Several years ago, Ann Moore, who serves on the Dial Hope board of directors, shared a great story about the famous artist Henri Matisse. In his later years, Matisse became very ill and required the care of a regular nurse. He was assigned a young student nurse named Monique Bourgeois. Monique was fun-loving, joyful, and gregarious. And over time, she and the artist developed a friendship. Monique was also a person of deep faith, while Matisse himself was not. But through their friendship, his own spirituality began to deepen.

Eventually, Monique became part of an order of Dominican nuns. She shared with Matisse that her community wished to build a chapel, and she asked for his help. Matisse responded by giving everything he had. 

He later wrote:  “I began with the profane and now, in the evening of my days, I am ending quite naturally with the divine. This work took four years of intensive labor to the exclusion of all else, and it is the culmination of my whole working life. In spite of its imperfections, I regard it as my masterpiece.”

And a beautiful masterpiece it is! I can only imagine how many lives have been nourished and inspired over the last 60-plus years as they visited this chapel.

Matisse’s life was touched by a single person. In turn, he paid it forward. He put everything he had into a final masterpiece. That masterpiece in turn has touched the hearts and souls of many, many lives… 

My friend Roger Kunkel would call this the “Ripple Effect of Generosity.”

I wonder how you, in your own life, have been touched by others. And I wonder, how you, in turn, are passing that on.

Let us pray: I thank you, O God, for those people who have made a difference in our lives. As we have been blessed, help us in turn to find ways to be a blessing to others. Amen.  

Albert Schweitzer was a remarkably gifted author, thinker, musician, and theologian. He could have excelled in any one of those areas. In fact, before he was 30, he was a respected writer on theology, an accomplished organist, and an authority on the life and work of Johann Sebastian Bach. Instead, he chose to work in an African mission hospital as a doctor. He went to medical school for that purpose alone. For his many years of humanitarian efforts, Schweitzer was awarded the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize. He used his $33,000 Nobel Prize to expand the hospital and to build a leper colony.

Speaking to a graduating class of college students, Schweitzer once said, “I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.”

I believe it. Here is someone of deep thought, tremendous intelligence, and integrity who practiced what he preached. I have also seen this played out over many years of ministry. Those who find a way to serve and give are by far the people most at peace.

Talking to his disciples, Jesus once said, “The greatest among you will be your servant” (Matthew 23:11-12)

Schweitzer offered one further piece of advice: “Do something for somebody every day for which you do not get paid.”

Beautiful!

Let us pray: Gracious God, you give, and you give, and you give. Your blessings rain down around us on every side. Thank you for creating us in your image. Thank you for the peace and joy that come with generous living. And thank you for people who inspire us to be the kind of people you created us to be. Today, we especially pray for those who give sacrificially to us. We lift up teachers, nurses, firefighters, police officers, women and men in the military and their families back home - and others who serve us regularly. Bless them, protect them, and give them your grace. Amen.

The Apostle Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5:17–19:

So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; look, new things have come into being! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.

In his book My Bright Abyss, poet and theologian Christian Wiman wrote something that struck me as profound: “Being saved involves embracing rather than denouncing one’s past. It is true that Christ makes a man anew, that there is some ultimate change in him. But part of that change is the ability to see your life as a whole, to feel the form and unity of it, to become a creature made for and assimilated into existence, rather than a desperate, fragmented man…”

There are definitely aspects of my past I would rather forget, even whole chapters I’d just as soon leave behind. And yet, I know the mistakes and failures of the past, the suffering and struggles I’ve faced, have developed in me a deeper sense of compassion, forgiveness, and grace.

Salvation is often described as leaving the old life behind, as though faith were a clean break from everything that came before. But Paul speaks of something more spacious and more honest. “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation,” he writes—not a new person with no past, but a life made whole and new through reconciliation.

He goes on to tell us that in Christ, God was “reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them.” In other words, reconciliation does not erase history. It restores relationship.

What if being saved is not standing over our past in judgment, but learning to stand within our lives in grace? What if new creation does not mean becoming someone with no history, but becoming someone who can finally see their life as a whole—its wounds and wisdom, its losses and growth—held together in Christ?

