becoming, thursday

Thursday, May 15

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.)

Scripture Reading for the Day: Jeremiah 18:1-6

Reading for Reflection:

Dear Potter,

The lump of clay that I am

keeps crying for some form

day by day

I yearn for you to mold me.

This is a trust-song, Lord

I am in your hands like clay

I am ready to be transformed:

I expect to be molded

I expect to be loved

And if by chance

someone should drop me

as your apprentices sometimes do,

I expect to be hurt

I’m just trying to say

I have surrendered to your dream for me

I am in your hands

like clay.

(Seasons of the Heart by Macrina Wiederkehr) 

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

                                          
Closing Prayer: Take me in your strong and tender hands, O Potter, shape and mold me into the beautiful work of art that you imagined long ago.  Forgive me for how I have marred and distorted that beauty through my sin and willfulness.  Let me surrender completely to your hands, your care, and your desire for my life.  In the name of Jesus.  Amen.

becoming, wednesday

Wednesday, May 14

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.)

Scripture Reading for the Day: Isaiah 29:13-16

Reading for Reflection:

Now is the time to strain—to pull at yourself until you assume the shape you are to become.  God knows what that is.                                                                                     

                                                                                                ~Philip LeVine

 

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

                                          

Closing Prayer: O creative God, who dreamt me into being before the foundations of the world.  Give me the strength, the courage, and the conviction to become all that you desire for me to be.  Mold me and form and shape me, that I might be conformed more and more to your image.  In the name of Jesus.  Amen.

becoming, tuesday

Tuesday, May 13

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.)

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

Reading for Reflection:

Day after day, as we expose ourselves to the light of Jesus and his word, something happens inside us.  We begin to notice things God says to us, things we feel, things we hear, things we see around us.  These things unsettle us and challenge us.  And it may be years before we hear his words to us loud and clear: “We have grown to love each other.  Come closer.  Become like me.” (Beginning Contemplative Prayer by Kathryn J. Hermes)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

                                           

Closing Prayer:  Drive far from us all wrong desires, O God, and incline our hearts to keep Your ways:  Grant that having cheerfully done Your will this day, we may, when night comes, rejoice and give You thanks; through the One Who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.  Amen. (Venite by Robert Benson)

becoming, monday

Monday, May 12

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.)

Scripture Reading for the Day: Galatians 5:16-26

Reading for Reflection:

    As we learn God’s desires for us, as he reveals himself more deeply, we realize the tinseled glitter of many of our desires and needs.  Gradually we come to desire the desires of God himself, letting God desire in us.  Jean-Claude Sagne says, “The Spirit makes our desire live from the life of God himself, to the point where God himself comes to desire at the heart of our desire.” (Beginning Contemplative Prayer by Kathryn J. Hermes)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

                                           
Closing Prayer:  Mighty Lord of heaven and earth, whose Son is the head of the church, shape and renew your people until we bear the image of Christ and show his true likeness to the world.  We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ your Son.  Amen. (The Little Book of Hours)

becoming, sunday

Sunday, May 11 (Fourth Sunday of Easter)

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.)

Scripture Reading 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

                                          
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.  (Pieces by Jim Branch)

awake, saturday

Saturday, May 10

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

Opening Prayer: Lord, awaken me, you whose love burns beyond the stars; light the flame of my lantern that I may always burn with love. (A Traveler Toward the Dawn by John Eagan)

Scripture Reading for the Day: Isaiah 50:4-6

Reading for Reflection:

Spirituality means waking up. Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep. They’re born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up.  They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing we call human existence. (Awareness by Anthony De Mello)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

                                          
Closing Prayer: God our redeemer, you have delivered us from the power of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of your Son: grant, that as by his death he has recalled us to life, so by his continual presence in us he may raise us to eternal joy; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.  (A Collect for Eastertide, Oremus)

awake, friday

Friday, May 9

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

Opening Prayer: Lord, awaken me, you whose love burns beyond the stars; light the flame of my lantern that I may always burn with love. (A Traveler Toward the Dawn by John Eagan)

Scripture Reading for the Day: Mark 5:21-43

Reading for Reflection:

     One had been bleeding for twelve years, the other was just twelve years old.  One had probably seen a good bit of her life come and go, the other, seemingly, had her whole life ahead of her.  One was from a prominent family, the other was just a face in the crowd.  One had a loving father that would go to any length to give his little girl every opportunity available to be healed, the other had most likely been abandoned by her family long ago because of her lengthy bout with an illness that rendered her ceremonially unclean—untouchable.

     But while there were significant differences between the two, there were also many similarities.  For both, life had taken a terribly wrong turn.  Both had grasped for healing and wholeness from every available avenue.  Both were now at the end of their rope—needy and desperate.  Both had some sense that Jesus was their final real hope.  And most importantly, though they had yet to realize it, both were dearly loved daughters of God.

     After meeting one in the midst of a crowded street, Jesus now turns in the direction of the other.  But it appears that, for this little one, he is too late.  Jesus enters the house, taking a small group of family and friends with him.  He goes into the room where the little girl is lying.  He bends over, gently taking her hand, and whispers tenderly in her ear, “Little girl, get up.”  Or literally, in Aramaic, “Little Lamb, Arise!”  His little lamb opens her eyes and gets up from her bed, as if simply waking from a peaceful night’s sleep.      

     Desperation turns to celebration, mourning to dancing.  The small band of onlookers is both amazed and overjoyed.  Jesus turns to Jairus and his wife and, with a soft smile on his lips, says, with a wink, “Now… why don’t you give her something to eat.” (Reflections by Jim Branch)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

                                           
Closing Prayer: Almighty God, whose Son Jesus Christ is the resurrection and the life: raise us, who trust in him, from the death of sin to the life of righteousness, that we may seek those things which are above, where he reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. (A Collect for Eastertide, Oremus)