becoming, day 7

Come to Stillness:

Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before God.

Opening Prayer:

God of our creation and re-creation, you who are constantly at work to shape me in the wholeness of Christ, you know the hardness of the structures of my being that resist your shaping touch. You know the deep inner rigidities of my being that reject your changing grace. By your grace soften my hardness and rigidity; help me to become pliable in your hands. Even as I pray this, may there be a melting of my innate resistance to your transforming love. Amen. (Invitation to a Journey by M. Robert Mulholland Jr.)

Psalm for the Week: Psalm 37

Scripture for the Day: Ephesians 4:17-5:2

Reading for Reflection:

We die; indeed we have to die in order to be resurrected, restored and renewed.  We die and we die and we die in this life, not only physically—within seven years every cell in your body is renewed—but emotionally and spiritually as change seizes us by the scruff of the neck and drags us forward into another life.  We are not here simply to exist.  We are here in order to become. (Absolute Truths by Susan Howatch)

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...
Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be.
Give our Lord the benefit of believing that His hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete. 

~Teilhard de Chardin

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: May the Mind of Christ, My Savior

May the mind of Christ, my Savior,
Live in me from day to day,
By His love and power controlling
All I do and say.
May the Word of God dwell richly
In my heart from hour to hour,
So that all may see I triumph
Only through His power.

May the peace of God, my Father,
Rule my life in everything.
That I may be calm to comfort
Sick and sorrowing

May the love of Jesus fill me,
As the waters fill the sea;
Him exalting, self-abasing
This is victory.

Closing Prayer:
Father, forgive us when we think that life is more about what we are doing than about who we are becoming. Help us to remember that more than anything else you want our hearts. Allow us to give them to you fully, that we might receive yours in return; changing us more into the likeness your Son Jesus. In His name we pray. Amen. (JLB)

becoming, day 6

Come to Stillness:

Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before God.

Opening Prayer:

God of our creation and re-creation, you who are constantly at work to shape me in the wholeness of Christ, you know the hardness of the structures of my being that resist your shaping touch. You know the deep inner rigidities of my being that reject your changing grace. By your grace soften my hardness and rigidity; help me to become pliable in your hands. Even as I pray this, may there be a melting of my innate resistance to your transforming love. Amen. (Invitation to a Journey by M. Robert Mulholland Jr.)

Psalm for the Week: Psalm 37

Scripture for the Day: Matthew 5:1-16

Reading for Reflection:

The man who has struggled to purify himself and has had nothing but repeated failures will experience real relief when he stops tinkering with his soul and looks away to the perfect One.  While he looks at Christ, the very things he has so long been trying to do will be getting done within him.  It will be God working in him to will and to do. (Pursuit of God by A. W. Tozer)

Love changes us in ways that the law cannot.  Spiritual formation, a term used to describe the process of being changed into the image of Christ, doesn’t happen by following disciplines.  It happens by falling in love.  When we fall in love with Jesus, all the other loves in our life fall into place.  And those that once competed with Christ now subordinate themselves to him.  Everything in our life finds its proper value once we have properly valued him. (The Divine Embrace by Ken Gire)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: May the Mind of Christ, My Savior

May the mind of Christ, my Savior,
Live in me from day to day,
By His love and power controlling
All I do and say.
May the Word of God dwell richly
In my heart from hour to hour,
So that all may see I triumph
Only through His power.

May the peace of God, my Father,
Rule my life in everything.
That I may be calm to comfort
Sick and sorrowing

May the love of Jesus fill me,
As the waters fill the sea;
Him exalting, self-abasing
This is victory.

Closing Prayer:
Father, forgive us when we think that life is more about what we are doing than about who we are becoming. Help us to remember that more than anything else you want our hearts. Allow us to give them to you fully, that we might receive yours in return; changing us more into the likeness your Son Jesus. In His name we pray. Amen. (JLB)

becoming, day 5

Come to Stillness:

Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before God.

