Thursday, June 11, 2009

Today’s text

Romans 12:1

I urge you, then, brothers, remembering the mercies of God, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, dedicated and acceptable to God; that is the kind of worship for you, as sensible people.

Reflection

I wake again into a world where you are, Holy One. I light three small candles and kneel. Lacking adequate words to thank you, I mumble my prayer in language that strains to say what I am really feeling or what I most need.

But I hope my posture, humble before you, is better prayer than the weak words with which I try to express my need to know you loving and near. May my body praise you when my words cannot say enough. And they never do.

Kneeling, I present myself before you in effect saying, “Take me this day. Do what you will with this life. It’s yours.” Then, I remember Dimce, who was so more given to you than am I.

The front curl of his wavy brown hair danced up and down as he drew a series of intersecting lines on a succession of paper napkins. We sat in a café in Skopje, Macedonia, on a sunny mid-April day.

Dimce was the business manager of a non-profit agency that dug wells in poor villages in his country. But this day he was diagramming how he managed the flow of food and supplies from ports in Greece and Albania, through rugged mountain passes to refugee camps that housed more than 80,000 in Macedonia.

Eighty thousand lives depended on his incomprehensible scribble that looked like the diagram of a football play drawn in the dirt by a demented 11 year-old in his backyard.

Most impressive, though, was Dimce himself. He never looked up. He extended his diagram from one rumpled napkin to the next, explaining all the while but he never looked at me. Not once.

He was given, totally surrendered to a life-giving task that had become a holy obsession. Holy, indeed, since creating and nurturing life to fullness and joy is God’s work, God’s only work. Dimce was given to that holy labor, body and soul.

I think of him, My Lord, and so many others who taught me without having any idea that I would remember them long after. He did not give you a part of himself, nor did he surrender some small pleasure to discipline himself or to identify with your sacrificial love as we do in Lent.

His gave himself to your life-giving labor of love for the world. And there was no doubt in my mind that this is what he wanted to do. A deep desire within his soul moved him, not some external compulsion or law.

I wonder, from what life-giving spring does this desire spring afresh?

It is you, loving God. It is always you. Give me that desire. Awaken me each day to your mercies that I may be as surrendered to your life-giving ways as is Dimce. He is a portrait of all that you are. Would to God that I should glow with such beauty.

Pr. David L. Miller

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Today’s text

Romans 12:1

I urge you, then, brothers, remembering the mercies of God, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, dedicated and acceptable to God; that is the kind of worship for you, as sensible people.

Reflection

Remembering the mercies of God … . The morning comes, dearest Jesus. The day holds the promise of blessing and hope. I hunger to taste again our blessing. And I hope that I may be an expression of your unceasing grace, a soul through whom the grace of all eternity flows, a river of peace, cooling the fevered lives of others that they may bask in the joy you intend for them.

But if so, the day must begin with an act of memory. Not just any memory, but the recollection of your mercies.

So I remember. There are so many, but today I remember just one, driving to Dubuque, Iowa, and parking my car in from of Martin Luther’s statue at Wartburg Theological Seminary. It was an act of faint hope on my part.

Sitting silently in the car, looking the statue and tall tower rising over the beckoning doorway of the school, I hungered to enter, but my hope was far weaker than the sinking awareness that I could ever walk through those doors.

A college drop-out, I made cheese, sold cars and worked in a drapery hardware factory. I found myself, my heart in none of them, and the longer I worked at each I longed. I hungered for another kind of life I could barely imagine even existed.

And that life was in wrapped up in the gospel of a love I also could not imagine. But that love burned in me. Not that I was so generous or giving, Jesus. I was not, but love for you and for the mysteries of your life burned in me.

I hungered not just to know more. I also burned, truly burned to know the love that you are that my soul might rest in the gentle consolation of simply being loved with that love for which my insatiable soul longed.

This burning moved me beyond my fears to embrace my hopes. No, that’s not quite right. Through the restless burning of my soul you moved me beyond my fears to throw myself into the hope you implanted in me

Loving Mystery, you were … and are … that hope that burns in us, moving us to reach beyond our fears and all that holds us back from deeper knowing and serving of you.

That burning made me so restless, so uncomfortable, so wanting … more that I pushed through my fears. I forgot about how much work it would be, how much money it would take, how impossible it all seemed as my wife and I planned for our first child.

And I walked into those beckoning doors to enter a world of studying and serving and struggling to know the love for which I and all are intended.

This is your mercy to me, Loving God. You refused to leave me to my fears. You made my heart relentlessly restless so that I might enter the hope you had in me, the hope fanned by those drives to Dubuque when I sat and stared.

The day begins, and I remember your mercy, a mercy that made me uncomfortable but moved me to trust your guiding and to walk into the warmth of your eternal embrace.

Pr. David L. Miller