Wednesday, March 18, 2026
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
For the sake of others
The LORD has forsaken me;
My Lord has forgotten me.
Prisoners: Come out!
If you are in darkness: Show yourselves!
Along the ways you shall find pasture,
on every bare height shall your pastures be.
You shall not hunger or thirst,
the scorching wind and blazing sun will not strike you.
For the Lord who loves you leads you
and guides you beside springs of water.
But can I trust you Lord? I am forsaken, at least that’s how I feel.
Sure, the Lord says. When I walk beside you, I do it for your sake, not mine. You are feeling ME when you feel forsaken. The path we take together doesn’t much appeal to me, but I am going to walk it with you.
I have enough trouble understanding myself; can you help me understand a little more what you mean, Lord?
How about this? I have nothing better to do than walk along with you, even though the world I made for you is crashing down around your ears. I’m with you, I love you, and as far as the rest of the chaos I see nothing, I hear nothing, I say nothing.
But you don’t love ONLY me. Don’t you love Margaret just like that? And Nancy? And Susan? And Chris, and Melissa, and Marc, and Andi? And the killers and the killed in Iran and Gaza and … like you said, in all that chaos? Oh the list goes on. All those men and women, babies, and angry adolescents, and grizzled baby boomers … Noah’s ark couldn’t hold them all, but You can. And the lions and the tigers and the bears? What about them?
You’re trying too hard, David. Why do you think you need to understand me? Come on! Let your heart beat, and listen to it while you can. My love isn’t limited like yours., and it’s not stunted by any comparison you make between your love and mine.
Stretch. Reach up to the sky and open your eyes. Taste and see the Lord’s love everywhere in all its power and glory given freely to everyone and everything everywhere and always. Take a breath. Take another one. That’s ME you’re breathing in, David. And that’s ME breathing in you.
They’d put me away if they heard me talking like this, you know.
Oh, well. I’ll walk that path with you too. Don’t worry, just pick some daisies and put them in the rifle barrels. Be a flower child for awhile. When you live like I made you to live, your life consists of one moment after another, and you can only live them one at a time. Let ME do the heavy lifting.
I am fascinated by history, what has happened and how it’s happened. And looking ahead, I am curious about what will happen next. And besides, sometimes I need to get away from right now. So even if I can’t actually live in the past or the future, I can pretend. I can put my head in the sand. Who knows?
David, I gave you your imagination so you can hear ME, so you can see ME and taste ME. The LORD is good. When you spend all those imagination-hours away from me, I miss you. Be with ME. Ask me about the past and the future. I made time too, you know. I loved time into being.
I remember a book I read for Miss Griffin’s freshman comp class at Valpo, The Educated Imagination. But I don’t remember what was in it.
Ah, that was Northrup Frye. I love him too, just like I love you. Want to hear a little bit of what Northrup came up with?
Okay.
Remember the story of the Tower of Babel in the Bible? I think the civilization we live in at present is a gigantic technological structure, a skyscraper almost high enough to reach the moon. It looks like a single world-wide effort, but it’s really a deadlock of rivalries; it looks very impressive, except that it has no genuine human dignity. For all its wonderful machinery, we know it’s really a crazy ramshackle building, and at any time may crash around our ears.
What the myth tells us is that the Tower of Babel is a work of human imagination, that its main elements are words, and that what will make it collapse is a confusion of tongues. All had originally one language, the myth says. The language is not English or Russian or Chinese or any common ancestor, if there was one. It is the language that makes Shakespeare and Pushkin authentic poets, that gives a social vision to both Lincoln and Gandhi. It never speaks unless we take the time to listen in leisure, and it speaks only in a voice too quiet for panic to hear. And then all it has to tell us, when we look over the edge of our leaning tower, is that we are not getting any nearer heaven, and that it is time to return to earth.
That’s on page 98.
I am just getting to realize that you are everywhere and see everything. And you know all the words. Maybe you know them before they are written.
Maybe.
Thanks, Lord. You made my day. Forsaken? No, but for the sake of others. Let me be led by you.
Get some sleep. Tomorrow I might tell you about Northrup Frye, William Blake and Bob Dylan. They had some god-moments, I’ll tell you.
(Isaiah 49, Psalm 145, John 11, John 5)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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