Opening Prayer:

God of our creation and re-creation, you who are constantly at work to shape me in the wholeness of Christ, you know the hardness of the structures of my being that resist your shaping touch. You know the deep inner rigidities of my being that reject your changing grace. By your grace soften my hardness and rigidity; help me to become pliable in your hands. Even as I pray this, may there be a melting of my innate resistance to your transforming love. Amen. (Invitation to a Journey by M. Robert Mulholland Jr.)

Psalm for the Week: Psalm 37

Scripture for the Day: Jeremiah 18:1-6

Reading for Reflection:

Souls are like wax waiting for a seal.  By themselves they have no special identity.  Their destiny is to be softened and prepared in this life, by God’s will, to receive, at their death, the seal of their own degree of likeness to God in Christ.  And this is what it means, among other things, to be judged by Christ.

     The wax that has melted in God’s will can easily receive the stamp of its identity, the truth of what it was meant to be.  But the wax that is hard and dry and brittle and without love will not take the seal: for the hard seal, descending upon it, grinds it to powder.

     Therefore if you spend your life trying to escape from the heat of the fire that is meant to soften and prepare you to become your true self, and if you try to keep your substance from melting in the fire—as if your true identity were to be hard wax—the seal will fall upon you at last and crush you.  You will not be able to take your own true name and countenance, and you will be destroyed by the event that was meant to be your fulfillment. (New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: May the Mind of Christ, My Savior

May the mind of Christ, my Savior,
Live in me from day to day,
By His love and power controlling
All I do and say.
May the Word of God dwell richly
In my heart from hour to hour,
So that all may see I triumph
Only through His power.

May the peace of God, my Father,
Rule my life in everything.
That I may be calm to comfort
Sick and sorrowing

May the love of Jesus fill me,
As the waters fill the sea;
Him exalting, self-abasing
This is victory.

Closing Prayer:
Father, forgive us when we think that life is more about what we are doing than about who we are becoming. Help us to remember that more than anything else you want our hearts. Allow us to give them to you fully, that we might receive yours in return; changing us more into the likeness your Son Jesus. In His name we pray. Amen. (JLB)

becoming, day 4

Come to Stillness:

Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before God.

Opening Prayer:

God of our creation and re-creation, you who are constantly at work to shape me in the wholeness of Christ, you know the hardness of the structures of my being that resist your shaping touch. You know the deep inner rigidities of my being that reject your changing grace. By your grace soften my hardness and rigidity; help me to become pliable in your hands. Even as I pray this, may there be a melting of my innate resistance to your transforming love. Amen. (Invitation to a Journey by M. Robert Mulholland Jr.)

Psalm for the Week: Psalm 37

Scripture for the Day: Isaiah 29:13-16

Reading for Reflection:

Eustace was silent for so long that Edmund thought he was fainting; but at last he said’ “It’s all right now.  Could we go and talk somewhere?  I don’t want to meet the others just yet.”

     “Yes, rather, anywhere you like,” said Edmund.  “We can go and sit on the rocks over there.  I say, I am glad to see you—er—looking yourself again.  You must have had a pretty beastly time.”

     They went to the rocks and sat down looking out across the bay while the sky got paler and paler and the stars disappeared except for one bright one low down and near the horizon.

     “I won’t tell you how I became a—a dragon till I can tell the others and get it all over,” said Eustace.  “By the way, I didn’t even know it was a dragon till I heard you all using the word when I turned up here the other morning.  I want to tell you how I stopped being one.”

     “Fire ahead,” said Edmund.

     “Well, last night I was more miserable than ever.  And that beastly arm-ring was hurting like anything—“

     “Is that all right now?”

     Eustace laughed—a different laugh from any Edmund had heard him give before—and slipped the bracelet easily off his arm.  “There it is,” he said, “and anyone who likes can have it as far as I’m concerned.  Well, as I say, I was lying awake and wondering what on earth would become of me.  And then—but, mind you, it may have been all a dream.  I don’t know.”

     “Go on,” said Edmund, with considerable patience.

