Friday, May 23, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Morning pages
I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name he may give you.
In the quiet moments of the day when I do no thing, see, hear and speak no thing, I don’t exactly listen for God’s voice but just wait for it. Like a puzzling decision, it’s usually better for me to wait on it to appear than to belabor it with logic and probabilities.
And what does God always say? Something like what he told his disciples in the Upper Room as they ended their last Passover feast together.
Go and bear fruit.
Beside my bed upstairs in our Urbana home there are two boxes of notebooks filled with journals, sermon notes, poems and beginnings of stories from the last 50 years or so. A few more than fifty, actually. Many mornings I decide to throw at least some of them out. But then when I open their covers I start reading and decide to keep them after all. The words remind me of people and ideas that come back a bit to life for me in those morning moments.
I don’t want to relive them, exactly. In the “do nothing” atmosphere of morning or evening, when the day has not yet begun or is done, these words written years ago quiet the urgencies rushing around my mind, the slippery to-do list that won’t stand still. Time slips off its usual gears. Past and future rest a bit more quietly in the peacetime of the present. Where are you, Lord?
It is the decision of the Holy Spirit and of us not to place upon you any burden beyond these necessities.
As the Christian leaders offered the new converts in Antioch a simple life of worship and obedience with just a few rules, so God offers that to me. And then Jesus simplifies it even more.
Love one another.
Will I listen to this command rather than losing myself in my ego, my ambition, and my tangled emotions based on fear or thoughts of failure? Sometimes I do. Knowing that I’ve struggled with these human inanities all my life reminds me that I always will, and Jesus waits beside me to love me anyway.
And so they were sent on their journey.
Paul and Barnabas, Judas and Silas would encounter many who insisted on complicating the message. They like us had to be reminded over and over that the complications were NOT the message, that Jesus invited them and us to a simple life of loving one another right here, right now unafraid of any evil. God’s promises were new every morning.
Isn’t that just the cat’s pajamas?
Awake, O my soul, and I will wake the dawn.
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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