moving through suffering, day 3

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

Opening Prayer:
Father, I know my wounded and broken places oh so well. At times they can consume me and keep me from being able to hear your voice. Help me to see my pain as an invitation to know you more intimately rather than a reason to doubt the goodness of your heart. Help me to know that through my pain you desire to accomplish something very good in me. In the name of Jesus, the author of our salvation, who was “made perfect through suffering.” Amen. (JLB)

 

Psalm for the Week: Psalm 121

Scripture for the Day: Romans 8:18-38

Reading for Reflection:

The heart is stretched through suffering, and enlarged.  But O the agony of this enlarging of the heart, that one may be prepared to enter into the anguish of others!  Yet the way of holy obedience leads out from the heart of God and extends through the Valley of the Shadow.

     But there is also removable suffering, yet such as yields only to years of toil and fatigue and unconquerable faith and perchance only to death itself.  The Cross as dogma is painless speculation; the Cross as lived suffering is anguish and glory.  Yet God, out of the pattern of His own heart, has planted the Cross along the road of holy obedience.  And he enacts in the hearts of those He loves the miracle of willingness to welcome suffering and to know it for what it is-the final seal of His gracious love.  I dare not urge you to your Cross.  But He, more powerfully, speaks within you and me, to our truest selves, in our truest moments, and disquiets us with the world’s needs.  By inner persuasions He draws us to a few very definite tasks, our tasks, God’s burdened heart particularizing His burdens in us.  And He gives us the royal blindness of faith, and the seeing eye of the sensitized soul, and the grace of unflinching obedience.  Then we see that nothing matters, and that everything matters, and that this my task matters for me and for my fellow men and for Eternity.  And if we be utterly humble we may be given strength to be obedient even unto death, yea the death of the Cross.

     In my deepest heart I know that some of us have to face our comfortable, self-oriented lives all over again.  The times are too tragic, God’s sorrow is too great, man’s night too dark, the Cross is too glorious for us to live as we have lived, in anything short of holy obedience.  (A Testament of Devotion by Thomas Kelly)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: It is Well

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

Refrain:

It is well….with my soul…it is well, it is well with my soul

My sin O the bliss of this glorious thought;

my sin not in part but the whole

Is nailed to the cross and I bear it no more;

praise the Lord, praise the Lord O my soul

And Lord haste the day when my faith shall be sight;

the clouds be rolled back as a scroll

The trump shall resound and the Lord shall descend;

even so it is well with my soul

Closing Prayer
Father, heal my wounds and make them a source of life for others; as you did with your Son Jesus. In whose name we pray. Amen. (JLB)