Faith by Steve Garnaas-Holmes “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.” —Mark 5.28 Holy One, O Sea, I sit before you, and your vastness opens within me. I open myself to you and become part of you. Your waves fall and rise in me, fall and rise. I sunbathe in you, surrender myself to your wind. A great strength stirs, a blessing flows, unseen. Even in the smallest place I reach out for the hem of your garment. I reach out. I open myself, and your vastness opens within me. O Beloved, in sick rooms and busy streets, in conflicted places, I open myself to you, longing. I place myself in your field of healing, your love’s willing sunlight. I reach out, and I feel you open within me. Consider the way the miraculous meets us in the midst of the everyday moments. This poem by Steve Garnaas-Holmes came out of the story of the woman healed on the way to Jairus’s daughter. She is part of a crowd, who is anticipating something Jesus *will be doing* perhaps when they get to Jairus’s house--but never expected it on the way there. But she reaches out to God in the middle of that crowd, and healing waves flow from Jesus into her. A miracle has happened, and they’re all asking about the ridiculousness of Jesus’ question: “Who touched me?” instead of “how?” or “what?” or “why?” in the face of this unanticipated goodness. There are thousands of accounts of similar stories of healing in the centuries since Jesus walked and breathed earth’s air. The Spirit moves in the mundane and the miraculous simultaneously, the places earth and heaven meet. Our tendency is to privilege one over the other: we may downplay the commonplace or the supernatural. But what would it be to intentionally live in the intersection? To allow for the life-waves of the Spirit to be enlivening every regular moment of every regular day (without then needing to control what God is up to in it all)? What healing in ourselves and in the world might we begin to see flow?

Posted by Jamie Bonilla at 2023-06-15 14:07:22 UTC