gathering days…two hundred ninety.

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Just spent a couple hours in the emergency shelter.  What they call a ‘catastrophic size’ tornado was on the ground near the airport.  When you’re watching this on the news it doesn’t help that the anchor is clearly nervous.  

It doesn’t help when he leaves the screen and you just see the radar going back and forth.  

People respond differently in a shelter. Everyone’s anxious in their own way.  A two year old stood at my knee and said, ‘I pull my hat down like this (hiding his face) and no tornado!’  

I think the grown-ups were wishing it were that easy.

In the midst of the chaos a man across the room said, Let’s pray for  the people outside - that they’ve found a place to be safe.

And in that prayer, with hail raining like cannonballs and wind  tossing branches like matchsticks through a peagreen sky…my heart grew quiet.

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~ lindasinklings

We know only too well that what we are doing is nothing more than a drop in the ocean.

But if the drop were not there, the ocean would be missing something.

~ Mother Teresa

Another morning and I wake with thirst for the goodness I do not have.

I walk out to the pond and all the way God has given us such beautiful lessons.

Oh Lord, I was never a quick scholar but sulked and hunched over my books past the hour and the bell; grant me, in your mercy, a little more time. Love for the earth and love for you are having such a long conversation in my heart.

Who knows what will finally happen or where I will be sent, yet already I have given a great many things away, expecting to be told to pack nothing, except the prayers which, with this thirst, I am slowly learning.”

— Mary Oliver, Thirst. And the river flows…

via (crashinglybeautiful)