To learn more about the official No Impact Project, visit http://noimpactproject.org/. And if you know of someone who would like to join our challenge this week, have them send me an email at karascroggins@gmail.com so I can put them on the list!
Luanne Panarotti sent me this reading this evening; it's beautifully-written and a good way to kick off the week!
From The Preaching Life by Barbara Brown
Taylor
One Sunday he asked me to sit up close to the pulpit. He wanted me to hear his sermon, he
said, and as I listened to him talk about the beauty of God’s creation and our
duty to be awed by it, all of a sudden I heard him telling the congregation
about a little girl who kept tadpoles in a birdbath so that she could watch
over them as they turned into frogs, and how her care for those creatures was
part of God’s care for the whole world.
It was as if someone had turned on all the lights – not only
to hear myself spoken of in church, but to hear that my life was part of God’s
life, and that something as ordinary as a tadpole connected the two. My friend’s words changed everything
for me. I could no longer see myself
or the least detail of my life in the same way again. When the service was over that day I walked out of it into a
God-enchanted world, where I could not wait to find further clues to heaven on
earth. Every leaf, every ant,
every shiny rock called out to me – begging to be watched, to be listened to,
to be handled and examined. I
became a detective of divinity, collecting evidence of God’s genius and
admiring the tracks left for me to follow: locusts shedding their hard bodies
for soft, new winged ones; prickly pods of milkweed spilling silky white hair;
lightning spinning webs of cold fire in the sky, as intricate as the veins in
my own wrist. My friend taught me
to believe that these were all words in the language of God, hieroglyphs given
to puzzle and delight me even if I never cracked the code.
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