The day after the Uvalde shooting, we made prayer beads together.

At the time, my oldest granddaughter Eliza was in kindergarten at the local public school. While she didn’t know any details of the shooting just yet, I wanted to do something with her for the coming day she would know the world’s cruelty.

I told myself it was for her and the children of Robb Elementary. True. Also, I needed to cry my heart out to the One who puts his ears to my lips and responds to his child’s distress. The One who cradles every broken heart.

We watched a video by spiritual director Lacy Finn Borgo, showing us how to choose an anchor bead (a shiny gold smiley face for Eliza), tie knots, and select five colors to move us through our prayer:

red = feelings matter,

orange = feelings need expression

yellow = name your support

green = have a plan for strong feelings

white = God is always with us

Threading each bead, we felt the strength of the cord and being together. As we added the white bead, Lacy’s calming voice said, “We are never alone. God is always with us.”

That phrase nestled peacefully into Eliza’s core. Her crayon took flight across the page. In her drawings, we are reaching toward each other, one with big blue tears, saying, “God is always with us” in speech bubbles over our heads, a skill she had learned in class that very week.

This kind of connection between souls reminds us, as we turn our faces toward a loving Father. His warm face is already turned toward us. Face-to-face is how we are meant to live. Theologian and pastor, Jean Stairs, reminds us that to take “a crisis-centered approach too easily masks the face of God.”

Putting creative hands to our prayers, we embodied the warm benediction God gave Moses in the wilderness, (Numbers 6:24-26)

The LORD bless you and keep you;
The LORD make his face shine on you
And be gracious to you;
The LORD turn his face toward you
And give you peace.

Notice God’s open-faced posture towards his people is initiated by God in the wilderness. In the Bible, the wilderness is a desolate place of howling winds and wild beasts, a place people tended to skirt or avoid altogether. Yet one where God leads and tends all along the way.

It is in the wilderness that God’s presence is visible day and night for 40 years. Later, Jesus is accompanied by God’s Holy Spirit for 40 days.

Metaphorically, the wilderness is any rough terrain (or time) between places: homeland and promised land, blessing and becoming, death and new life. It’s a season of learning to stop grumbling and see all that is present yet hidden.

These last three years of a global pandemic, the war against the Ukrainian people, and America’s reckoning with race, gun violence, and political chaos, feels like a wilderness. Like the people of the Exodus, we have been known to grumble, be unkind, and talk of going back to life as we knew it.

But what if our liminal spaces are also where we continue encountering the Living God and are lovingly shaped into God’s people?

Pastor and theologian, Jean Stairs, describes our loss when we push ourselves or others to prematurely leave liminality and get on with life, “We have neglected to affirm the full rhythm of life of spiritual beings, which includes listening for the soul’s need to taste death in the wilderness even as it longs for liberation and life.”

Tragedy and trauma can make us feel as though God has turned his back to us, stopped smiling, or simply forgotten his promise to be near us. The truth is God keeps showing himself otherwise – constantly, fiercely, tenderly with us. Our heart eyes need adjusting.

Jean Stairs challenges us to a new perspective, “Resituating the spiritual image of the wilderness from a sidelines Lenten position to one more central to the faith is one way to affirm and give words to the soul’s experience of liminality.”

The longer I live near God’s listening ear and warm face, the more I experience in my inner hearth that I am well within the circle of his smile. Always.

I cry out with the Psalmist,

Now answer me God, because you love me;

Let me see your great mercy full-face.

Psalm 69:16

No matter the circumstances of your life or the state of the world, may you know God’s face is shining on you.

Here’s a poem to remind us we are always in God’s loving presence. It is not only our children and grandchildren who need to remember.

Awakening

by Gunilla Norris

First thought – as in “first light”–

let me be aware that I waken in You.

Before I even think that I am in my bed,

let me think that I am in You.

Eyes crusted over, mouth dry,

my creature self feels so inert and dumb.

Let me be aware that these words

searching toward you into consciousness

are also coming from You.

You are waking me out of this sleepiness

into awareness that my life, my thoughts,

my body, my tasks, my loves, passions,

and sorrows are gifts from You,

to be discovered and received this day.

This post first appeared on the Companioning Center blog, a place I currently write about three times a year. Since that time, Eliza and I have made these prayer beads again and again in seasons of change and delight like when we might be afraid to fall asleep or attend a new school or celebrate a birthday.

The prayer beads are the creative work of chaplain and pastor Leanne Hadley. You can find the instructions here.

You can also find instructions for the prayer beads this delightful book about listening to children by spiritual director Lacy Finn Borgo and on Lacy’s Instagram feed of May 25, 2022.

If any of the quotes from Jean Stairs caught your eye, here is her wonderful book.

Keeping the Habit of Being Face-to-Face with Our Good God in Good Times and Bad