“Well, anyway, I looked up and saw the very last thing I expected: a huge lion coming slowly toward me.  And one queer thing was that there was no moon last night, but there was moonlight where the lion was.  So it came nearer and nearer.  I was terribly afraid of it.  You may think that, being a dragon, I could have knocked any lion out easily enough.  But it wasn’t that kind of fear.  I wasn’t afraid of it eating me, I was just afraid of it—if you can understand.  Well, it came close up to me and looked straight into my eyes.  And I shut my eyes tight.  But that wasn’t any good because it told me to follow it.”

     “You mean it spoke?”

     “I don’t know.  Now that you mention it, I don’t think it did.  But it told me all the same.  And I knew I’d have to do what it told me, so I got up and followed it.  And it led me a long way into the mountains.  And there was always this moonlight over and round the lion wherever we went.  So at last we came to the top of a mountain I’d never seen before and on top of this mountain there was a garden—trees and fruit and everything.  In the middle of it there was a well.

     “I knew it was a well because you could see the water bubbling up from the bottom of it: but it was bigger than most wells—like a very big, round bath with marble steps going down into it.  The water was as clear as anything and I thought if I could get in there and bathe it would ease the pain in my leg.  But the lion told me I must undress first.  Mind you, I don’t know if he said any words out loud or not.

     “I was going to say that I couldn’t undress because I hadn’t any clothes on when I suddenly thought that dragons are snaky sort of things and snakes can cast their skins.  Oh, of course, thought I, that’s what the lion means.  So I started scratching myself and scales began coming off all over the place.  And then I scratched a little deeper and, instead of just scales coming off here and there, my whole skin started peeling off beautifully, like it does after an illness, or as if I was a banana.  In a minute or two I just stepped out of it.  I could see it lying there beside me, looking rather nasty.  It was a most lovely feeling.  So I started to go down into the well for my bathe.

     “But just as I was going to put my feet into the water I looked down and saw that they were all hard and rough and wrinkled and scaly just as they had been before.  Oh, that’s all right, said I, it only means I had another smaller suit on underneath the first one, and I’ll have to get out of it too.  So I scratched and tore again and this underskin peeled off beautifully and out I stepped and left it lying beside the other one and went down to the well for my bathe.

     “Well exactly the same thing happened again.  And I thought to myself, oh dear, how ever many skins have I got to take off?  For I was longing to bathe my leg.  So I scratched away for the third time and got off a third skin, just like the two others, and stepped out of it.  But as soon as I looked at myself in the water I knew it had been no good.

     “Then the lion said—but I don’t know if it spoke—‘You will have to let me undress you.’ I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty near desperate now.  So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it.

     “The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart.  And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt.  The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off.  You know—if you’ve ever picked a scab of a sore place.  It hurts like billy-oh but it is such fun to see it coming away.”

     “I know exactly what you mean,” said Edmund.

     “Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off—just as I thought I’d done it myself the other three times, only they hadn’t hurt—and there it was lying on the grass: only ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly-looking than the others had been.  Then he caught hold of me—I didn’t like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I’d no skin on—and threw me into the water.  It smarted like anything but only for a moment.  After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone from my arm.  And then I saw why.  I’d turned into a boy again.  You’d think me simply phony if I told you how I felt about my own arms.  I know they’ve no muscle and are pretty mouldy compared with Caspian’s, but I was so glad to see them.

     “After a bit the lion took me out and dressed me—“

     “Dressed you.  With his paws?”

     “Well I don’t exactly remember that bit.  But he did somehow or other: in new clothes—the same I’ve got on now, as a matter of fact.  And then suddenly I was back here.  Which is what makes me think it must have been a dream.”

     “No, it wasn’t a dream,” said Edmund.

     “Why not?”

     “Well, there are the clothes, for one thing.  And you have been—well, un-dragoned, for another.”

     “What do you think it was then?” asked Eustace.

     “I think you’ve seen Aslan,” said Edmund.

(Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C. S. Lewis)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: May the Mind of Christ, My Savior

May the mind of Christ, my Savior,
Live in me from day to day,
By His love and power controlling
All I do and say.
May the Word of God dwell richly
In my heart from hour to hour,
So that all may see I triumph
Only through His power.

May the peace of God, my Father,
Rule my life in everything.
That I may be calm to comfort
Sick and sorrowing

May the love of Jesus fill me,
As the waters fill the sea;
Him exalting, self-abasing
This is victory.

Closing Prayer:
Father, forgive us when we think that life is more about what we are doing than about who we are becoming. Help us to remember that more than anything else you want our hearts. Allow us to give them to you fully, that we might receive yours in return; changing us more into the likeness your Son Jesus. In His name we pray. Amen. (JLB)

becoming, day 3

Come to Stillness:

Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before God.

Opening Prayer:

God of our creation and re-creation, you who are constantly at work to shape me in the wholeness of Christ, you know the hardness of the structures of my being that resist your shaping touch. You know the deep inner rigidities of my being that reject your changing grace. By your grace soften my hardness and rigidity; help me to become pliable in your hands. Even as I pray this, may there be a melting of my innate resistance to your transforming love. Amen. (Invitation to a Journey by M. Robert Mulholland Jr.)

Psalm for the Week: Psalm 37

Scripture for the Day: 2 Corinthians 3:1-18

Reading for Reflection:

     The journey between the dreaming and the coming true is a journey made on holy ground.  It is a journey made through silence and longing where, if we will listen, we can hear the whisper of the Dreamer echoing deep within us, calling us to become what the Dreamer sees when our names were first whispered: saints who believe in and pay attention for and recognize the Voice; saints who live our lives in joy and confidence and hope rather than judgment and anxiety and desperation; saints whose hours and days and lives are spent carrying people to the Christ, lending each other a hand when one has fallen, slipping along the river that brings joy to the heart of God, carrying God’s peace and love and presence and life to those we meet along the way.

     That is what we have been sent here to do.  And we will.  The Dreamer’s dream will always come true. (Between the Dreaming and the Coming True by Robert Benson)


Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: May the Mind of Christ, My Savior

May the mind of Christ, my Savior,
Live in me from day to day,
By His love and power controlling
All I do and say.

May the Word of God dwell richly
In my heart from hour to hour,
So that all may see I triumph
Only through His power.

May the peace of God, my Father,
Rule my life in everything.
That I may be calm to comfort
Sick and sorrowing

May the love of Jesus fill me,
As the waters fill the sea;
Him exalting, self-abasing
This is victory.

Closing Prayer:
Father, forgive us when we think that life is more about what we are doing than about who we are becoming. Help us to remember that more than anything else you want our hearts. Allow us to give them to you fully, that we might receive yours in return; changing us more into the likeness your Son Jesus. In His name we pray. Amen. (JLB)

becoming, day 2

Come to Stillness:

Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before God.

Opening Prayer:

God of our creation and re-creation, you who are constantly at work to shape me in the wholeness of Christ, you know the hardness of the structures of my being that resist your shaping touch. You know the deep inner rigidities of my being that reject your changing grace. By your grace soften my hardness and rigidity; help me to become pliable in your hands. Even as I pray this, may there be a melting of my innate resistance to your transforming love. Amen. (Invitation to a Journey by M. Robert Mulholland Jr.)

Psalm for the Week: Psalm 37

Scripture for the Day: Galatians 5:16-26

Reading for Reflection:

     When we are younger and are wrestling with choices about the future, we are very often asked, and ask ourselves:  “What are you going to do when you grow up?”  It is the wrong question.  What we are going to do is not who we are.

     When it was time for me to make choices, I should have been wrestling with another question.  I should have been asking, “Who am I going to be when I grow up?”  What I then went on to do with that should have been a reflection of who I was to be, a reflection of the word that was whispered into me.  I should have been looking for work to do that would sustain and nurture who I am (who I be, if you will).  I was then, and am still, the only person on earthy who has any clue at all what was whispered into me in the depths of my mother’s womb.  Everyone else is just guessing, and their guesses are a lot less well informed than mine.  God whispered the word Robert into me, and no one else.  If I can not hear that word, no one can.  If I do not hear that word, no one will.  If I do hear it and fail to act upon it, no one will be the word called Robert that God spoke.

