This month's SJT (Spiritual Journey Thursday) host is Jone, and she's asked us to reflect on remembering those who have left us. She mentioned that November 1st is All Saints' Day, a time to consider the saints who have gone before.
Today I'm sharing Carolyn Arends' song "Great Cloud of Witnesses," which refers to Hebrews 12:1 : "Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us." Arends includes a little list in the song of some of the witnesses she imagines in the cloud: her grandparents along with the patriarchs Abraham and Isaac and her buddy Rich (maybe Rich Mullins?). It's possible to imagine these grizzled veterans peering down on us from Heaven disapprovingly, wondering why we can't get with the program. But Arends thinks of them cheering her on: "I think they're shouting, 'Don't quit.'"
Who has gone before, and now is cheering you on? Like Carolyn Arends, I imagine my grandparents, and I also think of my dear friend Paulette, to whom I wrote this letter when she died in 2010, a couple of months after the earthquake in Haiti. And of course there are others; I hope any disapproval they might feel of my bumbling is softened by the grace they've experienced when, as Arends says in the song, "they have looked into His eyes."
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