opening your heart, realignment points of reference

Having missed a week at the weekly table for Tuesday Men's Bible Study, I could feel the absence more sharply after rejoining the circle for opening prayer, reading John 12, and round-the-table banter and chewing the words, context, intention, and longer thread of the selection. Being solitary, no matter how deeply one reads or engages with online, broadcast, or recorded media, the experience is nothing like the give and take of dialog, either via telecommunication or face to face. For some reason the interchange of ideas and interpretations, references to lived experiences and one's own assumptions brought to light has a powerful effect. It is as if solitary study, praise or thanksgiving occurs in a boundless desert that offers no feedback, echoes, or other means of sensing one's location and passage through the landscape. But when there are others involved, then care must be exercised to receive the others' viewpoints with respect and let them settle momentarily, rather than to react by dismissing the perspective conveyed. As a result of this consideration for others' standpoint, one's own heart rises to the surface, exposed to the care given by others and exposed in order to engage and express care for others. In summary, by study and worship with others, one's own heart can grow and one's position can be gauged by reference to others' viewpoint and the words on the printed page. By extension, perhaps it is not only for Bible Study or small group reading and discussion of a selected books together that creates this sustained engagement and sustaining community of respect and care, perhaps this group dynamic is true as well of praise, thanksgiving, and worship - it is an intersection for many relationships ongoing; it is a weekly pulse in one's passage through the year and the cycles of one's life that helps one's heart to thrive (tender, not calloused or hardened) and that help's one to realign daily cares, keeping things in perspective to what matters most in a life well lived among others in the world.

This photo of the passages we talked about shows a lovingly marked up copy of one man's Bible. As he says, "it is an old friend by now; one that invites conversation and wondering out loud."