     Rabbi Zusya, one of the great wisdom teachers of the Hebrew tradition, once said, “In the world to come I shall not be asked: Why were you not Moses?  I shall be asked: Why were you not Zusya?”

     The will of the One who sent us is that we be the one who was sent.  What we do is meant to be lived out of the context of discovering and becoming the person we are.

     If enough of us were to ungarble our words, perhaps God’s story might be more clearly heard and understood.  Perhaps the song that God sings into the wind that whispers all around us in the trees would be on more lips and taught more children.  My friend Russell Montfort once remarked that he suspects that “we die with half our music left in us.”  Maybe we do not know the words to our own song.

     And it is not just our own little melody that suffers; the whole chorus is not as good.  If you leave out enough of the words, even the Song of the whole universe will sound funny.

     The Song needs my word.  It is not the same song without it.  And I am the only one who has ever heard it, the only one who can ever listen to its echo deep inside and know whether or not the life that I am living—what I am doing with my hours and days and work and other selves to love—rhymes with it, and sings it clearly at all. (Between the Dreaming and the Coming True by Robert Benson)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: May the Mind of Christ, My Savior

May the mind of Christ, my Savior,
Live in me from day to day,
By His love and power controlling
All I do and say.

 

May the Word of God dwell richly
In my heart from hour to hour,
So that all may see I triumph
Only through His power.

 

May the peace of God, my Father,
Rule my life in everything.
That I may be calm to comfort
Sick and sorrowing

 

May the love of Jesus fill me,
As the waters fill the sea;
Him exalting, self-abasing
This is victory.

 

Closing Prayer:
Father, forgive us when we think that life is more about what we are doing than about who we are becoming. Help us to remember that more than anything else you want our hearts. Allow us to give them to you fully, that we might receive yours in return; changing us more into the likeness your Son Jesus. In His name we pray. Amen. (JLB)

becoming, day 1

Come to Stillness:

Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before God.

Opening Prayer:

God of our creation and re-creation, you who are constantly at work to shape me in the wholeness of Christ, you know the hardness of the structures of my being that resist your shaping touch.  You know the deep inner rigidities of my being that reject your changing grace.  By your grace soften my hardness and rigidity; help me to become pliable in your hands.  Even as I pray this, may there be a melting of my innate resistance to your transforming love.  Amen. (Invitation to a Journey by M. Robert Mulholland Jr.)

Psalm for the Week: Psalm 37

Scripture for the Day: Romans 12:1-21

Reading for Reflection:

The desire for transformation lies deep in every human heart.  This is why people enter therapy, join health clubs, get into recovery groups, read self-help books, attend motivational seminars, and make New Year’s resolutions.  The possibility of transformation is the essence of hope.  Psychologist Aaron Beck says that the single belief most toxic to a relationship is the belief that the other person cannot change.

     This little word morph has a long history.  It actually comes from one of the richest Greek words in the New Testament, and in a sense this little word is the foundation of this whole book.  Morphoo means “the inward and real formation of the essential nature of a person.”  It was a term used to describe the formation and growth of an embryo in a mother’s body.

     Paul used this word in his letter to the Galatians: “…until Christ is formed in you.”  He agonized until Christ should be born in those people, until they should express his character and goodness in their whole being.  Paul said they—like us—are in a kind of spiritual gestation process.  We are pregnant with possibilities of spiritual growth and moral beauty so great that they cannot be adequately described as anything less than the formation of Christ in our very lives.

     Paul used another form of this word when he told the Christians in Rome that God had predestined them to be “conformed to the image of his Son.”  This word, summorphizo, means to have the same form as another, to shape a thing into a durable likeness.  Spiritual growth is a molding process: We are to be to Christ as an image is to the original.

