Friday, Sept. 8, 2006

Today’s reading

Philippians 1:6-11

“For God is my witness, how I long for all of you with the compassion of Jesus Christ” (Phil. 1:8).

Prayer

I don’t think I can remember a time, my Friend, when my soul was not lonely. I can’t remember a time when I did not long for a knowing love to break into my isolation, recognize the hollowness of my heart and yet refuse to recoil. And always I wondered: Is this loneliness mine alone, or the truth hiding behind every human eye?

I long for you. I long for a savior, who knows me, my fear, my lostness, yet who cherishes me and fills me with a love that ever and always is for me, with me, in me. Only this can save me from myself, from the shame and fear in which I resist the blessed communion of souls into which you have invited me all my life.

You ceaselessly invite me beyond constant loneliness into the community of love that you gather around yourself. I want--I need--to be immersed in a communion of sharing life and your precious gospel where I may know you and the love, immortal and immeasurable, whom you are.

Dearest One, this day let me know you, hold you, savor you in sharing a communion with others who love and need you as I do. Place a guard on my tongue that I may not speak harsh or idle words that seek an unholy communion with other souls based on mutual criticism and judgments of other whom you also Lovelace me ever beyond my loneliness into the communion of of your love. Amen.

Pr. David L. Miller
Dean of the Chapel, Cornelsen Director of Spiritual Formation