The Passage:

This is what the Lord says: “Sing with joy for Jacob; shout for the foremost of the nations. Make your praises heard and say, ‘O Lord, save your people, the remanent of Israel.’ See I will bring them from the land of the north and gather them for the ends of the earth. Among them wil lbe the blind and the lame, expectant mothers and women in labor; a great throng will return. They will come with weeping; they will pray as I bring them back. I will lead them besides streams of water on a level path where they will not stumble, beacuse I am Israel’s father, and Ephraim is my first born son.”
Jeremiah 31:7-9, NIV

The phrase the rose up during lectio:

They found grace in the desert, these people who survived the killing.

The Message.

The collage:

I tore out this picture of a Muslim man reading the Koran before I even began my Ramadan practice. I knew I would need it somewhere. I thought it was going to be for the cover of my journal, but as soon as I read this passage I knew his time had come.

The frame of this collage is made of a photograph from the deserts surrounding the diamond minds in Africa. The sands are littered with the bones of the men who worked the mines, virtually as slaves in thier own land. The image behind the Muslim man is from a rock labyrinth near Sedona.

We all cry out to God. Our voices are all expressing hope for salvation, for sustenance, for water, for a level path. God is the parent of all. How quickly this is forgotten when guns fill our hands and our mouths fill with war.

Something Beautiful to Be Inspired By:

Belief

They don’t want to go
anywhere, they say they only want peace,
women who sift mortar

through thinned fingers like flour.
The only sun: the cellar’s fire
beating bread into bricks.

I hardly knew you
three women, sitting with Medoc
and bread between your knees.

The one with cropped brown hair
that fell to the side and followed
the smooth shape of the borw,

told me about your country
in a voice soft like milk going down,
firming the bones from inside….

-Colleen Morton Busch
(abridged)