Quiet time and devotions normally take place once a day, usually in the morning, and focus on “getting filled up” for the day or on interceding for the needs of others. The Daily Office takes place at least twice a day, and it is not so much about turning to God to get something as it is turning to God to simply be with him.
Sometimes the readings will speak powerfully to where you are. At other times, you may find yourself wanting to skim or skip them. Once again, it’s important to remember that the purpose of the Daily Office is to commune with God, not to get though all the reading!
He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves, and would not allow anyone to carry merchandise through the temple courts.
There is an irony in turning sacred time — time meant for communion with God — into a selling point for productivity tools and networked thought. The money changers in the temple were intermediaries extracting value from worship; networked note-taking tools risk doing the same with contemplation.I have a need of such clearance as the Savior effected in the temple of Jerusalem a riddance of clutter of what is secondary that blocks the way to the all-important central emptiness which is filled with the presence of God alone. — Jean Danielou5
Your love is better than life,
Does the Lord delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obeying the Lord? To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams.
Elaborate effort can become a substitute for obedience — the complexity of the work masking a refusal to do the simple thing being asked.For rebellion is like the sin of divination, and arrogance like the evil of idolatry.
Prayer feeds the soul — as blood is to the body, prayer is to the soul — and it brings you closer to God. It also gives you a clean and pure heart. A clean heart can see God, can speak to God, and can see the love of God in others.
Unclutter my heart, O God, until I am quiet enough to hear you speak out of the silence. Help me in these few moments to stop, to listen, to wait, to be still, and to allow your presence to envelop me.
Nineveh was an ancient site with layer after layer of ruined and unhappy history.
But Tarshish was something else. Tarshish was exotic. Tarshish was adventure… . Tarshish in the biblical references was a “far off and sometimes idealized port.”
In Tarshish we can have a religious career without having to deal with God.
call myself a Christian but then become busy, forgetting about your will and desires.
or like Jacob we can cling desperately to God.
Father, I relate to Jacob in striving, manipulating, scheming, denying, and spinning half- truths to those around me in order to get my way.
Jesus turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”
In perpetual motion I can mistake the flow of my adrenaline for the moving of the Holy Spirit; I can live in the illusion that I am ultimately in control of my destiny and my daily affairs… . French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal observed that most of our human problems come because we don’t know how to sit still in our room for an hour.
today. I offer my anxieties to you now — as best I can. Help me to be still,
Help me, O Lord, to be still and wait patiently for you (Psalm 37:7). I offer to you each of my anxieties and worries this day. Teach me to be prayerfully attentive and to rest in you as I enter into the many activities of this day. In Jesus’ name, amen.
He alone is my rock and my salvation; he is my fortress, I will not be shaken. My salvation and my honor depend on God; he is my mighty rock, my refuge. Trust in him at all times, O people;
The metaphor of “living stones” suggests that the church is not a static institution but a structure built from people — each one load-bearing, each one shaped. The temple is not a building; it is a community in formation.We strain out anything disturbing in order to gain tenuous control of our inner world. We are frightened and ashamed of what leaks into our consciousness. In neglecting our intense emotions, we are false to ourselves and lose a wonderful opportunity to know God. We forget that change comes through brutal honesty and vulnerability before God.12
I live in a society in which crowded schedules and harassed conditions are evidence of importance, so I develop a crowded schedule and harassed conditions. When others notice, they acknowledge my significance, and my vanity is fed. I am busy because I am lazy. I indolently let others decide what I will do instead of resolutely deciding myself. It was a favorite theme of C. S. Lewis that only lazy people work hard.
Busyness is not just a failure of time management — it is a spiritual condition. The craving for significance, for control, for the approval of the world: these are the same impulses that drove the fall. Confronting shortcomings takes more time than ignoring them, but God works at his own pace. Stillness is not inactivity; it is trust that the pace of grace is sufficient.Lord, grant me the grace to do one thing at a time today, without rushing or hurrying. Help me to savor the sacred in all I do, be it large or small.
is weak, vulnerable, and dependent on God and others.
