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Lenten Retreat March 7
You’re invited to a Lenten Retreat at Immanuel Church on Saturday, March 7th from 9:45am to 1pm. Join us for a day set apart to slow down and renew your focus on our gracious, loving God. A day of prayer, sharing, and quiet as we reflect on Elijah’s forty day journey from discouragement and weariness to a transformative encounter with God. Lunch will be provided. Artistic expression is welcome but not an essential part of the retreat; you can sketch with any kind of simple art supplies, you can “sketch” with words, or you can simply rest in God’s gift of a quiet morning. Details:Saturday, March 7, 20269:45 AM to 1:00 PMImmanuel Church…
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Winter Beauty
Our cold spell of arctic-like temperatures has ended, and the snow that has blanketed ground, rocks, and shrubs is starting to melt. While many people are rejoicing that today is predicted to hit 46 degrees, I am a bit sad. I’ve delighted in clear, crisp days and star-besprent nights. Bundled in layers of down and wool, snowshoes or micro spikes on my feet, I have tramped the steep hills above the Hudson River most days, Lyska or Ramble gamboling through snow up to their chests or higher. On sunny days with little or no wind I could even sit on a bench and sketch. Those walks, sometimes first thing in…
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Puzzle Ponderings
This winter I’ve spent many evenings by the fire working on jigsaw puzzles while Stephen reads aloud to me. Quiet, peaceful evenings, though the puzzle that I’ve spent most of the past three weeks struggling with has been extremely challenging. I’ve completed the beautiful birds, but the nearly uniform, light blue background has me nearly stumped. I got this puzzle from a friend who had gotten it from a thrift store, and she told me the two lower right corner edge pieces are missing, so even when I finish the puzzle, it won’t be complete. I’ve never quit on a puzzle and I intend to continue with this one, but…
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A Song in the Night
One night last May when my mother was in her final weeks and I was always on alert expecting an emergency call, I was unable to sleep, lying awake at 3AM with anxious thoughts and a runaway imagination. I tried to reason myself into a calm state, but you know how that goes. At 3AM one’s ability to reason is generally fairly weak, and the more I tried to calm myself, the more the mental loops tightened into knots. Gradually a sound from my open window began to penetrate the tangle of my mental gymnastics. Could I be hearing birdsong? A bird singing in the dark? At 3AM? It must…
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Awesome Tree Stump
Very little sunlight penetrated the thick canopy of old, dense tree growth, and where I walked was chilly and dark, despite the sunny day. Years of decaying leaves carpeted the forest floor, silencing my footfalls. I was deep in the woods in an area new to me in Butler Sanctuary. The 350 acres of field and woods, just over an old stonewall from my family’s ten wooded acres, were a sanctuary for me, a shy, hurting, often frightened child. But this area seemed different. I often wandered freely in the Sanctuary through fields and over hills and rock outcroppings, not following any trails, and somehow this day, I had found…
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Musings Along the Rail Trail
with encouraging words from those who’ve walked this trail before… I haven’t known any of these people, but their words tell me something of them and invite me to sit a spell and ponder. I wonder what words I would want on my bench…
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Owls in the Night
Sitting at my desk in predawn darkness, I heard a Barred Owl call faintly in the distance. Unlike most years, we haven’t heard many owls this summer, so this call immediately caught my attention, diverting me from my journaling about some inner tensions to gratitude for the owl; then gratitude for coyotes I had heard earlier (I love hearing their incredible range of yips, howls, squeals, and warbling wails in the night); gratitude for my sweet Lyska sleeping by my desk; and then gratitude for the subtle ways God touches my life even when I don’t sense his presence. I shifted my focus to journaling about longing to be closer…
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Anointing Jesus’ Feet
This morning, I read the story of Mary the sister of Lazarus anointing Jesus with costly perfume in the week before he was crucified (John 12:1-11). That reminded me of a similar scene from earlier in Jesus’ life when a sinful woman wet his feet with her tears while he was dining at the home of a Pharisee (Luke 7:36-50). I did a prayer sketch based on that scene, starting with Rien Poortvliet’s rendition of it in He Was One of Us, then modifying it by sketching myself rather than the woman in Poortvliet’s sketch. As I sketched myself in the scene, not worrying about making a finished drawing but…
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A Lenten Wilderness Sketching Journey
In the past five weeks of Lent, I’ve been meditating on the thought of being with Jesus in the wilderness. While we don’t have much geographical wilderness in our part of New York, there are other sorts of wilderness we can find ourselves in. Physical wilderness due to illness or injury; relational wilderness due to loneliness or broken relationships; emotional wilderness of grief and other hurts; spiritual wilderness of not knowing God or of not sensing his presence. I’ve found myself drawn to passages of Scripture that describe the challenges or express the anguish and longings that such wilderness experiences evoke, and while I’ve meditated on these passages, I’ve spent…
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Sketching as Prayer Retreat January 4, 2025
We’re fast approaching the annual turning of the calendar. For many, that’s a night for staying up late, playing games, watching the New Year’s Eve ball drop, and toasting the New Year. In my home growing up, we would open the back door to “let the old year out” and the front door to “let the new year in” right at the stroke of midnight. These days I tend to be sound asleep long before midnight, preferring to rise early on the first day of a new year. For me, that first morning is like the sparkling of sunlight on a fresh snowfall, as yet unmarked by footprints, or like…