Saturday, June 13, 2015

Psalm 13

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
   How long will you hide your face from me? 
How long must I bear pain in my soul,
   and have sorrow in my heart all day long?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me? 
Consider and answer me, O Lord my God!
   Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death, 
and my enemy will say, ‘I have prevailed’;
   my foes will rejoice because I am shaken. 
But I trusted in your steadfast love;
   my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. 
I will sing to the Lord,
   because he has dealt bountifully with me.

For J

Abandoned and alone, the voice said, forgotten and cut off from the face of God. Days of sunshine had passed, leaving only the shadow of not knowing what hope can be had from an uncertain future.

So many walk this road. And the voice little knew in what blessed company he walks, for he is not and never alone. He walks with all who are stripped of the false certainties once imagined to be true.

He walks with those who know what life is, a path where hard-won wisdom leads either to despair or to the Love which is the foundation of all real hope.

He walks with those whose hearts are being made loving and beautiful by what they suffer.

He walks with those whose words ring true because they have endured the valley and know what remains when illusion is stripped away.

What remains is you, Holy One, just you, and that’s enough. You are enough for us.

When suffering comes, when the illusion that we are in control disappears, what remains is the Love that leaks through the crust of this earth— through chemotherapy and radiation, through CT scans and ultrasounds, through to-the-bone weariness and doctors frowns.

What remains is the Love who streams through every love and beauty, through the light of every dawn, through the rain that waters the earth, through the sweetness of sound and melody that cut through our darkness to the sensitive soul assuring us again that Love is, Love is, Love is.

You are the Love who remains, Holy One, the Love on which we lay on days when we cannot stand. You are the Love to whom we call when forgotten and alone, far from healing light, we cry to feel the light of your face shining on us nevertheless.

We cry out, our voice one with the sorrow of our brother, Jesus. Forgotten and alone, cast out and rejected he wanted only one thing—You. He longed for the light of the Love that remains when every illusion shatters.

You are the healing for which the soul longs, the rock solid beneath our feet when life and disease shake our foundations. The light of your love is the hope cancer and uncertainty cannot kill, the light that pierces the darkness of the valley that must be walked.

You are Love, and You are here … even now … always. Nothing can change that. So pour through the dark of difficult days. Give light to our eyes that our hearts may see and sing your beauty.

Pr. David L. Miller

Tuesday, June 9, 2015

Psalm 92:4

For you, O Lord, have made me glad by your work;
   at the works of your hands I sing for joy.

Healing

Grant me grace to do the work of your hands with my hands, with my heart and voice. There are faces who hunger for blessing, too long neglected, their stories pushed aside by the demands of the urgent and the fearful mind’s avoidance of hard places.

Now, I hunger to let them know they are not lost to your people and never to you Holy One. What most gets in my way is guilt for having forgotten, for letting the clamor of living get in the way of loving hearts so wounded they could not cry for help.

But the anxiety of guilt is one more selfish distraction. It turns the mind back on itself, to its craving for comfort, making its own need central.

What is needed is not comfort but healing. The only comfort to be had, the only real comfort there is comes in the unity of love and reconciliation that heals the wounds of the forgotten, calms the fears of the threatened and washes away guilt in the flood of grace that flows from your heart.

It flows through us, Blessed One, when we open to each other the heart of our need and let the grace in us flow. This is your work, the work that gladdens the heart and lifts our souls to songs of joy.

Lift us today, Holy One, that we may sing the song that only love knows.

Pr. David L. Miller

June 8, 2015

Psalm 92:1-4

It is good to give thanks to the Lord,
   to sing praises to your name, O Most High; 
to declare your steadfast love in the morning,
   and your faithfulness by night, 
to the music of the lute and the harp,
   to the melody of the lyre. 
For you, O Lord, have made me glad by your work;
   at the works of your hands I sing for joy.

Found again

Gratitude and hope bring me to these keys again, great hope for what might roll from my fingers before my mind knows what is happening and stops me from writing what I am … and discovering what is inside this mystery who wears my face.

I am grateful, Holy One, for whatever I am … I am part of you, not separate but connected, an expression of the life you are. The love and gratitude I know this day bring happy tears and praises you for every joy and pain and experience that brought me to where I am … with hope for who I will be and all that is to come.

Life knows no diminishment as my hair grows whiter (if that is possible). More than ever, I relish the reality of being, just being alive and knowing the wonder of sky and light, cloud and shadow, savoring the grace of love and the hugs and laughter of children in all their spontaneous freedom, which welcomes the immediacy of joy that bubbles beneath the surface of my soul.

Thank you for them … and for all who know how to play, inviting the child within to speak and sing and release the self I most am, so that I might see and know who I have been all along, finally becoming what you always knew me to be.

Thank you for them. They sing the song of your grace to my heart more clearly than any book or teaching ever could.

It is days like this, moments like these when I know this life is not about figuring things out, reducing the world, emotions, actions, politics, the state of the world (blah, blah, blah) into tidy explanations and equations in some vain attempt to find meaning … and You … in the midst of all the noise.

I don’t need to find anything … because you continue to find me even as I stumble across these keys savoring moments when life, no Life, finds and surprises me and makes me glad.

Thank you.

Pr. David L. Miller