The pressure to present an image of ourselves as strong and spiritually “together” hovers over most of us. We feel guilty for not measuring up, for not making the grade. We forget that all of us are human and frail.
Christ’s power is made perfect only when we are weak.
How might brokenness or weakness in your life today present an opportunity for God’s power to be demonstrated?
Father, the notion of admitting to myself and to others my weaknesses and failures is very difficult.
In AD 500, Augustine wrote: “How can you draw close to God when you are far from your own self?”
In the midst of a mini-revival in the town of Capernaum, Jesus was able to withstand the pressure of everyone looking for him, and to move on to another place.
He also knew his Father, who loved him and had a work for him to complete. In living faithfully to his true self, however, Jesus disappointed a lot of people.
give in to the expectations of others rather than being faithful to what Jesus has for you?
Having taken off Saul’s armor, he went up against the nine-foot Goliath with only his slingshot and a few smooth stones, confident in the living God.
We unconsciously live someone else’s life, or at least someone else’s expectations for us. We are so unaccustomed to being our true self that it can seem impossible to know where to begin.
cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world,
. And I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface. But there is no substance under the things with which I am clothed. I am hollow, and my structure of pleasures and ambitions has no foundation… . And when they are gone there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness.
I am hollow, and my structure of pleasures and ambitions has no foundation… . And when they are gone there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness.16
Lord, grant me the courage of David to resist the temptation to live a life that is not the one you have given to me. Deliver me from the “Goliaths” in front of me, and from the negative voices I hear so often.
My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.
Vocation does not come from a voice “out there” calling me to become something I am not. It comes from a voice “in here” calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God. It is a strange gift, this birthright of self. Accepting it turns out to be even more demanding than attempting to become someone else! I have sometimes responded to that demand by ignoring the gift, or hiding it, or fleeing from it, or squandering it — and I think I am not alone.
Lord, I come this day inviting you to cut those deeply entrenched chains that keep me from being faithful to my true self in Christ.
1.Loving ourselves for our own sake 2.Loving God for his gifts and blessings 3.Loving God for himself alone 4.Loving ourselves for the sake of God
The highest degree of love, for Bernard, was simply that we love ourselves as God loves us — in the same degree, in the same manner, and with the very same love. We love the self that God loves, the essential image and likeness of God in us that has been damaged by sin.
He renounced all possessions to learn detachment; he renounced speech in order to learn compassion; and he renounced activity in order to learn prayer. In the desert, Anthony both discovered God and did intense battle with the devil. When Anthony emerged from his solitude after twenty years, people recognized in him the qualities of an authentic “healthy” man — whole in body, mind, and soul.
Anthony’s renunciations — of possessions, speech, and activity — are often dismissed as distractions from the world. But they were acts of recentering: detachment to learn compassion, silence to learn prayer. The desert was not escape; it was the furnace in which he discovered God and did battle with the devil. What emerged after twenty years was not a mystic withdrawn from reality but a man whole in body, mind, and soul.Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.” Jesus said to him, “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.’”
The devil’s temptation was not about wealth or power as possessions but about allegiance: who you worship, who you serve. The kingdoms offered were a redirect — an attempt to shift Jesus’ identity from one grounded in the Father to one grounded in achievement and control. The question for anyone making or building is the same: not “what do I have?” but “who do I serve?”Solitude is the furnace of transformation. Without solitude we remain victims of our society and continue to be entangled in the illusions of the false self. Jesus himself entered into this furnace. There he was tempted with the three compulsions of the world: to be relevant (“turn stones into loaves”), to be spectacular (“throw yourself down”), and to be powerful (“I will give you all these kingdoms”). There he affirmed God as the only source of his identity (“You must worship the Lord your God and serve him alone”).
What temptations or trials do you find yourself in today that God might be using as a furnace to help develop your interior life?
