Tag: prayer

God is Always With Us

/ colleen arnold / 2 Comments Featured

I was eating lunch outside on an early autumn day last week. The breeze was gentle, but the air tingled with a hint of cooler days to come. From the side of my patio, I felt a flicker of movement and sensed something coming toward me. In the split second I turned my head to look, the sensation was gone and the tree beside me stood still.

Just the breeze, I thought, as I went back to work on my salad. Then I saw another flash of motion in that same tree. I decided it must be one of the hummingbirds that have been zipping around my house all summer.

I made a big dent in the salad before I saw the movement again. This time I had the sense of something floating from a high branch to a lower one, far too slow to be a hummingbird. A leaf on the gentle breeze? A falling limb? My curiosity got the best of me.

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The Marathon Finish Line

/ colleen arnold / 10 Comments

Sometimes the small accomplishments mean more than the marathon ones.

Back in the 1980s someone dared my husband to run the Shamrock marathon without any serious training or preparation. Always up for a challenge, he accepted. He didn’t set any great records, but he did finish that race. He even had the runner’s patch to prove it. Now here I was, twenty-five years later, clutching that faded patch in my hands as I searched a new generation of marathon runners for my daughter.

Six months earlier, my husband was diagnosed with cancer. Our daughter, Jacquelyn, signed up to run that year’s Shamrock Marathon in his honor. She joined the Livestrong Cancer Foundation team and raised more money than anyone on her team except for the CEO of the foundation. She was even the featured runner for the marathon’s publicity newsletter.

Sadly, she was now running the race in her Dad’s memory. Although she wasn’t quite as unprepared as he once was, her training schedule fizzled down to an occasional walk in the last weeks of her dad’s life. Continue reading →

The Cure for Getting Lost and Giving Up

/ colleen arnold / 7 Comments

My oldest daughter was in second grade and the others were preschoolers when my sister-in-law and I decided to take our kids to Luray Caverns. We loved the enormous underground chambers filled with towering stone formations. We held our breath anxiously at the few moments of total darkness when the lights were turned off. We threw wishing coins into the crystal clear underground lake, and smiled at the music of the great the Stalacpipe Organ. But the most memorable part of the day, at least for me, came after we left the caverns and the kids talked us into walking through the intriguing Garden Maze outside.

The day was a hot, humid, typical summer Virginia day, and the contrast to the chill of the caverns made the maze a sweaty challenge. The sun was bright and directly overhead, which made squinting a necessity since we were not prepared enough to have sunglasses or hats. The bushes were 8 feet tall and four feet wide, and the maze itself consisted of a half mile of confusing paths. Various fountains and foggy misters helped a little, but the dead ends just seemed to keep coming over and over again. The kids ran from path to path with excitement, while I found myself growing increasingly frustrated and cranky by being lost and hot.
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Finding God in the Irish Countryside

/ colleen arnold / 4 Comments

Recently I was asked how my trip to Ireland impacted my faith and spirituality. I loved this question because it wasn’t in the Irish people or even in the Irish Churches that I felt God’s hand. It was in the land itself, three places in particular.

The first was in the Burren, an otherworldly expanse of limestone rock landscape that stretches for 150 square miles through Counties Clare and Galway, and in some places, is a half mile thick. The area gets even more rain than the rest of Ireland, and the climate is oddly temperate, so the rock is dotted with an unusual variety of plants and animals tucked into its crevices.

In the midst of this desolate appearing region is a structure called the Poulnabrone Dolmen, an ancient portal tomb dating back to sometime around 3500 BC. This tomb wasn’t the original resting place of its inhabitants– their bodies were kept somewhere safe until only the bones remained, then the bones and special personal objects were placed into the tomb. It is atop a small hill, so it can be seen as an eerie focal point from surrounding areas.

As I climbed up that small hill, the heavy rain let up. Gusts of wind swirled around me and Irish mist kissed my face. Although not allowed past the rope that loosely surrounds the structure, I was close enough to be awestruck by beauty of those ancient stones.

My daughter wandered a few feet away on her own, and I thought about the families who once lived here. Their lives were so different from mine -different worries, different fears, different struggles, different joys. And yet, here was a sacred place where they felt a lot like I have, a place where they honored and mourned their dead, sending them on their eternal journey with personal objects to comfort them. Over five thousand years ago they cared for their dead and grieved just like we do. Throughout the whole world and throughout time, human beings all share this common experience of sorrow and loss, a fact that should make us all a bit more compassionate and charitable to each other. Continue reading →

Sometimes The Best Prayers Are The Unexpected Ones

/ colleen arnold / 4 Comments

I didn’t start out to pray. I just wanted some exercise to help settle the thoughts that swirled in my head. I decided to walk the old train track trail behind my house, where it follows the river along the cliffs. I was not in a hurry, and took my time. Gradually my breathing slowed to match the easy rhythm of my pace. And then something wonderful happened.

I saw God on my walk that day. Continue reading →