Tag: Psalms

…Opening To…

Decision is a risk rooted in the courage of being free. (Paul Tillich, Theologian)

…Listening In…

You are definitely my rock and my fortress. Guide me and lead me for the sake of your good name. (Psalm 31:3; context)

…Filling Up…

Practicing God’s presence at all times helps us make the best decisions, whether small or big. So many small choices happen every day and deciding them in the light of God’s yearnings for us is the best way to live. This is the overarching theme I hope you get out of this week. But today I want to focus on something a little different. It still has to do with decision-making, though, so stick with me.

Sometimes you are faced with a choice. You pray about it, you think about it, maybe you write down lists of pros and cons. Each of the choices makes you feel discouraged or just so small in the face of the long, long path the decision could take you down. For one reason of another, in the end, neither choice feels right. They both (or they all) just feel somehow wrong. So what do you do?

The first thing to do is start over to make sure you didn’t miss an option. So you do that and then you end up back where you were before. None of the options feels right, but perhaps something inside you stirs you towards one of the choices, even though it feels wrong. You’ve now come to a tricky situation. How do you choose between the wrong option and the right (but really really hard to do) option. The right (but really really hard to do) option feels wrong at first because you just can’t wrap your head around what it would mean to take it on. It’s just too big, too daunting.

For example, perhaps you start smoking and despite your best efforts, you become addicted. You know smoking is wrong because of the harm it can do to you and people around you. But you look at the right choice – quitting – and it feels wrong, too. The right choice feels wrong because it is just so darn hard to do.

Here’s where we return to the daily-ness of decisions. By recognizing God’s presence each day in our lives, we can make the right choices more often than not. When faced with the right (but really really hard to do) choice, we have to make it every single day. We don’t make it just once. We make it over and over again. In our example, the choice not to smoke happens every day, maybe every hour. We can’t make the right (but really really hard to do) decisions just once. They’re too big. So thank God that we can make them over and over again with God’s help.

…Praying For…

Dear God, you are the rock in whom I trust. Help me to turn to you for strength when I in the midst of making right, but really really hard decisions. In Jesus Christ’s name I pray. Amen.

…Sending Out…

I leave this moment with you, God, rejoicing that you are with me in all the decisions I make.

…Opening To…

You know what the first rule of flyin’ is? …Love. You can learn all the math in the ‘Verse, but you take a boat in the air that you don’t love, she’ll shake you off just as sure as a turn in the worlds. Love keeps her in the air when she oughta fall down, tells ya she’s hurtin’ ‘fore she keens. Makes her a home. (Malcolm Reynolds, Serenity)

…Listening In…

Yes, the sparrow too has found a home there; the swallow has found herself a nest where she can lay her young beside your altars, LORD of heavenly forces, my king, my God! Those who live in your house are truly happy; they praise you constantly. (Psalm 84:3-4; context)

…Filling Up…

Far from being some obscure, antiquated doctrine, the Trinity permeates existence today as it always has even before anything else existed. The Trinity loves itself into eternally perfect relationship, which makes forming loving relationships in our own lives the best way to glorify God. When we come together in our faith communities or our groups of friends, we participate in the life of the Trinity. When we share the body and blood of Christ, we participate in the life of the Trinity. When we go out into the world in the power of the Holy Spirit to love and serve and find God in those we meet, we participate in the life of the Trinity. Our families, our groups of friends, our faith communities are home – not a perfect home like the Trinity is unto itself – but a good home made by fallible humans doing our best to love one another.

At the end of the film Serenity, the captain of the small spacecraft finds River sitting in the copilot’s chair, while rain lashes the cockpit’s windows. “But [flyin’] ain’t all buttons and charts,” Malcom Reynolds tells River. “You know what the first rule of flyin’ is? …Love. You can learn all the math in the ‘Verse, but you take a boat in the air that you don’t love, she’ll shake you off just as sure as a turn in the worlds. Love keeps her in the air when she oughta fall down, tells ya she’s hurtin’ ‘fore she keens. Makes her a home.”

The majesty of the Trinity is that God is a perfect home unto God. And God invites us and everyone and all Creation into that home. What makes God a home for us? It’s love, in point of fact.

…Praying For…

Dear God, you are Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, a Trinity of persons in a Unity of being: grant me the grace to live my life as the recipient of the kind of love that you have for yourself, that I may be sustained by it and bring it to all I meet. In Jesus Christ’s name I pray. Amen.

