come all who are tired...

We are back home in our sweet little Pittsfield house after a totally wild ass five days of ups and downs - fears and hopes - and lots and lots of prayers. Dianne's mother, Shirley, while still in the very early stages of recovery after two strokes on Easter Sunday is very much in the working hard phase of getting better and will enter rehab sometime next week. So, we slept late, visited her one more time in the hospital and then headed home on a gorgeous Spring day.

As we trekked through the rolling hills of New York into the Berkshires, Dianne asked me about this week's message in church. "It is about faith - the beginning of our 'everything must change' series - and rethinks the realities behind the word faith as something more like commitment, trust, fidelity and looking for God's vision rather than merely various ideas and abstractions."

After a long pause she said, "Maybe you and I could do Yvonne Lyon's tune, "Come," as part of the prayers or the sermon? People have been asking when the band's going to play in worship again and... it feels right."

I love this song. Di first heard it on a London TV show a few years ago while I was out at worship. We shared it with our new church community on our first Sunday, too. It is all built around that wonderful invitation from Jesus to "come... all ye who are tired and heavy laden" and has been one of the ways we have tried to emphasize God's grace rather than judgment.

To say that we have both felt tired and beaten down by life this week would be a total understatement; but it also true that we have been strengthened, encouraged and lifted up, too. So maybe the best way to share this sweet, paradoxical reality is to reclaim this song as an invitation to go trusting and searching for a glimpse of God's vision - we're likely to find it in the strangest places!