Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Today’s text

3 John 1:9-10

“I have written something to the church; but Diotrephes, who likes to put himself first, does not acknowledge our authority. So if I come I will call attention to what he is doing in spreading false charges against us. And not content with those charges, he refuses to welcome the friends, and even prevents those who want to do so and expels them from the church.”

Prayer

What greater blessing is there than to lose ourselves in you, free, free, free from ravages of driven ego? What greater grace can I enjoy than to disappear in you so that all I know is your encircling love, stilling all want and desire in a holy nearness where we are one and anxious need is abolished?

Fully encompassed within your enveloping embrace, most of what I think I am disappears. All that remains is that which holds and is held by your loving, and I am that loving.

I occupy less space than I normally require in my daily places and conversations. Rapt in you, I grow small but real, secure but brave, gentle but capable of greatness, for I am that which I am only in your love, filled with the substance of your divine life, able to give whatever your abiding grace requires of me.

And the need to be first evaporates; the urge to exclude that I may be greater dissolves vaporous illusions. For I know what is real and true, and that is you who are love, who fill me and all that is with life unimaginable, known now in moments of graced oneness, exquisitely heralding eternity in your embrace. Thank you that I should taste eternity and know the freedom you intend. Amen.

Pr. David L. Miller