August 14, 2012 – Take Off Your Shoes

Ordinary Olympics

August 14, 2012 Rev. Marie Noelle Duquette

(Printed first in The Circleville Herald, Values for Living, August 10, 2012) Like millions of others, I’ve been watching the highly entertaining Summer Olympics.

I notice connections between people, events, movies, music, writings, the spoken word, that seem independent of one another. I write and speak about these connections because I have been created for this work and it has the potential to draw people together and transform rough places into plains of peace. I am a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America; a writer whose muse is active and insistent; a lover of new experiences; a dreamer of old. I am fueled by both music and silence; I appreciate truths that can only be conveyed in whispers, if in any language at all. I have more friends than I deserve, a big fat french family I adore, and a lovely apartment with a fireplace in front of which I am now leading virtual worship. My most palpable experience of God's presence took place in a chapel in Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. In that place, where every great world religion was depicted by both name and symbol, a miracle took shape in 2005 that continues to inform my faith today. I believe the key to world peace is our willingness to understand one another and take the risks required to do that. My two sons are some of God's finest work; they are a blessing to me and to the world. I thank God for every single day of this wonder we know as life. And I thank you, for stopping by to take off your shoes and step into the shoes of those whose stories I am privileged to tell.

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