FootprintsintheWind.com

Lord I don’t know how to think about you in a way that will help me move forward in service. Service for some might mean helping a few people in small homey ways. It might mean significant or even big ways or perhaps helping many people and many generations. My insights, glimpses and inklings are of over-all long view varieties. So this is where I must begin.

:- Doug.

With grandchildren I’m a story finder.

:- Doug.

Insert this good into the world.

:- Doug.

Life is not about making the least effort possible: it is about meeting life.

:- Doug.

Alcohol? Why would anyone want to get wasted instead of used up?

:- Doug.

People are resourceful even precisely where they thought themselves resourceless. People have the power they thought they lacked—to act out their humanity so as to touch beyond their lifetimes and arms’ reach.

:- Doug.

Throw it all in.

:- Doug.

Those of you who want to live: Decide. Jump. (Deciding is harder than doing.)

:- Doug.

On our own incarnation of humanity we are given the opportunity to take wing and touch wider in space and longer in time. This is our destiny, our duty.

:- Doug.

Your guts churn. Can you dare pour out your blood upon the ground—this ground? Our very power is expressed in will—what decision? Deciding is more difficult than doing.

:- Doug.

Gather some people to help. Gather the margins.

:- Doug.

Ask bigger!

:- Doug.

How do I make myself as large as the universe?

:- Doug.

As we gather people we gather our best and most bountiful resources. Gathering people, gathering resources.

:- Doug.

My interest is working directly with people on the margin to help them find themselves resourceful.

:- Doug.

Why disorganize? Because we think that we can do nothing with things organized as they are: others are in charge of that. “You are in charge” is the most disorganizing thing we can say to one another.

:- Doug.

You are divine, holy; you have a gathering work to do, reconciling. This is the gathering work.

:- Doug.

Ripples not waves
Gentle, gentle
Washing, caressing
Inviting tenderly
Meeting, conversing
Gathering, gathering
Not converts
Friends

:- Doug.

I need for me to get beyond the reasonable to the utmost.

:- Doug.

I need for me to stretch and say I’ve done my utmost; done, not merely tried.

:- Doug.

They also serve who ask questions.

:- Doug.

When we set up a mighty god in front of us, we are constructing something built on our wishes: desires for things or wealth or fame or popularity or destruction of others. A powerful god is a human ego-driven god. A real God, one who is real and meets us where we are is one who knows failure, defeat, and the need for hugs, one who is not afraid to say “Who knew?” A real God is found in reality: in unanswered prayer not just impossible wishes granted, in prisons not just achievement, in poverty not just wealth, in broken cluttered homes not in shiny and new, in sickness not miraculous cures, in still hush not loud pounding pulpits. A real God is suffering, surprising, weak.

That means we have work to get to.

:- Doug.

I AM = With

:- Doug.