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)