Lord, help me to turn down the volume of the voices that tell me I have little worth unless I am wealthy, influential, and popular. Grant me the grace today to experience your voice, which tells me: You are “my [child], whom I love; with [you] I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:16). In Jesus’ name, amen.
When I give something I do not possess, I give a false and dangerous gift, a gift that looks like love but is, in reality, loveless — a gift given more from my need to prove myself than from the other’s need to be cared for… .
Burnout is a state of emptiness, to be sure, but it does not result from giving all I have; it merely reveals the nothingness from which I was trying to give in the first place.
to respect yourself in light of your God-given human limits?
Jesus, you know my tendency to say yes to more commitments than I can possibly keep. Help me to embrace the gift of my limits physically, emotionally, and spiritually. And may you, Lord Jesus, be glorified in and through me today. In your name, amen.
The distinction between glorifying God through action and glorifying oneself through capacity. Overcommitment often masquerades as faithfulness but is really self-aggrandizement — proving what one can handle rather than serving what one is called to.At the same time, you came to save me from the poison that flows in my veins, from that which keeps me from your Light.
him. During our five minutes together, I was listening to what he had to say only so that I might turn it into a clever rejoinder. I watched him only so that I might see what effect my remarks were having upon him.
What is most startling in reading this detailed explanation of what was going on beneath the surface of this fifteen-year-old boy, is the recognition that the same dynamics continue for most of us into our twenties, thirties, fifties, seventies, and nineties! We remain trapped in living a pretend life — always seeking the approval of others. True freedom comes when we no longer need to be special in other people’s eyes because we know we are loveable and good enough in Christ.
Grant me courage, Lord, to do today what you have given me to do, to say what you have given me to say, and to become who you have called me to become.
He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom. He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall;
but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.
“That’s the eagle, the king of the birds,” said his neighbor. “He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth — we are chickens.” So the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that’s what he thought he was.25
might you be living as a chicken when God, in reality, has made you an eagle?
Father, you have made me a golden eagle — able to fly. In so many ways, however, I still live as a chicken, unaware of the heights and the richness to which you have called me.
He chose to be mistreated along with the people of God rather than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. He regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as of greater value than the treasures of Egypt, because he was looking ahead to his reward.
After being raised in a wealthy, privileged home, he murdered a man, lost everything, and spent the next forty years of his life in obscurity in the desert. Yet, by faith he “sees him who is invisible” and hears God’s invitation
Help me to discern your hand at work in and through my life,
Discipleship, he made clear, is putting off the sinful patterns of unbelief so that we might put on the choices of faith, being transformed to live as members of Jesus’ family. As we go back to go forward, we find that it is a never-ending process. We go back, breaking some destructive power of the past. Then later, on a deeper level, God has us return to the same issue on a more profound level.
The Spirit intends to investigate our whole life history, layer by layer, throwing out the junk and preserving the values that were appropriate to each stage of our human development… . Eventually, the Spirit begins to dig into the bedrock of our earliest emotional life… . Hence, as we progress toward the center where God actually is waiting for us, we are naturally going to feel that we are getting worse. This warns us that the spiritual journey is not a success story or a career move. It is rather a series of humiliations of the false self.
the layers of my being that hinder my relationships and communion with others.
Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith.
The father [dragged] the son before the local bishop in the hopes that the town’s religious authority could talk some sense into the young man. But the plan backfired. There in front of God and everybody, Francis stripped off his clothing and handed it to his father.
Francis’s act of stripping himself before the bishop was not madness but clarity. He discarded dignity, reputation, and all social boundaries to continue unimpeded in his worship of God. The scandal was not the nakedness but the refusal to honor the claims his father’s wealth had on him. In that moment, he chose the trajectory of worship over the trajectory of inheritance.What would it look like for you to surrender the pains of your past (mistakes, sins, setbacks, and disappointments) to God today?
Most of us resist remembering and feeling the hurt and pain of our past. It can feel like an abyss that might swallow us up. We can wonder if we are only getting worse.
