Monday, September 30, 2013

Today’s text

Psalm 37:5-6

Commit your life to the Beloved,

     confident that Love will act          

on your behalf,

Making clear you pathway,

     Bright as the sun at midday.

Reflection

Sooner or later circumstances reduce you to what is most basic. It does not feel good, but it is great grace.

There are many forms. You come to see your best efforts aren’t enough to change things or do what needs to be done. Unmoved shoulders shrug and walk away from your deepest thoughts and heartfelt labor.

Finitude whispers in wordless speech the body knows: a subtle ache that refuses to leave, a small cough that interrupts sleep, a trembling hand that won’t do what it did with ease yesterday. Where did it come from? And why? 

None of this matters as much as the humble embrace of one’s humanity and of the certainty that human life is and always will be unpredictable and unfair--and no words can make it seem otherwise.

But only the humble, those who feel the ache in the night, the chill of fear and the pain of shrugged shoulders can hear the Voice of Love who breaks through the barriers of our aloneness.

The Voice speaks in the breeze of autumn mornings, still warm with remembrance of summer days. The soul hears and knows: the breeze blows because Love is. The leaves turn because Love is.

Love speaks and awakens itself in the soul, singing Love’s song, reminding the soul that this day is lit by a sun much warmer and brighter than Earth’s midday star.

And just as certainly as life is unfair, this greater sun is more unfair still, more unfair than our failures and finitude, our fears, pains and longings. For, it comes without our asking, and stays beyond our deserving--and never quits.

Love will act, the Voice says at a place so deep in the heart that it is inaccessible to all but the One who made it. So trust and know.

Trust is not an act of will or human accomplishment. It is the gift of Love in the soul, awakened by the breeze that speaks and the leaves that sing a single song:

Love is. Love will be. Love will light your days and abide with you on lonely nights when you long for that Voice that tells you the truth.

Trust and live.

Pr. David L. Miller