Dear Kaleid Women,
What do we love? Fresh flowers on the table? Sunshine through a window on the floor? A brand new pen? Hot morning coffee in your favorite mug? Close your eyes for a minute and mentally enjoy one of the tangible “loves” in your life.
Where do those loves come from?
Why do we love them? Do we really love them because of what they are or because of what they represent? Most likely, our simple, material loves carry the symbolic weight of deeper things: flowers may represent new life, sunshine may invite reflective peace, a new pen can mean a fresh start, and our cup of hot coffee might be just the perfect reminder that today’s courage is within our grasp.
In this back-to-school, activity laden season of the year, Kaleid women are thinking about how our habits shape our loves. Today we consider how the tangible habits in our lives--the small things that we use over and over--can invite us into habits of worship that are formational, good, and grounding for our busy souls.
What tangible things in your life point you to God’s presence with you? Do you have “rituals” (let’s intentionally consider this somewhat stuffy term) that draw your heart into your place at God’s table, seen and known as a beloved daughter?
The Church has always used material rituals and icons to shape faith from the outside in. Baptism with water, the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper, candles lit during Advent, and palm branches waving during Lent draw our hearts into deeper realities about the story of God at work in the Church and in the world.
Your daily material rituals can invite your heart into similar places of worship and truth if you take the time to draw the mental lines between tangible and intangible, between material and spiritual, between your “stuff” and your loves.
This week, take time to recognize where God is drawing you closer through those physical, simple things that remind you of deeper truths of faith, hope, and love. And be grateful.
This week’s journaling questions:
What are three or four physical things that you love? What do those things represent to you? Are they tied also to God’s story at work in your world or your life?
What are your physical rituals that open you up to awareness of God’s presence? How often do you do those things with an awareness of the deeper thing at work in your heart?
What might it look like to be intentional about connecting your worship to the tangible world around you this week?
Take ten minutes to meditate on the first ten verses of Psalm 34 and ask God to speak to your heart about tasting and seeing His goodness in this season of your life. What is He saying to you? Rest in that message and open your hands to receive it.
Blessings,
The Kaleid Team