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Note: The following is excerpted from the March, 2000, edition of The Journey Out newsletter. Please contact the Pilgrim Center if you would like to be placed on our mailing list to receive The Journey Out quarterly.

A Journey Letter from Arthur Rouner...

Dear Good Friends on the Way:

I greet you in the Name of Jesus, Who is the Lord of our lives, the Leader of our mission, the Light of our days.

And the light is longer these days! Springtime for the soul is ahead. Lent's deepening days soon will lead us to the heights of Easter. - Be ready for it! Read God's wonderful Word of Life in your Bible! Pray for everyone you can think of - especially for the Church of Jesus, so needed across the world, but too often choosing the culture of the crowd instead of the Cross. Help the Church speak truth. Help the Church live love. Pray for the preachers to be prophets - and true pastors.

And we will pray, and read our Bibles, and together we willcome to know the world of the poor - the vast majority of the world's people.

Then, there will be a reconciliation retreat for refugees, with Molly, myself, and our Nairobi National Team. Then two weeks of retreats in Rwanda, with our National Team of that country. Following, we'll do the same in Burundi, with our National Team there. We will then go to be part of the POKATUSA Peace Initiative along the Kenya-Uganda border, before returning home in early March.

As we have been among you during this past holiday time, gathering at our Center's Christmas supper, meeting for Bible studies, and sharing times of coffee and fellowship at Starbuck's, it has been a significant time of thought and prayer for me.

I have thought a lot about Americans, and how hard it is for us - in our feverish drive to "get on with our lives" - to dare to honestly look back at what we have actually done to hurt other people, or at mistakes we have made, or at all those sins of omission and commission that are part of our dark side. We have such trouble saying "I'm sorry." We want no pain, no discomfort, no grief, no confession. So, we become deniers of the truth, creators of facades of optimism, and so too often people of the facile and the shallow, and not of depth, integrity, and honor.

But after three decades of celebrating anger, our society is beginning to think forgiveness may be a better way, a way toward restructured relationships, toward whole hearts, toward renewed hope. Christianity Today has even done a cover story on "The Forgiveness Factor." The cost, of course, is confession, repentance, humility, and truth. But it also makes possible healing. And love. And a new day of the heart.

We are seeing it happen in Rwanda and Burundi. And that makes us know it could happen in America. In the American heart, the American family, and even in the American Church.

Your brother always...Arthur Rouner

The Pilgrim Center for Reconciliation

7001 Cahill Road, Suite 17

Edina, Minnesota 55439-2033

Telephone: (952) 946-6990 Fax: (952) 946-6985

e-mail: pilgrimcenter@pilgrimcenter.org OR rouner@aol.com

Pray for our Center, as it moves in ministry across the world - in broken-hearted Rwanda, tense Burundi, fearful West Pokot - and soon India and its competing religions - to be a power for peace, a ministry whose presence is love, and whose team goes as servants.

Since fall, we have gone north with a team to the Episcopal congregation in Cass Lake. Molly and I have preached at various churches in the Midwest, and we gathered "by the river" with 200 of you at Murphy's Landing. Our Board of Directors has met, generous funds have come forward to support the ministry, and a committed and growing corps of "intercessors" have faithfully prayed for our work. A Roman Catholic priest joined us in our work in Rwanda to begin the building of bridges between Catholics and Protestants there. As before, we watched miracles happen by the mighty power of God. And now, we go again.