Joseph clearly developed a secret history over a long period of time in his relationship with God. His whole life was structured around following the Lord God of Israel. Then, when the moment came for him to make a critical decision, he was ready. He took leadership of his family — and continued to the end of his days — providing for them financially, emotionally, and spiritually.
What pains in your life are waiting to be acknowledged and grieved?
Søren Kierkegaard once observed that life is lived forward, but only understood backward.
The one worrying thing was that I might not be given time to carry out the whole scheme. I felt as though I was about to fill a space in the world that was meant for me and had long awaited me, a mold, as it were, made for me alone, but discerned by me only this very moment. I was a molten substance, impatient, unendurably impatient, to pour into my mold, to fill it full, without air bubbles or cracks, before I cooled and stiffened… .
There is a paradox in the desire to become: the longing to fill one’s destined shape is so urgent that it becomes rigidity. The very impatience to be defined — to fit the mold — can crowd out the slow, fluid process by which identity actually forms. The desire to solidify works against the patience required to be shaped.Help me to trust you — with the good as well as the difficult, the successes and the failures, the joys and the sorrows of my past. I surrender to your voice that whispers to me, “All is well, and all will be well.”
the words from Exodus 14:14 – 15 — “The Lord will fight for you, you need only to be still” and “move on”
Lord, I can relate to the Israelites in the desert and their desire to return to what is predictable — even if it is miserable. Change is hard.
My heart is not proud, Lord, my eyes are not haughty; I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. But I have calmed and quieted myself, I am like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child I am content.
Considering that David was one of the more powerful people in his day, it is striking how he reminds himself in this psalm to not think too highly of himself.
When I was young, I set out to change the world. When I grew a little older, I perceived that this was too ambitious, so I set out to change my state. This too, I realized as I grew older, was too ambitious, so I set out to change my town. When I realized I could not even do this, I tried to change my family. Now as an old man, I know that I should have started by changing myself.
In Psalm 131:1 David prays: “I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me.” How do you hear these words?
Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability — and that it may take a very long time. And so I think it is with you; your ideas mature gradually — let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste. Don’t try to force them on, as though you could be today what time (that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will) will make of you tomorrow.
Give our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you. And accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.
“The benefit of believing that his hand is leading you” reframes anxiety as a feature of faith, not a failure of it. To feel incomplete and in suspense is not doubt — it is the posture of someone being led somewhere they cannot yet see. The question is whether there is such a thing as godly anxiety: an unease that comes not from lack of faith but from the weight of trusting what is unsearchable.Grant me courage, Father, to embark on the unique journey you have crafted for me. By faith, I surrender my need and desire to be in control of every event, circumstance, and person I will meet today.
Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? If you are not disciplined — and everyone undergoes discipline — then you are not legitimate, not true sons and daughters at all. Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of our spirits and live!
For this reason, John of the Cross wrote that God sends us “the dark night of loving fire” to free us from such deadly spiritual imperfections as pride (being judgmental and impatient with the faults of others), avarice (suffering discontentment), luxury (taking more pleasure in our spiritual blessings than in God himself), wrath (becoming easily irritated or impatient), spiritual gluttony (resisting the cross), spiritual envy (always comparing ourselves to others), and sloth (running from what is hard).39
Lord, I invite you this day to cut any unhealthy attachments or idols out of me. You promise in Psalm 32 to teach me the way to go. Help me not to be stubborn like a mule, but rather to be cooperative as you seek to lead me to freedom.
the angel of the Lord called out to him from heaven, “Abraham! Abraham!” “Here I am,” he replied. “Do not lay a hand on the boy,” he said. “Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.”
Abraham appears to have gone through the wall numerous times in his journey with God. Why? Thomas Merton explains, “Unintentionally and unknowingly we fall back into imperfections. Bad habits are like living roots that return. These roots must be dug away and cleared from the garden of our soul… . This requires the direct intervention of God.”
How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! “Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?”
call “holy unknowing” or mystery. This expands our capacity to wait on God when everything inside us is saying, “Do something!”
