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Crossing Life’s Bridges: Embracing the Unknown

The meadow sparkles in the clearing ahead — far beyond the  narrow footbridge I’ve come upon on today’s walk in the woods.  The shadow of an old pine flits back and forth across the weather-worn timbers and I stop, unable to  move.

The shadow enters the landscape of my mind: to cross this narrow bridge means leaving the familiar path I’m on and moving into unknown parts.  Land I’ve never walked before that may not be safe or where I may not be welcomed. Do I take a risk and forge ahead or do I turn back to the safety of the familiar?

A voice speaks within.  Keep walking and remember what it feels like to be part of something large, something timeless, a world that welcomes you beyond your current experience – a world that reaches beyond you and includes you, too.

So I walk … I remember … I am enlarged.

When spiritual truth and nature meet, I follow the Voice to its source and find an eternal display of meaning and connection.  I find the wisdom and the courage to embrace the unknown and to keep moving, letting go of the past (the good and the bad of it all) and moving into the future with hopeful anticipation trusting God’s good plan for my life.

Love & Peace,

Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and reaching forward to what is ahead. Philippians 3:13

For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Jeremiah 29:11

Posted on by Lois Stephens

The Journey Back to Eden: A Poetic Reflection


She inherited a clear mountain stream
It murmurs and burbles with hope & dreams.
Life-giving waters that renew & refresh
Lined with fruit-yielding trees that long to bless.

She inherited a wood where roots run deep
Where leaves do not wither, where souls do keep.
Where hope springs eternal in her fertile breast
A lush garden, a vineyard, a celestial nest.

Cast out of Eden love welcomed her back
Forgiven, redeemed with no shame attached.
A fountain of grace springing up from within
She inherits a Life that has always been.

Love & Peace,

“We were never cast out of Eden. We merely turned from it and shut our eyes. To return and be welcomed, cleansed and redeemed, we are only obliged to look.” – Margaret Renkl

“…Every fountain of delight springs up from your life within me!”  Psalm 87:7 (TPT)

Posted on by Lois Stephens

Finding Hope in the Waves of Grief

Sitting quietly, I listen with my ears and watch with my eyes, the eyes of my heart that is.  Eyes unlike my natural ones that are myopic with a touch of astigmatism causing an annoying blur when my contacts don’t settle just right. I listen and watch with my heart-eyes until I “see”. 

A mother lamenting the death of her child. This is not the way it’s supposed to be!

So much dark-water pain in her ocean blue eyes. Tidal pools formed in rocky coasts, filled with hard-shell creatures imprisoned in isolated depressions.  Living pain feeding upon trapped-water memories until they rise and spill over in tears. 

Morning and evening tides of pain.  Patterning, rhythmically, methodically – in and out, ebb and flow, always moving.

Both King Solomon and Bob Seeger remind me, “For everything there is a season”.  Yet today I question … does the season of weeping over the death of a child ever really end?

While the pain may lessen as time goes on, the impact of the loss seems to me to linger on and on, season after season.

I hear the mother’s lament once again, lingering decades beyond her precious child’s parting.  And with it I hear all the aching voices I have known, including my own, that still weep from time to time.

Yet in the moment I’m reminded that in every lament there’s a latent hope: God hears, and God cares.

We ride the waves of grief—up & down, down & up—until eventually, somehow, we land upon solid ground.  Ground that takes us in—womb-like—and protects.  The solid rock of trust in God when there are no answers to the hard questions. 

Love & Peace.

Posted on by Lois Stephens

The Story

“All of these lines across my face, tell you the story of who I am …”

The song lyrics linger with a reluctance to leave the divine divide between conscious and nonconscious thought.  By now I recognize that this is just one more way that God speaks to me: through music and lyric and poetry and prose.  I ask for understanding and patiently wait.  Selah – a Hebrew word used in the Psalms meaning to stop, pause and reflect. 

It makes no difference to me that the song would never be sung in a religious setting.  Some of my greatest prophetic inspiration has come from music not written for the church. God speaks in a multitude of ways, if we but choose to be open and listen.

Leaving some of the lyrics here … to linger a while. Selah.

The Story
Words and music by Phillip John Hanseroth

All of these lines across my face
Tell you the story of who I am
So many stories of where I've been
And how I got to where I am
But these stories don't mean anything
When you've got no one to tell them to
It's true, I was made for you ...

You see the smile that's on my mouth
It's hiding the words that don't come out
And all of my friends who think that I'm blessed
They don't know my head is a mess
No, they don't know who I really am
And they don't know what
I've been through like you do
And I was made for you ...

Love & Peace,

My frame was not hidden from You, when I was made in secret, and skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed. And in Your book they all are written, the days fashioned for me, when as yet there were none of them.”  Psalm 139:15-16.

Photo by Barcelos_fotos on Pexels.com

Posted on by Lois Stephens

Eben-Ezer: Stone of Help

“You will find something more in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters.” ― Saint Bernard of Clairvaux

Prone to wander, Lord I feel it. Yet still I raise my Ebenezer to you and by your help alone I come.

Love & Peace,