…Sending Out…

I leave this moment with you, God, thankful that in you I find perfect love and a perfect home.

…Opening To…

We are as sure to be in trouble as the sparks fly upward, but we will also be “in Christ,” as [Paul] puts it. Ultimately, not even sorrow, loss, death can get at us there. (Frederick Buechner)

…Listening In…

Why, I ask myself, are you so depressed? Why are you so upset inside? Hope in God! Because I will again give him thanks, my saving presence and my God.  (Psalm 42:5; context)

…Filling Up…

So what keeps us trusting God? What motivates us to surrender every day ourselves and our fear-filled anxiety to God? The answer to these questions is hope. (You see, I promised on Monday that we’d get to hope, and here we are!)

So what is hope? Well, for starters, hope is a much bigger concept than we can do justice to in three minutes, so we’ll only hit the summary of the summary here. Hope is the act of trust taken out of the present and projected into the future.

On Wednesday we talked about the unknown future being fearful because God is not there. Well, the act of hoping transforms the unknown future into a known one. True, we don’t know what will happen. In that, the future stays mostly unknown. But we do know one thing, and it’s the most important thing. We know who will be with us.

Trusting that God is with us and we are with God now helps us to have faith that God will be with us and we with God in the murky “then” of the days ahead. Practicing this trust daily strengthens our ability to hope, which is really just another way to talk about our future trust in God.

Hope transforms fearful anxiety using the raw material of trust. Surrendering to God is our part in the process of this transformation. No matter how good or bad we are at surrendering, God always and for ever invites us to do it – again and again. This invitation is always valid because God knows that we need the practice.

As someone who is still practicing and always will be, I’ll tell you that trusting in God today and hoping for God tomorrow is truly the best way to live. I hope that you will give it a try.

…Praying For…

Dear God, fulfiller of your holy promises, grant me the grace to be in your presence today and everyday in the future, so that I may continue to draw on your strength as I strive to achieve your call in my life. In Jesus Christ’s name I pray. Amen.

…Sending Out…

I leave this moment with you, God, thankful that you are always and forever inviting me to walk the paths of trust and hope.

…Opening To…

We are as sure to be in trouble as the sparks fly upward, but we will also be “in Christ,” as [Paul] puts it. Ultimately, not even sorrow, loss, death can get at us there. (Frederick Buechner)

…Listening In…

I cry out to you, LORD. You are my rock; don’t refuse to hear me. If you won’t talk to me, I’ll be just like those going down to the pit. Listen to my request for mercy when I cry out to you, when I lift up my hands to your holy inner sanctuary. (Psalm 28:1-2; context)

…Filling Up…

Fear of the unknown future is just part of the human condition. We feel anxious about that future because we know we can’t control it, but we haven’t stopped trying to. Today, we are going to talk about stopping.

But before we get there, let me share some wisdom with you from one of my favorite priests. She taught me that God is not in the anxiety that fear of the future produces. God is in everything, yes. God is the foundation of all that exists, yes. But those fearful futures, which we imagine for ourselves, to do not exist. They are nothing more than wispy possibilities that have yet to come to pass. And therefore, they are not of God. God is not there. God is in our present, just as God was in our past, and will be in our futures (the ones that actually happen, not the ones we have nightmares about).

Projecting ourselves into the unknown future is fearful because God isn’t there. So where is God? We are with God in the present, and I think God calls us to do something very special whenever we feel fearful anxiety.

In 12-step programs (like Alcoholics Anonymous), the first step is acknowledging that we are powerless over whatever the emergent problem is (alcoholism in AA). The second step is relying on a power greater than ourselves to restore us to sanity. I think God calls us to these two steps whenever we fall into anxiety over the unknown future.

Combining these two steps into one brings us to that very special something God invites us to do. And that is to surrender to God. When we project ourselves into the unknown future, we are fearful because God isn’t there. Our need to control asserts itself, which is always a fool’s errand. Thus we feel anxiety. But remember: anxiety happens when we realize we don’t control the future but haven’t stopped trying.

The answer is, of course, to stop trying. To surrender. And to trust in God. More on that tomorrow.

