Monday, March 5, 2007

Today’s text

1 John 2:7-8

“Beloved, I am writing you no new commandment, but an old commandment that you have heard from the beginning; the old commandment is the word you have heard. Yet, I am writing you a new commandment that is true in him and in you, because the darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining” (1 John 2:7-8).

Prayer

True in me? If so, that’s the best news I have heard lately. For I know what your commandment is. You command what you give, and you give yourself. You delight to share the eternal, uncreated love that is the source and goal of all that is, my source and goal.

Can it be that your love--the holy and eternal necessity of your life--is also true in me? If so, then I bear the mystery of your life and love, and you command me to live according to that which you have done and continue to do in me.

And I know this is freedom, a liberty I seldom fully know but which I constantly crave. I long to be free, loving, moving through my life unencumbered by the impatience, grudges, anxieties, angers, indignities and tender wounds I carry. They are a sack of dead weight, freighting my heart, binding me to the ground when I long to soar. I hunger to delight in the freedom of flight known only as I live the love that you are in me, acting and speaking from the commandment, the principle, the holy and priceless gift at the core of my soul.

Only you can pry this weight of death from my shoulders, and you do. But you, Loving Mystery, don’t pry or struggle: you simply love, and love me. In awareness that I am fully loved and bear this love, the burdens of the past evaporate, and my soul is free to be that command, that beauty that is true in me and in all in whom you are pleased to dwell.

Only your love can drive off the burdens that tie our souls to earth. So let us live aware of your love that our souls may soar. Surely, that will make you smile. Amen.

--Pr. David L. Miller