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Tag Archives: beautiful

Insights from Jean Vanier of L'Arche

Jean Vanier, founder of the L’Arche communities for people with severe mental and physical disabilities, recently offered an interview with Krista Tippett on her show, On Being. Vanier, one of those few hidden, great Christ-followers, is now 85 years old. The following are, in his own words, a few rich insights from that interview. I invite you to read them slowly and prayerfully. 1. The deepest desire for us all is to be appreciated, to be loved, and to be seen as someone of value. 2. Martin Luther King Jr. rightly said that we will continue to despise people until we have loved and accepted what is despicable in ourselves. 3. We need to love people, not because they are beautiful, but because they are human. 4. Those considered marginalized and disabled can restore balance to the world as to what is important, i.e. love and tenderness. 5. The goal of L’Arche is not to change. Read more.

Learning from Angelina Jolie

For the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than the are the people of the light. (Luke 16:8) I was deeply moved by a front page article in the New York Times yesterday, along with Angelina Jolie’s editorial a day earlier, about her courageous decision to have a preventive double mastectomy. She writes: “On April 27, I finished the three months of medical procedures that the mastectomies involved…I am writing about it now because I hope that other women can benefit from my experience.” While Angelina does not, as far as I know, consider herself a Christ-follower, we can learn a few things from her. Leading out of brokenness and vulnerability is powerful. She went public on an issue few Christians have been willing to talk about. We are imperfect human beings with limits. Beautiful and rich as she may be, she humbly acknowledged that she is. Read more.

Prayer and the Healing Waters of the Love of Jesus

Prayer is carrying people, paralyzed by life, to the healing waters of the love of Jesus. We meet a man in John 5, paralyzed and suffering for 38 years, who has been unable to get to the healing waters of the pool.  Fred Craddock notes that, perhaps, this was because able-bodied people with headaches, sunburn, and fever blisters continually beat the lame, the blind, and the paralyzed to the pool. What kind of community would allow someone to suffer 38 years without once helping him to the head of the line? At our NLF staff meeting last week, we symbolically created the “pool” through placing a blanket in the middle of a circle. We then invited individual staff to step into the “center of the pool,” representing people paralyzed by life. The rest of us in the circle then picked up the edges of the cloth blanket and gently ruffled it, “troubling the waters.” We. Read more.