Straight From The Hart

  Holy Groans Joan's note:  This just tore at my heart this morning when it appeared in my mailbox.  Even though I don't minister in a foreign land like this, and even though the church I pastor is small, I still hear too many "holy groans" from people on the fringe of my pastoral ministry who need  help, help beyond what I am able to give from the limited resources available to me, and my heart breaks every day because of that.  My Bible reading this morning came from Matt 25 which SO ties in with this.  I feel so helpless and burdened but then I realize God hears also MY holy groans of overwhelming needs of those in my pastoral care, and I'm so thankful for the Saviour who is ever interceding for me and all these others.   Holy Groans As I write this, I am waiting for a bus on a busy corner in an extremely poor community in Central America, in which I lived for a year and have been visiting now for nine years.  Most of the time, the tragedy of this place fades i

  SEPTEMBER IN THE OZARKS It was George Eliot who wrote “... if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive Septembers”. Actually, he wrote about seeking successive autumns but I’m sure if he had given it more thought he would have said September. I love poetry. I love reading it aloud to myself and anybody else who will listen. (It’s amazing how few people will!) I love memorizing poetry. I still remember October’s Bright Blue Weather from grade school. “When comrades seek sweet country haunts...and count like misers, hour by hour, October’s bright blue weather.” I only wish I had thought of those lines before Helen Hunt Jackson wrote them. September poems are hard to find so I wrote one myself this week and it is printed elsewhere on this page. September is an incredible month. Sandwiched in between August (my birth month so therefore special to me) and October, about which many poems have been written, it is a bridge, a transition time. Victoria Ericks