Friday, March 16, 2012

Today’s text

John 3:15-18

For this is how God loved the world: he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. For God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but so that through him the world might be saved. No one who believes in him will be judged; but whoever does not believe is judged already, because that person does not believe in the Name of God's only Son.

Reflection

Today, I want to live. This is a silly thing to say when taken on a surface level. Who doesn’t want to live? Only those so sick or troubled that waking up each day has become a burden instead of a blessing.

Here I am, Lord, awake again, fingers on the keys, awaiting for some small movement in my soul so that my hands may serve their truest purpose--pounding out words that bear your presence, shaping thoughts that come from your heart, speaking truth that wing my soul into the depth of your heart that you may enfold me and give total healing.

You are the Presence who eagerly awaits our return that our whole being may be wrapped in love.

That is what I want and need every morning, everyday … to feel my whole being--all that I am or ever will be--transported and wrapped in a love that rejects no part of me, a love in which I am always welcome. I want to feel and know it to be true. I want to know that whatever I feel when I am wrapped and lifted by love is my true identity--and yours.

So lift me into yourself, into the Love who holds me every moment so I may know salvation, the experience and reality of eternal life. To know your love is the experience of life itself. Anything less than this is the experience of judgment, of separation from our true home, from whom we really are and from whom you really are, Holy One.

Judgment is not something you lay upon us. We do it to ourselves every moment we live in fear, every moment we imagine that we are separate from you, every moment I fail to realize that this hunger in me for you is not a sign of your absence but of your presence pulling at me to surrender to your love, to quit doing, quit trying so hard, quit imagining that you are far off … and just know that all that I am and ever will be rests in your gentle hands.

So live with joy, you say. Abandon all fear. Cast away every anxiety and just know: your beginning and your end, your days and your years are in my hands. Fear not. Today is a day to live, really live.

Pr. David L. Miller