Tempus Fugit

“Tempus Fugit”—Time Flies…..how well I know!  A year ago we were about to wrap up a near four-month stint of caring for our grandsons.  I returned to supply preaching while trying to figure out how to search for a call during covid.  Then when I least expected it, I got a call to, of all places, Montana, where I had never even considered going. Suddenly we were selling our house and moving.  Then last month we bought a house and so we have moved from our apartment into a home—right at the church season of Advent!  To complicate matters, we were without internet for a week and my printer crashed.   

All this is to say, Hope’s Café has been neglected!  I return to you today with the recognition that likely everyone reading this shares the experience of life being disrupted in ways you didn’t anticipate.  So I count on you to “give me some grace,” as I am fond of saying. While in the Christian tradition, grace is the free and unmerited favor of God, another definition is “an extended period granted as a special favor,” the response I am seeking for my delay. 

So, in return for the gift of your grace, I offer this:

Now is the time to know
That all that you do is sacred.

Now, why not consider
A lasting truce with yourself and God.

Now is the time to understand
That all your ideas of right and wrong

Were just a child’s training wheels
To be laid aside

When you can finally live
With veracity
And love.

Hafiz is a divine envoy
Whom the Beloved
Has written a holy message upon.

My dear, please tell me,
Why do you still
Throw sticks at your heart
And God?

What is it in that sweet voice inside
That incites you to fear?

Now is the time for the world to know
That every thought and action is sacred

This is the time
For you to deeply compute the impossibility
That there is anything
But Grace.

Now is the season to know
That everything you do
Is sacred.

– Hafiz

Hope’s Café Bonus: There is a PBS piece  from September 2019 on Joy Harjo, which I could not seem to copy the link to and make it work.   Ms. Harjo is an internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and has been the United States poet laureate.    She is from my native Oklahoma and later taught at my alma mater in Knoxville, TN.  Among many youtube videos of her, there is one available of her reading her poem “Grace.” I would encourage you to check it out.  😊