     Still another form of the word appears in Romans when Paul says we are not to be conformed to the world around us but “transformed by the renewing of your minds.”  This word is metamorphoo, from which comes the English word metamorphosis.  A creeping caterpillar is transformed into a soaring butterfly—yet as the children of God we are to undergo a change that makes that one barely noticeable.

     When morphing happens, I don’t just do the things Jesus would have done; I find myself wanting to do them.  They appeal to me.  They make sense.  I don’t just go around trying to do right things; I become the right sort of person. (The Life You’ve Always Wanted by John Ortberg)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: May the Mind of Christ, My Savior

May the mind of Christ, my Savior,
Live in me from day to day,
By His love and power controlling
All I do and say.

May the Word of God dwell richly
In my heart from hour to hour,
So that all may see I triumph
Only through His power.

May the peace of God, my Father,
Rule my life in everything.
That I may be calm to comfort
Sick and sorrowing.

May the love of Jesus fill me,
As the waters fill the sea;
Him exalting, self-abasing
This is victory.
 

Closing Prayer:
Father, forgive us when we think that life is more about what we are doing than about who we are becoming.  Help us to remember that more than anything else you want our hearts.  Allow us to give them to you fully, that we might receive yours in return; changing us more into the likeness your Son Jesus.  In His name we pray.  Amen.  (JLB)

between, day 7

Come to Stillness:

Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before God.

Opening Prayer:

O Lord, our God, so much of this life is lived in between; between the now and the not yet, between arriving and departing, between birth and death and rebirth, between growing up and growing old, between questions and answers. Help us not to live only for some distant day when the in between will be no more, but help us to step into the mystery of that sacred space here and now—knowing that it will be a place of genuine change and true transformation. (JLB)

Psalm for the Week: Psalm 46

Scripture for the Day: Jeremiah 6:16

Reading for Reflection:

Waiting as we see it in people on the first pages of the Gospel, is waiting with a sense of promise.  “Zechariah, your wife Elizabeth is to bear you a son.”  “Mary, Listen!  You are to conceive and bear a son” (Luke 1:13, 31).  People who wait have received a promise that allows them to wait.  They have received something that is at work in them, like a seed that has started to grow.  This is very important.  We can only really wait if what we are waiting for has already begun for us.  So waiting is never a movement from nothing to something.  It is always a movement from something to something more.  Zechariah, Mary, and Elizabeth were living with a promise that nurtured them, that fed them, and that made them able to stay where they were.  And in this way, the promise itself could grow in them and for them. (A Spirituality of Waiting by Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Weavings Reader

This life, therefore, is not righteousness, but growth in righteousness, not health but healing, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise.  We are not yet what we shall be, but we are growing toward it; the process is not finished but it is going on.  This is not the end but it is the road; all does not yet gleam in glory but all is being purified.
                                                                                   ~Martin Luther


Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: Cleft of the Mountain

I will run to the cleft of the mountain and wait for You
Will you come and meet with me?
I will wait in the cleft of the mountain for You to pass by
Will you come and meet with me?

Oh, what a joy it would be
Just for a moment to lay at the feet of the Lord
Oh more than anything that’s what I long for
Oh, what a change it would bring
Just to look deep in the face of the King Who gave all
You gave everything so You could meet with me
Will You meet with me?

Closing Prayer:
Lord Jesus, Help me to trust you fully in the midst of this life that seems so chaotic and unsure at times. Give me, this day, a firm place to set my feet as I walk toward you through this ever-changing world. Amen. (JLB)

between, day 6

Come to Stillness:

Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before God.

Opening Prayer:

O Lord, our God, so much of this life is lived in between; between the now and the not yet, between arriving and departing, between birth and death and rebirth, between growing up and growing old, between questions and answers. Help us not to live only for some distant day when the in between will be no more, but help us to step into the mystery of that sacred space here and now—knowing that it will be a place of genuine change and true transformation. (JLB)

Psalm for the Week: Psalm 46

Scripture for the Day: Psalm 84:1-12

Reading for Reflection:

Waiting is not a very popular attitude.  Waiting is not something that people think about with great sympathy.  In fact, most people consider waiting a waste of time.  Perhaps this is because the culture in which we live is basically saying, “Get going!  Do something!  Show you are able to make a difference!  Don’t just sit there and wait!”  For many people, waiting is an awful desert between where they are and where they want to go.  And people do not like such a place.  They want to get out of it by doing something. (A Spirituality of Waiting by Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Weavings Reader)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: Cleft of the Mountain

I will run to the cleft of the mountain and wait for You
Will you come and meet with me?
I will wait in the cleft of the mountain for You to pass by
Will you come and meet with me?

Oh, what a joy it would be
Just for a moment to lay at the feet of the Lord
Oh more than anything that’s what I long for
Oh, what a change it would bring
Just to look deep in the face of the King Who gave all
You gave everything so You could meet with me
Will You meet with me?

Closing Prayer:
Lord Jesus, Help me to trust you fully in the midst of this life that seems so chaotic and unsure at times. Give me, this day, a firm place to set my feet as I walk toward you through this ever-changing world. Amen. (JLB)

between, day 5

Come to Stillness:

Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before God.

Opening Prayer:

O Lord, our God, so much of this life is lived in between; between the now and the not yet, between arriving and departing, between birth and death and rebirth, between growing up and growing old, between questions and answers. Help us not to live only for some distant day when the in between will be no more, but help us to step into the mystery of that sacred space here and now—knowing that it will be a place of genuine change and true transformation. (JLB)

Psalm for the Week: Psalm 46

Scripture for the Day: 2 Timothy 4:1-8

Reading for Reflection:

The Christian journey is a life lived from inside out, a life in which the things we experience within—dreams, memories, images, and symbols, and the presence of him whom we encounter in the deep silence—are in constant tension and dialogue with all that we experience without—people, events, joys, sorrows, and the presence of him whom we encounter in others.  Thomas Merton repeats a suggestion of Douglas Steere that the absence of this tension might well produce the most pervasive form of violence present in contemporary society.  “To allow one’s self to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns,” Merton writes, “to surrender to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence.  Frenzy destroys our inner capacity for peace.  It destroys the fruitfulness of our work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”

     One of the most critical tasks of the local church is to enable people to become “journeyers” rather than “wanderers.”  This suggests that the leadership of a congregation needs to be serious about their own journeys, to the point where they are willing to share their experience with others, not as those who have arrived but as fellow journeyers able to receive as well as to give.  Congregations are the natural settings for training in the contemplative disciplines, as well as the settings in which groups might form to give direction and support along the way.  For most congregations, it will mean a reordering of priorities for the development of a step-by-step strategy for the cultivation and nurture of a disciplined apostolate committed to the exercises of Christ’s ministry in the world.

     In his Markings, Dag Hammarskjold records some of the often agonizing turning points that were the occasion of the deepening of his remarkable journey.  One entry in this journal describes with particular wisdom that sense of creative tension which is the mark of wholeness.  “The more faithfully you listen to the voice within you,” he writes, “the better you will hear what is sounding outside.  And only he who listens can speak.  Is this the starting of the road toward the union of your two dreams—to be allowed in clarity of mind to mirror life, and in purity of heart to mold it?”  Ultimately, this is the question we all must ask, for it is the question Christ asks of us. (Mutual Ministry by James C. Fenhagen)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: Cleft of the Mountain

I will run to the cleft of the mountain and wait for You
Will you come and meet with me?
I will wait in the cleft of the mountain for You to pass by
Will you come and meet with me?

Oh, what a joy it would be
Just for a moment to lay at the feet of the Lord
Oh more than anything that’s what I long for
Oh, what a change it would bring
Just to look deep in the face of the King Who gave all
You gave everything so You could meet with me
Will You meet with me?

Closing Prayer:
Lord Jesus, Help me to trust you fully in the midst of this life that seems so chaotic and unsure at times. Give me, this day, a firm place to set my feet as I walk toward you through this ever-changing world. Amen. (JLB)