Saturday, June 14, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Invitations
In the evening we listened to the freight train gliding down the old, iron, rain-soaked rusty tracks, its mournful whistle fading gradually away. This dark home of sleeping birds and tired men and women waited for the rising moon to rise above the trees, above the branches, above the leaves, and we waited with it to fill the sky.
The artist Edward Hopper might rest his sadness among these trees, relent and accept our offer of a chair beside the midnight lawn. But he painted interiors mostly, seedy hotel lobbies or coffee shops at 3 a.m., just a few skeletal overdressed folks still up, wondering how they could get to sleep. His paintings are in the Art Institute and we’re out here in the suburbs, wishing the stars were just a bit more visible, wishing that the never-ending neon of signs and streetlights would just … take a hike … now and then … for awhile.
Whoever is in Christ is a new creation.
The old things have passed away and behold,
New things have come.
And all this is from God.
Jehovah the master artist doesn’t just paint us into his landscape; he shades our faces, remarks upon the lines around our eyes, and with muted colors invites us to leave our restlessness and look up. Our freedom is not in question; we have been given the peace of God which passes all understanding. If we would just look up.
As the heavens are high above the earth, so is his kindness toward those who fear him.
As far as the east is from the west, so has he moved our sins away from us.
Anonymous planes climb into the darkness as they take off from O’Hare. We hear them just a bit before we see their tiny lights 10 thousand feet above us. Our words, so plentiful earlier in the day, begin to fade away. Memories and imagining carry the weight of glory as we hold our own stories up to the eye of heaven, an offering to each other and to our Father. But now silence is golden, our breathing, the scrape of a lawn chair on the terrace, the sound of a cat calling from a block away … and in this deep peaceful place, we sense how alone we are, or could be.
We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.
For our sake God made him to be sin who did know sin.
What matters in the daylight doesn’t matter now, and what matters now will be obscured and lost when we begin the day tomorrow. This will be true no matter what we do. God’s charges we may be, but this world is not our home.
Jesus said, Do not swear or make a vow,
Not by heaven, for it is God’s throne,
Nor by the earth, for it is God’s footstool,
Nor by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King.
Do not swear by your head, for you cannot make a single hair white or black.
Let your YES mean Yes, and your NO mean no.
This seeking after truth and honesty and transparent living is the best we can do, leaving the rest up to God as best we can. Thus we learn, touched by surrender – that this must be the only goal worth having.
 (2 Corinthians 5, Psalm 103, Psalm 119, Matthew 5)
(posted at davesandel.net)
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