Forgive me, Father, for at times treating you as if you were my personal assistant or secretary. Your ways are unsearchable and beyond understanding. Help me to put my trust in you and not in my circumstances.
The drive to build personal knowledge tools — systems that self-organize one’s circumstances — runs into the theological claim that God’s ways are unsearchable. If knowledge management is an attempt to make life legible, there is a tension: at what point does the system designed to create clarity foreclose the space where mystery is supposed to operate? The tool that makes everything navigable may also eliminate the room God needs to work. pkmYou asked, ‘Who is this that obscures my counsel without knowledge?’ Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know.
Now, believe it or not, we are threatened by such a free God because it takes away all of our ability to control or engineer the process. It leaves us powerless, and changes the language from any language of performance or achievement to that of surrender, trust and vulnerability… . That is the so-called “wildness” of God. We cannot control God by any means whatsoever, not even by our good behavior, which tends to be our first and natural instinct… . That utter and absolute freedom of God is fortunately used totally in our favor, even though we are still afraid of it. It is called providence, forgiveness, free election or mercy… . But to us, it feels like wildness — precisely because we cannot control it, manipulate it, direct it, earn it or lose it. Anyone into controlling God by his or her actions will feel very useless, impotent and ineffective. — Richard Rohr42
Henri Nouwen observed that words are instruments of performance — used to demonstrate competence, to control a conversation, to make oneself legible. The instinct in God’s presence is the same: to articulate rather than to understand, to name the experience rather than inhabit it. This is the fear of God’s “wildness” — not that it is dangerous, but that it cannot be narrated into submission.The Bible presents David as a man after God’s own heart, yet the preceding Scripture reading shows us that David’s emotional world was very human and broken.
In Paradise Lost, John Milton compares the evil of history to a compost pile — a mixture of decaying substances such as animal excrement, potato skins, egg shells, dead leaves, and banana peels. If you cover it with dirt, after some time it smells wonderful. The soil has become a rich, natural fertilizer and is tremendously well suited for growing fruits and vegetables — but you have to be willing to wait — years, in some cases.
Powerlessness and humility in the spiritual life do not refer to people who have no spine and who let everyone make decisions for them. They refer to people who are so deeply in love with Jesus that they are ready to follow him wherever he guides them, always trusting that, with him, they will find life and find it abundantly.
Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.
Until other people become shadows to us, clouds and darkness will be ours every once in a while. Is our relationship with God becoming more simple than it has ever been?
You may want to use the following prayer found on an unknown soldier in Gettysburg to help you embrace God’s response when he says yes or no in your journey with him: I asked God for strength that I might achieve, I was made weak that I might learn to obey. I asked for health that I might do great things. I was given infirmity that I might do better things. I asked for riches that I might be happy; I was given poverty that I might be wise. I asked for power when I was young that I might have the praise of men; I was given weakness that I might feel the need for God. I asked for all things that I might enjoy life; I was given life that I might enjoy all things. Almost despite myself, my unspoken prayers were answered. I am, among all people, most richly blessed.
Lord, I relate to Peter’s headstrong nature, and to his struggle to understand what you were telling him. It is difficult for me to understand how you are running the universe and my place in it.
Teach me to wait on you. Help me to trust you. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Grant me the courage to follow you all the way to the cross, whatever that might mean for my life. And then, by your grace, lead me to resurrection life and power.
Sorrow took up permanent residence in my soul and enlarged it… . One learns the pain of others by suffering one’s own pain, by turning inside oneself, by finding one’s own soul.
Prayer Father, when I think about my losses, it can feel like I have no skin to protect me. I feel raw, scraped to the bone.
Suffering reduces us to nothing and as Soren Kierkegaard noted, “God creates everything out of nothing. And everything which God is to use, he first reduces to nothing.” To be reduced to nothing is to be dragged to the foot of the cross. It’s a severe mercy. When suffering forces us to our knees at the foot of Calvary, we die to self. We cannot kneel there for long without releasing our pride and anger, unclasping our dreams and desires… . In exchange, God imparts power and implants new and lasting hope.
