grasping, day 2

Come to Stillness:

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

Opening Prayer:
Lord Jesus, forgive me when my bleeding and wounded heart causes me to grasp for life and relief from any and every source available. Instead, help me to reach only for you—that I might touch the fringe of your robe and find healing and wholeness for the brokenness of my heart and soul. In Your Name I pray. Amen. (JLB)

Psalm for the Week: Psalm 16

Scripture for the Day: Mark 10:17-31

Reading for Reflection:

Greed is often associated with a ravenous appetite that devours anything within reach—a noisy, uncouth vice.  Yet it is more often known in the quietly insistent urge that nudges us from wanting to “needing,” then to grasping what we now “need” so others cannot deprive us of it.  Jesus addressed this grasping, clinging mind when he counseled that we cannot serve God and mammon, and Aramaic word denoting ill-gotten gain (Matthew 6:24).
     “In your minds you must be the same as Jesus Christ: His state was divine, yet he did not cling to his equality with God…” (Phil.2:6, JB).  The spiritual life is one in which we grow out of the grasping, clinging mind into the mind of Christ.  The Christ-mind releases us from our compulsion to associate personal worth with what we have accumulated, taming what nineteenth-century professor Adolphe Gratry calls “the exuberant desire to rise by a borrowed power.” (Editor’s Introduction by John S. Mogabgab, Weavings, November/ December 2005)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: Tender Mercy

 

Hear my cry for mercy
As I call to You
As I lift my hands in Spirit
And in Truth

We cry mercy
(in the name of the Father most Holy)
We cry mercy
(in the name of the Son Who was slain)
Lord have mercy
(in the name of the Spirit indwelling)
Tender mercy Lord
You are mercy (in the name of the Father most Holy)
You are mercy (in the name of the Son Who was slain)
Lord have mercy (in the name of the Spirit indwelling)
Tender mercy Lord

 

           In Your tender mercy
           Brought by grace through faith
           I will lift my heart
           Toward Your most Holy place

Closing Prayer:
Lord Jesus, give me the grace and the strength and the courage to take off that which I use to cover myself; and to clothe myself only and always in you alone. Amen. (JLB)