Surpassing Knowledge

It's almost been 2 weeks since I was placed on bed rest and a week since we experienced more complications. We are taking it day by day, but each day I feel good physically and we remain positive.
Thank you for your prayers and encouragement and for all the Southerners living in NYC who have brought food! They have buoyed our family up in uncertain times. Many have offered me this verse as comfort: Ephesians 3:14-21. It has become our daily mantra. After reading it several times, I remembered this was the text I chose for my service of ordination. I chose it because it spoke of God's "love that surpasses all understanding," and I felt that phrase best described how I felt God's presence in my life. There was probably a part of me that thought it was broad enough to let me off the hook a bit when I didn't get
something, but now I realize it demands more of me to live daily in the unknown and to trust in what I cannot see than to try to explain what cannot be fully explained.
Over the last week, I have received a lot of medical information and statistics, things doctors can say we do know. What often gets left out, dropped from the end of sentences or said as afterthoughts on the way out the door is all that we don't know. What we don't know is the territory I find myself in right now, and which is where, if we are honest, we all live. The second part of the Ephesians's passage that those who've faced medical uncertainty have encouraged me to see is the part about how God can accomplish " far more than all we can ask or imagine." Oh, right! That is how it happens isn't it...great things can happen when we believe in pushing the boundaries of what we know and of what we allow ourselves to dream? Two Sundays ago, I prayed during the pastoral prayer to "surrender my need for control." I do not know what the future holds for my family, for you, for us as a nation, but I know that it is far, far more than what I could plan.

As you pray for my family as you do for yours and for our world, consider reading Ephesians 3:14-21 every day. We read it as a family in the morning or before bed, and I hear it differently together than when I read it alone. But every day, I am pushed to imagine more for the people and earth God has made.

Eph 3:14-21: "For this reason I bow my knees before the Father/Mother from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. I pray that, according to the riches of God's glory, God may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through God's spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend with all the saints, what is the breadth
and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to God who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish far more than all we can ask or imagine, to God be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen."