Journal of Sacred Work

Today’s meditation was written by Cathy Self, Senior Vice President for the Baptist Healing Trust.

"I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where it was always June."  – L. M. Montgomery

     June is filled with numerous and wondrous gifts. Today is sunny and hot and the wind blows deep green leaves that wave like thousands of hands clapping from the branches of full trees. My neighbor’s yard is filled with roses and daylillies – a cacophony of color. Yesterday I shared the most delectable popsicle with friends – made from fresh plums, the color a deep crimson. The children on my street have emerged with skates and bike and kites and bubble making machines. Life is rich and hope shines in the corners again.

     In  her book titled Simple Abundance, author Sarah Breathnach writes about creating a hope chest. I know there was a time when hope chests were traditionally passed on from mothers to daughters in preparation for setting up future homes. Often beautifully crafted, these chests were filled with hopes in the shape of linens, sterling pieces, and books of poetry. I remember looking at the Sears "wish book" as a teenager, mentally choosing the chest I would have loved but never received. We couldn’t afford such things when I was growing up. But years ago, after reading Breathnach’s book, I began to build a hope chest.

     Actaully, my hope chest is just a box in the bottom of a closet upstairs. But in that box are a myriad of hopes – pieces of quilting fabric for that quilt I’ll make someday for my children (ok, maybe now they will be for my grandchildren), and papers and trims for the scrapbooks that someday I’ll fashion and fill. Perhaps my hopes are simply dreams, but I wonder if dreams are our gifts for the future, especially if, as Breathnach suggests, "faith is the very first thing" packed into your hope chest.

     How if your faith doing right now? Are there hopes and dreams alive in you for the difference Love can make in your work, in this world? I admit to days of discouragement and sometimes a readiness to walk away – frankly at times I think it’d be great to just run away. Maybe that’s just the child in me that feels the disappointment of dreams not yet realized. But isn’t that what faith is about – to believe that even in winter, we can be June.

     What are the hopes and dreams you hold for your work? If you had a hope chest on your desk, what would it hold? Projects to be completed, programs to be implemented, relationships to be cultivated, or maybe just a to-do list with everything crossed off? Many of my hopes look like that, but I also hope for a day when Love emerges first in every encounter, when actions of hate and words of condemnation have disappeared. In the hope chest of my soul I have stored patience and tolerance, peace and compassion. On the best of days I remember to go there.

     Hope shines again in the corners of June, but Love sheds light even in the darkest night. What does Love whisper in your ear today?