Meditations for Monday 20th July
Please Read John 11:1-7, 32-36
My Father Richard DeHaan, had been battling a debilitating disease for many years. We asked the Lord to take him Home. But as I knelt by his bed and watched him take that last breath, the tears I had choked back on other occasions came out like a flood. As my brothers and my mother hugged and prayed, the finality was overwhelming.
That event helped me understand the significance of the shortest verse in the Bible: “Jesus Wept”. God the Son wept! He knew the reality of heaven. He was the source of all hope of a future day of resurrection. And yet, Jesus cried. He loved His friends Mary and Martha and Lazarus so much that Jesus “was deeply moved in spirit and troubled”. Jesus truly felt their heartache.
When someone we love dies, we struggle with a wide range of emotions. If a young person dies, we ask “Why?” When death comes after long term suffering, we struggle to understand why the Lord waited so long to bring relief. We begin to think of God as distant, untouched by our sorrow. We may question His Wisdom or His Goodness. Then we read, “Jesus Wept.” God is deeply touched by our anguish.
When a painful situation invades your life, remember the Bible’s shortest verse. Jesus shed tears too.
(Kurt DeHaan – And He Walks with Me)
If you doubt that Jesus cares, remember His tears
Meditations for Monday 13th July
Lending a Hand
Jeremiah 10:1
Jesus says to us: “Either you give life to others in your relationships with them, or you drain them of it.” Life can be taken out of others in rivulets and drops, in the small daily failures of inattention, that bitterest fruit of self-absorption, as surely as by the terrible strokes to their hearts.
Writes Frederick Buechner: “Sin sprouts, as banana trees on the Nile, whenever the effect of your relationships with others is to diminish rather than enlarge them. There is no neutral corner in your human encounters, no antiseptic arena in which ‘nobody else is hurt’ or ‘nobody else knows about it.’ You either make people a little better, or leave them a little worse. You define your faith and moral posture in the ordinary stuff of your daily routine, The Kingdom belongs to those, as artless as children, who love others simply and directly, without thinking of anything but them. The inheritors of the Promise are those unsung folks who lend others a hand when they’re falling. That’s the only work that matters in the end.”
(Brennan Manning – Reflections for Ragamuffins)
Meditations for Monday 6th July
Are we over-presumptuous sometimes in what we expect from God? We can be, can’t we, almost expecting Him sometimes to pander to our every whim. Similarly, we can develop an over-inflated image of our own importance, even imagining we have every right to expect God’s acquiescence, it being no more than we deserve.
Contrast such an attitude with that shown by St Columba (521 – 597) in the following prayer. Like the Apostle Paul, he considers himself the least qualified of God’s people, the most he dares ask for being the lowliest place in God’s Kingdom. Happily, God delights to give much more, but Columba’s words help us to keep a proper sense of perspective – one we do well to cultivate. (Nick Fawcett – A Calendar of Classic Prayer).
Almighty Father, Son and Holy Ghost,
Eternal, ever-blessed Gracious God;
To me the least of saints,
To me allow that I may keep a door in Paradise –
That I may keep even the smallest door,
The furthest, the darkest, coldest door,
The door that is least used,
The stiffest door.
If it be but in Your House, O God,
Grant that I may se Your Glory even from afar,
And hear Your Voice, O God,
And know that I am with You, O God.
Amen.