Lord, everything in me kicks against going to the foot of the cross where you will root out of me all that is not of you. Help me not to fear the “deaths” it will take for me to be transformed into a free person who loves you and others well. Have mercy on me, O Lord. In Jesus’ name, amen.
When peace, like a river, attendeth my way, When sorrows like sea-billows roll, Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say, It is well, it is well, with my soul. Though Satan should buffet, though trials should come, Let this blessed assurance control, That Christ hath regarded my helpless estate, And hath shed His own blood for my soul.50
Hymns like “It Is Well” became durable because they passed through a narrow channel — limited access meant a song had to earn its place in communal memory. In an age of infinite curation, where access to worship music is frictionless, the question is whether anything can accumulate the same weight. Greater access may dilute the conditions that allowed a song to illuminate truth for an entire generation. ecology-of-technologyFather, I can only bow to you before such unimaginable loss and suffering. I join with Spafford and pray to you: “Whatever my lot, Thou has taught me to say, It is well, it is well, with my soul.” In your Son’s name, amen.
On the surface it seemed that life was lessening, but silently and lavishly the seeds of new life were always being sown.
“He must become greater; I must become less” (John 3:30).
Yet a part of us hates limits. We won’t accept them. This is one of the primary reasons that biblically grieving our losses is such an indispensable part of spiritual maturity.
Lord, forgive me for the arrogance that sees interruptions to my plans as alien invasions. Forgive me for constantly trying to do more than you intend with my life.
We’re mortals, after all. We and everyone around are scheduled for death (mortis). Get used to it. Take up your cross. It prepares us and those around us for resurrection.
The rhythms of mortality — taking up the cross, accepting limitation — are not in service of earthly flourishing. They orient toward the eternal. And this orientation is communal: preparing for resurrection also prepares those around us.C. S. Lewis said that “we should bring to God what is in us, not what ought to be in us.” The “oughts” will keep us from telling the truth. They will also keep us from feeling the truth. Especially the truth about our pain… . When Jesus realized the nearness of His own death, He went to a quiet place and prayed… . We are told that He agonized with “loud crying and tears” (Heb. 5:7). We are also told that He fell to the ground, where He prayed fervently and sweated profusely (Luke 22:44).
Abba Father, I admit that I am often afraid and embarrassed to openly tell you all that is going on inside me — even though I know you know it all anyway.
The capacity to grieve is almost lost in our culture. People use work, TV, drugs, alcohol, shopping, food binges, busyness, sexual escapades, unhealthy relationships, and even serving others at church — anything — to medicate the pain of life. Year after year we deny and avoid the difficulties and losses of life, the rejections and frustrations. When a loss enters our life we become angry at God and treat it as an alien invasion from outer space.
In what ways are you tempted to spin or cover over your losses and miss God’s deeper work in you?
Lord, I acknowledge that I prefer to ignore and deny my pain and loss. I struggle with seeing how resurrection life can come out of death.
Most of these unnumbered seeds perish and are lost, because men are not prepared to receive them: for such seeds as these cannot spring up anywhere except in the good soil of freedom, spontaneity and love.
But every expression of the will of God is in some sense a “word” of God and therefore a “seed” of new life. The ever-changing reality in the midst of which we live should awaken us to the possibility of an uninterrupted dialogue with God… . We must learn to realize that the love of God seeks us in every situation, and seeks our good.
Achievement in the spiritual life is often misattributed to dramatic encounters with the Spirit rather than to the quiet seeds that sprout when busyness relents. The communal nature of faith presents a choice: to do, achieve, and seek — or to be receptive enough that the Spirit can work through the ordinary.More than all things love silence: it brings you a fruit that tongue cannot describe.
If we refuse rest until we are finished, we will never rest until we die. Sabbath dissolves the artificial urgency of our days, because it liberates us from the need to be finished… .
“Unless one learns how to relish the taste of Sabbath while still in this world, unless one is initiated in the appreciation of eternal life, one will be unable to enjoy the taste of eternity in the world to come.” We are simply naïve if we think that having wasted or squandered the many good gifts of this creation, we will not do the same with the gifts of heaven.
