Sojourner Dream Of Grace

After giving a sermon on the spiritual journey at St. Stephen’s yesterday, I flew back to Henderson and had the most beautiful, healing dream I can remember. I was moving to Nevada. Much of the journey was on foot and I would stop in small towns along the way. The beauty of the dream was the kind and gracious way several people helped me. I feel like a new person today.

In waking life, the road was hard last year, to say the least, and the hardness has continued to weigh on me until now. My dream was a channel of grace and peace.

We are all on a path, often not of our choosing. We would prefer to stay in Abram’s home, Ur; or in Jerusalem, like the apostles who did not leap into fulfilling The Great Commission, but instead set up shop in Jerusalem until driven out by persecution. One way or another, we are all on the road, pushed out of our nest. I don’t know where the road leads. The song says it, does it not? “I know not where the road may lead . . . . (only that) I walk the King’s Highway.” But regardless of the destination, grace happens when people are kind to us at the way stations.

Perhaps that is the wisdom embedded in the spiritual practice enjoined by the law of Moses to welcome the alien and shelter the sojourner, remembering that we are sojourners ourselves. As we go about being the Church, we might do well to think less on sustaining our institutions, to think more about the literal and spiritual sojourners around us, and find ways to extend a bit of consolation.