Friday, January 22, 2010

Today’s text

Luke 4:18-19

The spirit of the Lord is on me, for he has anointed me to bring the good news to the afflicted. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives, sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free to proclaim a year of favor from the Lord.

Reflection

Today, I want to be free. Everyday I want to be free, but I am free only on some days. And recently, they have been too few.

So I come again and listen to the voice of freedom, and I hear your desire, singular it is: to set captive souls free from every bondage that prevents true humanness.

I am well acquainted with bondage. In recent days, my impatience with long meetings, human pettiness, administrative minutia and my own limitations of time and grace have made me less than a reasonable soul.

Perhaps I should ask for forgiveness for ways in which my anger has owned me, but I know forgiveness is already there for the taking. And I take it.

Plus, my soul is less bound by guilt than by my own perfectionism and my insistence that life should be lived as much as possible from the center of one’s soul, from the grace and beauty that is there.

That comes easily when I listen and talk to souls, seeking their good, when I pray and speak of the Loving Mystery you are, Holy One. But it disappears behind a thick gray cloud of frustration and melancholy when the big picture of life and grace gets lost in a dense cloud of detail.

So what is my captivity? Dealing with the detail? Shutting off my soul when the minutia and pettiness comes? Or perhaps it is my secret belief that I should not have to (and do not want to) deal with the nuts and bolts of the machinery that makes life … and congregations run?

Frankly, I can’t name my own bondage at this moment, but I am freer just for acknowledging this. I sense the center of my soul that has been lost to me in recent days. And the love I feel there--yours and mine--frees me to live with the joy of freedom that is your desire for me. And mine. Thank you.

Let me live this day from the heart.

Pr. David L. Miller