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Draw near: Praying to accept pain as a source of growth

Lynne Baab • Tuesday March 28 2023

“No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by it, and made fit for God by that affliction.” —John Donne, “Meditation 17” of Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

I resist John Donne’s idea with every particle of my being. I don’t want to be shaped by pain because I don’t want to experience pain! No, no, no! And yet, my perceptive and supportive husband tells me that my 16 years of battling depression (from age 27 to 43) softened me. I met Dave when I was 23, and he says he remembers many moments in my twenties when I came across...

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Draw near: Praying for the ability to listen to unexpected voices

Lynne Baab • Tuesday March 21 2023

My mother has a green thumb, and her home and garden are full of thriving plants. When she shows me a new plant, she’ll often say, “This plant is happy here,” meaning that the plant is thriving in the western sunlight of this particular window or the more diffuse light in the living room. Her plants tell her where they like to be.

I’ve read about sculptors who say that the stone tells them what it wants to be. In an article about her spring quilt, Avis Collins Robinson said, "I let the fabric’s colors and textures tell me how they want...

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Draw near: Asking God for maps

Lynne Baab • Tuesday March 14 2023

Until I was nine years old, my dad was a pilot in the U. S. air force. For those of you who love planes, he flew P-37s and P-51s in World War 2, then cargo planes (C-47s and C-54s, also known as DC3s and DC6s) in the late 1940s and 1950s. I have vivid memories of my dad coming home from a trip. He would carefully spread out maps on the dining room table and show me where he’d been. One time, he had flown somewhere tropical – the Caribbean? Hawaii? – and he saw a black sand beach. He showed...

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Draw near: Praying to be present when people change

Lynne Baab • Tuesday March 7 2023

The week before Valentine’s Day, a friend posted a quotation on Facebook. Since then I have returned over and over to this quotation, which is increasingly relevant as I get older, and as my family members and friends are aging, too:

“To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be. The people they’re too exhausted to be any longer. The people they don’t recognize inside themselves anymore. The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into. We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back...

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