The goodness of earthly gifts — the delight they bring, the “glimpses of heaven” — can become the very engine that drives people past Sabbath. The more good the gifts, the harder the temptation to toil for more of them, and the more invisible the loss of rest becomes. Sabbath is cast aside not by indifference to God’s gifts but by overvaluing them.As long as we are working hard, using our gifts to serve others, experiencing joy in our work along with the toil, we are always in danger of believing that our actions trigger God’s love for us. Only in stopping, really stopping, do we teach our hearts and souls that we are loved apart from what we do.
“Master,” said John, “we saw someone driving out demons in your name and we tried to stop him, because he is not one of us.” “Do not stop him,” Jesus said, “for whoever is not against you is for you.”
We often forget that the people Jesus chose to form the leadership of his church were neither spiritually nor emotionally mature. Like us, they had a great deal to learn.
This ability to really listen and pay attention to people was at the very heart of Jesus’ mission, and it could not help but move him to compassion. In the same way, out of our contemplative time with God, we too are invited to be prayerfully present to people, revealing their beauty to them.
As Henri Nouwen has written: I have to kneel before the Father, put my ear against his chest and listen, without interruption, to the heartbeat of God. Then, and only then, can I say carefully and very gently what I hear. I know now that I have to speak from eternity into time, from the lasting joy into the passing realities of our short existence in this world, from the house of love into the houses of fear, from God’s abode into the dwellings of human beings.69
I must first be still to myself if I am to be still with another. And, of course, I must learn to be still before God if I am to learn to be still in myself. Presence begins with a still place within one’s self. If I have no such still inner place, I cannot really be present for others. — David Benner70
Lord, I am often overwhelmed by the needs of the world around me. Thank you that you are responsible for the world, and I am not. Help me to see the individual today — the “one, one, one” — so that the words and actions that flow from my life might reflect your life. In Jesus’ name, amen.
the healthiest or maturest relationship possible between two human beings as an “I-Thou” relationship. In such a relationship, I recognize that I am made in the image of God, and so is every other person. This makes them a “Thou” to me. They have dignity and worth, and are to be treated with respect.
In most of our human relationships, however, we treat people as objects — as an “it.” In an “I-It” relationship, I treat you as a means to an end — as I might a toothbrush or a car. I talk to people in order to get something off my chest, not to be with them as separate individuals. I talk about people — authority figures, people in the news, and so on — as if they were subhuman. I get frustrated when people don’t conform to my plans or see things the way I do. The priest and the Levite did not make the connection that emotional maturity (loving well) and loving God are inseparable.
Love springs from awareness. It is only inasmuch as you see someone as he or she really is here and now and not as they are in your memory or your desire or in your imagination or projection that you can truly love them, otherwise it is not the person that you love but the idea that you have formed of this person, or this person as the object of your desire not as he or she is in themselves. Therefore the first act of love is to see this person or this object, this reality as it truly is.
Jesus asks, “Do you love me?” We ask, “Can we sit at your right hand and your left hand in your kingdom?” (Matthew 20:21). Ever since the snake said, “The day you eat of this tree your eyes will be open and you will be like gods, knowing good from evil” (Genesis 3:5), we have been tempted to replace love with power.
Many of us have no trouble at all dispensing advice or pointing out the wrongdoings of others. We don’t tend to allow others to be themselves before God or move at their own pace. Instead, we project onto them our own discomfort with their choice to live life differently than we do. The result is that we end up eliminating them in our minds, either trying to make them like us, or falling into a “who cares?” indifference.
I must see the extensive damage sin has done to every part of who I am — emotion, intellect, body, will, and spirit
Is there someone God is calling you to stop judging? What might it look like to bless and extend mercy to them?
Grace in its simplest form may be the discipline of withholding opinion — not because the opinion doesn’t exist, but because extending mercy requires making room for another person’s pace with God.
