“Love is everywhere and you only need to look to find it!”
I regularly find myself repeating this adage from my Aunt Susie whilst envisioning the “heart” she found hidden in the pavement. It may have been composed of just a few street cracks. Still, to her, it signified the ever presence of love in our lives.
I was reminded of my Aunt’s wisdom hearing Reverend Jen Bailey share how she experiences God in the tiny and the vast; Be that a warm embrace when she’s sad or the melody of the Stevie Wonder songs her mom played on road trips.
“God is fluid in my experience in that there is not one way in which God can and will show up,” she says. “The sacred, the divine, exists in all of it...In my tradition, if we really believe that all Creation is made in God’s image, it’s through getting to know and touch and be amongst Creation that we can more fully understand who this divine Spirit that guides everything is.”
Whether we believe in God, the Universe, or no higher power at all, Reverend Jen invites us to be present to the sacred around us, whatever we intuit it to be. The more we engage with it, the greater our capacity to experience it.
Founder of Faith Matters Network and Co-founder of the People’s Supper, Reverend Jen is a compassionate voice in the new dawn of religion and spirituality. We delve into her book, To My Beloveds: Letters on Faith, Race, Loss, and Radical Hope, to explore what it means to live into our faith and how that shapes the way we take care of ourselves and each other. She illuminates this in my favorite passage in the book…
“I believe the great question of the twenty-first century is the question of how we “be” together. Not how we are together or how we relate to one another, but how our state of being, our very essence, touches one another and learns to thrive in a state of interdependence.”
To My Beloveds is a book of letters. It’s also a book of invitations. Invitations to embody love and hope, trust and faith, all in pursuit of creating a more loving world.
For me, that’s one filled with more tiny hearts in the pavement.
What is one small act of kindness that would show someone that they matter to you this week?
With gratitude,
Jenna