And if God is not counting our trespasses against us, how might that change the way we see ourselves—or the way we extend grace to others—as people learning, slowly and imperfectly, to belong?

Let us pray: Reconciling God, we thank you that in Christ you accept us as we are, and that you gather even our past into your grace. Where we carry regret, grant forgiveness; where we bear scars, awaken compassion. Teach us to stand within our lives with trust, and to live as people reconciled to you and to one another. Through Jesus Christ, our peace. Amen.

Something I’ve thought more about in recent years is the beauty of handing down a family name—to be named after a father or grandfather, or grandmother, or beloved aunt or uncle. Simply saying the name must invoke memories… And I’ve often wondered if being named after someone doesn’t draw out something of that person’s character in them.

There is power in a name. And also power in a nickname, which can be good or bad.

When I taught high school, some of my students, instead of calling me Mr. Albright, would call me Mr. Not-so-Bright! Which I guess I took a lot better than when I was a kid and wore glasses. Other kids would call me “four-eyes,” or “geek.” Those kinds of names can hurt.

Sometimes the names we are called, the labels we are given, can stick with us like glue: clumsy, stupid, hardheaded, fat, ugly. Other names can be defining and put us in a box: conservative, liberal; Republican, Yankee, Southerner; gay, straight; Black, white—or any negative derivative of those. And we might have other names we call ourselves, some good, some not so good.

Sometimes it is important to remember that those labels are not our primary name. They are not at the root of our identity. They don’t fully sum up who we are. And they don’t fully sum up who others are either.

I’m reminded that if we take the wrong name, or if we put the wrong name first, it changes everything. Those names influence and shape not only what we believe about ourselves and others, but they also can shape our worldviews.

And I’m reminded of our primary name, our primary calling.

Whenever I baptize a child, I carry the child through the sanctuary, and I quote 1 John, chapter 3, verse 1: “See what love the Father has for us, that we would be called children of God. And that is what we are.”

Let us pray: God of Grace, today we remember again the words spoken over the waters of baptism: “You are my son, my daughter, the beloved. With you, I am well pleased.” Help us never forget, O God, that before anything else, we are your child. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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“Be still, and know that I am God.”
—Psalm 46:10

We spend a lot of energy trying to stay near the surface of life. We manage schedules, curate impressions, and distract ourselves from what feels too heavy or frightening. Beneath the surface are the things we fear most: anxiety, grief, anger, uncertainty, and the awareness that the world can be violent and fragile.

In her beautiful book of essays, Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard gets at this. She writes that “in the deep are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us.” The deep, she says, is real—and it is dangerous. And yet, she refuses to stop there. She dares us not to flee. If we “ride these monsters down,” she suggests, we discover something beneath them—something science cannot measure or name. Beneath the chaos is a kind of sustaining reality.

The 13th-century mystic Meister Eckhart gets at this from another direction. He writes of a “spark within us that knows God,” a light beyond thinking or feeling. When we become attentive to this spark, Eckhart says, we enter a “still desert where all is one.” This desert is not empty or lonely. It is a place where false divisions fall away, where fear loosens its grip, and where we discover that God is closer than our own breath.

Put together, Dillard and Eckhart are pointing us toward the same truth: when we stop running from the depths—whether the depths of the world or the depths of our own hearts—we discover that God has been there all along. Beneath our fear is faithfulness. Beneath our chaos is communion. Beneath all our effort is grace.

This does not mean the monsters disappear. The waters may still roar. But we are no longer alone in them. The stillness God offers is not the absence of trouble; it is the presence of trust. It is the deep knowing that our lives, and our life together, are being held by something stronger than fear.

What if stillness is not withdrawal, but courage? What if the deepest truth of our lives is not what we fear, but what carries us?

Psalm 46 promises, “God is in the midst of the city; it shall not be moved.”

When we find time in stillness, we find neither, finally, shall we.

Let us pray: Holy God, you meet us not only in calm and clarity, but in the depths where fear and uncertainty dwell. When the waters roar and the ground beneath us shakes, help us to be still—not in escape, but in trust. We ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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