Here we go...

Producing a blog has been something I have had a longing to pursue for quite some time now. However, being the perfectionist that I am, I have procrastinated from the fear of failure; that I might put something out with my name attached that will not be well received. And I probably will, I'm not sure if people will even read this, but I believe that I have something of value to add to the blogging world, just as anyone would. I have a perspective different from you and you have one different from me. As we begin to piece together all the unique perspectives of humanity we begin to truly know who we are and perhaps a little bit about who God is as well. Each of our stories is a mere thread in the tapestry of life and only when they are sticthed together can something beautiful occur.

I choose the title for my blog, "A Sprig of Hope" from a Frederick Buechner sermon. As only Buechner can do, he masterfully and poetically retells the story of Noah, humanizing this immenssly powerful narrative that has become nothing more than a fairy tale or a nursery rhyme. He paints Noah as the "bearded joke draped in a sheet who walks down Broadway with his sandwich-board inscribed REPENT" And yet his message is not heeded and the bearded joke witnesses the end of the world. But hope is not lost...

"Then finally, after many days, Noah sent forth a dove from the ark to see if the waters had subsided from the earth, and that evening she returned, an lo, in her mouth was a freshly plucked olive leaf. Once again...the place to look, I think, is Noah's face. The dove stands there with her delicate, scarlet feet on the calluses of his upturned palm. His cheek just touches her breast so that he can feel the tiny panic of her heart. His eyes are closed, the lashes watery wet. Only what he weeps with now, the old clown, is no longer anguish, but wild and irrepressible hope. That is not the end of the story in Genesis, but maybe that is the end of it for most of us-just a little sprig of hope held up against the end of the world."

Buechner reminds us that this story is our story, we only need to open the Denver Post to realize that, left on our own, we are doomed. Yet in the face of a world covered in death, we have hope. For Noah foreshadowed the One who was to come, Jesus; the one who breaks through our hopelessness and whispers ever so gently in our ears that we can love again, it is possible and it is good.

My prayer, not just for this blog and those reading it, but for each of us God's children is that we may see the tapestry of our faith all the more clearer. That we may, somehow, learn to love. That we may look to Him who has looked on us and felt pity and that in Him we may find what it means to truly live. And as we live, we love. And against a hopeless world that we may hold up a sprig of hope.