…Praying For…

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. In Jesus Christ’s name I pray. Amen. (The Serenity Prayer, with a minor addition)

…Sending Out…

I leave this moment with you, God, thankful that you are always and forever inviting me to walk the paths of trust and hope.

…Opening To…

The glory of God is the human being fully alive. (St. Irenaeus)

…Listening In…

Many people say, “We can’t find goodness anywhere. The light of your face has left us, LORD!” But you have filled my heart with more joy than when their wheat and wine are everywhere! (Psalm 4:6-7; context)

…Filling Up…

In the times when we feel fully alive, it’s a really good idea to thank God for such times. Now, we can feel fully alive without attributing the fullness to God. After all, I don’t think God necessarily seeks the credit for what God does. But besides the fact that it’s a good idea to thank God for God’s movement during our experiences of fullness (after all, if your mother fills you up with the best steak and potatoes you’ve ever eaten, it’s just good manners to say, “Thank you”), there is another reason to do so.

When we attribute our times of fullness to the presence of our Creator, we actively train ourselves to be on the lookout for God in the moments when God is easiest to see. For most of us, I’d imagine that God is easiest to see in the fullness – the sunrise over the ocean that I mentioned on Tuesday. Or holding the newborn, which I seem to keep coming back to.

This training is so important because it helps us to notice God’s movement in the rougher times, in the valleys, in the moments when the trials and tribulations of this world shield us from being aware of God in our midst. God is present in our fullness and when we feel empty. We just have a harder time noticing God in the latter. But when we use the full times to train ourselves, we can find God more readily when times are tough.

Too often, people start seeking God when their lives have hit a downward spiral. But this is like waiting to go to the doctor after you are sure you are sick rather than for regular checkups. Practicing noticing God’s presence when we feel fully alive equips us to continue seeking that presence when a thousand little deaths have taken our fullness away.

I hope, then, that you will look for God’s presence when you feel fully alive. Celebrate the reality that God is the foundation of that fullness. And when you feel empty, draw on the memory of your fullness so that you know where to look to find your Creator.

…Praying For…

Dear God, source of all life, help me to notice your presence during the full times so that I may more easily notice that presence in the lean ones. In Jesus Christ’s name I pray. Amen.

…Sending Out…

I leave this moment with you, God, rejoicing that you constantly yearn to draw me more deeply and more fully into life.

…Opening To…

The glory of God is the human being fully alive. (St. Irenaeus)

…Listening In…

Yes, goodness and faithful love will pursue me all the days of my life, and I will live in the Lord’s house as long as I live. (Psalm 23:6; context)

…Filling Up…

Yesterday, I asked you to think about a time when you felt fully alive. And judging by my own reflection on that question, I then wondered about how often our feelings of “full life” intersect with our awareness of God’s movement. So I’ll begin today with a premise and we’ll go from there. The premise is this: God is the foundation of all fullness of life.

Wait just a second, you say: what about those destructive instances you mentioned yesterday? Right, I’m glad you brought that up. Destructive forces like drugs and alcohol simulate true fullness (or they just keep you from caring), and thus keep us from pursuing the healthy, good ways to reach fullness. Other destructive forces give us something akin to fullness by taking it away from someone else. Therefore, fullness is also simulated in these cases because what we perceive as fullness is someone else’s emptiness, and thus when you add them together, it’s a wash.

So, you cannot find true fullness through chemical stimulation, nor through taking someone else’s fullness away. And with that, we return to our premise that God is the foundation of all fullness of life. Now we must ask ourselves, “On what is this premise founded?” Well, like all other things having to do with God, the premise is founded (when you get right down to it) on God alone. Yes, God is the foundation of the foundation. But let’s move a few rungs up the ladder just so you don’t think I’m dodging the question.

My own life of faith has brought me to these thoughts today: All life comes from God because God created and is creating everything that is, has been, or will be. God yearns for all life to find the fullest potential for which God created it. Other species find this potential when they do the things that they do best of all, the things that they just seem to be created to do. God created us humans to love God and be reflections of God’s love in this world. We realize our fullest potential when we participate in God’s movement in our lives, which always seems to play out in such a way as to make us better at loving. Therefore, God is the foundation for all fullness of (human) life.

When we feel fully alive, the best thing we can do is to try to become aware of how God is moving in that fullness. But that’s a topic for tomorrow.

