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Draw near: Be the Gardener of my soul

Lynne Baab • Tuesday June 21 2022

“Spirit of the Living God, be the Gardener of my soul. For so long I have been waiting, silent and still—experiencing a winter of the soul. But now in the strong name of Jesus Christ, I dare to ask:

Clear away the dead growth of the past, Break up the hard clods of custom and routine, Stir in the rich compost of vision and challenge, Bury deep in my soul the implanted Word, Cultivate and water and tend my heart, Until new life buds and opens and flowers. Amen.” —Richard Foster, Prayers from the Heart

Richard Foster’s prayer draws on so many...

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Quotations I love: Make it beautiful

Lynne Baab • Wednesday April 28 2021

“If it can’t be happy, make it beautiful. . . . I hope that, in the midst of your sorrow and the bleakness of what you’re facing, you can yet find a way to make it beautiful. . . . The pandemic has been an experience of powerlessness and sadness for most of us. It hasn’t been happy. But we can still make it beautiful.” —Samuel Wells, vicar of St. Martin-in-the Fields, next to Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery in London

I love Samuel Wells’s distinction between happiness and beauty. I find it easy to conflate the two. I have seen so...

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Quotations I love: Listen to the sermon preached to you by the flowers

Lynne Baab • Wednesday April 7 2021

“Let all creation help you to praise God. Give yourself the rest you need. When you are walking alone, listen to the sermon preached to you by the flowers, the trees, the shrubs, the sky, the sun and the whole world. Notice how they preach to you a sermon full of love, of praise of God, and how they invite you to proclaim the greatness of the one who has given them being.” —Saint Paul of the Cross (1694-1775), founder of the Passionist Order and preacher

At 20, one year after I became a committed Christian, I spent a lot of...

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Psalm 96: A call to prayer for the nations

Lynne Baab • Wednesday October 21 2020

Back in the 1990s, I used to teach for a program called Perspectives on the World Christian Movement. I was assigned one of the 15 lessons, and I travelled to different churches around the Northwest to teach my lesson. When I would tell friends the title of my lesson – “the biblical basis of mission in the Old Testament” – they would often say, “What? There’s mission in the Old Testament?”

To help my students get beyond that perspective, I would begin the class session by reading them Psalm 96, asking them to count the references to the whole world. They came...

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