Wednesday October 16, 2013

Today’s text

Psalm 121: 5-8

Yahweh is your guardian, your shade, Yahweh, at your right hand. By day the sun will not strike you, nor the moon by night. Yahweh guards you from all harm Yahweh guards your life, Yahweh guards your comings and goings, henceforth and for ever. 

 Reflection

Guard our lives, O Lord. Keep us from dying.

There are so many ways we lose our lives and die. Days come when we feel the breath of energy and joy fleeing our hearts and failing our bodies.

You are the breath of life that flows within us. Don’t leave us.

Come fill us each morning, for you are the hope for joy and goodness, for meaning and laughter that stirs us to meet each day with expectation and eagerness.

We breathe you in and throw ourselves into the day, doing what you have given us to do in this life.

Turn our eyes from our weakness and failures. Turn us from our fears of not being enough for the challenges of our days. Protect our hearts from eroding despair that we may not receive what our hearts most need to live with joyful purpose and love.

Guard our lives from the forces and emotions that kill our souls and reduce us to empty husks.

Just breathe, O Lord; breathe the felt assurance of your nearness into our lungs with every breath we take. Smile at us in the faces that bless and fill us with the wonder of love and loving.

Guard our comings and going this day lest the weight of our labors or the fatigue at day’s end wither our life and joy.

For we want to live; we yearn to be filled with your breath and life.

We want to draw it into our lungs and feel it filling our hearts. We ache to breathe in the love you are and be filled with the assurance of knowing, always knowing that we are children of a great and eternal love.

And this, only this, is living, really living.

So let us feel your life in us, filling us, guarding us from all the ways death comes. Fill and guard us all, especially those most death most threatens.

We have known your breath within us, O Lord, and we cannot be satisfied with anything less. So please, breathe in us.

Pr. David L. Miller