…Praying For…

Dear God, source of all life, you yearn for all of your creation to participate in the fullness of your grand design. Help me to be aware of your presence and to give thanks for the fullness you shower up me. In Jesus Christ’s name I pray. Amen.

…Sending Out…

I leave this moment with you, God, rejoicing that you constantly yearn to draw me more deeply and more fully into life.

…Opening To…

The glory of God is the human being fully alive. (St. Irenaeus)

…Listening In…

Praise the LORD! Let my whole beingpraise the LORD! I will praise the LORD with all my life; I will sing praises to my God as long as I live. (Psalm 146:1-2; context)

…Filling Up…

My question is this: when have you ever felt fully alive? I ask because I’m really curious.

I assume that many answers will tread the path of the natural and the poetic. Perhaps you felt fully alive when the sun first peaked from under the ocean’s blanket and bathed you in the newness of dawn; or when you reached the peak of the mountain after a long hike and now you see the patchwork farmland stretching for miles in the valley below; or when you went outside on the first truly cold day of the year, saw your breath, and felt the chill air sting your cheeks until they turned rosy red.

Or might the answers wander a more relational path? Perhaps you felt fully alive when you first ventured to hold the hand of your crush, and (how incredible!) your crush held your hand in return; or when you scored the game-winning run and your team swarmed you at home plate, lifted you onto their shoulders, and chanted your name; or when you held a new baby for the first time and counted her tiny toes or offered your finger for him to hold onto with his tiny hand.

Or might the answers walk along the path of “what if”? You feel fully alive in the moments after narrowly avoiding a collision with another car. What if you hadn’t reacted so quickly? Or maybe you feel fully alive after a nasty bout of flu and you’re finally up and about. What if you had gotten sicker instead of better?

Or might the answers go down a destructive path? You feel fully alive only when you’re high or drunk; or when you’re racing down a straight road at midnight going 100 mph; or after fighting with your girlfriend just because you like the energy of conflict.

There are so many answers to the question; truly, they could fill volume upon volume. But I wonder how many of us would answer the question by bringing God into it? Might our answers travel the path of God’s movement? We’ll pick up that question tomorrow.

…Praying For…

Dear God, source of all life, help me to see what brings me the feeling of fullness in my life, and grant me the grace to see how you are moving in that fullness. In Jesus Christ’s name I pray. Amen.

…Sending Out…

I leave this moment with you, God, rejoicing that you constantly yearn to draw me more deeply and more fully into life.

…Opening To…

The glory of God is the human being fully alive. (St. Irenaeus)

…Listening In…

The days of a human life are like grass: they bloom like a wildflower; but when the wind blows through it, it’s gone; even the ground where it stood doesn’t remember it.  (Psalm 103:15-16; context)

…Filling Up…

In a few moments, I’m going to ask you an odd question, so I feel the need to prepare you for it first. Perhaps, the preparation will make the question seem less odd; only these intervening paragraphs will tell. Because I am in the act of typing this and (in an indeterminate number of temporal increments down the timeline) you are in the act of reading it, I feel quite confident in diagnosing both of us as “alive.”

Now, of course, you might have jumped out of the pages of a scifi/fantasy novel and thus might not be alive, but if that were the case, I imagine you’d be out looking for brains or thralls or something and not reading this reflection. But I digress.

So we are both alive. But I wonder what we really mean when we claim this. I am biologically alive because my respiratory system is working to bring air into my lungs, which then oxygenate my blood, which then travels to my heart, which then pumps it out into my organs, which then continue their never-ending routine. When these organs and systems cease functioning, I will no longer be alive.

But there must be more to being alive than the complex machinery of my body working in concert with the fuel that I ingest to keep the machine running. Biological life – the fact that I am a semi-autonomous organic construct that responds to some sort of stimuli – must only be one part of what makes me alive or else I wouldn’t have ever thought to reflect on it.

And this brings us to the quotation above from St. Irenaeus, who lived during the 100s in what is modern-day France. “The glory of God is the human being fully alive.” In our discussion of biological life, it would seem that being alive is one half of a binary state. We are either alive or dead. But if we take what Irenaeus says seriously, it would seem that life could be lived with more or less fullness, and the fuller a life is lived, the more of God’s glory is shone.

So my question is this: when have you ever felt fully alive?

