While still sorting through my impressions and pictures of our recent trip together to Egypt, Jordan, and Israel, our tour leader posted this picture of Peter and me on a boat crossing the Sea of Galilee.
In truth we are both crossing seas every day--changing seas. of age, circumstance, the joys and challenges of ministry, and our continual need for personal and communal growth. Somehow, on that day, a calm sea calmed also within us the stresses and strains that daily life at home often create. It was as if the Lord himself were near, in climes where he bore burdens much greater than ours, beyond our imagining.
I was reminded again of T.S. Eliot's description of him as our "still point in a turning world." And a prayer went up that by his grace both of us--not to mention all those to whom we belong in our extended family as well as the larger family of faith--might better portray his calm in the troubled seas through which so many are passing these days.
It is good to be ministers on the sea of life together. And it was especially good to be thus ministered to on the Sea of Galilee.
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