sojourn stories...

"Great is Thy Faithfulness, Oh God my Father"

Great is Thy Faithfulness, Oh God My Father…There is no shadow of turning with Thee, Thou changest not, Thy compassion it fails not…as Thou hast been, thou forever will be…

Great is Thy Faithfulness, Great is Thy Faithfulness, Morning by Morning, new mercies I see…All I have needed, Thy Hand hath provided, Great is Thy Faithfulness, Lord unto me…

One day, when I was 14, I got very angry with my mother, and rather than mouth off, which would only get me into more trouble, (I knew this from experience) I headed out the door for my very first run.  I remember the feeling of pounding my anger out on the pavement, the struggling for breath and then eventual peace that came, as my breathing became rhythmic and my strides began steady.  And as I ran, I worked through the verbiage that would never reach her ears; since that day, I have been a runner, a jogger really, but runner sound so much better.

I am inconsistent at times, faithful and dedicated at others.  Even after the longest stretches of literal winters and metaphoric winter seasons when my running shoes sit unlaced and unused by the back door, eventually I tie them up once again and hit the asphalt to work out the feelings and words that cannot be articulated.

I have written books while I run…wish I had a tape recorded, organized presentations, oh where was the whiteboard, composed letters, rehearsed difficult conversations, and envisioned ideas, but they remain forever lost on the pavement…remnants of moments in time that return only in glimpses and snippets when I sit in front of my laptop trying to recapture them.  More than anything else, when I run, I think and I pray… the rhythmic nature of my breathing centers me, calming my soul and stilling my mind that I might commune with g-d…and haggle and hash out and dream and envision and reason together…

On that day of my very first run, so many years ago, my dad told me an interesting story… “you are not supposed to be able to run…”  were his first words when I told him about the exhilarating way I had found to keep from mouthing off to my mom!  My puzzled look must have prompted him to expand on the following story…

el shaddai...

i read a very provocative post yesterday, from a link via adam at pomomusings, about the femininity face of g-d, which is a passion of mine.  Jimmy, at culture driven life, wrote about the fact that El Shaddai, a common name for G-d in the Hebrew Scriptures can be translated as "the breasted one"  and how that name has been buried under the more commonly known and neutered or distinctly male names- the almighty or thus sustainer of life .  The comments on this post are interesting; ben makes a great point about the questions surrounding mary magdalene, and it is a great segue into conversation about our hesitancy to view g-d as having a feminine face. 

Literally, g-d has neither breasts or a penis, although the historical figure, Jesus, G-d made flesh, did come as a male, so he did possess male genitalia.  thus it is accurate, to call Jesus our brother, to acknowledge the masculine manifestation of g-d bodily form, but it is ridiculous to limit g-d to this one revelation. 

El =God, and Shaddai= breasts or "of the breasts," as jimmy articulates, but this does not meant that we should stop with the literal reading of these words any more than we think of g-d as having wings, because of the pleading in the psalms for us to find shelter in the shadow of his wings...

El was the common name for all the gods in the time of the Israelites. El was the name that the surrounding nations used in their polytheistic worship, but when is used for the G-d of Israel, it is most often coupled with an attribute to reveal an aspect of YHWH the One True G-d...