…Praying For…

Dear God, source of all life, thank you for creating the perfect set of circumstances for life to flourish on this planet and for the circumstances that have transpired to make me the person I am. In Jesus Christ’s name I pray. Amen.

…Sending Out…

I leave this moment with you, God, rejoicing that you constantly yearn to draw me more deeply and more fully into life.

…Opening To…

Oh, help me, God! For thou alone
Canst my distracted soul relieve.
Forsake it not: it is thine own,
Though weak, yet longing to believe. (Anne Brontë)

…Listening In…

I love you, O Lord my strength, O Lord my stronghold, my crag, and my haven. My God, my rock in whom I put my trust, my shield, the horn of my salvation, and my refuge; you are worthy of praise. (Psalm 18:1-2)

…Filling Up…

God is the One in whom we can always rest our weight. God is the One who never fails to keep a promise. Therefore, God is the one whom we can always believe. When we reserve the word “believe” for God alone, we can begin to recapture the majesty that the concept of belief has lost through overuse in unworthy situations.

If believing is about resting your weight on something, then belief means knowing and trusting the something that takes your weight. This is your foundation. Every foundation that is not God is not a foundation at all, but a structure built on God, who is the ultimate foundation. God is, so to speak, the ground upon which everything rests. Believing in God is all about not being content until you find that ground, that deepest foundational level, upon which to rest your weight.

Through metaphors about rocks and strongholds, the people who wrote the Bible express this understanding of God being the foundation. At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus expresses this same understanding when he tells the story about two people, one who built a house on sand and the other who built a house on rock. Of course, the house built on the rock weathers the storm. The next time you use the word “believe,” ask yourself if the context surrounding that word is your rock and your foundation. If not, I invite you to try a different word.

…Praying For…

Dear God, you are my rock and my foundation. You are the ground on which I walk, the One walking with me, and the One to whom I am destined. Help me believe in you so that I may see your road laid out beneath me; in Jesus Christ’s name. Amen.

…Sending Out…

I leave this moment with you, God, knowing that you are the foundation of all truth. You believe in me, which allows me to believe in you.

…Opening To…

Look upon me, O Lord, and let all the darkness of my soul vanish before the beams of your brightness. (Saint Augustine of Hippo)

…Listening In…

How long shall I have perplexity in my mind, and grief in my heart, day after day? How long shall my enemy triumph over me? Look upon me and answer me, O Lord my God; give light to my eyes, lest I sleep in death. (Psalm 13: 2-3; context)

…Filling Up…

Imagine that you are lying in bed and, for some reason – perhaps you accidentally set your alarm clock wrong or you have an early hockey practice – you wake up at about 5:30 in the morning. The diameter of the pupils of your eyes grows as your eyes adjust to the darkness of the room. There’s a tiny sliver of soft pre-dawn light sliding under the blinds on the windows – just enough light for pitch dark to soften to regular dark. You lie there trying to fall back to sleep. Sleep doesn’t return, so you try the trick of keeping your eyes open as long as you can in hopes that they will tire and close on their own.

Your eyes rove around your room, and you notice how different the walls and bookcases and trophies and posters look in the near darkness. Everything is there, exactly as you left it last night. But everything looks odd because the darkness has leached the color out of all the objects in the room. The first and second place trophies, usually distinguishable because of their blue and red colors are different only in height now. The clothes in your open closet look like hand-me-downs from the wardrobe department of a black and white film. The world as you know it faded to gray during the night.

“Give light to my eyes,” pleads the person who wrote Psalm 13. The psalmist knows that the world has no vibrancy, no vividness, no vitality without the wonder that is light. Without light, we have no hope of noticing the beauty of all the colors under the sun, all the paint that God brushed and scattered and sloshed onto creation’s canvas. It’s no wonder then that God created light first of all, perhaps because God knew that when we humans came along, we would need that light to live fully in this world. What a gift it is to be able to see all the hues of the flowers in a garden. What a gift it is to be able to tell the difference between football teams. What a gift it is to notice the subtle variations of color in a friend’s eyes. What a gift is light. And we never notice this gift until it’s not there.

…Praying For…

Dear God, thank you for the light with which you show the glory of your creation to your creatures. Give light to my eyes so that I might see all the things you would have me see in all the beauty and complexity that those things possess; in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

…Sending Out…

I leave this moment with you, God, knowing that you are a light that never goes out. You are always shining on the path that takes me home.