In that very bright light is enormous love.
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Breakfast is a fantastic time of day.
Good conversation with good food starts my day like nothing else, especially when you don’t know who you are going to have breakfast with, nor what will be discussed.
We have a family custom, which goes back to the days when my daughters were very young. Whatever I read that I felt I wanted to keep and remember, I would put on three by five cards and serve them up with dinner.
It was impossible to get my daughters to bless the table before dinner so I would put a card at everyone’s place and they would read their cards. That was fine as long as we didn’t have guests who were their age. Then it would be horribly embarrassing for them and they would apologize to their guests for this horrific habit of their mother’s.
I have continued this practice, even though they are grown and gone. Without children to indoctrinate, I now use the cards for our breakfast guests. They get these cards periodically although they are not required to read them. Sometimes, we are happily surprised when guests read their cards out loud before eating.
This one morning, one card said “We Live by Faith not by Sight”. A quote from 2 Corinthians 5-7. That is a verse from the Bible that my grandmother used to quote to me when I was about 3 years old and would go inside to get her because there was someone under our house talking to me. She would come outside, see nothing and assure me everything was fine and remind me that ‘we live by faith, not by sight’ and I should talk to whoever I was seeing at the time. If it was important enough for them to come to talk to me, I should be polite enough to respond.
This particular breakfast one of our guests read that card, which was at her spot at the table and she was delighted . That started a conversation on what this world is truly about and how handicapped we are, if we will only live with what we can see. It was the first such conversation in which I had participated and it was fascinating. For once, those who can’t ‘see’ were in the minority and those who recognized that faith takes you strange places were in the majority.
The woman who read her card out loud talked about what life was like for her. She talked to dead people, knew things like when the phone would ring and it did, etc. It was an incredible conversation. She mostly talked about how, as she grew older, she realized there were many people like her although they did not share or talk about this gift because it is one that can make others look at you rather strangely and give you lots of room.
As we talked, I realized how deep one can go into ‘seeing’ by Faith and recognizing others who do the same. It is a wonderful world of people who understand and know things just because……… and for whom Faith is a big issue. Many people who have a deep, real, abiding faith generally don’t know where it came from, why or how they live on such a level. Those who don’t have such faith live a very intellectual life or just life from day to day. Some live saddled with great anxiety for reasons they don’t realize, recognize, can’t deal with, so they escape in some form or other.
Have you ever thought how some people can go through horrendous experiences in life and come out still loving, smiling, living and moving along in life and some go through less and are bitter, feel sorry for themselves, become victims and sometimes not very nice people? Faith and lack of faith seems to be the difference.
It was a joyous breakfast. One woman told a couple of us about our lives, – past present and future; another woman talked about her visions; another about helping those around her with what she could ‘see’ without saying anything to the people she helped. I would love to live in such a community, but there is none that I have ever found. It was an extremely spiritual breakfast where God seemed to be the one who brought all of us together to share that moment in time – and we are deeply grateful.
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Tags: bed & breakfast, breakfast table talk, Spiritual Reflection
