Monday, September 8, 2025
Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Running
Who can know God’s counsel,
 or who can conceive what the LORD intends?
 For the deliberations of mortals are timid,
 and unsure are our plans.
There’s always plenty to say, especially on Mondays, when I need a pick-me-up once the weekend’s over. But really, seeking God’s counsel is a daily rhythm I never want to lose, seven days a week.
It hasn’t always been that way …
Today the Church celebrates the birth of Mary, Jesus’ mother – this Mary whom the Greeks call theotokos, the mother of God. Her birth deserves a celebration, this birth followed by a life filled with surprises, and no little suffering.
Yesterday at church I kept thinking about one of the songs we sang, “Run to the Father.” I thought how impossible it seems for me at this time in my life to run anywhere else.  But my journeys began with a lot of running from, and not much running to.
My heart has been in Your sights
Long before my first breath
Running into Your arms
Is running to life from death
And I feel this rush deep in my chest
Your mercy is calling out
Just as I am You pull me in
And I know I need You now
There was a moment many years ago on a curve at the bottom of a wooded Pennsylvania hill, when the flat-front Ford van I was driving lost its brakes and I lost my cool, and we slammed into a large tree at midnight. My face was jammed against the broken windshield. My friend fell out of the passenger door and he stepped on Justin, a five-year-old who had rocketed forward in his sleep from the back seat. Justin fell out first and fell face down into a puddle of water. My friend picked him up and he did not drown. Rather than flying through the windshield his head had hit the visor. At the hospital he had only a bruised spleen, and all of us crowded into Justin’s parents’ car the next day and headed back to Valpo, where Justin’s dad was a hot air balloonist and philosophy professor and the rest of us were students.
That night I climbed the hill and screamed at God behind the huge sky fall of stars. Where was my sigh of relief? I was so angry with myself for … what? For not downshifting, I guess. I was just so angry. And not at all ready to surrender that anger. It seemed like that was all I had.
My heart needs a surgeon, my soul needs a friend. The song sends me running to the Father, but I was running in circles then. I guess I was too embarrassed … I remember how easy it was to pray when I was a baptized Lutheran kid, and now much older I’m learning to talk with God and imagine what he’ll say back to me. But then? I just wept and screamed and wept and screamed.
In the BBC version of Ellis Peters’ The Leper of Saint Giles, twelfth-century Brother Cadfael speaks to a quietly renegade nun: “Sometimes I like to put a little sand in the oyster of my faith.” In an article he wrote, Gary Percesepe said, “My mother taught me that a human being is one continuous interrogative prayer.” There is nothing simple about having a relationship with God. It requires everything in me to let him love me when at the same time I’m blaming him for all the bad stuff happening to me.
So sometimes I feel like Robert Duvall in The Apostle, who in a rage kills his wife’s lover and then flees across the state line to his mother. In his childhood’s bedroom he prays, “I’ve always called you Jesus, you’ve always called me Sonny. What should I do? Tell me! Tell me! Tell me!” His mother (June Carter Cash) talking to a disturbed neighbor who overhears the hollering, “That’s my son. I’ll tell ya ever since he was an itty bitty boy, sometimes he talks to the Lord and sometimes he yells. Tonight he just happens to be yellin’ at him.”
I fall into bed sometimes, exhausted by pain in relationships with the people around me. Friends and family do too. But where else can we go? People matter, God matters more, and we can drown in all that mattering.
But people say that God suffers along with his children. I think those people are right; why wouldn’t he? He’s the first parent. When nothing changes, even especially my own despair, I can believe that God hurts more than I do.
In spite of everything.
I don’t have a context
For that kind of love
I don’t understand
I can’t comprehend
All I know is I need You
I run to the Father
I fall into grace
I’m done with the hiding …
Where else is there to go?
(Micah 5, Romans 8, Psalm 13, Matthew 1)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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