There is a comfort in knowing God. I know that there are some who don’t believe in God and who believe that the comfort we feel is the comfort of the weak and addle-headed.

Well, yes, there are believers in Christ who ARE weak and addle-headed — just as their are non-believers who are weak and addle-headed.

But to believe in the Something we cannot fully see, touch or feel — well, it seems a bit crazy. I know, I get that.

But it also takes a lot of strength. It takes courage. It takes dedication.

Think of Billy Graham, G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, Martin Luther King, and others like them … weak and addle-headed? No way, no how.

It takes strength to be a believer. But it’s not the kind of strength that allows you to take someone down with your words, to debate them into the ground and punish them with a verbal beating. That’s not how you lead your loved one to the Comfort of God.

If there someone that you love who doesn’t know God the way you know God, if there is someone you wish could feel His loving arms and comfort — don’t try and talk them into it. Love them, show them, BE for them what God is to you.

And if you must use words, sing.

We are buried in snow out here in Washington State. I’m very grateful for the fact that I don’t have to go anywhere to work but here, in my own warm home.

I rejoice in the snowfall because I so enjoy photographing the birds in the snow. It also warms my heart and gives me a motherly feeling of unity when I watch the birds at my feeder chowing down.

There was a raccoon on my front porch last night, raiding the feeders. I’m normally not a big fan of raccoons, but with the dumping of 18″ of snow, I couldn’t help but worry about him.

I made him an almond butter sandwich and set it out for him. I hope he enjoyed the meal!

Visit Outdoors blog I keep for The Chronicle, the newspaper I freelance for, to see more photos my beautiful backyard friends, hikes along the Nisqually Delta and fishing adventures, The (Almost) Daily Bird.

Much Love to you, my Friends!

Effacement
Is a golden gun.
It was not easy to hold it against my head
And fire!

I needed great faith in my Master
To suffocate myself
With his holy bag
Full of truth.

I needed great courage
To go out into the dark
Tracking God into the unknown

And not panic or get lost
In all the startling new scents, sounds,
Sights,

Or lose my temper
Tripping on those scheming
Night and day around me.

Hafiz,
Effacement is the emerald dagger
You need to plunge

Deep into yourself upon
This path to divine
Recovery—

Upon this path
To God.

~The Great Poet and Sufi Master, Hafiz

I haven’t posted on this blog for over six months. I’ve been away. I’ve been sitting in the dark and silence. Sitting inside the cocoon of my own personal Advent.

Waiting. Waiting for the Love to arrive.

It’s here.

I’m so glad.

No need for explanations. I’m not even sure I could explain it to you if you told me you really needed to know.

But I do know this: the Love never left, but I didn’t see it.

Maybe I didn’t want to see it. Maybe I couldn’t see it. Maybe it was a combination of both.

It doesn’t really matter.

What matters is that I’m ready to continue my journey … well, maybe not ready, but at least willing.

And that’s something.

Caution: Be prepared for a Rant of Peculiar Energy if you read on and continue down this rocky, oft traveled road with me. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

When I read in the A Church for Starving Artists blog about a resolution “On the Reality of Hell” that was put before the SBC and adopted last week, I had to check out the SBC resolution link myself to see if it was really true.

Not that I would normally doubt this particular blogger, I’m a loyal follower and I have never had any reason to think she tends to make things up. Not at all! But this just seemed to ridiculous to be true.

Nuh uh, surely not. Really?? A resolution?

Surely the 4,700 messengers attending this 158th annual meeting would not have wasted serious time on writing, discussing and then approving a resolution to single out Rob Bell, who “in his 2011 book, Love Wins, has called into question the church’s historical teaching on the doctrine of eternal punishment of the unregenerate … ” even though ” … The church has addressed this issue throughout her history, yet orthodox Christians have affirmed consistently and resoundingly the reality of a literal Hell.”

Really?? Yes, folks, Hell is real and Rob Bell’s going there. The SBC said so.

Yup, that oughta get that hyped-up, hell-doubtin’ hipster a good dose of cod-liver-oil-flavored taste of his own theological-proclamatin’ medicine and wake that boy up! Disbelieve Hell, will ya? The nerve! We’ll do the proclamatin’ around he’yah!

But really, honestly, sarcasm set aside (for now) — I ask you, out of all the unspeakable tragedies and out of all of the injustices God’s children are suffering and have suffered, and the SBC has the time to spend on THIS?

I’d love to find out what else they accomplished in those two days of congregatin’ and proclamatin’ in Phoenix. Imagine all the rights they must have wronged before they got to this little item about Hell on their SBC to-do list. Glory be!

(Okay, so I can’t keep the sarcasm out of this rant … perhaps someone should draft up a resolution against it … and me.)

According to a Christian Post article, “They have also accused Bell with being a universalist, a charge the author has verbally denied.”

Dang. A Universalist?? Oh the horrors! How dare anyone find hope in a loving and forgiving God or express an opinion that is clearly outside of (Southern Baptist) Conventional thought!

Oh, but wait, there was another resolution in which they, ” … reaffirmed the convention’s belief that all people — as made in the image of God — have religious freedom, meaning they possess the liberty ‘to convert to another religion or to no religion, to seek to persuade others of the claims of one’s religion, and to worship without harassment or impediment from the state.’ It also called for prayer for persecuted Christians throughout the world,” according to the Baptist Press.

Ah, well, isn’t that special, bless their hearts.

So that oughta tell you something. They really meant to say they love everybody and everyone is OK in their resolution writing book … except Rob Bell, of course.

No, wait, read further down the list of resolutions … there it is … they “also renewed the convention’s call for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as only between a man and a woman.”

Oh. So, there you have it. The SBC loves everybody — it’s just Rob Bell and gay people they don’t like.

And there is the pressure to be different than you are. All the time. Everywhere.

Everywhere you look you see ads whispering to you that you can be much more than you are now, if only you would listen to them and buy what they have.

Commercials shouting to you that bliss is just around the corner and you can have it in 6 easy payments.

But you know better. You know that bliss is never to be had without struggle and pain. Without wading waist deep through the mire of bullshit quick-fixes that this world piles high around us, you won’t even get close to happiness.

Happiness is hard work. That’s what they don’t tell you, that’s what they don’t know. Happiness is hard, hard work.

And it’s the wanting, the constant wanting to be something different than you are, to have something different than you have, the constant wanting that keeps us ever at arms length from Joy in What Is.

You want to lose weight, I know I do. We are constantly wanting to be a different size than we are. Wanting it so much that we can’t enjoy who we are at this very moment.

And what would happen if you gave up wanting to be thinner? Would you suddenly become an out-of-control glutton hitting every drive-thru from home to work and back again until you could no longer fit behind the wheel and would have to ride the bus until you were so large that you couldn’t get on the bus and you’d lose your job and your world would crumble and collapse into itself from the shame of it all?

I doubt it.

Try giving up wanting to be something different for a day — or maybe for a day at a time. Let the pressures of life mold you and shape you. It’s enough. You’re enough.

Swallows are plentiful at my mother’s house on the hill. So far I have identified the violet-green swallow, the cliff swallow and the barn swallow. They are very, very difficult to focus in on as they swoop around. I’m hoping I will get better with time and practice.

I think of them as rescuing angel birds as they swoop in to save me from the biting mosquitoes. What beauty flows from their wings.