By Ajung Sojwal

In these uncommon times that we find ourselves in, I have come to realize how much I took for granted the practice of my faith in its liturgical and communal rhythm. Maybe because the spaces where faith got expressed in tangible ways seems to be shifting, maybe because a rugged cross, once again, got dragged through the crowd by a mob ready to kill for their version of truth barely six days into a new year, maybe, finally, I have learnt to listen for God’s voice — whatever it is, I find myself taking a serious inventory of all the people in my life, the place I happen to be, the things I treasure and the emotions within to understand the relevancy of my faith for this moment.

As I write this, a snow storm has quietened the traffic on our busy intersection, and I am transported to another time. Twenty six years ago, one January morning, two months after we landed in this country, I woke up to see the blanket of snow outside for the first time in my life. The beauty of the landscape was startlingly moving as the first thought that came to me was the verse from Isaiah that says, “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow.” For the first time I could visualize the enormity of God’s forgiveness that not just erases my sins so thoroughly but in fact, creates a completely new landscape within me.

The relevancy of faith that’s strong enough to change the landscape in me is about connections coming together to help me stay in the moment with courage. Connections of life experiences, encounters, conversations with people, God and scripture that converge in a moment to transform my view of everything. I am amazed to discover just how many of my parishioners are/were nurses. More than ever before, along with the rest of the world, I find myself deeply grateful for the work that these frontline workers do. And, it seems serendipitous that our appointed psalm for this Sunday, February 7^th , should say, “He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.”(Ps. 147:3).

When I feel wounded, abandoned and confused, it can become difficult to feel the love and nearness of God in my life. I can imagine that my state of brokenness itself is cause for God to turn His face away from me. In the midst of my sorrows, when life sometimes can become just one struggle after another, God is best welcomed as the nurse who sees my wound and my pain — the one who knows exactly how to bind up my wound and be there in the moment of my pain as the one who has no other agenda than to nurse me back to health.

The psalmist realizes that we can get so overwhelmed with the omnipotence and omnipresence of God that we can become unable to relate to him. And so it is, that every now and then I must reach out to grasp God in the particularity of my brokenness. Only then might we be able to see that it’s because God has walked through our battlefields, tending to our wounds, nursing us back to health over and over again that he is determined to change our bloody landscape to one that’s startlingly different — snow-covered, ladened with moisture, soaking the dry, hardened ground in preparation for a glorious Spring.

Ajung Sojwal is Rector of St. George’s Episcopal Church in Hempstead, NY.