moving through suffering, day 7

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: Psalm 42

Reading for Reflection:

Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divining, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys.  For they are moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and a new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.

     I believe that almost all our sadnesses are the moments of tension that we find paralyzing because we no longer hear our surprised feelings living.  Because we are alone with the alien thing that has entered into our self; because everything intimate and accustomed is for an instant taken away; because we stand in the middle of a transition where we cannot remain standing.  For this reason the sadness too passes: the new thing in us, the added thing, has entered into our heart, has gone into its inmost chamber and is not even there any more,—is already in our blood.  And we do not learn what it was.  We could easily be made to believe that nothing has happened, and yet we have changed, as a house changes into which a guest has entered.  We cannot say who has come, perhaps we shall never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters into us in this way in order to transform itself in us long before it happens.  And this is why it is so important to be lonely and attentive when one is sad: because the apparently uneventful and stark moment at which our future sets foot in us is so much closer to life than that other noisy fortuitous point of time at which it happens to us as if from outside.  The more still, more patient and more open we are when we are sad, so much the deeper and so much the more unswervingly does the new go into us, so much the better do we make it ours, so much the more will it be our destiny, and when on some later day it “happens” (that is, steps forth out of us to others), we shall feel in our inmost selves akin and near to it. (Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke)

 

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)