ENGAGEMENT:

What's your "Sailing" - the song that calms you, or lifts you, or takes you somewhere?

Belonging may be the thing our culture has left us most starved for. Where do you most need to hear that you are seen, valued, and God's - not for what you produce, but simply because you're his?

The song throws its invitation absurdly wide - all the earth. Where in your life have you believed you had to be worthy enough - steady enough, sorted enough, good enough - before you could come? What would it mean to hear the invitation includes you exactly as you arrived today?

Engagement:

• Dr. Wolfelt asserts that "Grief is only transformed when we honor the quiet forces of stillness" Where have you experienced this?
  Or where might you need to let stillness transform your grief?

• Like Lazarus in the tomb, is there a place where you are asking God "how long" but haven't felt permission to ask?

• When you focus Eucharist on pausing to grieve, does that feel different for you? Why?

• Verse 5 of Psalm 13 says "But I trust in Your faithful love" While the situation for the psalmist hasn't changed their focus has. Are their parts of your grief that you may be invited to shift your gaze?

Engagement:

The psalmist writes: "My Heart is not lifted up... My eyes are not too high...I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me." What "too-great thing" have you been trying to carry that was never yours to hold?

I shared two images of smallness: a weaned child with their mother, or going to bed with the hall light on. What images help you "pause in smallness" with the big challenges you face? What does pausing look like for you?

Are you with God for what God gives, or learning to be with God simply because God is God? What do you appreciate most when you can enjoy God simply being God?

ENGAGEMENT:

Where in your life right now are you longing for a map when what you've been given is a Shepherd?

Think of a valley you've already walked through. Looking back from the far side, can you see now that it was a corridor and not a destination - and does that change how you walk the valley you're in now or the ones to come?

Is God, for you right now, someone you talk about, at a distance or someone you talk to? And if you're in a difficult stretch and can't feel the "you" at all — what would it mean to say the words "you are with me" anyway?

"The valleys are the thin places and the quiet mercies discovered in the hard places: the valley is so often where trust is born, not where it dies." - what say you?

ENGAGEMENT.

Where in your life are you gripping something so tightly that your hands have forgotten how to open - and what would it mean to loosen even one finger this month?

what does being still actually look like for you? Is it a single breath, naming what isn't yours to carry, or the braver confession that you can't hold this alone and need to reach for help?

Like Moses, do you find yourself asking "who am I?" — what would change if you heard God answer not with who you are, but simply, "I AM — and I am already here"?