Thinking today about Corrie ten Boom’s famous quote about embroidery–how we see one side, but God the other:
“Although the threads of my life have often seemed knotted, I know, by faith, that on the other side of the embroidery there is a crown.” – (Corrie Ten Boom in My Heart Sings)
If you would like to see the actual embroidery she was referring to, you can go here.
(Note: this is a respost. But you can’t get enough of a good thing. Have a blessed Sunday!)
Amy Carmichael’s note on this poem of hers: “Ps 109.21. A prayer that may be unfathomable comfort to the ill and tired: ‘Do Thou for them, for him, for her, O God the Lord.’ When one cannot pray minutely or powerfully, this prayer suffices. We need not tell Love what to do; Love knows.” God knows better than we what is best for those we love. Here Amy is simply encouraging us to trust Him who knows how to love best.
Do Thou For Me
Do Thou for me, O God the Lord,
Do Thou for me.
I need not toil to find the word
That carefully
Unfolds my prayer and offers it,
My God, to Thee.It is enough that Thou wilt do,
And wilt not tire,
Wilt lead by cloud, all the night through
By light of fire,
Till Thou has perfected in me
Thy heart’s desire.For my beloved I will not fear,
Love knows to do
For him, for her, from year to year,
As hitherto.
Whom my heart cherishes are dear
To Thy heart too.O blessèd be the love that bears
The burden now,
The love that frames our very prayers,
Well knowing how
To coin our gold. O God the Lord,
Do Thou, Do Thou.
I’m reading Fr. Donald Haggerty’s Contemplative Provocations and I keep getting stuck at each paragraph, like this one:
The inclination to hiddenness is a quiet mark of holiness. It corresponds to the secrecy of relations between a soul and God. For it seems to be God’s consistent habit with souls to conceal himself even when they are close to him. We can surmise that the saints came to know well this divine preference for concealment. It added intensity to their seeking after God in his many disguises. Rather than frustrating them, the divine hiding provoked them with intense longings. And it aroused in them a desire for their own concealment, not from God, but from the eyes of others, so that they might remain among the unknown and the recognized. If we want to find holiness, the first place to search is in the shadows and corners.
“When people are making demands on you and you feel drained and empty; when you have to speak and you have not had the time you wanted to prepare; when God calls you to a task for which you know yourself inadequate; when you feel humiliated and foolish because some undertaking in which you did your honest best has turned out disastrously–then it may be, to your astonishment, someone will tell you that you helped most, did your most fruitful work. When our ego is humbled and not obstructing, God’s creative Spirit can often have freer play. Like the bare trees, it may be that we allow the glory to shine through at these times more purely than in our summer prosperity.” (Maria Boulding)
A beautiful poem on beauty by one of our sisters, Sr. Stacy Whitfield:
Beauty
I love your wild extravagance,
mountain flower and autumn leaves
Endowed with lovely lavishness,
making much of what none sees.
Yet surely you would not adorn
with greater glory grassy hills
Than sons and daughters made for joy
and destined for more beauty still.
Oh give me hope to lift my soul
to beauties that yet lie unseen,
That wait beyond the shimm’ring veil,
awaiting Dawn’s eternity.
The wondrous views of heaven’s scope
from which earth’s grand reflection springs,
The beauty that is fairer still
than all your earthly artistry.
Oh give me faith and love to long
to see all beauty’s heavenly source,
From which all loveliness is flowing,
river-like upon its course.
The fullness of all beauty there
on which to gaze to soul’s delight,
A heart all pure, a form all fair,
the fountainhead of love, of light.
I shall abide in blissful rest,
loving Love and Beauty seeing,
Taking in your loveliness
with opened eyes, with transformed being.
©Sr. Stacy Whitfield (revised February 3, 1991)
May this be the prayer of each of us. Beautifully done and sincerely sung: I Shall Not Want (Audrey Assad)
I’m rereading Ann Voskamp’s 1000 Gifts. If you haven’t, you should. And I’d love to know what any of you are thankful for today!
“As for me, as long as I look at myself, my eye is filled with bitterness (Job 17.2). But if I look up and fix my eyes on the aid of divine mercy, this happy vision of God soon tempers the bitter vision of myself.” (St. Bernard)
From Contemplative Provocations, Fr. Donald Haggerty:
“In some lives, loving God may entail over time a shipwrecked manner of loving–cold and tired and holding on, clinging to broken wood, swept along currents they cannot master, yet knowing always that they cannot drown.”
Witnesses to Hope 