentence:

My Dog represents comfort and love to me, something to hold onto in a troubled and troubling world.

Here is the photo slideshow Rick made for today's offertory song, "Awake, My Soul" by Mumford and Sons. "Where you invest your love, you invest your life." Shazam!

Nathalie was kind enough -- and brave enough! -- to share this original poem with us at Bible Study on Sunday. 

"Dancing in the Rain"

If I could have another life to live
An actress on the stage is what I'd be.
And then my Father surely I'd forgive,
Although he still might not encourage me.

Those words he spoke when I was seventeen
Conveniently have rung inside my brain
Causing me to waver in between
Staying inside -- or dancing in the rain.

Oh! Dancing in the rain! What joy! What grace!
And why on earth should ever i refrain?
If thunder crashes, God may show His face!
And locked inside, through dry -- what do I lose?

Somewhere I think there waits an empty stage.
Free at last, this child will come of age.

"Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each new year find you a better man."

~Benjamin Franklin

For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.

~T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding"

"We will open the book.  Its pages are blank.  We are going to put words on them ourselves.  The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year's Day."  

~Edith Lovejoy Pierce

"We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched.  Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives... not looking for flaws, but for potential."

~Ellen Goodman

"Year's end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us. "

~Hal Borland

It’s December 20, 2011 and I’m feeling a bit down. Christmas is coming and I have very little joy in my heart. I called my dad last night to tell him that my husband and I were not going to Houston for Christmas. I had rescued Thanksgiving, but I just wasn’t up to building a Christmas celebration. Setting boundaries and protecting oneself is often difficult for a pleaser like me. He seemed to be fine with it and made jokes about how he’d do his usual nothing but it would be on a holiday so it would be more special. In the conversation, he wondered to me why he was still alive, if there was some purpose to his life yet to come. He was 89 on his birthday last October. He mused that there have been times when he could have lost his life and yet here he is still going. Was there some reason he was still alive? I told him I didn’t know. Now that’s an uplifting conversation.

When I ride the bus in the mornings, the stop where I get off is such that I have to cross two large four-lane streets to get to the building where I work. This morning as I was crossing Dean Keeton Street, the second of these big streets, I was looking down at the ground. Half way across the east bound and second half of the street, my eyes fell upon a three-inch long, bright, shiny nail. It was a sixteenth of an inch thick with a with almost a half inch head, a real tire eater. I kicked it because I didn’t think it would be a good idea to stop in the middle of the street even if I did have the right of way with the crossing signal. I kicked it with each step until it and I came to the curb. There I stooped to pick it up. At the time I was thinking I surely didn’t want that to end up in someone’s tire.

As I walked to the building, I thought this nail might be a symbol to answer dad’s question of why we are here. Probably not his specific question of why HE is here because it seems to me he does very little to make anyone’s day better. But the thought came to me again (I say again because I’ve thought this before and often have to have it reinforced), that we are here to do what we can to make other people’s lives better in small ways or big. I picked up that nail, so it would not end up in someone’s tire. I’ll never know whose tire it would have gone into or whether it would have ended up at the curb anyway without ever having threatened a tire. But I choose to believe that this helped out someone’s day, someone who will never know she or he will not have a flat tire today.

This speech by JK Rowling was our conversational starting point at the most recent Koinonia meeting.